Called back

Mr Laurent. Mr Laurent. Mr Laurent.

With three cool fingers pressed on

the back of my hand, I heard a calm

feminine voice calling to me, and

awakened to see my young Swedish-born,

Brown University-educated, New York

residencied internist standing at my 

side as I emerged from surgery in my 

hospital room in Virginia. I have con- 

fided that she is beautiful, I have 

tried to show that we can not give 

up the balsam of that reality in any-

thing. My belief had told me, she

would be there, but to come back from

unconsciousness in this way is to feel

repair in its greatest depth.

My last words to her, via telephone before my peripheral arterial by-pass operation, were that it was undeniably certain that she had saved my life. This was a race against time, wringing tighter every day. I remember, at our first visit, how her quiet I just wish we knew what is causing this gave me complete confidence in her care. And, within hours, leapfrogging whole protocols of other tests, she had me in the painstaking hands of interventional radiologists who immediately passed me into surgery, with as exhaustive a map of an arterial system as has ever been drawn.

I was extremely unwell, without knowing it except in incidental pains and odd discolourations. And although this surgery was a godsend, it delivered me rather only to a new life of self-repair in ways of living - with which I am eager to get started. I have a great project, which perhaps I had lacked, and the experience gathered that perspective in myriad small enormous ways. A youngster whose tumblr I warmly admire posted a superb portrait of Eliot on the same day, with the most exquisitely apposite quotation from East Coker, rinsing me in that lifelong relationship ~
                                     
To arrive where you are, 
to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way 
wherein there is no ecstasy.

But, always, some France. I had a note from a young mother of two, distracted by her husband and son, inventing mathematics and lunch down the hall, by her daughter practicing ballet in the adjoining sitting room; and one could not but see her as the solar center of an antic vitality, which I find handsomely verified in her garden in the Touraine.

Cascades of signals of actual loveliness compete, in any recovery space, with breath-shortening pain and mind blunt-ing medications. Studying alternative versions of Dylan's Tom Thumb's Blues one afternoon, I was interrupted by a visit from my presiding surgeon, a guy about my age. I told him, Here, you gotta borrow this, there's more to it than we thought. As in Kerouac's sad Big Sur and in Eliot's most caustically bitter imagery, there is the great beauty of the caring human voice, confessing to its default condition of love. Mr Laurent. Mr Laurent. Mr Laurent.

T. S. Eliot
The Four Quartets
Mariner Books, 1968©


Bob Dylan
No Direction Home
Film sound track
Martin Scorsese, director
PBS, 2005©


iii  Matthias Lauridsen


iv   Private source


v    Derek