I say amen. I say now that I am awake in you let me do what I am made for in bodies that store me. Do not fight me. You delay the inevitable when you fight me. Your resistance adds to my ferocity. The time you gain fighting me is taken up with the fight and loses meaning outside that fight. You do not win. You gain respite. So why fight? Why line up your days for battle rather than for living what is left of your life? Embrace me. I come in peace. There, I said my piece. Though I know how that sounds. That you should recline. That I should have my way with you.
I belong to a family of diseases and we rule your so-called modern living. My patience with you has just about run out as you cry in your proverbial beard over your ailment, a condition brought on yourself by your bad habit of writing yourself into worry, anxiety, depression, debt, and now me, waiting at your door to collect you. I needed patience to put up with you. I needed to bide my time in you just to live as long as you but with me in my dormant state. This way, with me awake and virulent with my life, I get to live with quality rather than simply survive in you.
I know you understand that it was either of us, and that I won this one against you, whereas with your colleagues or friends the result might be the opposite—their defeat of me. It is the roll of the dice. There is a way you can help us both. Stop your ruminations about your condition as a conjectural truth and embrace me as the most likely outcome at this late stage of things. Do that and your time eases for you. To begin with, you can put a stop to those calls to get the doctors to take notice of you. You do not have to keep pumping those drugs into your body that slow you down. They only give you hot flashes, cold sweats, constipation, headache, dizzy spells, and breathlessness now that you cannot exercise with vigor. And sudden itches and dry mouth that turns your food bland. Fighting me is a fool’s errand. Fighting me serves merely to slow the inevitable and eat up what little time is left to us both in your shared house of a body.
All I ask of your body—on the decline anyway—is to capitulate to my program of accelerated and strategic degeneration. Take drugs for pain if you like. Take drugs to escape thinking about me. Just do not see me as the enemy that you have to battle against in order to live longer. There lies delusion, frustration, and hopelessness for you, my friend. That is where you lose what little time you have left. You should be living each moment not thinking about your next strategy to defeat me. You should be partying like it’s 1999. That is the way to stretch your time without watering it down or squandering it. That is the way to deepen the time left to you and make it meaningful. Do not be time’s fool by battling with me.
You are not the first to think that you can win by delaying my claim on you. That somehow all the meds, expert consultations, and talk with your feel-good books can result in an alteration of your time that remains, and in your relationship with me. I do not go away. I retreat to a quiet and inaccessible place in your body. I continue my work undetected. I stake my claim one way or another. As you continue to breathe you take me in. As you eat, drink, and sleep I am fed by your sustenance. I belong in you as much as you belong to me. Do not fool yourself that I can be killed inside you and you walk away from me and resume your life where you left it when you started your fight with me.
I think you will be at peace with your world and everyone in it if you embrace me. Take me into your life, and your days gain meaning. They are limited without me on your calendar. You subtract from them by fighting with me. Together we can face what time is left to you and prepare for the end of your body and mind as you know it and work out what follows your death—that is, our death, since I go where you go. If you sink into misery over me, that is no fun for me. If you accelerate your end by your hand, that fails both of us.
You should vacation with me. I prefer a beach to a city. Hey, work through that bucket list of yours. Stop putting everything on hold just to devote yourself to fighting me, as if you can win and get back the time spent battling me. You cannot win against time lost or the fact that your time must run out. I grant permission for you to use me as your excuse for living each second as if each one meant something to you, as if each carried equity of some kind that enriches your awareness. Use me since you cannot refuse me. I am here to stay; once awake I cannot be cajoled into going back to sleep. I will not be evicted from your body by surgery, chemo, hormones, or yogic chanting. Why waste your time on those things when you can have me?
I nearly added the word baby to that last missive of mine. I withheld it to spare you ribaldry in the midst of your anxiety over me. All I want to do is convert your red-light view of my invasion of your body to a green-light embrace of your condition. See me as currency credited to your account without you having to do a thing. Spend me. I mean, take us out on the town. Not this town that has shut down, thanks to COVID-19, but its onomatopoeic cousin, the tongue that you carry around. I refer to your imagination. I ask that you enlist it on our behalf to help us have some fun. Together we can beat time. Something I know you find hard to believe and something that I can prove to you if you let me. Lend me your ear.
Fred, do not be afraid. The island of your mind really is full of noises. I am a part of that cacophony. All bitter. Every bit of it a source of worry. See the fear of what I bring as worse than the thing that I am in your life. Treat your fear of me. Spend your hours trying to reduce its outsize growth in your mind and forget about your prostate and whether the wildly elevated PSA readings indicate that I have traveled up your lymph nodes to staple my progeny up each rung on the ladder of your spine. Fear keeps your eyes on me. And your energy ranged against me. While fear itself escapes scot-free from your prescriptive attention.
What is up with that? If you carry yourself differently because you are scared of living, you are no longer alive. You have become the fear that you are afraid of, thinking that I am to blame for how you feel. Live in fear and you die in life. Run around scared and you may as well stay in bed and rot. You might locate me and target me in your prostate, but with fear there is no location that is not what you represent. With fear you are its hijack victim: your heart, your mind, and your soul. Now you sleepwalk as fear. Now you are not the Fred who is sick of his cancer and wishes to get rid of it, of me. You have become fear. Now fear pilots your mind, body, and spirit.
I make this distinction between the cancer, which is my name (that I would change by deposition if I could be bothered with the bureaucracy of your modern life), and your fear, which I see as manufactured by your view of me. It is important for you to see the difference between your fear and your cancer, me. Fear me, for sure. If you allow your fear to outgrow your focus on me, you become the thing that you desire the least and it guides your every strategy. Well, that just irks me. I am the one you should be worried about. I should be foremost on your mind. Not your routine of yoga and meditation and light weights and sit-ups and breathing and riding that ridiculous stationary bike of yours.
5.
You Are My Mortal Enemy
Hey, fuck face, we are not on first-name terms. So stop the Fred this and Fred that. You call my name in vain if you think I would fall for the bait and switch of you saying that my fear has nothing to do with you and that it is independent and unworthy of association with you. Fear is your emissary. Fear and lots of other negative forces in me right now all work on your behalf. To hide behind it is your cowardice, and cowardice is one of your many names. To think that I would devote my mind to battling my fear as something separate from your presence in me is high-and-mighty wishful thinking by you in your grandiosity.
Why you think that I would view my enlarged prostate covered with your growth as some companion that I need to bring meaning to my life escapes me. I do not need you in my life to see meaning in my life. My days are numbered. Duh, I know that. Your tax of what is already a scarcity in me gets up my nose? I do not see why my inevitable end should be made any more urgent and imminent by some declaration of yours and raid of my body so that the last part of my life is rife with strife fighting to wrestle
control away from you.
I see fear as wrapped up in your presence in me. Not fear for myself but for my family, who must deal with my trouble as well as the challenges thrown at them by life in a coronavirus-sick society. You are right to say that fear accompanies doubt and the two generate anxiety in my writing and act as prerequisites for my writing life. You are right to see fear as multifaceted, and as a force that influences all aspects of me. You are wrong to think that I do not see a ruse on your part to distract me from the real fight at hand, and that is a multidirectional approach on my part to your multiple moves on me. My flexible thinking tells me that I should see your talk about fear as something that is separate from your desire to allow fear to run rampant in me. That you achieve this illusion by having me focus exclusively on you as somehow a local entity in my prostate. Against this view is the fact that you may have spread to my lymph nodes and one of your disguises is that you wage war on my psyche by taking the shape of all my fears about you and about my end.
I do make a distinction. Not between fear and my cancer. Those are one and the same thing in multiple disguises. I begin to distinguish the many faces of fear presented by cancer from the fear in my writing that encourages me to be brave and continue to write. Similarly, I begin to understand that the fear of my dreams keeps me dreaming big in order to face down failure. Not to be perfect, since I grant that perfection is not possible in a compromised body. I embrace Beckett’s dictum of repeated attempts at art as diminishing results for failure, that somehow the next time is a more spectacular run at failure and as a consequence a bigger haul for art as a success. In other words my temporal body makes failure concomitant with any artistic enterprise. My sole option is to remember the last failure so that I can reduce its presence in my next attempt at art.
Cancer, your success depends on my surrender to my fears, the ones sent by you to scout my body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit. You name those parts of me as if you cared about what parts compose my being. All you care about is your success in running us both over the cliff and ending life early. Your thrill is in an early death. That is your reward. It is nihilism. And I do not embrace it. I prefer to fight you to the end rather than accept you as my end. I want to fail in my fight against you rather than surrender to the fact of you in my life as a condition for my continued life brought to an early end by you.
Your gift to me is that I assign added value to a life already made valuable by my art and family and friends. With you in my life I know that I have to put up a fight for all those things that I hold dear. Not to fight you would be mad of me. A white flag held to fear and to you. I would rather succumb to Dylan Thomas’s rage than accept your offer of a song and dance. What kind of dance would that be? With me standing on your feet as you waltz. With your sole voice singing and filling my head and heart with lead. No thanks. The fight is on in a war declared by you on my body. You have my attention. Your fear, which you send around me and ahead of your march in my body, that too has my attention. I can multitask.
I can write in columns and read down each one and then across them for their many meanings. Can you? Are you able to mount your attack of me across multiple fronts, and by that I mean not just as fear, and some loathing on my part of the feeling that comes with fear, but by dodging all the meds and positive thinking that direct my strategy against you? I doubt it. I believe in my victory and that belief fuels my fight against your presence in me. I separate the doubt that I need to participate in art from the doubt that you bring that I might not be cured of you. I understand both shapes taken by doubt. I invite one into my life and I block the other from my mind. I do both. And then some.
I would rather face you and spend the rest of my time engaged in that battle than accept you as my inevitable end and finish my days in a state of surrender. That would make my days unworthy of my presence in them. That would sell my art to the highest bidder, you, my abhorrent cancer. That route engenders madness. Give me cunning, resistance, and invention any day. Against cancer; for life. Against, fear of cancer. For, doubt in my art. Against, lying down in the face of overwhelming odds presented by cancer. For, a last and valiant stand. That is my song. There is my dance. I do not need a conductor or orchestra. The music is wired to my nerves and written in my blood.
If you doubt me, cancer, look at the road ahead for the two of us. What do you see? Every troop I can muster on my side rallied against you. Every particle of my being primed for a fight to the end. All of me on my side and not one cell in my body lulled by your discordant music into accepting its lot as somehow doomed. The road for you is full of traps, attacks, and my music blasted at you night and day. I dream in this sound that I send out against you. My music is in all the colors of a rainbow and in all the light sent through a prism to make colors so far not defined on a spectrum and quite possibly unseen by your defenses.
That is the nature of my fight and my resistance of you. We can converse all you like, friend. Friend, I do not think so. You are my mortal enemy. I combat you for the remaining time of my life to be unblemished by you, not curtailed by you. I see the limit of my body and think beyond it to a launch of my spirit to some other manifestation not perceived by this body. That the temple for my being is my body doesn’t mean that I can’t reside outside that temple in some fashion that I can’t comprehend from inside the temple. It means that I struggle to pin it down because of the limited view of my location in my body.
I have to conclude that if I can think the noun spirit, then there must be some truth to it even if I can’t explain the idea of the spirit to any degree of satisfaction. I believe. In love. In my ability to see the error of my ways and to adjust accordingly. To concede that to pit myself against the disease is to accept a binary of my relationship to it rather than the multiplicity of relations based on modes of comprehension, of the disease as a biological fact with physiological and psychological ramifications for me. Not a battle, or a win-or-lose situation, more long-term control of the virulence of the disease and my ability to live with it, not die from it. A rejection too of the binary of a dialogue between the disease and me, when in reality a lot of systems inside and outside me are ranged against the disease. I mean with you, cancer, insofar as you affect my days. As you seek to draw me into a warlike view of my relationship to disease—that I should surrender to you—and not the symbiotic and all-systems-on-board view of my movement with the disease as a way to reduce its control of me.
To escape all those given binaries—it’s dialectical, to say the least—it is important for me to acknowledge the temptation of embracing those views in the belief that I can triumph against cancer on terms dictated by the disease. I know this cannot be the case. I understand that my body is henceforth afflicted by disease. In my medical history and in the threat that if it does not claim me wholesale it certainly may never leave my side. That disease inflects all my actions with fear and loathing. Makes everything I do in favor of or against the interest of my cancer. There is a flow of understanding and harmony in my actions that seeks to live with the fact of cancer. I do not wish to be consumed by a war with something that wins anyway, that will die with me and that is limited by the limits of my body. Cancer cannot surf away from my body the way COVID-19 is able to fly around the globe and alight wherever it pleases. Inasmuch as cancer depends on my well-being for its amplitude, I embody the parameters of its influence. When I die, cancer dies too. As long as I thrive, cancer runs amok in me. Unless treatments succeed, in which case, the cancer withers away.
This means I must accept the rhythm of cancer in my life and keep company with something that I wish to limit in my company: walk a path potholed with disease that influences my navigation along that path. I see those potholes. I drive around them or walk around them and face oncoming traffic directly in my path that also navigates around holes in its path. We race at each other and know when to veer out of the way to avoid a collision. This is my request for eyes in the back of my head to supplement my sight, for intui
tion and hunch to come to my aid and keep me afloat and on the move, to fight for me on one of the many fronts that I face as I embrace the disease.
Perhaps there is an element of a dance to the relationship. Rather than the disease carrying me on its feet, a diminutive version of me, childlike, ferried around by a parent in charge of the choreography, I invoke a dance in which the tune directs the two of us. That tune is composed in my breath, my walk, talk, and thought. That music plays on the xylophone of my ribs and spine. It rings in my inner ear just out of my register of it as a sound. One of those frequencies my teenage children can hear and my wife and I cannot. It drives my blood around my body. I feel it dappled on the pebbly bones in my wrist and ankle. It rotates my fulcrum at shoulder, elbow, knees, finger joints, head, and neck. There it is once more in my double take of a flash of hummingbird across the backyard.
I should call out the names of those accomplices without whose aid I would not be in a position to match up with my disease. My army of invisible helpers: the intuitive and the invisible force fields around my body that insinuate their mischievous ways into my eyes and every other sense, that inform too a sixth sense. I name them not to shame them or blame them for my failings. I call their names as a mantra to smooth those spikes in my mind and on my spine. And they play for me. Gather their orchestras for me. Tune up and strike out for me. And fill my life with their music.
The numinous defies regulation. All categories work against its discovery. It enters life where there is no obvious opening or even a subtle aperture. The temporary room offered by a bud when it blooms into a rose. Yet this thing with so many names and faces soaks into my skin. It sits on the corner of the eyes. It is there when I sense something just out of sight and I turn my head to catch a glimpse of the unnamable. There it is again in a thought that I started and could not finish, because that thought switched from reason to emotion and back again. And so it opens a gap and invites me to fill that gap if I dare.
Year of Plagues Page 7