2 Weeks Post-Op

On July 6, I start 3 months of twice-a-week physical therapy (PT) at a facility at the Hospital for Special Surgery, where I had the surgery. It’s an easy bus ride from my apartment, and the physical therapist follows my surgeon’s protocol. Most of the other patients are in my demographic or older, but there are some young people too. Everyone is serious, focusing on their therapist’s directions; there’s little banter. (Sports-related injuries are handled at a different facility, across the street; here it’s all post-op.)

I don’t do my home PT exercises daily, but since I’m allowed not to wear my sling at home (apparently not everyone gets this privilege), I’m using the left arm as much as it can handle (e.g., no heavy lifting, but I can do laundry [goody], make the bed and pick up a plate or mug ). Serious apartment-cleaning is beyond me; a friend has kindly given me a session with her cleaning lady so my apartment doesn’t become totally rancid.

I do wear the sling whenever I go out, to support my arm and, hopefully, warn people to steer clear of my shoulder. Seems to work. It also generates a certain amount of sympathy: I’ve had total strangers stop and say, “I hope you recover soon.”

Also out on the street, the walking stick loaned to me by a friend has been very helpful for balance, which feels “off” because of one arm being in a sling. It’s also helpful to lean on in case of fatigue and in warding off potential sidewalk collisions—or, at least, in making me feel like I can do so if necessary. It’s a great security blanket!

I continue to have a certain amount of pain. I was sent home with a prescription for oxycodone, a powerful pain reliever. I took a lot of it the first day home, less thereafter because it wastes you. I substituted acetaminophen when possible—since I was taking aspirin daily against blood clots, I couldn’t take ibuprofen, my anti-pain drug of choice. On Friday of my 2nd week post-op I ditched the aspirin and started taking ibuprofen. By Sunday, 3 days shy of two weeks, I stopped taking oxycodone. But I’ve kept up my daily drug log, to make sure I don’t take too much ibuprofen, especially in the middle of the night, when one tends to feel pain more than during the day. At two full weeks, I’m pretty much down to twice a day.

I still sleep propped up on several pillows, with my left arm supported on another pillow, which reduces pain at night. Oddly, the upper arm, not the actual shoulder, is the area that tends to become sore. (Later, the surgeon explains that “the shoulder refers pain to the upper arm.” Who knew?) Also interesting: while PT produces a certain amount of soreness, failing to do PT produces more. My theory is tension.

My biggest problem: any activity causes total exhaustion. On Friday, I cancel what was to have been my first evening outing; PT that day has done me in.

On Sunday, July 10,  though, I take the bus to Central Park to meet my birding pals at the hawk bench by the model boating pond (74th street near 5th Avenue, facing east, with a clear view of the nest). One of this year’s 2 Pale Male offspring is still on the nest; the other is perched atop a nearby building. Wearing my sling,  I join some members of the birdwalk group for lunch in the nearby Boathouse Café. A friend carries the tray for me. Afterwards, I take the bus home and collapse!

3 Weeks

Stamina improving, but still have to schedule only one activity per day. On Thursday and Saturday I manage to get to dance events at Lincoln Center, including my first evening outing (Maryinsky Ballet, choreography by Alexei Ratmansky) and the all-afternoon Merce Fair, part of the Merce Cunningham company’s farewell tour. After successfully negotiating these events, I stop using the walking stick.

I stop keeping a daily medication log, and start resuming my supplements (calcium, etc.), all of which had been stopped 10 days pre-surgery. I’m also finally sleeping flat on my back, although still supporting my left arm with a pillow.

4 Weeks

My post-op bruises (one, on my left ribcage and breast, was originally a dark eggplant in color) have dwindled to almost nothing;  the skin of my left forearm is no longer hyper-sensitive to the touch, although a slight sensitivity remains. I’ve recovered enough stamina to feel frustrated by my continuing tendency to tire easily.

5 Weeks

For whatever reason (I think years of yoga, and perhaps a naturally hearty constitution), I’ve been told at PT that I’m way ahead of the curve in range of motion and strength in my left shoulder and arm. When I see the surgeon on Friday, July 29, he tells me I’m where they generally expect people to be at three months, and that by the time I’ve completed the PT course, I’ll be at the normal six-month level. And, I’ve been sprung from the sling!

On Sunday, I join my birdwalk group for my first real post-op birdwalk.

6 Weeks

Six weeks seems to be a magic number: I feel a big boost in stamina and strength. I begin walking to or from PT,  about a mile. I start opening doors, even heavy ones, with my left hand. I feel less fragile and wary on the street, less worried that someone might slam into my shoulder.

8 Weeks

By August 17 I finally feel basically normal in terms of stamina: running around the city, exercising more normally and being able to make plans with confidence that I won’t have to cancel due to exhaustion! I can easily walk both to and from PT.

For general-purpose use, my left arm is now quite functional. Marlene, my physical therapist, says that from here on progress will be much slower. By 6 weeks, in terms of raising my left arm (while I’m horizontal) and trying to move it back to touch the floor or bench—180 degrees—I’d reached 150 degrees. So far, I haven’t progressed any farther.  Peter, my substitute therapist while Marlene is on vacation, tells me that he thinks the shoulder—as opposed to the hip or the knee—takes the longest to get to be so normal you don’t have to think about it: up to a year.

In some ways, my arm and shoulder feel right now about where they were before the operation: unpredictable pain if I move my arm the wrong way, or too far too fast, and incomplete range of motion. On the other hand, I’ve resumed a modified home yoga practice. The good news is that, while pre-op I wasn’t raising my left arm at all, now I’m raising it as much as possible. Holding it horizontal for standing poses is a lot of effort, but it feels like progress. It will be a long time before I attempt downward dog or headstand; alas, all the professionals tell me that shoulder stand will not be in the cards.

Specifically, at the end of the scapula is a shallow “socket” called the glenoid. At the end of the upper arm bone, the humerus, is a “ball” that rotates in that shallow socket.

Both ball and socket are cushioned by cartilage. When the cartilage goes, as with arthritis, damage ensues.

The scapula actually protects the shoulder joint. A “bony projection” angles up and curves forward to meet the end of the collarbone, making a “roof” over the joint. (That little bony hillock most of the way down your shoulder, so handy for anchoring a shoulder strap, is the end of the clavicle, where it meets the scapula.) Another, lower and shorter, projection extends partway over the joint under the clavicle.

So what’s replaced?

All of that protective shoulder structure remains; what’s replaced is just the ball and socket—the part that’s bracketed top and bottom by grayish-white in the image directly above. The new “ball,” made of cobalt and chromium, is attached to a long stem that fits down into the hole in the center of the humerus. At the top of this stem, titanium mesh enables the bone to grow right into it. (One hopes.) The new “socket” is polyethylene, attached to the scapula with a titanium mesh piece that also allows bone to grow into it.

If you’re really curious, you can get a look at the device on the Biomet website: on the right, under “Additional Information,” click on  “Comprehensive® Shoulder System – Product Brochure.” Note that there are a number of different shoulder implant systems,  made by different manufacturers. The one used in my shoulder was co-developed by my surgeon, Dr. David Dines of Hospital for Special Surgery.

It’s great fun to watch Anselm Kiefer work. It’s also sometimes heart-stopping, as when he patters around in flip-flops while he and assistants smash large panes of glass into piles of shards. Or when, sans goggles, mask, or gloves, he wields a powerful, long-handled blowtorch, melting lead in a cauldron while standing precariously atop the steep slope of a giant pile of dirt.

Watching him work is the best part of Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, a documentary by Sophie Fiennes, who followed Kiefer around his vast art-making complex outside of Barjac, France, shortly before he decamped to Paris in 2008. In fact, the amount of installation-work he was doing at a point apparently close to his departure suggests a whole dimension of performance art designed to be filmed.

Kiefer moved to Barjac from Germany in 1993, and made a lot of art—at one point he casually mentions “112 lorries full” of art already trucked away, presumably to galleries, museums and private sales. But, he says in the film, he plans to leave a lot in Barjac, too—some kind of sculpture or painting in every room or house, of which there are many. Some appear to be freestanding sheds, small outbuildings with doors through which you can peer at a painting or installation. Others are bare suggestions of houses: cobbled together from pieces of cast cement in varying sizes, they are stacked one atop the other, so many mad leaning towers across the landscape.

Kiefer obviously loves building things—from faux houses to tunnels to caverns excavated around concrete columns pre-constructed by digging round holes in the ground and filling them with concrete and rebar. (Heavy machinery is definitely one of the stars of the film, from the huge rotary drill to the compact, turn-on-a-dime steam shovel.) He even constructs rubble, as we see at the end of the film when the camera moves with excruciating slowness around one or more piles of the stuff, all tangled rebar and broken concrete, carefully encased in a large, mostly glass structure, a sort of giant vitrine-in-the-woods.

All of which begs the question of the purpose of Barjac, beyond enabling Kiefer to dig up the landscape and mass-produce art. Does he intend for the place to be a sort of museum? The film gives us no clue. Only later, from a profile of Kiefer in the Guardian UK, did I learn that “Talks are underway to establish a joint German-French foundation to look after the Barjac complex, with the specific intention of allowing nature to slowly reclaim the site.”

In the meantime, there is the pleasure of watching Kiefer work. One of his signature giant, grayscale paintings of a forest—or, rather, the tree trunks of a forest—lies flat on the floor of his giant “art hall.” Kiefer moves around and on it, scattering a white substance over the surface with a hand-held brush until an assistant brings a long-handled broom.

Then two assistants coat the whole surface with ash or dirt. The piece (by this time it seems paltry to call it a painting) is then hoisted partly upright by a block and tackle, so that the coating starts to crack and run in rivulets down the surface. Kiefer asks the assistants to give the whole thing a good shake, and they do—great clouds of dust fly off. Finally, an assistant seems to be steam-cleaning the surface. Everyone—but especially Kiefer—appears to be having a great deal of fun. It’s a boy’s wet dream—all the dirt and muck and molten lead and rebar and cement you can possibly want, with assistants to handle the heavy stuff. (Kiefer, after all, is now 66 years old.)

Still, unlike such younger art entrepreneurs as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, the artist remains at the center of both creation and production; his hand is, literally, on the work. That molten lead gets poured (by an assistant) down the giant pile of dirt, but it coagulates too fast. Kiefer wants it to run all the way down, to make the sculpture he envisages. He has an idea, takes up the blowtorch again, clambers part way up the dirt pile, directs an assistant to get on the other side, and together they re-melt the coagulated lead so it runs all the way to the bottom.

Then, at the foot of the stream of lead, they burn a book (not being implicated in it, Kiefer has never shied from evoking Germany’s Nazi past). A giant lead book. When the book is ashes, Kiefer rakes the ashes around.

Giant lead books turn up everywhere. We see piles of them waiting for use, apparently mass-produced, with individual lead pages that can be turned.

Many of the concrete faux houses squash giant lead books. Or books are draped over their top corners at different levels. A giant lead book is hoisted up in front of a huge painting of the ocean (another signature theme) that has been carried in by the assistants. (”Fetch the sea” brings a laugh in the movie theatre.) The book is too big. A smaller one is produced, hoisted, affixed. The surface of the lead pages is distressed.

A large lead boat is hoisted up in front of another sea: the paintings grow more and more like sculpture. They remind me—on a much more massive and somber scale—of the 60’s, when Rauschenburg, Johns and others dangled objects in front of a painted surface or fixed them to it—a fork, a chair, a ruler. Mixed media, in a vastly different frame of mind—colorful, playful, fragile, domestic. Kiefer, born in 1945, just before the end of World War II, has said that as a child he loved playing in the rubble left by the war. (In the Guardian profile, he says he made little houses out of it.) Rubble has a somber tone, as his work does now. The very massiveness of his work here—both wall pieces and installations—seems at once evocation of that time, recreation of a world destroyed, and, since Kiefer intends the Barjac installations to return to nature, ironic confirmation of the fragility of man-made structures.

Later, Kiefer burns stacks of real books that appear to be held together with rebar. The burned real books, lovely book-shaped piles of ash, are scattered around, inside and out. (Burned lead and paper books were also featured in his 2010 show at the Gagosian Gallery, Next Year in Jerusalem.)

Fiennes clearly worships Kiefer’s work; in the first part of the film, the camera spends entirely too much time moving slowly across rough walls and down long, well-lighted tunnels. We do see some marvelous pieces inside the sheds or free-standing rooms: The camera looks in through one door frame, pans down a display of broken pots and potsherds artfully arranged against a flowing black stain, then backs up until, outside, we see a woodsy fall landscape next to the shed.

The portentous accompanying music by Gyorgy Ligeti and others was perhaps added because Fiennes didn’t think there was enough dramatic tension in merely looking at the art. The high, shrieking sounds—electronic chalk on a blackboard—are, however, only distracting, particularly when they crescendo to a climax as the camera simply pans across a rough dirt wall. Luckily, when Kiefer enters the frame the music stops, so we can hear his directions and comments in French, German or English to his assistants, and let our ears tune in to the sounds of process. (Less successful is a lengthy, tedious interview in the town library, earnest questions asked by an earnest German art historian.)

Also fortunately, Kiefer at work is the bulk of the film, because the camera returns to a tight focus at the end, giving us a letterbox view as it moves slowly down slabs of cement, the edges of giant lead books, those rough dirt walls. I thought of the eye’s ability to take in so much more, and longed for Fiennes to pan away and give us a sense of perspective. Only at the very end does she allow us a satisfying glimpse of the expanse of those leaning towers of faux concrete houses.

Director: Sophie Fiennes
Director of Photography: Remko Schnorr
Editor: Ethel Shepherd
Music: Freie Stucke Fur
Producers: Sophie Fiennes, Kees Kasander, Emilie Blezat
Released by: Alive Mind Cinema.
In French, English and German, with English subtitles.
Running time: 1 hr 45 min

These questions go to the heart of what makes this play so interesting and disturbing—and the answer is only partly that Mark Rylance embodies Johnny as such a vivid life force that we might almost forgive him anything.

Painted Wooden Roof Boss from Rochester Cathedral, Kent (Medieval)

The tenderness of Johnny’s third-act scene with Phaedra certainly suggests a relationship. She brings down the curtain on the second act when she suddenly emerges from his trailer in the woods and calls his name. When she emerges again in Act 3 to find Johnny alone among the dilapidated furniture scattered in the yard out front, she recounts the thrill of being crowned queen of the annual fair on the previous year’s St. George’s day (April 23, England’s National Day), sadly counting down the minutes until the end of her tenure—it’s St. George’s day again, and, over at the fair, a new queen is about to be crowned. Johnny tells her she should leave, but she commands him to dance with her. He roars that he doesn’t dance, but she, in her gauzy, pale-green dress and tatty fairy wings, prevails. They dance, stiffly (he with his gimpy leg), until they embrace, he lifting her high in the air, her hair and body pouring down over him. Is it sexual? It’s hard not to think so. Yet the freedom of Phaedra’s manner, and the gravity of Johnny’s deference to her, contain not the slightest suggestion that she is a victim. What’s going on? Or is this somehow the cosmic union of two primal souls, pouring out their mutual yearning?

Phaedra opens the play and the second act, standing alone in her fairy togs on the apron of the stage, in front of a scrim painted with the medieval Cross of St. George (still the flag of England), singing. The first time, she sings the haunting hymn “Jerusalem,” an English favorite, its lyrics a poem by William Blake. She’s soon drowned out by the ear-shattering din of a party at Johnny’s trailer—and an epic party it is, as the scrim rises and we are enveloped by aural and visual shockwaves as frenetic, strobe-lit bodies hurtle around the stage.

The prevailing tone of the play, though, is elegiac. Johnny was once an Evel Knievel-like motorcycle daredevil who soared over rows of buses at long-gone St. George’s Day fairs. His trailer in the woods—a life-sized, streamlined aluminum model aptly named Waterloo, set in a thick grove of what appear to be real, leafy green trees—has been a refuge for the youth of the local town, Flintock, for 30 years. He plies them with alcohol and dope, and even when they grow up and pass into the ranks of his condemners, some of them continue to visit and buy dope from him. But now the law is closing in—Johnny’s about to be evicted, his trailer bulldozed, due to a petition signed by 1500 people in the ironically named ‘housing estate’—what we would call a housing development—that’s been built within eyesight and, obviously, earshot, of the wooded encampment.

The morning after the party, Johnny’s young disciples arrive or emerge—from the town, from the depths of a falling-apart couch, from under the trailer (two girls, one of whose clothes are smeared with what Johnny definitively declares is badger shit). Phaedra is not among them; in fact, her disappearance from her stepfather’s home is a running theme of the play. Someone suggests that werewolves might have gotten her.

Which takes us back to the wildness in the woods. The English are heirs to a complex folklore involving the land, especially the forest—think of all the magical things that happen in forests in Shakespeare’s plays. Across the countryside, relics and ruins of a pagan past abound: Johnny’s trailer in Wiltshire is not far from Stonehenge and other holy sites that date from a time of Druids and magic that Johnny channels and even the local teens seem at home with. It’s not just that Johnny tells fabulous tales, including one about a 90-foot giant who claims to have built Stonehenge. References to traditional folklore frequently come up in casual conversation; although under siege by the secular, the commercial and the small-minded, the soul of England lives in this ancient, mythologized connection to the land.

That is Johnny’s—and the play’s—saving grace. On one level, Johnny Byron looks like a type familiar to Americans from movies going back to Marlon Brando in The Wild One and Henry Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider—the romantic rebel, the eternally adolescent male, the unrepentant, uncivilized man/boy/dog. Unanchored by myth, lacking an epic dimension, this model got old a long time ago; although versions of it remain a staple on stage and screen, it’s difficult, at least for a woman, to feel much beyond impatience with it, however charmingly the rogue is portrayed. Grow up, already!

Johnny Byron, though, fully inhabits the glorious myths of England’s past. That past may be the object of nostalgia (a heavily sentimentalized yearning common to adolescents) on the one hand and commercial exploitation on the other (the local pub owner’s corporate overlords have prevailed on him to dress up as a Morris Dancer for the fair), but the rumbling we hear whenever anyone looks Johnny Byron straight in the eye is an intimation of something genuinely wild, a force that’s escaped the ever-tightening strictures of what passes for civilization.

Most Americans have at best a second-hand relationship to folklore. Our foundation myths are not about giants and spirits occupying the land we live on. In America, such stories belong to the people who got here first—the Indians, Native Americans or First People. The dominant culture’s foundation myths are about conquering the original people and taming the land they inhabited. This country is a product of the Enlightenment, not of folklore and fairy tales. Yet in our hunger for myth we’ve romanticized both the Indians and the cowboys, the latter our first Easy Riders.

If the American romantic hero is a rebel, an outsider, at odds with the culture around him, Johnny’s relationship to the local culture is more complex. He’s not really a rebel; he’s tapping into a vein of wildness that is still, however tenuously, a part of English identity. It’s not only ferocious; it is also radically innocent. For all his roistering, Johnny is clearly bewildered by the demands of modern life. The fabulous is his refuge: when his ex-lover, Dawn, arrives with their small son  to remind him of his paternal responsibilities, his response is to recount a tale of being abducted and held for a week by Nigerian traffic wardens. In more congenial times, he might have been a bard.

Johnny even seems mystified by his own outrageous nature—which, far from making him look larger than life, seems more often to render him helpless, even pathetic. It’s the young people who tell him how, when drunk, he has at various times smashed his own TV during his party, caused a “fracas” at the local pub, and peed in his pants—the last provoking a mass urination on him by the other males present, including his own disciples. Johnny’s reaction to all these stories is bewilderment, not braggadocio.

Sober, thought, his manner toward his young followers can be grave, even courtly. Tanya and Pea, the two young women who tumble out from under his trailer in the first act, have no fear of him. In fact, although the female characters in the play are less developed than the male, they are by no means reduced to the camp follower/mother figures found in the tales of American easy riders. In the play, when Tanya offers herself as a prize to Lee, the boy who’s leaving for Australia the next morning, and he hesitates, she tells him bluntly and cheerfully that “it’s a good offer,” and is about to be withdrawn. Johnny himself stands up to the adults for the reality of teenage sexuality, reminding Wesley, the publican/Morris Dancer—one of his former followers who, while banning Johnny from his pub, still stops by for dope and succor—that he, Wesley, lost his virginity at 12.

Phaedra’s stepfather, Troy, is another alumnus of Johnny’s camp. When he first comes by looking for Phaedra and menaces Johnny with an axe, Johnny disarms him by reminding him that, as a teenage regular at the camp, he couldn’t look at his own reflection in a plate of (possibly magical) liquid; it made him tremble. Unable to help himself, Troy throws down the axe and starts trembling, and Johnny goads him: Are you still horny? Stepdaughter sleeping in the room right next to you?

Immediately after Johnny and Phaedra’s last-act embrace, Troy arrives again, with his two thuggish brothers. Phaedra flees; the brothers force Johnny into the trailer, where they noisily beat him up while, outside, Troy heats up a branding iron he passes to them. When they’ve fled and Johnny emerges, bloody and half-naked, he repudiates Ginger, his chief sidekick, who’s come to tell him the police are closing in and who wants to stand by him. Alone, Johnny begins to beat the drum that, he’s told everyone, the giant gave him to sound the alarm if he ever needs help. Gradually, the morning light turns green; the trailer and Johnny’s torso gleam with emerald highlights; a rumbling is heard and the trees shiver as in a wind. The curtain descends.

The Green Man is a major figure in English folklore, the embodiment of rebirth, of spring, of the sheer vitality of nature. You can find his pagan image carved into Christian cathedrals, churches, and other buildings dating from the 11th century onwards: his face is formed by foliage, or foliage sprouts from his mouth or eyes. He’s been linked to Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Celtic deities—even, of course, to Jesus. The Green Man has been a persistent theme in different media and remains a potent subject today: Peter Pan, arriving from Neverland covered in green leaves, is his avatar, as is Shakespeare’s Puck and Gawain’s Green Knight. The Green Man is probably related to the Woodwose, the Wild Man of the Woods. The Woodwose is always portrayed as hairy, and Johnny Byron’s personal foundation myth includes the assertion that he was born with all his teeth and hair on his chest.

Fairies are also creatures of the wood, spirits or magical beings, prone to nighttime mischief. Phaedra, her little wing-harness undercutting the mythical, nonetheless partakes of it. Her last-act embrace with Johnny is one for the ages. The achievement of this sprawling, too-long play, and the epic performance by Mark Rylance, is that, while recognizing that most of us might have signed that petition just to get a good night’s sleep, it nevertheless gives us all a glimpse of that Druidic age when giants and fairies shared the earth with man.

A Modern Version of the Green Man

Banksia Man by Australian artist Graham Wilson
© 2009 Graham Wilson, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

[Thanks to Abby Robinson and Victoria Roberts for illuminating conversations.]

Directed by Ian Rickson

The actors (as their characters are mentioned): Mark Rylance (Johnny Byron), Aimeé-Ffion Edwards (Phaedra), Geraldine Hughes (Dawn), Aiden Eyrick / Mark Page (Marky, Johnny’s son), Charlotte Mills (Tanya), Molly Ranson (Pea), Jay Sullivan (Lee), Max Baker (Wesley), Barry Sloane (Troy Whitworth), Richard Short (Danny Whitworth), James Riordan (Frank Whitworth), Mackenzie Crook (Ginger), Alan David (the Professor), Danny Kirrane (Davey), Sarah Moyle (Ms. Fawcett), Harvey Robinson (Mr. Parsons)

The production: Sets and costumes by Ultz; lighting by Mimi Jordan Sherin; sound by Ian Dickinson for Autograph; music by Stephen Warbeck; production stage manager, Jill Cordle; production manager, Aurora Productions; general manager, STP/David Turner; British general manager, Sonia Friedman Productions. A Royal Court Theater production, presented by Sonia Friedman Productions, Stuart Thompson, Scott Rudin, Roger Berlind, Royal Court Theater Productions, Beverly Bartner/Alice Tulchin, Dede Harris/Rupert Gavin, Broadway Across America, Jon B. Platt, 1001 Nights/Stephanie P. McClelland, Carole L. Haber/Richard Willis and Jacki Barlia Florin/Adam Blanshay. At the Music Box Theater, 239 West 45th Street, Manhattan.

]]> http://beyondthezeitgeist.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/jerusalem-the-play-by-jez-butterworth/feed/ 1 bz62 RochesterCathedral_Boss1 Banksia_Man_by_Graham_Wilson http://beyondthezeitgeist.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/welcome-to-beyond-the-zeitgeist-2/ http://beyondthezeitgeist.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/welcome-to-beyond-the-zeitgeist-2/#comments Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:33:06 +0000 bz62 http://beyondthezeitgeist.wordpress.com/?p=704 ]]> Zeitgeist: The spirit of the present time.

Simply by being, you embody it—until the zeitgeist moves on, and you find yourself wired into previous versions.

Unless all zeitgeists continue to flow, separate currents in the same stream, so that anyone can swim in any one at will. In that case, welcome to this one.

Having had my initial follow-up visit with the surgeon and seen the x-rays, I can now say that I underwent successful surgery on Wednesday, June 22 and am the proud possessor (bearer? wearer?) of a titanium and polyethylene left-shoulder joint, plus a plastic ID card to show TSA screeners should I set off their security alarms.

The surgery was carried out by Dr. David Dines at Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery, a short distance from my apartment. After consuming copious amounts of Jello and cranberry juice (who knew fasting meant eating like a kid?), I met my friend Ellen at the hospital at the civilized hour of noon, and was duly admitted for a 3-pm-ish surgery. An astonishing number of people, from the surgeon through the anesthesiologist & his assistant (an auntish-woman in granny glasses and a mob cap who called me “dear”) to several I could not identify but who were full of questions, visited me in the prep room, after which I took the proverbial gurney ride into an extremely businesslike operating theater. I was greeted by the auntie (“Hello, dear”) and promptly checked out of my consciousness.

While I was out, Dr. Dines removed the badly deteriorated bone of the ball and socket of my left shoulder joint (I had read the MRI report—sounded dreadful) and replaced them with implants of his design. The “ball” is the top of the humerus, or upper arm bone. The “socket” is a cavity at the end of the shoulder blade.

The Hospital for Special Surgery only does orthopedic surgery. Dr. Dines, who replaces up to 150 shoulders a year there, developed his first implant back in the late ‘80’s and has been improving on it since. Nowadays, it’s apparently custom-fit. The ball is attached to a piece that extends down into the upper-arm bone, securing it; the polyethylene socket (invisible in the X-ray) is attached to the shoulder blade by a small titanium piece into and through which, Dr. Dines, assures me, my own bone will grow. The whole thing should last 30 years, by which time I will be 100. (If necessary, Dr. Dines’s son Joshua, now in practice with him, could presumably do another at that time, should I once again find my yoga practice seriously compromised.)

I woke up easily in the recovery room, through what turned out, alas, to be only a dream of the operating team clapping and cheering. Great way to wake up, though, and I was told that they did think the surgery had gone very well. A couple of friends appeared at the end of the bed, but no one could tell me when space in a regular room would open up. As late afternoon slipped into evening, I was told that I might have to spend the night in the recovery room. I realized that sustained sleep would be impossible due to the constant beeping of monitors, and spoke to a nurse, who told me a dirty little secret of hospitals; just like the airlines, they overbook. In midweek, there is no guarantee of a room space opening up that first night.

However improbably, though, someone decided to check out of the hospital in the middle of the night, and by 2 AM my bed and I were ensconced in the inside space of a double room on the 5th floor. (What a great improvement over the old system, in which you were transferred from bed to gurney to another bed! Now they just zip you around in the same bed, and a very comfortable one it was, too.) I slept soundly until 4 AM, when staff came around to check vitals—heart rate, BP, temp. Amazing that I registered any vitals at all, but it was a lovely 2 hours’ sleep.

In a hospital dedicated to orthopedics, everyone knew what to do, and there was plenty of staff to do it. During my one full day there (Thursday) I found them very responsive  and unfailingly cheerful. I was never bored, and ate well—from Face Greek Yogurt to—at dinner—decent grilled chicken. Ice bags made of some kind of material that doesn’t sweat were continually replaced, and, on a combo of pain meds from IV drip and oxycodone pills, I was feeling no pain. Charming Dr. Sam Taylor, the 5th-year resident who had assisted in my surgery, came around and had the very bulky protective dressing covering my left shoulder removed, to reveal an astonishingly small incision in the front of the shoulder. It was covered with short, overlapping vertical strips of plastic tape; I wouldn’t have to change this real dressing!

Friday morning, the great man himself—Dines—came by, and told me that I didn’t have to wear my sling at home (only when out) and that I would be able to do the few PT moves I had been taught in the hospital on my own—apparently not always allowed—until I was ready to start formal PT.  So I came home, with a copious supply of oxycodone pills to keep me going. Friends generously turned out to bring whatever supplies I had not laid in before the surgery and, for a couple of days, to help me bathe. By Monday I could shower on my own and took my first little walk outside, across 2nd Avenue to the tree-and-bench-lined, brick-paved pedestrian mall that is 91st Street between 2nd & 3rd Avenues. (This was once the famous Ruppert Brewery and is now the main street of Ruppert Towers apartments. It was also once Jimmy Cagney’s neighborhood and the block is officially named after him.)

So: ten days along, the arm continues to be somewhat sore and a bit swollen, probably because I’m using it, which is ultimately good. I’ve got lots of multicolored bruises. But the long top incision stitch has been removed, I’m on the mend, and I start official PT on Wednesday. The surgeon swears that, eventually, I’ll be able to do headstand again.

The rig looks like an illustration out of an old physics book: Build a scaffolding, attach a wheel at the top and run a cable—from far enough away for leverage—over the wheel and down to the object—in this case, the steel rescue capsule—to be let down and pulled up again.

And then, there was Georges Méliès. His 8-minute, pioneering 1902 film, The Voyage to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune), is a classic.

And, clearly, a hoot.

Just as clearly, the rescue of the miners was not. Yet, somehow, as the operation became routine, the sight of the occupied rescue capsule beginning its ascent from the rock cave where the other miners waited

reminded me of Méliès’ improbable moon rocket and lunar landscape,

with the whole thing working in reverse. (Look closely and you will see the man in the capsule in both pictures.)

In Méliès’ film, the rocket is loaded into a giant cannon by a bevy of bathing beauties in skintight shorts and jaunty, military-themed tops and hats.

In the Chilean footage, the capsule is loaded into the tube by a clutch of hardhats in jaunty orange vests and jackets.

(The first rescue worker starts his descent.)

Of course, it turns out that, inside, the capsule and the ascending miners were chockablock with 21st-century technology:

Yet this wonderful diagram is itself completely 20th-century.

And, I thought, we were back in the 19th century when it came to the food delivery system that supplied the miners waiting for the rescue shaft to reach them. Food

and drink

were introduced into a tube and whisked down to the mine. Again irresistibly, I was reminded of the wonderful system of pneumatic tubes that once whisked receipts and messages from department to department and floor to floor of the great department stores in New York, London and Paris. At one point, New York even had a pneumatic-tube postal system between Manhattan and Brooklyn!

And then I found out that Manhattan’s Roosevelt Island, a small town in the big city, today sends its garbage to Queens via pneumatic tubes. And a new town in Sweden has a more sophisticated pneumatic-tube-waste-disposal system that includes compost, recycling, and burning garbage and sewage for energy!

Everything old is new again.

View the film, The Voyage to the Moon

Sources:

Chilean rescue photos from multiple sources (many of which carried duplicate or near-duplicate images), including BBC, Sunday Monitor, Mail Online (Daily Mail) and Gulf News, among others.

Diagram Source: Mail Online (Daily Mail)

Mexico is different. Even a gringo-ridden town like San Miguel. The other night a friend was leaving, about to go through the doorway from the courtyard to the yard. There’s a light there, and he said, casually, flicking his head toward the upper-right corner of the door frame, “Is that a black widow? Looks like it.” I hadn’t noticed. There were a pair of them, and they’d already covered the corner with a 3-D web. They scurried for cover as we scrutinized them. I couldn’t see the belly, but the body shape fit. “I’ll ask the gardener to kill them,” I said. The next day, I swept off the visible web and what looked like a piece of yellow pollen, small and round, maybe an egg pouch. The spiders were hiding inside the door frame, where there’s a space—it’s old.

I draw the line at black widows, but otherwise my arachnid tolerance has increased remarkably here. Spiders come into the house. So do scorpions, beetles of all kinds, lizards, caterpillars, the odd grasshopper, other bugs and the occasional bird. The other day, I was sitting on the couch, reading. The screen door was slightly ajar.  A house wren flew in and headed straight for the big window over the couch, where it attempted to beat its brains out—or, at least, to break its bill—against the glass. Here was a living example of the dangers of birds and glass—except in this case the bird was trying to fly through to the actual outside, as opposed to being fooled by a reflection.

I finally caught the wren with the aid of my trusty critter-catcher, a clean yogurt container. I held the bird in my hand, feeling its heart beat. I took it outside and set it onto the horizontal section of an ancient Mesquite tree that leans out of the terraced garden on one side of the courtyard, is propped by an iron pole with a cradle, and then angles its way up and across the courtyard.

The wren keeled forward to rest on its lower mandible; its beak was wide open, but its eyes were shut. I could see that its heart was beating. I stood next to it, and it opened the eye on my side. So I moved back, out of range. Gradually it raised its head and almost shut its beak. I could see, from the doorway where I stood with binoculars, a piece of dirt or wood in the space between the mandibles.

Finally it stood erect, eyes open, and looked around. Its beak was closed. It took a step, then scampered up the sloping trunk. I was filled with joy and relief. I hope it was the same wren I saw and heard a couple of days later, grazing on the Mesquite, pulling caterpillars and bugs out of the chinks in the bark and devouring them. It was scolding away as it grazed, but obviously oblivious to me.

The wren, I suppose, could have happened in suburbia USA, but not so much the scorpions. I don’t like scorpions, but I don’t always kill them. Something about this place makes me less prone to kill small intruders. The scorpions are not huge—all the ones I’ve found in the house so far have been only about 3-4 inches long, a shiny bronze in color. A little evil-looking, in truth.

When I first came down here, last February, I found a succession of them—fortunately, always right out in the open, and mostly in the bathroom. The first one was on the window screen one night when I went to close the curtain. I went downstairs, got a yogurt container (I save them—they beat Tupperware for all-purpose food storage, and they’re free) and managed to get the scorpion to drop into it by nudging it with the lid. I slapped the lid on, went outside, across the yard, down the stairs to the door that opens onto the callejon, and down the block to the vacant lot that serves as an estacionamento and occasional stone quarry. I shook the scorpion out into a pile of rocks near one wall—well away from my person—and went home to bed.

After that, I found two or three more in fairly quick succession—one on top of a pile of towels, one on the bathroom door frame. Those I killed, although I don’t really like stepping on them. One I partially squashed and then, coward that I am, got it into the yogurt container I now keep in the batheroom. I put the lid on and took it out to the rubbish bin in the corner of the courtyard. When the gardener looked inside a couple of days later, it was dead.

On the morning of the June day on which I was flying to New York for a month, I watched from bed as the cat stretched languidly up to a dark shape in the corner of the wall next to the door from the outside stair landing (it has a space under it that a mouse could probably stroll through). I didn’t want the cat to kill and eat the scorpion, so I killed it instead, dropping it to the floor and stepping on it (one reason I always wear flip-flops in the house). After I’d disposed of it, I saw the cat licking the floor where I’d killed it. I reflected that the cat had very likely killed and eaten scorpions before. Maybe the stinger isn’t so poisonous when ingested.

The cat belongs to my friend and landlady, Sue, who lives in the main house on the property (she also employs the gardener). When Sue’s away I feed the cat, and she includes me on her daily rounds even when Sue’s home, dropping by for a little water or milk and sometimes a quick cuddle. She has the run of the grounds and all the buildings, and turns up on my roof or anywhere. She stalks, kills and sometimes eats anything she finds. Once I watched her lurking in the Oleander bed. A lizard started up the wall of Sue’s water tank, about 15 feet away. The cat was across the yard in a flash, the lizard in its mouth

At first I tried to rescue the lizards, but a/ there is really no place to put them in the sun that the cat can’t get to, and b/ even if she didn’t get to them I’d invariably find them the next day, dead. So now I generally let nature take its course. We’ve had an invasion of caterpillars in the last couple of weeks. I’ve taken a number outside and released them in the yard. Tonight, the cat came in for dinner and, on her way across the floor, stopped to eat a couple of new arrivals. Lagniappe.

I draw the line at butterflies and birds, though. Once the cat brought a bird into the house. I was up here in the 2^nd floor loft office that overlooks the living room, so I saw her come in. When she has prey, she gives a peculiar low howl, very different from her usual squeaky miaow. I rushed down the stairs and rescued the bird. It was small and gray, and its wings were so askew I feared one was broken. I picked it up and smoothed its wings. I could find nothing that looked like a serious injury. I put it in a paper bag, as I’d learned to do in Central Park from my friend Deb Allen, a birder and professional bird photographer who is as knowledgeable about birds as anyone I’ve ever met. She always carries a paper bag with her in case she happens on a bird that needs rescuing. Once she snatched a Robin from the jaws of a large bullfrog in the Ramble.

The bird was obviously a fledgling, but such a mess I couldn’t quite tell what it was, perhaps a dove. I put it on top of a bureau in the 3^rd-floor bedroom. The bag permits it to breathe but calms it. I clipped the opening shut with a clothes pin. After a few hours, the bird was cheeping. I opened the bag slightly and saw that it was indeed an Inca Dove. It had come to itself enough to assume its proper shape. I carried the bag out to the balcony-terrace, thinking to leave the bag open on the floor, but something made me look up to see the cat peering from the roof. I took the bag back inside.

A couple of hours later the bag was rustling. I stupidly opened it up and the dove flew out and crashed into the wall. I rescued it again, carried it out to the wide balcony railing, and set it down. The cat was nowhere to be seen. After a few seconds, it took off. Again, relief.

The cat is, yes, a killer. I have no doubt that she could make her own way as a feral cat if she had to. Yet she also likes to drop suddenly to the ground, floor, bed or couch and roll over on her back to have her tummy rubbed. In the mornings she likes to get under the covers. Thus the dual nature of us all.

I can’t blame the cat for being a cat. When she brings her prey into the house, she’s part of the outside coming in. When she wants to sleep warmly on a chilly morning, she allies herself with the manmade inside. She has the best of both worlds, and passes back and forth between them with ease. Whereas I, and most other people, venture into the outside with care, with proper equipment, with sunblock and water and hat. Even in New York City, entirely manmade, we dress to protect ourselves from the weather and whatever lies underfoot. If we, too, are killers, we disguise our natures. We’re civilized.

Road Crew at Work

As I write this in the office of the casita I rent from my friend Sue, the excited chatter of children cuts through the deeper tones of the men, with a woman’s voice chiming in occasionally. Then all is silent but the thud of the sledgehammer. They are breaking up the concrete at the paved end of Sierra Gorda, the calle that dead-ends in the callejon—a short, narrow, previously dirt lane, or alley, named Curtidores, that runs between several gringo houses, two of them relatively new.

Curtidores starts where Callejon Atascadero runs up from Santo Domingo and abruptly switches to stone steps. Making the blind left turn off the short steep hill onto Curtidores means gunning the engine at just the right moment. If you overshoot, you could ram into the stone wall of an ancient tanning pool. Callejon Curtidores was the alley of the hide cutters, probably in the 18th century, certainly the 19th.

Gringos began to move up here—near the top of the hill that rises at the east end of town—in the 1970’s. Sue’s house compound, at the corner of Sierra Gorda and Curtidores, was a one-story colonial relic when Peter, who’d first come to San Miguel in the 50’s, began building it up, adding a second story, darkrooms, a third-story studio, guest quarters, sheds, the casita. In the mid-80’s, my friend Judy bought a rubble-strewn lot on the other side of Sierra Gorda, which in those days was unpaved, too. She and her husband David, whose family has owned land in San Miguel for generations, incorporated the lot’s colonial stone “shack,” with its beautifully carved, heavy wooden doors, into their house compound. Eventually, when Sierra Gorda was lined with house walls on both sides, the residents got together and had it paved.

On the other side of its intersection with Sierra Gorda, Curtidores remains flat for a short stretch and then trails downhill, angles right and takes a new name, Chepitos. Just beyond Valvino’s house, Chepitos narrows into a pedestrian walkway, overhung with bougainvillea and deeply shaded by the gringo and Mexican houses that crowd along it. Chepitos gives onto Cuesta de San Jose, the other main road leading down into town.

At the road-building site, there are engineering decisions to be made. The stretch of Curtidores between Atascadero and the intersection with Sierra Gorda has had to be raised to prevent the flooding that the rains used to bring to Steve’s house. He’s paying for this stretch, and he does a fair amount of kibitzing himself. The question is, how to angle the new surface to connect with Sierra Gorda, which rises northward from Curtidores, in such a way that when the rains come the water pouring down Sierra Gorda will drain into Curtidores and keep on flowing—down to Santo Domingo on its east end and down the hill past the vacant lot on its west end.

When the rains come to San Miguel, cobblestone streets and other hard surfaces become swift-running streams. Water flowing in from side streets hits the downhill streams with waves of turbulence. I’ve seen the steps at the northwest corner of the Jardin, the Plaza Principal at the center of town, turn into a waterfall, feeding the ankle-deep flow of the street below it.

But now it’s the dry season, and Steve, a retired lawyer from Maine in a white polo shirt, khaki Bermuda shorts and running shoes with no socks, is trying to help solve the engineering problem; unlike many gringos in this town, he’s fluent in Spanish and has a lot of Mexican friends. His hose provides water for the cement that Valvino’s crew mixes on the ground in the vacant lot beyond Sue’s house. The stretch of callejon from Sierra Gorda to the lot, running between Sue’s house on one side and two other gringo houses on the other, was the first section to be paved, using stones from the vacant lot. Sue and her neighbors hired Valvino, and on the basis of his work for them, Steve followed suit.

The flat half of the vacant lot where the cement is mixed serves as a parking lot (the day’s mound of wet cement is an impediment, but now that the intersection with Sierra Gorda is torn up, no one can drive anywhere anyway). Beyond the parking area, the lot runs down hill next to Curtidores. It’s full of stones that are the right size for cobblestones, cemented by hand-poured mortar. Steve, though, has purchased “river stones”—fairly uniform in size and nicely rounded. I remember, during my first visit to San Miguel, in 1995, watching workmen paving a downtown block (a municipal, as opposed to private, project). They carefully set the egg-shaped cobblestones upright in the dirt, then poured liquid cement around them from little beakers like Turkish coffee pots.

On Curtidores, the little kids have been having a ball. On the first stretch, in front of Sue’s house, they could dig up a few cobblestones from the parking lot / stone quarry, load them into their miniature wheelbarrow, and trundle them to the paving site. Even with the river stones, they can help set them into the stretch of dirt graded and prepared by their elders. It’s the kind of real participation in adult life that, in the US, would violate every known child-labor law, while provoking the nostalgia of cultural historians who yearn for the days when US kids could find meaning in life through similar participation.

Valvino—a cheerful, stocky man with a pronounced limp, a generous belly, broad features and a luxuriant black mustache—is the neighborhood entrepreneur. His house on Chepitos and the two next to it are sandwiched in between two gringo establishments. The one on the corner houses several rental casitas behind its high walls. On the other side, a brand-new B&B is under construction, its parking garage giving onto the very end of the drivable stretch of Chepitos. The gringo houses all have high, smooth, variously tinted facades or walls. Valvino’s house and the two next to it are brick, on several levels, with a big stack of timber in front of two of them, bird cages and, often, a cage or two of puppies on the porches, a big sheet of blue plastic shading one section, and potted flowers hanging everywhere. On weekend evenings you may find Valvino’s extended family and friends sitting outside his house, small children and puppies tumbling over each other, adults chatting and laughing, music playing. During the day, you’ll almost always find a couple of hand-pulled wagons stacked with plastic bags of garbage, waiting for the garbage truck to clang its arrival on Cuesta de San Jose. One of Valvino’s self-constructed jobs is collecting the garbage from various gringo houses in the neighborhood and taking it out to the garbage truck.

The garbage trucks in San Miguel are small, open trucks with high, white, slatted wooden sides. The garbage men, the basureros, stand in the back on top of the pile of garbage bags. The truck moves slowly along and stops, announcing its presence with the clanging of an iron triangle. Householders come out with their garbage, in cans or bags, and hoist it up to the waiting hands of the basureros.

The trucks don’t come down Sierra Gorda, so Valvino performs a valuable service. Without him, householders on Curtidores and Sierra Gorda would have to lug their garbage the equivalent of a couple of blocks—and, in any case, they can’t hear the clanging of the truck.

Beyond the Zeitgeist started as a New York City arts-and-language blog—random acts of culture from beyond the Zeitgeist.

After a hiatus, the blog relocated to San Miguel de Allende, a Central Mexico mountain town inhabited by a considerable (about 10% of the total) population of gringos—Mexican for “Americans.” Random acts of culture here mean culture in the broadest, or anthropological sense—anything that goes on, or the way things are. (From time to time we may report on the arts, but as likely as not from an anthropological, as opposed to a critical, perspective.)

Written by a gringa in Mexico, this blog is doubly beyond the Zeitgeist. And yet—the Zeitgeist is always the present time and place. So we can and do inhabit, legitimately, the spirit of our present situation.