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Surprisingly, my narrow to the point, forward looking
spellchecker still recognizes the word. While I observe things changing at such
a speed, as to make that which is only a few years old appear beyond the very
possibility of useful existence. If they were, and some wikipedia entry attested to it, they're now useless, be they concrete objects or concepts. The important
thing is not to regret them, but to believe that they are, without a doubt,
obsolete. Was that really possible? Were people really called neurasthenics,
when they refused to leave their house? Would that be ethical? That name, that
label? we ask with suspicion. Was that a form of hysteria? and if so, were
the doctors responsible at fault for naming it?
Were these patients, these clients, not highly offended when
somebody (a doctor they addressed to as Herr Professor mind you) told them that they did not suffer of an
organic, but rather, of a psycho-neurological, or rather (at the time) nervous
condition? Needless to say, the very judgement passed on such revolute circumstances must, today, be the result of the speed at which all beings technological egg us
on, as if people and their machines were never more pressed to mark the finish
line.
Proust suffered at the hands of this affliction himself. He who
makes it easy to understand why, as we grow old, we turn ever more in the
direction of our forebears. The meaning of our actions becomes clearer when we
see some version of them in another. The advantage with making ourselves the
improved rendering of our kin resides in the appropriation of certain
historical circumstances. In this process of identification chronology is
levelled, and we are free to adopt those lost conditions which are now precious
and available to the nostalgic. In other words, since our own life history
seems to be wanting, we are free to adopt our great aunts’ oddities as our own.
It is not quite correct to say that I did not leave the house. I
do, every day, but only for the daily waltz with Rocky, along the forest and
pond-lined Canada trail. Somehow, this forest has become part of our dwelling,
and therefore, like for our dog, the divide between the outside, public domain,
and our territory, does not begin at the door of the house, but at the margin
of the forest, along the fields inhabited, during the warmer months, by our
skittish cow-friends. During these walks, and maybe because of their solitary,
Rousseauist nature, I am tempted
to try and figure the illness of which I suffer in the terms of what it would
have appeared like before diagnostic imaging techniques.
There's a good research topic: first, a survey of those who,
affected by a tumor, carried on in spite - if not because of - it. I do not mean the elephant man, even if
he is certainly the logically extreme case. I mean people who lived with the
symptoms and knowledge - if such
it can be called - and did what they had to do. Secondly, what was it, this
thing they had to accomplish, or, better yet, what did it become? In light of
the illness underlying their actions?
Quotation marks indicate the level of the communication we
struggled to sustain. The question itself was put in a sort of indifferent,
vague, by-the-way-here's-a-detail sort of way. Nothing in the gaze to betray
the thought, possibly the thinking process, behind. He looked overall drawn and
unshaven, in spite of wearing a beard. I kept going back and forth, up and
down, from his face to the photograph of his face on his name tag, which showed
a younger, sturdier, more ambitious, even if just as much of a philistine kind
of fellow. That photograph must come from the time when he still believed in
cancer research.
Had Colin not been with me, I would have answered differently. I
promise it makes a difference, because, with him there, I have to behave, to
adhere to and possibly match that coolness, the cool of cool he embodies, even
when he occupies the fated chair of the patient's companion. That superbly
generous, unfazed demeanor, undisturbed in the face of human failure, no matter
how often it repeats, remorselessly, its errors.
I would have asked the lung specialist if he was indeed trying
to see whether the medication I have been taking, whatever it is - for he would
have no idea - had already turned me into a senile old woman, who does not
quite know any longer why she spends her time "on disability", either
in the woods, or at home.
Or, I could have said something about his own level of brain
activity.
Instead, we assured him, like good wards of the health care system, that yes, we knew the
lesson, we knew what was happening to my spine.
Now, you might understand how, when one has spent some time
under that label, however imprecise, of "disabled", under which I
present, even unknowingly, in most social settings which I still have to
attend, one develops a bit of a hesitation, a bit of a phobia, regarding the
encounters with even the better informed members of the so called community to
which we now belong. On the other hand, the lung specialist could have compared
the shape which eludes him to worse things. He could have more precisely,
closer to its actual size, compared it to a worm, which would have put a
different spin on the therapeutic contract we somehow still entertain. One can
always do worse.
As for my bouts of neurasthenia, all I can hope for is that the
tumor, real as it is, if diminished, will keep pushing me out of the house and
into the forest. We have our alpenstock, Rocky and I. We keep measuring the
distance and thinking of all the blog entries still to be written. All the
pictures still to be taken in order to replace the undigestible imaging
flooding my chart.
