7.12.06, What Cannot be Said

Pre-script from the early evening:
1) I did have a meeting with Dr. Whiting yesterday at the end of my infusion session. We talked chemo rationale once again; all of what was said conforms to what I wrote about yesterday in the a.m. before my IV party (see that post). We also discussed my latest CA-19-9 numbers, no lowered to 5790. Another drop. Another step in the (for now) desired direction. Every downward movement of the number, the so-called tumor marker, is desirable.

2) The swirl of feelings, dealings, copings, and communications or their attempts continues a pace. As it should. Few if any of us know what we're doing; but most all of us seem to be trying whatever we know or sense how to do.

3) How I try, in countless ways. One through writing that comes often through reading. So, three new books yesterday: after reading more of Michel Surya's enigmatic biography George Bataille, I picked up Bataille's three-volume The Accursed Share on that inexplicable surplus energy to be found, used, squandered, or celebrated in any "political" economy," one I've never reached yet; then also Louis Althusser's (yes, finally my favorite) last of three posthumous works by Verso called Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, which includes a great short bit at the end called "Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher." I seem unable to resist the philosophers, especially those solidly materialist in outlook.

The standard blog:

Several pages of very heavy material, possibly for the blog, sit waiting on a desk. (OK, there in my harddrive, but the paper and desk reality seems so much more appealing . . .) Problem is precisely their weight. The blog has become a wonderful space to pass along and share certain types of information, but only certain types. Boundless and totally honestly meditations on death, for example, I fear will not be well received. Could be taken symptomatically, as signs of some disturbance within me, or worse, signs that I'm weak and not fighting hard enough, not optimistic. So they wait, and some are good, while I evaluate . . .

Franky Scale: (still no new measure for this) Given the drugs and steriods still pulsing from yesterday I feel all right, a general absence of worse feeling; I'll put 6. There is still a kind of background fatigue from a day of sucking in toxic fluids and before tomorrow which is always the day when the negative effects seem revealed. A limbo of Wednesday, where I peeter (sp?) around as if normal, wind down in the evening, then close the shutters in anticipation of the storm.

Otherwise, in the land of what we can say acceptably, I go to see my shrink today, with whom I'm experiencing a bit of dissatisfaction. I feel like many helpful, kind of textbook suggestions have been made — even more helpful because they come from the cancer textbook which I can't seem to find — but on the deeper, if you will more existential issues, we've not done much. So today I'm going to direct the talk, and ask for her help, so that we stay only in that area where possible: things like the use of one's time when you have little time left, the identification of desire, the discrimination between more and less genuine desires, what becomes of the concept of selfishness in the face of death.

Most of these issues are subordinated to that first question: "What do I want to do?" It's asked rhetorically, it's a question that by nature she cannot answer for me, it's an impossible game from the start, even the rules contradict each other, and yet this is the kind of knowledge that I'm off to seek.

Here is where being, for example, a devout Christian or (un)serious Zen follower would obviate the need to ask — to yield oneself to an unquestionable higher authority, or simply to flow without concern for or attachment to authority. (But who wants to take the easy way out? That's at least one thing I've learned about life.)