The Logic of Birds and
Fishes As It Relates to
Shingles

I admit I’m not often found browsing ancient Sufi texts. You take your chances but come willing for your life to take a radical shift. This isn’t helpful but the confusion always comes with my lame sense of order. I had anticipated (wrong) a dulcet spring watching our migrant birds arrive, walking the dogs, good hygiene, and no apocalypse, donating Lady Gaga and the Tea Party rubes to the proctologists. Instead I’ve had forty-nine days of shingles thus far, the feeling of which is to be bound in tightly stretched hot barbed wire and to be treated generally like Gustave Doré treated Dante’s hell-bound travelers.

Since this is by nature a food column I’m beginning this ritual by eating two junior buffalo tongues, much lower in fat and tastier than beef tongues. They were raised not far from Crazy Horse’s home, to which I ascribe great meaning. Our trail of butchery followed east to west and is still continuing. We are as pathetic as the plastic in which we survive. There’s an immense section of the Pacific dense with plastic, which is our heritage. We have spent our history shitting in the sandbox and giving ourselves rewards for it.

Nothing new here, dumb people are dumb people. Sad, though, when they’re proud of it. Much care must be spent diverting yourself from irritation. For forty-nine days I’ve had no problem, what with having this severe case of zona, as they say it in Europe. The pain is relentless and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of it without success under the heading “The Theory and Practice of Pain.” You can read all you need to know in an hour and come up empty-handed except for your jolts and spasms. Doctors are somewhat embarrassed because there’s not much they can do beyond the pain pills, which I stay distant from except minimally because they’re soul deadening. It is here that I finally understood Rilke, who denied himself pain pills while dying because life was too precious to waste on nothing. Naturally older people go through streaks of illness that are plain bad luck, though I was told mine was likely nervous exhaustion precipitated by writing at least fifteen books in fifteen years. It isn’t fun to be obsessive but I’ve always been what they call fugal. Coincidentally my wife fell victim to an incurable skin disease called bullous pemphigoid a few months before my shingles, though it can be contained. It had never been diagnosed in Montana but can be treated at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, near which we live in the winter.

Now for the interesting stuff. Other people’s illnesses are a tough go. Thank God it’s not me, we think. Or we say, “Why me?” to a doctor and he says, “Why not you?” I once wrote in a poem, “Our bodies are women who were never meant to be faithful to us.”

My plan was a bit scattered at first, but it made my experience endurable, if barely. During the first week my mind got totally hooked on a new book by the young Turkish writer Elif Batuman (she is an American born in New York City to Turkish parents), The Possessed, possession being, ostensibly, what happens to people who spend too much time reading Russian literature. Since this happened to me between eighteen and twenty-five I found the book darkly comic and anxiety-provoking. I had read that Dostoevsky drank fifty cups of tea a day so it seemed in order to buy a teapot. The drawback was to be spending most of your time peeing. For a break Finnegans Wake was wonderfully sexy.

However, fifty years later, these books do not add much in the way of clues to my own true nature. Three doctors have attributed my infirmity to nervous exhaustion, something the Russians were good at. When you get the idea of writing it doesn’t mean that you have to do it fifty years without stopping and neither does it mean you should try to memorize Notes from the Underground. It has occasionally occurred to me that if I hadn’t gotten interested in cooking early on I’d be a goner. The same way with fishing. If I write for four hours then go fishing there’s a semblance of calm, as fishing replaces the writer’s black lung disease, drinking.

There was a gift this time. I had to stop writing because of the somewhat electrical jolts and spasms of pain. I couldn’t flow. I recalled that when Suzuki Roshi was dying of cancer he thought of the pain as a caboose trailing off behind him. In my case my curiosity had to drive me ahead with nothing for the pain to feed on. Mind you if the emotions aren’t there to feed on, the sense of pain is far less brutish. It’s pain, but it’s pain unadorned, less acute, of course, than gout and kidney stones but more tolerable if your brainpan is active. I have lived fairly actively with birds and fishes all of my life and once my mind had released me to live with them moment by moment a great deal of pleasure arrived.

This easily could be misunderstood as sleight of hand but I welcomed them as distant relatives in behavior and the logic that fueled their lives. I could at least abandon my largely worthless nomenclature as long as I was ill.

There was a radical event one day at dawn. It was two degrees for the first time since 1879. “This is abnormal,” I said. “This was a radical event,” I said loudly. “My sores hurt.”

Another day. Before dawn. Loud crashing sounds in our brushy front yard next to the creek. I felt weak and old so didn’t investigate. It wasn’t light enough to shoot. At mid-morning I took the dogs for a walk and there was what was left of a large buck deer in three pieces. A couple dozen ravens. I imagined the battle, the leaps, the twisting. By evening it was largely gone and the bones turned from red to white. For the two (mountain) lions, it was a Michelin three-star.

Perhaps the worst pain today but the best recent meal, a lavish lamb tagine with a simple wine that wouldn’t be canceled out. Odd that wine was devised in southern Iran thousands of years ago.

Pain is causing the nature of my curiosity to change. It is a far more intense need to find out why I hurt, which is at best simple-minded because you hurt because you hurt, a medical explanation that without a doctor at your elbow presumes you know a thousand physiological details and terms. It’s more likely that the pain amps up the whole system, which subconsciously feels threatened, thus science was invented. One grand scientist I know, Danny Hillis, has posited that his position as a prominent inventor is a sexual boost. Women in the tribe turn to the inventor because he makes their lives more gracious and easy. The hunter of course keeps their tummies fed. When the medicine man tells the attractive female patient exactly what shingles is she yawns and bobs her hair because she metaphorically is going to get her ass kicked for weeks.

I can’t recommend anything about life indoors. On several occasions in the past few years a group of Chihuahua ravens, fifteen plus, decided to take a walk with me and the dogs. They were noisy, as if giving me a lecture while guiding me up a steep canyon. My Scottish Labrador tended to ignore them but they made my wife’s English cocker intensely irritable, like one of those jaw-flapping English politicians one sees on TV. It was clear that Mary the cocker wanted to kill a raven but she never came close. Then she pretended she didn’t want to kill one but in any event never came close. I sat on a log and began to think of a splendid eel stew I ate in Narbonne with a Côte-Rôtie. It was my first eel stew, a natural match with this feeder. I had been feeling a little poorly because my books had become successful in France and I was convinced something was wrong. Why should my books do that much better in France than America? Early in the morning before the stew I had been wandering around Montpellier and found where Rabelais went to college. This made me feel better as I had revered Rabelais in high school, thinking he would be a perfect friend. Occasionally while cooking I’d think of something Rabelais might like, say a duck and rabbit cooked in a barbecue sauce my wife makes from fresh plums. We had a petite miracle wandering, looking for food. An American woman from Tennessee had a little restaurant on a side street. Her name was Whitney Blanc and her husband was a French chef but they had moved back to Montpellier, a wise choice as I love its spaciousness. The chef had made a young turkey fricassee that had surpassed anything I have had of that order. Meanwhile at the next table they were having a birthday party for a hundred-year-old woman who was drinking a good deal of wine and flirting with us, one of those pure, gorgeous interludes. We stayed an extra morning for an equally fine lunch. The next evening we were way out in the country where an ex-croupier was cooking us peerless sardines a la plancha on the route of the new Paris-to-Barcelona train I’ll take this May.

Unrestricted travel is to take yourself by surprise with otherness. In Villeneuve-lès-Avignon outside Avignon by the river, there is a little three-star hotel called de l’Atelier, the back of which is in a thicket and near a splendid wine bar and restaurant, the AOC. After dinner we sat out in a soft rain under a big umbrella listening to dozens of chatting birds and my vertebrae were humming. There had been very few birds in Paris, Lyon, Nîmes, Arles, though of course many out in the Camargue, where I try to visit every time I’m in France, and also see the Mediterranean. And in a garden restaurant, La Chassagnette, a friend was at a nearby table with Canut Reyes, a member of the Gipsy Kings, who played guitar for an hour, a wonderful substitute for a bird. In hopefully the waning days of my zona I am at least in the heaven of birds, this being the apex of northward migration with many exotics and rarities. One day while grilling a baby goat I saw a lazuli bunting and four different orioles, and one day while finishing a novel I saw an elegant trogon three feet out the window.

Of course our curiosity brings us to beauty, without which we couldn’t bear up under pain. When you are covered with sores you naturally wonder why but then you don’t pursue the question because you know that pain is in grand supply. I certainly had no urge, no matter how dramatic, to see the mountain lions kill the deer. I like to turn the volume down to the equilibrium of the ordinary. On my many trips to Paris on publishing business I visit the bistro Le Bon Saint Pourçain as much as five times because everything about it suits me, including the terrier Vickie who hangs out there. The food is superlative and I don’t get drunk or stay sober. It urges me to the middle whether I am eating brandade or beef with olives.

We miss nearly everything. Yes, I got my work done to the tune of thirty-five books but more pain arrives with the obvious lacunae in botany, physics, mathematics. The odds were against me camping with Marilyn Monroe in a pup tent at fourteen.