Above is the hospital ID bracelet I had on when I had my surgery to repair my shoulder which was broken in four places after a fall in Paris down some steep metro stairs on my way to Orly Airport after enjoying two months here during my first year of living life as a spiritual and cultural pilgrim. I was in more than a bit of shock at first - my head bloodied, my right knee somehow not broken but severely torn open from the tumble, my shoulder shoving shovelfuls of pain through my body - and spent the night in the emergency room where an ambulance had taken me and where I got an MRI and x-rays and had the somehow-not-broken knee sutured up. I decided to head back to America to have the complicated shoulder surgery I needed after being told I couldn’t leave until the French surgeon arrived. He got out of bed to see me and arrived at the emergency room around 6 a.m. That was almost as much of a shock as my fall had been. After consulting with him and my medical team family on a conference call with him - my brother who is an OB-GYN, my sister who had been a nurse, and a nephew who is an orthopedic surgeon and was in the midst of completing a surgical fellowship in Albuquerque - I decided to fly home to America to have my surgery in Santa Fe where I was headed next on my pilgrimage after a week in New York. My nephew’s attending physician had gone to medical school at Duke with a surgeon whom he considered the best “shoulder guy” in America who had moved back home to Santa Fe to practice medicine. He arranged for me to see him upon my arrival in Santa Fe and the surgery was scheduled - 2 1/2 weeks post-fall - after a few complications that stalled it but even more interventionist grace that moved aside the barricades that bureaucracies frustratingly exist to fabricate.
When I first began this pilgrimage I was asked what would happen if I got sick during my long stays in foreign countries or, God forbid, I had a really bad accident and needed surgery. Well, God - in whatever form that human concept takes - had not forbidden it. In fact, I have come to believe that it was God’s gift. I have long been spiritually and narratively connected to “the fall” that we humans experience in our humanness. It is, I believe, the essence of what it means to be human. But I don’t consider the fall to be what one has from grace, but into it. As I lay in that emergency room that night I tried to find the narrative thread and the spiritual thrust that landed me with such precision in such a predicament. I had started this pilgrimage living for four months previously in London and the accident in the metro had happened in my last few seconds in Paris after being here for two months. There was an exactness about the timing that was making me look even more deeply into the concept of time itself as narratively and spiritually simultaneous and not linear. I think the fall was always happening and I just had to arrive at that precise poetic moment to complete it.
I had already begun writing about what had happened in a more prosaic way and photographing it all and posting about it on social media as I was lying in the ambulance even before I was deposited at the emergency room because reportage has always been a way for me to repair the narrative thread of trauma that has long been sewn into my life, embedded in me really, since my siblings and I were orphaned as children. I went into survival mode that night a year ago. I wrote. I observed. I sunk into my separateness from my own life. By thinking of ways to describe the immense pain I was in - I had refused the morphine drip offered me because I live a life based on the tenets of recovery - I was not alleviating the pain but aligning myself with it and making it a part of my story. By turning it into an artful construct I was imbuing it with artifice and in some alchemic way that no drug nor medical or surgical procedure could remedy with such alacrity remade it into a motif and lessened it by heightening it. I sit here this morning with ten titanium pins and a plate in my ever-healing shoulder doing the same thing in this column as I spiritually and narratively ever-heal.
I have come to look on my broken shoulder as one of the biggest blessings in my life. Its having deepened my belief in the simultaneity of time is also based on a spiritual realization - I am convinced of it - that I was falling down those metro steps the first day I walked into a room where recovery from addiction is based on spiritual precepts. I could not have gotten through this last year without them. As I lay in that ambulance and emergency room, I was reporting on it and documenting it to calm as well the panic that I was feeling about how I was going to get through it all - the surgery, the pain, the structured homelessness of a pilgrim’s life, the expense, the impending guilt that was already surfacing of having to rely on friends and family in a way that my solitary existence and stubborn self-reliance had always solved and salved for me. And then it came to me with an overwhelming sense of calm: I knew how to get through it because I was already living the solution. I would wake up every day and surrender. I would do what I was told. I would do the work. And I’d get through one day only. I sit here a year later on a mountain of one-days-at-a-time. I didn’t climb it. I’m just here. There has been a here-ness to all this that got me from there to here this morning. I have always each day been here.
I have also always been fascinated with myself and my life’s narrative from being that poor little southern gay boy aborning growing up out in the country in Mississippi where I was raised by my grandparents after the consecutive deaths of my father and mother in 1963 and 1964 to my moving to New York at 19 to attend Juilliard’s Drama Division to be an actor to becoming more professionally a writer (I’d always written) by working at Andy Warhol’s Interview and then at Vanity Fair and myriad other magazines. I had for a time a pretty big life lived just outside the frame of fame - even serving to frame it myself. I’ve written two bestselling memoirs, Mississippi Sissy and I Left It on the Mountain, and post so much on social media because I see that as writing a meta-memoir in real time. Many of these columns are part of writing such a meta one. I even have often described this pilgrimage I am on as my belief that “I have one more chapter left in me.” But I have never really liked myself. Never. My addiction and the destructive behavior involved were ways of active dislike, even a kind of disgust at who I believed myself to be: an imposter who would always be a poverty-stricken orphan, a ridiculed sissy at recess, one whose perversions were not just sexual but societal, an outsider who found a way to navigate the world of insiders by staying outside of myself. But for the first time in my life, I actually like myself. I like the person who got through all this the last year. This brokenness. This pain. This further need for healing. I tell friends I’ve discovered that “I’m a tough old coot.” But it’s more than that. I fell into grace and found down deeper into it the grit it takes to grind it into being. I found the grit in gratitude. And I found as well a way to accept kindness more readily into my life by not being a receptacle for it but a conduit though which it could pass and travel onward toward others by my own acts of kindness. Kindness passing through me - visualizing that - was even in some way a physical way to heal myself, not just a spiritual one.
When it first happened, I sensed my brother and sister wanted me to stop this life I am now living, come home to Mississippi, have the surgery there, and reassess yet again how I am living a life that is so different from theirs. But I knew that all pilgrimages have a crucible at some point and mine had just come early with the fall and my brokenness and the pain and the healing I would have to endure. I knew I had to fold it all into the pilgrimage and define it more in spiritual terms than in physical ones and, in doing that, the former would enable me to get through the latter. I am blessed that my brother and sister and their yet again called upon patience concerning having such a person as a big brother in their lives allowed me the space to move forward in the way I felt I was being spiritually called to do so. Their presence in my life continues to be a part of the grace I experience daily even if I still have some guilt that I am not that kind of presence in theirs. I’m the one-off, the one who has to be worried about, but not the prodigal for my story of redemption is not about returning but refiguring, renewal, reviving, realizations, rallying, and religiously rejecting religion for the spiritual and experiential, each fully lived day a rebirth. Narrative is my nativity.
Once I cut the bracelet in the photograph above off my wrist after my surgery, I decided to keep it as a talisman of all I went through this past year. I now take it out and place it on my desk wherever I am in this pilgrim’s life I now lead. It has its place now among other objects that give me a sense of home - and self - since a continuing deeper sense of self is now the only home I have left. The above photo captures where it presently lies atop a glass-top desk in my little garret here in Paris where I am again. It lies here next to me where I type this column - this sentence - below a reflection of the Parisian sky seen from the window. There is something hopeful to me about it lying beneath both the sky itself and the reflective version since going through the experience of the fall, the break, the surgery, the rehab, the healing, the ever-onward-ness has been both so very real but also a period of such profound reflection. It has been both the sky - as big and real as that - and the way it is perceived - which is even spiritually bigger.
Arthur Miller went through a period of profound reflection after the death of Marilyn Monroe to whom he was married in many ways just outside the frame of fame. He then chose to frame his grief and anger and love and regret the only way he knew how by writing about it. The play was titled After the Fall. It was directed by Elia Kazan and opened in 1964, the first production of the newly formed Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center. It starred Jason Robards, Jr., and Barbara Loden, who married Kazan three years later. In his review of the play, The New York Times theatre critic, Howard Taubman, referenced both pilgrimages and the simultaneity of time. He wrote:
“Like all writers who matter and who inevitably write about what they have felt, sensed, and learned, Mr. Miller is probing into his own life and those near and dear to him and seeking answers to the eternal riddles that confront human beings on this earth.
“What is love? What are its limits? Is there any difference in those limits in proportion to the nature of the beloved? Does anyone, however hard he tries to save those he loves. do more than mourn their loss and secretly rejoice at one's own survival? If living itself is filled with peril, should one go on?
“After three hours of turning and searching, After the Fall offers a firm, though quiet yes to the last question. For Quentin, the protagonist, is on a pilgrimage for self‐knowledge as he harrowingly reviews his past and fearfully contemplates a future. He is not simply the mouthpiece of an author wishing to shrive himself of what is gone and dead. He represents any and all courageous enough to hunt for order in the painful and joyous chaos of living.
“Quentin's pilgrimage traverses his mind filled with its mingling of thoughts and events. Like the simple set of many levels on the outthrust stage in the amphitheater of classic design, Quentin's quest covers terraces of memory. Time seems vagrant, like the mind itself. Scenes from childhood, first marriage, second marriage, new love, work and play years apart flow and ebb like overlappinng waves.”
Miller himself wrote in After the Fall:
“I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible … but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one’s life in one’s arms.”
Back to Taubman:
“The new play, though unsparing in its search for one man's truth, also ends on a note of hope.”
I would like to end on such a note myself today one year after the fall. I have finally at 68 taken my life in my arms now capable of holding it. Having healed, there is healing in that.
This morning I woke and whispered this to whomever it is who hears such whispers: “Thank you for my broken shoulder. Thank you for this year.”
Onward …
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This morning before writing this column I put these words into a Google search: “French artist falling.” I was looking for a visual image to use perhaps with the column but instead this video came up of artist Yoann Bourgeois. It gave me chills and made me tear up. Just as Taubman above writing about After the Fall and using the word “pilgrimage” to describe it made me gasp, this video turned the gasping into a grateful sigh. It really is one of the most beautiful works of art I have witnessed. It certainly resonated with me as I started this morning watching it on this one year anniversary of my having fallen and thus surrendering to that which helped me get back up, the centrifugal force of surrender itself. I leave you with this.
“I found the grit in gratitude” and the exhilaration of self-love - so thrilled for you
Falling into grace. I like that.