a plea to Atropos
Lord, You searched me and You know.
These words begin Psalm 139, considered one of the most introspective in the canonical collection. This beautiful, beautiful poem reaches across centuries--imagine them unrolling, the dating of the psalms is a fool's errand but we can venture to think of the First Commonwealth, the Return to Zion. The psalms were produced by many different poets, over more than half a millennium, perhaps beginning during the tenth century BC, the latest no later than the fifth or, take another hundred years, the fourth century BC. By the late first century BC, the Book of Psalms was so central to the scriptural canon that in Luke 24:44 it is mentioned together with the Torah and the Prophets as one of the three primary categories of the sacred writings. So tells me Robert Alter, whose translation of the Book of Psalms is dear to me.
The oldest surviving description of cancer is written on a papyrus from around 1600 B.C. The hieroglyphics record a probable case of breast cancer: "a bulging tumor...like touching a ball of wrappings." Under treatment, the scribe writes "none."
Hippocrates used the words carcinos and carcinoma to describe tumors. In Greek, these words refer to a crab, perhaps the spread of the disease reminded the ancient physician of the lengthy pincers of the crab. I think of crabs scuttling for shelter when under siege, furrowing in the sand to hide. Hippocrates himself lived between 460 and 370 BC.
For you created my innermost parts,
wove me in my mother's womb.
The poem astonishes me in its embrace of biology and rapture at once.
The God of this Psalm is present when the speaker began, "when I was made in a secret place,/knitted in the utmost depths." The literal sense of the Hebrew phrase is "in the depths of the earth." The Aramaic Targum rendered the phrase flatly as kereisa de'ima, "mother's womb."
For me, "a secret place" where we are knit together evokes sex, genetics, the dark night of Genesis from which God knitted together earth, and the animals, and then Adam, and from Adam, Eve. I think of the Moirae, or Fates--the three ancient crones charged with the destinies of all living beings, each destiny imagined as a string. Clotho spun the string that represented the life of each human; Lachesis would measure its length to determine the span of the lifetime, and Atropos, the eldest woman, would cut the string at the time measured, ending that human's life. Rumor has it that even Zeus feared the Fates.
The Lord of Psalm 139 is omnipresent--"If I soar to the heavens, You are there,/If I bed down in Sheol--there you are."
The Lord of Psalm 139 tells me not to fear the dark. "Should I say, "Yes, darkness will swathe me, and the night will be light for me."
Alone on the road in front of my house, the dark plummy night illuminates, comforts.
"Darkness itself will not darken for You,/and the night will light up like the day,/the dark and the light will be one."
The Psalm is capable of being read as breathtakingly modern. It could be a dissertation on genetics, the helix spiraling through the poem, save that here, the Lord knows all. "[i]n Your book all was written down." My EGFR mutation, which has allowed me to stay on this earth this past nine months, was knitted into me in a secret place by a Lord who will not abandon me, who is incapable of abandoning me. Indeed, it is not possible for me to abandon this Lord, although I may have turned my head away, may have not listened until now, when my cancer has forced me to look for Atropos, with her gleaming silver shears. "I awake" the Psalm says, "and am still with You."
This week a very small Chinese woman attended Qi Gong class; she has come to class before, but doesn't speak much English, so we mostly smile at each other. There were just three of us in class. Me, with my shorn head and flat, black clogs, my black leggings and my sweatshirt which reads: "I'm a warrior. I'm stronger than I've ever been." And the instructor, who has the beauty of Heidi, her hair in thick plaits, defiantly un-modern, her shirts with embroidered plackets and her skirts long. She is new to teaching Qi Gong, and stops to consult her notebook, with its carefully penned lesson plan. We don't mind.
At the end of class, we stand in a circle, our right hand hovering over the person to our right's left hand, our left hand hovering underneath the person to our left's right hand. Heidi tells us to imagine balls of chi nestled between our hands. In this way, we share our chi, which we have cleansed in our exercises that morning, reaching into the earth and sky for chi--which I imagine as liquid light. We ask the earth to give us what we wish for most fervently, for ourselves or for others. The very small Chinese woman smiles at me beatifically. Tears stream down my face and I'm not sure why, except that I feel small inside. Which is strange because I am two women in size compared to this little person next to me. I know she has cancer, it is why she is here. I can't tell what kind of cancer she has, although most of the women I meet at the center have breast cancer. I imagine a tiny crab scuttling across her small limbs, tucking itself into hiding in her breast, or perhaps her kidney, or maybe her brain.
After Qi Gong, I met with a minister who comes to the healing center. She believes in Jesus Christ--in a way that I like. She has room for dinosaurs in her way of thinking about Christ. We talk for a bit about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a Jesuit priest who also trained as a paleontologist and geologist. I was thinking about him when I sat down with the minister because I had just been with the Chinese woman, thinking about how strange it was to go from the Qi Gong class to meeting with someone who has devoted her life to Jesus Christ. Being Jewish, and traveling in the circles I do, I don't spend much time with people like the minister. Anyhow, Teilhard was part of the group of people who excavated the Peking Man Site--hence the broad, almost ridiculous connection to the Chinese woman in my class.
In the early 1930s, all manner of fossils, including both human teeth and bones as well as stone tools, were discovered in a cave at what came to be known as the Peking Man site at Zhoukoudian. The age of these fossils was estimated at between 500,000 and 300,000 years old. (Did I mention that the tool the Egyptians used to take out the tumor from the breast of the suffering Egyptian woman was a cauterizing tool called the fire drill?)
The analysis of the bones at the Peking Man excavation site led to certain claims about Homo Erectus, and the stages of human evolution, including claims that Homo Erectus used tools. I don't know much about it, but there is a whole debate, the kind of debate which generates dissertations year after year, about whether Homo Erectus used tools, about whether Peking Man was ancestral to modern humans, about whether Peking Man resembled modern Europeans more than modern Asians, and so on and so forth. I don't know anything much at all about any of these things, but what I do know was floating around in my head when I met with the minister and we spoke about Teilhard.
Of course I am drawn to Teilhard because he is a person of faith who is also a scientist, and I think that is remarkable whenever I find it. And that led me to Psalm 139 which has comforted me much of late. I have to believe in science, of course. I mean, believe in science in a way that others might believe in religion, because now, scientific discovery is the only way my string will be a little longer. So I suppose I am trying to have some faith that there will be some kind of clinical trial, some advance of immunotherapy or targeted chemotherapy, that allows me to live beyond the year or so left to me, according to the statistics, which are fuzzy but nonetheless sharply terrifying. At the same time, I have this feeling that my fate has already been sealed, and it is just a matter of time unfolding for me to see just what it is. That sounds fatalistic, but that's not how it feels. Within my fate, I feel lots of control. It's up to me to decide whether to take long walks with my dog, and to drink kale smoothies, and to take the medicine religiously, which means, on time, without food in my stomach for two hours before and two hours after (which doesn't feel, in the action, like religion at all), and it's up to me to decide how to spend my days and nights, whether that is huddled in a frightened ball, shivering in the dark night, worrying endlessly about my young children, my older children, my Kyle, who I believe loves me so fiercely, my larger circle of family and friends, or to have days carried out with a measure of serenity, me dressed up in the modern cancer warrior costume--the hoodie with the pointed message, the comfortable shoes, my worn copy of Emperor of all Maladies stuck into my satchel, along with my bottled water, my methadone, my tape to wrap my ravaged fingers, and my Book of Psalms, number 139 dog-eared so I can turn to it quickly.
I confess that when Heidi asked us to make our wishes for ourselves or for others, I did not wish for a peaceful planet, or for the war in Syria to end, or any of the countless selfless wishes I could have made. I greedily prayed to the Lord, to the glowing Chi, to the three fates for more life, more more more life.
Psalm 139 ends this way:
Search me, God, and know my heart,
probe me and know my mind.
And see if a vexing way be in me,
and lead me on the eternal way.
If it vexes God that I am unrepetantly thinking small, of my small boys, of my small life, then I will listen carefully to the presence I feel in the night, I will attend to the the gorgeous sadness in the eyes of my fellow travelers in Qi Gong class, the lilting comfort of my rabbi and my minister, and never the two shall meet, to the intellectual wanderings of Teilhard and his cosmic theories of being, to the poems--from the Psalms, to Dickinson, to Oliver--which have stood me in such good stead this almost year of cancer, and I will learn to think bigger, to think of strings woven into strands, my string braided in with my mother's string, and my grandmother's string, and my children's strings, weaving back through history to the Peking Man and his rudimentary tools, to the sober Egyptian surgeon, the ancient poet of God, the French Jesuit priest, weaving forward into an unknown future where my children's children will play together and hear stories about me, and how much I would have loved them, how I would have laughed with them, and baked bread for them, and wiped away their tears, and talked to them about love and family. Just as their mothers and fathers will do. This seems to me to be the eternal way, and I yearn to be known by God, to be seen and loved, as we all do.
I love to think of all of these humans in time, with their various tools, their fire drills and iron tools and papyrus scrolls, and typewriters, and boats from France to China, and our computers spinning out the human genome, and scientists bent over their microscopes, huddled at their screens, the crab of cancer scuttling across the sand, the skin, the sky. I can't help but think of Walt Whitman, and his own lust for life, Song o f Myself: I celebrate myself, and sing myself. And what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
To my children I direct them to the 52nd stanza, after Whitman bequeaths himself to the dirt to grow from under the grass he loves ("If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles)."
"Failing to fetch met at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you."
These words begin Psalm 139, considered one of the most introspective in the canonical collection. This beautiful, beautiful poem reaches across centuries--imagine them unrolling, the dating of the psalms is a fool's errand but we can venture to think of the First Commonwealth, the Return to Zion. The psalms were produced by many different poets, over more than half a millennium, perhaps beginning during the tenth century BC, the latest no later than the fifth or, take another hundred years, the fourth century BC. By the late first century BC, the Book of Psalms was so central to the scriptural canon that in Luke 24:44 it is mentioned together with the Torah and the Prophets as one of the three primary categories of the sacred writings. So tells me Robert Alter, whose translation of the Book of Psalms is dear to me.
The oldest surviving description of cancer is written on a papyrus from around 1600 B.C. The hieroglyphics record a probable case of breast cancer: "a bulging tumor...like touching a ball of wrappings." Under treatment, the scribe writes "none."
Hippocrates used the words carcinos and carcinoma to describe tumors. In Greek, these words refer to a crab, perhaps the spread of the disease reminded the ancient physician of the lengthy pincers of the crab. I think of crabs scuttling for shelter when under siege, furrowing in the sand to hide. Hippocrates himself lived between 460 and 370 BC.
For you created my innermost parts,
wove me in my mother's womb.
The poem astonishes me in its embrace of biology and rapture at once.
The God of this Psalm is present when the speaker began, "when I was made in a secret place,/knitted in the utmost depths." The literal sense of the Hebrew phrase is "in the depths of the earth." The Aramaic Targum rendered the phrase flatly as kereisa de'ima, "mother's womb."
For me, "a secret place" where we are knit together evokes sex, genetics, the dark night of Genesis from which God knitted together earth, and the animals, and then Adam, and from Adam, Eve. I think of the Moirae, or Fates--the three ancient crones charged with the destinies of all living beings, each destiny imagined as a string. Clotho spun the string that represented the life of each human; Lachesis would measure its length to determine the span of the lifetime, and Atropos, the eldest woman, would cut the string at the time measured, ending that human's life. Rumor has it that even Zeus feared the Fates.
The Lord of Psalm 139 is omnipresent--"If I soar to the heavens, You are there,/If I bed down in Sheol--there you are."
The Lord of Psalm 139 tells me not to fear the dark. "Should I say, "Yes, darkness will swathe me, and the night will be light for me."
Alone on the road in front of my house, the dark plummy night illuminates, comforts.
"Darkness itself will not darken for You,/and the night will light up like the day,/the dark and the light will be one."
The Psalm is capable of being read as breathtakingly modern. It could be a dissertation on genetics, the helix spiraling through the poem, save that here, the Lord knows all. "[i]n Your book all was written down." My EGFR mutation, which has allowed me to stay on this earth this past nine months, was knitted into me in a secret place by a Lord who will not abandon me, who is incapable of abandoning me. Indeed, it is not possible for me to abandon this Lord, although I may have turned my head away, may have not listened until now, when my cancer has forced me to look for Atropos, with her gleaming silver shears. "I awake" the Psalm says, "and am still with You."
This week a very small Chinese woman attended Qi Gong class; she has come to class before, but doesn't speak much English, so we mostly smile at each other. There were just three of us in class. Me, with my shorn head and flat, black clogs, my black leggings and my sweatshirt which reads: "I'm a warrior. I'm stronger than I've ever been." And the instructor, who has the beauty of Heidi, her hair in thick plaits, defiantly un-modern, her shirts with embroidered plackets and her skirts long. She is new to teaching Qi Gong, and stops to consult her notebook, with its carefully penned lesson plan. We don't mind.
At the end of class, we stand in a circle, our right hand hovering over the person to our right's left hand, our left hand hovering underneath the person to our left's right hand. Heidi tells us to imagine balls of chi nestled between our hands. In this way, we share our chi, which we have cleansed in our exercises that morning, reaching into the earth and sky for chi--which I imagine as liquid light. We ask the earth to give us what we wish for most fervently, for ourselves or for others. The very small Chinese woman smiles at me beatifically. Tears stream down my face and I'm not sure why, except that I feel small inside. Which is strange because I am two women in size compared to this little person next to me. I know she has cancer, it is why she is here. I can't tell what kind of cancer she has, although most of the women I meet at the center have breast cancer. I imagine a tiny crab scuttling across her small limbs, tucking itself into hiding in her breast, or perhaps her kidney, or maybe her brain.
After Qi Gong, I met with a minister who comes to the healing center. She believes in Jesus Christ--in a way that I like. She has room for dinosaurs in her way of thinking about Christ. We talk for a bit about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a Jesuit priest who also trained as a paleontologist and geologist. I was thinking about him when I sat down with the minister because I had just been with the Chinese woman, thinking about how strange it was to go from the Qi Gong class to meeting with someone who has devoted her life to Jesus Christ. Being Jewish, and traveling in the circles I do, I don't spend much time with people like the minister. Anyhow, Teilhard was part of the group of people who excavated the Peking Man Site--hence the broad, almost ridiculous connection to the Chinese woman in my class.
In the early 1930s, all manner of fossils, including both human teeth and bones as well as stone tools, were discovered in a cave at what came to be known as the Peking Man site at Zhoukoudian. The age of these fossils was estimated at between 500,000 and 300,000 years old. (Did I mention that the tool the Egyptians used to take out the tumor from the breast of the suffering Egyptian woman was a cauterizing tool called the fire drill?)
The analysis of the bones at the Peking Man excavation site led to certain claims about Homo Erectus, and the stages of human evolution, including claims that Homo Erectus used tools. I don't know much about it, but there is a whole debate, the kind of debate which generates dissertations year after year, about whether Homo Erectus used tools, about whether Peking Man was ancestral to modern humans, about whether Peking Man resembled modern Europeans more than modern Asians, and so on and so forth. I don't know anything much at all about any of these things, but what I do know was floating around in my head when I met with the minister and we spoke about Teilhard.
Of course I am drawn to Teilhard because he is a person of faith who is also a scientist, and I think that is remarkable whenever I find it. And that led me to Psalm 139 which has comforted me much of late. I have to believe in science, of course. I mean, believe in science in a way that others might believe in religion, because now, scientific discovery is the only way my string will be a little longer. So I suppose I am trying to have some faith that there will be some kind of clinical trial, some advance of immunotherapy or targeted chemotherapy, that allows me to live beyond the year or so left to me, according to the statistics, which are fuzzy but nonetheless sharply terrifying. At the same time, I have this feeling that my fate has already been sealed, and it is just a matter of time unfolding for me to see just what it is. That sounds fatalistic, but that's not how it feels. Within my fate, I feel lots of control. It's up to me to decide whether to take long walks with my dog, and to drink kale smoothies, and to take the medicine religiously, which means, on time, without food in my stomach for two hours before and two hours after (which doesn't feel, in the action, like religion at all), and it's up to me to decide how to spend my days and nights, whether that is huddled in a frightened ball, shivering in the dark night, worrying endlessly about my young children, my older children, my Kyle, who I believe loves me so fiercely, my larger circle of family and friends, or to have days carried out with a measure of serenity, me dressed up in the modern cancer warrior costume--the hoodie with the pointed message, the comfortable shoes, my worn copy of Emperor of all Maladies stuck into my satchel, along with my bottled water, my methadone, my tape to wrap my ravaged fingers, and my Book of Psalms, number 139 dog-eared so I can turn to it quickly.
I confess that when Heidi asked us to make our wishes for ourselves or for others, I did not wish for a peaceful planet, or for the war in Syria to end, or any of the countless selfless wishes I could have made. I greedily prayed to the Lord, to the glowing Chi, to the three fates for more life, more more more life.
Psalm 139 ends this way:
Search me, God, and know my heart,
probe me and know my mind.
And see if a vexing way be in me,
and lead me on the eternal way.
If it vexes God that I am unrepetantly thinking small, of my small boys, of my small life, then I will listen carefully to the presence I feel in the night, I will attend to the the gorgeous sadness in the eyes of my fellow travelers in Qi Gong class, the lilting comfort of my rabbi and my minister, and never the two shall meet, to the intellectual wanderings of Teilhard and his cosmic theories of being, to the poems--from the Psalms, to Dickinson, to Oliver--which have stood me in such good stead this almost year of cancer, and I will learn to think bigger, to think of strings woven into strands, my string braided in with my mother's string, and my grandmother's string, and my children's strings, weaving back through history to the Peking Man and his rudimentary tools, to the sober Egyptian surgeon, the ancient poet of God, the French Jesuit priest, weaving forward into an unknown future where my children's children will play together and hear stories about me, and how much I would have loved them, how I would have laughed with them, and baked bread for them, and wiped away their tears, and talked to them about love and family. Just as their mothers and fathers will do. This seems to me to be the eternal way, and I yearn to be known by God, to be seen and loved, as we all do.
I love to think of all of these humans in time, with their various tools, their fire drills and iron tools and papyrus scrolls, and typewriters, and boats from France to China, and our computers spinning out the human genome, and scientists bent over their microscopes, huddled at their screens, the crab of cancer scuttling across the sand, the skin, the sky. I can't help but think of Walt Whitman, and his own lust for life, Song o f Myself: I celebrate myself, and sing myself. And what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
To my children I direct them to the 52nd stanza, after Whitman bequeaths himself to the dirt to grow from under the grass he loves ("If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles)."
"Failing to fetch met at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you."
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