‘You want that two percent back,’ he said.
‘I’m English,’ I said. ‘Ninety-eight percent of anything always sounds good to me.’ So my impulse was to say the same thing to the doctor: Forget it, let’s not bother advancing to this new tier of specialism. Especially as this neurologist was based in Hollywood. I’d regained my equilibrium to the extent that my default reaction to many things — like having to schlep over to Hollywood for a hospital appointment — was ‘What a bore!’ But I made the appointment and schlepped over there to see this new brain guy. His name was Sanjay. He looked incredibly young to be in such a senior position, but he managed to trip me up with some simple tests. With my right hand I could run my thumb from little finger to index finger without effort or thought. The first time I tried it with my left hand I made a mess of it, couldn’t get the sequence right. And the second and the third. We then went through an extended series of question-and-answer tests and looked at some of the images of my brain, including the come shot, where you could see quite clearly the explosion or blob of blood of whatever it was, the thing that could have been so much worse than it was. But the finger-and-thumb routine still concerned him, and so, in the coming weeks, I schlepped back for tests that would use million-dollar gizmos to discover why I’d failed this simplest of exercises. Sanjay seemed excited by the case — but it was unclear whether this was simply for the intellectual challenges it presented rather than for my well-being. Even if the outcome of these tests changed his assessment of the cause of the stroke, would it make any difference to the treatment? I asked. Good question, he said. It might well do, depending on the outcome of those tests.
So we kept at it, chasing the source of the problem, smoking it out as if it were Bin Laden in the Tora Bora caves. At one point it seemed that there might be an abnormality in my lungs, so I went back for a test on the lungs. If that proved positive, surgery might be necessary. But that test was negative. The trail went dead. And so, in the end, like the two neurologists before him, Sanjay called it a day, resigned himself to an intellectually frustrating verdict — shit happens, even in the brain — and I continued taking Lipitor and low-dosage aspirin.
In the immediate aftermath of the stroke, I’d often thought of the line in Tarkovsky’s film Solaris: we never know when we’re going to die, and because of that we are, at any given moment, immortal. Even now, many months later, with all of those tests behind me, with my sense of the unavoidable tedium of life fully restored, when the resolution to treat each day as a gift has been largely forgotten, it still feels good, being where I’ve always longed to be, perched on what Adorno called ‘this remote western coast.’ There’s a wild sunset brewing up over the Pacific. The water is glowing turquoise, the sky is turning crazy pink, the lights of the Santa Monica Ferris wheel are starting to pulse and spin in the twilight. Life is so interesting I’d like to stick around forever, just to see what happens, how it all turns out.
10
In Luxor there is a sculpture, slightly larger than life-size, of a prim king and queen sitting with her right hand on his left shoulder. He is complete, facing straight ahead, but by some accident of time half of her chest and all of her head and left arm have been sheared off at an angle. The damage is severe, the loss irreparable, tragic.
Looked at from a different angle, from the husband’s right, it seems as though her left hand (which in fact is entirely absent) is on his shoulder. Imagine a couple sitting for a formal photographic portrait — a photograph in ancient stone. In the instant when the shutter clicks she dips her head behind his back, giggling at the ridiculous rigidity of the pose they have been asked to adopt. Suddenly they are made whole again.
I assumed this effect was a transitory delusion on my part, but every time I shifted position the woman moved accordingly, reconfiguring herself and re-creating the illusion. The statue has been like this for thousands of years, but its delicacy is such that the fleetingness of a moment — a movement — has been preserved in stone. The ravages of time are caught — and reversed — in an instant. Time is alive, permanently.
Notes
6 Matisse: Quoted in David Sweetman, Paul Gauguin: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 554.
9 ‘notorious among all’: Kirk Varnedoe, ‘Gauguin,’ in William Rubin, ed., ‘Primitivsm’ in 20th Century Art, vol. 1 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), p. 189.
13 ‘a bit snivelling’: D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 3, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 566.
14 Pissarro’s bitchy remark: Quoted in Varnedoe, ‘Gauguin,’ p. 186.
15 ‘I am down’: Ibid., p. 179.
17 ‘something indescribably solemn’: In Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 75.
19 ‘dry bread’: Quoted in John Berger, Permanent Red (London: Writers and Readers, 1979), p. 202.
76 ‘the invisible is real’: All quotations from De Maria are from ‘The Lightning Field: Some Facts, Notes, Data, Information, Statistics, and Statements,’ originally published in Artforum, April 1980, p. 57, reprinted in Jeffrey Kastner, ed., Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), pp. 232–33.
76 Heidegger: Quotations are from Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 248 and p. 107.
78 John Beardsley: Reprinted in Kastner, ed., Land and Environmental Art, pp. 279–80.
78 ‘It is only for their gods’: Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, 1961), p. 37.
85 ‘no bigger than’: D. H. Lawrence, ‘On Coming Home,’ in Phoenix II (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 255.
85 ‘the greatest experience’: D. H. Lawrence, ‘New Mexico,’ in Phoenix (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 142.
88 ‘some places seem temporary’: D. H. Lawrence, ‘Taos,’ in Phoenix, p. 100.
91 Smithson: Quotations are from ‘The Spiral Jetty,’ in Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 145–47.
94 Coplans: Quoted by Ben Tufnell in Land Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 43.
116 ‘or even if some eminent Victorians’: Annie Dillard, ‘An Expedition to the Pole,’ in Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), p. 35.
144 ‘sun was strong’: Cf. Susan Sontag, ‘Pilgrimage,’ New Yorker, 21 Dec. 1987, p. 46.
145 A wave of émigrés: A map of the émigrés’ homes can be found at the end of Lawrence Weschler’s essay ‘Paradise: The Southern Californian Idyll of Hitler’s Cultural Exiles,’ in the catalogue Exiles + Emigrés (Los Angeles: LACMA, 1997), pp. 358–59.
145 ‘tahiti in the form of a big city’: Bertolt Brecht, Journals 1934–1955 (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 159.
145 ‘helper, advisor and sympathetic instructor’: Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel (New York: Knopf, 1961), p. 37.
146 ‘the disease [syphilis]’: Schoenberg quoted in Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 265.