Post-Procedural:
Galimatias
25 February 2014
A friend of mine who also takes Remicade insists that he can feel it coursing through his system during the infusion, kind of like Popeye with the spinach. Wouldn’t that be cool! It doesn’t happen for me. I leave the hospital in pretty much the same old shape. Usually, that’s not a bad thing: I go in feeling pretty well. (That’s the idea.) This time, I envy my friend. I’ll envy him even more tomorrow. The day after the infusion is always the lowest ebb of energy.
The rheumatologist came into the Infusion Therapy Unit shortly after the pump was turned on, expressed his satisfaction with the state of my eye, and ordained another infusion in six weeks. I have no objection, no objection at all. I like the idea of spacing the infusions as widely as possible — as a general proposition. This one time, I’m already looking forward to the boost in early April.
People ask me: what does Remicade do? It’s complicated, but I came up with homely metaphor — homely in that I’ve borrowed it from a DVD that I watch at home all the time, The Hunt for Red October (one of the best kitchen movies ever made): countermeasures. Countermeasures are decoys that the target throws off to distract the weapon. The gazillions of Remicade molecules that get pumped into me every so often are countermeasures that protect my body from my overeager, underemployed autoimmune system, which, rather like an adolescent sociopath, sends out nasty thingummies that inflame tissues for no good reason. Remicade prevents frolics like the attack that turned my left eye into an orb of blood last week. It prevents Crohn’s-like symptoms that, happily, I was largely spared, although there were intimations that my colon was about to go haywire. A lot of the inflammation is very low-grade, presenting nothing worse than a persistent fatigue. Nothing worse — considering the things that can go wrong, I have to say that. But persistent fatigue is insidiously demoralizing.
I did very little over the weekend, but yesterday I experienced a little burst of vim, and the simple project that I had asked Ray Soleil to help me with — adjusting the height of a particular shelf in the bookcase alongside of which I work in the blue room — launched a cascade of local fixes that, among other things, arranged all of my Penguin Classics (some of which date to the 1960s) on two neighboring shelves and unearthed my collection of Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness travel guides. Are you familiar with the DK Eyewitness guides? These books are priceless, and more or less timeless, guides to cultural artifacts around the world, and the entry for India is the one book that I recommend to anyone who wants to begin to learn something about the Subcontinent. The cover of the Istanbul guide nearly matches the view that we had from our room at the Swisshotel in 2005. The Upper East Side chapter of the New York guide includes two images that closely resemble photographs that I’ve taken myself and published here. Molto simpatico.
About a year ago, I began to wonder where they were, the Eyewitness guides. I knew where they’d been, but I’d moved them and forgotten whither. It turned out that they were sealed behind a brick wall in my brain, upon which it was written (in amontillado), This shelf is stuffed with NYRB editions. Of which I have an overflowing supply. Only yesterday did it occur to me to put my conviction to the test. The range to the front were all NYRB, but, behind them… Ordinarily, you find things when you’re not looking for them, a bittersweet experience because you don’t find what you were looking for. If I was looking for anything yesterday, it was bookshelf space — and I found that, too, when the Eyewitness guides were moved back into the bedroom, where they belong. Sweetsweet!
At the hospital, I read Sense and Sensibility, with the mounting conviction that it has been a long, long time since I last read the novel. I had rather allowed Emma Thompson’s screenplay to stand in for it. You could do much worse and probably not any better. But: accept no substitutes! Give me the plain Jane, black and strong and clear as a bell:
I have not wanted syllables where actions have spoken so plainly. Has not his behaviour to Marianne and to all of us, for at least the last fortnight, declared that he loved and considered her as his future wife, and that he felt for us the attachment of the nearest relation? Has not my consent been daily asked by his looks, his manner, his attentive and affectionate respect? How could such a thought occur to you? How is it to be supposed that Willoughby, persuaded as he must be of your sister’s love, should leave her, and leave her perhaps for months, without telling her of his affection — that they would part without a mutual exchange of confidence?
Jane Austen, of course, completely disagrees with this oration, delivered by Mrs Dashwood shortly after Willoughby’s unexplained defection. We are meant to understand that it is foolish for the doting mother to dispense with formalities where sentiment is so unmistakable. In fact, Mrs Dashwood’s consent has not been asked, daily or otherwise. Mrs Dashwood has simply given it — a meaningless gesture.
Now it’s time to go back to my easy chair for another episode of Lewis. (Something from Season Three, I think.) I just watched the one that ends with Juliet Stevenson immolating herself with gasoline. It’s not my favorite episode, but, hey — Juliet Stevenson. I will leave you with a crumb from Hannah Arendt’s magnificent essay on authority in Between Past and Future:
This is also why old age, as distinguished from mere adulthood, was felt by the Romans to contain the very climax of human life; not so much because of accumulated wisdom and experience as because the old man had grown closer to the ancestors and the past. Contrary to our concept of growth, where one grows into the future, the Romans felt that growth was directed toward the past. If one wants to relate this attitude toward the hierarchical order established by authority and to visualize this hierarchy in the familiar image of the pyramid, it is as though the peak of the pyramid did not reach into the height of a sky above (or, as in Christianity, beyond) the earth, but into the depths of an earthly past.
This passage gives expression to a sensation that has been mounting powerfully but wordlessly within me: I can see the past so much more clearly that I used to be able to do. I don’t know much more about it, and I’m certainly not talking about my past. It’s the past, all of it. What I see wouldn’t make much sense if literally transcribed; it wouldn’t seem to say anything. So I have to talk about it obliquely. I do know this: until enough of us see the past clearly, the past is where we are all headed. And I’m no Roman.