They repeated it to me at every session. Difficult to know what it could mean. Daily life had gradually been dragged down into a uniform exhaustion.
Chemotherapy washes out so much, dulling even the colour of your eyes, everything left languid by how it sucks away at you; you become a distended, pale form, mouth straining towards the gloom. Just as it painlessly plucks out your hair—the absence of pain making it almost more terrifying as you feel yourself dissolving alive—it ends by tearing you from everything, everything falling apart within it.
Half-dreaming, I would turn my face and eyes, transparent, having turned completely clear, towards what seemed to exist at the end of my fatigue. Sometimes it would take me over entirely. I could no longer move, not even my lips or eyelids, nor could I think, allowing myself to be drawn into that state where the body lightens in being weighed down, as though at the far pole of the self one might still find life, a hint of life onto which to cling or around which to gather.
I would travel towards the ends of exhaustion, there where birds of fire live, resembling certain nights of love in which you give yourself over to lovers who play at being men, launching themselves like matadors, pirates or pimps, covering your eyes when they can no longer bear your gaze, harpooning your flesh, marrying your mouth, your eyes, your ears, every orifice, strangling you with their tentacles, a little like the woman abused by octopi in Hokusai’s print, profaning you while you expect nothing in return other than to be at their mercy. Jouissance, then, without pleasure, the jouissance of pure abandon, which owes less to love than to shock and consent. Tentacled lovers to whom you are grateful for offering you the fleeting illusion that you are both man and woman, and therefore neither one nor the other, but whole in the ambiguity. And grateful that you have survived it too, without being blinded. A rare eclipse on the road to the impossible.
The cold octopus I was then grappling with, which wasn’t just the combination of cancer and chemotherapy but the weakness they engender and which digests the body, gave me the impression, in such moments, of being a beast that meant me neither harm nor good, one groping at me as though I were some bizarre object in the world’s great domain, embracing me, holding me back to examine whether I was corpse-like or ecstatic, content or horrified, and offering me, snatched up in death’s vulva, sensations never before imagined.
The tumour melted like snow in the sun—on this point the doctors were satisfied—but not always without pain. Petrified blue snow or filthy névé, it dragged along parts of the healthy body in its regression, a glacier retreating slowly, sowing its moraines. For a long time to come it would make its presence felt.
Every hospital stay was a reminder of a completely different reality.
What had opened up before me was not a few months of chemotherapy; it was years before they would tell me: “you’re cured,” and, as doctors rarely speak definitively except when they’re lying, that “you’re cured” would come with caveats.
Between the percentages, I was holding out for a future which meant no certainties or stable home, a land of peril only.
This domain took on a mathematical aspect. I’d been plotted on a curve which showed a high probability for recurrence. I was hurtling down the slope of time, full schuss on a black diamond run. One point. And I didn’t know whether the curve would collapse beneath me or would allow me to find the low plateau and tranquil prairies again, where I might still fall, not looking when I crossed the road, for example, but with much lower risk.
Luckily the treatment and medical effort created a distraction. One becomes a tumbler without realizing.
I would regularly spend mornings in the hospital.
During the taxi ride or on the metro I would shrink back into my shell. In the reception, the admissions office, on the ward. Tubes would dangle under the gurney, the bed frame descending under the scanner; lab coats took their coffee break. I wouldn’t look anybody in the eye, or, if I did, I did only by chance; my look pierced all it fell across.
Up until then, Paris’s Public Hospital system had seemed like the bastion of one of those monastic orders which you never really leave, whose every house has its familiar rituals, and where, as though you were at home, you have the right to sit in a corner, cross a hallway or make an inventory of the species of flower the gardeners had chosen for this year’s beds.
Breaching its surrounding wall often felt, whether as a student, a practitioner or a patient, like a way of opening a parenthesis that reminded me of the grandeur of the profession, the grandeur of man. An impression highly prone to disappointment and surprise, leading to the precipice of disillusion. Hospitals are high ground split by sudden cliffs. To live within one sends us back to the Nordic sagas: the sadism of war, everyday tortures, the pettiness of academic ambitions, aspirations that are nothing less than humanist, so many discoveries which leave even the most idealistic and least philosophical amongst us indignant.
Moreover, for them, the hospital stood at the heart of a network of knowledge and care which gestured towards the creation of a sacred architecture, there where the sacred path of the profession began, which connected the names of the bigwigs, the living ones who made you sweat with their vicious interrogations and off-the-cuff questions–but there is no programme when faced with a patient! (“Yessir!”)–and who would flunk you in exams; those illustrious forebearers, patrons of patrons, whose legend stalked the corridors because one supervisor, as soon as she could, would offer memories of her apprenticeship on the ward, those of a young nurse who used to tremble at the thought of him, him the old academician or writer of polemics, the former deportee or Compagnon de la Libération, the pioneer straight from the Age of the Cathedrals with his banner of righteousness, loyalty and courage, who was interviewed on television about organ donation, abortion or the Boat People; that was thirty years ago, with a famous journalist from the time, what’s their name again? And he himself told stories about his own mentor, the venerated mandarin who spoke as an equal with the likes of Mondor or Pasteur Vallery-Radot; and going further, tangled in the voices of our professors, our books and our courses were names such as Bichat, Yersin, Dieulafoy, Broussais, Esquirol, Sydenham, Harvey, Paré, Avicenne and Averroès, going back down the glorious lineage to Gallienus and Herophilos, and even to Asclepius and Father Hippocrates; so many heroes transformed, for us, into amphitheaters to which they gave a taste of peplum, into hospitals, streets, diseases or anatomical terms, and whose glory was dragged between the mandibles of dysorthographic med students bored stiff by having so many names to remember, listening to secretaries’ stories, themselves living witnesses to the golden age and who, suddenly changing the topic, showed off piles of blank examination applications, which were enough to uphold, for no short time, especially when you were sensitive to the epic of the hospital, the belief that you were participating in some great work by doing a job which was often as boring as could be: filling in forms, which a bitter voice on the phone would yell had to be completed promptly when they had been forgotten or because, yet again, the day students in Prof. X’s ward hadn’t done their job properly, and they were going to report it to the boss, the supervisor or who knows whom else, a threat with the pretentions of implying that our future was at stake, that our lack of ethical awareness had already revealed us as failing at our profession and that we were clearly on the way to becoming, like almost all of them, bad doctors.
The time of epics was over.
*
Certain treatments demanded that I stay in hospital for longer.
Overnight.
Here we are again: me and him, this other I don’t quite recognize any more, today, as I write these lines.
I’m not asleep. The lights are out, the nurse inspects the drip with a pocket torch, says a kind word and then continues with her round of the beds.
In the beginning, I said to myself: What if what is happening is an opportunity? What if everything that has happened is an opportunity? And what if the real misfortune is not being able to see the chance in everything, to make a chance out of everything?
And so I was jubilant, as if, like a fabulous juggler, I had managed to keep up around myself, in my hands, a multicoloured cloud; as though I had discovered within myself unexpected powers. Amazed that suffering could be such a fertile crucible for joy. Immobile and swept up in a whirlwind. Uprooted.
I loved this uprooting, just as I had loved the trains of North America and Vietnam, and everywhere I’d travelled—always moving towards another end of the world—with the hope that an inner strength, mustered like a living horde, would be enough to confront whatever lay ahead. The same strength that, every time, allows us to rebound or rise up, which resists, making us more supple, and more fragile, but making us more perceptive.
I would stare at the drops of the infusion. The only truth in a night lit by the night light. This drop-by-drop was hope, and I, good chap, had been climbing it for months, jumping from one droplet to the next, climbing this sluggish cataract, which fell like time and was, undoubtedly, changing who I was.
Who can say whether I was getting closer to the nature of the bodhisattvas? Bodhisattvas are fundamentally men who have lived their entire being in a contradictory manner that encumbers them and makes them lighter, who have experienced the great North of the heart, when one is oneself only, closed and alone in oneself, and in which the birds of fire are released in drops of miraculous water.
Deep down, I was hoping to pass between the drops.
Even though, as I checked out of the hospital, relieved and leaving others to their fate, the hope of getting through it made me less and less serene with the end of my treatment nearing.
Perhaps because, even in sickness, to get through it alone is to have allowed something of yourself to die with those whom, for a lack of help, you could never love or so much as look at.
A bodhisattva is also a man who has detached himself but returns full of tenderness for others and their solitude, and who makes out of his immense care, his rightful place—his home.
*
I had been a recluse for several months.
I no longer felt the inner support or enthusiasm to write as I had in the beginning. I was headed back towards that enchanted island from which I would soon escape, but to where? The help that I’d received from books had run out. The outstretched hands were nothing but shadows.
The certainty of change that I had dreamt of in the beginning, the joy of asceticism at the start, which had made me want to write about my journey, had dissipated. I was no longer dominated by vulnerability but by gravity. Something heavy, light and dark. I was reaching shores that seemed unapproachable. Poor, undeserving. I didn’t fight; I let it happen. No tomb in sight. Another silence settled in: the end of the enchantment.
I could no longer feel the verve of the fabulous animals, or the streams that flowed from the other realm. A force overwhelmed me, fixing my gaze on faces, hair and asses. This violence made me invisible, I don’t know why, even to those who witnessed my desire. Or so I thought.
If we keep you, we gain nothing; if we execute you, we lose nothing. Words written by a deportee. Why repeat it to myself? I was still in the land of the dead.
The chemotherapy would soon be over.
Suddenly, you’re told it’s done. You leave the hospital and you’re afraid of what lies ahead. Because the man without hair remains inside you.
But the hair, stubble and beard grow back. The source has not dried up, but it is muddy and troubled: a defeat rather than a spurt. This rebirth, as those around me were fond of pronouncing it, would not be the emergence of a glorious body that showed off its wounds, but rather that of a man who still transparently bore visions of which others were beginning to tire of hearing.
I had hoped, and indeed it had been what sustained me, that something would change afterwards. But in front of me, within me, there was nothing but a shutting down. Maybe that’s what health is all about: gaining in strength, losing in acuity; regaining a one-eyed lucidity, seeing with less definition.
Untreatable, without control / Useless / This health builds a prison.
I had often repeated that verse without understanding it.
Sickness had eaten away at my relationships with others, with my partner above all, with approximations of myself, with most books and with everything I had written until then. It had left me with the after-effects of an emergency which would tolerate no half-heartedness, and which nothing seemed capable of satisfying.
And what if what resisted was only the ruins—only what runs through the ruins, like the life that still animates ancient faces.
Nothing drowned destroyed lost.
Faces
like pebbles rolled
over oblivion.
Ghost
all this sand.
*
It was into the violence that I had just experienced that I would have to delve. To move forwards, looking back at that country which is invisible to the healthy, and that I was soon to leave—to write about it.
And I was giving meaning to the far-reaching aspiration which was coming into view: not to change or become new, as I had thought, but to write differently—writing to tend to what no one can heal.
*
In his notebooks and correspondence with Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov invokes a new prose, “the prose of tomorrow,” for writing The Kolyma Tales.
I did not experience the moral corruption that those of the camps had, but this abrasion of sensitivity to the misfortune of others, yes.
What had resisted?
I couldn’t say what it was. I only knew that something inside me had held out. Was it that which belongs to no one? Something in man or in literature or art?
As I’ve said, in the beginning, I had the impression that the library was full of the dead. But the books are there, and there are those still capable, in the worst of times, of forging a link with their unknown brothers.
What resists?
The expectation of a prose that excavates itself and invents that onto which it manages to hold.
Prose which touches truth, rediscovers compassion perhaps, everything that is terrible in the desire to love that which dies, to write and to survive despite it all.
A prose hidden in the caverns of a time that is not of today and that wears away at much more than time: at this truth which makes everything what it is not, crumbling—illegible.
Prose found at the foot of a wall, where everything trembles. The very point of escape.
*
I had this uncertain ambition: to write for times of woe.
