Publié chez Penguin

What an interesting finger
let me suck it

It’s not an interesting finger
take it away

The statement is pointless
The finger is speechless

It is boring that you are frightened
you are boring me by being interested in me

In trying to be interesting,
you are very boring.

You are frightened of being boring, you
try to be interesting by not being interested,
but are interested only in not being boring.

You are not interested in me.
You are only interested that I be interested in you.

You pretend to be bored
because I am not interested
that you are frightened
that I am not frightened
that you are not interested in me.

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

Doing the dishes is not like freedom. Freedom is whatever we notice because it isn’t like doing the dishes. The ordinary is ordinary because it ordinarily repeats : taking care lacks freedom’s entertainments and its exceptions.
For any author of doing the dishes, the best part of the story would be the story of missing out on everything else while the dishes are being done. Or a person could be a modernist of the dishes and make a stream of consciousness account of an attempt to flee dish-sink reality. But it would be easy for any of those accounts of doing the dishes to miss what is important about doing the dishes, which is that it is not interesting or remarkable work in itself, but that it is the work on which everything else depends.
An ongoing necessity like dirty dishes needing to be done doesn’t produce narrative. It produces quantities, like how many dishes were washed. It produces temporal measurements, like how much time was spent washing them and when. Narratives end. Quantities, hours, and dishes don’t. Maybe dishes produce categories and distinctions.
Maybe one kind of dish is washed but not the other, one kind of technique used and not another. To study the dishes could result in an account of spaces, of technologies, of tools and instruments, or infrastructures, economics. A work like that could demonstrate the crisis that occurs in its absence : the dishes have piled up, the smells and cockroaches have come. Or it could result in an account of class, race, and gender—who, in the current arrangement of the world, does the dishes and who does not.
Doing the dishes falls inside a larger set of relations made up of necessity. We have physical bodies. These exist inside and among the larger bodies of the world. All of these bodies—ours and everything else’s—are adhered to decay, are always ruining or on the verge of it, never evade entropy or collapse. The ordinary ongoingness of our existence, like every time we do the dishes, is every time we try to block ruin’s path.
There is the work of making the world, which is the world that’s good to look at, and there is the quieter work of keeping the world okay once it is here. Making the world is a concrete pleasure, but the nature of the rest of it has yet to be determined. It’s hard to make a judgment of the senses regarding the sometimes invisible and necessary efforts we exchange between us. It is hard to read, for beauty, the everywhere space we are always making around the always manifesting world of the world.

Every movie I watch now is a movie about an entire cast of people who seem to not have cancer, or at least this is, to me, its plot. Any crowd not in the clinic is a crowd that feels curated by alienation, all the people everywhere looking robust and eyelashed and as if they have appetites for dinner and solid plans for retirement. I am marked by cancer, and I can’t quite remember what the markers are that mark us as who we are when we are not being marked by something else.

At the fullest expression of its treatment, breast cancer is near total strike : striking hair, striking eyelashes, striking eyebrows, striking skin, striking thought, striking language, striking feeling, striking vigor, striking appetite, striking eros, striking maternity, striking productivity, striking immune system, negated fertility, negated breasts.
Self-manage, the boss that is everyone says : work harder, stay positive, draw on eyebrows, cover your head with a wig or colorful scarf, insert teardrop- or half-a-globe-shaped silicone under your scarred skin and graft on prosthetic nipples or tattoo trompe-l’œil ones in pubescent pink or have flaps of fat removed from your back or belly and joined to your chest, exercise when tired, eat when repulsed by food, go to yoga, do not mention death, take an Ativan, behave normally, think of the future, cooperate with the doctors, attend « look good feel better » for your free high-quality makeup kit, 8 run a 5K, whether-or-not-to-wear-a-wig-during-sex is a question the book says to ask your husband, « one family member at a time » says the sign on the way to the infusion room, the pink ribbon on the for-sale sign of the mansion.

There are people who feel bad in their bodies and do nothing about it, and there are people who feel bad in their bodies and submit their symptoms to search engines and stop there. Then there are people who can afford to circulate what hurts between professionals who will offer them competing diagnostic bids. This group of people follow a set of symptoms toward a promise, ask for tests, question answers, travel long distances to visit specialists who might be able to recognize what’s wrong.

If symptoms are circulated long enough, a set of discomforts might be allowed the mercy of a name : a disease, a syndrome, a sensitivity, a search term. Sometimes that is cure enough—as if to appellate is to make okay. Sometimes to give a person a word to call their suffering is the only treatment for it.

In a world where so many people feel so bad, there’s a common unmarked and indefinite state of feeling ill that provides, at least, membership in a community of the unspecified. Discomfort in need of diagnosis forms a feeling-scape of curious pains and corporeal eruptions, all untamed by the category disease. The kind of illness that has no name is the kind that is held in suspense or held in common or shuffled into the adjacency of psychiatry.

A body in mysterious discomfort exposes itself to medicine hoping to meet a vocabulary with which to speak of suffering in return. If that suffering does not meet sufficient language, those who endure that suffering must come together to invent it. The sick but undiagnosed have developed a literature of unnamed illness, a poetry of it, too, and a narrative of their search for answers. They finesse diets in response to what medicine fails, assay lifestyle restrictions, and in the mix of refined ingestion and corrective protections and rotating professional inspections, health or ill health wanders from the bounds of medicine, resists both disease and cure.

Cancer’s custom, on the other hand, is to rarely show up unannounced. Cancer comes in a wave of experts and expert technologies. It arrives via surveillance and professional declaration. Our senses tell us almost nothing about our illness, but the doctors ask us to believe that what we cannot see or feel might kill us, and so we do.

« They tell me, » said an old man to me in the chemotherapy infusion room, « I have cancer, but, » he whispered, « I have my doubts. »

There is no more tragic piece of furniture than a bed, how it falls so quickly from the place we make love to the place we might die in. It is tragic, too, for how it falls so quickly from the place where we sleep to the place where we think ourselves mad. The bed where anyone makes love is also—and too clearly for anyone stuck there because of illness—the grave, as John Donne described it, from which they might never rise.

In vertical life, when you are well or mostly and walking around, pretending to be, the top of your head is the space that the heavens touch. The total area of the top of you is pretty small. You are only moderately airy, then, and your eyes, rather than gazing up, gaze outward at the active world, and it is to this you are mostly reacting. And it is mostly during the night, during dreams, that imagining becomes temporarily expansive and the ceiling air spreads over you, or at least this was, in those days, one magic theory I conjured in bed to explain the relationship of posture to thought.

When you are sick and horizontal, the sky or skyish air of what is above you spreads all over your body, the increased area of airy intersection leads to a crisis of excessive imagining. All that horizontality invites a massive projecting of cognitive forms. When you are so often lying down, you are also so often looking up.

I think of the medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna’s floating man, who, denied all sensation, still knows, as proof of the soul, that he exists.1 I am not sure I believe him. A better answer is found in the Roman poet Lucretius’s argument in his epic poem, De rerum natura, that we can die inch by inch. Every cell is a kingdom of both substance and spirit, and any kingdom can be overthrown. Our life force, like our flesh, never seems to issue away from us all at once. Anyone who has been half dead can attest to this. What we call our soul can die in small quantities, just as our bodies can be worn, amputated, and poisoned away, bit by bit.2 The lost parts of our souls are no more replaceable than the lost parts of our bodies, life incrementally lifting from life, just like that. And there we are, mostly dead, but still required to go to work.

I come across a headline : « Attitude Is Everything for Breast Cancer Survivor. » I look for the headline « Attitude Is Everything for Ebola Patient » or « Attitude Is Everything for Guy with Diabetes » or « Attitude Is Everything for Those with Congenital Syphilis » or « Attitude Is Everything with Lead Poisoning » or « Attitude Is Everything When a Dog Bites Your Hand » or « Attitude Is Everything for Gunshot Victim » or « Attitude Is Everything for a Tween with a Hangover » or « Attitude Is Everything for a Coyote Struck by a Ford F150 » or « Attitude Is Everything for Gravity » or « Attitude Is Everything for the Water Cycle » or « Attitude Is Everything for Survivor of Varicose Veins » or « Attitude Is Everything for Dying Coral Reef. »