December 1, 2006
The Philosopher’s Stone
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
--D.H. Lawrence, "Healing"
these dark nights
I begin to feel like
the Chinese poet
Li Po:
drinking wine and writing
poems
writing poems and drinking
wine
all the while
aware of the strict limitations
that come with
being
human
then
accepting that
the wine and the poems
gently
intermixing:
yes, there is a peaceable place
to be found
in this unending
war
we call life
where things
such as
light, shadow, sound
objects
become
gently
and meaningfully
fascinating.
Li Po
drunk on his
wine
knew very well that
just to know
one thing well
was best.
--Charles Bukowski, “A.D. 701-762”
After pulling an 18 inch long blue plastic “temporary stent” out of my urinary tract and pronouncing me likely to soon start passing the fragments of my recently bombarded 6mm+ kidney stone, the urologist said to me rather abruptly, “I don’t mean any disrespect, but how do you justify in your mind your obvious concern for a healthy lifestyle and a vegetarian diet with your propensity to drink so much alcohol?”
“Well, first of all,” I said, “I originally became a vegetarian for ethical reasons, not health reasons. Whatever health benefits there are, are strictly a bonus. I remember reading when I first became a vegetarian that Gandhi had said that even if being a vegetarian was bad for him, he would be one anyway for the sake of the animals. Gandhi was one of my heroes even before I became a vegetarian. Secondly,” I said, “Gandhi is not my only hero. I suppose you could say I consider myself, philosophically, something of a cross between Gandhi on the one hand and the hard drinking bohemian poet, Charles Bukowski on the other. Ever heard of Bukowski?” I asked him. He shook his head no, but I think he understood the character type I was describing and I don’t think he saw Bukowski or Gandhi either as very good role models. Both seemed adherents of an irrational and romantic self-destruction and I could see the doctor’s eyes begin to glaze over the way our own eyes must when we find ourselves being lectured to by fools. It made no sense to go on.
In the last few years and especially in the last few months, I have felt myself being swept overboard of my halcyon days. Contemplating my mortality is something I’ve always done, though mostly in the abstract. Lately I’ve been feeling like a large and fearsome bear being slowly brought down by a relentless and merciless pack of wolves. I told the doctor that I believed that my kidney stone was the result of my not having been drinking enough water for years and having converted a couple of years ago (ironically for “health reasons”) from beer to wine. Despite an inadequate intake of pure water, the great volumes of beer had kept my kidneys well flushed out. When I switched to wine, the volume of liquid per measure of alcohol went down greatly and I did not think to compensate with an increased intake of water.
When I say I gave up beer for wine for “health reasons,” that is not quite the whole story either. I keep trying, for the sake of doctors, or at least doctors as symbols of some perceived rational part of my mind, to frame the decisions I make in strictly rational terms. The truth is that just as the vegetarianism was more for philosophical reasons than for health, I think it may be that I started drinking red wine more for aesthetic reasons than for health. Aesthetic on several different levels. I was heading for France the next year and the French are famous for wine and the French are famous for style. I have been fascinated all my life by all things French and have sought time and again to achieve some Frenchness in my life that might represent a new level of poetic or intellectual sophistication.
Now, of course, I didn’t discuss any of this French stuff with the urologist. Why would I? Well, to answer my own question, I could have at least discussed aesthetics with him because less than 2 weeks earlier within the first few moments of meeting him for the first time there in my hospital room on the night before I was to undergo the bizarre kidney stone busting procedure called lithotripsy, he had confessed to me that he had decided to specialize in urology 20 years earlier because of the “elegance” of the common surgical procedure (before lithotripsy) for going in with a knife and removing offending kidney stones that were stuck in people’s ureters.
My dictionary gives 6 definitions of the word “elegant.”
1. tastefully fine or luxurious in dress, style, design, etc.: elegant furnishings.
2. gracefully refined and dignified, as in tastes, habits, or literary style: an elegant young gentleman; an elegant prosodist.
3. graceful in form or movement: an elegant wave of the hand.
4. appropriate to refined taste: a man devoted to elegant pursuits.
5. excellent; fine; superior: an absolutely elegant wine.
6. (of scientific, technical, or mathematical theories, solutions, etc.) gracefully concise and simple; admirably succinct.
Just look at the common ground--the aesthetic common ground-- between my decision to emulate the French in style, verse and vin and my urologist’s decision to become a urologic surgeon! The parallel seems downright scandalous unless you take the view that goes at least as far back as Plato and Aristotle that the rational is beautiful and the beautiful is rational. Even George Bernard Shaw can be cited here as having claimed that his vegetarianism was based on aesthetics!
Where does this leave us? In the documentary film of Bukowski’s life, “Born into This,”
Bukowski flaunts a glass of wine before the camera at one point and relates the story of how his doctor had told him that if he ever took another drink it would kill him. “That was years ago,” he said, downing the wine. Bukowski died eventually of cancer, I believe. Gandhi from the bullet of a religious fanatic. Who knows what will get me. Or you. The question of how to live your life remains the eternal question. One man’s elegance is another man’s pain. One man’s truth, another’s sorrow.
Unlike Bukowski I do not wish to flaunt anything before anybody. I’ve been humbled by unbearable physical pain, humiliated by the overwhelming cost of a simple medical procedure in America (a cost that with only one night in the hospital totals up to 3 ½ times my annual Social Security pension) and even chastised by the doctor for living an apparently irrational life.
The results are not yet in on the chemical make-up of my kidney stone. Most stones are of calcium oxalate. If that’s what I had I must not only drink enough water to pass at least 2 liters of urine every day, I must eat a minimal amount of high oxalate foods for the rest of my life. High oxalate foods that have provided the backbone of my vegetarian diet include soy products, dried beans, whole wheat bread, corn, berries, nuts and most dark green leafy vegetables. The challenge to keep oxalates low and still maintain a healthy intake of protein and other needed nutrients is daunting to say the least. I suspect that neither Gandhi nor Charles Bukowski would have worried about any of this as much as I am. So there must be someone else in here running my brain. Someone at once rational and severely depressed. Alcohol, everyone keeps reminding me, is a depressant. But it is also a pain killer. A killer of the existential pain that is life itself. What D. H. Lawrence called the “wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self.” Nirvana can do it, too, I suppose, if you can get there. It’s just not as easy to find as a liquor store.
Rabbit Rock, North Carolina
December, 2006
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