One thing I like about cancer is that it is very real. I respect the fact that its biological imperative is clear and unambiguous: destroy, destroy, destroy. Thus when there is growth in the body, hair that returns from chemotherapy, energy that pops up out of nowhere, a guy like me can have a momentary rush of optimism. I am beating the destroyer! I am winning! Any sign that destruction wielded with all the subtlety of a grim reaper has left a shoot of new grain can be seized upon and blown up to emotional propaganda.
I've been discussing emotional propaganda with Charles' new friend from Denmark, a firm believer in meditation and visualization, a student of Betty Shine and Louise Hay. Much of what is proposed in their perspectives makes perfect sense, even if they tend to express it in a sense I wouldn't--they cloak the mind as a place I'm not certain it is, impose a real world structure upon it as I wouldn't, but I'm attempting some of these techniques less critically because--what the hell--I'm not a shaman, an expert, or even a particularly deep thinker.
Rather like my father, I've tended to historically be dismissive of the power of the mind when applied to practical applications like healing. He, an iron-ribbed son of the Earth from Northern Indiana circa 1920, was on a lifelong search to be the biggest asshole he could possibly be in as few words spoken as possible. This is not to ignore that he had good qualities, many of them, but simply to tell you in as few words as possible that the Age of Aquarius never really dawned for James A. Price, Sr.
My mother was the more mystically oriented of the two, and even she would only go so far as to murmur agreement with the general sentiment that one felt better when one was in a good mood. My mother spent the last, oh, 20 years of her life with an antibacterial wipe in one hand and a foot in the family bathroom where she constantly complained that my father's urine spots would cause her to acquire Black Death, pneumonia, tuberculosis or SARS. Her idea of good time was sniping at my father with my sentence and limply praising her own unending labors with the other. Don't be fooled, the woman did work--indeed, all of my life she worked a fulltime job both inside and outside the home. My father didn't believe that a man should do housework and I think I know why I've always found it sexually confusing that I'm good at those tasks...
So there was no fertile ground here for New Ageist ideas to take hold, and plenty of flinty skepticism to keep the fragile beliefs from spreading their Tinkerbelle roots. So I'm trying to de-rock my psychic garden and shut the fuck up and get the fuck out of my own way for a change. I'm trying to accept that I'm stupid about the process of daily meditation, that I don't know the outcome before the effort and that anything, anything that makes me feel even the slightest bit better, or more empowered, or at least less helpless against cancer is welcome. And it is.
If there's a theme here, it's the mission to allow emotional progaganda to sway me in a positive direction, to open my creaking, nailed over chakras, to air out my crank old man-isms and accept that my breeding, my background and my life have not necessarily conspired to create in me the best of all possible cancer warriors.
I am trying to be open to Scott telling me I wasn't the most communicative of partners in San Francisco, that I kept the cancer safe and warm next to me, and the support cold and distant far from me. That I've allowed my horror at how I now look to isolate me and prejudge all my social interactions based up that fear I have of looking nothing as I used to, of rejection, of people wincing when they realize it's me they see...that I'm what's left of Mark.
There's nothing funny about feeling like a circus freak--and I know this because I do. I have to face up to the fact that I'm being run roughshod by vanity that just no longer applies. I have to face up to the fact that I feel like a failure because I can't come back to being the old Mark, the peanut butter eating, locquacious, snipey, judgmental good old Mark--failure because he's dead and try as I might I can't breathe him back into life.
But why should I?
On April 1st, a few years back, my father died. I wasn't upset, rather I was actually somewhat relieved. We'd always had an undercurrent of dislike between us, we'd always been at arm's length. We always chose to sit on opposite sides of the room. We weren't sympatico, we weren't meant to be friends. Sometimes when people pass on from our active lives, that's alright. Even those we are traditionally supposed to mourn most deeply may be more palatable through the veil than sharing this side of it. I could transfer some of this logic, it seems, to a state of mind that needs a thorough cleaning--the idea that I've failed because I'm not who I was.
I might visualize the possibilities that cancer offers me both destruction and a clean slate upon which to build. The idea of a threshed field, the visual of acreage mowed down on April 1st about to become a light green carpet. The sight of a man walking from far away toward me, whom I can't make out, making the slow, steady, occasionally unsteady and occasionally quite slow progress that light green makes toward emerald in high Spring, a man holding onto nothing but advancing forward nonetheless, letting the wind slice him clean and the sun warm him up in a new but not at all New Agey way.
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