13 - lupron poétique

Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow...
I do love you both together...
Fair and foul I love together...
Oh the sweetness of the pain!
Muses bright, and Muses pale,
Bare your faces of the veil;
Let me see, and let me write
Of the day, and of the night--
Both together:--let me slake
All my thirst for sweet heart-ache.

      —John Keats, Page 123, Keats’s Poetry & Prose

~~~

I am thinking of my physicians this morning, the healers who keep me alive: primary care, oncology, radiology, urology, cardiology, researchers, case managers, nurses extraordinaire, and my Camille.

To all of you who have been there from the beginning, to those who've overseen, attended to and directed my present survival, it's as if I owe you something more than payment in full from Anthem Blue Cross. I have hope now where once there was only despair and death.

Rilke comes to mind: “It is not possible to have an adequate image of how inexhaustible the expansiveness and possibilities of life are. No fate, no rejection, no hardship is entirely without prospects; somewhere the densest shrub can yield leaves, a flower, a fruit.”

I am compelled to write as a means to attempt comprehension of what I am now describing as the Lupron Effect.

I had returned to college after a draftee stint as an imagery interpreter in Army Intelligence, the "philosophe"/poet was stirring, buried deep and still unacknowledged, having made his first appearance while I was in Colorado. It was there I got an inkling that there was something more, a possibility of coming to life, of potential unrealized. I was above the timberline at the end of a Pike's Peak climb. I had the sixteen golden stairs before me and I turned, glancing back, and was surprised by what I saw. "Mesmerized" may be closest to the sensation, a kind of euphoria (lack of oxygen?), then on the heels of this enchantment, an insight that was unsettling: the wide expanse, the forest, mountain ridges and valleys rolling one into another, downward, back to Manitou Springs, to the beginning of the journey. I had no words for it, no developed ability to attempt expression, to detail the instant epiphany that life was so much larger and more magnificent than I had imagined.

From school to now I have doffed my cap to this extra-sensitive one, given him his due, set aside time for him to ponder and reflect, all the while remaining in the world as an ordinary citizen—working, living and loving. I have always fought for him and carved out a necessary solitude, a planned detachment for his work, the living of a "second life." I've written twelve books now, copyrighted and unpublished, failure after failure to get into print. Undaunted he is, this philosophe-poet. Beckett speaks to him: "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

The point? The events of the last three years have brought me to a moment where I no longer need to fight for the time, no need to carve out the solitude, life has done that for me, in such a marvelous and unexpected way. I think I may have hinted at it before, but I must tell you I don’t know if I’ve ever lived so enrapt, so keenly aware of how grand and glorious life is; striking and stirring.

The ordinary citizen is now giving way to the philosophe-poet, and it's a wonder to me, and a joy; and I am, in my rediscovered innocence, beginning to believe that salvation and redemption in this world will come when each and all discover their own poet-self.

There was a time just after graduate school when I crafted an art of living philosophy, an acknowledgment of the importance of walking with death, of keeping it close, making it one's companion. The thought was to live in the moment, to slow things down, to never take anything for granted, to endeavor always to be "here and now," revering and attentive. I see clearly that this was of mind only, that death was still one or two removes away, like the imagined intimacies and ecstasies with our absent lover. Keats was on to it, death ever-present in his life, mother and younger brother both dying early of consumption, and he knew it was his fate. I expect his feeling for, his profound empathy with, what sorrows and tragedy lay in wait for each of us made him THE POET of the Romantic era.

Death? It has come so very near, and I have not turned away, but embraced it, and,… well, I could not have fathomed the effect.

There's no understanding it, this new and in-depth breadth of feeling—an attentiveness to things precious and ephemeral—without looking outside the natural conditions at play. There's certainly a confluence of thought, feeling and happenstance, the effects of the break with Maya, the medical castration and the challenges that derive, all of what has transpired, a natural progression to a more thoughtful and intense experience of being alive, but this isn’t it. Something else is at play.

Good healers who are keeping me alive, do you see? There has to be literature on this, some longitudinal study, a body of research. It’s the damned Lupron!

Full-on, no ifs, no ands, no buts. I am a different person, biochemically altered. Transmutations abound. Age old alchemy seemingly reborn. I swear I could craft promo pieces for the manufacturers of this incredible drug.

Is life getting you down? Do you feel alienated and disconnected from those you once admired and adored? Do you feel angry, sullen and morose? Do you feel life has dealt you a bad hand? Don't fold yet, I'm here to tell you, there's hope.

It's Lupron Poétique, in only four injections a year you will be transformed. What you once believed about yourself, the biochemical individuality you thought fixed and permanent, well, no more. A "Brave New World" has arrived. With the help of L-Poétique you'll begin to see how amazing your day-to-day lives can be.

Driving into work, same old same old? Not when you're on the Poétique. A sunrise, cloud formations, an orange ember sky against the azure blue? You'll be wailing in delight, a ululation so unfathomable you'll wonder how you could have missed it.

At dawn or dusk, even at noontide, routine moments become opportunities for a circumspect understanding, wordless sensations of grandeur and magnificence, a recognition and realization that in the simplest of moments there's something more to the daily round:

- in a father's reaching out for the hand of his daughter on an evening stroll;
- in the simple smile of a stranger;
- in the swaying palm and the warming ocean breeze;
- in the raucous squawks of the unruly ravens or the yawps of the ornery seagulls;
- in the moment when we tiptoe past a sleeping spouse, child or lover and pause, hearing the rhythm of their breathing, noticing their vulnerability;
- in the intimate ankle nudge of a cruising feline;
- in the heartfelt good-bye to our beloved at the airport, saying “I love you” and meaning it, then the sensation, the possibility of never seeing them again;
- on and on and on...

Events once unnoticed or unrecognized, now exhilarating and affecting, and a hint, just a hint at what has existed for eternity—love elemental.

Without Lupron Poétique not sure I would have had it in me to see so clearly, feel so intensely and thus understand all of what it means to be a human being.

I understand there are no guarantees, that time must be understood as short. I wanted to let you know that this time has been the richest and most enlivening of my life. I would change nothing, absolutely nothing, and good physicians you are part of this, part of the whole complex that joins sorrow with joy, sadness with happiness, suffering with healing.

Saying thank you for all that you’ve done will never be enough.

~~~

Following Verlaine:

… Let your words be the thing in motion
Which one feels who flees from an altering soul,
Towards other skies to other loves.

Let your words be the happy occurrence,
Somehow within the restless morning wind,
Which goes about smelling of mint and thyme...

And all the rest is literature.

~~~

With warm regards and undying affection.

Max

Comments

[dPerry]

Lupron=Huxley's "soma" (Brave New World)?
I first read BNW when I was a bright shiny Mormon boy of 13 or 14 years and any mention of the soma seemed to jump from the page and tweak my ass. Many years later I was prescribed a muscle relaxer called soma and by God I was excited. What a let down.
Nothing important, nothing at all. Just a silly little snapshot.

[Maxwell Kinney]

:-) Yes...

"Benito was notoriously good-natured. People said of him that he could have got through life without ever touching soma. The malice and bad tempers from which other people had to take holidays never afflicted him. Reality for Benito was always sunny."