Anatomy Trains

These Cotswolds villages are all light brown river stone – the roofs, the walls, the barns, and the beautiful dry stonewalls, the fair fitting of which must be a dying art.  Rooted in the soggy but productive soil that once made them rich with wool, these villages now sport yuppies with foreign cars and Judi Dench types – smart but doubting, conventional but thoughtful, plain but beautiful in not trying to hide.

The Ramsden churchyard is the only place in this tiny village where you can get a phone signal, so there I repair at the end of the pub lunch to check in with my life’s center.

Among the mossy stones are the boys who died in World War I:

Life’s race well run,
Life’s work well done,
Life’s crown well won –
Now peace at last

and a little white marble:

Jesus called a little child
Susan Carole Holifield
Aged 6 years

A tiny flower,
Lent, not given,
To bud on earth
And bloom in Heaven

What a world of pain resides in this short residence of hope in the sure and certain promise of Christian afterlife!  The enduring Church of England – many of its churches near empty on a Sunday despite the soaring spires and patina-ed stained glass – offers that rock-hard assurance.  I think if my child had died that I would fall through any such comfort like an anvil through paper.

My child is one-third of the world away in Santa Fe, and the worst that can be gleaned from these churchyard shouting phone calls is how often she is acting as designated driver for her vodka-soaked boyfriend.

But whoever lost a child of six and retains such faith is either resting with that anvil on the ocean’s floor, or floating in the illusory world of a beneficent God where somehow all things will be made right.  New Englander that I am, I feel we must fight to deserve it, that randomness is part of God’s will, and – Quan will oppose me here – that life is simply not just.

Tell that to the English: the genteel outrage of injustice pervades every newscast, “Will the minister assure the public that …” because each night it is farmers in Shropshire, fishermen in Margate, single mums with inadequate pensions, leaked information from the National Health … Somewhere something unfair is happening to some other worthy social group, and something simply must be done about it.  The Nanny State is failing under Gordon Brown (nicknamed “Dear Prudence”) even as England thrives on gibblety goblets of North Sea oil.

So goodbye, old chum, muddle on without me for a while, and I shall be back to see your dowdy newshares (Fox and CNN have newsbunnies, the BBC has toffee-nosed twittering male newsrabbits and earnest frumpy female newshares) earnestly seeking justice and fairness, the mother of all Parliaments raucously seeking the truth by scoring points, and the hapless but articulate dissidents wittering on about how much damage the next government scheme will cause.

Nowhere else on earth …

Last weekend, I got to visit with the very rich, and no, you can’t know who they are; I want to talk about the house. Built sometime in the 1300’s and still marked around the door arch with the swords of the English Civil War - of course much has been replaced and added to - and continuously in one family since then, it seems an organic part of the earth from which it springs. Rounded brick and rainwashed stone climb unevenly, some covered in ivy, topped with twisting chimneys, softened by gnarly trees close to the house. The moat remains on one side to reflect the perfect harmony of the many different windows, all with a thousand tiny diamonds of glass criss-crossed with lead. Topiary and sweeping gardens as you climb the hill above the hollow where it lies, up to where the ground was flattened so that Henry VIII could play at jousting when he visited. See the smaller farmhouse and the chapel, graveyard for six centuries of old nobles and sickly children and lost daughters and dead soldiers, and realize as you top the hill that all the land for as far as you can see used to belong to the Lord of this house.

Like much of England’s nobility, the current Lord is much reduced in land and holdings, but still commands more money and concomitant responsibility for preservation (a castle, this house, a London landmark, 190 employees including a full-time roof thatcher) that showed up my own obsession with a single farm in Maine as a minor skirmish in a larger war.

It’s a long walk from my lush but chilly bedroom to the Great Hall, and the impressionist art on the walls is real. The sound system that fills that hall would probably have financed worldwide domination of KMI - and it has the additional disadvantage of spoiling you for anything else, listening to early jazz on vinyl with every instrument crisp and located. The wines flow, topped with a Taylor port from 1955 with the most complex set of tastes I have ever imbibed.

This weekend, teaching in Oxford, I am listening with amusement to my young assistant who is a font of information of the nefarious doings of the Freemasons and Illuminati, who are, according to him, undermining everything from the Twin Towers on 9/11 to the dollar bill to keeping us all in thrall to hidden forces of evil. Well, I don’t deny that the world is in a state, and undoubtedly there are people trying to manipulate it to their own ends, and conspiracies abound But evil has always been with us, and the banal kind is more distasteful to me than the Machiavellian.

I don’t have the heart to tell him that the world is more complex and meandering and hopelessly personal than these grand tales. I don’t have the heart to tell him that if this world is what God has made, I am ready to try a little Satan to see if he can do any better. I don’t have the heart to tell him that I spent the previous weekend with the head of world Freemasonry, and whether he is serving God or Mammon, feast or famine, priest or shaman, he is as extraordinarily ordinary as any of the rest of us. He would just like to save the beautiful organic stately home his family has tended for 28 generations, a refined but anachronistic expression of a fading way of life.

The Lord and Arch-whatever-he-is of the Freemasons feels neither rapacious nor scheming. He and Her Ladyship are homebodies, philosophical about the passing of English nobility, with a spiritual perspective that encompasses more than his 28 generations, clear-eyed, humorous, free of regret or grasping desire for reinstatement. He does say ‘hice’ when means house, but this can be forgiven.

I am not a socialist, but I am a democrat, agreeing with Churchill that it is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones. Like Christianity, democracy has not been tried and found impossible, it has been found difficult and left untried. I believe in the free market of ideas, though I don’t believe that we any longer live in a free-market economy. With these huge corporations making their own transnational laws, we are once again becoming feudal. Are my huge corporations just my substitute for my young friend’s Freemasons-taking-over-the-world conspiracy? Maybe, but someone has to run the world, and you can bet your shoes that those who are doing so currently (as ever) are not motivated by benificent feelings toward their fellow man, especially those at the bottom.

But is there not room, as the world descends into an American commercial blandness, for difference? Is there not room for the whimsy that nobility has always promised and delivered? Crazy and poor is insane; crazy with money is eccentric. The great thing about having a nobility or aristocracy is not that they always manage reasonably - the descent of the House of Windsor into tabloid triviality is proof positive of the losing battle aristocracy has with modern education - but that some among us are given a vote, the ability to follow an idea through without accountability. It leads to the excesses of Ludwig driving madly through the countryside in search of young boys, but it also leads to the ‘excess’ of this house - an event no socialist utopia could produce.

Doctor Zhivago’s house and China’s treasures fell to the Communist revolutions - proof that aristocracy tends to forget the bottom of the pyramid that supports the crowning stone. The huge stone Buddhas fell prey to the arrogant madness of the Taliban mullahs. Surely, we in what’s left of the Western world must save room for something so beautiful as this house - so whimsical, so purposeless, but yet so necessary to our sense of who we can be.

My fingers are clumsy with cold as I type this. The clocks ‘fall back’ this night, but since my body clock doesn’t know that, I set out for my morning run in total darkness – in a six o’clock that was really five. A little cup of moon provided what light there was, and orientation came courtesy of the Ursae and Orion.

You can rely on Rick to have the roads in good repair, so my feet lopped along the invisible dirt road with confidence, though my ankles are alert to the odd offsetting stone. I haven’t run for a couple of weeks – exercise has been provided by getting the docks in, the boats put away, the summer tied up and ended, culminating in the chain-saw extravaganza that produced our wood for the ’08 – ’09 season. Several hours of holding that noisy machine out in front of me, and my body feels fine. Every year in July the hay shows up, and we swing 500 bales into the loft for the horses and rabbits. I measure my physical aging by how much I feel it in the ensuing days. But this day of harvesting trees was great. And that reminds me of Misty, who stomped away in righteous protest at 7 when we cut down a pine in her presence. I have been in the company of a bunch of vegans last week, and I love to tease them about how the plants feel about being pulled out of the ground. You have to come to terms with eating, with making part of the universe into yourself …

I digress, but this is how your mind goes when you are running, easily down tracks of thought and memory. Reaching the road, I ran up the middle – no cars this Sunday morning. Dogs announced my progress, the cows at a nearby farm started lowing, and deer clicked across the tarmac and disappear into the woods with their high white asses.

As the pink started to glow above the line of trees in front of me, I came across two horses. Traveling, as great as the work is, and as much as I enjoy having all these different people in my life, is animal-free, for the most part. My home life is full of them thanks to Quan – rabbits to doctor, cats on the bed, horses to feed – but on the road, it’s just people, and they are a most unsatisfying animal. The black one will have nothing to do with me, but the paint comes over for a nuzzle and conversation. The warm sweet breath, the mobile lips exploring my hand, his curiosity about my shirt, his search for an apple but I have nothing. If I can I’ll steal an apple for tomorrow and make a new friend.

is waiting.

Paul Theroux writes about Graham Greene:

I had the feeling of a kindred spirit, a fellow sufferer, who was completely alone, who had only his work and who, after seventy years, woke up each morning to start afresh, regarding everything he had done as more or less a failure, an inaccurate rendering of his vision, a betrayal.

(This is in an absolute treat of a book called Picture Palace)

Quan calls it my mistress, I call it my indulgence (especially after looking at this year’s bill), but let other people find their joy where they may, sailing just plain does it for me.  Even though the tool is artificial - at least mine is, frozen spit and aluminum and nylon; nothing natural (wood or canvas) about it - the dance is all animal.

Beset with obligations, Annie and I instead played hookey yesterday, setting off at noon.  We were spit out of the river at 1:30 by the tide and strong west wind, and Annie persuaded me to lay off for Monhegan - along trip for an afternoon.  But the air burnished so clear that each flame-leafed tree is etched on the shore - unusual for such fast-moving air so near the water’s surface to stay so dry - so making a run for something was irresistible.  The waves were high with some cross chop, and she horsed and slewed the nine miles to Monhegan in a mere hour and a half.  Empty now of tourists, we roared through the harbor dead before the wind, seeing almost no one, the boats and wharf uncharacteristically deserted.

We pulled around Manana, and tightened the sails for the trip uphill to home.  We were flat on our side, rail under, climbing and slamming over the rollers, spray flying above us and in our pockets.  Both Annie and I could feel how little sailing we had done this summer, our balance and footing shaky, more than it should be at this time of year.  Also, though it has been warm here, there was a bit of October in this wind, so we were a bit stiff-jointed from the cold and from managing the wheel of the plunging boat.
Halfway across, I saw water coming through the floorboards, and there we were, full of water and bouncing along at 6 knots.  The pumps - the electric and my flying hand on the manual - kept up with it, and it stopped as soon as we rounded Thrumcap and were upright in the river, so it must be a leak up near where the deck meets the hull - something else for Mike to look at this winter.

The tide and the last tongues of wind helped us up the river.  We couldn’t bear to turn on the engine even though it went from civil twilight to nautical twilight, and we landed at the dock under sail in the dark, putting her to bed for the night by feel and the light of the waxing moon.

But this is it.  Today I will pull off the things that can’t freeze, and then take it down to Mike’s to be hauled for the winter. It will be six months before I take the helm again, six months that will take me to Canada, England, Japan, Norway, Germany, as well as all over the States.  But nowhere will I find the country I enter when I leave the land and take to the sea, dancing between wind and water to commune with my God.

We’ve been dealing with a lot of death in the rabbitat this year, and Isaac went down this morning.  His belly was large and hard, and Quan debated taking him to Brunswick for an autopsy with a vet, but we decided that this mass was so obvious that surely we could see what it was for ourselves.

I took my gloves and scalpel and set poor Isaac - cold and wet from last night’s rain - on some newspaper.  Quan left me with him, but was soon back to see -  an incurably curious cat.  I put on my dissector’s objectivity and pierced his skin around the navel, splitting it up and down the midline.  His muscles look healthy underneath.  We went through the muscles in into the peritoneum, and this huge tumor the size of a grapefruit - really - red and white, rolled out of his belly.  At first I though it was stomach, then intestine, but further examination proved it to be in the omentum, hanging from the lower edge of the stomach and transverse colon.  The entire digestive system was there - liver, stomach, small intestine, large intestine - intact but shriveled, as so much physiological power must have been going into building this tumor for months or even years.

I was whupped up side of the head, as my father had died of just such a tumor - mesothelioma in the omentum and peritoneum - just five years ago.  Here is was again, under my hand.  Every little mouse in the field, in the miles of woods behind out house, needed to construct a body just as complicated as mine, with all these complex organs, just to live out their feeding and mating in the woods.

I cut into the tumor.  The skin was thick, a centimeter or more, made of many layers of meat, like fascial bacon.  Inside was the strangest white thick ooze, like liquid corn starch or unset plaster.  It should have been pus, but had a different smell.  There was a full cup of this yucch, inside the thickrind grapefruit.
“Pasturella!”, said Quan, relieved, recognizing it from her books.  All rabbits carry this, some succumb.  No one in Quan’s well-fed paradise has done so before, but now it has found us, maybe we should expect more.  It will yield to a regime of penicillin, but we can’t do that for 100 rabbits.

I’ve seen cancers in cadavers, but this was so new, and was nearly as large as the animal it came from - Isaac looked small and defenseless beside it. “We all live so close to that line and so far from satisfaction” - Joni Mitchell.

Distress is the state of having a different view of what you think the world should be from what your senses are telling you the world is, and my situation with my neighbour is distressing.  She has upped and given her house not to her daughter but to the son of her boyfriend.  The boyfriend was a sweet old codger, but the son is a skulking little weasel.  He will get the land when she sheds her body and meanwhile he wants to use it for a large fishing pier, though she thinks he is just rebuilding what was once there, a small personal dock.

The neighborhood is objecting the large pier, but he has poisoned her against us all.  She’s an old coot, opinionated and spiteful, but we all love her for her independence and her spunk - she’ll be out there most of the day at 92, chopping at a stump, whittling it down until nothing is left.

She thinks Quan and I are after her land, but we have enough trouble with our own, we just liked having someone elderly in the neighborhood, made it variable and fun.  Quan took extra food down to her, and I carried her wood and shot the shit, gossiping away about current peccadillos and strange events of 50 years ago when she was in her prime and I was but a stripling, cadging her doughnuts.

But I haven’t spoken to her since June, when this thing came up.  Today, though, as I chopped and lopped the bruch to make room for the dock to go on land at the top of the ways for the winter, I saw her flag - raised every day and taken down every night, despite her deafness and macular degeneration - today it had been raised upside down, the universal naval signal for distress.  The flag is torn, and seeing it buckle and furl upside down was so sad.
Should I believe her and see what’s up?  Break the silence? Or leave her without confrontation in her last days?  I think we should all go see her together, and confront this wrong, but we haven’t built up the collective courage yet.

Woke this morning as usual at 5 o’clock, and as usual stumbled to the loo to to pee.  What was unusual was the silence, but I didn’t realize until a few light switches and a faucet that hissed like a snake what it was - the electricity was out.  The house, usually alive with machinery, was as a mausoleum.  I worked on my book by battery on the computer until it ran out, and then ran in the early morning mist.

Mid-October, the height of the leaves this year, and it is still balmy, balmy enough for fog.  Around my three-mile run, the houses are all dark, but the sun awakens, blasting the fog up in slow motion, setting the leaves alight - the sun is Agent Orange, the leaves are napalm, the world is at silent war.

No, it’s peace.  Coming back home, we discover from clocks that it’s been off since 12:30, and the freezer is starting to melt.  Fuss with the rigamarole of wires and switches, and the generator chugs into life.  The house breathes again, and all our conveniences are there, but only at the cost of burning gas, disappearing dinosaurs, and carbon footprints slouching toward Bethlehem.

The New York bodyworkers didn’t like it when I warned last weekend of the coming economic storm.  It was sobering in the middle of an otherwise elatory weekend.  We therapists float on the froth of the affluent society - the whole cappuccino will be off the counter when the foecal matter connects with the atmospheric conditioning device.  We’ll be bartering for sessions, as the economic sieve shakes us all down.  Food and energy will cost most of our salary.  The strong will survive?  No, not the strong, but the most adaptable.   How adaptable has our profession made us?

Even the boat needs the shore - the batteries have run down while I was in NY, and the bilge pump can’t run.  I’ve been keeping the boat pumped out by hand, but I have the battery on shore on the battery charger, and after the lights have been back on for an hour or two, I take the battery back out and start the boat, the possession I prize for not using fossil fuel - it has an engine, but I use it little, is in fact connected inevitably to the system grid. We’re all co-dependent.

This weekend, during the whirlwind of classes we did for the Breathing Project, a yoga studio in NY, I came across a postcard for Naked Yoga.  (www.NakedYogaNYC.com)

Only in New York, perhaps.  I did not consider going - it’s like: I was going to get a tattoo, but then the canvas sagged.  I think naked yoga might be beyond me as an age prospect, but I was interested that the benefit being advertised brings money to ’sex health and education’ projects, and that the teachers were versed in Tantra.

Quan and I, in our younger hotter years, got a lot out of studying Tantra, and my ideas for Kinesthetic Literacy would definitely include a sex-ed piece.  On Chesil Beach, an amazingly tender but brutally accurate novella by Ian McEwen, points to the striking need.

So hats off (and everything else, I guess) to the Naked Yogis.  It makes a refreshing change form the Puritanism I find in the Vedantists, whose stretchier-then-thou positioning can lead to spiritual materialism (I can do Lord of the Dance better than you-ou).  Or how little do you eat, or how pure.  I am more with the Tantrikas - embrace life! Eat it up, digest it for poetry, shit out the toxicity and search for another appetizing meal to cook.

I doubt that God made such a diverse and tasty world with the intention that we should renounce it.

The website makes clear that this is not puerile or an excuse for hanky-panky - the idea really is that yoga without clothes is a liberating act.

I can’t help it - I wonder who is going to be in front of me, and who behind me when we are doing downward dog.

At the risk of harping on the same subject, one of the reasons that the substantially new event of a hand-held computer - currently in my life in the form of an iPhone - is so successful is measured in how many places you can get with just two clicks, two motions.  It opens with two clicks, I can get to the music or mail or the internet with two clicks from wherever it opens, can find any song or any phone number within two clicks - an astonishing range of changes is available within two clicks of anywhere.  I haven’t yet opened a manual, as everything is so intuitive.  And this is just the first one.