Review by Lynda La Rocca
Life and Death – August 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Living, Loving, and Other Heresies
by Zsolt
Published in 2003 by Conundrum Press
ISBN 0-9713678-1-7
THIS IS BY FAR the most difficult book I’ve ever attempted to review. It’s also one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read. I don’t mean that in a negative way. Far from it. It’s just that Living, Loving, and Other Heresies seared my soul and I’m still smarting from the wound. Yet in an odd way, I’m also grateful for its scar.
This is a fierce book, full and fervent, exploding with a passion that’s almost overwhelming in its intensity. Its words forced me to confront parts of myself that frighten me, aspects of my humanity that I need to make friends with if I ever hope to take more than a few, faltering steps on the path to understanding, acceptance, and wisdom.
Zsolt, who goes by this single name, is a 45-year-old musician, dancer, teacher, poet, and writer coping with a debilitating and progressive neurological disease. This condition, which has never been clearly diagnosed, has steadily robbed Zsolt of the use of his body in irrevocable, and often terrifying, increments. First it took his legs, then his ability to speak. It twists his limbs with wrenching seizures and freezes his hands into curled claws increasingly incapable of using the technology that enabled him to laboriously produce this 240-page book by tapping one finger on a keyboard. It even affects his ability to breathe.
(According to Cath Sherrer of Crested Butte-based Conundrum Press, at present, some seven years since the onset of this disease, Zsolt’s muscles have almost completely failed him. Yet his mind is as keen and sharp as ever, and his spirit burns as brightly.)
LIVING, LOVING, AND OTHER HERESIES was culled from a series of e-mail letters, which the author calls “Zsoltgossips,” written from October 1999 through September 2003. Each “chapter” is actually an essay or a finely wrought poem originally transmitted en masse to Zsolt’s myriad correspondents when the effects of his condition made it impossible for him to maintain individual, in-depth correspondence.
I have to admit that, when I began reading, I felt frustrated because it seemed that these missives were written to members of a select club to which I’d been denied membership. They assumed a great deal of knowledge, past and present, about the author. Yet I was reading as a stranger who craved a biography of sorts or at least a more linear explanation of who Zsolt was, where he’d been, and why.
But around page 40, I suddenly realized that Zsolt had begun to charm me. Maybe it was his recounting of his first trip down a water slide or his description of Harriet the tarantula, who doggedly accompanies the then-ambulatory Zsolt on his slow shuffle to the outhouse behind his New Mexico home, a walk he persisted in taking despite having indoor plumbing because it was something his body would still allow him to do. His descriptions of the black widow spiders inhabiting the outhouse and the wildlife and landscapes he sees while standing on his own legs (albeit assisted by a walker) are delightful–and poignant.
Later, when he has become virtually wheelchair- bound, Zsolt learns to ski in an adaptive ski program and skydives strapped to a jump buddy. But he doesn’t do either as a way to somehow fill in life’s gaps; rather, he pursues these to realize “the amazing potential of what can be accomplished without full use of one’s legs,” to feel the exhilaration and freedom of flying down a snowy slope or floating in the sky. He does them because he’s been offered the opportunity to do them, and he’s eager to see how his changed body and restless spirit will respond.
That the man is a voracious reader is evident from his frequent references to a wide-ranging mix of ancient and contemporary philosophers, poets, novelists, composers, artists, and religious thinkers. And can he ever wax eloquent about music–and the pleasure he takes in playing it, listening to it, and (when he still could) dancing to it.
Sandwiched within and between sections on etiquette for interacting with the wheelchair-bound, water therapy, the satisfactions and sorrows of first being a caregiver and now needing a group of caregivers (The Z Team, to whom the book is dedicated), what our hands reveal about us, the killing of pesky houseflies, traveling in Europe and South America, the components of charm, and his abiding love for pearl necklaces, Zsolt slips in observations of stunning intensity.
Here he ruminates on a “Do-and-Don’t” list for a person in his “current state of being” that ends up as only a “Do” list:
” … taste the oily, salty, bitter olive
with the tongue’s edge,
recognizing in its flesh
the beginning,
the end,
and every sorrow
woven into the rapture
of being.”
Later, he tackles our penchant for accepting the opinions and judgments of those to whom we give power:
“I find it fascinating how we will readily listen to all manner of artificially selected authorities–doctors, newscasters, and politicians, among others–yet we will deny our own deepest sense of Self, of Truth, of our own relationship with the mysterious spark of life within.”
THEN, WITH GUT-WRENCHING CLARITY, Zsolt looks at death:
“Who among us is prepared to accept his or her final moment, to accept even the fleeting and final moment now flowing across our flesh?
“Who among us is prepared to accept that there shall ever be a last breath, that at some moment, whether today or a lifetime away, there shall not be another inhalation, though they who bear witness to our deaths shall afterwards take a deep breath, rise from the bedside and step into the moonlight, the sunshine, the earth luxuriant with life?
“And is any one of us prepared to acknowledge that we have done with our lives what we did–no more and no less?”
Despite the preceding passage, this is not a book about death. It is, rather, an affirmation of life, a life joyously, hungrily, and rapturously lived.
And Zsolt’s are not the musings of a disembodied voice. It’s impossible to distance oneself from this extraordinary person, impossible to say that his journey is not ours, too. Ultimately, Zsolt reminds us that everyone follows the same path. All he asks is that we embrace and help and love each other along the way. Because nothing in this life is more important.
–Lynda La Rocca