Beauty Is a Verb
Page 4
My record was published on page 449 of the 1974 edition of the Guinness Book, landlocked between the listings for “Largest Circus” and “Club Swinging,” in the chapter entitled “Human Achievements”:
Clapping. The duration record for continuous clapping is
14 hours 31 minutes by Thomas C. Andrews (b. April 30,
1961) at Charleston, West Virginia on November 15, 1972.
He sustained an average of 120 claps per minute and an
audibility range of at least 100 yards.
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I would like to feel a stirring in my knee, calf, and ankle: a signal that the blood pooled there is being absorbed at last and the joints are opening again, like a fist or a jonquil.
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I make $12,500 a year. I work as a copy editor for Mathematical Reviews, a bibliographic journal for mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, logicians, historians and philosophers of mathematics. When Joyce said he wrote for an ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia, he might well have had our subscribers in mind. At least they seem to be up all night, reading, assaying, scribbling after absolutes in a language the clipped densities of which rival, on a good night, any passage from Finnegans Wake.
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I would like to feel a stirring.
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Today is Thursday.
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I’m writing this from my bed at the Universty of Michigan Hospital. It is 3 a.m. It is the half-dark of hospitals at night. I have had an accident. I have been in an accident.
From my window I can make out the iced-over Huron River and a tennis court covered with a taut white sheet of snow.
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Philadelphia Enquirer November 28, 1972
Martin Bormann Reported Alive in South America
Champions’ Routes to Glory
...And sometimes champions have highly developed imaginations
that help them in their quest for glory. Tom Andrews, only 11, of
Charleston, W.Va., applauded without interruption for 14 hours
31 minutes. His father, Ray, so attested in an affidavit he sent to The
Guinness Book of World Records.
The National Tattler January 28, 1973
Boy Breaks Hand-Clapping Record
He Probably Never Will Applaud Anyone!
Dear Tom,
It was certainly nice to read that you have broken the world’s record in clapping. Keep your Dad busy getting that affidavit recorded.
We used to enjoy seeing how your Dad recorded you and John in your annual picture for Christmas. The last few years we had lost contact.
Congratulations again. Everyone is very proud of you.
Sincerely,
The Ripley Fishers
National Enquirer September 9, 1973
Director Who Made ‘South Pacific’ Reveals He Was Mentally Ill for 28 Years
Twins Engaged, Married and Have Babies on Same Day
Smothering Sneezes Can Harm You, Warns Doctor
11-Year-Old Boy Claps 94,520 times in 14 Hours 31 Minutes
Tom Andrews doesn’t expect anybody to give him a hand for
breaking a world record. Especially after clapping for himself an
astounding 94,520 times!
“I just wanted to break a world record,” grinned freckle-faced Tom, who lives with his parents in Charleston, W.Va.
Norris McWhirter, co-compiler of the Guinness Book, told the Enquirer: “We don’t have many 11-year-olds in the Guinness Book. So this is quite a remarkable feat.”
Dear Tom,
Try to come out if you can, but if you can’t that’s o.k. I can play till about 4:00 or 5:00. I hope you come out. Will you walk with me today? Circle YES NO
I think you are the nicest boy over in Rolling Hills. I’m going to try to get you something.
Love, Diane
P.S. Write back if you want to. Don’t let anybody else see this except Nan if you want to. Or Laura. I just showed Nan and Laura. Do you mind? Circle YES NO
Answer questions and give back, please.
•
“That your scrapbook?” Ellen, the night nurse, asks.
When I mutter that, technically, it’s my mother’s, who brought it to the hospital to cheer me up, Ellen glances at the National Enquirer headline and says, “You did that? Clapped your hands?”
I nod.
“Lord!” she says. “Did you have a major bleed, or what?”
•
Two days after my brother died I learned to juggle apples.
As children John and I stared in wonder at jugglers, at the blurred orbits of their hovering knives or bowling pins, at their taunting nonchalance. Gravity flowed from their fingers. Two days after John died, in Charleston for the funeral, I traced on notebook paper the looping flight paths three objects must follow to remain aloft while being shuttled from hand to hand. I was staying at my great-aunt’s apartment on Kanawha Boulevard. She kept a bowl of fresh fruit on a coffee table in the living room, where I found three apples of serviceable size and with them made an inelegant leap from theory to practice. I kept dropping the same apple. Once it fell against a corner of the coffee table: the yellow skin split and juice began to drip. I dropped it again. More juice. And again. The smell was terrific, sweet as just-washed hair. Eventually I could keep all three bruised, dripping apples weaving in midair, circulating. Gravity flowed from my fingers.
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I have had an accident.
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I have had an accident on the sidewalk. I watched my feet come out from under me on the iced concrete with a kind of anecdotal perspective. The bleeding inside the joints, the infusions of factor VIII, the weeks of immobility, the waiting for codeine, the inventions with which my mind would veer in the direction of solid ground—as my weight drilled into the twisting leg I saw the whole pantomime emerge with the clarity of blown glass.
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Sunrise. The sky gray and pink.
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My roommate, an elderly man with end-stage heart disease, was rolled in on a stretcher today. Oxygen tubes curl around his ears, line his cheek, enter his nostrils. His wife reads newspapers while he sleeps. They look uncannily alike: white-haired, slight, their salmon-colored faces stretched tightly across the facial bones. He’s yet to be awake in this room.
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When I told my hematologist that as a teenager I had raced motocross, that in fact in one race in Gallipolis, Ohio, I had gotten the holeshot and was bumped in the first turn and run over by twenty-some motorcycles, she said, “No. Not with your factor level. I’m sorry, but you wouldn’t withstand the head injuries. You like the sound of yourself being dramatic.”
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The riffled sea of my sheets.
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There is a mathematical process, useful to physicists and probability theorists, called the “self-avoiding random walk.” Walter, one of MR’s physics editors, once explained it to me as a succession of movements along a lattice of given dimensions, where the direction and length of each move is randomly determined, and where the walk does not return to a point already walked on. I almost wept with delight.
Walter looked confused. “You studied randomness in school?” he said, earnestly.
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So many infusions of factor VIII...
As the concentrate filters into the IV drip, I feel the cold rise up through the upper arm, the shoulder, then branch off descending into the chest. I contain multitudes.
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Heels clicking by in the hallway.
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Later I learned that Walter would sometimes perform a kind of mime when he was drunk, a bodily interpretation of the self-avoiding random walk. Walter wore wire-rim glasses and a long, dazzlingly unkempt beard. He had close friends everywhere: Kyoto, Glasgow, Milan, Leningrad, Sao Paulo, Cape Town. I tried to imagine his self-avoidance. Head crooked severely, eyes fixed, doll-like, in the opposite direction, feet turned alternately inw
ard and outward, arms flailing somehow along trajectories his head, eyes, and feet did not intersect. I liked Walter. He refused to publish a review of any paper that referred to “cone-shaped objects” and their velocity, heat-seeking ability, etc.
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In the hallway in the shunt-light
of the hallway
you wake
a nurse comes to show you
to your room
but can’t find it
the entire wing is missing
you look outside
there in the gravel lot the sleet
pounding its fists
your white gown is walking home
•
Ellen takes the ice pack off my right calf and feels for a pulse at the ankle. She’s been doing this every five minutes throughout the night to make sure the pressure of bleeding hasn’t compressed and finally flattened the blood vessels. I’m a half hour or so into a dose of codeine: removing the ice pack doesn’t make me cry out.
“It’s still so hot,” she says, meaning the skin around the calf. “You could fry an egg on it.”
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Glaring light. Shocking cold of the bedpan.
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The President through the TV’s drift and snow: “Things are even more like they are now than they’ve ever been.”
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Body positioning, weight distribution, throttle control.
Work with the bike. Don’t fight it.
The sooner you shift your weight out of a corner, the sooner you can accelerate. Don’t lose time between braking and accelerating.
Use the bike’s ability to control itself.
Preparing the bike—the gear ratios, the suspension, the jetting—ahead of time will help your ability to concentrate on the race.
Concentration: don’t let something stupid happen in the lulling middle of a race.
Adapt to the track as it changes. Be on the lookout for alternative lines.
Racing in the rain: controlled insanity. Get out front to avoid being roosted with mud from the rear tires of other riders.
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There are times, in the last minutes before I am allowed, or allow myself, more codeine, when the pain inside the joints simplifies me utterly. I feel myself descending some kind of evolutionary ladder until I become as crude and guileless as an amoeba. The pain is not personal. I am incidental to it. It is like faith, the believer eclipsed by something immense...
The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle
For the sin against the HOLY GHOST is INGRATITUDE
—CHRISTOPHER SMART, Jubilate Agno
May the Lord Jesus Christ bless the hemophiliac’s motorcycle, the smell of knobby tires,
Bel-Ray oil mixed with gasoline, new brake and clutch cables and handlebar grips,
the whole bike smothered in WD40 (to prevent rust, and to make the bike shine),
may He divine that the complex smell that simplified my life was performing the work of the spirit,
a window into the net of gems, linkages below and behind the given material world,
my little corner of the world’s danger and sweet risk, a hemophiliac dicing on motocross tracks
in Pennsylvania and Ohio and West Virginia each Sunday from April through November,
the raceway names to my mind then a perfect sensual music, Hidden Hills, Rocky Fork, Mt. Morris, Salt Creek,
and the tracks themselves part of that music, the double jumps and off-camber turns, whoop-de-doos and fifth-gear downhills,
and me with my jersey proclaiming my awkward faith—“Powered By Christ,” it said above a silk-screened picture of a rider in a radical cross-up,
the bike flying sideways off a jump like a ramp, the rider leaning his whole body into a left-hand corner—
may He find His name glorified in such places and smells,
and in the people, Mike Bias, Charles Godby, Tracy Woods, David and Tommy Hill, Bill Schultz—
their names and faces snowing down to me now as I look upward to the past—
friends who taught me to look at the world luminously in front of my eyes,
to find for myself the right rhythm of wildness and precision, when to hold back and when to let go,
each of them with a style, a thumbprint, a way of tilting the bike this way or that out of a berm shot, or braking heavily into a corner,
may He hear a listening to the sure song of His will in those years,
for they flooded me with gratitude that His informing breath was breathed into me,
gratitude that His silence was the silence of all things, His presence palpable everywhere in His absence,
gratitude that the sun flashed on the Kanawha River, making it shimmer and wink,
gratitude that the river twisted like a wrist in its socket of bottomland, its water part of our speech
as my brother and I drifted in inner tubes fishing the Great White Carp,
gratitude that plump squirrels tight-walked telephone lines and trellises of honeysuckle vines
and swallows dove and banked through the limbs of sycamore trees, word-perfect and sun-stunned
in the middle of the afternoon, my infusion of factor VIII sucked in and my brother’s dialysis sucked in and out—
both of us bewildered by the body’s deep swells and currents and eerie backwaters,
our eyes widening at the white bursts on the mountain ash, at earthworms inching into oil-rainbowed roads—
gratitude that the oak tops on the high hills beyond the lawns fingered the denim sky
as cicadas drilled a shrill voice into the roadside sumac and peppergrass,
gratitude that after a rain catbirds crowded the damp air, bees spiraling from one exploding blossom to another,
gratitude that at night the star clusters were like nun buoys moored to a second sky, where God made room for us all,
may He adore each moment alive in the whirring world,
as now sitting up in this hospital bed brings a bright gladness for the human body, membrane of web and dew
I want to hymn and abide by, splendor of tissue, splendor of cartilage and bone,
splendor of the taillike spine’s desire to stretch as it fills with blood
after a mundane backward plunge on an iced sidewalk in Ann Arbor
splendor of fibrinogen and cryoprecipitate, loosening the blood pooled in the stiffened joints
so I can sit up oh sit up in radiance, like speech after eight weeks of silence,
and listen for Him in the blood-rush and clairvoyance of the healing body,
in the sweet impersonal luck that keeps me now
from bleeding into the kidney or liver, or further into the spine,
listen for Him in the sound of my wife and my father weeping and rejoicing,
listen as my mother kneels down on the tiled floor like Christopher Smart
praying with strangers on a cobbled London street, kneels here in broad daylight
singing a “glorious hosanna from the den”
as nurses and orderlies and patients rolling their IV stands behind them like luggage
stall and stare into the room and smile finally and shuffle off, having heard God’s great goodness lifted up
on my mother’s tongue, each face transformed for a moment by ridicule
or sympathy before disappearing into the shunt-light of the hallway,
listen for Him in the snap and jerk of my roommate’s curtain as he draws it open
to look and look at my singing mother and her silent choir
and to wink at me with an understanding that passeth peace, this kind, skeletal man
suffering from end-stage heart disease who loves science fiction and okra,
who on my first night here read aloud his grandson’s bar mitzvah speech to me,
“...In my haftorah portion, the Lord takes Ezekiel to a valley full of bones,
the Lord commands him to prophesy over the bones so they will become people...,”
and solemnly recited the entire text of the candlelighting ceremony,
“I would like to light the first candle in memory of Grandma Ruth, for whom I was named,
I would like Grandma Dot and Grandpa Dan to come up and light the second candle,