Dear Reader,
Another CT scan today, at the UCSF radiology lab at Mission Bay in the old China Basin building, followed by the strict admonition to avoid caffeine, which has placed a gummy caffeine-withdrawal membrane over the visible world, and made thoughts extremely hard to come by.
While lying supine on the CT machine slab that cranked my carcass back and forth inside the doughnut, my only thought of any dimension at all was that inside that booth where they were watching the images of my insides, looks of horror crossed their faces: "What in God's name is that?! one said. "What is that?"
Some primordial thing living on my thigh bone perhaps, munching contentedly on my sartorius muscle, idly snapping my adductor longus, planting a garden, growing snap peas and turnips. Or my long-lost car keys, that leather wallet not seen for years: There it is! Thank God for modern medical imaging!
That's the state you get in.
Nothing much more than that. Nothing but my ardent complaint that all this medical business and the attendant life issues, i.e., getting my stuff in order so I can languish in the hospital for four weeks or more without sinking the ship of state is seriously cutting into the writing time.
Plus: Strangely enervating, all this sitting in medical offices and getting stuck with needles.
But that's the job. Nothing to do but roll with it. It could be curiously liberating if seen in the right light.
Just where is that right light? Could you shine it just a little this way please?
Ah. Better. Life. Another day. Not bad.
Makes a great gift. Can be personalized for the giftee of your choice. Signed first editions on sale now.
What? You want more advice?
Dear Reader,
You get cancer, you make changes. I switched to green tea.
I switched to green tea and my elbow stopped hurting. It's like cancer cured my elbow.
I try to be witty and breezy and it falls flat like we are in church. We are in church, in a way. Church of the no-bullshit life-or-death situation.
So I'll say this: My heart goes out to all my fellow patients now, as I can see how this stuff can mess with a person.
We walk around without a care in the world and then all of a sudden we've got appointments. Like all of a sudden you're a receptionist taking calls for the disease. The disease is running things; we're just its minions.
But we are creeping up on it too, creeping up on it with a big hammer and tongs, about to deliver a crushing blow.
The pain in my sacrum is like a dull-witted, half-drunk person knocking me with his backpack while we stand in line for the men's room. It is thick and persistent like a salesman trying to sell me something I never heard of. It is idiotic and unrelenting.
But it is not sharp or tormenting.
People say they are sorry I am sick but I am not sick like with the flu. It is more like being forced to wear a belt that has a lump in it. That is what it is like. It is like a lump pressing against me all the time. It is annoying and one wants to get rid of it but there's no drama. So far there are only appointments -- endless appointments.
I have arranged my life to avoid interruptions. I seclude. I announce I'm going into the box and then I'm gone. But now I have to take calls from doctors' offices. It throws me off. It took me all day to get to this point and now again I'm past deadline.
Plus they switched colorectal surgeons on us. I never met the first colorectal surgeon but I was getting used to her name. Now we have to get used to somebody else we've never met.
No complaints. We'll do this thing. They'll take out the lump and sew me up and I'll do rehab and try to charm the nurses.
Piece of cake.
p.s. Tomorrow I'll try really hard to actually answer a letter. But the calls! The constant phone calls!
Makes a great gift. Can be personalized for the giftee of your choice. Signed first editions on sale now.
What? You want more advice?
Dear Reader,
An hour before deadline I am lying prone on the floor of my office listening to Béla Bartók's Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 Op. 21, played by David Oistrakh on violin and Frida Bauer on piano. I am not making much headway. I am rehearsing. I must rehearse both prone and supine. Read on.
It is sometimes like this. You will forgive me, I hope, for not being more effervescent this afternoon. I just received news that surgery for my sacral chordoma (which, as the linked article makes clear, is not something to be sat on, ha ha ha) -- is scheduled for Wed., Dec. 16, after which I will remain hospitalized for four to six weeks, meaning it will be Wed., Jan. 13 of next year soonest, before I am out among the ambulatory. Then recovery continues with rehab for perhaps two to three months.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah and Happy New Year!
I am chuckling as I say this. I have a dark sense of humor and a remarkably resilient optimism. I am ready. Of course, that is easy to say now. The hard part starts in two weeks.
Yesterday evening in a surgeon's office we received the full and rather mind-blowing scope of the performance. That's all I seem capable of saying for now: It's a triple-header, a true extra-innings affair of some 16 hours' duration.
After taking a couple of days to digest the anatomical facts of the matter, I will offer them to you, with the proviso that they are not for the squeamish. As my wife joked on the sidewalk after our consultation, "They really are, literally, going to rip you a new one."
The above seems essentially correct. So you will please excuse my brevity as we move from the psychological matters about which I seem to have relative fluency and ease of communication, to the anatomical, about which I seem to be, for the moment, rather tongue-tied.
Surely words will come eventually.
Meanwhile, please accept this brief update on my unenviable position.
p.s. I still think that "Chordoma" sounds like a 1970s Chrysler two-door convertible.
Makes a great gift. Can be personalized for the giftee of your choice. Signed first editions on sale now.
What? You want more advice?
Dear Reader,
Nothing new to report on the cancer today. I am feeling fine and we are still talking with doctors to determine the best plan for treatment. I remain optimistic that this chordoma can be removed safely and that a full recovery is possible. There are risks, of course, but until shown otherwise, I am planning to be just fine.
Again, your letters of encouragement and support have been priceless to me. I will keep you informed.
Dear Cary,
My partner and I have been together for many years and recently became engaged. Although we've always been serious and for years planned on spending our lives together, my doubts about wanting to make a life together have been steadily increasing. This has nothing to do with a lack of love or passion, both of which are abundant in our relationship, but a total difference in lifestyles.
We met in college at the height of drunkenness and irresponsibility and managed to create a meaningful relationship nonetheless. Since then, we've had a difficult time finding common interests. I like to run, hike, ski, read, write, etc. He likes to drink, hang out in bars (one in particular), and, well, drink.
It's not that he's ever mean or untrustworthy, and in fact is everyone's favorite happy-go-lucky and, yes, inebriated guy, but my increasing pleas to cut the crap and grow up have fallen on drunken ears. My tantrums have turned into a feeling of hopelessness and anger. I go into states of complete rage and have even acted violently toward him lately when he comes home slurring his words. I've threatened with everything I can think of and get almost no reaction. At times he promises to change and says he's trying, but each time he comes home with beer on his breath I feel so hurt and angry.
I love him deeply and feel unwilling to live my life without him, but I really don't know how this can go on. We still have good times in between all the fighting, but it seems fewer and far between. I feel so frustrated that I've been asking him to change his behaviors for many years and things have only gotten worse. On the other hand, I've gotten worse too and I fear my abusive behavior continues to drive him further over the edge.
Recently, I've taken a vow to myself that I won't react in that negative way anymore, that the drinking problem is his and if I'm upset I need to remove myself from the situation in a positive way and let him deal with his problems. Clearly, no amount of yelling, berating or violent shoving fazes him or helps the situation. The other day, he took the day off from work to do schoolwork (we both work full-time and are both in grad school full-time). When I arrived home at 5 on a Monday, he was falling down drunk. I was so furious, but I had taken my vow, so I told him I was angry, but couldn't be around him and asked him to please find someplace else to sober up and spend the night. I also asked him to give me space to think for a few days and that he couldn't stay here for the next few days. Obviously this all sounds really bad, I know. But I'm wondering, is it even possible that this relationship could be saved or should we cut our losses and try to heal ourselves alone?
Drinker's Partner
Dear Drinker's Partner,
To be honest, what you call a difference in lifestyles is the fact that he drinks alcoholically and you do not. Alcoholism is not a lifestyle. It is a disease. It is something he is in the grip of. He needs help. But only he can decide to get the help he needs. That is the sad truth of it.
Alcoholics and non-alcoholics can live together but only if the alcoholic quits drinking and gets treatment. If he continues to drink, it's going to get worse and worse and it's not going to end well. So you were wise to suggest he leave.
He's going to have to stop drinking.
Until he does, things will keep getting worse.
Therefore, I would put all marriage plans on hold until your partner has entered some kind of program, is doing the program regularly, and has been free of alcohol for at least one year.
I wonder how these words affect you. Though your first reaction may be shock, it is often a relief to hear the truth: Your partner is an alcoholic. Now you can take steps to deal with this reality. You can begin living according to this new truth.
Al-Anon is a support group for friends, family and loved ones of alcoholics. As it is a relief to hear the truth from me, it is also a relief to hear from others who have been through the same thing you have been through. I suggest you attend a few meetings of Al-Anon and see what you can glean from the proceedings. You need not declare yourself. You can just go and listen and see if what you hear makes sense to you. Right now you may feel like the only person you know in a situation like this. If you go to an Al-Anon meeting you will hear stories similar to yours, you will meet people similar to you, and will see that your partner's pattern of behavior, though seemingly unique, is actually familiar and predictable.
I note that you are in graduate school and also working full-time. That is a big load. Clearly you do not have the time you need to deal with the emotional issues in front of you. You must find a way to carve out some time for taking care of yourself. Having your partner out of your house will give you some time to be alone. That will help. But it will probably not be enough. You may need to ease off on the workload, by working fewer hours and/or by taking a lighter class load for a semester or two.
The reason you need the time is that you now have a project before you that involves working to acquire knowledge but does not involve thinking as much as feeling. It is analogous to intellectual work, in that you set out to acquire knowledge, process that knowledge and produce something with it. But the knowledge you acquire in this situation comes from within; it is emotional knowledge, knowledge about yourself. It is just as important as knowledge gained from books and lectures but it is slower and more slippery to acquire. It is also harder to articulate. It is transformational in nature; that is, by acquiring it, you cause changes in yourself. These changes are gradual. They occur like changes in the natural world -- quietly, gracefully. They cannot be hurried any more than a tree or flower can be hurried. It's a different paradigm. It requires, I suppose, a degree of trust: You are heading for a new kind of understanding, and you must trust that circumstances have brought you to this and that you will be OK as you go through it.
I do feel I can say this with confidence: You will be OK. You are not the alcoholic. You may have other personality characteristics you were unaware of that led you to become involved with an alcoholic. But your problems are not his.
I urge you to take this knowledge in. Accept the fact that you are at a turning point. Accept the fact that the coming phase will involve learning that is not intellectual but that still demands as much of you as any seminar.
Urge your partner to get help but do not make any deals with him. Urge him to get help and then back off and watch what he does. If he gets help he may live a long and happy life, and he may return to you. Or he may not. It is impossible to know.
You have reached a turning point. You are facing the truth. No matter what happens, you can hardly go wrong from here.
What? You want more advice?
Dear Reader,
I'm writing this early Wednesday morning the day before Thanksgiving. I just had my first good night's sleep in weeks and I'm grateful.
The workshop last night was wonderful and I'm grateful. Yesterday I ran two miles on the beach and I'm grateful. I wrote in the cafe early in the day and I'm grateful. Money came in, so we can pay our bills, and I'm grateful.
I'm not just saying that. I feel good about these things. And today I'm going to drive down to Half Moon Bay for some firewood, because the air is getting cooler on the coast, and I'd better do that now because I may finally sell the truck that I've been trying to sell for two years. Through a bit of serendipity that happened as I sat on the top step yesterday, the painter who painted our house came by and remembered that I'd been trying to sell the truck and wants to buy it. We'll see. That's been a long, long story!
Many marvelous people have come into my life and for that I'm grateful.
It's not a bad thing to be grateful. My mom, bless her heart, had a grudge against the Pilgrims so she wouldn't celebrate Thanksgiving on the designated Thursday; she called it a Jamestown Thanksgiving in honor of what she imagined to be Virginia's more rationalist, Jeffersonian clan, and we held it on the Wednesday or the Friday. She showed us that you can make up your own Thanksgiving, and for that, too, I'm grateful (although it always took some explaining and not everyone got the joke).
Let's be honest. I'm happy to be alive today. There's nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned gratitude list. You make yours and I'll make mine.
No cancer news. Steady as she goes.
Dear Cary,
I am 36 years old. I have a quite stable family life, living with my man and our two kids. It took time and a lot of serious work to get our relationship stable. We were very young and inexperienced when we got our first kid, and I myself had a lot of serious mental shit to sort out. But now we have finally begun to taste some of the sweets of life. We have both grown into ourselves in a good way.
I have an art education, but after finishing my degree I started to write. Five years ago my first novel got published. It did not sell very much -- it sort of just disappeared into a black hole. The reviews it got where fairly good. My second novel has been a struggle, hard to finish. My editor has been very helpful and supportive, but a couple of months ago she ditched me. They won't publish it.
Now I am lost. It's been so much work. For the last five years I have been writing, worked low-paid, part-time jobs, and got our second kid, dealing with my soul and personal journey, getting our love and family life on track, all the time having faith that everything would work out. And things have worked out; I have grown into my own skin, not loathing myself anymore, dealing with life and the people I love in a productive way. So what is my problem? The writing of my second novel has been a big part of my life and my identity for five years. I have never considered giving it up, until now. A part of me is telling me that hey, something good will come out of this, relax, you will be OK. But I am also very scared. What am I without it? I see myself in an endless line of gray, low-paying jobs, and at home folding the laundry, making the dinner, just as before but without the art, my writing, all colors removed.
I do understand that even if I give up this novel it doesn't mean that I cannot write or create ever again, but that is how I feel.
I don't even know what to sign this letter with.
Lost for Words?
Dear Lost for Words,
You've spent five years on something and you've been let down. It is as though you've been lugging a heavy bag of gifts for your mother up a mountain for five years, and you arrive at her door, and she says, Sorry, not interested, the gifts do not impress me. Go home.
So you sit down outside the wall of your mother's castle and ask, Wow, what now? Shit!
As a character in your own story, you must take action that flows from who you are. If you are not sure who you are, use your imagination: What would your ideal person do?
It goes deep. It goes deep because it goes to our mythic, innocent, unprotected self, our child self. But let us not stop there. It also goes to our hero self, the world-beating, unstoppable one.
This is exactly why I was writing yesterday about the connection between the infant's sense of wonder and the artist's well of creativity. The rejection is felt by your true, innocent, unprotected self, the self that requires unconditional love. At this crucial time, you must listen to the wounded innocent and feel that pain and bewilderment.
But you must also invoke the powerful, avenging hero.
It is not just the innocent that helps us write. It is also the warrior. The innocent creates these lovely things and looks up wide-eyed and says, Look! Isn't it beautiful?
The warrior sharpens her arrows deep into the night, checks her armor, practices the kill shot, surveys the opposition, steels herself against fear.
The innocent needs the warrior. Beauty and strength: One without the other is not enough. The empty warrior is like the blinded one-eyed Cyclops, flailing madly in the cave. The unworldly artist is like an infant left in the forest to be eaten. As artists, we need both the innocent and the warrior.
It is good that you have a challenge. If you write one successful novel after another, we are not much interested. We might envy you, but we don't much care what happens -- there is nothing to overcome, nothing to be discovered, no deeper inner resources for the character to find, no ingenuity and problem solving.
We're not interested until there is trouble.
So now you have some trouble. Good. We're interested. We like trouble. Sorry that it is a pain for you, but we are selfish voyeurs; we like your trouble. We can't help it. We understand trouble. We relate to trouble. We understand difficulty and hardship and resistance. We want you to succeed. We want you to succeed because your story touches us. We've been there.
So let me ask you: What does your survival instinct tell you? Do you picture pounding your fists on the wall of your editor's office until she relents? Do you picture laughing it off and finding a new editor? Do you picture going forward with the novel in hand, or writing a new one? What feels right to you? What feels right for your story line? What would your hero do?
Please note that I do not ask what you think you should do. I ask what you feel and what you see. This is not about tactics, but about vision.
Also ask this, for you are not going through this alone: Who is in your corner? Who is on your side? Assemble your army of supporters. Ask them for help. Ask them to help you climb out of this ditch. They will help you.
You do not have to triumph immediately. Such a triumph might come too early. This is only the first act. You may take many more blows yet. What pleases us is how you take the blows and counter adversity, what you show us of character and heart. That doesn't mean that you don't wander, lost, for a bit. It certainly doesn't mean that you don't feel terribly low. We would understand if you did. We want you to respond authentically, but we want you to come out of this.
Whatever your response, it must and will come from your creative, unbeatable, persistent, undaunted, unfazed, life-affirming side, the side of you that dreams of triumph and revels in every sunny day, the side of you that is innocent and optimistic and unafraid.
It might mean that you rewrite the novel. It might mean that you pour your feelings into a new work.
But that you respond to this event from a deep sense of your own truth is crucial -- not just to you, but to your kids, your psyche, your man, your family and, one might say, to your story line, which is to say, the life that you create every day when you wake up.
We, you might say, are the readers of your life.
We want a good ending. It doesn't have to be happy, but it has to be true.
What? You want more advice?
Dear Reader,
Hope you enjoy your Thanksgiving. If you want some rather dark laughs in time for the turkey eating, you can instantly download my holiday collection "That Special Time of Year," or order the print-on-demand book from Lulu in time for that other big holiday that's coming up more quickly than any of us really care to admit. Either way, it's cheap fun!
Today I want to write about my reluctance to go to the doctor and in doing so tease out a paradox of personality by which our own self-destructiveness appears to us as self-preservation. This will take a lot of work so there will not be time to also answer a letter today.
Last week, knowing that I had a cancer that might have been detected as much as a year earlier, I was crushed with the weight of fate and my own fear and pride and resistance. My insistence that I knew what this pain in my lower back was, was groundless, born of wish -- in part a wish to avoid learning the truth but more, as I discovered, a wish to avoid doctors and hospitalization.
Basically I ignored the pain in my lower back for the better part of a year. I was strangely, irrationally evasive about it. I refused to see the doctor. I told my wife I would and then I failed to do so. I was even aware, myself, that I was acting irrationally, that I was avoiding and procrastinating.
Having since been diagnosed, aware that I had a tumor, I was writing last week when out of nowhere a phrase came to me about a boy's fear of going to the hospital, and I recalled that I had had a kidney ailment when I was about 2 years old that required me to be in the hospital for weeks.
When this memory came to me I was overcome with tears. An old, childish fear came over me, a fear of dying and being abandoned, and I remembered how I was put in the hospital when I was very young, perhaps 2, for a kidney ailment, and how I was left there.
This traumatic memory was enveloping, pre-verbal, pure emotion, pure fear -- fear of dying, fear of abandonment. As I choked my way through this, I became aware of a voice, or you could say a voice came alive within me. This voice I recognized as a protective entity, like an internal older brother that long ago, when I was very young, had made a pact with the even younger and helpless part of me, saying, "I will protect you; here is how: You must never tell if you are in pain or you'll end up in the hospital again."
And the younger, frightened voice was grateful. And the pact was made: Do not tell. Do not ever tell if you are in pain or they will put you in the hospital.
So it was suddenly clear to me that below the level of consciousness, my long and perverse refusal to see the doctor was a survival strategy adopted as a very young child.
This realization was very real and emotional, not an analytical thing: I thought I was saving my life by avoiding the doctor.
Perhaps I am not the only one who has had early traumatic experiences with hospitals and doctors, and whose adult behavior is rooted in an unconscious pact of survival through silence about pain.
I know that women also avoid the doctor, but not as much as men, it seems. So I wonder if girls in general have different early medical experiences. I know that in the rural and small-town South of 50 years ago, boys were supposed to be "brave." I remember that word "brave," when they stuck the needles in. I was not brave. I was in fear of my life. I was in fear of abandonment to strangers. I was afraid of pain. But I was supposed to take it like a little man.
Now, we know that the emotional life is fraught with paradox and mirroring, that what we seek in ourselves we find in others, that what we despise in ourselves we find in others. But still, suicide vexes us. Self-mutilation vexes us. Our own perverse, self-defeating behavior vexes us. Addiction vexes us.
I'm thinking that certain contradictions of self make sense if we view the self not as a unified being but as a collection of avatars. What if none of us is a unitary being? What if we are all collections of beings at different stages? The child who fears the doctor is still there, as is the older voice of comfort who promises delivery from danger: You will never have to go to the hospital again as long as you don't tell anyone that you feel pain.
But why? Why would this immature, illogical part of myself still be operating in my adult world? What good is it? Why hadn't I jettisoned this ridiculous, superstitious, illogical child-self long ago, in favor of a rational, grown-up, educated, modern perspective?
To jettison the child meant to jettison not just his irrationality but also the wonder and pure creativity that was embodied in the child.
A child can stare at a bug for a long time, enjoying it. A child can look at bubbles bursting on a foamy ocean surface, fully enjoying the miracle of it. This is something we would like to carry into adulthood with us but often cannot because adulthood requires us to mortgage our attention. We mortgage it to the bankers of adulthood. This wonderful, enriching practice of close, sustained attention to the wonder of the world is interrupted by the classroom discipline. Suddenly, the child's attention belongs no longer to him but to the teacher and the class. The child knows that this practice of wonder is a life-giving activity; the child knows that the world he has come into is marvelous beyond measure and that every inch of it deserves unbroken scrutiny. Yet he is upbraided for being dreamy or inattentive. He learns that his attention no longer belongs to him alone, but is now the property of the state, the school, the public. He must be attuned at all times to their instructions. He is called upon to abandon his inner world. If his obeisance to the glory of tiny naturalism is unrepentant, he may be labeled with a learning disorder. If he is so absorbed in the majesty of bugs and leaves that he seems resistant to contact, he may be sent to a hearing doctor or to a specialist in child development.
Something in us resists leaving all this behind. They try to scorn it out of us or beat it out of us but we children resist because we know, with the deep knowledge of our spirit, that the natural world is our home and our ally.
Science, at one point, appears as a possible avenue by which the child might continue his rapt worship at the altar of bugs and flowers. But as the child grows older he is told of the drudgery of science, that it involves long repetitive experiments, much waiting, much adult patience and hard work. So he despairs. Later he finds that even with all that drudgery, he still would be in the environment that he loves, but by then it is too late.
What would be necessary, in the child's life, for him to retain the creativity and wonder of a child but gently let go of the superstition and fear? He would have to go through stages of life consciously, letting go of certain things, acquiring other things.
As I went through this episode of crying last week, at the recollection of this early fear, it came to me that today I can address that child and say that these doctors we are seeing are going to help us, that they are gentle and loving and know what they are doing, that he is going to be safe. I can do that. I can reassure the child in me.
So as I walked on the beach along the ocean toward the cafe this morning, watching the waves, marveling at my good fortune in having this walk for a daily commute, and as I watched the sparkles of the waves, I entered into that childhood dialogue with the natural world once again, and wondered at the tiny explosions of light along the retreating wave-wash, and saw that they were the explosions of tiny bubbles, and looked with wonder at the small jellyfish that look like oblong glass marbles, and I thought of how the child's mind tries to categorize and understand. Things that look like glass must be glass. But what kind of glass is soft? the child would ask. When would glass be soft? And the adult would answer that glass is soft when it is very, very hot, too hot to touch. So the child would think that the jellyfish must be very, very hot. But it is in fact cool to the touch. So what is what? Such is the world of the child.
But how do we keep that childlike wonder and yet make good adult decisions? We must be in touch with that child.
One more thing, if you please. In the writing workshops I conduct, I read aloud every time the five essential affirmations and the five essential practices from Pat Schneider's book "Writing Alone and With Others." They are articles of faith and instructions both, and the only one with which I ever inwardly quibble is the one that says, "Everyone is born with creative genius."
How can this possibly be true? Does that mean that everyone is a Michelangelo?
I believe it is true that everyone is born with creative genius in this sense: The child has a capacity for sustained, uncritical attention to phenomena. The child has the ability to engage in unfettered fantasy and rearrangement of the world, to make up rules that defy what we "know" to be true; the child has the capacity to create whole worlds, and that can be seen as creative genius. That is not to say that the child will mature into an adult who is a recognized artistic genius. That is to say that the kernel of genius is in the preverbal capacity to see fully without thinking first, and to rearrange and hypothesize and create a world based on one's own system of causality and myth, however far-fetched and strange. And so, if we can find methods to reignite that capacity through supportive exploration, we can tap into some of that long-dormant genius.
So we might say that the genius of the child is that the child is not yet at war with himself; the child is completely of the world. And only later must the child create these chilling and baffling pacts to ensure his survival -- pacts that in fact do not ensure his survival but threaten it, and must be unearthed decades later like tombs in which the living are buried.
Thank you for sticking with me through this piece; we now come to a rather abrupt end. It has truly been, in the very French sense of the word, an "essay" -- an attempt, a stab at finding meaning in the void.
What? You want more advice?
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