Six Lessons in Humility and Patience

There's an excellent book out there by Prof. Joseph Williams, titled Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.  It's a manual of composition in professional writing, and it should be part of every English language high school curriculum in the world, but in particular I've always thought the title was magnificent.  So I stole it.

Why?  What does its reworking here describe?  My six cycles of chemotherapy treatment.

This is what happens on treatment days: I have to come to the 'infusion center' as it's called, and sit in the presence of the terrified, the wrecked, the slowly dissolving, the bewildered, the dying.  They look like hell, busted up and raked over, staring glassy-eyed at their blood pressure cuffs, leaning forward in their recliners to accept a thermometer.  And with them before and around me, I want nothing more than to deny the flatly obvious: that I'm just like them.  My uppity soul.  I don't want to be like them.  I want distance, I want my carefully honed sense of superiority back.  But I can't have it, can I?  Because I am just like everybody else, aren't I.  I stare at the blood-pressure cuff, don't I.  I lean and cringe just like they do, powerlessly.  Oh, what a lesson!  What a bitter, necessary lesson.  A bitter cause for laughter.

And here is what happens after treatment days: I take mega-doses of Prednisone and so can't sleep.  I get nauseous and register actively the smell of absolutely everything, even things that don't normally seem to have a smell.  Muscle spasms, headaches, fatigue, the whole list and litany.  Just like that which everyone else experiences.  And there's nothing to do but bunker up, duck and cover for however many days, because nothing will help.  Wisdom doesn't help, sharing doesn't help, and screw courage, what does courage have to do with it?  It's the waiting that gets you there.  Like a lion, hungry and without options there in the weeds.

After today, four lessons left.  Will I really learn?

The Picasso Answer

I've had a lot of people ask me about writing, about continuing to write during chemotherapy.  Will I be able to write, I've been asked.  Well, yes and no is one accurate and necessary answer.  There are predictable patterns of incapacity in the course of chemotherapy treatments, and they're not to be trifled with, they are no joke, and anyway they impose themselves, there's nothing I can do about it.  But they go away.  And life and vitality seem to return, however provisionally, and use of the imagination seems warranted again.  Or at least that's how this first cycle of treatment, some 11 days in, has seemed to go so far.

But I heard recently an answer to the question that I like far more.  Picasso is reputed to have said it, though I don't know when, where, to whom, or in response to what.  Who cares.  It's the right answer, and right answers are beyond citation.  It's this:

If they took away my paints, I'd use pastels.  If they took away my pastels, I'd use crayons.  If they took away my crayons, I'd use a pencil.  If they stripped me naked and threw me in a cell, I'd spit on my finger and draw on the wall.