JANUARY 2001
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Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
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A Master of the Wired World?
I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.
It's the night before Valentines Day, and Rachel and I go out for dinner and a movie. Money is scarce, but I buy a print for her anyway, by artist friend Dan Bruggeman, of two birch trees gently intertwining. It costs $300, but I'm in love and don't care. Wouldn't you know, I get an overdraft notice that afternoon from the bank.
We choose an Indian restaurant in Minneapolis, figuring not many people will think of celebrating Valentine's Day Indian style. When the waiter, named Dinesh, stiffly presents us with our menus and leaves, Rachel whispers that he doesn't seem to have much of a sense of humor. But I hold out for him. "He's all right," I say.
We order wine, my first drink since suffering the stroke. What a difference it is to be wearing pants and drinking a cheap merlot in a nice restaurant. We order our dinner, telling Dinesh to cook our food no spicier than mild-to-medium. "We are from Saint Paul," I say slowly. No reaction.
So I tell Rachel her about my poetry reading earlier that day. The City Center mall downtown thought an open-mike reading about love would get the cash registers ringing sales. When it was my time to read, people were passing before me like traffic at a major intersection. The sound system was loud and hollow. But this was what I told the shoppers:
"You know, it's funny to be reading here. In my experience, this is the first time a store has tried to make money off free verse. [Wait for laughs, none come.]
"Our topic today is the decline of the love poem. Today's poets write very few poems about the love we feel for our chosen ones. This failure began, oddly enough, in the Romantic era, when poets redirected their attention from what was around them, to what was going on inside their heads."
I'm going great guns, by my own estimation, and Rachel listens to my monologue with eyes shining. Dinesh brings our dinner, which is wonderful -- a dozen little dishes and sauces and chutneys and breads and rice. I continue with my speech at the mall:
"The reason poets don't write love poems," I told shoppers, "is that they love their muses more -- their imaginations. It's one reason poetry seldom seems to matter any more. It's not about love for others. It's not a gift we give readers. It's like masturbation -- fun, but unromantic.
"I have a special insight into this issue because I found out two weeks ago that I have a brain tumor. [A few shoppers halt in midstride and look in my direction, but not many.] They say it's not cancerous, but it may have to come out. I'm afraid of the tumor, and I'm afraid of the operation. I'm forgetting things. I have lots to lose besides my life.
"What if I lose my IQ? Or my sense of humor? What if I lose my muse?
"And I'm asking myself, Which is more important to me, my muse or my wife? And the answer is -- my wife. Poetry only wants you at the top of your game, when all your faculties are clicking in perfect synch. But even if I come out of the operation washed up as a poet, Rachel will still love me."
I'm telling Rachel all this over tandoori chicken and naan. I'm very pleased with my public proclamation. She just shakes her head.
"You're full of it," she says. "If you love me more than your writing, why do you write all the time?"
I nod, and think about all the times I head upstairs to clatter on the computer rather than climb into bed with her.
"But," I say. "If I come out of the hospital a vegetable, you'll still love me, right? Whereas I'll probably never hear from my muse again."
"You'll probably be OK, you know," she says.
"Sure. But if worse comes to worse, you have power of attorney. If I'm really bad you can pull the plug on me. If I'm just pretty bad, you can put me in a home. All I want is that you come visit me sometimes. I mean, I would want you to have a life, maybe get married again."
For a moment there is silence, as I push the basmati rice with a fork.
"You know," Rachel says, "if you veged out, you could still live at home. Just because you're sick doesn't mean we can't be together. Just that you'll be more like furniture."
"Then it's settled," I say. I ask Dinesh for the bill. He gives it to me, and I give it to Rachel. "Handle this, dear," I say. Dinesh cracks up.
"See," I tell Rachel, "I told you he had a sense of humor."
After dinner we go to a movie -- Shakespeare in Love. Rachel and I have a ball watching it, whispering excitedly, shoulder to shoulder, giggling.
A man sitting in front of me turns around not once, but twice, to insist we put a cap on it. I spin him back around with a twirl of my finger:
"Just enjoy the movie," I say to him, as if I was doing him a favor, as if it wasn't his fault he couldn't recognize true love -- "please."
I have my first night out with friends, playing pool at City Billiards, the old downtown club in Minneapolis with a couple of writer friends, Bob and Larry. What a piece of work I am, audacious one moment, on the brink of tears the next. I can't just shut up and play pool, I have to bring the guys down with the ghastly details of my healing. I tell them about the gurgling sounds I hear sometimes. I tell them about my problem with orgasms. I tell them about intracranial pressure. They stare at me, stricken.
This must be how the war wounded feel on Memorial Day, when everyone crowds around you in your uniform and slaps you on the back. No, you are not one of them, except on one day of the year. Then it is all rejoicing and hysteria and amputation envy.
Sometimes I turn my head too quickly and the whole room spins like a merry-go-round doing a hundred and twenty in a twenty-five zone. I put my hand on something solid to steady myself -- surely not the first person to do so at City Billiards. But it feels so great to be out among other men dumping a mug of cold beer into one’s belly. I feel like I have been restored to the realm of the living.
We play a kids' game called Cutthroat – where each of three players tries to sink the other players’ five balls. Bob and Larry are meticulously setting up one shot after another, trying to run the table on me with stealth and poise. I haven't the patience to play that way -- I never did -- so I play one hideous slap shot after another, hitting every ball with power. My point must be to convince them that there is no beating a player who has spent a month in hell, because he is a little crazy and has nothing to lose.
Sure enough, remarkably good things happen when I send the cue ball like a bullet into the crowd -- their balls drop in the pockets, and mine, with one or two exceptions, do not. The implication is clear -- God, and the laws of physics, are on my side. I don't tell them that this is how I have always played -- stupidly.
And I get my comeuppance when the cue ball flies up off the table and smacks a comely blonde in melon-colored, painted-on pants across the room in the right cheek of her bottom. Some comeuppance -- she walks lopsidedly over to our table, smirks at me, and drops the heavy ball into the soft palm of my hand.
We spend half the night delightedly doing one another in, the other half apologizing in a heartfelt fashion to the person whose balls you have rammed in, explaining how you hate to do it, but it is required of the game, and anyway, it is the way of nature.
Since we are all writers I am unable to shut up about my brain tumor book, and they feign interest. I want to try my latest thought for a title out on them. I have been turning it over and over in my mind, and I am confident this latest title captured the essence of the project.
It is the sort of title that, when you hear it, you want to cry because it so captures the emotional richness of the topic. It contains equal parts humor, impossible anguish, and the kind of intellectual rigor you associate with Dostoyevsky, or Camus, or one of those guys.
"Are you going to tell us what it is?" Bob says.
"OK,” I say, and I set my cue down to place the title officially in play. "The title I am thinking of is … " dramatic pause "… Way to Go, God.'"
Larry nearly blows his beer across the felt. The two men do a rapid double-take with one another. The first glance is to see if it's OK to laugh out loud at me. It is a poolroom, and cruelty of that sort is not unheard of in poolrooms. But the second glance -- it only lasts a fraction of a second -- is to come up with a diplomatic plan, a way to tell me the truth while being fully supportive of my efforts.
"Mike, I'm afraid no one will like that title," Larry says. "People are really funny about God. Religious people will think you’re dumping on the Almighty. They won't see it as a richly textured, highly ironic thing -- they'll just think you're trashing their guy."
Larry hands the baton to Bob. "And people who aren't religious," Bob says, " will think you're some lazy-ass guy who couldn't have something go wrong with him without dragging the cosmos into it. Everyone else," he says, sinking my fourteen ball, “will think, ‘What the fuck is that all about?’"
“It’s a good title, Mike – to lose,” Bob says, chalking his tip.
"You might want to think of it as an artist's title," Larry says. "The way Duchamps called his masterpiece 'The Large Glass.' People who get the joke aren't the problem -- it's the riffraff you have to worry about."
I want to be sure they got my intention – that a brain tumor was kind of a Whitman Sampler sent by the divinity just to mess you up, like breaking a fresh rack. And the title's sarcastic tone, in my gurgling mind, is just the way to set up the key question of the book – “What am I supposed to do with this thing?”
I spent two weeks in love with this title. It exactly describes the relationship of divinity to mensch: God as the never-visible hurler of thunderbolts; the mensch not as sarcastic but as self-interested, while trying to parse the divinity’s obscure woodwork.
But I get their point – no one will buy a book with a title like that, except weirdoes, and no publisher wants to publish a book just for weirdoes.
Tumors change your religion. You don't have the same attitude about a universe in which your body does not mutate into a malignant, self-destroying thing, and a universe in which it does. The Bible says the Lord is aware of every sparrow that topples from a twig. If so, the Lord is aware of every cell that, for whatever reason, decides to go bad, and take the entire body with it.
Presumably, there is purpose to this universe; it is hard to get religious about a universe with no sense of purpose, no meaningful story. But what is the purpose of a brain tumor -- a flaw in the body's otherwise stunning array of defenses, a flaw that is so close, so intimate, with the nearly sacred tissue of the brain?
Is the purpose personal growth? Is it a story of glory, about growing and saving oneself from death? Is it a poignant story about growing spiritually but dying physically? Is it a motivational lesson, to help us get our lives together? Or is it just a dumb story about something witless growing inside you and crowding out the good parts? Possibly it's the story of a foolish man who freaks out for no good reason. Hero, martyr, victim, clown -- different tales.
There is a clinical basis for the efficacy of prayer. It's true. Religious people swear by prayer, but those of us who doubt such things can easily explain such miracle cures: People who know that other people are praying for them have a powerful reason to get better. The knowledge that they have such fervent support helps them rally their defenses and get better. Simple.
But it's more complicated that that. Clinical studies using control groups and guarding against placebos have shown some remarkable things:
What this suggests is that the healing begins not in the patient's body, but, astonishingly, in the good wishes or positive mental attitudes, of third parties -- or possibly, but this is not proven, divine intercession.
Every day I do visualization exercises, in which I see the tumor shrinking with every suggestion. It is a war between my brain, which still controls my body, and the other thing, which has no need to do anything but grow and wreck things.
My brain, through me, is giving itself instructions: Surround the tumor. Corrode it. Destroy it. Absorb it. Shrink it.
It is a dizzying, powerful feeling. My eyes are closed, and I feel each breath swim into my skull like a gust of healing medicine, then swim out again, flushing away the bad stuff. Sometimes I feel a wave of biochemical happiness that is quite extraordinary. I want to stand up and dance. Even if I'm in, like, the Department of Motor Vehicles.
It's not as dramatic as Carrie using her brain to telekinetically wreak havoc on her senior prom. But it amounts to the same thing: mind over matter.
A profound experiment was conducted several years ago, in which electrodes placed against a user's head generated enough impulse to move a cursor on a computer screen. People were providing data input with their minds -- an in almost the same way that the PC itself works, via electrical stimulus.
If I can move a cursor with my thoughts, what else can I do?
I picture tiny nanobots, at the cellular level, or even smaller, as small as the prana of the Indian yogis, swarming over that poor tumor and chomping into it like sugarbees at a blueberry pie-eating contest.
And they aren't subtle about it. They are smacking their lips lustily, and singing ionic sea chanties!
Sounds preposterous? Yes, but there are many, many, documented cases of people using visualization techniques to successfully combat all sorts of illnesses. Miracle cures seem almost to be a matter of whether we want them or not.
I say almost because the magic doesn't always work. A woman in a new age cancer peer group swore she would "think" her uterine cancer into submission. Wanting, the harnessing of the brain to the will, was that powerful. When the cancer swamped her instead, people in the group asked her why she wanted to die.
I can't swear to you that it's working. But each time I go in for my MRI followup, I expect the worst. And each time, the image has shown no growth. The tumor, which caused me to have a powerful stroke in January 1999, is dead in the cranial water as of June 1999.
So I'm thinking of old Archimedes of Syracuse and the lever he called for that was as big as the world. All he needed was a place to stand -- a safe universe, from which to pry this one apart.
And I consider that the ultimate lever, the ultimate technology, the ultimate magick, is the crown of creation that is us. Eureka, eh?
One day, out of the blue, Rachel tells me that Catholic guilty feelings are what define me.
"They sure did a job on you," she says.
I don't defend myself -- Jesus wouldn't. I don't think there is anything necessarily wrong with being defined by guilt. In fact, I'm a little proud of at least having standards of right living to live up to. That's a measure of ambition, isn't it, of stretch?
But I defend Catholicism, which I stopped practicing at age 13. Where does Rachel get off, as a Jew, telling me that the tradition I was raised in, and which I have largely sloughed off, is neurotic? And I know thousands of Catholics, raised in the same general milieu I was raised in – but they don't not apply the same gravitas to living that my brothers and I do.
Sure, the Catholic religion contributed, because it is there for my kind of personality to seize on and mould to my purposes. But I am confident I would have been a long-sufferer even if I'd been raised Unitarian.
"Offer it up to the poor souls," is how the nuns urged us to transform pain into grace.
But it is so hard, and so treacherous. Dante wrote about the circle in hell reserved for the good who were proud. C. S. Lewis had great fun characterizing the self-consciously virtuous whose sin was second-guessing God.
Promising God you will wear beans in your shoes as a sign of your covenant with his will sounds great. But the jailhouse lawyer that resides in every soul quickly learns the beans hurt less if you soak them overnight –better yet, use canned.
So I'm in the pool hall with Bob and Larry, and we decide to step outside. I have a wonderful secret for them -- a rolled joint, given me by a friend who felt that smoking pot had to be good for a traumatized brain. My friends are in awe at the prospect. We are all sort of hip, but it is a rear-view mirror sort of hip. All the cool things we know are in the past.
We walk across the Mississippi, watching the ice jams butt up against the spillway walls. We sit in the crisp snow and light up. Instantly we are transported to that ancient sense of camaraderie we remember from the 60s and 70s. I hadn't smoked in nearly twenty years, and I don't suppose Bob or Larry had, either.
It is all still there, where we had left it. The childish excitement, the affection of sharing a secret, the delight that is inherent in everything. We watch the sparkling waters roll down the spillway for perhaps fifteen minutes, remembering special moments from the past.
Then we stand and hike over to Nye's Polonaise, a wonderful Polish bar with three stages, a piano bar, a blues band, and "the world's oldest jazz band," a quintet of players all in their 80s. The cigarette smoke, the banging of the cymbals, the buttery smell of kapusta hovering in the air. "Oh, God," I sigh, as the ancient drummer beats on her tomtom. We grin at one another and exit into the cold again, and walk to our cars.
It's one of the happiest nights of my life. Except that going home, I have to pull over and idle on the shoulder, because the pressure in my head, from the beer and the pot and the noise, feels like the Lord God is twisting a dull bread knife in my prefrontal region.
My friend Brit and I agree to have lunch at a Thai restaurant near my place. The buffet is fantastic, and the conversation better, as we take turns telling the stories of our lives. "Your father was insensitive in the '50s -- let me tell you about my insensitive father."
Since Brit's a music writer, among other things, I mention I was once backup rock critic for the Saint Paul paper, twenty some years ago. But I lost that gig one February when the Rolling Stones came to town, and my editor, Bob Protzmann, wanted me to cover a Conway Twitty/Loretta Lynn concert that night instead.
I was sure there was something that could be said about that concert, but I was just as sure I was not the one to say it.
I loved the Stones – enough that I laid down my $75 a shot job for them. Predictably, when I returned to the paper as a computer columnist 20 years later, only one person from the old regime remained in the newsroom – Protzmann.
I like jazz, and blues, and classical, and other things, too. But what grabs me in my heart is still rock and roll.
Now, this is a warm spring day, and as I slip my fleece sweater over my head in the restaurant booth, my wallet falls out of my pocket and into the next booth. When lunch is over, I am unable to write a check to pay for it. (Worse, when I call the credit card company, I learn someone in the restaurant the same time as me put a $50 Thai meal on my card.)
We walk back to my place, and I show Brit my CD and tape collection, and we quiz one another on favorite Dylan albums. He likes Bringing It All Back Home best. I can't help it, I'm a John Wesley Hardin man.
Then we ask about the Stones. Brit digs way back and comes up with December's Children (And Our Own)" circa 1964. My choice is more conventional, Beggar's Banquet. It was the record playing in my college dorm in 1968. I had it on an old cassette, but not on CD.
After Brit leaves, I go online to Amazon to linger over the Rolling Stones discography.
Toward the end of the concert back in 1977, the Stones did something wonderful. Mick had terrorized people in the front rows all through the first set with a steel bucket. Everyone assumed it was full of water, but when he finally emptied it on the people, after many false spills, it was only rose petals, fluttering onto their faces and shoulders.
For the last few numbers they turned on the house lights. Whatever mystique they had created earlier in the show, with the huge inflatable phallus and neon puckered lips-and-tongue, dissipated instantly, and they were just guys in T-shirts, blasting out "Jumping Jack Flash."
It was a democratic gesture, topped when Mick dumped the bucket on himself, and this time it was filled with water.
So I'm sitting at my computer, licking my lips at the Amazon URL for Beggar's Banquet. I want to have it now. I want to turn up the volume, close my eyes, and relive the sounds of my unscrupulous youth. Maybe, if I get a clean MRI, I can afford to buy it. Maybe I'll live to be a hundred, and have the best record collection in the home.
But I don't need it. I can play the versions I already have, the one on cassette tape, the other in my head. Because I know every twang of song by heart, from "No Expectations" to "Parachute Woman." And my favorite song of all of them, which I never questioned before, seems so right to me now:
I just want to do my jigsaw puzzle,
before it rains any more.
A month after my night out at the pool hall, she corners me in the hallway of our home.
"There's something I need to ask you," she whispers.
I am confused. She's taking a tone with me I have never noticed before. It is as if she is the parent and I am the child. She holds up a baggie with half a joint and a few crumbs of pot still in it. "I found this in your jacket pocket. Can you explain this?" she asks.
I sputter for a moment. To be caught with drugs by one's teenaged child -- I was unprepared.
"Yes," I say. "I can explain."
I explain that a friend gave me two joints after my night in the hospital, in the belief that smoking would hasten healing in my brain. I tried it exactly twice, got awful headaches, then forgot I had it.
She pondered that, and decided it was not unreasonable. "If that's all it is, I guess that's OK. But I can't have you getting high all the time. You have responsibilities, and if you got caught you'd go to jail."
Daniele is not a prude. She hangs around with people who smoke and do worse. Now she's asking me if she can trust me that this is all there is to it.
"You can trust me," I say to her, all contrition.
"OK then," she says. "We won't mention it again."
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