Let's see, I'm going to read now a really intense passage.
[CHUCKLE] But I've never read, I and I'm
going to take the microphone out,
I think it would be interesting to try that.
I've never read this aloud, so it's
going to be kind of interesting to read it aloud.
I do get to say in the course of Ceaser,
both the father and the son die, and everybody
assumes that the following scene is the son dying.
But in fact, I am here to tell you
I wrote it very carefully so that you don't
know who's dying, and it could be
either the father or the son.
The title of the chapter--
it's a very short chapter--
it's called, "Where Do We Come From, What
are We, Where are We Going?"
Which is my translation of the title of Gagarin's Fabulous
Woodcut which fills a whole wall in the Boston Museum of Fine
Arts, and if you're ever in Boston
you should certainly seek it out.
It has an older woman to one side,
a couple with a child in the middle,
and a young child to one side-- to the other side,
and it's called, "Where do we come from, what are we,
where are we going"
The choices are these, breathe and cough, or don't breathe.
So he breathes and coughs and with each cough
catapults himself into an altered state of being.
The pain transports him beyond pain
into some parallel universe where the knowledge of pain
is impossible.
Because pain itself forms the substance and being
of existence.
His consciousness shrinks to a white dwarf
of a star concentrate of pain, brilliant pointed star turning
in the darkness of his chest.
The clarity and purity of this feeling
he has never before known, it is the closest
he has come to ecstasy.
Only anger is keeping him alive and his family's
faces he sees his agony reflected
as their wholly comprehensible wish that he hang it up, turn
it in, and kick the bucket, call it quits.
What they don't understand is that he hangs on
so as to see their pain, partly from love.
How can he let go this dearness earned so dearly, partly
from sheer onrightness.
They are distressed, sorrowful, they pity his incontinence
in pain, but they are not here, they
are in that other world, the world of the not sick,
whose horizons extend beyond the here and now.
He's hanging on and hanging on, and then he
sees miss Camilla who totters in one afternoon.
She is dressed in white, and at first he
mistakes her for the nurse who visits him
on every shift at the hospital.
He is barely conscious as she goes through the routine.
It's Camilla, Camilla Perkins, can you hear me?
Squeeze my hand.
He retreats into his private universe of pain.
He drifts there until he hears her voice
from some far and cavernous place.
Forgive, he hears her saying more than once,
a pesky breathing at his ear.
He would raise his hand to brush it away, forgive what?
What can it matter now?
But he cannot control his hand, it drifts off the bed and he is
following it to where it is going until he is called back
to consciousness by her sour old breath.
Smell, his nose is as sharp, maybe sharper than ever.
She is leaning over him her eyes bulging, her eyebrows forming
half moon arcs above his own.
Let go, she, whispers you have earned your death.
Who could have imagined this happening to him, to anybody.
He has seen many deaths, and still this is true.
He shakes his head as best he can, no, no.
She holds up a small brass corner chest,
its leather straps dangling.
I've come to take your heart, she says.
He raises his eyebrows, I'm taking your heart, she repeats.
Take my heart, he says loud crazy old maid,
friend and lover, mother of sorrows, angel of death.
As he speaks he breathes, as he breathes he coughs, as he
coughs his lungs rack and swell until his chest bursts,
and his breastbone splits cleanly down the middle.
He is splitting wood, plunging an axe
into a thick straight poplar log that
divides neatly into halves.
A few splinters, a gush of blood from the woods
pale yellow heart.
He is gutting dear the swift, sharp, stroke
he learned from his father, and that his father learned
from the father before him, and on back
to whenever there were knives to wield,
wherever there were fathers to teach.
And the quick spurt of blood in his
thought when he first made this cut years ago.
Who could have imagined that a single animal, any animal,
holds this much blood.
He is covered with his own blood,
until he smells his flesh burning,
and the blood stops, and his chest
opens wider of its own accord.
And lifting itself from his chest, his heart,
ringed with thorns, and encircled in flame,
and rising to hover above his dissected chest,
until miss Camilla holds out her strong box
and he yields his heart into her quivering hands that
guided into this casket of gold, ciborium of leather and brass.
His chest knits itself together.
The pain is as transcendent as ever,
but he breathes easier now that his swollen heart is not
crowding his fluid filled lungs.
Now that his heart is in safe keeping, away
from these doctors, this hospital.
Away even from his blood family.
He knows what she will do, she will take his heart
and place it in the wood shop stove, which
she will fire using the badly glued block of wood from which
he was to learn or teach.
And all of him that is of any count will rise to the clouds
to join all that has gone before.
And when the stove is cooled, she
will shovel the ashes into her strong box
and drop the whole from the palate forward bridge,
so that they may join all that remains behind.
This is right and just, a fitting and proper end
for the joy and grief, evanescence and futility
of human endeavor.
That was the mid-1980s, that was a pretty intense period
of time.