Field of Dreams

Richard
Field of Dreams
Starbucks, June 26, 2007

I am a man who thinks he can be deported for jaywalking, although really I'd like to rob a bank. It makes compliance a difficult thing.

I am a man who has not wanted to think that diabetes controls his life, has not wanted to think he has been controlled by anything, has not wanted to think. I mean about myself. I'm English, you know. Although I’m not claiming it’s a national charactertistic. The English are a diversified people with introspective types strewn about. It's just that I've found more interesting subjects to occupy my thoughts than me. Generally speaking. But when I consider the concept of compliance, I find it strangely encompasses my life.

Diabetes, like the British class system, is all about compliance. Stay in line and fulfill your role, and you don't upset the cart. Gum up the works? Arouse the sleeping lion? What image applies, class being such a shape shifting thing, or is it a mental state? Diabetes is about balance and avoiding extremes. Blood sugar too high and you're into hyper-glycemia, which after many hours makes you feel nauseous and drugged. You smell of acetone. If you don't bring your blood sugar down, it could lead to coma and death. Blood sugar too low and you're into hypo-glycemia. Your mental processes slow down and you start to sweat. You get disoriented, and you might want to fight anyone who tries to help you. If you don't bring your blood sugar up, it could lead to coma and death. Hence the vigil of staying on the path, taking the injection, balancing out food and exercise.

On the way to low-sugar death, though, the altered states have something to be said for them, rather a lot, actually, in that they are tantalizing little mind treks. Can you walk the tightrope? Why would you even want to try?

I once watched Field of Dreams on TV when I was alone. As my blood sugar drifted down, the movie became more and more profound. I looked up from the screen and saw the living room through a fish-eye lens. The bookcase was swaying, the arm chair mumbling quietly to itself. I looked at the backs of my hands, which were attached to extremely long, rubbery strips. The hairs on my hands, light brown and silky, were beautiful and mysteriously meaningful. A drop of sweat ran down my forehead, splashed on my thigh, and rippled like a water drop on the surface of a pool. And I thought—very slowly and with a self-satisfied smile that signaled danger—I thought, I'm having a really low blood sugar.

I found myself in front of the refrigerator with the door open, letting the cold air move across me. I was slick with sweat, just sweating all over. I couldn't remember what I was supposed to eat, so I bit off some cheese (bad idea, since it has no effect on blood sugar), and I drank some orange juice (good idea, you can easily see why) directly from the container. Ten minutes later, I felt normal again, and I went back to watching Kevin Costner meet his dead father in a cornfield. Costner had lost his profundity and seemed wooden. James Earl Jones was over-the-top ecstatic at coming across dead baseball players, and I felt a bit wooden myself, ejected from my field of dreams.

I realize that under normal blood sugars, big Hollywood, metaphysical films don't have the same captivating effect. Take Ghost with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze, where Demi is in love with her recently deceased boyfriend who can't find his way to the white light of whatever without help from Whoopi Goldberg. Most of the time this is not my idea of a plausible life or afterlife, but when I have a really low sugar, I'm a believer. As Max Weber famously put it, some people are religiously musical. I'm not, but when my blood sugars hit the forties I find it conceivable that a ghostly Patrick Swayze can occupy the body of Whoopi Goldberg with little more than a shudder of breeze blowing around her big hair. In these states, a sense of the spurious cosmic grips me, and I feel encouraged by the notion of shafts of white light, as if they were a vacation destination. Most of the cosmic consciousness I've read about strikes me as a brain state that can be explained by a self-induced hypo.

In one rather precarious low sugar, while my wife Suzanne was handing me a glass of orange juice and waiting for my jumbled speech to mean something, I was convinced that time was running backwards. I could swear that everything had already taken place, a sustained sense of deja-vu. I kept saying, “I've already drunk the O.J.” and “How come time is going in reverse?" If you've seen the film Memento you'll remember the main character goes around without any operating memory and has to piece together what’s happened to him from notes he leaves on his body. As he constructs and reconstructs this knowledge, the story is revealed to him (and us) in reverse. My experience felt like this, and the odd sense that it engendered—you feel smugly ahead of the game, hence the oily smile—stayed with me for days.

I understand that these moments are tricks of the blood sugar, but I see them as special mental abilities, regardless of how they're generated. I'm not saying that time was really running backwards, rather that I enjoyed the sights and sounds as you might a journey to the Arctic or the Amazon, even though you would not always want to live in these extremes. How many Richards am I? In the rhythm of sudden sickness and rapid recovery, I experience little deaths and rebirths many times, even in one day. The return to a sense of self not shaken in the fist of either a high or low sugar is sweet in the same measure as altered states are illuminating. I feel hopeful as I reassemble the fractured parts of me, languid on a couch, the littlest hairs on my body feeling air moving across them. I am small and excited, ready to evade repetition, folly though that yearning might be.