For use: Friday, January 17, 2001

MFINLEY: "Get Away!"

by Michael Finley

It seems like forever since I have written to you. The reason is that I spent all last week in an empty house in the northernmost village of Wisconsin, a one-store town ironically named Cornucopia. Writing my head off -- and it felt wonderful.

Careful readers of this space know that I suffered a stroke two years ago today, on January 17. A week later, I learned that a brain tumor called a meningioma in my head caused the stroke. Life ain't been quite right since then.

I will not rehash the psychic misery my diagnosis ushered in. I will say that almost immediately, I sought to undercut the stress of the situation by writing about it. I think my reasoning went like this: If I was scared, I would tell everyone I know what was happening, as scarily as I knew how. When I had scared everybody I knew, I would have offloaded a large part of my fear.

People will say (people did say), "But that is manipulative." All I can say is, that's what writing is, and what it's good for. It is a shaping of reality, almost always with some selfish purpose in mind. Sorry.

In my case, I must have spent 2000 hours trying to put down my experiences for a book. I went through a half dozen concepts, a couple dozen titles (including the execrable Boomer the Tumor and the excremental Way to Go, God). I had a bushel basket of contradictions.

The truth is, I have never, despite being a 50 year old writer, gotten away for a few days to just write. Well, I got away good this time, and it was a joy.

When I first arrived at the house, things seemed irremediably bleak. I set up my laptop, loaded the manuscript, and realized I had not really thought about it since October. By promising myself this week away, I vacated it from my mind. Now I had to catch up, and quickly.

Outside, the snow was 20 inches deep. Too deep to spend much time with the dog in. The deep would lift back their racks and snort derisively at his efforts to galumph after them. So it would be just me and the laptop.

All I had to do was do my work, fix my meals, and clean up before leaving -- taking special care to remove all food items from the refrigerator, because who knows when the next visitor will show up.

I decided to start on the first page. The basic problem was that I had done everything in pieces, at different times, and in a wide assortment of moods -- anxious, self-pitying, sarcastic, lugubrious. While many of the pieces were good, they didn’t quite connect. How does one integrate a lapful of fragments?

I began with a list of fundamental truths:

1. Everything has to relate to my brain problem. This meant jettisoning some 100 pages of autobiographical "background" material.
2. Everything has to flow. The original MS was written in six verb tenses, including past pluperfect and future conditional. I decided to recast the entire book in the present tense, because that is how you feel when your brain goes south on you -- every moment is kind of a mystery.
3. Show, don’t tell. It is a vanity of my "columnist" style of writing that I think my opinionated description of a thing ("This man was so stupid that ...")is equally gripping as a narrative retelling ("The man stood dripping wet on my doorstep for several minutes before uttering the identifying morpheme, "Duh...").
   
   And I realized a critical fourth point several pages into the work:
   
4. Get with it. I realized, in an existential moment, that I customarily let a kind of ambient anxiety drive my thinking and writing, Woody Allen-style. While this is a useful and amusing gait, it should not be one's only one. The sin is that I fall back on it because it is a known (and amusing) deal and because it protects me from trying other ways of walking.

So I got to work. The worst part of this project for me has been absence of direction. I literally don’t know how it ends. Do I get better, do I succumb, do I experience deficits and learn to live with them? Those were the possibilities, and each led, in my mind, to a different book. (The first is a testimonial, the second is a swooning tragedy, and the third is self-help.)

I paced. I deleted. I played my guitar. I talked to myself. I talked to the dog -- who had to be wondering what the hell was going on. I worked in a strange noncircadian cycle of ten hours of work, then three hours of sleep. This was part due to frenzy, part due to the noisiness of the baseboard heating in the little house. The banging of the heater was so noisy, it was like trying to sleep in a popcorn popper.

So line by line I overhauled an 80,000-word book, breaking it down to 40,000 words. This is famously difficult work if you are unsure of your direction. But this week, I was an arrow cut from a zen branch, flying straight and true.

At least, that is how it seems to me. I have been riding the crest of a splendid manic wave since I got back, and all things seem possible.

If you’re curious about the MS, I have parts of it on display at mfinley.com/list-tumor.htm.

The lesson for me was powerful. It really does help to "get away." It means looking your loved ones in the eye and telling them to get along without you. But they will do fine -- they need time away from you, too -- and it will be a life experience for you.

And may I say this: you are functioning at such a high level, it makes you feel wonderful about your head. When I cleared out of the cabin, it was with a conviction that, after two years of vague uncertainty, I had really healed.

But I am concerned about the roast beef I left in the fridge.

 

Making Miracles Happen , by Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh

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