15. As If I’d Seen A Ghost
The Year of Paying Attention
“’When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived,’ Bishop said to Robert Lowell,” reads the cutline under a grainy photograph of poet Elizabeth Bishop in The New Yorker. Really, the loneliest person who ever lived? A new Bishop biography, under review in the magazine, no doubt provides haunting evidence, and god forbid I take issue with Bishop, Lowell, or The New Yorker. I suppose the poet looks lonely, sitting on a stoop in a straw hat, perhaps lost in self-tormenting thought, shoulders hunched, smoking a cigarette. Poor Elizabeth, fatherless before her first birthday, her mother unstable and taken from her before she was six, after which she was “kidnapped,” as far as she was concerned, and taken to the same Massachusetts city where I was a toddler, Worcester. Why does her claim bug me? Is loneliness a weakness? Proof of failure, or of having been failed by another? Is it because my father, not Bishop, should win the prize for loneliest?
I flip the page to another picture, of the great and tragic Billie Holiday, cuddling a sleeping Chihuahua to her cheek, her gaze similar to Bishop’s, lost in a reverie. Now it was the little dog bothering me – why does anyone want such a useless, quivering, yipping creature? But the dog is neither quivering nor yipping, but sleeping, like a baby, in Billie’s arms. Billie, an alcoholic like Elizabeth Bishop, like my father, like me. A woman of towering artistry, who carried her sadness with her, nowhere to lay it down until she gave up the ghost.
Rohr’s book Falling Upwards talks about the sadness waiting in the second half of a life, which he claims is evidence of maturity and spiritual growth. When I remember a period of sadness, it’s a stretch of slow-moving traffic on a long car trip, unwanted and unavoidable. But when I’m feeling very sad, it’s like floating at night on an inner tube out at sea, no land in sight, bobbing on the water, arms and legs scrabbling, going nowhere.
The paper says pianist Misha Mengelberg has died, in his 80’s, another musician I’ll never see perform. I regret having never seen artists like Billie Holiday and John Coltrane, but their deaths seem like history – they were gone before I was paying attention. I saw as often as I could artists like Steve Lacy, Charlie Haden, Ornette Coleman, Mose Allison, Paul Bley, whose music touched me the way a new lover might. Their deaths have been a shock.
My friend Peter, a publisher of artists’ books, goes to the Poetry Project, the legendary Greenwich Village venue, to attend memorial services honoring poets he’s known, and sees poet friends there, and artists with whom he’s collaborated. He mentioned recently he was waiting to hear back from a friend who’s dying, in case Peter might visit him one last time. I sent him a text about Mengelberg.“Is this something I’m going to be doing with you from now on – sharing the breaking obituary?” “Oi,” was his reply.
***
A regular in my beginners yoga class, enthusiastic, a little heavyset, was absent for a stretch, then reappeared. In the changing room I overheard him tell another yogi that cancer had kept him from class. He was excited to be back. It was as if he’d seen a ghost — he needed to tell somebody about it, because he couldn’t quite believe it.
I well knew that feeling from my own cancer trip: a mild pain in my gut that wouldn’t go away — maybe a hernia? Sarah insisted I call my doctor, who wasn’t worried and sent me for a scan, then called me at work — there was a problem. Next came a meeting with a specialist, soon thereafter surgery, then recovery, then back to work, bing bang boom — there was hardly any time to fear death, because the prognosis was always good, and everything went well. I didn’t even milk it by delaying my return to the office. (Pro tip: don’t do this.) I wanted my cancer story — the discovery of a mass on my right kidney, my being rendered unconscious, cut open, sliced into and stitched up, then sent home to recover and regain my strength — to be a receding memory, an unimportant aberration.
Before long I had the experience of briefly forgetting any of it had even happened. I was peering into the refrigerator, and thought — wait, did I have cancer? I did! I had cancer! That moment summoned the memory of another momentary forgetting, decades earlier. Watching my toddler daughter playing on the floor, my mind wandered here and there, until the thought struck me — there’s an infant in the other room! I have two children now! It had slipped my mind.
The Year of Paying Attention is a record of thoughts and events from 2017. Next week: Hell on Earth.
