Mark Rudman
Conversion in Scafa
“If you want to see what man could do if he wanted to, you have only to think of
those who have broken out of prison or tried to break out.
They have done as much with a single nail as they could have with a
battering ram.”
—Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg
“Sickness is not only in body, but in that part used to be call: soul.”
—Dr.
Vigil in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
Something happened.
I want to tell you.
I want you to know.
I can’t talk about it.
I can’t talk at all and my voice isn’t hoarse.
My voice only becomes hoarse when I talk about it to my wife
who’s with me in this
night of the soul but often
doesn’t respond.
So I say it again.
And then I pass out from exhaustion.
I mean total spiritual exhaustion.
The real exhaustion.
I knew who I was and shuddered at who I had become.
I understand the conversions of so many writers I love for the first time.
And it might not have happened if I hadn’t been disabled by air I could not breathe,
result of freakish late blooming trees and fumes from the asphalt factory in Scafa,
able to rise from breakfast washed down with lots of espresso
only to drag upstairs and collapse back into bed
hour after hour after hour
in the beautiful emptiness.
From the dawns, which my retina has stored for all time.
To cockcrow.
To the first swallows looping.
And many times I saw you there, in that doorway, saying
embrace the fear.
And have you looked at Fear and Trembling lately?
Looked at, I thought.
Fear, trembling.
Shuddering through uncertainty.
Ambition’s barroom.
And while walking around with
boundless trepidation I’d think,
Kierkegaard, ok, but the same
thing happened to Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo,
he’d known the risks,
and so the worst happened,
but now his life was limited—and not by his language—
and the screenplay limited his fears to heights
but heights also meant a few feet off the ground
as when he stands on Midge’s stool to show her
it’s ok, it’s nothing,
one more step and he is suddenly, overwhelmingly,
overcome.
A cure?
To go through it again?
But how can you go through anything again?
Only when emptied out can you begin again.
And then a glass of wine.
For pure pleasure or to mourn.
For relief from the pent-up blues in the ruins.
My father never had a glass of wine.
Never a casual drink for pleasure with the others.
Only a tumbler at a time.
He mastered the black art of putting everyone
on the defensive with his barbed quips.
Which led to confrontations.
They’ve come back to vex me again,
erasing any gains I’d made in
dealing with the two sides of his nature right out of the book by Stevenson he loved
to talk about more than any other except the one by Conrad.
I love to wear the Jekyll and Hyde tee shirt I bought
after I’d taken Sam to see the
musical.
And it looks better now that it’s faded and bloody and the colors run and blur.
And who is who and what is what.
I regret having sought solutions more convenient
than the one that enabled
the neuralgia-wracked Francis Parkman
to write his history of Montcalm and Wolfe
in a bathtub on a board propped on the sides
(I believe that Wolfe said he would rather have written Gray’s Elegy
than taken
moments before the bullet entered his heart?).
It didn’t solve the pain; it solved the problem.
And I have lost time.
I have wasted time.
Overcoming.
Teddy Roosevelt was my hero, no, my role model, no, my uncle my brother my father, no,
nothing to me at all, but once I was forced to accept, through the frequency of
doctor’s visits if nothing more conscious, my fragility, Teddy became a figure of
Biblical proportions.
It wasn’t the ailments, it was that I underestimated the physical difficulties and
repercussions.
Why did I care?
I moved around a lot.
I had to find a way.
I wanted to participate.
To make a life for myself
wherever I lived for however
short a time.
Ball.
Let me see: Dad wasn’t around, the Rabbi managed two
physical acts a year during the High Holidays,
holding the Torah and blowing the Ram’s Horn.
And my passion for mud was unappeasable,
and no amount of asthma, short of asphyxiation,
could deter me from the thrill of rolling in the mud…,
no, not rolling, being completely immersed.
Football.
Looking back, I wish I’d been a textbook introvert and said “only philosophy
bucks me up,” involved in school beyond the minimum of what was required and not
living for recess
and what was happening in the street after
school.
It’s my fantasy that I could have lived more in my mind’s interior, constructing
sub- worlds to inhabit while my body was elsewhere, like somebody who really gets
lost—and found—in chess or mathematics.
Among the myriad risks some were truly unwise: stupid.
Like saying yes to playing tackle in a scrimmage without shoulder pads
with the Utes, carrying the ball into the line just to see what would happen.
“Nobody’s serious when they’re seventeen.”
Nobody’s bones are formed at fifteen.
An ex-All American guard, Jewish, married to the daughter of a family friend, offered:
A Jewish linesman?
I figured he’d watch over me.
Or that they’d go easy on a kid.
Athletes usually did.
Seven years older and seventy more pounds?
Or that there’d be someone.
Instead of no one.
To open up a hole in the defense.
But the guard became absorbed in the game.
—Who knows what game he was replaying in imagination?
They let me pass a few times and I managed a few unintercepted incompletes without harm,
so when I took the handoff and stayed right behind my All American friend
I hadn’t considered that the defensive line, joined
by the linebackers, would converge to upend me at the ankle and as I fell
hit me higher and higher, from all sides,
thigh, waist, torso, shoulder, neck,
and when I was down, piled on.
To complete the crush, squeeze the air out.
I didn’t mind a new order of pain.
And to lie motionless under the hard-edged autumnal blue.
There were two things I didn’t want: a broken neck or to lose the use of my legs for
life.
“Give the kid some time,” I heard a voice say out of the huddle, and it
wasn’t Ned’s.
(They weren’t worried, good sign.)
Only on the drive home did Ned confess his fear that I might have broken something when I
didn’t get up and they had to run the next few plays around me. He confessed, quietly, that he hadn’t
thought they would have played that rough. Later,
over drinks, he managed to get a word in over the wild, boozy, and hilarious banter
between my stepfather and his father-in-law; he said he couldn’t believe that I had
hung in there and played despite some brutal hits. They
weren’t listening, didn’t take it in, but I did.
And so did Mom, who appeared proud.
But the real danger wasn’t in any lack of control
over animal or machine, it was panic, doing the reverse
of what was best in a crisis.
Gunning the engine at cliff’s edge when I wanted to turn it off.
Maybe if “Mom” hadn’t used so much of her air time warning me what not to
do
I would have been less reckless, more lucid in exhilaration,
able to pay more careful attention
to where my body was in the physical world.
Sure, Mom had to get the dirt out.
It’s like yesterday. When the sky burst
open, people asked:
“How can you continue without an umbrella.”
I didn’t say, “something else I’m going to leave behind?”
If I was going to get wet I wanted to get drenched.
In these dark times my concentration goes and I can’t change
gears, switch to something
more practical, consume myself, workaholic style,
in something so consuming it would take my mind off
the repercussions
the question of what would happen.
Economics.
It’s daunting to raise a child in
A more modest lifestyle out of the city?
And the boy is adamant about staying.
Maybe it’s your fault for playing that song when he was three,
the one with the refrain
“First we take
But this July in the rugged Abruzzo something stole my sleep.
In exhaustion, it all comes clear.
The stars so close to the ground.
The way, the way they appear, one by one.
No vasty, vertiginous blur.
The dry, ravaged air that molds
every rock and shrub and crevice and grotto,
every white house chiseled into the Appenine range.
Not that there is no secret to the universe,
but that the secret may not be one
we want to hear.
Mutinous, destitute, monotonous
squeaking in the fields.
Every night, a reenactment.
Some pernicious scent.
It must have come this way to the others.
This emptying. This knowing
that nothing after today will ever
be that way again, calling
for a new metamorphosis.
Hour after hour, duration, blankness, ashen distances,
once in a while a cloud crossing the trees
in the emptiness like a visionary haze.
Silence. Dogbark. The occasional tractor.
That afternoon in
Immeasurable.
As every night I pray for deluge.
From Sundays on the Phone (