Hospital reflection 1
Saw pictures of your frozen heart, wondered where you were at that time. Machine, saw the machine–lots of pistons and pumps. It’s a wonder that thing keeps you alive when your heart is frozen. Now more thoughts about if its working right today. Who fixes and repairs heart and lung machines? Heart and lung machine and airplane mechanics, they are important people.
Chest ripped open, held open with clamps, ribs broken methodically, as is surgery is somehow not painful but just a process. cutting meat, sterile environment. wow the pictures. some of you might see them, but only in private audience. they are of a sensitive nature. photographs of living but frozen and bloody hearts, scalpels, surgeons under bright lights. And then the one that to me matters most–the severed and bloody mechanical arterial valve sitting isolated on a table, bloody and useless, divorced from any utility. It actually looks evil, but its really an object.
Possibly this is the hardest thing. That there is no one to blame. That all this can be explained in terms of cause and effect but for no initial reason. That the world itself works like this. The bloody valve, maybe a good thing to direct anger at. But why anger? It’s all cycles: anger, compassion, frustration, pain, some sort of cathartic moment every once and a while. The kind of painful moment when things feel raw and intense. a time wash, a burst bubble of a protective layer you didn’t know you had. At this point you realize there is just caring, just because. things are, or they aren’t. scales, structures of things we add value too start shifting.
In the face of a crisis, for instance, the uncertainty that my sister might at some point get lost in this sea of time, uncertainty that anything I do will matter, uncertainty that it’s not over–in the face of a crisis there is the real ideas that everything falls apart. This is true, except the conclusion of this thought is that everything is always falling apart, all the time, and coming back together. A crisis is a crisis not because you are unprepared, but because the fastness of the events outside of you becomes significantly different than the speed at which you can process them. shut down, shut down now.
We are perfect in health and in sickness. I keep telling my sister over and over again that she has to forget how she used to be, like all of us, and be here now. Not some hippy bullshit, but really here.
There’s a lot of talk of living in the moment, being present, etc. but are we willing to be there at the worst possible moment, the one we cannot even think of because it’s so horrible? We are the bloody broken valve, the healing and not healing wound, the damaged trauma mind. Fuck everyone’s idealized future. Our thoughts are important, but out of order. The vastness and intensity and depth that life gives to us without filters is something else. I am ready now to take some things for granted after all this life and death shit for months.
Sat there during surgery trying not wonder or think much at all, because no matter what it leads to the thing I want most, which is the thing I cannot control whatsoever. how frustrating. I distracted myself constantly on a computer, at the cafeteria, reading dadaist poets, mentally ill and fucked in the head artists, wondering about their minds and making sense of their complete nonsense. somehow at this point everything seems flipped around but i’m not sure how.
Families in the waiting room in oakland texting each other and playing music while my family sits silently. We are funny, and have this thing down by now, after years. Give each other enough space to to cry and sit in the unknowable but also flowing universe but not enough space to lose it completely. Slight conversations about procedures with mom and dad and we all have the same eyes–damp, tired, red, waiting. I want to say almost meditative–what world exists in there mom and dad–where are you?–only because i wonder where i am too.
Everything I look at is not itself but only a reflection of the fucked up world in my head that is either figuring itself out or driving itself more insane in the face of completely uncontrollable, unknowable, yet highly emotional events unfolding at their own speed and time. Thoughts swirling about knives, sewing, blood, surgeons that are people too who hopefully had their coffee this morning, had a good night’s sleep, solved the existential crisis they were having, if they were having one.