Dr. Frankenstein, and other words of love for R.
"Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful." Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus
This isn't my dear friend from my metastatic cancer support group; it is a stock photo of someone about to undergo cyberknife treatment, or maybe it's just a model (which is to say, in this case, a healthy-looking woman, with the suggestion of conventional attractiveness under that mask (certainly make-up) who seems to have all her hair), pretending to be such a person. Lung, breast, and skin cancer are the most common sources of metastases to the brain. Chemotherapy usually doesn't, never?--learning as I go here--reach brain metastases because of the blood-brain barrier, which protects the brain from toxins (like, ha! chemotherapy drugs). Cyberknife, a focused, highly-targeted radiosurgery and fractionated radiotherapy (I don't know, I'm not a doctor) is an improvement in how modern medicine delivers radiation to the brain. Although that woman above, with the confusing necklace (I understand Xs and Os, but I can't imagine you can wear necklaces into cyberknife procedures) is wearing a custom mask which is screwed into the table on which she calmly lies, other radiosurgery methods use a metal frame attached to the patient's head with screws to immobilize the head, to accurately treat the metastases.
It's not just Halloween which is making me think about Frankenstein, the novel--with its questions of the soul and the body, production and reproduction, its absent mothers and fathers who birth monsters who then want love. It's not just that I recently finished Frankisstein, by Jeanette Winterson, a wonderful reimagining of the circumstances under which the crushingly young Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (think again of dead mothers, doomed love, a flood of exquisite writing about creation and autonomy, the idea of a scientist who created life and was horrified by his creation coming to Shelley in a dream (Winterson's book is thick with the dank smell of dreary castles, the steady drip of rain, the unwashed, yearning body)).
It's not just that my friend from group, let's call her R., has brain mets from her longstanding relationship with breast cancer--some twenty-four, or twenty-five--these numbers must be spelled out--years long. And that she has undergone more than one cyberknife surgery. And that the cancer in her brain is affecting her gorgeous mind, or that it is unclear what the next steps will be (pause to bow before the Boston Doctors, their degrees from Harvard hung high, their methodical, undaunted brains shifting the pros and cons, the new, the old, and delivering advice to us, their penitent beloveds, our Medicare cards grasped in our shaking hands, as we sit, gowned, waiting).
It's not just that R's beautifully written health update which arrived today, in which she praises the glory of the humbled gang of thieves who surround her--stealing time, spending another day, another week, another year, another decade, honoring the great joyful coincidence that has allowed us to spend time on earth, even in this small forested corner of Massachusetts, traveling with R.'s generous intellect, deep humor, thorough and pensive Buddhism, her Goldendoodles tucked into her car, nay, her bed, her daughters wending their way under her watchful eye, her stoic husband pedaling his bike down every road, riding as if to outride fate, her joyous and loving presence in our group, where she reaches down and gathers you in her arms to say hello, in which her wings flutter like the dark shadows of the murder of crows that swept across my yard this weekend, their movements en masse and yet specifically individuated. R.'s wings flutter around the room, alighting on each of us as we go around our circle, reciting our fears, our blood, our bodies, our souls. It's not just that after I read her update sitting in my car, then calmly drove away down the grey streets, the muted oranges and yellows of late fall lighting the way, NPR humming with impeachmentfiresukraineprimary that I began to sob, great, sorrowful sobs at the state of things.
It might be these unanswered questions about the soul and the body and the death of the body, and the trouble with rationality, and the uneasy welcoming arms of the idea of a soul, a heaven. I walked up the dark stairs from my basement to the first floor last night and Sebby, my Goldendoodle, was framed at the top of the stairs, in the golden-lit doorway, awaiting me, eager to greet me although I had been gone precisely one minute, and suddenly I was overcome at the thought that Scout, our beloved Rottweiler, dead this long decade, would be there to welcome me when I died. Might I see her at my side as I walk up another set of dark stairs--would it be a shiver of brain cells, would it matter, would it be enough? Or is this so much ridiculousness, another version of the lions and the lambs laying down together on the cover of so many, many pamphlets--all that paper, all those words. As I write this, I dare to think of Shadow, my first dog, little collie, recipient of my tears and my affront at the many, many ways in which the world misunderstood me.
When Percy Bysshe Shelley dies in Winterson's novel, Mary Shelley discovers that "grief means living with someone who is no longer there."
I think about the grief of the unspooling body and mind of metastatic cancer, the mourning we do for ourselves as long as we are able, which then passes, like a baton in a running race, to our own gangs of thieves. I think of the monster Dr. Frankenstein created (despite our insistence that the monster is named Frankenstein, the name belongs to the scientist, the doctor, who would create life where there is not life), mourning the loss of the companion monster the doctor endeavored to build for him (" I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.") Dr. Frankenstein destroys the companion he has created for his monster, terrified of the consequences of his actions. Would the new female monster have autonomy, and choose someone other than the original monster to love? Might she love Dr. Frankenstein instead? A human man? [Might she, I wonder, choose independence?] What if the monsters procreated? What if the earth were overrun with monsters?
What was the grief the monster experienced, knowing that he was truly alone on this earth?
You must be with me now--the woman in the cyberknife photo reminds me of the blurred image of the monster in Frankenstein, the cultural currency of the lightening bolt, the bolts in the head, the eyes fluttering open, the cartoon groaning of Mel Brook's monster, the scientist coaxing life out of a body which is stitched together from bodies whose lives have already ended. "It's alive!" the man shrieks in fear and joy.
I know I'm the monster, not the scientist, not the doctor, in this story, but I am not alone. Not in the least.
I think of the oddness of Halloween. I have worried aloud about this before. Is it what Bakhtin described as carnival, the grotesque body--carnival laughter as an expression of social consciousness and communal spirit (if that is indeed what Bakhtin wrote, reaching back here decades to my beloved seminar with Lori Lefkovitz, who now teaches at Northeastern)? What does it mean to celebrate death, the grotesque in the way we do, Americans, once a year? My lovely, small boys are going as a ghoul and a zombie this year, their horrible costumes displaying bone and blood alike. They love the power of being scary, of not being themselves, of turning the world upside down into a rainy October night filled with candy-for-dinner, and graveyards poking out of suburban lawns, followed by the inevitable request, the exhausted children now in bed, the mothers dragging themselves that way too: could you leave the hallway light on?
Forgive me. I get maudlin as the seasons change. You know that.
Tomorrow morning I am going to drive the rain- and leaf-soaked narrow roads of Carlisle to visit with my friend, R. I am going to bring cinnamon scones--I have a new trick I learned wherein you freeze the butter ahead of time, and then grate it into so many small flakes of almost dissolved butter, before adding it to the flour. We will drink hot tea, and eat warm scones, and talk about everything and nothing all at once.
Winterson one more time: "By consent, the majority of us live and die as though the world around us is solid, even though each day disappears without trace. Our actions have consequences that rebound through time, yet each day disappears and a new day takes its place."
As R. would remind me: nothing to do but enjoy the view.
Happy Halloween, happy new day.
This isn't my dear friend from my metastatic cancer support group; it is a stock photo of someone about to undergo cyberknife treatment, or maybe it's just a model (which is to say, in this case, a healthy-looking woman, with the suggestion of conventional attractiveness under that mask (certainly make-up) who seems to have all her hair), pretending to be such a person. Lung, breast, and skin cancer are the most common sources of metastases to the brain. Chemotherapy usually doesn't, never?--learning as I go here--reach brain metastases because of the blood-brain barrier, which protects the brain from toxins (like, ha! chemotherapy drugs). Cyberknife, a focused, highly-targeted radiosurgery and fractionated radiotherapy (I don't know, I'm not a doctor) is an improvement in how modern medicine delivers radiation to the brain. Although that woman above, with the confusing necklace (I understand Xs and Os, but I can't imagine you can wear necklaces into cyberknife procedures) is wearing a custom mask which is screwed into the table on which she calmly lies, other radiosurgery methods use a metal frame attached to the patient's head with screws to immobilize the head, to accurately treat the metastases.
It's not just Halloween which is making me think about Frankenstein, the novel--with its questions of the soul and the body, production and reproduction, its absent mothers and fathers who birth monsters who then want love. It's not just that I recently finished Frankisstein, by Jeanette Winterson, a wonderful reimagining of the circumstances under which the crushingly young Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (think again of dead mothers, doomed love, a flood of exquisite writing about creation and autonomy, the idea of a scientist who created life and was horrified by his creation coming to Shelley in a dream (Winterson's book is thick with the dank smell of dreary castles, the steady drip of rain, the unwashed, yearning body)).
It's not just that my friend from group, let's call her R., has brain mets from her longstanding relationship with breast cancer--some twenty-four, or twenty-five--these numbers must be spelled out--years long. And that she has undergone more than one cyberknife surgery. And that the cancer in her brain is affecting her gorgeous mind, or that it is unclear what the next steps will be (pause to bow before the Boston Doctors, their degrees from Harvard hung high, their methodical, undaunted brains shifting the pros and cons, the new, the old, and delivering advice to us, their penitent beloveds, our Medicare cards grasped in our shaking hands, as we sit, gowned, waiting).
It's not just that R's beautifully written health update which arrived today, in which she praises the glory of the humbled gang of thieves who surround her--stealing time, spending another day, another week, another year, another decade, honoring the great joyful coincidence that has allowed us to spend time on earth, even in this small forested corner of Massachusetts, traveling with R.'s generous intellect, deep humor, thorough and pensive Buddhism, her Goldendoodles tucked into her car, nay, her bed, her daughters wending their way under her watchful eye, her stoic husband pedaling his bike down every road, riding as if to outride fate, her joyous and loving presence in our group, where she reaches down and gathers you in her arms to say hello, in which her wings flutter like the dark shadows of the murder of crows that swept across my yard this weekend, their movements en masse and yet specifically individuated. R.'s wings flutter around the room, alighting on each of us as we go around our circle, reciting our fears, our blood, our bodies, our souls. It's not just that after I read her update sitting in my car, then calmly drove away down the grey streets, the muted oranges and yellows of late fall lighting the way, NPR humming with impeachmentfiresukraineprimary that I began to sob, great, sorrowful sobs at the state of things.
It might be these unanswered questions about the soul and the body and the death of the body, and the trouble with rationality, and the uneasy welcoming arms of the idea of a soul, a heaven. I walked up the dark stairs from my basement to the first floor last night and Sebby, my Goldendoodle, was framed at the top of the stairs, in the golden-lit doorway, awaiting me, eager to greet me although I had been gone precisely one minute, and suddenly I was overcome at the thought that Scout, our beloved Rottweiler, dead this long decade, would be there to welcome me when I died. Might I see her at my side as I walk up another set of dark stairs--would it be a shiver of brain cells, would it matter, would it be enough? Or is this so much ridiculousness, another version of the lions and the lambs laying down together on the cover of so many, many pamphlets--all that paper, all those words. As I write this, I dare to think of Shadow, my first dog, little collie, recipient of my tears and my affront at the many, many ways in which the world misunderstood me.
When Percy Bysshe Shelley dies in Winterson's novel, Mary Shelley discovers that "grief means living with someone who is no longer there."
I think about the grief of the unspooling body and mind of metastatic cancer, the mourning we do for ourselves as long as we are able, which then passes, like a baton in a running race, to our own gangs of thieves. I think of the monster Dr. Frankenstein created (despite our insistence that the monster is named Frankenstein, the name belongs to the scientist, the doctor, who would create life where there is not life), mourning the loss of the companion monster the doctor endeavored to build for him (" I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.") Dr. Frankenstein destroys the companion he has created for his monster, terrified of the consequences of his actions. Would the new female monster have autonomy, and choose someone other than the original monster to love? Might she love Dr. Frankenstein instead? A human man? [Might she, I wonder, choose independence?] What if the monsters procreated? What if the earth were overrun with monsters?
What was the grief the monster experienced, knowing that he was truly alone on this earth?
You must be with me now--the woman in the cyberknife photo reminds me of the blurred image of the monster in Frankenstein, the cultural currency of the lightening bolt, the bolts in the head, the eyes fluttering open, the cartoon groaning of Mel Brook's monster, the scientist coaxing life out of a body which is stitched together from bodies whose lives have already ended. "It's alive!" the man shrieks in fear and joy.
I know I'm the monster, not the scientist, not the doctor, in this story, but I am not alone. Not in the least.
I think of the oddness of Halloween. I have worried aloud about this before. Is it what Bakhtin described as carnival, the grotesque body--carnival laughter as an expression of social consciousness and communal spirit (if that is indeed what Bakhtin wrote, reaching back here decades to my beloved seminar with Lori Lefkovitz, who now teaches at Northeastern)? What does it mean to celebrate death, the grotesque in the way we do, Americans, once a year? My lovely, small boys are going as a ghoul and a zombie this year, their horrible costumes displaying bone and blood alike. They love the power of being scary, of not being themselves, of turning the world upside down into a rainy October night filled with candy-for-dinner, and graveyards poking out of suburban lawns, followed by the inevitable request, the exhausted children now in bed, the mothers dragging themselves that way too: could you leave the hallway light on?
Forgive me. I get maudlin as the seasons change. You know that.
Tomorrow morning I am going to drive the rain- and leaf-soaked narrow roads of Carlisle to visit with my friend, R. I am going to bring cinnamon scones--I have a new trick I learned wherein you freeze the butter ahead of time, and then grate it into so many small flakes of almost dissolved butter, before adding it to the flour. We will drink hot tea, and eat warm scones, and talk about everything and nothing all at once.
Winterson one more time: "By consent, the majority of us live and die as though the world around us is solid, even though each day disappears without trace. Our actions have consequences that rebound through time, yet each day disappears and a new day takes its place."
As R. would remind me: nothing to do but enjoy the view.
Happy Halloween, happy new day.
Beautiful. As always.
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