by Anne Boyer
No one really knows how Cleopatra killed herself. Her contemporaries’ guesses were a snake or two snuck into a basket of figs or flowers, a poisoned hairpin, or a deadly salve. According to Plutarch, Octavian preferred the asp theory, which has had an enduring sex appeal, and depicted this in his triumphal procession: “an effigy of the dead Cleopatra upon a couch was carried by, so that in a way she, too … was a part of the spectacle and a trophy.”7
The anonymous young woman in the anonymously painted Flemish painting is, in her unsexy suffering, no trophy, and in every way an antidote to an early death’s seductions. As the painter Marlene Dumas wrote of first seeing Goya’s Fates, “I covered my mouth as if to prevent the devil from entering.”8
I was alone in the hospital, and the call button had fallen onto the floor where I couldn’t reach it. I wasn’t able to climb out of bed, but I could see that someone had put a sticker of a Disney prince on the call button I needed, a joke that went: “someday my prince will come.”
“Promise when I am ill, you will take me out back and shoot me,” a person at work said. Sometimes people told me, “I would rather die than…”—the ellipsis to be filled in with how they would rather be dead than do what I must to live.
The administrator of the breast cancer fetish page—one that gathers photo galleries of fair-skinned young starlets and invents fictional erotic accounts of their breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes—has written this: “Thinking about a gorgeous, perfect woman developing a cancerous lump, and it destroying her body and her life, elicits such sorrow and emotion from me that the reaction actually causes sexual stimulation.” It goes on: “Now picture them, alone or with a lover, undressing and displaying their beautiful perfect bodies. Now imagine a hand, hers or a lover’s, moving over one of her perfect breasts—and discovering a lump. Picture the fear, the shock, and the despair the girls would feel, so young, so perfect, and so filled with cancer in their breasts.”
“To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth,” wrote Virginia Woolf in “On Being Ill,” an essay in which she claims there is no great literature about being ill.9 The claim that there is no great literature about being ill is a claim made in almost all great literature about being ill.
On good days, I visit the art museum to look at an 1859 painting by Thomas Couture called The Illness of Pierrot. In it, the sick young clown is dressed in white and sinking into his bed. One of Pierrot’s fellow clowns, Harlequin, has turned his own face to the wall in a posture of grief. An elderly woman leans expectantly toward the clown in the sickbed. A physician in Enlightenment clothes looks away from the patient, crosses his own stocking-covered legs, reaches his hand toward the clown to feel the pulse. The sick clown was once the life of the party, at least that’s what the empty wine bottles near him suggest, but now he is half lost in his linens and not to be helped by the physician who won’t look directly at him or the friend who won’t stop grieving or the elderly woman who looks but won’t touch. Some days I think Pierrot the clown will die, and some days I am certain he will get better, but every time I visit, he seems never to have left his bed. It’s a problem with art that sick Pierrot always stays sick.
Only certain kinds of sick people make it into art. There are almost never any sick in humble beds, unless these are the gorgeously humble beds of artists, and no bed on earth is as humble as the other places people are left to be ill and die. I’ve never seen a painting of an incarcerated woman sick from breast cancer hanging on the wall of the Louvre. I’ve never seen one of a sick person in a car in a rural emergency room parking lot on the walls of the Met, or a sculpture of a homeless encampment tent at the Vatican, or an installation of a suicide-inducing Foxconn factory in the Uffizi.
I’ve also never seen a sickbed scene from the point of view of the person in it. A problem with a sickbed scene as painted by the sick person herself is that it would have to be painted on a canvas with no edges, to be too small to measure, to be too large to contain. It would happen outside of time, happen inside of history, exempt the present from the linear, rearrange substance so that blankness is an element, rearrange aesthetics so that the negative is almost all. That kind of painting would be hard to make.
2.
Doing the dishes is not like freedom. Freedom is whatever we notice because it isn’t like doing the dishes. The ordinary is ordinary because it ordinarily repeats: taking care lacks freedom’s entertainments and its exceptions.
For any author of doing the dishes, the best part of the story would be the story of missing out on everything else while the dishes are being done. Or a person could be a modernist of the dishes and make a stream of consciousness account of an attempt to flee dish-sink reality. But it would be easy for any of those accounts of doing the dishes to miss what is important about doing the dishes, which is that it is not interesting or remarkable work in itself, but that it is the work on which everything else depends.
An ongoing necessity like dirty dishes needing to be done doesn’t produce narrative. It produces quantities, like how many dishes were washed. It produces temporal measurements, like how much time was spent washing them and when. Narratives end. Quantities, hours, and dishes don’t.
Maybe dishes produce categories and distinctions. Maybe one kind of dish is washed but not the other, one kind of technique used and not another. To study the dishes could result in an account of spaces, of technologies, of tools and instruments, or infrastructures, economics. A work like that could demonstrate the crisis that occurs in its absence: the dishes have piled up, the smells and cockroaches have come. Or it could result in an account of class, race, and gender—who, in the current arrangement of the world, does the dishes and who does not.
Doing the dishes falls inside a larger set of relations made up of necessity. We have physical bodies. These exist inside and among the larger bodies of the world. All of these bodies—ours and everything else’s—are adhered to decay, are always ruining or on the verge of it, never evade entropy or collapse. The ordinary ongoingness of our existence, like every time we do the dishes, is every time we try to block ruin’s path.
There is the work of making the world, which is the world that’s good to look at, and there is the quieter work of keeping the world okay once it is here. Making the world is a concrete pleasure, but the nature of the rest of it has yet to be determined. It’s hard to make a judgment of the senses regarding the sometimes invisible and necessary efforts we exchange between us. It is hard to read, for beauty, the everywhere space we are always making around the always manifesting world of the world.
3.
It is usually someone’s mother with cancer, at least in books, or their sister, or lover or wife. In literature, one person’s cancer seems to exist as an instrument of another person’s epiphanies, and sickness takes the form of how a sick person looks. At a poetry reading I attend during my illness, a poet is nearly shouting and wailing poems about a cancer she doesn’t have, then another poet at another—everyone’s mother—then a book comes in the mail in which the mother dying of cancer is, now that she is so thin and pale, compared with a long list of famous thin pale beauties. None of this literature is bad, but all of it is unforgivable.
Lepers were once called God’s captives, an opportunity for charity, shouting “unclean, unclean” as they entered any city.10 It is as if cancer patients shout “instrumentalize me, instrumentalize me” with only our looks.
I once had hair. I would brush it out and put it in a loose knot on top of my head, wash my face, pat on serums and lotions, wear pajamas, climb into a made bed, read myself to sleep, wake up in the morning and take down my hair, go to the bathroom and look in the mirror to see if anything about me had changed in the night. I would apply sunscreen, mascara, eyeliner, lipstick, earrings, check for chips in my nail polish, find pleasure in clothes and sex, feel hungry for food. Now I am ashamed that I had ever
been so unphilosophical as to search in a mirror for a wrinkle, ashamed also about how I used to covet my physical pleasures in the manner of a miser whose tiny purse they believe to be full of riches but is full of nothing but carefully accounted-for decay. I am ashamed that I should ever have been like a dog who thought its purpose was in guarding the modest portion of deception and ephemerality that is sometimes mistaken for beauty. This is not anything I want anyone to know about me.
After one of my surgeries, I asked a friend to help me count my wounds. She said, “I don’t like this,” and looked like she was about to cry, like this was the sort of event that would end up in literature later, and I pleaded with her. I said “this is my body” and “I want to know what has happened to it” and “I was drugged and no one explained what they did to me” and “I don’t even know how many holes I have.”
I stood in front of the mirror with my compression garment pulled down past my waist. We looked at what we could see, one of us in horror, me in harsh, curious insistence. We couldn’t figure out what were holes and what weren’t, what the bruises meant, the blood spots, the abrasions. The pains in my body were not precise instructions for the future or reliable accounts of the past. The entire upper half hurt: neck arms glands upper abdomen lower abdomen back eyeballs throat face shoulders head. There was one spot, on the side of what would be my new left breast, that hurt like an emergency. There was one spot, on the side of what would be my new right breast, that hurt like a minor emergency.
What being a writer does to a person is make her a servant of those sensory details, obedient to the world of appearances and issuing forth book after book compliant with deceptive and unforgivable showing, full of cruel and unnecessary showing, irresponsibly sparing every ethically required telling, as telling is that other truth, and the senses are prone to showing’s lies.
Showing is a betrayal of the real, which you can never quite know with your eyes in the first place, and if you are trying to survive for the purpose of literature, showing and not telling is not reason enough to endure the disabling processes required for staying alive.
The slightly ill but undiagnosed—the people who hover near hypochondriac—are better narrators. Their suffering is not so overdetermined. They can be lavishly self-defined, poetic with the glamour of the sick person’s proximity to finality. They bear none of the weight of being specifically ill in specific body parts at a specific point in history with a specific and specifically gendered disease.
I do not want to tell the story of cancer in the way that I have been taught to tell it. The way I have been taught to tell the story is a person would be diagnosed, treated, either live or die. If she lives, she will be heroic. If she dies, she will be a plot point. If she lives, she will say something fierce, her fierceness applauded, or perform the absolutions of gratitude, her gratitude then praised. If she lives, she will be the angel of epiphany. If she dies, she will be the angel of epiphany. Or if she is allowed a voice, she can complain in fractured and enigmatic drips or corral situational cliché and/or made-for-TV sentimentality and/or patho-pornography into a good story. Literature sails along on every existing prejudice.
A single mother with breast cancer should be an opportunity for a sentimental projection worth a thousand country songs. She should be beautifully devised, donating her easy-to-see agony to the mythic accruals of art.
If this were a novel, a sick person would discover that she is a reincarnated version of Job, then find out that every other person alive is a reincarnated Job, too.
If this were sociology, experience would inhabit a set of categories. The sick person is, as they say, a deviant like all the other deviants. First, she will recognize that she is ill. Then her new role as sick person must be defined. The doctor fills out the paperwork for HR. If she is insured, the insurer is notified. If she isn’t, and is poor enough, the social worker helps her fill out the Medicaid forms. The Facebook post is made, the head shaved in a photo-documented process of smiles and thumbs up. She begins to submit to treatments and to situate her disease progression in the social realm. She must appear to others as sick and begin to ask for help, establish her virtue in a plea for fund-raising and meal deliveries. People with cancer are not put in prisons or mental hospitals or homeless shelters like others who are considered deviant, although there are many sick people in all of those places, too, sick with cancer without a bed to sleep in or throwing up from chemotherapy inside a prison ward. But our hypothetical sick person, if cancer is her one big problem, rotates in and out of clinics and emergency rooms and intensive care, as if she is a car submitted for service that will keep it barely running but always coughing exhaust.
I would rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as is.
I am certain that my illness would make a better book if it were someone else’s. Who would want to hear the hammer always complaining about its meeting with the nail? An object is an object for a reason. Or at least I tell myself this when the books others have written about people with cancer start to show up in the mail. These are always mailed with the best intentions, always about the sister, wife, or mother-in-law, all of the dying women with a bald head and none of them with a voice or much else to distinguish them in particular except they were surely once distinguishable people and by the time they made it into the books, weren’t.
These books I am given read like proof that it should always be other people’s faces that are swollen from steroids, not my own, not my own breasts gone now, replaced by glued skin and cold silicone. But I am, despite the literature, the sick one, the recipient of what seems to be all the dying-wife stories in the canon of cancer’s accounts. Women’s suffering is generalized into literary opportunity.
Cancer is in our time and place one of the most effective diseases at eradicating the precise and individual nature of anyone who has it, and feminized cancers—in that to be seen as a woman is also to be, in a way, semi-eradicated, this eradication deepened by class, race, and disability—even more so. Women with cancer are often forced to watch themselves dissolve, lamentable objects intolerable as lamenting ones, witnesses to everyone else’s sad stories but socially corrected as soon as a sadness issues from their own mouths.
If you send me a literature in which a woman with cancer is herself, a complete, complex, and speaking person, I will open the mail. But what kept showing up was like the unrivaled suffering of some acquaintances with whom I’d often disagreed too much to call friends. They seemed to cry harder at my diagnosis than I did. All that unearned “so shook up” typed, overfamiliarly, toward me in chats by men who expected me to absorb their own excessive feeling on the occasion of my devastation.
A man I met once at a bar has decided to devote himself to my care, and his enthusiasm for my vulnerability is so great that I have to block his number from my phone. My friends and I sometimes joke about cancer chasers, or cancer daddies with CDs full of slow jams, the gifts showing up at the door, the outbreaks of attracted chivalry, the curious attempts at seduction. One friend suggests that whatever libidinal appeal cancer possesses has to do with the disease’s nontransmissibility. Cancer’s attraction is that it is a disease of probability rather than communicability, she tells me, and every person with cancer can be understood as someone who has cancer so you won’t have to.
We share this world, the objects and environments in it, its systems, distribution, and manufacturing, the radioactive rays of the machines on which we seek to talk to one another, too, and all we know combines into the industrial world’s carcinogenosphere. That we catch our disease from the shared world absolves us from fear of giving it to one another directly, and cancer allows proximity to the authentic experience without other diseases’ proximate risks. Cancer can be a stage of virtue on which others can act, and it is also a pure instance of suffering in which we have no one—and everything—to blame.
Here is an exercise in lamentation without opportunism: walk down a street and imagine the unhappi
ness experienced behind every door, then, while moving through a town or city in a car or bus, observe every business and imagine what each of the workers would rather be doing than work. Then imagine those workers’ parents, what they would rather be doing, too, or what they would rather the children that they raised could do.
The graveyard has the same effect. Each tombstone is like a Wikipedia stub unfilled.
Next, do the same thing, only this time, in front of a prison. Then do this in a hospital.
4.
I read somewhere that while many people have written histories of illness, no one has ever written a history of the ill. But I don’t think this is true. Every person with a body is a secret historian, at work on the same volume: skin as the annals of sensation, genitals as jokes told by fools, teeth as the rise and fall of what bites.
I dream I am walking at three a.m. in the high streets of the suburbs which on a turn would become the low streets of the city, 140th Street to 18th Street, 196th to 3rd. These were the streets of every gridded place to which I had ever been, and I was worried because in the dream I had cancer and was weak, lost, and all around me in the streets and cars were celebrants before dawn. I knew that the celebrants were ordinary and, in this, dangerous to the sick in the way that celebrants almost always are.
Disease is never neutral. Treatment never not ideological. Mortality never without its politics.
Cancer is held apart as a special kind of suffering, but suffering from the inevitability of our common accident isn’t valiant. To be a child of this accident never made me a member of a valiant class. Immobilized in bed, I decide to devote my life to making the socially acceptable response to news of a diagnosis of breast cancer not the corrective “stay positive,” but these lines from Diane di Prima’s poem “Revolutionary Letter #9”: “1. kill head of Dow Chemical / 2. destroy plant / 3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM to build again.”11