A Salamander's Tale

by Paul Steinberg

  Patience, patience, patience. We are all patients, either now or in the future. My patienthood has lasted longer than most. My good fortune in finding a way to make a deadly illness into a chronic illness has allowed me to last longer than most.

  “You, as my patient,” I can say, “and I, as your doctor and fellow patient, are on a ride together. We will ride these waves together. We will try to change the trajectory of the waves together. We will give it our best shot.”

  Happy is the one who understands the nature of things, who has discovered the causes of things. With longevity comes an understanding of the nature of things. With the loss of lust and libido—with an inability to forget time and death—comes an understanding of the nature of things.

  Only with longevity and time does a species have the opportunity to evolve. Even in the limited course of 150,000 years, the human species has evolved in a profound way. Even in the limited time of the past 10,000 years—with the stabilization of climate and temperatures on our planet and with the consequent domestication of animals and wheat and barley—have we as a species evolved. And just in the past millennium have we seen a gradual diminution in the level of violence and aggression in our species. We are indeed continuing to change and evolve.

  Only with the longevity of my illness have I been able to evolve. A quick death of a species, a quick death of a human being—it goes without saying—prevents any evolving and growth and redemption. A quick death—circumstances in which one does not live with death hanging over one’s head for, say, thirty or more years, circumstances in which one does not live with an inability to forget time and death—may not allow for a full-blown evolution, a full-blown salvation, a full-blown understanding of the nature of things. To last, to linger, to stay alive, to thrive in any way we can—even without sexual health and lust and luster—is crucial.

  This is what I can pass on to my patients: We will do everything we can to understand the nature of things, to discover the causes of things, to survive as long as we can, to see the rises and falls in those waves we are riding for as long as we can.

  How has Helen evolved over these past thirty or more years? Her initial reaction: “How could this be happening to us? None of our friends and peers are dealing with this. We are only in our mid-thirties. Our plate is not just full, it is overflowing, and not overflowing in a good way. Fertility and love and sex, and life itself, have been ravaged.” The same questions as were asked by Ivan Illyich, asked though perhaps for different reasons.

  Given that I could not tolerate my own self-pity, I was unable to tolerate Helen’s. I provided a less than sympathetic ear. “There’s a ton of pain in this world. I deal with it all the time in my office. Our contemporaries, and some who are younger than we are, are experiencing things that are as awful, or even worse, as what we are going through. I see it every day; I see it in my office every day.”

  What the hell am I saying? Come to my office, and you will get a sympathetic ear. Huh? Come to my home, though, and be part of my family—and you will barely get a tender and responsive ear. If your pain is different than what Helen and I are going through, you will get my compassion and support and guidance. As long as your night-side of life is distinct from my night-side of life, you will have a more than sympathetic ear.

  My prostration from being prostateless prevented me from supporting Helen in her helplessness. I was unable to handle my own predicament at the time. And I could not accept and face Helen’s predicament.

  Through good fortune Helen and I have lived long enough that our peers have caught up with us—with their own struggles and tragedies, their prostate cancers and breast cancers, with their same Tolstoyan questions, “What is it all for? Why is this happening?” None of them have spent thirty or more years losing their lust, being unable to forget time and death. We are, in a sense, ahead of them; we are their beacon, their sentinel, their canary in the coal mine—a canary who has not died yet despite the absence of oxygen, despite the periodic loss of lust, a husband-and-wife set of canaries that have survived surgery and radiation and hormonal manipulation together.

  So, you wanna know what it’s like? We’ll tell you what it’s like. We’ll tell you what it’s all about. Is it wisdom? Is it hubris? Are Helen and I as a couple simply the walking wounded, or have we both in our own way become wounded healers? Or have we simply learned to keep walking despite our wounds?

  A new kind of potency. A new kind of power and control. A new kind of understanding of the nature of things. The antithesis of helplessness. Helen, not unlike me, has taken the best shots the gods and the quanta can give her, and she is still standing: standing tall as a wife and mother, ready to give as good as she gets. Freakingly amazing—she has taken standing by her man to inimitable heights. I may have lived with prostate cancer and metastatic disease and intermittent castration for several decades, and more amazingly, she has been willing to live with all of my afflictions and stand by me for those same decades. Implausible, inconceivable, preposterous. Arguably more preposterous than standing by a man who has been repeatedly unfaithful.

  And all the attention showered on me for the past thirty or more years: “How’s Paul?” ask her friends and mine. “Is he okay? How’s his health?” Rarely the question, “How are you doing, Helen? How are you holding up?” Yet she was the one facing the prospect of being a single parent in her mid-thirties into her forties.

  At the same time, shame and self-consciousness have fallen by the wayside for both of us. Privacy? Privacy for my and our privates? Forget about it. We are not exhibitionists, yet we are not thirteen year-olds obsessed with keeping ourselves hidden and clothed.

  If, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “We are only as sick as our secrets,” then Helen and I—despite my cancer, despite how affected by my cancer she has been—are among the healthiest on the planet.

  During the Jewish new year, during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, Jews around the world recite and chant a Hebrew prayer purportedly written by a German rabbi in the eleventh century, possibly written several centuries earlier in what is now Israel. For the coming year the prayer asks, “Who will live, who will die, who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire . . . who will rest and who will wander . . . who will be degraded and who will be exalted.”

  The notion is that one god will determine everyone’s destinies and inscribe the verdicts for the coming year.

  The singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen took the same prayer and put it to a poem and song in the 1970s. It begins in the same way as the original prayer, “Who by fire? Who by water?” Then, “Who in the sunshine? Who in the night time? . . . Who in your merry month of May? Who by very slow decay?”

  But there is a punch-line after each verse: “And who shall I say is calling?”

  Can we live with the ambiguity of not knowing who is calling, of not knowing precisely what the hell is going on? All we can say, perhaps, is what is not going on. It is inordinately unlikely that there is one god, or a god couple, a husband and wife god couple, or, say, seventeen gods, or a father and son and holy ghost set of gods, or a god who sends down prophets and angels and messengers and gerundives to direct us on how to live, to tell us who is among the faithful and who is an infidel.

  Can we live without concrete gods, without concrete stand-ins for the gods—without our new idols: the Torahs, the Bibles, the Old and New Testaments, the Korans? Can we return to the abstract, to the intangible, to the impalpable, to the indefinite, to the ambiguous and uncertain? Can we avoid a regression to the concreteness of childhood, to the concrete thinking of a six-year-old?

  Can we accept Martin Buber’s notion that formal religious dogma is “the great enemy of mankind?”

  Those frigging unseeable quanta, those bastard bundles of energy, those loopy lumps—both particles and waves, going everywhere and nowhere at the same time, on infinite pathways and on a single pathway at the same time. Not unlike those unseeable bastard
prostate cancer cells, filled with their own bundles of energy, always lurking, always ready to pounce.

  So, I can pray to the quanta, to the cancer cells; I can try to sway them. I can laugh at them and humor them. I can cry with them, despair with them. I might be able to arouse them and silence them. I can at least fuck with them. A little tit for tat, given how much those fuckers are fucking with me, with all of us, given how easily they can silence us, squelch us.

  And who shall I say is calling?

  A Twenty-First Century Keats

  Warning: The following ode has no sexual innuendos. This ode has no sexually explicit or implicit content.

  ODE TO ANDROGENS

  Power! Control! You slayer, you source of testy torment

  You pedophile, you rapist, you fucker without consent.

  So facile with crime and abuse,

  Never willing to consider a truce.

  Warmonger, a monstrosity for mankind,

  And even more: a horror for kids and womankind.

  Yet I will be thy priest, and build a fane

  To make your goodness known

  When you are here the forests swell, the mountains shadow the plain

  The brooks do fill, the barren trees go green, we never feel alone.

  Can there be ambition, love, and poesy without thee?

  What else will fill all fruit with ripeness to the core?

  What can swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells?

  What else can set the buds afloat on the wonderful vaginal floor?

  Adieu, adieu—I am fucked through and through.

  Without thee I am lost, and yet forever young.

  Epicene, nothing ever obscene, I give up the profane.

  I see creeks all crippled, all the rivers do drain.

  Those droop-headed flowers abound.

  Springtime for Hitler but where is the springtime for me?

  Hast thou forsaken me, O Androgens?

  The hormones: Estrogen, yes, but testosterone, no.

  Where art thou, brooding hormones?

  I am waiting . . . and waiting. Will you come back? Are you failing me now?

  Is it Daddy-o? Is it Godot? Is it Androgen-o?

  Thou wast not born for death, immortal hormone.

  Hungry generations try to tread thee down.

  But none of us can forget:

  You are the creator of emperor and clown.

  The swelling swagger, the babbling blather

  The trophies, the towers of power

  Joy and Beauty and Pleasure and Delight

  Without thee, melancholy—no thrust in our engines, everything sour.

  All is indolence without thee—my pulse grows less and less.

  You give wings to man and help women flower.

  Without thee, Love is worse than dour.

  Vanish, ye hormones, into the clouds, but please, pretty please, return.

  As you come back—gradual to be sure—

  I begin to have visions of delight for the night,

  For all the world, everything is set right.

  When old age will this generation waste,

  You dear hormone will remain both a friend and foe.

  And ye will say in midst of other woe:

  Beauty is hormonal fullness; hormonal fullness beauty—

  That is all ye fuckers and non-fuckers need to know.

  A Final Note

  “. . . a book can only end in one of two ways: truthfully or artfully. If it ends artfully, then it never feels quite right. It feels forced, manipulated. If it ends truthfully, then the story ends badly, in death . . . Life itself always ends badly.”

  - Jess Walter, Citizen Vince

  Many of us die a quick death—a heart attack, a stroke, our heads severed in an automobile accident, whatever. Even cancers can lead to a precipitous death—think pancreatic cancer and melanoma. But for those of us with prostate cancer, we live and die on the installment plan, a slow slog of a slaying. We lose our lust and libido, then gain it back. We lose our lust for life, then gain it back. We get bone metastases and get rid of them via an androgen blockade or through radiation. We do likewise with lung metastases and even brain metastases. We go through rehearsal after rehearsal for our own deaths. We practice and practice. We face a death sentence over and over again, then we get reprieves. We escape the clutches of death, until we no longer can escape.

  The lords of the kitchen normally boil the water first and then put the crabs—you can choose lobsters if you would like—into the hot steamy water. The crabs do not know what hit them; they die a quick precipitous death.

  But for crabs like myself, the lords have put us into water at room temperature and then have turned up the heat. We recognize what is happening and we hightail out of the pot. The lords gather us up again, put us back into the pot. The water is a bit warmer now. We know we can still escape, and we do so. The next time the water is hotter still. We keep escaping—but we now know the end is nigh. But we deny the nighness.

  Ah, denial—de Nile—yes, the biggest river in Africa. We make jokes about denial. We deny we’re in denial. Those who die precipitously cling to their denial right up until their precipitous death. It is beyond their imagination. Not sick even for one day in my life, they say. I’ve got the reaper covered. He has nothing on me. I work out every day; I play tennis or basketball; I run practically every day.

  For those of us dying on the installment plan, we keep managing our escapes. We keep finding escape routes, and we keep assuming that new hatches will open. It goes without saying that we live ultimately to die, but when facing the rapidly boiling water we are dying to live. Our denial of death allows us to extract every ounce of power and creativity out of every moment. No, I am not helpless. I can escape from that torrid water a third time, a sixth time. Feverish, slowed hopelessly by the heat, I still push forward; I grab the edge of the pot with my claws. I still hold out hope. I will still make my escape. . . .