I completed my course of radiotherapy today. No doubt I’ll have more to say about it as the results become clearer in time and when I’ve had some time to reflect, but it’s worth recording the date.
I have been lucky. The radiographers treat anywhere between 180 and 240 people per day using 6 machines. and I know from chatting to people in the waiting room that some of those people have much more significant and life-changing cancers than me and face more intense side effects. Cancer, and the waiting rooms, are great levellers.
***
Team Doolally
Late to the party, I caught up with Dept Q, scandi-noir transplanted to Edinburgh with a magnificently sweary Matthew Goode taking the lead in a very strong cast. I binged it over two nights and am looking forward to the next series when it finally appears. Also, I enjoyed playing the game of spotting Edinburgh locations and noting when they did not match geographically.
At a loose end, I revisited Matrix : Resurrections which I thought I’d written about here previously but seemingly not. The first part of the film is funny and clever; unfortunately the second half is a boring retread of stuff we’ve seen before. It was a good earner for most of the Sense8 cast who appear in it, cast adrift when that series was cancelled, but not a particularly good film overall. I suspect that had a lot to do with it being the work of only one Wachowski: Lana.
In other news, Jon Anderson, erstwhile lead singer of Yes, is touring this year. He is 81. Touring with the Band Geeks, the show will be dominated by Yes classics played at their original tempo. I have, of course, already bought a ticket.
In his 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, Philip K Dick explores competing narratives in which characters, believing one thing to be true, catch glimpses of another perspective from which and in which the opposite is true. The text plays with the reader’s understanding of narrative and the fictive ‘truths’ that are told.
I often think of the novel when looking at the present situation in the USA and the competing narratives of ‘reality’ in play. In this context, I was interested in something Joe Biden said on 27 January about Minneapolis. He said (on X of all places),
What has unfolded in Minneapolis this past month betrays our most basic values as Americans. We are not a nation that guns down our citizens in the street. We are not a nation that allows our citizens to be brutalized for exercising their constitutional rights. We are not a nation that tramples the 4th Amendment and tolerates our neighbors being terrorized … Violence and terror have no place in the United States of America, especially when it’s our own government targeting American citizens.
What fictive reality is he living in? How can he claim that America is ‘not a nation that guns down our citizens in the street’ in a society that has accepted massacring children in schools and adults in churches? How can he talk about not brutalising citizens for exercising constitutional rights when that is precisely what American authority does, especially to citizens who are not straight white men? Violence and terror in and by America is something understood and recognised instantly across the world.
There is a narrative told within the part of the American demographic that leans Democrat and regards itself as ‘progressive,’ a narrative that reduces to ‘this is not who we are,’ and yet this is a nation the re-elected Trump in the full knowledge of what he is while a significant proportion of the electorate could not be arsed to vote either way. It is a nation in which, at the time of writing, somewhere between 39 and 41.5% (depending on whether you read the Economist, New York Times or Nate Silver) approve of Trump’s actions with perhaps another 6% who are ‘not sure’ – so say something around 45% are OK with what the current administration is doing.
Trump is not an aberration, he represents a deep and abiding strand in the American polity. Biden’s statement is at best aspirational and the Dems and progressives who wring their hands and wail this is not who we are have the same energy as men who stand outside a domestic violence refuge and say not all men. Aspirations and good intentions won’t cut it. Obama gets that, I think, but he is too intoxicated by the lure of extended rhetoric to state it clearly and succinctly (something familiar from another SF novel, Doris Lessing’s The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, 1983, in which characters end up in a specialist hospital for rhetorical diseases.)
There is already a civil war underway in the USA; it is a war of narratives and the ‘progressives’ are losing.
This is something I posted at the weekend over on Substack and thought worth cross-posting here. I’ve edited it lightly and also added a link to the song from which the title comes.
In the newfound reverie Of quiet peace I found Freedom comes from being unafraid Of the heartache that can plague a man
===
I haven’t posted here for a while; I have been caught up with treatment for early stage prostate cancer and my focus has meandered. Some initial reflections on that are what I want to sketch here, fully conscious that these are neither well-formed musings nor decided positions.
When I was coming to terms with the diagnosis, before I knew details of the staging and treatment, I had plenty of time to consider personal mortality and also to determine, firmly, that creativity is resistance. That conviction remained, and remains, even after it was determined that my cancer (bog-standard, no funky stuff, per the Clinical Nurse Specialist) is eminently treatable. What has changed over time are the ways that creativity has manifested as my treatment has progressed.
A key impact has been on my ability to focus on my novel-in-progress – that focus has come and gone; in parallel my reading has shifted back and forth between books that require concentrated attention and books that don’t. For a while I had that sense of guilt usually expressed as hashtag I should be writing. I was conscious of every day that passed without my putting forth a thousand words or so. I still am. On the other hand, somewhere along the way I have worked out how the novel will end and how that ties to what I’ve already written and thus how my existing draft should flex to accommodate it.
And I have generated a load of running notes of ideas and scenes to write, plus I’ve had plenty of time to consider (and reconsider) the overall shape of the book and the ineffable something that I’m searching for in the first draft, the ghost in the story that animates it.
Even though I expected it, I have been surprised by the extent to which my reactions to treatment have affected my focus and stamina for fiction; it is as though concentrating on the realities of life has got in the way of my ability to live in a fictional world of my own devising. Conversely, I also think that sharp focus on the mundane is shaping my approach to the prosaic, and that this will be manifest in my writing once I have a first draft and can get down to the hard work of turning words into writing.
In the meantime I have channelled creativity into other activities: I tried my hand at verse that occasionally aspired to poetry (and in the process read a lot of poetry); I learned to stitch and bind my own hardcover notebooks; I began the process of remembering how to play guitar; and, as sales of my existing books have fallen to zero, I have pondered what that means for the one I am writing, the scattered short stories sitting unpolished in folders and the stories I hope to write when the current one is done.
Somewhere along the way my mindset shifted. Or perhaps something that has always been there crystallised and the title of this piece frames it: although the realities of treatment get in the way of some aspects of creativity, they will pass. I have reached an uneasy détente with mortality that frees me to articulate to myself the things that are important to me.
The renewed story I tell myself of who I am is shaping the fictional worlds I create.
At the time of writing I have complete 14 of 20 fractions of radiotherapy; to the best of my knowledge it is going well. The side-effects, principally tiredness, come and go and I just have to go with them. I’ve learned that Bluetooth and earbuds are the solution to TV noise in the waiting room. I have many playlists and sometimes particular songs bring joy. Pet Shop Boys are always a cert, and three others are posted at the end of this. Most days the actual time under the beam is around 90 seconds, although once every week they also do a scan to check everything looks good.
Early in the week I took time to go to a couple of local gyms to check prices and also to ask if instructors were OK to work out a programme focused on recovery from the impact of the hormones and the radiotherapy – primarily addressing potentially reduced muscle mass and possible issues with bone density (although prescription calcium/vitamin D supplements should have helped with that.) As the androgen inhibition impacts of the hormones wears off I can build in cardio, I think. The key is not to be heroic, just to do some focused work. I get a heavily discounted rate with the local authority gym through MacMillan Cancer Care, though the private gym is the nicer (and closer) facility. Probably I’ll use the cheaper options while I can, then reconsider.
One of the books I read in the waiting room and at home was William Gibson’s Neuromancer (pub. 1984) It is justly seen as a formative work in modern SF and you can pretty much see the future being written, although as ever what is a warning about a techno dystopia seems to have been taken as a blueprint and call to action by the tech industry. It functions as a novel by being a fast-paced caper thriller presented in what was then a novel setting (the term cyberspace comes from it) using tech neologisms. I enjoyed it and can understand why it is so well regarded, but it will go back to the charity shop I got it from.
In TV viewing, after a shaky start Star Trek: Star Fleet Academy delivered what I thought were two decent episodes in episodes 4 and 5. I gave up on Star Trek: Discovery during its third season for several reasons, one of which was its tendency to inspiring speeches. The first three episodes of Academy leaned into this with ‘teachable moments’ delivered with that aura of cloying, earnest sentimentality that is uniquely American. Episodes 4 and 5 succeeded by largely dispensing with that and were much the better for it.
In the meantime, I took the opportunity of rewatching all of the TV adaptation of Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches. I think I’ve mentioned before that I very much prefer the books and had problems with the way the narrative was compressed for TV. In fairness, I enjoyed it more in this binge watch, albeit that I fast-forwarded through some scenes. As I’m avoiding anything particularly intellectually challenging I may read the books again. That isn’t to disrespect the books which I enjoy and are layered, but they’re not Pynchon. Of the five so far published the first three are by far the strongest, however I’ll give Prof Harkness a pass because she too was public about her encounters with cancer.
Today marked the halfway point in my planned radiotherapy. As ever it was quick and easy and the radiology team at the Edinburgh Cancer Centre were a cheerful, professional delight. Significantly, it also marks the point at which I no longer have to self-administer an enema to ensure the bowel is empty before the daily dose of radiation. That may not sound like much but it is.
At my preliminary meeting with the oncologist in September he said that there would be side effects but no one can predict in advance what those side effects will be or how severe. In my case I have had weight gain from the hormones (because testosterone production is effectively shut down) and I am now beginning to experience regular fatigue caused at least in part by my body’s defences trying to repair the impact of the radiation. Less obvious is that both the radiation and the daily enemas disrupt the normal daily digestive process, and that is why the end of that particular routine is a relief in more ways than one.
On the subject of enemas two cautions:
enemas and white underwear make a dubious combination, though I got through it largely unscathed and unstained, and
as my neighbour Sandy who has also been through this said, ‘never trust a fart.’
The trick is to keep as active as possible. I try to walk my 10,000 steps every couple of days (I know the target is arbitrary but it is a decent rule of thumb, and also includes Kaimes Road as a touch of cardio.) and I have some dumbbells here, mainly used for bicep curls.
It occurred to me earlier this evening that, although I have tried to be as open as sensible here there is one topic I have hinted at but have not written about at any length, and that is the long nights of the soul that followed the original suggestion that I might have cancer. It is a big subject and one that I do want to write about because it is foundational to how we as individuals react to a potential diagnosis and intimations of mortality, but haven’t yet found the words. A year on from the original discovery is quite some time to wait before finding the words, but I have private journals and notes to remind me. What I remember very clearly, though, is that there was a distinct ‘before’ and ‘after’ sensation when I got the ‘phone call from my doctor.
***
The road goes ever on
In amongst all this stuff I have managed the occasional paragraph or two of the novel-in-progress and have also compiled an expanding set of notes on to work on once I feel more focused. I do not for a moment compare myself to JRRT but I find this extract from a letter to Auden reassuring as a first draft slowly reveals itself to me.
I’ve mentioned JRRT a few times recently. I am not an uncritical admirer: I enjoyed The Hobbit, and LotR astonishes every time I dip into it. I never got on with The Silmarillion. I enjoyed his translation of Gawain and the Green Knight and am currently working through his unfinished The Fall of Arthur which is fine but was abandoned and is thus neither finished nor polished. Even so, I think he has a stature that goes well beyond the confines of the genre he inspired but of which he was not himself a part.
Recent Comments