37 - art has the power to transform

All my life long I have put off this reckoning, saying, Too soon, too soon. Well it is still too soon. All my life long I have dreamt of the moment when, edified at last, in so far as one can be before all is lost, I might draw the line and make the tot. This moment seems now at hand.

      —Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

~~~

Wide awake in the middle of the night, could hear the ocean. Camille has begun to leave the slider open in her study on the other side of the ¾ wall. Turned and watched her sleeping, am in the throes, in the moment, sad and thoughtful. I leaned down and kissed her, such a charming creature, formidable, so lucid and full of life. She didn’t stir and I eased out of bed.

It’s nearly 3 a.m. I go down to my study on the second floor and remember that The Brick and Bell opens at four. Peter, the owner, said when he first tried it he was surprised that so many were up and in need of the “kick start.” If only :-( now decaffeinated, au naturale, sipping the iced, decaf Americano, but still… Didn’t turn the iMac on, showered up and found myself dashing off a note to her, left it on the kitchen table:

You. Incredible you!

Driving to The Brick and Bell.

You know how I feel, you know what you mean to me. Is it nuts to just want to slow it down, to miss nothing, to never sleep again? Dreaming awake with you, is that possible? Am so lost in love. I don’t have the skill and command of language to articulate it; maybe words really don’t capture it. I… it’s… it’s like these tears of joy won’t go away: laying next to you, cuddling up, sitting at the café or in front of my MacBook, on the drive to REACH, or in front of my PC at work, getting it done, yapping/laughing it up with my comrades, on my walks in the afternoon, at the gym in the evenings, sitting down to dinner with you, our strolls along the beach, in my study late at night, always, a constant welling up, the tears, it’s maddening, and unfathomable, and, well,… just wanted to say:

Good Morning! ♥

P. S. Beach House tonight? Email me…

On my way to La Jolla Village pulled over along the water at Torrey Pines State Reserve and got out of the car. A deep blue-black, starlit sky and the morning tide, the white water waves moon-illumined, plunging, tumbling, splashing down, and more tears. God-damned Lupron!

At the café I get to thinking about Maya, we had come back from a horrible trip up North, an attempt to rejuvenate and reignite the passion, the love; a failure, and given the hematospermia, an omen, and it’s like from that moment four years ago, through diagnosis and the start of my Lupron life, to the afternoon I walked out in 2009, I never shed a tear. No small feat with Depot-90 coursing through your veins. I had shut down completely, no emotion, love was gone, no bringing it back, connection lost, never to return, and now I’m understanding that emotion and vulnerability equals love, and you are lovable and loving when you’re at ease with who you are and what you do. For Maya I never measured up, a constant harangue, my clothes, my haircuts, my boisterousness, the simple nonprofit work I do, my unwillingness to join the rat race à la American, my writing, my love of film, my liberal sensibilities, even the way I sliced the god-damned strawberries. Jesus Fucking Christ!

Can’t remember exactly when it started, when I began to tune her out, when the connection began to weaken, when I went to sleep. I don’t know,… maybe it was when I crafted the log, a four-column Excel spreadsheet (date | nag | snippy | moody/pissy) chronicling what I came to call “the bitch harangue,” the constant piss and moan, no one immune to her denigrating rants, no one measuring up. Over a four-year span, on average, she’d nag, be snippy, moody or pissy 24 times a month. That’s a lot. So miserable she was, and I’d listen, try to reframe it, try to reroute it, try to see it as some purposeful struggle, that there was righteous meaning in it, and of course there’s never meaning in it, there’s just the details inducing it, and either you recognize the misery is self-made or you end in blaming others. What a relief to walk out, to unburden myself, now she would no longer suffer, no longer be miserable, and demeaning, and unhappy.

And now this, I don’t go a day without being overwhelmed, always flabbergasted and stunned. And I think Camille and I see less of each other than most couples when under one roof. Alone together works, it’s possible. It’s idiosyncratic and it serves. She’s phenomenal, trying to ratchet down the hours at work (now reduced to 50-plus) so she can have something left to study for her MCAT; and me, more immersed and engaged than ever before, reading and writing, thinking it’s my time to get published, to actually make the dream a reality:

You walk into a bookstore and up to the New Hardcover Fiction table and there it is. The cover design is striking, royal blue, brown with grays, there’s an elongated rhombus, a kind of café, and a figure, on the periphery but close in, apart, in the midst of, looking, peering at those around him, a crowd huddled together.

OR

You travel online to Powell’s Books, and you click in at their Staff Top 5s listing, and there it is, in three top five lists, and one staffer, makes it her number one:

"apart: in the midst of - camille got to me, so real, so honest, so touching in it's confessional, 'probe-goading' way. The perfectly placed and penetrating descriptions of the effects of advanced stage cancer made me think of my father, when in the death throes of his own struggle with the disease he called into question how he had lived, that he'd not been attentive enough, that he'd been suddenly awakened to be more courageous and fearless, more loving and sensitive, that all of what we do and say must be done and expressed out of love.

In an essay exploring truth in fiction, and anti-fiction, and autobiographical novels, Margot Livesey wrote: 'Art has the power to transform the world, and nowhere is that power more evident than when applied to the unpromising material of the everyday.'

Kinney's on to it, a simple man trying to find his own words, wanting to share with and persuade his readers that transformation is possible."