Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether.
–Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World: A Memoir (2013)
I promised myself yesterday that I wouldn’t mention my recent diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer in today’s post. I figured yesterday’s post said enough. But I came across the passage above from Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, and felt that I needed to comment on the effect of the disease on time for me at this point.
Her words instantly struck a sharp chord in me when I first read them. The past several months, especially the last month or so, have found my mind racing at breakneck speed. I feel as though the big hourglass containing all the time of my life had been suddenly pierced. The grains of time are spilling out freely now and my mind is desperately trying to find a way to repair the leak so that as little time as possible is lost.
I have always known that time is limited for us all. But until I saw it spilling from my own hourglass, that seemed like a philosophical concept that you study from afar. A cold object to be held up and examined.
It now seemed real and my mind panicked in trying to find a solution or at least a competent repairperson to step in and take charge in making my hourglass somewhat whole once more.
It is here that time suddenly felt like it stopped completely even as it sped away in my mind. It was obvious that I would be dependent on the healthcare system, the repair shop of our physical lives. But it moves in a slow and often opaque manner that seems far removed from the rhythm and time the mind is expecting.
Every day, every minute, felt interminable, filled with the nervous anticipation of the wait. Every minute seemed to have 90 seconds and every hour 90 minutes. I often found myself sitting motionless, almost paralyzed as I waited for some movement to take place in the space outside of my control. Part of my brain was telling me that I had to try to ignore it and get to work while the other half was flashing red DANGER lights and blaring sirens.
It was like being caught exactly in the space between the fight-or-flight response. My creative mind felt shut down. My brushes and paints sat unmoved on my painting tables. The same canvas has been on my easel for weeks now, prepared to go but untouched.
It feels like this logjam of time will be with me for a while longer, until the appointments of the coming weeks establish the course of treatment showing me a path forward.
I suspect many of you who have been in similar situations with your own health issues will understand what I am saying. You know there is a problem and want to repair it.
I have said before that artists often come to be because that is the only way they understand how to solve the problems they perceive. In a gallery talk several years ago, I spoke about a passage from a Virginia Woolf book where she recounted three episodes from her youth that led her to becoming a writer. Two filled her with despair, pain, and hopelessness, an ugly physical confrontation with her brother and the suicide of a neighbor. The third was in the recognition that came in observing that a flower outside their door was whole in itself as well as connected to the whole of the earth. It was in itself the union of all things.
The first two awful experiences showed her that the world and people were sometimes broken. The wholeness of the flower showed her that there was a purpose and reason in our being and that she must try, as a writer, to use that reason and purpose to somehow repair the broken world.
I understand her thought completely. I think a lot of artists– and non-artists– feel that way, that their purpose is in healing the world somehow, even in a tiny way. Because even the tiniest flower has meaning as part of the whole.
In her book, Moments of Being, Woolf ends the section containing this episode with the following concluding passage. I think it speaks volumes:
From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.
I don’t know if this post explains anything. Maybe it is just a release for me, one that might allow me to break out of the creative paralysis this episode has brought on. I sure hope so.
I need to get my hourglass fixed so I can get back to trying to repair the small part of this world within my reach. To make things whole once more.
PS: Many thanks to everyone who reached out to me yesterday. I was most touched and will be working on getting back to everyone today. Hey, at least. that’s doing something. And I promise, no cancer talk tomorrow!
Redtree Times 