Desultory Diary Number 40: Rumi, Cancer, and Me

1.

Well, I knew it was coming, and I must confess, I was a bit nervous. On 4/28/2022, I had an appointment at the Weinberg Cancer Center of Hopkins; I was scheduled to have tiny gold markers, called fiducials, surgically inserted in my prostate. I was slightly nervous because I was required to come to the clinic to get a dose of Ativan (Lorazepam) which is an anxiolytic. Was the procedure going to be that painful? Nobody had explained to me what to expect, which added to my apprehension. Only a slight apprehension, mind you; I usually divide myself into Big Self and Little Self. Little Self is the worrier;  Big Self, unacquainted with grief, remains calm always. Now that I'm older and a seasoned meditator, Big Self has become my prominent identity.

I was given the Ativan and told to disrobe and wait for about a half hour until the procedure was scheduled to begin. I used to be shy about taking my clothes off, but old age and the fact that I've had so many procedures recently have caused me to lose all sense of modesty when required to take off my clothes. I feel as embarrassed as I would be if I had to roll up my sleeve. Nobody is interested in gawking at an old man in the nude.

Soon the nurse called me into the room in which the procedure was to take place. I was instructed to put my feet into stirrups; huge rubber boots locked my feet into place. The flimsy gown covering my nakedness was pulled back so that I could assume, in the nurse's words, 'the position of a woman about to give birth.'

A fellow (Hopkins is a teaching institution) began to jab my perineum with lidocaine under the chief doctor's guidance. I felt like a trussed-up turkey being attacked where it hurts by a porcupine.

After about an hour of fairly minimal discomfort, the fiducials had been inserted. The purpose of these markers is to help fluroscopy identify the prostate so that the beams meet their target. At the end into my end 20 cc of hydrogel was injected, The liquid soon hardens and lifts my prostate from the rectal wall, thus enabling the radiation to spare my rectum somewhat. This injection was the most painflul part of the procedure.

Everyone was nice to me, extremely professional, albeit somewhat impersonal. The feeling of being a lump of clay in the hands of the doctor, however, never left me. 

Now I am ready to be zapped. Not so fast: in a week I have to return for a mysterious 'simulation session'. The five weeks of radiation therapy will begin three weeks thereafter, once the equipment is programmed according to my topography. 

I am so grateful for the miracles of modern medicine, and for all the professionals who put progress into action. One of the doctors informed me that without treatment my aggressive tumor, which fills up much of the gland, was likely to metastasize within three years. I will soon, I hope, have the chance to live longer than that.

2.

Whenever I have an appointment and am likely to sit for some time in a waiting room, I am like Linus with a security blanket, except that the blanket has pages, except that the blanket is a book. My waiting-room default position is outstretched hands supporting a novel, non-fiction, poems or whatever, between the covers of a book. Even when I go to the ophthalmologist to be treated for macular degeneration, which I periodically do, I have, while waiting to be seen, a book in my hands, This doesn't do me much good, for I'm soon given dilating drops in my eyes, after which I can't read at all. (My right eye can see forms, but nothing else.)

There is one problem, though, I am a bit vermischt, aad often forget to pick up a book once I put it down. So I'm loath to take library books to my appointment. To have something to read while waiting for the surgical procedure, I took a book at random from a bookshelf in the hall. It turned out to be, "Open Secret, Versions of Rumi, translated by John Moynbe and Coleman Barks", a book I didn't even know I had.

In the cavernous underground waiting room for urology patients at the Weinberg Cancer Center at Hopkins, I was fascinated by reading such lines as:

Stay in the company of lovers.
Those other kinds of people, they always
want to show you something.

A crow will lead you to an empty barn,
a parrot to sugar.

and:

What is this competition we feel then,
before we go, one at a time, through the same gate?

What a serendipitous choice of reading material! Just what my need needed. I was especially fascinated by the following lines:

We take long trips.
We puzzle over the meaning of a painting or a book
when what we are wanting to see and understand
in this world, we are that.

and:

In the body of the world...there is a Soul,
and you are that.

Sufis say what Advaita Hindus say: tat tvam asi, Thou art That. Whenever we realize that we are the stuff stars are made of, and that there is nothing in the body that is not found in the outside world, maya, the ego, disappears and we experience ecstacy. This is wisdom, the path of the East. But we're humans, not mountains; the West stresses love, the ecstacy of relationship. We need both to live a balanced life.

I mentioned that my Little Self was a little nervous, while Big Self remained calm. Little Self I refer to as this, Big Self I refer to as That. 

Rumi, thank you for demonstrating and deminishing the variable distance between this and That!

3. 

Actually, I had been thinking along those lines on the night before the procedure. I had read a poem in the latest edition of The New York Review of Books; I liked it despite its having been written in the modern style, which I find to be somewhat prosy if not prosaic. The author put metaphor over language; I usually prefer the other way around. 

I was very tired. Before going to sleep, I decided to write a poem that recounts what was going on in my mind. In other words, my inner critic fell asleep before I did. I make no claims for this stream-of-consciousness poem; I include it here to show that Rumi's this and That were images in my mind the night before I took that book off the shelf.

The Mirage

On the evening before the procedure
During which the doctor will place
A few tiny stars, golden prostate markers,
each a solitary light house guiding
Rays to avoid healthy cells and to depredate

Those striving to choke away life.
 

Dart about, doomed little poisonous minnows--
How lucky I am, whatever I am, having already
survived three score and sixteen years!
If those minnows had their way, I wouldn’t be here
Writing this poem, another vain attempt
To transcend life and hopefully reach yours?

Now in old age, I am very much uselessly occupied,
Reading and writing essays and poems no one needs.
I had been a bug in isolation’s amber far too long;
Nevertheless, it has been a very good life,
With a great wife of fifty years, and a great son
For over forty--even if I died tomorrow: joy,

Right up to the moment this world disappears.
A famous Indian guru, diagnosed with throat cancer,
Refused all treatment, proclaiming that cells,
Roiling health within him, were also alive
And deserve to live as well. I don’t believe it; if I did,
How could I let radiation zap me on?

I love faith undogmatically, religion not too much,
Despite its dreadful valleys in which I lay in tears,
I love life, and, only when I have to, accept death.
Before I’m taken down, perhaps forever, I’ve risen
--For how long, who knows? and intend to cherish
Every godless minute I have left.  Amen.

Though the last word is silent, cancer,
If you are not defeated, so be it. Who knows?
Young and splendid in a sari, Nirmala and I
Might meet again, and again, for the first time--
Cancer cells, normal cells which one or sum of you is
That? This, this, what a doomed, happy mirage!