Georgia O’Keefe
This past week I seem to have taken as a challenge Elaine Scarry’s observation (in The Body in Pain) that representations of physical pain in literature are rare. Two more I add to the list are the Blake professor in Gail Godwin’s The Good Husband, who is dying of cancer, and Rosie, the stressed-out union organizer in Rachel Kranz’s Leaps of Faith, who suffers from fibroids.
Through Rosie the author makes the case (as she also has this past week in response to some of my posts) that often being in pain is what we need, even if it’s not what we think we want. As the acupuncturist in the book asks her at one point,
“Would you rather be sick, Rosie? I’m sure your body does have the energy to heal itself. But maybe being sick is just what you need right now. What do you really want?”
These are vital questions and insights, ones that I’m sure I will revisit. But for the moment I’ve exhausted myself on the topic of whether pain isolates us and or has something to teach us. It’s Friday, a long Columbus Day awaits, I’m heading off to New York to see a play (Talking Band’s Radnevsky’s Real Magic at La Mama), and perhaps it’s time to take a break from all this heaviness. To shift emotional gears and move to a simple enjoyment of life, I leave you with a favorite poem from my high school days, “The Shell,” by Irish poet James Stephens:
And then I pressed the shell
Close to my ear
And listened well,
And straight away, like a bell
Came low and clear
The slow, sad, murmur of distant seas,
Whipped by an icy breeze
Upon a shore
Wind-swept and desolate.
It was a sunless strand that never bore
The footprint of a man,
Nor felt the weight
Since time began
Of any human quality or stir
Save what the dreary winds and waves incur.
And in the hush of waters was the sound
Of pebbles, rolling round,
Forever rolling, with a hollow sound.
And bubbling seaweeds as the waters go
Swish to and fro
Their long, cold tentacles of shiny grey.
There was no day,
Nor ever came a night
Setting the stars alight
To wonder at the moon;
Was twilight only and the frightening croon,
Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind
And waves that journeyed blind—
And then I loosed my ear . . . Oh, it was sweet
To hear a cart go jolting down the street.
Enjoy the lightness of being. Talk to you Monday.
