The Faraway Nearby

by Rebecca Solnit

  When you are well, your own body is a sealed country into which you need not explore far, but when you are unwell, there is no denying that you are made up of organs and fluids and chemistry and that the mechanisms by which your body operates are not invincible. You may have pains in places where the healthy person feels nothing, you may when injured see your own bones, or see X-rays and be reminded of death’s skeleton under the flesh of life, you may be invaded, have parts of yourself removed, or tubes, shunts, devices, plates, and more added, your chemistry and hormones may be tinkered with, drugs administered. The system has been opened up and so has your awareness of it.

  Ann continued making art as she went deeper and deeper into the country of illness for the last time. She made a series of drawings of lines across sheets of grid paper, and because her hand shook, the drawings became registers of tremors, like the lines traced by seismographs recording earthquakes, like the lines shown by medical monitoring equipment. An unsteady hand is usually considered to mean that you can’t draw, but she made the shaking into a means of recording the little earthquakes of her being and an assertion that life and art would go on for a while anyway. And they did, trembling.

  With the help of her assistant and her sister, she then made a final masterpiece, a vast wall map of white plaster topographical reliefs of islands. Each island was connected by fine red string reaching out to the other islands, like flight routes for planes or birds or neural pathways or blood vessels. Or conversations, affections, alignments. I think of that piece as an elegant assertion that everything is connected. Each of us is an island of sensations confined to the realm beneath our skin, but a great deal of migration and importing and exporting connects most of the islands to each other. It does if you can locate yourself in an archipelago or trace the lines to where they reach others and the lines whereby others touch you.

  • • •

  The night before surgery Sam and Kat took me out to dinner and then Kat went to rehearsal and Sam and I went to Ocean Beach late at night. On the firm wet sand at low tide your footprints register clearly before the waves come and devour all trace of passage. I like to see the long line we each leave behind, and I sometimes imagine my whole life that way, as though each step was a stitch, as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, crisscrossing others’ paths, quilting it all together in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced. A meandering line sutures together the world in some new way, as though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life.

  A thread now most often means a line of conversation via e-mail or other electronic means, but thread must have been an even more compelling metaphor when most people witnessed or did the women’s work that is spinning. It is a mesmerizing art, the spindle revolving below the strong thread that the fingers twist out of the mass of fiber held on an arm or a distaff. The gesture turns the cloudy mass of fiber into lines with which the world can be tied together. Likewise the spinning wheel turns, cyclical time revolving to draw out the linear time of a thread. The verb to spin first meant just this act of making, then evolved to mean anything turning rapidly, and then it came to mean telling a tale.

  Strands a few inches long twine together into a thread or yarn that can go forever, like words becoming stories. The fairy-tale heroines spin cobwebs, straw, nettles into whatever is necessary to survive. Scheherazade forestalls her death by telling a story that is like a thread that cannot be cut; she keeps spinning and spinning, incorporating new fragments, characters, incidents, into her unbroken, unbreakable narrative thread. Penelope at the other end of the treasury of stories prevents her wedding to any one of her suitors by unweaving at night what she weaves by day on her father-in-law’s funeral garment. By spinning, weaving, and unraveling, these women master time itself, and though master is a masculine word, this mastery is feminine.

  Women were spinsters before the word became pejorative, when distaff meant the female side of the family. In Greek mythology, each human life is a thread that the three Moirae, or Fates, spin, measure, and cut. With Rumpelstilskin’s help, the unnamed fairy-tale heroine spins straw into gold, but the wonder is that every spinner takes the amorphous mass before her and makes a thread appear, from which comes the stuff that contains the world, from a fishing net to a nightgown. She makes form out of formlessness, continuity out of fragments, narrative and meaning out of scattered incidents, for the storyteller is also a spinner or weaver and a story is a thread that meanders through our lives to connect us each to each and to the purpose and meaning that appear like roads we must travel. As we did on that midnight walk on the beach, trailing footprints behind like stitches.

  “The ‘I’ is a needle some find useful, though/the thread, of course, is shadow,” writes Brenda Hillman in her poem “String Theory Sutra.” The English and Latin word suture has the same root as Sanskrit sutra or Pali sutta. They both have to do with sewing. The sutras, the most sacred texts of Buddhism, were named for the fact that they were originally sewn. The flat blades of palm leaves were strung together by two lines of thread that tied together the stiff, narrow pages like accordion blinds. The books were copied by hand over and over again in that climate of decay. Thus leaf became book, and knowledge was held together and transmitted in a thread, a line, a lineage.

  The term sutra, as in the Platform Sutra, the Heart Sutra, or the Lotus Sutra, generally means a teaching by the Buddha himself or one close to him, as distinguished from the scholarly and philosophical texts that piled up afterward. The word is said to have arisen from the actual sewing or binding of these old palm-leaf books, but it must have had some more metaphorical sense, as though the sutras’ words and meanings run throughout all things and bind them together, as though the threads are paths you can follow and veins through which life flows.

  When you take the precepts or are ordained in the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, you are given a piece of paper on which is written the lineage to which your name has just been added. Written and drawn, since the names are inscribed on a long red line that loops back and forth so that so much lineage can fit on a single large sheet. It’s a kind of family tree that traces the teachings from student to teacher and to the teacher’s teacher and beyond, following the Japanese Soto Zen masters back to Dogen, who brought Soto Zen from China in the thirteenth century, and tracing the Chinese ancestry back to the first Chinese ancestor, Bodhidharma in the fifth century, and then through the Indian teachers back to the Buddha himself (though some older parts of it must be mythological).

  It’s called the blood lineage, as though you had been sutured to a new family whose ties are as strong and red as blood, been sewn into a new set of associations, or given a transfusion. Or become the newest page of a book that continues to be written, or sewn. It’s a way of saying that Buddhism is nothing more and nothing less than a conversation that has gone on from generation to generation, not by palm leaves but face-to-face, a thread of ideas and efforts unbroken over 2,500 years. It makes the recipient of the blood lineage only the latest stitch as the flashing needle keeps working its way through the fabric of this existence.

  And I, if sutures are sutras, what was I going to be stitched to? I got up before dawn that morning to wash myself in the harsh disinfectant they’d given me, and another friend took me to the early morning appointment. I changed into the ugliest hospital gown I’d seen yet, a billowing sack with snaps all along the top and two clashing patterns in green and brown, put on the blue cap that covered my hair, and the white support hose meant to prevent blood clots during the long stillness of surgery. Then the anesthesiologists came in to see me.

  I had been well prepared for surgery but little had been said about the other procedure I was to undergo, the instigation of numbness, stillness, amnesia, and oblivion by drugs injected and then inhaled through a tube put down my throat and a mask over my face after the intravenous ones had taken effec
t. The doctor or medical student slipped a curved needle into a vein in the crook of my left elbow, and the drugs began to do their work. The drugs they give you induce a retrograde amnesia, so I must have been conscious for a little while after that, but those minutes were erased from the record and the next few hours too.

  Happily erased, since what must have transpired would be horrifying to witness and excruciating to feel. Before anesthesia, major surgery was unbearable. The effects of agony made it a last resort, not a routine procedure, and speed was a surgeon’s chief virtue. Ether and other early anesthesias appeared as miraculous solutions to the problem of pain in surgery, though they exacted their own toll. Administered incorrectly they were fatal. The drugs and techniques have since been refined, but there are still consequences and aftereffects that can linger for months, and occasional permanent damage.

  The anesthesiologist sits at the head of the patient during surgery like the host at a table. While the surgeons’ job is to change, the anesthesiologist’s is to maintain, to monitor and manage heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, all of which he or she can control with the mix and rate of drugs, bringing consciousness down like a banked fire and then withdrawing the restraints as surgery finishes and allowing consciousness and the body’s own regulatory processes to return. I felt that interruption for a long time afterward, as though I had lost the beats of the music, the steps of the dance, and was stumblingly trying to recapture them, these rhythms that were my own metabolism.

  There was a continuity that was my breath since birth, and the anesthesiologist cut that, tied a knot in it, put me on monitors and respirators, then started a new thread, and while I was stopped, the continuity that was my skin was cut, and I was altered, and then sewn shut with thread and knots. There are a thousand stories in which someone falls asleep or wanders off to fairyland and comes back unchanged to find that years, decades, centuries have passed, but surgical anesthesia is the opposite adventure: you go to sleep for what seems a moment, and when you wake up everything is the same except yourself. You have been severed from who you were when you went in and stitched to another destiny and body, saved or maimed or both.

  Five hours or so after I’d gone under, I regained consciousness in the recovery room, or that’s where my memory returned. I must have wanted to believe that I was not affected, because I had a brief phase of overcompensatory brightness, when I tried to entertain my Czech nurse and somehow aired the only phrase in that language I know, Nic netra vecne, a phrase I learned when it was scrawled on a bust of Stalin paraded through the streets as that country liberated itself from the Soviet bloc in 1989. Nic netra vecne: nothing lasts forever. The nurse corrected my pronunciation and ignored my vital signs. The phase in which I reached for some interview transcripts and notes as though I would resume working right away faded and I settled in to being exhausted. I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.

  People who loved me were there to greet me, and so were huge bouquets of flowers. When they had left to let me rest, I realized I couldn’t get out of bed. My left arm had the long curving needle in it, so I couldn’t bend or flex it to lift myself up; my right side and arm were injured and tender; and a muscle that ran down my torso had somehow been tweaked, so that it hurt and I could not use my abdominal muscles to sit up as I usually did. Dusk came as I was immobilized in the room with the masses of flowers, without a call button or lights. I tried shouting for help to see what happened. Nothing did. Darkness fell.

  The beautiful surgeon came in later, about a dozen hours into her workday, to tell me that everything had gone well under her aegis and to see how I felt. She summoned the nurse and upbraided her for my blood-stained gown, my missing call button, my poorly arranged equipment, the uneaten tray of food in front of me. Then Dr. Pam came with her fiancée and some more appealing food, and I threw up even the delicate things I had requested, repeatedly. It felt as though my stomach had been sealed and my system had not woken up again, and so I took nothing in that night. Later, Mario the night nurse took my blood pressure and found that it was astonishingly low, since I had had nothing to drink for almost twenty-four hours. He pumped fluid fast into my veins and woke me up every hour to check on me.

  In the morning I endeavored to return to civilization, changing into the beautiful orchid silk pajamas brocaded with a pattern of phoenixes and dragons that I’d bought in Chinatown and Jane’s old dove gray crepe de chine kimono whose long sleeves made a perfect receptacle for the wound drainage bulb I was going to have to secrete somewhere on my person for the next three weeks. It was stitched into me with black thread, a sign that I had been invaded and was now to be literally drained a little.

  I also contained some temporary plastic tubing for drainage, some other manmade materials, and a small square of denatured skin matrix stripped of its DNA. I was in a minor way now a Frankenstein’s monster too, containing a fragment of another’s body, stitched into another lineage, and the artisans had done their work well. Somewhere in the maze of the hospital some of what had been me not long before was being inspected by pathologists, a book for others to read under microscopes.

  A few days after surgery I realized there was a disk stuck to my back—a spongy circle with a metal snap—where the monitors had gone. It was strange to feel that I was so alienated from my body that this thing like a leech had been on me for days—and then I found two more, and then several days after that one last disk. They were reminders that while I had been gone I had become an inert object that others maneuvered, altered, and monitored. I was no longer I, and my body was not my own but something absent, inert, alien, waiting.

  There is a serenity in illness that takes away all the need to do and makes just being enough. In that state I’ve only been in before with severe flu, there is no boredom, no restlessness, not much thinking about what should be done or what has been done. You are elsewhere than consciousness, than everyday life, than the usual bodily awareness and social engagement. We call it doing nothing or resting: the conscious mind does little but the body works furiously, under cover of stillness, to rebuild, rewire, recharge. I recognized that this state must be some of what produced Ann’s luminosity, though she deserved credit for some of it as a state of grace, not just depletion.

  A major illness or injury is a rupture that invites you to rethink, to restart, to review what matters. It’s a reminder that your time is finite and not to be wasted, and in breaking you from the past it offers the possibility of starting fresh. An illness is many kinds of rupture from which you have to stitch back a storyline of where you’re headed and what it means. Every illness is narrative. There are the epics, in which you will ultimately triumph over what afflicts you and return for a while to your illusory autonomy, and the tragedies, in which the illness will ultimately triumph over you and take you away into the unknown that is death, and the two are often impossible to tell apart until they resolve.

  Then there are the enigmatic illnesses whose prognosis is uncertain, in which well-being comes and goes unpredictably, with the difficulty of a story without a plot, or with an unfathomable one. Doctors are forever being implored and pressured to read the future from the medical evidence in the present, to confirm the story, but early on they learn that the rules are rubbery: the near-thriving suddenly collapse, the person at death’s door travels all the way back to rejoin the living, and the time line of death and likelihood of recovery remain unforeseeable.

  I got better. Nellie’s daughter got stronger and left the room of premature infants to go home. And Ann’s end came. I visited her a week after my own surgery, taking the bus across town, and reading to her an essay of mine about Mexico and slowness and stories and snails, subjects I thought she might like even if she took in no more than the tone of voice and the attention. I talked to her about her own accomplishments and influence, and she beamed. The next visit I read her the “Garden of Live Flowe
rs” chapter from Through the Looking-Glass. I told her about the paradise of blooms her sister had coaxed into being in her own back garden and some of the ways she was like a flower.

  I had been naive about how tenacious she was, and how long life can live in a body that is so racked and weakened. She would look into my eyes directly, with tenderness. There was so little sense of separation, or embarrassment, that it was as if she was looking into the mirror, and perhaps to some extent she was. She was radiant for a while and then everything got worse. I went to see her when she was not conscious at all, but restless, vanishing, dreaming her way back into nonexistence.

  And then, on a day of roaring, relentless winds that tore down branches and shingles and signs, she was gone. They asked me to write and deliver the eulogy, and so I did in front of a few hundred people while I was still feeling frail myself. I said Ann’s words, her friends’, and my own for her, and a couple of days later I got on a plane for Iceland.

  8 • Unwound

  What’s your story? There are so many ways to tell it. When the near capsized like a ship, the far swept me up. I flew over the untrammeled lands of the subarctic and then across the sea. From the air Iceland looked like a high-relief puzzle of dark stone and pale vegetation and blue water. It was as strange as another planet. In the calm, sparsely populated airport, Fríða and the regal Klara were waiting with a big car to bring me and my bundles of books and warm clothes past long miles of knife-edged lava upholstered in thick moss to the city of Reykjavík. In the city I wandered dazed and jetlagged and still convalescent and contemplated pale people, a stuffed two-headed lamb in a store window, and the view north across the blue waters of the wide fjord to the sharp mountains still clad in snow.

  Luxuries and fine goods had been scarce in Iceland’s penurious past, but one shop on a side street had teetering stacks of fine china from not so many decades ago. The plates, cups, and saucers were all painted in the soft blue-gray of an overcast day and adorned with gulls. Even these bits of domesticity on which families had eaten their best dinners recalled the cold sea and the birds that travel such distances across it. Beyond the city and the one person I knew in this country, far away from everything, was my temporary home. A couple of days after I landed, Klara drove me there through a hundred miles of rough terrain with big rocks and, occasionally, tiny trees.