Life's Sanguine Quest.
OF A MORNING, WATCHING A DILUTED WINTER SUN BREAK AGAINST THE CIRROCUMULUS VEIL. My thoughts turn to the phrase "live to see another day." That call for caution–to withdraw or retreat in the face of overwhelming odds–in its inceptive context now takes on entirely different meaning. There is a marketing buzzword axiomatic in the cancer community to which I acquiesce, encountering it in the denouement of the first year of treatment: "survivorship." To all a state, to one a destination, to another that first sip of wine after crossing the Sahara. I like to put words through their paces, draw out the lexical scaffolding that our minds interpret as meaning.
survive mid-15c. "To outlive, continue in existence after the death of another," in the legal (inheritance) sense, from Anglo-French survivre, Old French souvivre, from Latin supervivere "live beyond, live longer than," from super "over, beyond" (super-) and vivere "to live"
-ship The "quality, condition; act, power, skill; office, position; relation between," Middle English -schipe, from Old English -sciepe,"state, condition of being," from Proto-Germanic skepi "to create, appoint," (Old Norse -skapr, Danish -skab, Old Frisian -skip, German -schaft).
Here we have two things of note: Survival being something established in relationship to the death of another, not-in-and-of itself. Also, the condition of surviving, the "power" of surviving; the "office," or "appointment" of surviving. Survivorship is, in essence, a covenant or contract that exists in relation to the death or ending of another; the death of a prior self or state of being. In order for one to become a survivor something else must be lost, either other lives, as in the case of an accident, conflict or natural disaster, or in the case of cancer, the loss of... what, exactly? Bad habits? Old contracts? Innocence itself? Inhibitions? The answers are as diverse as those marked with the diagnosis.
Sat yesterday, across from a friend–herself a member of the carcinomic tribe, a ten-year breast cancer survivor; she regaled me with the wages of her survivorship a double-mastectomy, the long march through epicurean disgusts feeling un-womaned, robbed, returned to second-girlhood by thoracic desolation and learning to love her complanate form like a baby daring one teetering inaugural foot behind another. Cosa mentale; the notion that desire has a life of its own and its own lifespan. Everything that lives desires, it is the naphtha of the mind. A desire for feminine wholeness attracts the promise of material concessions, breast implants a harrowing weeks long shortcut back to the familiar calculus of human desire; a decade of self-worth reduced to tits. Years on, a call from her surgeon bearing words she never would have expected, "the implants we gave you have been shown to cause a rare form of anaplastic T-cell lymphoma within the first ten years. Given that you've already had cancer, you should consider removing them." left with no questions, back to the high-key hustle of the operating room, the promise of another inscision–inframammary or in the fine-grained skin around neuropathic areolas. She wakes up, back in the familiar state of demolition, returned to tread the path of hard-won self love from the trailhead, gazing up the mountain. Vanity is the wages of survivorship, beating cancer–at minimum–demands a price paid in blood, sinew. Something of you must die so that you can yet live. These are postmodern human sacrifices, made daily in the ziggurats of the medical industrial complex. Susan Sontag wrote:
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.1
Passing through the heart of darkness, how can one return to the the desert of the real? That material noplace territory of our lives which, ever in flux, can have no map? Here serotonin technicians feed from our aspirational exertions; our sanguine hopes and dreams. The social media hauteur dangling a curated authenticity that drives human desires towards the slaughterhouse of materialism. Muggeridgian urgings whoop and roar through my mind, "Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society." Why so much stock in the integrity of the body? What have my friend's breasts to do with the "passion of the real?" My thoughts drift to my own body wasting away during months of radiation and chemo, pants and belts cinched to minimums until everything normally fitted resembled hand-me-down chic. My surgeon telling me that I may loose the use of my penis, and may not even be able to excrete normally. Every morning and every night feeling around my body for signs of recurrence, awash in the terror of colostomic gene death; are these the wages demanded for my survival?
If paid, then what admittance can be expected to a social landscape so caught up in worshiping the Californicated mien? In inconsequntialities rules my generation; everything airbrushed, curated, devoid of flaws: selling, selling and selling anything but authenticity. Sidelong glances thrown in the mad dash between shopping malls, pregnant with kinesic outcry, "Spare us from the real! Do not remind us of our fragility, that youth is a temporary condition, a depreciation asset that can be–that will be–taken away!" Youth, commodified into chasing the latest depthless thing. Trends are like tides, they come, they go; predictably. Only dead fish go with the tide! Instead, swim! Against the tide, across the tide, be vital! Vitalis "of or belonging to life." Avoid anything that lulls into a passive state, into the living death of stabile consuption–of things, of happenings and of others. Life is anything but passive; life is unapologetic. It interrupts, pushes past boundaries, a loamy surf crashing against the sea-wall uplifted in tsunami by mathematical disruptions. Life laughs in the face of those fleeting impositions of human will. It begs no permission or indulgence, it simply quests against the slow march of entropy in search of sine qua non metabolic currency; a hedge against those forces that would interrupt its ability to make more life.
We are the living, all 7.7 billion of us and we converse with ghosts. We are the living. What permission do we need to go on in that precarious condition? Antithetical immersion, paid off by flesh, by the letting-go of whatever delusion we have built our lives around. We watch them vanish, submerged in space and time, and when the last vestiges can no longer be distinguished beneath the waves, we face the Sun, the haze clears and we walk on illuminated.
Footnotes & References
1. Sontag, Susan.Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.