Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  In this frame of mind I tell my daughter to hurry up. She tells me to stop rushing her. I tell her she is wasting time and not taking school seriously. She tells me that this exchange is the precise reason she wishes that I had not brought the family to LA to join me. She starts to cry as I drive. I feel a rush of steam between my ears. I am like one of those Looney Tunes cartoons from the seventies where the maddened animal character literally becomes a steam train of rage and flies about wrecking stuff. I tell her that she is selfish. She cries and blurts out that my anger is abuse and a mark of damage and poor parenting. Her very words! By now I am seeing red, and that last contribution from her is a red rag waved in front of me. The traffic is terrible on Pico Boulevard, too many cars and too many red lights, and hardly any movement. I tell her that she is spoiled rotten. She cries harder. She says that she wishes she did not have me for a father and that any other adult would do for a father except me. By now her face is red and her nose is streaming as much as her eyes. The car is full of our static. I glance at her and freeze. I do not have to pull over since we are hardly moving. I say to her that I am sorry that she is right and I take back everything that I said. I tell her that I am under pressure. I apologize profusely and offer her my prized handkerchief from my jacket top pocket (I cannot get at the one in my trouser back pocket). She takes it and blows copious amounts of snot into it and folds it and dries the spigots of her eyes. She says she is sorry too. That she feels pressure and sadness because of my cancer. That she does not want me to die, that she hardly knows me well and loves me and wants her father, me, and no one else to be her father. Now I am the one in tears and with no handkerchief I sleeve my eyes clear. Thank goodness for LA’s grinding traffic or stops and starts and low-mileage cruises that require little of the driver except the will to defray boredom. I ask her forgiveness. She says that there is nothing to forgive. I reassure her that the cancer will not take me from her, not without a fight. That I have a lot of good medicine on my side and so much love from her and her brothers and her mother, and with my army of love ranged against cancer, I will be unbeatable. We hug across the gearbox console. I tell her I love her very much and she tells me she loves me too. I drive around the block of her school for her red face to clear and for her to stop hiccupping with upset. I beg her to forget everything bad that sprang out of my mouth. That I am a fool at the mercy of my diagnosis. That I lack the necessary control to be a proper father to her. She says she wants me to be her dad, none other, and that she loves me and she will be fine in a minute or two. She offers me my soaked handkerchief. I tell her to keep it in case she needs it again. She says that she is fine. We have never been closer and with such intensity—thanks to my cancer. We are late for the start of her school day. I tell her if she feels bad just call me or text and I will leave work and pick up her in under ten minutes. She says she will be fine, really. That I shouldn’t worry. That she feels better. She asks me how I am doing. I tell her I feel better too. We part with a brief lock of eyes and hurried mutual I-love-yous.

  Thank you, cancer. I called you a fucker for turning up uninvited and ruining what was supposed to be the party of my life. Now I thank you. You turn up the intensity in my routine domesticity.

  There is a dream—isn’t there always?—of me walking into a bar or restaurant or assembly room of some sort with a counter and staff, and crowded with customers. I see all this through the brick wall and oak door—as dreams tend to allow the dreamer to do. Two featureless people are ahead of me. A man and a woman, going by the gender-specific clothes each wears: a gray suit for him and a pencil skirt and frilly blouse for her. First, the man enters the crowded space and someone behind the counter rings a bell and announces, Man with prostate in the house, and everyone whoops, applauds, and hollers approval. The same happens for the woman ahead of me. She walks in and again the bell rings and another voices shouts, Woman with ovaries in the house, followed by the same noises of approval. I enter and no one looks up, no bell announces my arrival, nothing. I wait for an age to get served or find a table or whatever the fuck reason made me go public with my cancer in the first place.

  I wake up still stuck in that bastard dream though all alone this time. I reach down to my crotch area as if to console my anatomy shamed in public (in a climate of prostatism or ovarianism as the prejudice might be known were it to exist in the real), only to find nothing there, all of my block and tackle gone, an empty region, just a pelvis covered in skin. I wake up with a start and a frown. Man with or without a cancerous prostate, I wish to stay out of the limelight. The only recognition I want is from life, is life, its continuity in me.

  It’s not the first time a bar features in my life. Way back in the late seventies, ’79 or ’80, my friend Geoff and I were about to enter a bar and he stopped and asked me, which one of us should be the first to enter the pub, the fag or the wog? My frame of mind that evening did not allow for a hierarchy of our oppression in that slave-memory-allergic city of my birth. I said both and we squeezed into the door and heads turned as they do in these small turnstile-like settings and we got to the bar and ordered a couple of pints and the pub settled back into its indifference. No one questioned that these two specimens of the male gender possessed prostates. What mattered more was the fact that one was black and the other was gay (my friend was headlights full-on camp).

  Fact is, I have to lose my prostate and soon or keep it housed in me and risk its wildfire spread throughout my body. So toll those bells for me. Man sans prostate it has to be. Necessarily missing a part to continue my part in life. I catch myself just in time. Pull back on those reins before I gallop ahead of myself. Whoa, there, buddy. What an opera queen! Listening to too much Sylvester. More Liberace, I see the glittery cape trailing behind me as I rest my forearm on my forehead and lament my situation. It’s me as Laurence Olivier playing Othello (when it should be Paul Robeson) in that black-and-white footage of big gestures and rolling eyes on a blackened face.

  Fuck that browbeating shit. Let me not whine, dear Lord. Take me down in a lasso and hog-tie me rather than let me lose my shit. I need every ounce of my energy to cope with this disease. Some room in my body and mind that I kept under lock and key all these years must now be broken open to release whatever it was I was saving up for a rainy day. I forget what is in that room. I know that there is such a place in me and that I kept it, saved it up, for a time just like this one that now presents itself as an ultimatum, drink this hemlock and lie down, place your head on this block, lower your neck for this noose, bare that chest for that bullet, and so on, as the cape comes back on and the stage lights flood in unison, and the darkness that I look out on from my stage might be the calendar that has run out of days for me. Cancer wants a fight. I am ready for a fight.

  There is a shadow calendar that does not look outward at any clock for confirmation of its location in the day or night. It beats with a pulse and it moves with the flow of blood and the rhythm of a body on a stroll or run. This calendar’s measure, if lineated, might be spread across the entire space of a blank page with lines of varying length broken according to breath and the ability of the tongue to wrap around those clauses. Rather than flowing from the mind to the mechanics of the body to be broadcast to the world, that calendar informs and shapes thinking; that is, it travels from the body to the mind, where it finds linguistic expression.

  Could it be geared toward cure? Are its coordinates amenable to alteration dictated by a mind in search of obliquity, the intangible, and numinous, as ways to marshal resistance to virulent and authoritarian disease? I ask because my daughter on the way to school tuned in her phone to my wife’s Bluetooth system in the car that I borrowed for the day. Up blared this tune with a bold bass and drum rhythm and a repeated phrase that my daughter bounced to in her seat, pulling on her seat belt and rocking the car. I found it infectious and joined in with a modified old-man bounce of my own. For a couple of traffic lights we were propelled by this song and swept up in a current of deligh
t. I was lost to myself, invisible to my disease, transported, as it were, to a plane of unselfconsciousness, akin to body without ego. Joy returned to my humble diseased machine.

  The fact that I incline to such waves of ebullience, that I am susceptible to the contagion of joyous transport of the self away from itself and into a shared mode of exuberance, belies my usual front of cool and calm. Meaning, that I wish to be in that place and space more often and by all means at my disposal, including my daughter’s natural effusive charm. I learn from her how to be uninhibited, how to make myself freely available to strategies for my cure that are otherwise seen as off the grid or inaccessible if not intangible and invisible. Those threads of meaning that shadow my calendar as if deliberately invoked by the material location of my days on a grid, that serve as counterpoints to all calendars by their very immateriality, their ethereal nature.

  How to swerve clear of a binary between seen and unseen, material and immaterial, physical and spiritual, and sustain its dialectical relations?I see this shadow world indebted to a plurality of sources. For example, on the creative front of poetry I depend on this shadow world’s intuited, phrasal, and clausal procedures that result in the poem. An intelligence that feels its way forward and relies on one step to generate the next. There is linear propulsion at work, velocity, and circular and deepening schemes as well, forward moves in terms of time passing and details accumulating, and a depth charge of exploration, as emotion deepens in complexity thanks to the passage of time marked by accruing detail.

  Force exerted by this creative outlook and inward gaze might be directed toward ill parts of the body in need of repair and restoration or transformation. If the body is full of regions of forgetting, neglect, and trauma, it may well equally be a repository for restorative powers and open to their deployment in sick areas of being. In league with meds I may be able to double down on my oppression and topple it from the inside. Not just something administered to my body from the outside into it as meds do; rather, an approach that emerges from the body itself, as if the body knows best what ails it and prescribes what it needs to cure its ailments.

  My voice rises from within me aided by breath (ribs and diaphragm), throat, tongue, and palate, and so on. The physics of my voice depends on an underlying awareness of intent to make a sound, perhaps from a thought, not quite conscious or willful. I feel the birth of sound in my body as it masses and rises, and I send it out into the world. In a similar way I may direct this curative thinking and sound to other parts of me in need of their particular magnetic resonance, their vibration of cure. Of course my voice (as a coalition of thought and sound) is not alone. Other forces conspire with it and join its train of insurgency against disease.

  They include the arc of positive thinking that emits positive vibrations. The yoga of movement that releases locked-up and knotted energies trapped in pockets of the body so that the body feels elated and lighter without those negative energies and taxing thoughts. And the catharsis of creative composition, of making something whose end is not known but whose procedure pays dividends to the person engaged with it. I place my trust in the shadow history of knowing, which is not knowing, or unknowingness, as properties for this realignment of the spirit, whose recalibration cures my sickness.

  I remind myself to beware of willful forgetting, a kind of amnesia that amounts to a neglect of the spiritual, of memory as a contract and bond with the past needed in the present to shape a more purposeful future. Forgetting has its charms when it comes to the fresh feel to a familiar encounter, its sensuous delights; and forgetting has its benefits, say, in the face of a surfeit of trauma that traps the sufferer in a cycle of despair. Forgetting as a prerequisite for a traumatized community to continue onward and for it to become unstuck sounds plausible, but the better tool of remembering is its portal to dig deeper to recover something curative and familiar. The maxim that we forget so that we can remember at a deeper level places forgetting at the center of any act of memory, there to help shape how we remember.

  The difference resides in Keats’s notion of negative capability, that place of uncertainty and insecurity where poems languish and grow. Keats wants us to stay with insecurity rather than run back to certainty and miss out on poetry. Imagination thrives in that uncertain mindset. Poetry abounds. All the poet has to do is trust in discombobulating feelings rather than run from trickster emotions back to familiar ground. I say all, as if it is all or nothing, and knowing that is a lot to ask of a mind invested in certainty. Ludic coordinates threaten imbalance, even breakdown. An invitation to stay in that space for the procurement of poetry might be asking for trouble.

  Keats tells us that we can grow from the exposure to uncertainty, as poets and people. Could there be room for cure in this tremulous place of uncertainty? Is going there an act of opening the self even more to unwanted damage, more bombardment of the nervous system with poison? For Keats it results in a negation of self and identification with the subject of the poem so that the poem enacts that assumed subjectivity. Alan Watts answers the injunction with a wise quotient written into the insecure, in his The Wisdom of Insecurity. The obverse, security, is the illusion. Insecurity is the normal condition for all affairs, material and otherwise. We dupe ourselves into believing that the trappings of materialism somehow underwrite the spiritual, actually lead to satisfaction. Watts argues that we cannot get any satisfaction—without conceding ground to the Rolling Stones’ clarion call for sex and more sex—without taking the risk of walking away from the self. The frustration is existential for Watts, an ego invested in too much devotion to the materialist quest as a substitute for spiritual vacuum.

  Watts and Keats fold into my arsenal of tools for me to tackle my trade and standoff with cancer. The rhythm of recall of these early readings that helped me find a place in my body and in the space where I lived, that provided solace, might be the lesson in itself. Not a vehicle that conveys something but the structure of the thing. My feelings in my body know what I mean when I say the word rhythm. My body remembers rhythm as tied up with feelings of transportation, of goodness. That rhythm of transport and transformation carries with it such riches that surely they might help me with my quest for cure. If I am true to Watts I know I must be careful not to strive too much after a thing that defies being pinned down. I know that the condition may be entirely psychological, a mental plane of existence, a state of mind, rather than a property to be captured and deployed in my favor.

  So I chant, sing, dance, breathe purposefully, move with a method to my madness, voice with direction, all in the hope of mustering an atmosphere conducive to cure. I seek the numinous without setting out on a quest (a quest would be to lose even before I begin my journey). I conjure the spiritual, a wave rather than a straight line. It wobbles like prodded Jell-O that soaks up the velocity of the prod without collapsing. It trembles like leaves that give shape to the wind by their frolicking. It hums as that same breeze squeezes between blades of grass. Cobweb strung overnight beaded with morning dew where light plays and the web vibrates like an instrument. There it is once more in a stick plunged and held in a clear pool so that the stick bends and waves underwater, bends with water, wavers with light. The blast of energy from all these things felt and seen turns toward my disease and drives it from my body.

  I cast aside doubt. Usually, doubt powers my art. I generate poetry, fiction, plays, and essays as a direct result of doubt playing on my mind. Doubt makes me begin again on another poem or story rather than settle for what already exists in a library stuffed to capacity and beyond. Doubt invites me to dare desecrate the unblemished beauty of a blank page whose startled look invites the gaze and diverts attention from less challenging undertakings. Thanks to doubt I have the ability to start all over again from a new angle, renewed each time by fertile doubt to tease out a new question or sensory haunting or memory.

  The creative doubt into which I plunge fosters the kind of insecurity that is necessary for literary production. But the s
ame doubt and insecurity, when turned against my belief in a cure for my cancer, wreak havoc on my mind. I pivot between inviting those two conditions into my life for their benefits without succumbing to their negative effects. Doubt turned against me by my disease is a disaster for my prognosis. I begin to feel insecure, in the sense of being unhinged by my cancer. As a result, the floodgates of gloom open. The bad feeling makes me wonder if there is any point to all the meds and marshaling of a personal existential prescription for my return to health. With doubt working against me, I stumble and founder in the face of the disease. I see my calendar as half doors, top and bottom halves that close on me if I duck under the top half or climb over the bottom half. Doors that leave me in the dark, excluded from the march of time and the quantum leaps of thought and feeling, and from the spiral of imagery that progresses to newer and more profound depths of insight. Doubt on the side of my disease, as my enemy, once my friend, may be the most damaging force of all.

  I can’t account for the switch of doubt from friend to enemy. Nietzsche’s saying that what does not kill you makes you strong may have something to do with the change, that somehow the property and quality of most benefit to my creative life could be the force for accelerating my descent into my victim status in the face of my disease. Doubt powers faith. I have no faith in the conventional sense, so the reason for keeping doubt anchored in that binary relation to my psyche appears to be lost to me.