The Knee as Metaphor

Doctor examining a kneeSometimes life imitates art to a great extent.  So I had been dipping into a book titled Out of Sheer Rage:  Wrestling wth D. H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer, which not so much about D. H. Lawrence as it is about depression, despair and procrastination. And it’s absolutely screamingly funny in places. (In other places just kind of weird, or vulgar, or boring, so I’m not recommending it as a book of the week.)  Doesn’t sound possible, does it?  But comics are usually very unhappy people.  Dyer’s description of the time he was flown all the way to Denmark to give a talk about Lawrence, and he came down with the flu, and he hadn’t prepared his speech at all, and his nose started bleeding in the middle of the lecture, had me snorting with laughter. But the passage that struck me most was this:

I have waited three years to get my knees repaired . . . and I am not doing the exercises, the simple, strength-building exercises which are necessary to prevent my knee causing me untold and probably intolerable pain in the future . . . In a fraction of the time spent sitting here thinking about my knee and how much it hurts I could get on with the exercises which would eliminate the pain in my knee, . . . but instead of doing the exercises I sit here thinking about how I should be doing them    . . . My knee is not the problem, that’s for sure: it’s a symptom of this larger disease, this inability to carry on with anything, this rheumatism of the will, this chronic inability to see anything through.
(p. 196, 1997 hardback edition).

Now, depending on what type of person you are, you may read the above and say to yourself, ‘Hey, Buddy, get a grip!’  But I have to say that I completely understand what he’s saying.  To sit and look at something that needs to be done and to feel totally paralyzed–that’s the way I can be, like, totally.  But I would also say that with the greater self-knowledge that has come over the past several years as I’ve dove (dived?) into this whole subject of happiness, I now know that I can overcome that paralysis.  It’s a surprisingly small step to just go ahead and get started.  Just go ahead and lie on the floor, for instance, if that’s the position for the exercises.  You’re not going to lie there and then just get back up again without doing anything, are you?  Probably not.

In the knee-themed spirit of this post, I will mention that my husband Jim had knee surgery yesterday.  It was interesting–he’d been told by one guy that he didn’t really need the surgery all that much, and maybe it wasn’t worth the recovery time.  I thought myself that maybe he shouldn’t bother with it.  But he forged ahead, got a second opinion, and, it turned out, made the right decision.  The second-opinion surgeon (SOS) said that the ACL, which was what needed repair, was “incompetent.” (Kind of sounds like an insult, doesn’t it?)  The knee was loose.  It really needed to be fixed.  So now Jim’s hobbling around on crutches, and the Christmas lights are only half up, and this wasn’t a great week for him to have this done, but hey!  He went ahead and did it.  He still has physical therapy ahead of him, and followup doctor’s visits, and pain meds.  But he took the initiative and did the right thing.  Maybe he and good ol’ Geoff Dyer could have coffee sometime.

2 thoughts on “The Knee as Metaphor”

  1. Funny! I can relate, too. As I thought about the scene of someone getting on the floor and doing nothing, it brought to mind an ad where the guy gets on the floor and does one push up and is completely satisfied with himself! Sometimes that’s me’. Well I did something!

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