Stefania Sinigaglia.

THEMES IN A BUDDING CANCER

1. ZIG-ZAG CONTOUR CELLS

Cellular big bang.....I was born, she is shrieking, it’s the newly shaped zig-zag-contoured cell, nobody cares, but I’ll multiply, just as you round-bellied ones, nice and shapely, I want to live too, tooooooo! the shriek echoes through the meandering cavities of the tubules, of glands and nodules, of interstices and parenchima, this is my ocean, I’ll swim and float in your blood stream, I’ll have my progeny, I’ll survive, live endlessly, and so will my offspring.

2. SURVIVORSHIP

A survivor.....this sentence by....struck me...All cancer patients are survivors since the moment of diagnosis. Looking for metaphors...I can’t think of a “battle”, so many battles, not a “struggle”, so many struggles, not even a trench, a frontline: to me, this is the image, my metaphor, as a sea creature as I have always been. Since the diagnosis I have been trying to swim as after a shipwreck one tries to find a board among the  scattered débris (will it be a coffin?) and then drifts away on a wayward stream, over billows,  which nobody can check nor control. No, let’s not deceit ourselves: you can’t. Too many elements in this force field, and a new  wind can always blow, rising and falling  com’altrui piacque. Leave it, and float, float away, any way, the compass  lost its pointer some time ago, or long ago, who knows, who remembers, who cares

3. BODY and SOUL

My body...” the center of my sinful earth”. Deceit and shame. It believed in its phantasmatic health...Its frame always kept going, never failed...In Africa among mosquitoes, it thrived. It swooned in bliss in Maputo, long ago, leaning on the frayed beach at Costa do Sol, sprinkled by the flickering nocturnal plancton, it travelled on old clunkers through Brazil and the Philippines: its resilience was proved in the forests of Angola and the swamps of Bissau, the drought of Mali and the killing dampness of Benin. It faced mugging and assaults. Now, this same body is caving in, mysterious poisons bubble up on the surface of its vital fluids, a floraison hors saison, who is me now? what is happening inside me? I am well, I feel still well, but my body is ill, how is it possible, such a deep cleavage? Where do I belong ? Who is ill, endlich?

4. BETRAYAL

My body betrayed me. It happened or at least it must have started when I was in Greece, yes, just when I realized that I had never felt so well in my life: a sense of fullness and ripeness growing inside, every day stronger, a firm sense of beauty and hospitality all around, the encounter with eternal Eros grazing the earth with light heels and heavenly eyes. I thought I was touching the utmost limit of human health and at the same time my body was starting to rot. Ambulant  blind carrion in the sparkling sunshine, casting an unconscious shadow. Perhaps a flower withered at my touch, at my step, at my glance, and I did not pay heed.

5. IDENTITY

Loss of self-image... You must learn to function at vitesse reduite, eh? And, until when ?

Who was I before and who am I now? I shall never be as I was before. And this does not have so much to do  with the number of scars on my flesh, the scars mark the soul. The raven cries: nevermore.

6. WHY

The why - immaterial to physicians - is to me essential: how does it come over, why do these cells go wrong? all multiple possible factors---illness as not an opposite to life and health but condition for health, fullness as illusion and reality as dialectics of imagined health, postulate, projection of sensations that can transform physiological data. Plunging parameters can point to glorious sense of domination over those parameters: it’s me and it’s not me, I can go beyond them and exist encrusted, circumscribed by another realm, soverain. Not dichotomy please, soul and body, not Thomas Mann of  Zauberberg, but Svevo, illness and death as safety valves, safety, salut, salvezza, bouée de sauvetage, movement of and within life, dynamics opposed to stupefied unreal full WHO definition of Health. Re-descovery of dialectics, dear old dialectics.

7. CONTRAST

Greece was heavens and I was hatching a cancer.

Who said: mon flanc droit cède, mon aile gauche recule, situation excellente, j’attaque.

8. DEADLY HEALTH

You can’t fall ill unless you were well. But what kind of fall is this? Is it a perpetual slimy slope along which I shall glide down, deeper and deeper? The bottom is not a spring upward, it is the final gaping mouth swallowing the prey.

9. OWNERSHIP

A ciascuno il suo. You shall not have any other cancer but me. Encompassing total absorption. I am your kharma, you cannot get rid of me

10. SCREAM

Choice of death. My body did it, I did not know that it was yearning for self-annihilation so deeply, so wholeheartedly, so totally. The scream I kept inside, the scream I throttled in my throat for so many years, which I forgot sometimes, erupted finally and rent my whole being. It had been simmering for almost  15 years, since 1985, the days I found a violet on the lawn at Bloomington, in November. I hailed it as a good sign, but then guiltily discarded it.

The scream lived on hidden deeply in my breast, for some time it sank so deep that I forgot it, thinking that it had disappeared, faded away. But last November the scream levelled up again, up to the level of my lips, and I looked around for somebody to whose face to deliver it, to unburden myself of such a weight finally, to eject such a lump of anguish. But nobody was there, and the lump, chased back once again, wandered around the body to find a new place to take roots.  And found it, in my left breast, near the heart. Hic manebimus optime. And, in the end, it burst open, and let the scream out, a scream of the flesh.

11. DISTANCE, VOID, EMPTINESS, SUSPENSION.

No plans possible, no mission possible, no engagement possible, erasing of a system of signposts, my billboards, my way is blocked, and I am hovering in a non lieu, neither air nor earth, haunted by the presence of the past, no future imaginable.

12. JUDAISM

Disgrace turned into advantage. My ancestors were capable of  reshuffling the cards of destiny. Many times in history. Shall I be capable of that? How can I take advantage of this deadly illness?

13. MOTIVATION

Is it so important to live on?

14. ASHWEDNESDAY

 Teach me to sit still..

15. CHOICE

How  can you figure out your body, which is also your soul, maimed.

I can’t. Full life, full death.

16. AMPUTATION

So it seems I have decided for self-amputation, self-burial, self-death, self-mutilation and effacement. It seemed impossible and I am doing it. No choice but this or straightforward suicide. I am listening to Couperin, La leçon des tenèbres.

But this may be the means to rebirth, one has to die to be alive again, la descente aux enfers must be complete before re-emerging: so I hope I do hope sans hope sans esperance I do hope to be alive again, different, amputated, I do not imagine how I shall feel, how I shall be, if I shall be able to look at myself and say: this is still me, old and new me after the long ride through the desert this is a new shore and I can land and set foot on firm sand and still moving sand.

17. LA LEÇON DES TENEBRES

Yes, hail to my new amputated self, the refrain that echoes in my ears is that of the raven nevermore. How do I feel? I do not feel, that’s the answer, as unconsciously probably I am striving not to pay attention to perceiving myself, I have raised  the threshold of the perception of my physical self. Physical self…is there anything like that? Can the self be perceived as different layers of identity, the physical shell as distinct from the inner self, from the reasoning mind, from the thinking self? No answer. But no: I have always insisted on the unity of all facets: how does amputation modify my being on earth? I am cold, and since yesterday, in sudden bouts, I am taken by a sense of nausea, deep at the stomach, a perception that disappears quickly as it comes.

I’ll try some discipline: get up earlier in the morning, start regular study: so many books waylaying me.

Looking back at past pages: I did not write much: analytical I am trying to be rather than descriptive. So, essential words only.

Next theme will be: mutilation, about snakes in fairy tales.

18. SNAKES

So long since last entry. Re-linking with my previous self, after the ride out into the wide world, where almost nobody knew of my disability. Is it a disability? Technically, yes, but I do not feel disabled, even though I can’t do any more all that I used to do: gym, sunbathing, prevented, cannot make efforts with my left arm. So, I had written snakes seven months ago. Regeneration The beautiful stories by Brüder Grimm, Kinder und Hausmaerchen. The traveller is in the darkest of the woods, the heart of darkness, and needs help, he finds it under the guise of the slough of a snake, this heals the wound or disinfects the sore. Or he cuts off a part of a snake, and this part sprouts again, fresh and healthy. Snakes, I do not dislike snakes, they rather exert on me a certain lure, also because I have always associated my initials to two sprightly snakes. Serpentelli.

19. FRIENDSHIP

Did friends help? Yes and no. So often I find out that the answer to my questions is contradictory. Yes: the night after the diagnosis, I was alone, and Marta came, I could weep in someone’s arms. But the loneliness of your soul and body looking inwards, mentally raking your entrails, imagining to spot the rotting cells, this idea of the inner enemy which is your self turned other, how can you not be alone to live this anguish?

20. CONTINUATION

Almost two years after. Le corps tient bon, comme les pompes India-Mali. And soul also? No more physical love since Greece, I can’t conceive of my naked body being visible to anybody but me. Hiding, even to my sister. But in front of the mirror I gauge my breasts aslant, the asymmetry is somewhat enticing, magic, funny, not rebuking as I thought. The problem of what to do continues, and I try to swim looking for new shores. Spes ultima dea, a shore where to land must exist, perhaps to be found.

©SilviaMontevecchi