Recuperation/Recovery # 5, including A Celebration Breakfast

Background to this post:

I woke up this morning at 5:06.  I had slept since something after three.  For me this was a good stretch of sleep.  I didn’t turn on CNN, or CBCNW, or CTVNC and actually wondered about putting my head back down to sleep some more; after all, I had already watched the stiff little marionette figure of Paul Ryan address the predominantly blond female and mostly pudgy and nondescript male inhabitants of/participants in the 3-day RNC infomercial and listened to the commentaries of the insipid Piers Morgan with his assortment of beer drinkers at the CNN Grill as they analysed Ryan’s lies (like accusing Obama of closing the Janesville GM plant when it  was actually the Bush-monkey who did), his half-truths, empty platitudes, and assorted pandering to whatever the party strategists figured was needed last night.

I decided to snuggle down, and let my own mind and body decide whether more sleep was the answer.  It didn’t take me long to realize that I had things on my mind and that I could do some more sleeping later before E. came over for EFT so I sat up, slid my feet into my sandals, noted the brightening bluish light to the east, collected the debris from my 3 a.m. snack, and headed downstairs to prepare a new picnic for this new morning, the second last day of August, with its touch of summer’s end in the air.

Before I ate anything I thought of the deck of cards in a drawer and played a game of Patience on the dining room table.  The game was taught to me by my grandmother and I played it in her memory (she died in 1970 the same week Lorraine and I were married, during the October Crisis), and in memory of her daughter, my mother, who died on August 27 of last year (see RECUPERATION #3).  If you understand the game at all, you will recognize that I had one move left to make (in column 2), but after that the game was finished, four diamonds up.  Then I was free to eat.

It is now 6:43.  The sun has risen and illuminated our bedroom, shining on my Egyptian fabric piece and Lorraine’s Tunisian desert photo, and on the chakra garden that has been with me more than two months now.

Actually it is now 2:22 p.m. ADT, an auspicious sounding time, and I have just woken up, after a morning when  I have eaten some, slept some, drunk some, and been treated to a celebration breakfast (see Recuperation #6, not yet written, on the amazing and immediate effects of vemurafenib, a new drug for treatment of metastatic melanoma  like mine, produced by Roche and provided/sold as Zelboraf).

 

I have just looked at my sitemeter, which reads 482 visits this month (you are reading a non-viral blog here!), noted that our son JE was one of two visitors to the site today, read Fareed and Saleha’s kind e-mail from Kabul, signed on to an Avaaz petition, and photographed a message of love from my 5-year old granddaughter. 

And now it’s time to get to the post:

RECUPERATION #5 – Remembering who you are:

I believe it is important to remember who you are and to understand the continuity of self from as far back as you can trace it to the present moment in order to be more present in the world, whether it is the recuperative journey I am travelling in/on at the present or any other activity/focus/perceptual awareness I am engaged in (if I am starting to sound prescriptive or tendentious or proselytizing here, please forgive – or, at the least, humour – me for the moment).

In my EFT session with E. this morning, she finished the session with” “Backward visualize to a time when you were at optimum health, and bring that forward to now.”  I did what she suggested, going back to a summer 30 years ago when she was just three, and felt a stream of energy move through my body from my feet to my head, and it was a good thing.

I have not been reading a lot on this journey (other than Al Jazeera online and The New Yorker), but I have been exploring over the last few days some areas of my bookshelf for some treasures from my past and present that help remind me who I am and have been. 

Although the list is long, I’ll try to keep the entries precise, and please remember that these entries are descriptive of my recuperation/recovery process and not prescriptive – you don’t actually have to look at any of them.

Here’s the list:

THE LINES OF MY HAND by Robert Frank (1989) – look in the section “IN NOVA SCOTIA Canada” for “words”, “for my daughter Andrea who died…”, “POUR LA FILLE” on the following page, “sick of goodby’s”, “4AM MAKE LOVE TO ME   4AM MAKE LOVE TO ME”, and “HOSPITAL” that includes this message: “THE WIND WILL BLOW THE FIRE OF PAIN ACROSS EVERYONE IN TIME”.  Go there if you like.

THE ENGLISH PATIENT by Michael Ondaatje (1992).

.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED by Anne Carson (1998), another great novel, this one in verse.

UNDER THE ICE by Alden Nowlan (1961), inscribed in blue marker, “For my son, Johnnie, with love Alden Nowlan”, and I wonder where is Johnnie now and think of Frank’s works about Andrea (mentioned above) and any works he made about his son Pablo (both of Frank's children were young when they died).  I also remember finding the section in the Dalhousie University stacks in 1964 where Nowlan’s books were lined up and I remember living inside them for days.  This book is from my late father’s collection and I do wonder if he bought it with me in mind.

DANCE OF THE HAPPY SHADES by Alice Munro (1968), a wonderful bunch of very short novels.

PLAINWATER by Anne Carson (2000), a gift of poetry and prose given to me by my old friend Udo (a small prescriptive note: read “Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother – pp. 245-260 – before reading NOX).

NOX by Anne Carson (2010), a book of loss housed in a box.

THE COLOUR OF THE TIMES: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF RAYMOND SOUSTER by Raymond Souster (1964) found down the stacks shelf from Nowlan, another place to live for a few days.

THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, edited by Donald M. Allen (1960).

THE POETICS OF THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, edited by Donald Allen& Warren Tallman (1973).  A companion piece to the one above.  It was edited by Warren, who was on my thesis committee and who organized a memorial service at UBC for Charles Olson at which I wrote a short poem involving the moon that night, the constellation Orion, and The Aspy Fault which is a connecting earth line between northern Cape Breton and Gloucester and read as part of the service.  I never met Olson.

THE BROKEN ARK: a book of beasts, poems chosen by MichaelOndaatje/drawings by Tony Urquhart (1971).

HIS IDEA by Robert Creeley, photographs by Elsa Dorfman (publication date is shown as 2 March 1973, my 28^th birthday), includes the following: 

"Note read re
letter of Lawrence’s

to Mrs. Aldous/Huxley? That
films are obscene

if when the young
man and woman come home,

they masturbate one by one.

Not so --
if they make love.”  

I did meet Creeley.

LETTERS FROM THE SAVAGE MIND by Patrick Lane, “a loon/without wings/wanting to fly/recording letters/from the savage mind”, “This book is for Red Lane/The/Carnival/Man” (1966).

MEXICO CITY BLUES (242 CHORUSES) by Jack Kerouac (1959).

And there are two additional books not included in the image:

FIRST VOICE by J. E. Field (1991), with the following dedication:
"TO ROGER
MY DEAR FATHER
WHO SHOWED ME THE WAY"
It also included a longer personal inscription in blue ballpoint.

THE COMPLETE POEMS: 1927 – 1979 by Elizabeth Bishop (1995) with “At the Fish Houses” (pp. 64-66), “Cape Breton” (pp.67-68), “First Death in Nova Scotia” (pp. 125-126), and “The Moose (for Grace Bulmer Bowers)” (pp. 169-173), as well, of course, as “One Art” (p. 178).