Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [54]
It all simply goes out of my hands, things going wrong in ways that I feel I have no capacity to do anything about. There’s no strength in my lower back at all, and I feel incapable of supporting myself, as if the muscles just won’t hold things where they belong. I slip, dangerously, into a skewed posture, an Expressionist angularity with potentially devastating consequences. To say the back “goes out” is an odd but apt expression, since one feels that its usually unnoticed capabilities have simply gone someplace, leaving the body helpless, prone, making it painful to do things such as, say, lift a telephone receiver, or bend over the sink to brush one’s teeth. I begin to imagine never being strong or upright again, becoming dependent, compromised. There’s nothing for it but bed, ice pack, ibuprofen, reading: nine days thereof, punctuated by hobbling walks to the chiropractor’s office and a trip to the masseur. Everything helps a little; nothing helps enough. I’m grateful to my friends for bringing me dinner, walking the dogs, and quickly begin to resent them for being ambulatory, just as I can tell they don’t really want to hear one more request from me for, say, the Sunday Times.
The nine days wear on. I read and read; I spend days living in Elizabeth Bishop’s spirited and observant letters even though the book is too heavy for me to hold up and I have to keep shifting around to find different means of supporting it. Elizabeth Bishop has a life of travel and change, Nova Scotia to Brazil; I feel I will never go anywhere again, except, if I am lucky, the kitchen. I start dramatizing things. I read Diane Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses, a book I am supposed to review, a huge compendium of arresting facts about the pleasures of smell and touch and etc. Diane Ackerman goes all over the world tasting strange and delicious things; she rhapsodizes about vanilla beans; she puts bats in her hair; she kneels in a grove of eucalyptus and tags migrating monarch butterflies. I think if I am very lucky I may be able to drive to the A&P next week. I begin to hate Diane Ackerman; I hate her pert attitude, her perky enjoyment of all the possibilities for pleasure the world holds out. I hate my life. I begin to enjoy the pitch of my self-pity, even though now I think that self-pity’s just a mask for a deeper abjection. I am in pain, up against my limitations. This is the worst my back has ever been.
All spring it’s been coming. Right after Wally died I began going to a yoga class; I’d been ready to forget the idea, but a friend more or less forced me to go, saying he wanted someone with me all the time—Wally’d been gone only a few days then—and he wanted a break from me, so please would I go. The first minutes of the first class we were sitting on our knees on our mats, in the floor-wax and sweeping compound atmosphere of the elementary school cafeteria, with its pink metal tables folded into the walls and its stage masked by a blue velvet curtain. We’d begun doing breathing exercises, listening to our own in- and exhalations, feeling the breath expand in us as we paid attention to it, and the teacher said, “Here you are, in your body. Feel what it’s like to be in your body.” I knew then I was in for it; the tears started to roll down my cheeks. I kept breathing and moving, sometimes