Remembrance of Words Past

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

WELL another day, another nap. I seem to be sleeping my life away. Productivity, in any real sense of the word, has gone away. But at least, for a while, I spent a somewhat productive few hours reading. Got some exercise in also. Half-an-hour of walking. But my life seems to be a torment of low energy or only median energy. Real life has descended into a dream-state. I'm fully awake, but life is just a series of images, some more meaningful than others. A hand has descended into the labyrinth of my mind, pulling at neuron and synapse with the grip of fatigue and boredom.


This hand is the dream. The dream of illness on our shoulder. The dream of survival. The dream of dying. Like Dali's Dream places a Hand of Man's Shoulder(1936). The world of dream and 'reality' become blurred. The wall becomes cracked, plaster crumbling beneath the heat of illness. The world becomes a dream, casting red shadows onto a dry land where the arid hopes come to rest until our fate is decided. Our faces, like those of the painting, become obscured. Only the visions of day and the dream of night become reality. We are lost in a world where hope is merely hope for survival all other hope is subsumed, because all hope lays in the future, and that is uncertain - even in the short term. The dry wind of illness blows over us, and we smile and weep at the same time.

Our shadows are cast in the dry land where the yellow light casts shadows of blood over our realities. Both those of waking and those of sleep. The yellow light dry and monotonous as a life of pain. The yellow light that obscures the water shining in the morning. The yellow fogs that are dry as rice paper. We hate this light, for it is hot, arid and dry, and seems to suck the energy from our bodies. It becomes ordinary. And this is the saddest part, living our yellow-tinged lives, we find it hard to see through the mists and remember the clarity of health. The only thing to do is fight. "I challenge the stale yellow light to a duel," writes Jeanette Winterson (1996, p. 63). We fight as adverseries, those who are mutually insulted. Those whose honour is at stake. The honour of living and enjoying this planet. It is a daily fight. No intermission, no referees, no rules. Just a bloody fight fought in the yellow light of pain and fatigue.

The line of sleep and wake blurred, where are we? In the world of instinct, of magic, of illness, and hoped-for survival. Our lives are mired in survival. Our lives are blood-ridden and pain-soaked, but we hope. We dream. We wake. Even if we can't tell the difference. In the land of instinct only the lifting of lids tell us we wake. "And," Writes John Keats, "he's awake who thinks himself asleep." (Keats 1818). Life becomes a dream, where everything sems unreal, yet too real. meaningless but cherished. Everything fits into its opposite. Symmetry is never as common as when we are sick. Our eyes open and yet we dream our days. The illness that eats away at us both awakens and makes drowsy. We awake to mortality and sleep away our lives.

But the strange thing is that we come, in some ways, to embrace our illnesses. It is our constant companion. And like a lover, its spurning tears a hole in us, for we fear its return and loathe its leaving, for it may return. Auguste Klimt shows us in our embrace. The woman almost asleep beneath the faceless man. We are in its embrace and should he leave we awake in confusion, the complex colours and shades of our blanket strewn about our naked bodies. The blanket comforts us and is where we are wrapt together. Hoping. Dreaming. Loving. Hating. All of these things. Its complexity, is the complexity of any relationship and particulaly the relationship of oneself to one's body. And like the lamb in Rilke's Sonnets, the noise is all we have. The noise of our thoughts and fears.

"to us only noise is offered.

And out of a more quiet instinct

The lamb begs for its bell."

We, as we grow healthy, beg for the bell. The noise of crisis versus the silence of health. It is an addiction, cancer. For it involves survival and fear and love and hate and sorrow. All we are is rolled into a mass of poisoned cells. "My spectre," writes William Blake, "around me night & day/Like a wild beast guards my way." even death and fear of death and suffering can be ordinary and so the spectre and its wild beast of ill-health guard our passages. And we fear its leaving. We do not know how to be alone. Without disease.

This may seem morbid, but it is true. We fear health as we fear loneliness, because they show us our independence as well as our strength. We want to be children. But are afraid of our vulnerability. We remember the pain and the anguish and the embrace of the illness and the fight. If it leaves it may return. Worse. We acknowledge what we know. We embrace it. For all else is shadowed in fear.

References:

Blake, William. "The Little Girl Found" in Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Keats, John. "What the Thrush said..." 1818.

Rilke, Rainer M. Sonnets to Orpheus Second Series XVI. Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. Translated by A. Paulin, Jr. Houghton-Mifflin Co. Boston. 1977.

Winterson, Jeanette. Art and Lies. Vintage Books, New York. 1996.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006


Testing yourself

We test ourselves everyday, but the sick test their wills and their bodies everyday. As we are tested by them. We do not what the day will bring, what new pains, or old sorrows will re-emerge from livers or brains, arms or legs. We do not know where we will be at the end of the day. We know only that the struggle is there before us, as the sunrise is. It can be met with drawn shades or its light on our faces, it is up to us. The last scene of DH Lawrence's Sons and Lovers has Paul Morel staring at the dark of the night and into the lights of the city. He chooses light and walks back to the city. We choose our paths, though not always well, and some of them are chosen for us, and we must survive their passages and struggle the rocky slopes and muddy depths that they offer to us. We may emerge at a road of our choosing afterwards. Roads offer both choices and destinies.

Cancer is a destiny, though not in a good way. The gravel and stone that cut our feet along that path, offer us their scars after. We may accept their offerings as we choose. We may choose to never look at our soles again, to turn away from the bright scars, and toss aside the memories of trodden paths. We may also learn to admire our scars as we sit on the edges of our beds in the evening, not worrying, as we once did, what pains the next day will bring. Hrothgar, in the great epic Beowulf tells the hero, "If you emerge alive from this undertaking you will want for nothing." (Beowulf, p. 42) We may emerge alive, we may not. We forget the pain, but remember the scars. We cannot choose this destiny, only stare at the path ahead and tread the stones, hoping the cuts will not pain us too much.

We test ourselves with our lives. At sunrise we yawn and wonder what will hurt today, and maybe even hoping that today will be pain-free. Cancer is life magnified, cells that give life slowly taking it away.

Well the test continues. We write this test with blood and tears in pens made with our marrow. Hopefully we will pass. Hopefully, tomorrow will bring summer vacations with friends on beaches. Until then we write our illness in our memories and with our pain in diaries of perhaps shortened lives, closing the covers until tomorrow.

References:

The photo here can be found at www.ippp.dur.ac.uk

Beowulf translated by David Wright. Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth. 1960.

Monday, June 26, 2006

For a jaundiced view of modern, ideological religion try this site: The Libertarian Defender. A bit too atheistic, but still good.



Leisure is not all its cut out to be

I have become increasingly disinterested in leisure. When I wasn't sick, leisure was something to which I looked forward. Now it is a nuisance, another symptom, something I need, but something that isn't wanted. Fatigue gives me leisure. Chemo gives me a break from responsibility. So even leisure is eaten away by tumours. When you work, you work forty hours, more or less, cancer is full-time, day-time/night-time, like an infant. There are no breaks. Only sleep. You become a Dickensian workhouse child. Cancer requires full payment, full-time labour.

We cancer patients are full-time workers. We are married to our diseases, as if they were our spouses. Even if we are truly married, it fills up the space netween husband and wife. It punctuates our sentences. It is a condiment spread over shared meals. The energy required to fight, requires us to give something up, and requires those who love us also to give. But we go on, like unpaid labourers, just for the free meal. The meal, when it comes, will lead to either to extinction or life. It is only partially up to us to choose. And sometimes it is entirely out of our hands.

In King Lear Cordelia tells her father that she will not marry to love her father all, but that half her love would go to her husband. Half her love is not much to give Lear thinks and accuses her, "So Young and so unkind." "So young, my Lord," she replies, "and true."

It is her unwillingness to love her father all that condemns both of them to death. It is what comes between them, as cancer comes between sufferer and loved one. Only mutual understanding can bridge the canyon between sufferer and loved one. The bridge must be built from love, hope and shared lives. But when we disappear into our illness, it is not through lack of love, or lack of desire to do so, only the willingness to survive and continue another day. Pain must be suffered by only one, but it must be endured by all. Pain trumps love, if only for a moment, an hour or a day. It is temporary. Thankfully. But we do not forget love, only have it pushed aside by survival.

Leisure - the ability to put aside all but what is most important and revel in that - is what disappears most and first. While we do not work, we work. While we are sick, we survive. While we rest, we are fighting. A boxer in a ring, running to steal second, a marathoner bursting past fatigue to continue on. Leisure is sacrificed to survival, because cancer does not allow us to work, it also does not allow us to not work.

"Freedom," Writes Camus in The Rebel, "is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, Justice seems inconceivable..." (Camus, 1991, 105). Equally, is the motivating priciple behind all disease. Without it there is no justice, only despair. There is no hope, only grief. I do not believe that we can throw away hope, because it helps us to survive. Survival, against all odds, is our greatest triumph. We march to victory on a path of dead cells. Our loved ones beside us, helping us to regain our strength. Our victory arches our are protruding ribs. They remind us of the struggle. They remind us of our fear and what we have gained.

"The apples emerge, in the sun's black shade, among/stricken trees,/A straggle of survivors, nearly all ailing." Ted Hughes writes in Apple Dumps (Hughes, 1995, 134). We are the trees, bringing forth the apples of our lives. We asre leaving the edens of previous lives, for the knowledge of new, perhaps better, but certainly different, land. We have escaped. Survived. And at the end of a bitter race fall to the ground.

References:

Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Translated by Anthony Bower. Vintage Inernational, New York. 1991.

Hughes, Ted. New Selected Poems, 1957-1994. Faber and Faber, London. 1995.


Sunday, June 25, 2006

This is an interesting (if semi-commercial, what the hell) site. Not much content yet, but showing promise. If you like the American SouthWest, visit here. NEW MEXICO & MORE


I am Tired.... of doctors and hospitals. Tired of needles and scans and flashlights waking you in the middle of the night. I am tired - particularly - of bone biopsies (After all how many samples of my marrow does anyone need?). Someday it may all be over, meanwhile I try to relax and think of the past. I do not (or try not to) consider the future too often. The problem is my past is too muddled and uncertain, the only thing I have are words. Words that have flowed into me and become a part of my existence. In fact (as sad or great as it may be) they define me, without them I do not exist, except in form. My form is only sinew and cell, but myself is grammer and syllable - word and sentence. So I write and think of previous words. Words I have formed and words that have been formed for me. I think back to words and how they have formed me.

One of the books that has formed me the most was Shelley's Frankenstein. I am, I think now, something like frankenstein, a role that I was, perhaps, always meant to play. I am risen from both beds and books. Like a shadow, I am emerging. Doctors have saved me literally from death, but not all of me. Something else died, and that was a sense of myself. One that I have not quite found again. I wander around, like frankenstein, not understanding the images which lay before me. I was expelled from a previous eden and am lost in the wilderness of my body and my mind.




"Did I ask thee maker..." begins the novel. The hardest thing is being your own maker and so I rise once again from the shadowy figures of words that scatter like blood or raindrops across my body, that has been saved for everyone else but not for me. It doesn't even seem a part of me anymore. So I think of past words, of the shadowy Creature - for his name is not Frankenstein - in the hills of Switzerland listening to the family read and speak. Here he learns, but doesn't entirely understand. Concepts he can grasp, but relations elude him. He is a shadow rising from the words and ideas which he hears. So, I think, am I.

Perhaps this is the fate of those still suffering. To be a shadow searching for themselves again. It is, at least, for me.

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