October 19, Sugar Molecule

Angela writes:

Ottawa under heavy rain and fast winds is not much to look at. We could not even get out of the car to go and eat somewhere afterwards. I had had to fast before the test, which took almost three hours. That is because one needs to wait for that sugar molecule, as they call it, to come out of the metal syringe, itself encased in a metal box, all of which are handled with gloves, and travel deep into the body of the testee. This it will eventually light up from the inside.

The lung doctor called me yesterday to let me know that the pet scan shows an area of mild activity, not characteristic of cancer, probably an inflammation of sorts. The results are non-specific again, or inconclusive. I have two options: either wait for another three months and get another cat scan of the lung, and again every three months after, for two years; or have the surgeon go in and remove this formation, with the risk, of course, that upon biopsy the extirpation prove to have been unnecessary. In spite of all the expensive, so-called non-invasive imaging techniques, the scalpel remains the most trustworthy instrument.

Since I was given a choice, I chose to wait.

Some of my friends or colleagues, with whom I communicate from time to time, give me an idea of how they imagine convalescence. Since the university professor’s most important complaint is to have not enough time to read and write, to do research as it is referred to, because of teaching and other administrative duties, a character on sick leave, or, even better, on disability, such one like myself, would certainly take advantage of all the time freed up by the disease in order to, while taking pills, read and write. And, in case that person, on account of some debilitating condition, were unable to write, they would certainly at least read voraciously all those excellent books they were not able to get into while doing the work required by their salaried condition.

To this question I have to again answer in the negative. No, I do not read. The fact that I lay, apparently still, propped on a pillow, on my couch, does not mean that I am comfortable. Indeed, as the traveling sugar molecule would tell you, if it could speak, the condition of the opium eater that I have become is one of double discomfort: a fire burning within the body, especially along the spine, which takes not kindly the loss of one of its member vertebrae; and a film of ice coating the outer envelope of this burning body, the skin. If for Scheherazade it was not difficult to answer the riddle of the one who walks dressed and undressed at the same time, by wrapping herself in a fishing net, for me the answer appears less easy to grasp.

Between reading books, after fifty years of book reading, and reading music, as I now do, as a beginner, there lies a difference that in fact allows me to take pleasure in the second and reject the first. Reading music is at this point the recognition of a direction, and a rhythm for the hands. For the moment it is all about the hands, and the manner in which, without grasping anything whatsoever, they bring about some lovely and ephemeral formation of sound. No real meaning beyond that deciphering, if not the correspondence between sound and a small, well-defined gesture. The reading of books, now an old if not respectably competent endeavor, is much more about finding the sought-after meaning. Why this, why that, and how it came to be. All the awe at the deciphering of signs, which makes reading so enjoyable in the beginning, now lost. The attention we must bestow upon such an occupation, much more purposeful than the one we apply to hitting the right note.

I am not, of course, against reading, and if I were, it would take longer than this to justify. Yet for those who consider it to be the most desirable of the minor, low energy actions to fill the day of the proverbial patient, I suggest that the fictional nature of all reading can only offer false, self serving answers. The pleasures of fiction can easily hide the struggle at hand. While the clearly imperfect exercise of one’s hands, in painting and music for instance, gives the full measure of the body’s mood.