“The black angel…forces open my hands /and in the palms/leaves her footprints”

 Featured image: Black angel in the Aurora consurgens (Dawn Rising) illuminated manuscript held at Zentralbibliothek Zürich in Switzerland, a 15th-century illuminated alchemical document, with its oldest, most heavily illustrated version dating to approximately 1420-1430.  Its author is unknown. 

Post title: Quote from the poem “The Black Angel” by Michael S Harper (1938-2016).  He wrote his 1968 poem at the height of the US civil rights movement. In the last stanza he asserts that “the shrill eloquence of other men”—white men—in canonical literature had engendered self-hatred in African Americans. The Black Angel’s role was to counter the self-loathing by a kind of “wounding”: she has to aggressively imprint her hard-won love of  her own physical and cultural blackness into their skins of her earthly kin: by forcibly “leav[ing] her footprints” in their palms.

MY DREADED BACK SURGERY IS NOW ONE MONTH IN THE PAST

My surgery took place on Tuesday, Jan 27th. Right after I was taken from recovery to my regular hospital room, I had to lie flat on my back without lifting or even turning my head for a shoe day. My surgeon accidentally nicked or tore the dura mater—or the membrane around the spinal canal—a known and common complication during spinal surgery. If not immediately patched, spinal fluid can enter and build up in the area between the dura and the bony vertebrae or in other forbidden spaces, causing “positional” headache, which worsens when upright and improves when lying down. To prevent bacteria accessing the central nervous system, surgeons treat leaks immediately, sometimes using regular surgery stitches and at other times applying a thin film of sealant to the opening. When a patch is in place, the patient has to lie on her back for 24 hours so that the patch can “take.”

Flat on my back for 24 hours

Even though I was technically awake, I can remember very few details of my 3 1/2 days in my hospital room. What I do remember is that I was not allowed to go to the bathroom without a nurse because of the risk of falling. From previous hospital stays, I remember having had to do my business in the toilet with a companion right there to prevent falling. Rather disconcerting but I can deal with a breach of my privacy for safety reasons.

Though I can now lift my head, my smile does not really meet expectations…

Given that I was being drugged up to my eyeballs with intravenous opioids and other pain killers, walking in the hall with a physical therapist seemed a breeze

Peter and I were so happy that I was going home

During the first 2 days at home, I was still under the influence of the hospital painkillers. I lived in somewhat of a haze.  So did Peter—he wouldn’t get a full night’s sleep until about 2 1/2 weeks after my surgery: during the night, he’d get up to lift me on and off the toilet—and, during the day, for all my bathroom needs and for every other sit/stand situation. I was like having a very new baby at home. Eventually, though, medically inflicted wounds do heal: how marvelously our bodies restore damaged cells and tissues, roping in stem cells to grow back whatever parts are missing; inflammation and immune reactions boost the repair process. Not only the new assaults are fixed, but the maintenance work of, for example, regenerating the lining of the gut every 3-5 days keeps going on. The external evidence of my recovery is visible mainly on the skin of my back. And if the skin is healing, I tell myself, the same must be true for the bone and muscles inside. Despite the pain’s brain-cleaving protest that nothing is getting better at all…

First, 3 days after surgery. Second, 5 days after, our friend Sean Graff—a nurse at the Veteran’s Hospital—removes my bandage. Third, almost 2 weeks later.

After only a few days at home, Peter was exhausted with all the physical and psychic help he was giving me. Throughout the day  he did more work than he or I had ever imagined my recovery would generate. After I’d been home for about 2 weeks, I sent Peter the cartoon above with the message: “Reverse the genders, and you and I can be having exactly the same dialogue.”

As if we needed anything more to deal with, on the Sunday of my first weekend home my pain became seriously debilitating overnight. I woke up in agony after only a few hours of sleep and was unable to sleep again because of the pain. In the morning, Peter called the nurse listed on my discharge paper as our first point of contact for help. After 2 days of trying , though, Peter had to throw a septuagenarian tantrum to eventually get Oxycodone. I was very disappointed that my doctor’s team—ever so efficient before the surgery—was letting me down afterward. (This was a different team member than those who helped us before).

Above, the meds I was taking after returning from the hospital. In the back row, 5 containers with my hospital discharge medications, in the front row, my regular daily medications. The paper in the foreground on the left is the bookkeeping tool Peter used to make sure my multiple prescriptions were each taken at the correct time of day, on the right are the medication boxes for a week of morning- and evening meds

Contemplating the materials for the photo above, Peter and I were both caught off balance about the vastness of the  array. I seriously questioned whether consuming as much medical/chemical intervention as I currently do, did not specify as a criterion for life having become no longer worthwhile. Peter was quick to point out, though, that all the containers in the back row were just temporary. I reassured him that I was fully on board to go the full route of recovering from my surgery. We both counted on the over-the-top-excess from the hospital going away in a few weeks.

To banish my tendency to succumb to hopelessness in the face of what seemed like no progress to me, Peter he took me on our first outing to Starbucks—about three weeks after my surgery

* * *

The Oxy helped a lot for my pain, but the doses were too far apart to keep me comfortable. My overall memory of the next two weeks is  a dark funnel of pain. For short periods, I would glimpse a light at the end of the tunnel before being swept into blackness again. At those times I felt “there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, there isn’t even a tunnel. The best thing I can do is…sleep and wait for death to get closer” (Charles Bukowski, German-American poet and writer, 1920-1994). Two weeks after surgery, I was completely off opioids. The end of opioids, alas, does not mean the end of pain… I (sort of) managed with acetomenophin 3 x per day. Nevertheless, there are at times when I have pain so severe I have to lie flat on my back for about an hour several times during the day. At those times, I consider that I really didn’t bargain for enduring this high a level of pain for this long and into the foreseeable future. I speculate about taking opioids again. However, I have so far been able to Zen myself through the “valley of the shadow of death” with the mantra “without opioids I can have wine with my lunch.” I also want to get back to doing my share of the work in the household again. (I wish I could say that this desire stemmed from pure altruism, but no: it was mostly a taking back of my territory, the kitchen in particular having become I mark of my identity since dementia has robbed me of my part in any intellectual governance of our household.) While Peter never complains about having taken on most of the household, he did send me this cartoon:

* * *

I have spoken and will still speak a lot about of pain and darkness/blackness in this post. Per long established cultural logic, black is bad, as pain is bad too. Depending on where you are on the “woke” spectrum, you may cringe at the knowledge that in our new governmental dispensation “black ” is again actively being racialized. In ancient and classical times, though, associations between light/dark and good/evil were not initially race-related: they began with the Pythagorean Table of Opposites. Later in Greco-Roman culture, black was non-racially associated with the underworld and mourning, while in Western religious and philosophical traditions, white was linked to divinity and purity. What would become our current commonplace “black is bad” originated when colonization during the 1500s-1700s mapped color-based prejudices on skin color to justify slavery. in the 19th  century “Jim Crow” and “scientific” racism were used to enforce systemic inequality, a concept that Black Americans deconstructed during the Civil Rights Movement through slogans such as “Black is Beautiful.” Tragically, the Trump administration has sadly shown how easy it is to revive entrenched, white-supremacist interpretations of the name for a color. 

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The illuminated manuscript Aurora consurgens, Dawn Rising—from which I took the mini-painting of the Black Angel as the featured image at the start of this post—precedes the racialization of black and white by at least 1 ½ centuries in ways I will talk about below. Dawn Rising is an early 1400s alchemical document; while we generally think about alchemy as the quest to change lead into gold, this ancient precursor to chemistry has a sometimes forgotten philosophical component: it sees the metallurgy of extracting metals from crude ore as a parallel to spiritual transformation. The untransformed soul experiences pain. The colors in the Black Angel miniature project stages of chemical transformations onto a series of  individual spiritual metamorphoses. As the ore changes color when exposed to the intense heat of the alchemist’s furnace, the soul moves through stages of purification, each of which consititutes a step in the spiritual “healing” that the Heavenly Metallurgist requires for the benefit of the earthly soul.

The color black names a condition of strain, trial, and unmaking rather than pointing to race. In the alchemical meaning of the Angel’s black skin and the black earth on which she stands, I see a parallel to the pain, dread, and breaking down of my identity that took place in my “black tunnel.”

The color red intensifies the “unmaking” represented by the black through heat, incision, and inner transformation. I’m struck by the size of the Angel’s incision compared to mine; the skin appears to be forced open by the bulging innards to a point where “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men/ Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” (That’s how my slow ongoing recovery feels.)

Despite representing purity, the color white appears as a fragile, hesitant, and receptive condition rather than a final post-transformational condition. The thin, white tunic provides no protection against the Heavenly Metallurgist’s intention to “wound” the Angel. The opened skin breaks the tranquility usually associated with a state of purity. However, by means of the incision, white opens a space for the Heavenly Metallurgist to insert substances that will assist in the soul’s purification. Chief among them, LOVE.

Even before the surgery, I was of course anxiously aware that surgical cut opens the possibility of a hospital infection. Neverthless, without the incision, the surgeon wouldn’t have been able to bolt titanium strips to my vertebrae to hold them still.

X-ray of my spine, today, 6 weeks after the surgery.

* * *

Love, in medieval times, required a wound. Even the love of Christ had to be procured through the soul’s piercing of his heart with an arrow.

Illustration by Rudolf Stahel (ca. 1448–1528) from a copy of Christ and the Soul in Love (Christus und die minnende Seele), Constance, Germany, ca. 1495. Writer Amber L. Griffioen provides this caption: “The Soul [bride] takes up her bow, draws her minne stral (‘arrow of love’)…and wounds Christ [bridegroom] in the heart, capturing him in order to ‘enjoy him’ forever.”

My question is, does love still require a wound in our day and age? I could make an argument for that, but I’d rather move on to what I’ve learned through my surgery about the medical rupture of skin: a “wound” attracts love. Before I had even gone into hospital and while I was there, messages, cards, visits, and blog responses left Peter and me in no doubt that were loved. Once I returned from the hospital, friends and family came to visit with food, flowers, the niftiest little succulent pot plant, special cheese, a bottle of scotch, and cheer. When my pain increased once the anesthesia and intravenous drugs had worn off, friends gave me the gift of being able to be selfish: I have been virtually a hermit for the last six weeks. The people who love me stayed in touch without being hurt when I neither Peter nor I did much to respond and declined multiple generous offers of food. They gave me the time to “suffer” in peace, understanding that it took all my energy to cope with staying fed, toileted (jump-starting my awful digestive system routines), cleaned, and dressed; those who love me granted me the many hours is still have to spend every day to lie on my back and visualize the pain coming over me and, rather than fighting it, accepting it tranquilly as an interval that augured health still to come.

Claude Monet, (1872), Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) 1872.  First shown at what would become known as the “Exhibition of the Impressionists” in Paris in April, 1874. The painting is credited with inspiring the name of the Impressionist movement.

* * *

Peter, too, urgently needed “time to himself,” as if catching-up-on-the-endless-tasks-with-which-he-had-gotten-behind-over-the-months-of-caring-for-me-even-before-surgery can be grouped among the blissfull connotations of “time for oneself.” He, too, has health issues—and even though I am still slurping up his lumpen hours with my problems, he nevertheless has to attend to his own time-sensitive medical treatments on schedule. To name a few,  1), Every six weeks he has to have a shot in each eyeball for macular degeneration. He cannot see to drive afterward, so Newton takes him or he catches an Uber. 2), Every evening, last thing, he has to put a drop in each eye for his glaucoma. 3), In between, he followed up on a skin cancer that had been diagnosed very close to his eye—his dermatologist scraped off layers of skin, using the sound of her tool as a diagnostic criterion: if it made a mushy sound, it was cancer. If it responded with a guttural “grrrrts, grrrrts,” she knew she had reached healthy skin. She believes she got it all out. He still has to treat the site twice a day with vinegar water, vaseline, and a bandaid to prevent it from scarring.

* * *

In her poem “Marriage,” poet Ellen Bass says that the kinds of love that “count” do seem to carry the possibility of wounding within them. With love’s every difficulty, whether physical illness or psychological strife, the possibility that love—or the beloved—may not survive it is part of the deal. The start of the poem speaks to my and Peter’s recent experience:

“When you finally, after deep illness, lay/the length of your body on mine…”

“How to bear the weight,/ with every/flake of bone pressed in. Then, how to bear when/ the weight is gone, the way a woman/whose neck has been coiled with brass/ can no longer hold it up alone. Oh love,/ it is balm, but also a seal. It binds us tight/ as the fur of a rabbit to a rabbit./ When you strip it, grasping the edge/ of the sliced skin, pulling the glossy membranes/ apart, the body is warm and limp./If you could, you’d climb inside that wet, slick skin/ and carry it on your back. This is not/neat and white and lacy like a wedding,/ this visceral/ bloody union that is love/ but beyond love.

The Heart, 1898 – 1899, Edvard Munch