Down to the Bone
Doing some landscaping with an electric Bushwacker, clearing out a briar patch in the garden, moving too fast. Blades just kissed the fleshy pads of two fingers. Middle finger cut down to the bone. Ring finger no so bad. Time slows. I can admire the clean triangular geometry of each wound. The brain perceives the damage done to the flesh. Then just closes the door. Goes upstairs and stands on the balcony overlooking the pain. Pain claws at the door like a cat on fire. Brain calls down from above: I know that's got to hurt, but you are not getting in.
I go inside the house to wash out the blood, see how bad it is. Still no real pain. I figure that I must have a little shock reaction going on. The family advises a trip to the hospital. Down the road into the fluorescent institutional miasma. They stick me in a small room in triage. Sit for a while. I flash to the last time I was in a hospital, about nine months back, sociopathic, suicidal, paranoid, hallucinating helicopters and hell on drugs. I study the small wounds in my flesh. I can pull back a big chunk of flesh on my finger to see down to the bone. The pain is there. But it is out there. Not in my head. It seems rather easy to separate myself from it.
A doctor comes in, washes it out with iodine. Tells me I need stitches. I tell him I don't want any. He looks at me. Shrugs. Says he might be able to glue them shut. He gets the shallow cut glued back but the deeper one is bleeding too much. Outside, we hear that a four month old child with cardiac arrest is being brought in. The doctor tells me to wait. Walks out. I wait about 15 minutes and walk out. They have more important issues to take care of than my cut fingers.
It has been just over 90 days since I have last used drugs. I remember it all like yesterday. I imagine that there are physical scars or lesions in my brain as a result. But more, I know without doubt that there are scars upon my soul. Every time I loaded up a rock into the stem, those blades were cutting into my soul. I can see now that I wanted that spiritual pain. I wanted to fall all the way down to the bottom of the of the world. To a place where I could be lost amongst the lost, where nothing was expected of me, where no one knew my name, or face, or spoke any language that I could understand. I wanted to cut myself down to degree zero. I wanted to know and to burn within the lowest circles of Hell.
And I did.
In the Divine Comedy, Dante tries at the beginning to take the way up. His path is progressively barred by three allegorical animals: a leopard, symbolizing sins of malice and fraud; a lion, symbolizing sins of violence and ambition, and a she-wolf, symbolizing sins of incontinence such as lust and adultery. So he must go down, take another path - "a te convien tenere altro viaggio" - through the Gates of Hell, abandoning all hope, down to the darkest pits of sin, before he can hope to ascend again. The path, as always, leading from the Dark Wood to the White Rose.
A new life! That was what he wanted. That was what he was waiting for. Surely he had begun it already. He had spared one innocent thing, at any rate. He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.
As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in the locked room had changed. Surely it was not still so horrible as it had been? Perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel every sign of evil passion from the face. Perhaps the signs of evil had already gone away. He would go and look.
He took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs. As he unbarred the door, a smile of joy flitted across his strangely young-looking face and lingered for a moment about his lips. Yes, he would be good, and the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror to him. He felt as if the load had been lifted from him already.
He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome--more loathsome, if possible, than before--and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilled. Then he trembled. Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? Or the desire for a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these? And why was the red stain larger than it had been? It seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers. There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped--blood even on the hand that had not held the knife. Confess? Did it mean that he was to confess? To give himself up and be put to death? He laughed. He felt that the idea was monstrous. Besides, even if he did confess, who would believe him? There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to him had been destroyed. He himself had burned what had been below-stairs. The world would simply say that he was mad. They would shut him up if he persisted in his story.... Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. His sin? He shrugged his shoulders. The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him. He was thinking of Hetty Merton. For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been something more. At least he thought so. But who could tell? ... No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity's sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now. - The Picture of Dorian Gray