My Wobbly Bicycle, 12

Third chemo yesterday. My oncologist was a bit late for our appointment  (There’s always a pre-chemo exam). He’d been at the hospital and was obviously frustrated after talking with a patient. He didn’t give particulars, but said something like this: heart disease is the #1 killer, cancer is #2. Even though heart disease has as many variables and is as much a mystery, somehow people assume the doctor is working in their best interest with heart disease, that a stent, certain medications, are appropriate. Yet with cancer, everyone has a different tangent, an anecdotal cure, they think may be better than what the doctor has in mind. Not that he discourages supplements, herbals, acupuncture, etc., but it’s the attitude I could tell he was responding to.  It does seem that cancer feels more out-of-control to us. My many years of meditation training have made it quite clear to me that my very being is “out of control” in an ultimate sense. I can’t dictate when I’ll be born or die. About all I can do in this lifetime is encourage certain attitudes that can help lean me in a direction I want to go.This chemo doesn’t seem to be giving me much of a grace period of feeling good before the ickys set in. And here it is, full winter. Here’s a photo of a trail near our house in winter. I’m glad to have chemo and radiation this time of year.  Caps and wigs are hot. And I can wear a stocking cap now and feel like my old self when I go outside. But the dark and enclosure sometimes gets to me, no matter how diligently I follow my cheering up routines. I am not all light sabre and optimism. Sometimes I sink. Sometimes, with Keats, “On the shore / of the wide world I stand alone, and think.”But there are books. I would like to sing the praises of novels and memoirs for a change. I just finished The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe, a publisher with a distinguished career from a prominent  family of publishers and philanthropists. He chronicles the last couple of years of his mother’s life as she’s dying of pancreatic cancer. They’re both huge readers, and they talk their way through a pile of books during this time. You’d think I’d want a more cheerful book. But it did cheer me.Will’s mother, Mary Ann Schwalbe says, “When you walk around New York, or really anywhere, you see so many people like that young woman [in the book they’re reading]—not desperate, but still sad and lonely. That’s one of the amazing things great books like this do—they don’t just get you to see the world differently, they get you to look at people, the people all around you, differently.”Great books, not schlock (although some schlock may be insightful, too). I’m not thinking of books-as-moral-lessons, either. I’m thinking of people’s made-up or true stories as “acts of awareness,” as D. H. Lawrence said.  Hawthorne reminded us that the “truth of the human heart” is sometimes more evident in what he called “romance” than it is right in front of our nose. We make up our lives in our minds whether we write it down or not. We live in our illusions. We are as mysterious as cancer. A book takes me deeply inside many different  minds,  helps me see the close details of another life, which in a real sense is my own life. We aren’t separate. We can’t get free of someone else’s suffering—or joy—by ignoring it.I’ve also just read Shantaram,  by Gregory David Roberts, a huge thick book, a fictionalized account of the author’s escape from an Australian prison. He ends up in Bombay, serving as a beloved doctor in the most horrible slums. He’s thrown into a ghastly Indian jail, gets out, goes to Afganistan to fight the Russians—it’s epic in proportion. I liked holding the book, bought by a friend in India:  cheap paper,  sometimes the print slanted on the page, bleeding through or too light.I’m now reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I’m not terribly interested in the clinical, physiological aspects of cancer—I only want to learn enough about that to help with my recovery. I’m more interested in how people have responded over the ages to cancer, the psychology of the research.And of course as always I have a stack of poetry books I’m plowing through, each one a different angle of the mirror, each a beating heart—mine and its, combined.When I feel down: first I sit with it, looking into the quality of my mind/body.  I drop the label “down,” entirely. What is there, exactly? It is what it is. Nothing to panic about. (There’s 2500 years-worth of what to say, here, about how this works, its purpose, its affinities with what’s typically called prayer, etc.)  And I get together with friends. This helps a great deal. And I read. My intention is not to “get lost” so much as it is to see more, from different angles. And Jerry and I have just finished our marathon watch of season 2 of Downton Abby. Finally, finally, Mary and Matthew are together!  That brought tears of joy to my eyes, no joke. There is as much subtlety and good writing in this series as in a great Victorian novel. Plus good acting.And I think of the cottage, my paddle-board stored in the garage along with the kayaks and canoe, waiting for summer. That makes me smile. 

The Case of the "Dead" Brother

Once I heard a poet read a poem about his brother who had died a tragic death. The audience was deeply moved. Afterward, some people came up and asked him more about his brother. “I don’t have a brother,” he said, somewhat airily. “Do you assume my poem is about some factual truth?” I was offended. Others were, too. WHY we were is the interesting question.When what we write appears to be truth, is it okay to lie? This is an issue that merits some looking into. And has been—most recently for me at a panel discussion by Rainier Writing Workshop faculty members Sherry Simpson, Mary Clearman Blew, Dinah Lenney, and Scott Nadelson, on “Why Genre Matters.” I didn’t have a chance to say anything in the open discussion, so I’ll take a crack at it now. If you want more background and pertinent references, you should read Dinah Lenney’s great blog at http://college.usc.edu/thegamut/2012/02/hurroo-hurroo/.The discussion, nay, the vehement arguments, about where written “truth” may give way to fiction certainly didn’t begin with what we call “creative nonfiction.” The truth is “messy, incoherent, aimless, boring, absurd,” wrote Janet Malcolm in The Crime of Sheila McGough, later comparing accurate narratives to a shapeless housecoat. “The truth does not make a good story; that’s why we have art.”Journalist John D’Agata obviously agreed, inventing a category he calls “essayist” rather than journalist, to describe his unfortunate blend of fact and fiction. And of course James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces “fooled” Oprah and lured over 3.5 million readers.I first think of Hawthorne’s Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, where he compares the “romance” (writing that may depict events that can’t actually happen) to the “novel” (writing that must remain true to what could happen).” Here’s Hawthorne:WHEN A WRITER calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former--while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation.Hawthorne’s thinking seems to underlie the current argument for messing with the truth: A nonfiction piece claims to have actually happened. Fiction can go anywhere. But both might—and sometimes do—claim the right of a “romance” –to go anywhere, based on the “truth of the human heart” rule.My thoughts. Hang with me here. I’m going somewhere with this:1. Humans began to make miraculous intellectual progress at the beginning of The Enlightenment. What happened was that we began to want to verify facts. The scientific method was born. For something to be “true,” it must be subjected to a test: it must hold true through trial after trial under equal conditions. It must be verifiable. Truth is true under all conditions, or it is not true. What we got from this, as a human race, is what I will call purchase. We got a foothold, someplace to stand so that we could see what the next level of thinking might be.2. The intellect is important not only for our intellectual life, but for our spiritual life. We have used it to build scaffolding which has enabled us to see and understand subtle spiritual truths.3. Caveat: There is no such thing as truth and when we look closely, we know it. All is a swirling mass. All is mystery. We invent what we call truth as a way to live within the swirling mass. And sure enough, “truth” does allow us to do that.4.I would like that poem to have been about a real brother. I would like when someone tells me something in a poem or an essay that claims to be fact, that it is fact. If I can trust that, a barrier is removed between me and the voice of the poem. I feel the poem on a more human level. It was you. It is your words.5. I see something of the “language” poets’ point of view in that dead-brother-poet’s response. Language poets ask me to be entranced, arrested, amused, intellectually stimulated, almost exclusively by the play of words on the page. That poet who wrote about his “brother” had us feeling sad, touched by his death. But the poem turned out to be only the poet’s game. If the poem had been ABOUT how one invents a brother, and why, and what that means to the speaker, that would be another thing.6. Tell me the truth or the world will fall apart. Tell me what you say is a story, or frame it so that I know it’s a story, and I’ll willingly suspend my disbelief. I’ll love doing that, and may be changed by it as much as if it were your true story. Deceive me and you’ve violated the basic human contract: we’ll find ourselves living in the hell fires of, for example, this particular political season.