The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care

by Anne Boyer

Everything I am advised to do in response to the cancer seems, at first, like a symptom of a world that is sick itself.

cancer’s instructional materials bear signs of cancer as social ritual

Enchantment is not the same as mystification. One is the ordinary magic of all that exists existing for its own sake, the other an insidious con. Mystification blurs the simple facts of the shared world to prevent us from changing it. Cancer’s disenchantments give its mystifications room. I

There had to be a simple fact, or a set of them, but I could not see the truth with the screen in my face, ardent that somewhere inside my computer, I would find a warrant to live.

the etiology of your illness: If you are lucky you will read another word that means “illness has turned you into an armament.”

In this new theory of being a sick person your friend will say that caring for you is now to care for arms. You have turned your room into an armory. Everyone who brings you water or food is also now loading a gun.

We do not look like people: we look like people with cancer. We resemble a disease before we resemble ourselves.

Language is no longer compliant to its social function. If we use words it is to approach as a misplaced bomb.

Contemporary medicine hyper-responds to the body’s unruly event of illness by transmuting it into data. Patients become information not merely via the quantities of whatever emerges from or passes through their discrete bodies, the bodies and sensations of entire populations become the math of likelihood (of falling ill or staying well, of living or dying, of healing or suffering) upon which treatment is based.

I like wigs. I wear wigs. People I like wear wigs. Dolly Parton wears wigs. Beyoncé wears wigs. Enlightenment philosophers wore wigs. Drag queens, Egyptian princesses, and grandmothers wear wigs. Medusa wore a wig made of snakes.