The Great Gig in the Sky
By: Joel Peckham, Jr.
Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it—Elaine Scarry
Once I read about a boy from Northern Pakistan who didn’t experience pain. He’d entertain a crowd, amazed and laughing, by walking across a smoking pit of coals, stabbing himself with knives, jumping from the roofs of buildings. Everyone loves a spectacle, a miracle. Everyone wants to believe in what they could do (and be) if only there was no pain to keep us locked in time and the body’s rhythm, reminding us of what it means to be human. To be inured to injury is to be dangerous (to yourself, mostly), to mask it, out of it, completely—like my father in the last days, his stomach muscles undulant in the semi-dark of the accent care facility, mouth agape and riding an opiate wave-like signal beyond the reach of gravity. Drifting. I know a little of drifting, those two years after the accident I spent hooked on Trams and Oxy (safe for longterm use) and plenty of bourbon. I even remember some of it. The brochures from the clinic, primary colored and slick with bright and shiny faces who looked out at the future as if they were all headed to the same bright and shiny places. Hawaii maybe. Or somewhere in the Keyes. Families intact, in tow. No dark circles under the eyes, no fear, no vacancy. Even the kids were happy. Sometimes I miss that feeling of floating away as people pointed and shouted from the beach. What are they saying? Doesn’t matter. How it all got soft at the edges. The past a distant thing. The future? My four-year-old on the couch watching Spongebob in Spongebob pajamas, a bowl of honey nut cheerios on his lap, hands and face sticky as I slipped along the edges of a Saturday? a Sunday? I miss the not remembering--that interruption of the signal between me and what was hurting me, which was me, which was everything between what my body was saying and what it might mean. Just breathe. You can stand anything if you just take it, one minute at a time, my father said. I was eleven and he was counseling me through the purple throb of my left thumb which may or may not have been broken. He wrapped it with a piece of green foam and half a roll of athletic tape, and I played anyway, learning to snap the football lefty so I wouldn’t miss the game. I think of all those times I’d thrust a hand or foot into a bowl of water filled with ice or pack a freezer bag around a knee and grit my teeth, forehead sweating. Twenty minutes on Twenty minutes off. Until the numbing settled in. I learned the art of patience as an act of will and time. Sometimes I’d hum or even sing my way through the minutes, knowing exactly the length of each melody. I know a bit about pain and music too and the fine line between singing and screaming. But what do you do when there’s no song long enough and the rhythm is always the same slow beat or worse becomes erratic, irregular, maddening, a sky fractured with lightning. When you’re afraid of standing or sitting or lying down. Or just moving. What do you do when you can’t sleep? There are so many ways we hurt ourselves, trying not to hurt. As for me, the pain receded, retreated to a constant low-grade burning I could almost reason with. Quit the pills. Smoked a lot of weed. Still do. And most nights I can sleep. People want to know how I beat it—as if you ever do. They talk about their boy in rehab or how grandpa used to be so good with the kids. How their mom loved to cook. “Now she just sits in her recliner, sweating and the house smells like piss.” Drifting. Me, I’m just lucky to feel anything. To still be singing. Even if the song is often painful to hear and strains my throat. Even though I sometimes forget the words. On the Dark Side of the Moon there is a song, a wordless wail. Orgasm and agony, an improvised melody, floating far above a few spare chords. They only paid the singer 30 pounds for studio work. Her name was Clare Torry. Sometimes when my back hurts, or my head, or my hip. When I have to stop in the middle of a jog or sex or when it takes ten minutes just to get out of bed that song comes to me and maybe I think of that kid and how many times he must have burned his fingers and his lips, how many bones he had to crack before he learned to be careful. If he ever did. I imagine him on his last day, 14 and standing on the edge of a rooftop with a crowd of boys beneath him, daring him to leap. It is awful how much we hurt ourselves trying to feel. And I hear that singer’s wail—voice raised and rising always on the edge of fracture desperate with its need to stand it, sure. Take it. Yes. But not just that. Reverse the fall, turn the drift into an arrow shot high into the dark. Enraptured in its making, in what a song can do.
Joel Peckham, Jr. has published 9 collections of poetry, three collections of essays, and has been published in in The Southern Review, The Sun, Brevity, and the Black Warrior Review. His most recent books are Any Moonwalker Can Tell You: New and Selected Poems (SFAUP), Gone the Sun: A Memoir in Segments (UnCollected Press), and the spoken word LP, Still Running (Eat Poems).