At my age every word I write may be my last. In my late teens while I was suffering from a nearly fatal disease, the doctors, Bob and Bob Jr., gave me fifty years to live. I’ve always loathed the notion of “living on borrowed time” even though I’m confident that God wears a watch as big as the moon and with no dials. Unlike nearly all intellectuals I have no problem chatting about God though I’ve never connected with Him on my cellular like George Bush. I recently spent time with a physicist-inventor who has devised a clock that will last ten thousand years to be installed in a cave at an elevation, not incidentally, of ten thousand feet on a mountain in Nevada.
The big question this morning is, Did I have a prequel? And will I have a postquel? Is there an end to eating? Are we all mere mortals or are there exceptions? Apollinaire said that Jesus held the world’s high altitude record. To the contrary of a recent Sony movie Jesus never married Magdalene. Their relationship went kaput when he spent his forty days alone in the wilderness. Women aren’t biologically structured to wait forty days according to Kinsey who interviewed ten thousand grocery delivery boys during the Second World War when so many husbands were away fighting for freedom. One can imagine the scene repeated countless times. The boy puts the bags of groceries on the kitchen table, his skin tingling with premonition. He half turns and she leaps on him like a mountain lion jumping a fawn.
Eating is a race against time. This morning I shot yet another crotalid (rattlesnake) near the steps of my study, its writhing body finally slumping into a question mark. No more rodentia lunches for this Republican sucker whose relative killed my beloved English setter, Rose. I pitched the dead snake to the pigs, and the big sow, Mary, ate it with the evident pleasure of a hungry man before a plate of foie gras. She smiled at me as if to say, “Thank you, we’re on Earth together. When you eat my big hams I’ll be turned loose in heaven in a field of ripe sweet corn and muskmelons.”
All of my jobs have required considerable fuel. During the few months I worked as a contortionist for the Cirque du Soleil I astounded kings and presidents, not to speak of hordes of riffraff, by my ability to stand on a forefinger, the finger made improbably muscular by writing longhand so that it looks like a buffalo turkey wing. Big jobs demand immense meals.
Writers need to be a little cynical about their motives and I have noted that certain of my vaunted ancillary projects tend to take me to countries where I wish to eat. I call this activity “eating the country.” How can you pretend to understand France or Spain unless province by province you eat what they eat, thus making your empathy a matter of biology. Last fall’s zampone (stuffed pig’s leg) eaten in Parma and Modena has entered my neurons and increased my sympathy for Cesare Pavese, just as eating dozens of different game birds in quantity made me a better bird-watcher.
Let’s get utterly serious, whatever that might mean. We simply have no evidence that we’ve had a prequel or will have a postquel. Years ago in a tavern (I’m a student of taverns) in Dannebrog, Nebraska, on the edge of the Sandhills, a group of very old farmers welcomed me home insisting that I had left the area in 1938. Frankly, I don’t look like anyone else what with buckteeth and a blind eye. Nothing I could say would dissuade them that I wasn’t the local young man who had hit the road just before the Second World War when in fact I was only a few months old. Of course as an artiste I was daffy enough to give the conviction of these geezers some credence. Maybe this was why I felt so comfortable in the Sandhills during all of the months I was researching my novels Dalva and The Road Home. Of course I was mildly frightened, having occasionally convinced myself of Rimbaud’s dictum, “Everything we are taught is false.” Luckily food kills fear and I drove north to the Peppermill in Valentine where a three-pound porterhouse and two bottles of red returned me to the accepted earth. This area produces the best beef in the United States and I especially like the well-aged Chianina-Angus cross. Sad to say this much beef at one sitting will give you Arnold Schwarzenegger dreams of being someone like Pelle the Conqueror swinging a bloody ax and mating bulbous-butted women wearing soiled opossum skins. Specific foods cause specific dreams.
A certain small group of basic nitwits knows that to be a literary novelist and “minor regional novelist and poet” (as I have been called) is to spend a lifetime walking across freshly plowed fields. In other words, lumpy. However, I have no complaints because when not actually writing I get to be outdoors doing important things like hunting, fishing, bird-watching, roasting a wild piglet, studying the sources of creeks, or driving ornate mandalas around the entire country. By profession I collect memories. Once in Toronto after eating a stellar tongue sandwich I saw a woman slip on a banana peel and fall to the sidewalk. I turned away, having been taught by Christian parents not to look up a woman’s legs unless invited to do so. When I helped her up I thought she might say something sexy like “Buy me a villa,” but she looked in shy distaste at my Quasimodo face. l quivered at her dandelion scent. Her blouse was in disarray and when I caught a split-second glance at her belly button I knew she was a human being rather than an android.
On a recent trip to Europe I had an accidental insight into my postquel. The trip began poorly in cold rainy Paris in March when thousands of malcontents were busy marching to and fro and burning cars, the acrid smell of which is off-putting to the appetite, but not as much as the giant Salon du Livre, what is known euphemistically as a “book fair” but in reality is a giant Walmart packed with book vendors and their largely tawdry wares. Three times I fainted from torpor and tipped over to the floor as old people are wont to do. I might have perished without the best tête de veau of my life one evening at Apicius. For mental and physical well-being I recommend eating the head of a calf. One becomes playful and innocent. And the next noon I had the wild-pig rillettes at La Taverne Basque, a regular hangout of mine on Cherche Midi. A woman is lucky indeed to meet a man who has eaten wild pig rillettes in the last twenty-four hours. Her partner will paw the air and snort loudly.
In Paris I gave a speech to a mass of students advising them to take drugs, drink as much as possible, and stay on strike forever, after which I flew down to Seville on my necromancer’s project called “Pilgrimages,” the same project that took me to Collioure to visit Antonio Machado’s grave and search for his lost poems that likely were eaten by Falangist goats. In Seville I walked daily on the banks of the Guadalquivir with Christine Campadieu, the famed French vintner who keeps me from tipping over in front of cars and also speaks many languages while I’m limited to Michigan English, a perverse gibberish, though in most countries for some reason I’m totally informed in food and wine terminology.
I was in Seville to walk where Federico García Lorca walked. He loved the Guadalquivir. By chance this day in June is his birthday and were he alive he would be one hundred and eight, which is old indeed. Unfortunately in Granada, a few hours after visiting Lorca’s execution site at the Barranco de Viznar, I became quite ill so that on the way home I ended up in the emergency ward at the Resurrection Medical Center near O’Hare Airport in Chicago. My tentative consciousness at the time whirled with Spanish dreams as the IVs in both arms attempted to return me to “normal,” also a somewhat tentative state. I thought of Lorca, who it is said was shot in the ass repeatedly with a high-powered rifle because he was “gay,” a term not used at the time. I had also stayed in a room he favored at a hotel in Granada but there I mostly had thoughts of Miguel Hernandez dying in prison in Madrid.
Frankly the hospital was reassuring because I had been without food and wine for four days and felt like Dondi Gandhi, a comic-strip waif. In the hospital I was back with Machado wheeling his eighteen-year-old wife around the hills of Castile as her TB-ridden body lost its ability to breathe, and also Machado carrying his old mom across the border into Collioure on a cold rainy night. He died a month later and in the hospital it didn’t seem like a bad idea but more of an adventure that you wouldn’t be able to write about. As a poet I hope for an epiphany every day and this would be a whopper.
Back to the postquel. On the last leg of the return trip to our winter casita on the Mexican border I dreamed I’d be reincarnated as a scraggly elm tree out in a pasture against which cows would rub their itchy fly bites. This seemed a grand idea what with the sensuosity of having one’s bark rubbed by mammals, skin to skin as it were, and even more important, it meant that there would be eating after death. Trees, of course, eat not with their roots, which are nutritional conduits, but with the millions of infinitesimal root hairs that protrude into the soil from the roots. In short I would continue a form of existence by eating through my hair. What a relief. It was too much to imagine that Manuela the flamenco dancer from Seville would ever visit and rub against the homely elm but as many of us have noted, we can’t have everything.
Now I am back rowing a boat down large rivers and trout fishing. This and cooking seem quite enough though occasionally a strophe will land on my head in the form of an undiscovered bird. I have become involved in a perhaps doomed money project I call “The Michelangelo Mode” in order to earn enough to buy expensive food and French wine. The project involves the relatively new nano science, and also a stray dog I met in Florence last October that was obviously related to a dog of Michelangelo’s. Five stories under the Uffizi in a subbasement full of skulls the dog led me to a trove of manuscripts unknown to the museum’s employees who sit around all of the time drinking prosecco. The manuscripts smelled like white truffles but the odor may have emanated from my fingertips and mustache because I had been eating white truffles twice a day for thirteen days. The number thirteen is a key here and it precipitated a trip to Arlington, Texas, a nasty headquarters for training Homeland Security employees, but then I needed to use some of their high-tech equipment. A young woman who helped me also smelled like white truffles though it was somewhat veiled by the scent of her lunch at Burger King.
My deep thinking has recently driven my wife, children, and friends quite batty. We all began as female and weighing virtually nothing but immediately began gathering volume. Our enclosed nano souls are a millionth the size of a grain of average beach sand tainted by suntan lotion. We began as the Nano People and our souls retain their original size, while our bodies vary, but can reach a thousand pounds in a number of instances (a big guy named Walter ate several chickens and quarts of Pepsi for breakfast). When the young woman in Arlington noted this soul particle through an electron microscope she insisted on naming it a “wiggly squiggly,” which lacks resonance.
The use of nanotechnology on Michelangelo’s manuscript revealed, among other things, his prediction that God would abandon our galaxy in 1907 in hopes of doing a better job somewhere among the ninety-five billion other galaxies. This is a tad discouraging but not to an elm tree. I can imagine the approach of a friendly Holstein, her udder swaying slightly in a southern breeze that also ripples my leaves. My root hairs suck gently at the soil in an endless meal. The Holstein turns around because the obnoxious fly bite is near her nether parts. She rubs her butt against my bark. What a fabulous memory of my past life.