lassie

"I have set my heart upon honesty in this chapter" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Ill-Gotten Gains No Insight

I have such lovable, intelligent, exquisitely fragile friends here. It is with some fear, overcome only by my sometimes dangerously irresistible penchant for blunt honesty, that I therefore now embark on an entry about illness: yours, mine, and ours.

This is not about any single individual, because the truth is, at least 4 online friends have proffered their confessionals to me this week: confessionals of illness and struggles for recovery. We are all recovering, more or less, are we not? There has to be a restoration, remember? This is the earth, and we are flesh and blood. And the word.

Why is this confessional energy swirling around me right now, on all sides? I'm told by some that I solicited the confessions. But I didn't, did I?

People will often become angry after confessing their illness to me in godforsaken detail. I encounter this reaction often, and it puzzles me in some ways, every time. For example, I had a close RL friend who was bipolar I. He knew I was severely depressed before my doctors knew it. He felt perfectly comfortable, on the basis of his own experience, advising me to "get my chems right," even when I asked for no advice. I found his concern and the calm straightforwardness of his advice so comforting, however, that it struck me as poetic. I wrote down and preserved his very wording. He talked freely of his own illness. So it completely confused me when, years later, when I was asking him about the side effects of a certain anticonvulsant I might try for my neurological deficits, a medication he was on, he suddenly became angry and claimed he didn't like to talk about his illness, medication, or any of that jazz, "ever." Huh? Since when? Well, since he began remembering he tended to confess to me, light candles at my feet and kiss my hem, fellow sufferer that I was . . .

You see, I suppose, though I hate thinking about my attacks when I am doing pretty well (I'm talking about the rare Persistent Migraine Aura Without Infarction, not depression), and even think I can bring on my bouts by thinking too much about them, talking is different. Talking about the illness is curative to me. I seem, therefore, to be seeking comrades in illness, thinking that if we can show each other our wounds some, and acknowledge as only a community can some common humanity in our suffering, however distinct and ultimately lonely that suffering is in the black moments, we will heal ourselves scars that at least bear the delicate resemblance to the commonly acknowledged beauty that pattern is, that overcoming achieves, that ex-pression effects. Expression is literally pressing out. In pressing out, we overcome the need for the complete inner core we lack, that was stripped from us. We find complement in the dear eyes and words of our likewise expatriated and unmothered companions.

I've been sick for 6 straight weeks now. I'll make full confession when I have the energy, for it does take energy. And time. For a full. Confession. Of deficiency. Perhaps people yield to this undertow in me now, filling me up with their confessions, stored energy for the expression that is coming, my own confession, you know, dreadful dears . . . flooding your screen soon in a town near you.

The American Romantic essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (you remember the plucky "Self-Reliance" essay from high school, no doubt?) has an essay not quite so plucky. It is my favorite of his, called "Experience." It is a difficult masterpiece to which I return at least once a year to read in full. Here is what he writes: "There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is." Emerson wrote this, my friends, right after his 3-year-old son died. What is he saying, then? He is saying he wishes he could penetrate true pain conceptually, verbally, emotionally--to be it, confess it, live anyway, live period. Instead, there is for us all this inaccessibility to our own grief--and how, and why, and to what good?

Emerson then goes to the bone, referring, obviously, to his dead little innocent beautiful son: "So it is with this calamity: it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature." This is what he writes about his most precious little boy, who's just died. It seems strange that grief would be characterized chiefly as inability to grieve, but there you are. And, my dears, here we are . . . no less in the same situation so long as we hide from ourselves and one another, which inevitably we must do when most ill, but do not have to do when we are at least recovering.

I find during illness that illness teaches me nothing. So when I'm well, I go searching, on some level, for what I think I was supposed to be learning. I try to penetrate the pain, in myself and in others, openly. In order to do what? In order that we may be truly alive. In order to touch truth. In order to feel something besides the illusoriness of feeling and the emotional avoidances of "fellow" sufferers.

Here is what I wrote elsewhere a few weeks ago:

Flu rolled on, gathering in sequelae of a common cold and persistent cough, then rolled through weeping black fog sufficient to swell up a full flush of bronchitis and fever.

The black resulting horror of a bloom is in my mouth, it is my mouth, it is large as a magnolia bloom in its obscenely excessive sheer size, eclipsing pale face, upstaging eyes all pupil blackness and mute.

Three weeks, and as usual, illness teaches me nothing, except how powerless grief, illness, loss, or fear is to teach anything useful, translatable, or even palpable. It is all nothing, not even experience.

I imagine that death will be just as meaningless as a process, and that whatever insights pretend to claim the distinction of being considered, much less recorded in prose, happen in the workaday light of ruddy cheeks and wheelbarrows full of violet flats to set in the earth. You know: the distorted sense that is our time. In illness, we are already out of time.

Emerson says, "Grief never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers." Such is my esteem for honesty above all else, though it may cost me friends. Though it may be misread as mere "attitude." Though the sickest among you may crawl away to silence, disdaining me as cruel for saying so.