Excerpting some knowledge
Y'all notice there is a biannual rhythm to me getting super poetic? The specter of cancer reappears in the form of 6 month surveillance scans. I get real weird. I imagine for some people its prayer, and sure I go there too, but for the most part my appeal to a higher power is poetry. Poetry and a few totally wrecked looking novels.This scan around I've got some questionable results. So as saddle up for another ride in the wild world of oncology I have the voice of my favorite author ringing in my ear. He's saying:
"Make sure," "be prepared," plan out every endeavor.Like a scout on the stupidest camping trip ever.
If New York City is in the east, David Rakoff was the sun. When he died I mourned selfishly. Who will take this world full of sads and uglies and make it beautiful for me? Great writers are all guilty of this, I know, but I felt like David was mine. He took my tangle of fears and loves and laid them out in all of their transcendent beauty and absurd anxieties. God damn I miss him.Here's the excerpt I've memorized from the his final novel "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel (by David Rakoff) written in the last year of his life and recorded in the last month. If your tear ducts need flushing and you could use a belly laugh, consider listening to him read it. It's entirely in AABB verse. Anyway, superlative, superlative, superlative. This section is about the character Cliff who is now dying of AIDS. It's beautiful, it's sad, it's darkly hilarious, it's exactly what David was to me.
It was sadness that gripped him, far more than the fearThat, if facing the truth, he had maybe a year.When poetic phrases like "eyes, look your last"Become true, all you want is to stay, to hold fast.A new, fierce attachment to all of this worldNow pierced him, it stabbed like a deity-hurledLightning bolt lancing him, sent from above,Left him giddy and tearful. It felt like young love.He'd thought of himself as uniquely proficientAt seeing, but now that sense felt insufficient.He wanted to grab, to possess, to devourTo eat with his eyes, how he needed that power.But, just like a child whose big gun is a stick,Cliff was now harmless, he'd gotten too sickTo take any action beyond rudimentaryRoutines that had shrunk to the most elementary:Which pill to take now, and where is your sweater?Did the Immodium make you feel better?Study your shit to make sure you'd not bled,Make sure the Kleenex is next to the bed."Make sure," "be prepared," plan out every endeavorLike a scout on the stupidest camping trip ever.The facts were now harder, reality colderHis parasol no match for that falling boulder.And so the concern with the trivial issues:Slippers nearby and the proximate tissuesHe thought of those two things in life that don't vary(Well, thought only glancingly; more was too scary)Inevitable, why even bother to test it,He'd paid all his taxes, so that left... you guessed it.