by Brian Dillon
One of my earliest memories sees, or rather hears, my mother expressing as best she could a sensation that at the time I took for a real, physical, agony. She felt, she said (I can picture the scene now: we are in the sitting room of our house, and I have inadvertently done something to worsen her already fragile condition), as if her head would explode. Years later, while she was still alive, I would revise my initial horror at this description, imagining that there was a strict distinction between mental and bodily pain, that this feeling of being on the point of a real, physical detonation was in fact a metaphor for a less distinct psychic unease. Much later again, I would know that she meant nothing so figurative: depression was precisely as palpable a pain as she had desperately tried to convey to the frightened child in front of her. But I think I first began to understand the complete disarray into which her body had drifted over the years at the moment I knew that her final bout of depression had been brought on by the treatment for her scleroderma. And I think I grasped then, for the first time, the state of confusion in which she had existed for so long: each symptom, each setback adding to her sense of inhabiting a body entirely out of control. As that last mental storm had closed in, she had begun to say that she was going to die soon. I no longer recall whether I thought she really believed this, or whether (because it was not the first time: she had often in the past intimated that she would be ‘better off dead’) I understood it as a part of her depression. All I remember is my reaction: I simply wanted her to stop saying it; at those moments, I would be overcome by fury, an anger directed not at the circumstance, not at her illness, but at her.
¶ ‘a sudden change, and alteration to worse’
In the years after her diagnosis, my mother’s illness seems to me to have ruled our household. This cannot be completely true, but ours seemed a life cut off from those around us. Nabokov’s inversion of Tolstoy’s famous dictum concerning unhappy families – ‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike’ – has always seemed to me too glib in its paradox. Misfortune, surely, finds unique and inventive forms. An unhappy family feels itself cut off not only from those happy families of legend, but quite painfully aloof too from the miseries of others. A common cliché has it that we can never really know the secrets of a family other than our own. Who knows, asks an ordinary, half-prurient wisdom, what goes on behind closed doors? Less tangible still, though, is the reality of what a family feels like from the inside. It feels, in short, different. I recall distinctly my sense, very early on, that my family was unlike others, and can easily trace that rather shameful sensation. My parents, a little older than the others I saw around me (my father was nearly forty when they married, my mother thirty-three; though I have always, till this minute, when I wrote them for the first time, added a year to their ages), seemed noticeably to have arrived too late on the scene of my childhood. They were a little too austere in their parental strictures, a touch too pious in their religious observance, a decade or two behind the times when compared to the families of my schoolmates. We had no car, took no foreign holidays at a time when that said something about one’s outlook and aspirations; my parents dressed as if the sixties had never happened. In all of this, they were far from eccentric, but such details can seem, to a child, to mark a family as distinctly and embarrassingly odd. We were already out of step with the world around us when my mother’s disease sent us staggering and sprawling. Although I can pin the change down to no definite date, I know that the beginning of my mother’s illness marked an alteration in the way I experienced the chronology of family life, and a shift, therefore, in what and how I am able to remember. Everything I recall is measured according to the advance of her disorder.
In his book A Fortunate Man, John Berger has described very precisely the loneliness of the patient who faces a drastic diagnosis:
As soon as we are ill we fear that our illness is unique. We argue with ourselves and rationalize, but a ghost of the fear remains. And it remains for a very good reason. The illness, as an undefined force, is a potential threat to our very being and we are bound to be highly conscious of the uniqueness of that being. The illness, in other words, shares in our uniqueness.
The difference spreads; it draws those around the suffering person into its obscure circuit, so that they too begin to feel themselves living in another time, as if a whole family had been flung out of the orbit of normality and sent spinning into space. Berger writes:
The objective coordinates of time and space, which are necessary to fix a presence, are relatively stable. But the subjective experience of time is liable to be so grossly distorted – above all by suffering – that it becomes, both to the sufferer and to any person partially identifying himself with the sufferer, extremely difficult to correlate with time proper.
The family starts to live in accordance with another rhythm, a variable tempo marked by the organizing of hospital appointments, the dull terror of an encroaching diagnosis, the sudden, precipitous speeding up of time occasioned by an emergency in the middle of the night. You live as if time has been splayed and dissected; the rhythm of the calendar – the predictability of future dates hovering in the white space of time yet unlived – feels like it has been drawn into its constituent parts. The future seems both more defined and less knowable. On the one hand: the certainty of appointments, consultations, courses of treatment; on the other: the absolute enigma of an unguessable outcome.
Somewhere between these two incompatible times there unfolds that oxymoronic chronology: the ‘progress’ of a disease. The brute irony of the term is only the first of the temporal paradoxes in which we are caught. We hurtle towards some definitive end point; we are trapped in our own private, uniform and undeviating time. But other strange chronologies proliferate around us. The world speeds up (‘a sudden change, and alteration to worse’, writes Donne) but decelerates too, in accordance with the sudden hope of remission or relief, those times when it seems that a conventional gearing of time is possible again, if even for a brief interlude. In the latter case, everything else speeds up: life goes ‘on’, for a while. What do such dramatic and unpredictable shifts do to our retrospective purchase on events? How can memory begin to reshape a time so creased and stretched? How to recall days, weeks, months and years in which those abstract markers have themselves lost their meaning? I have to stop myself from interpreting everything as a function of the effect of my mother’s illness on our lives. But even those periods when it seemed to abate for a while are, from the perspective of the present, marked by what I know is to come.
¶ Anatomical model
In 1908, the philosopher Henri Bergson wrote:
we may speak of the body as an ever-advancing boundary between the future and the past, as a pointed end, which our past is continually driving forward into our future. Whereas my body, taken at a single moment, is but a conductor interposed between the objects which influence it and those on which it acts, it is, nevertheless, when replaced in the flux of time, always situated at the very point where my past expires in a deed.
Bergson has in mind the merest sliver of time, which is nonetheless space enough for a body to move, to refashion and reorient itself according to the immediate boundaries of past and future. Our bodies, says Bergson, are constantly remaking themselves as they career forward into the unknown, an acceleration that depends on the notion of a vanishing present, an almost invisible instant in which we forget ourselves, as it were, in order to become ourselves again. My body, thus conceived, is nothing but the conduit, as it reaches out into the world, between here and there, then and now (although this ‘now’ is exactly the problem: where is it?). I forget myself in order to invent myself. I might say that my body as I experience it – in its weariness or exhilaration, its labour or lassitude – is composed of these little vanishing acts: moments of a being which is in fact non-being, only put together in retrospect.
Actually, it is absurd to say that I recognize or truly experie
nce this process. If it were consciously felt, my body would surely cease to function, seized at the most fundamental level by the kind of debilitating self-awareness I glimpse, for example, when I pay too much attention to my own breathing. Bergson’s image of a body at one with itself only because it is, in time, unhinged from itself, is perhaps so compelling because I immediately want to extrapolate from it to other, vaster expanses of time. What is it that a body remembers or forgets, considered in its extension into days, months, years? My body seems to repeat, at a level very distant from the microcosm on which Bergson is focussed, the same dialectic of memory and forgetting. I live, according to this wider timeframe, exactly the same oscillation between memory and ignorance. And in my case, the process has a name: hypochondria.
In two cities, a handful of hospitals and several medical practices, there still survive, I suppose, plump folders which attest to my prodigious medical imagination. Together, they would make up a fat autobiographical volume in which the protagonist – a decidedly unreliable narrator – was forever on the point of giving up the ghost, announcing an imminent demise clearly at odds with his talent for sketching new pages and chapters in the chronicle of his decline. This comic narrative of serial delusion – and who knows what profusion of exasperated footnotes a succession of outwardly patient professionals has scribbled in its margins – has now, in my memory, the jerky predictability of a silent movie. The hapless hero speeds, wide-eyed, towards all manner of lethal encounters, only to emerge dishevelled but unharmed, ready for the next absurd interlude. Comedy, says Bergson, happens when a living body acts like a machine. I seem to have spent a good deal of my life submitting my body to the preposterous mechanical repetition of its own imagined end.
I can still feel the overheated waiting rooms in which, time and again, I sat in airless dread of an impending interview, completely convinced that behind a closed door or down a quietly carpeted hallway a doctor was putting aside my notes and setting his or her face into whatever sort of expression it is that one uses to greet a young man on the edge of disaster. I imagined these messengers from my curtailed future to be surprised but professionally intrigued by the extent or swiftness of my disease, somewhat sadly noting the disparity between age and prognosis. I seem to have specialized in contracting the symptoms of a patient three or four times my age. This never occurred to me at the time; my illnesses, I considered, were entirely arbitrary, and therefore perfectly plausible. Why, I reasoned, should fate not afflict me with such ailments? At nineteen, as a boiling summer stretched towards my now unthinkable entry into university, every joint in my body seized up. A stiff, aching knee signalled the start of a general stricture: within days, my spine was a twisted rope of pain, fraying into lesser agonies which eventually unravelled as far as the last joints of my fingers. I spent a fortnight huddled and fearful, eking out the hot days coiled like a superannuated embryo in front of the television, before dragging myself to our family doctor. Who discovered, of course, nothing: except, perhaps, for an unseasonably pallid youth whom he might have done well, had he been less reserved and given a little more thought to family history, to remind that crippling and degenerative disease was rather rare in one of my age. My mind was set on rheumatoid arthritis, though I imagined also certain complications that would ensure a swift decline. But at no point was the warm air of an austere Georgian consulting room disturbed by any reference to my mother’s death three years earlier, nor to my father’s recent retirement following the sudden onset of suspected heart disease. I left the surgery thinking only of my own unexpectedly spared body, and walked several miles round the city centre, unsure whether the giddiness that kept me moving was elation, embarrassment or the still persisting fear of a pain that had seemed so real only hours before.
A year later, I turned up at the same surgery with exactly the same symptoms. In the middle of my first university exams, the same dull ache traversed my whole body once again, becoming keener and more worrying as it colonized each joint, until eventually I was racked and immobile on my bed. This time, there were blood tests and a more thorough articulation of my unwilling limbs. And again: nothing. I think it was then that I vaguely intuited a correlation between my ailment (which at some level I knew to be fake) and the anniversary of my mother’s death. Still, this knowledge did nothing to retard the elaboration of a predictable pattern. Over the next few years, I settled into an almost annual habit. In my early twenties, the onset of summer almost always brought with it a diffuse unease that slowly gathered and refined itself to a sharp point of fear. In solitary hours (my continued studies made sure of too many of these) that fear was refracted into innumerable rays of cold light, illuminating, so I thought, the latest signs of my certain doom. The pattern was always the same: a passing discomfort nursed into darting pain, in turn sublimed in the crucible of a sleepless night into a malign growth or implacable genetic death sentence. Weeks would pass during which I tried to keep my suspicions at bay; I would give vague hints to those around me that I felt unwell, but never come clean about my real fears. It was only when I had reached a point of absolute conviction, certain that my symptoms could denote nothing short of whatever disorder had gripped my imagination this time, that I would make an appointment with a doctor. A few of these fantasized ailments lasted for years. If some of my many crises were easily traced to recent family history (rushed to a cardiac unit, I dragged with me the ghost of my father), others I can only marvel at now, in their baroque inventiveness. Tiny moles grew to deep-rooted melanomic proportions under my gaze; faint rashes flourished, lurid and efflorescent, into lifetimes of disfigurement.
Thinking now of those years of habitual dread, I regret less my misery and fear than I do the sickening waste of time, the hours I spent in dazed and appalled concentration on symptoms which disappeared with even the most cursory examination. I regret those days and weeks spent glumly suspended above my own life, waiting, idiotically, for it to drift far enough away from me to feel that I had entered another, private and almost mythical world. However convinced I might have been, on each occasion, of my impending demise, I was addicted in fact less to melancholy and morbidity than to the ceaselessly replicated moment of resurrection. Emerging from a doctor’s surgery with a fresh assurance of my good health, I immediately forgot the horror of only hours before, and could happily return to a life that was not, after all, unpromising. Months, occasionally a whole year (though never more), could go by without interruption, and I found, several times over, that I could talk blithely of my hypochondria as a thing of the past.
Hypochondria, like addiction, is a way of structuring time. It provides a reliable – because supposedly immovable, fatalistic – timetable to those who feel themselves at a loose end between past and future. By a devious logic, the hypochondriac turns his or her feeling of not getting enough from life into an extravagant demand, simply, for more. More life. Nothing of the everyday can match the exhilaration of rebirth that seizes one when the imagined disorder fails to become real. Fixing the date of his good or bad news, the hypochondriac says: from this moment on, my life will change, for better or worse. And the worst, sometimes, seems better than no change at all. But the ruse is compromised, counter-productive. The high doesn’t last, and when, inevitably, the ordinariness of things begins to press too hard again, ever more elaborate fears are called for. Over time, your sense of chronology shifts, as if you were really sick and out of phase with the world around you, like a tape recorder looped back on itself, playing and recording at the same time, until eventually all is meaningless noise.
What is it that this noise is designed to drown out? Feeding back on itself, turning a fearfully lived moment into the cacophonous rehearsal of other, identical moments, my mind moved further and further away from the original recording. At the time, the signals were scrambled and undecipherable. I failed to connect them with other, earlier stutterings of my imagination. I had quite forgotten the origins of my fears in a way of experiencing my own body which was,
I now acknowledge, a way of reckoning with the agonies of my mother’s. It had been a matter, I now recall, of how I lived in my own skin.
¶ Desiccated
I am about twelve years old, and I dream, consistently over a period of several months, this scene. It is morning in my bedroom (the room where I am dreaming). I wake up suddenly, violently shaken (from a dream within a dream?) by some as yet obscure discomfort. As often in nightmares, I both inhabit the dreamed body and see it from a distance: an impossible vantage point, identical to the perspective claimed by those who insist on their out-of-body experiences. What I see from my unlikely position close to the ceiling is this: I wake and immediately, frenziedly, throw back the bedclothes to reveal a body covered from head to toe with livid red marks which are already, in the morning air, hardening to a kind of crust. I stare for a moment, horrified, and my dreaming mind feels the mixture of pain and itch which my dreamt self suffers. The image lasts only for an instant, before the scene shifts to my parents’ adjacent bedroom, where I stand weeping tears which sting my raw skin, and saying something I can never hear, no matter how often the dream repeats itself. My parents, indistinct at the other side of the room, remain silent.
The early years of my adolescence were ruled by my skin. Well before the onset of an ordinarily pustular pubescence (acne vulgaris: the terminology seems calculated to add to the adolescent’s grubby shame), I had begun to live on the surface of a body that gave itself away in frightening and humiliating ways. I must have been about ten when my scalp began to itch, flaking off in a case of dandruff which obstinately resisted all treatments. I itched like the damned. My mother spent hours trying to comb away the evidence. Huge flakes of skin migrated from my scalp to the surface of my hair and from there to my clothes, pillows, to anything I touched. I remember whole afternoons during school holidays vanishing in blizzards of my own skin as I tried to shake away the peelings of my pain (I discovered that there was a state of itchiness indistinguishable from pain). I was adrift in ashy debris, a whirling star chart of my humiliation.
