foreword
On the 14th August of that year, Mr Munday felt a great tiredness while visiting his friends and their young son. As he came back home and lied down, he could hear a wind waving in his ears, urging him to close his eyes and let the Gods of ancient Greece reach out… - Or maybe he was just very tired, recovering from the peculiar heaviness and persistent pain in his skull that had lasted for days.
As he woke up later that afternoon, he noticed a blur in his vision, a tiny but resolute stain like a sudden eclipse, at the centre-left side of the eye globe.
Oedipus had just made his entrance. The next morning it was Mr. Munday who entered the nearest hospital.
This is the Journal of Mr. Munday during his acquaintance with the symptoms of a rare and real disease that will have him lose most of his eyesight in less than four weeks. It recounts the uncanny encounters Mr. Munday had with the mythical and notorious Oedipus. As they ventured together in the underworld of medical vacillations, it tells of their crossing over the shadows.
Searching for ”the cracks where the light gets in”, Mr Munday reaches out for the help of ancestral stories, and in the conversations, real and imagined, with the poets and artists met on the way.
Above all, his is a journey on discovering the strength of unwavering friendships, without which there is no survival.
Part One
22 MAY - 29 AUGUST
OEDIPUS IN MY EYES
22nd May. It’s a Saturday.
The streets of Paris are beautiful under the rain. Different and just as romantic as those in Lisbon, without the shiny slippery cobbles. I wait under a shallow doorway. In this light the modern building across fits interestingly out of place.
I’m getting my first shot of Covid vaccine; we move through the corridor of this townhall like the hesitant hurried cattle pulled towards their feed, or pushed to a more sinister destination, it seems we are undecided as to which one it is.
After the shot we wait, sitting in front of a clock, waiting for the time to be allowed out, the normality of our phonescreen lowered head restored.
23rd of May. Afternoon.
I am having an episode of heart palpitations.
They will last for the next five weeks. The doctors will find nothing, but my heart will go nuts from 2pm to evening every day, leaving me exhausted and worried.
My heart seems to dislike my rest: it keeps becoming arrhythmic when I am lying down for an afternoon nap, or when going to sleep in the evening.
Earlier that month, the medical profession has been able to explain why my legs have been hurting intermittently during the last ten years: an MRI has revealed that my spinal cord is tightened at the very end, where once our tail was attached, by a compression of the L4 and L5 vertebrae. This has not surprised my mother and her side of my family who all suffer from this predicament.
… and all I can think of is the bottom part of my body slowly disconnecting from the top half… and how to fix it….
Perhaps it needs a better, more thorough connection to the ground? I am imagining a conversation between these different bits of me – I need to find new ways of being in the world, one that will be the echo of the new sensations I will find from witing, in my body.
From the pain in my legs, something new to learn, and a possibility opens.
29th June – The Ankles
I sit down for my morning coffee, Agafya who is barely awake immediately notices that my right ankle is swollen. I ma surprised, and annoyed; my ankles have never been swollen, my ankles are strong, and so are my bones, and my legs also have always been strong.
The next day the left ankle is also swollen. Something is not quite right. I feel it in my body, in my legs, and it connects to something awkward that I feel in in my mouth when I am speaking. Sometimes I find myself stumbling on some words, and maybe that is because they are not in my mother tongue. Or maybe I’m just a little tired.
And sometimes also I drop things, as if I cannot hold them tight enough.
As a child the tale of The Little Mermaid was the one that I physically empathised with the most – the distinct sensation of not being able to speak or articulate words in my mouth, while at the same time my legs would hurt and struggle to keep me upright. It is a sensation that I can still have and is part of a recuring nightmare. I remember learning to speak and walk at the same time, but then only able to utter desperate and incomprehensible cries for attention and love, while my legs would fail me and I would keep on falling down. I can almost picture my parents’ bewildered eyes, their incomprehension and powerlessness projected in my failing attempts to be a complete human being – and therefore to be loved by them.
My fears emerged from the invariant outcome of the Little Mermaid’s tale: not heard and not noticed, even if equipped with her legs, my hero would forever lose herself and dissolve back into the white foam of the sea waves, alone and unloved.
The sensation of disconfort in my legs and the muting tightness of my mouth IS the inevitability that her/my sacrifice of love will invariably cause her/my demise. The myth here is as real as a physical pain in the thighs, and its meaning as palpable as a clinched jaw and grinding teeth.
12th to 17 July. Work session in the rehearsal space at last.
This is the time at last.
To meet in movement with colleagues in a non-virtual space.
This is the time to celebrate the relationship of the body to the environment and to itself, to unearth its stories and narratives.
This is the time to make Theatre together again!
And if we are to converse, let it be with the movements, and the presence, and the sharing – of our time, of the landscape, and even of our food.
Here all the movements and all the singing, all the interactions of the daily, all is embodiment of our selves.
This is why we are here;
Meeting again and encounter this knowledge, to somehow keep it with us when we go back to the world - the one that we have left for a few days.
Here we are allowing ourselves to dive in the depth of the ocean rather than staring at its surface in fear.
For only what is underneath the waves can explain what is visible at the surface.
Here what we do is what we call our Work, our Home, our Theatre.
24th July. Also a Saturday, South England.
I sit on a chair in a big room, waiting for the second shot of vaccine. I read the leaflet to calm my impatience, it seems that the heart palpitations I experienced during the last month were in fact a reaction to the first shot of C. Vax.
Should I risk further side effects with a second shot? I fail to act on what feels like an intuition, a clairvoyance eclipsed with efficient phrenzy by the nurse who shots in the second dose, and a soundless smile.
25th July.
There is a little bit of pain in the muscles and in the joints. A bit of fever, probably for two or three days more, is to be expected.
29th July – 4th August
“My skin has started to itch on the 29th of July, on my chest below the heart and opposite in the back.
And then in the next days the irritation spreads through the right leg and up to the forehead. I am taking care of a horse and I have hayfever. The itching settles down around my left eye, and after a week of this it is only the eye that itches, waking me during the night, and feeling like the eye globe is scratched. Sometimes it lasts during the day.
I’m thinking one of my cats lashed out at my eye, as she would.”
The 5th of August
I am playing tennis with my friend Yakov. He always plays faster and better than me, trained as a pro, and I can beat him only with incredibly geniuses moves – the ones that even I have no idea how I make them, seeing that I never ever played - or mainly in my dreams or on TV, but he doesn’t know that. SO I am really looking forward to lose by ONLY seven games out of nine, and that is on a good day.
But today I am not feeling well and have had serious misgivings in coming out to play. At the end of the game my heart is palpitating so much that I need to lie down on the ground, my legs failing to support me. I am used to this, but today I am worried.
7th August.
This early morning it isn’t the eye that hurts the most, but the crushing pain in my head. I never have headaches. This is like having a metal bar that tights both my temples together going between my eyes and down my nostrils.
That weekend, I numb myself with painkillers, lemon and ginger, but the hurt in my skull does not go away.
10th August. Doctor’s appointment.
I wake up at four and take a doctor’s appointment online for the next morning. On the phone, my leading questions orientate the prognostic, and I am not really reassured by this consultation placebo. “Nothing to worry about”, her voice says rushing, “Keep the pain away with the pills, the sinuses will clear up, but do call back in a few days if it doesn’t”.
11th and 12th August.
The headaches have eased in intensity but linger like a relentless background noise. There is a mysterious presence that makes me feel more and more tired – no amount of coffee in the garden, and surrounded by the wilderness of the trees, plants and bushes that we will still not trim this year, is able to summon the energy I need to go through the day.
Friday 13th August.
I’m not superstitious, I am feeling lighter today as the headache is almost completely gone. But there is a strangeness in the air, and there is a strangeness in me. There is another body that is present, one that I do not recognise, and that I seem to become as it is becoming me.
I am feeling very dizzy at times, and overall, very weary. I try to enjoy the sunny day, this has to be a momentary dip in what can only be the recovery from last week’s symptoms. Surely.
14th August. Oedipus appears.
This morning I felt a great tiredness while visiting my tennis champion of a friend, his musician wife and their enchanting young son. I am enjoying their presence during what has become a Saturday morning coffee treat tradition. Today the dance and songs of the little prince hardly energise me, I can hardly register the display of care and life happening around me and ask to be taken home.
I lie down, with sounds like wind waving and howling inside my ears, urging me to close my eyes and let the Gods of ancient Greece reach out… - or maybe I am just exhausted, recovering from the peculiar heaviness and persistent pain in my skull that has stayed with me for days.
I wake up well into the evening. I notice a blur on the left side of my vision, a tiny but resolute stain, like a sudden eclipse at the centre-left of the eye globe.
Who knocks like this inside my head and though my eye? Will you be away soon, in an hour? Tomorrow?
15th August
I wake up and the stain in the eye is there here. Maybe bigger. Oedipus has made his entrance. This morning I will enter the nearest hospital.
The ophthalmologist is a very lovely man with a German accent. Misail and I talk of Berlin, and Italian coffee. He explains the oedema at the back of my right eye, and the resulting stain that is spreading on the left side of what I see. He sends me to the emergency eye clinic and promise to keep in touch about the eye. There is a human kindness that only shows in moments of real danger – as if the importance of an event is judged on its proximity or its distance to death, allowing a certain quality of silence that makes even small talk meaningful. Even though it is happening in my eye, it seems that we are both in this together, and I feel much less alone than before I came here.
15th August Sunday afternoon, Emergency Eye Clinic
The Eye Clinic is half-closed, or perhaps half-opened. There are two nurses wandering in the corridors, entering and leaving rooms, attending patients inside them, but really waiting for the authority of the increasingly late doctors to settle the mood of newcomers like me who have braved their Sunday afternoon comfort zone to hear bad news.
After some more time, in an instrument-empty consultation room, the doctor is glad to see the phone pictures I have from Misail the ophthalmologist: she can confirm that there is an oedema in my eye and refers me for an emergency MRI followed by a specialist‘s appointment “sometime at the end of next week… or the week after”.
That’s fine, but Oedipus is already making himself quite comfortable, and I’d rather he took his leave as soon as. SO I will not change my plans to go to Paris the next morning, and instead will check on what Oedipus is up to there, it will be quicker, I think. So thank you, but no thank you, I think there might be a real EMERGENCY here, I’ll go somewhere else.
16th August
Packing my bag is difficult with one eye that has a dark stain at the centre of what it sees. Lenses are making me feel drowsy and nauseous. It is like being seasick on a ship and unkind weather.
It is a strange sensation to have something happen that changes what you feel and makes the world around you utterly different from what it was a day ago. Yet no one seems to notice that the universe has vaulted irremediably on the dark side. So I hide my discomfort, sitting on the train, looking at the window for a world that has already ceased to exist for me..
I always dread leaving. For anywhere. For a long time, I thought it was the fear of abandoning – and provoking in others the oblivion felt when I had been left behind myself. Today the fright is overwhelming even before I make the effort to get out of bed. As I do and gravity forces the energy of change, I think for the first time that it is the fear of the new, and as any real journey promises to implement changes. I am afraid of leaving because I know this voyage, perhaps even more than all, will see me travel to a different me.
At thus moment I realise that I AM AFRAID OF LIFE. This thought is absurd and pathetic and real – I laugh at myself, first with just a quiet smile, then with outright laughter, and I can’t quite explain this to my beautiful young son. He looks at me like the man in the attic, it confirms what he always suspected, but that is ok by me, his bewildered presences warms my heart.
OK, time to go and face the music, the road, the unknown and the new. But one step at a time, I can’t see very well: I have an Oedipus in my eye.
17th August. Doctors.
9am
“I am here because my legs hurt, even though we know that L4 and L5 are damaged, we think with my GP that it may really be a neurological problem” – Dr Starchenko does listen, (I feel like a proper human being), she considers everything, she considers the whole, and only after then does she considers the symptoms. So I’m happy to get electric shocks on different parts of my legs, and growing in intensity as the forty minute session makes me think of a Chinese acupuncture gone wrong – modern Western medicine is too intrusive no matter who administers it. “You’ve got nothing neurologically wrong here” – “So why the coldness in the legs, if it’s not cardiovascular either?” – “That my dear man, I cannot tell you, just one of those things… but for your eye, do let me know how the MRI goes, now that could be cardiovascular”.
I’m thinking it’s only a doctors’ irremediable curiosity, and her interest in me both soothes and worries: is it ever good to awake a doctor’s interest? I am truly thankful for her time, true gift between mortals.
10:30am
This is the MRI that I managed to book yesterday; they will check my left eye and I’ll be good to go to a doctor for treatment. As Misail said on Sunday, they can only treat me if they know what is causing the oedema. I feel sure we’ll find out what’s going on.
11:45am
I’m coming out of the RMI, walking aimlessly and now sitting somewhere on a bench in the street. I need to talk to someone.
“I knew something was wrong when he decided to add a marker and do it again… there is white matter in the brain, it’s neurological according to the doctor there, I have to go to an eye specialist, or a neurologist, I don’t know what to do” – “Bloody hell!” is all she replies; Agafya is as stunned as I am. I’ve had my share of health issues in recent years and I did not expect or intend or can deal with more. She listens, she doesn’t let me feel her own fear, nor does she pretend to be able to help. That she is with me though miles apart is a miracle that she makes happen. Thank you. For a few minutes I am not alone. Thank you.
5:30pm
I have rushed here to a random ophthalmologist to show her the MRI. The Oracle checks my eyes, makes a report on the state of the sight in the left eye, then the right eye, and reads the MRI report – With a tiny voice as I sit head down on some stool, certain that my sight is getting worse by the hour, I ask: ”What does it looks like for you?”, she doesn’t hesitate: “For me it reads like M.S., which is why you need to go to the Emergency Eye Clinic right now to get treated with cortisone - you can live with MS, but you have to act now if you want to keep the eye.”
Ok, well, that’s a handful.
I wonder when they will schedule my MRI in England, I call Agafya “She says its MS” – “Bloody Hell!!!” this time with a little more worry coming through. So I reassure her that where I’m going next is the real deal, the crème de la crème specialists of neuro-ophthalmic diseases in the country. And it is true, but I’m the one who’s not reassured, and I don’t really think she is either. Now in the background I’m sure I can hear Oedipus laughing.
5:30-9:30pm
So here we are at the Emergency Eye Clinic – that’s me and Vanya my brother in arms of many adventures and of many years. He is visiting the city as I am, in between two jobs before fleeing back to give care and embrace more of the world and its peoples. He waits for me for a while outside, current health measures do not allow him in. We communicate across the wall with our phones, and since this could take hours, he takes a walk in the gardens nearby. It is a warm summer’s night in the city of lights.
I wait anxiously with my MRI scan and referrals, its 9:30pm and it has been a long day. The tone of the intern who has finally appeared and is now re-testing everything is not warm or empathetic. There will be no treatment tonight, there will be no cortisone, he will leave it to the specialists to call me back soon, probably tomorrow, for an appointment most probably at the end of the week.
“I have no intention to lose the use of my eye, why can’t you do something now?”. I think a fair question after all I’ve heard today, but he gets crossed, he knows best, and there is nothing he is going to do tonight. So there, go home and wait for the call!
With that, and like Humpty Dumpty looking up from his wall, and with the tone of a fragile young man who has learnt his lesson by heart, who will not be waived by a patient’s fear or emotion, lest he might fall and break into million pieces, he shows me the door and bid me good night – good life?
3:50am
I’m lying in my Parisian bed, the heat of the summer allows the night life to come through the open window, I cannot sleep, my heart is ponding; the uncertainty of the prognostic is keeping me awake and anxious, in a state of panic.
18th August.
The hours pass, I’m more and more worried, as the left eye gets worse. The possibility that this may be a family thing like my mother’s and uncle’s loss of sight in one eye – albeit at a much older age than mine, is now very real. But I’m not quite ready to be one-eyed. The alternative of a neurological disease like MS is not more rejoicing. I wake up in a wet bed, covered in cold panic sweat.
-“Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare”, yes but one-eyed, Philip. And it’s not really soundless either where I am, life if going on outside, and it has the gentle random soundscape of a street at night. Your not so quiet despair that used to entice my angsty teenage years has left – I never was that kind of nihilist: my panicking heart yearns to live, and shows no sign of despair or discouragement. Instead of your dreadfully feared ending for Aubade as “postmen like doctors go from house to house”, I’d rather put myself to sleep with: “and the empty pages, should they ever be filled, let it be with celestial recurrences, the day the flowers come, and when the birds go”, I always thought your poems featuring nature had a sort of naivety; I was wrong, they are the ones with real depth…
Let me be with ALL things, not separated from them. Let me continue to be part of the world, whatever is happening to me will not define me, instead make it show me another way to be. Let me learn what this is meant to teach me. Our dreams before dawn sometimes have the qualities of hope and courage, I pray they subside until morning and into the days to come.
20th August. Oedipus or The Cyclop?
I’m given the full examination protocol in the most specialised clinic in Paris – full with all the latest gizmos, complete with medical nerds firmly attached, and an army of white bloused nurses, half my age or less, to give me and all here the time of day. My own Ophthalmo-Neurologist intern has a first and a last name that could be translated as “Sewing Justice”, her cheerful energy and perky eyes behind large glasses reminds of spring and reparation, so even Oedipus has a sense of humour after all.
Vanya is waiting once again for me, most of the afternoon and into the evening while the doctors, technicians and nurses decide on the state of my eye.
By nine that evening, I am told that it is a Cyclop called NOYA that is inhabiting the back of my eye-lobe. Similar to my mother’s and uncle’s, my left eye, though diminished even more since the beginning of the week, will possibly get slightly better, albeit stay permanently damaged.
I can still see around “the stain” in the left eye, and my right eye is not affected. I am so relieved not to have MS, and that the white matter in my brain is not neurological but most probably cardiovascular, not uncommon, and benign. I walk energetically out of this place, happy to only have a slightly damaged eye – “And possibly not damaged at all, do think: no MS and a restored eye” says my lovingly caring friend, and I agree, I wish I had his refreshing optimism and utter lack of fear. Vanya Is the most perfect listener that I know, and the keenest observer of the human condition, I trust him with my life.
The Cyclop as a character, or myth, never really inspired me. His unique eye is not a symbol of wisdom, rather a lack of it. His lack of vision is exactly that, in all the meaning of the word. And this is true in both stories where Polyphemus the Cyclop appears – as the gruesome man-eater coned by Ulysses, and as the somehow redeemed lover fooled by Galatia. His is rather a stubbornness, turned into meanness, and monstrosity that makes him un-human rather than more than human. Add this is how it feels tonight – a mean injury that I will have to compensate for, rather than learn from. In this return to ‘normal life’ I feel relieved and deflated in the same breath – if the intensity felt in the potential colossal loss expected only a few hours ago is exhausting, it is also life affirming in that it forces to confront one’s finitude in the most direct way. Without it, the softness of the return to normality is a sort of anti-climax, even if very much welcomed. I’m not sure if I am not missing Oedipus’ laughter, if only because I wanted to know what It was all about. I’m glad though that my hubris to know will now have to be channelled in other ways.
22nd August. Oedipus, Oedipus, Oedipus.
Sunday. Careful what you wish for.
Eye is not getting better, but worse with every hour. I spend the afternoon with my friend Safka and one of his acquaintances, we talk about theatre in England, our love for the stage, for the craft. And as the evening falls so does my sight on the left eye. The stain has remained in place, but a shadow has fallen on the rest of the eye, the same acuity but much darker in a matter of a few hours. This is not a NOYA, it is evolving so fast, none of this makes sense.
It is three, and four, and now five am, the same throbbing heartbeat in my ears and in my chest, the same sheets covered in sweat: I am panicking.
24th August. Going dark and staying dark.
It has been two days now that the left eye is almost completely seeing dark. This is not the Cyclop-style NOYA that I was told of. I am confused and angry. Could they have had it wrong? The great specialists, the great Gods of all things neurological-ophtalmo-medical. Zeus is laughing, I can hear him too. If nothing else I seek the truth, I need to know what is going on, and my gut feeling is that nothing here is what it seems. I contact the young Justice for advice. I spend the rest of the day gauging every change in my eye, comparing it to my mother’s symptoms, and worrying.
But maybe Justice is listening, as she sets another appointment at the hospital on Thursday. Justice is a young apprentice, and she could also be merely repeating what she hears, or what she is being told to say. Or leading me to look another way.
Echo also spoke too much, keeping the attention of Hera as Zeus wandered off in one of his many extra-marital affairs with other nymphs. Punished for doing so, Echo is condemned to only be able to speak the end of sentences spoken to her. In a dreadful encounter with the beautiful Narcissus, and incapacitated to speak her own feelings, she too is rejected in shame and regret. Hiding forever in a cave, she can still be heard repeating the end of whatever is spoken to her… For if love is solely to reflect the desired being, then it is like listening to your own sound repeated over and over again, without being able to perceive its source, and forever being deceived: in this kind of love there is no one here other than you, alone. “I may never relish on the powers of unreflecting love” will lament Keats much later.
The great Grec myths do not offer moral dictates, but they explain the human emotions and are metaphors of transformative acts. As (an) Echo cannot inspire unreflecting love to Narcissus, in turn his inability to love others is solved through an act: he must first learn to embrace himself to be transformed into the most beautiful and inspiring flower in the Greek world. (It’s only the most recent developments of extreme individualism that makes Narcissus a negative hero – he was in fact a positive one even under Freud’s scalpel and until the end of the last century)
I wonder who’s words Justice-Echo is repeating to me, and who is the Narcissus she is trying to reflect.
26th August.
August. Oedipus back at hospital
I am waiting for the results of another full set of tests at the hospital. Echo is talking with her colleagues behind the closed door of her office, it is taking more time than I expected. This is a spaceship of a hospital, where everything is new and shiny, and everyone works like they are ants in a gigantic hive, or in the Enterprise spaceship from Star Trek. These people are a great mix of technicians, nurses, interns, doctors and surgeons, assistants and secretaries, receptionists and cleaning personnel, who’s social and personal allegiances are apparent only in what sticks out from their similar white and blue uniforms; a piece of jewellery, a fancy pair of shoes, a hairstyle, or the texture of their speech. I wait seated, looking at my fellows-in-misery, there are no real smiles here. People are ill, often clearly suffering as they await a verdict that they have learnt not to be hopeful for – we are here because we know things are bad, there is no need to sugar coat it. But maybe this is just me, the fact is that we hardly speak to each other, we’ve all been waiting here long enough and just hope that our turn will come soon.
I can still read with my one eye working. I’ve picked up a Japanese thriller at the bookshop, titled “In the eye of the devil”, I guess it was appropriate. I call Olga, I thought to see her for dinner tonight, I have not seen her for a while, and miss the friendship intimacy that I have not had for a while.
As I just manage to reach her mobile, the doctors finally call me in, I can see through the open door that their meeting has included even more people online. I’ll call Olga later.
The verdict falls like a hammer on a nail, insisting with every blow that the steel enters deeper into a wound that is already deep, painful, and irremediable. “You are right Mr. Munday, your left eye is almost blind, which is not consistent with a NOYA; more importantly there is another oedema growing in your right eye” says Echo-Justice with her soft voice, and then to put a final blow on that one: “We need to keep you here and do more tests, you’ll stay at the hospital tonight and for the next few day, it looks like it is a neurological issue after all”.
Behind Justice sits, hiding in front of screens with pictures of my eyes all over, a long and bony figure, a male in his mid-thirties, attached to a mask-obscured face equipped with sad-looking eyes. It is often very strange to me how the medical profession responds to emotion, and tonight is no exception. As I protest with teas that I cannot stop wetting my face, thinking (irrationally?!) about my child coming to visit me in the next few days, and who will undoubtably freak-out to know that his dad is in hospital, I am met with cold rebuke; “And this is why we are keeping you Mr Munday, to make you feel better soon. (surely there is no need for this at your age, also don’t you dare make us feel guilty for two mis-diagnostics already, it’s hardly been more than ten days wasted for a possible treatment, it’s only medicine that we are doing here after all)” .
The voice of Oedipus whispers in my ears: now almost half-blind, its as though my sense of hearing lets me contemplate the thoughts rather than the words of the people talking to me.
I’m calling Olga at last, I won’t be seeing her tonight, unless she wants to make the trip to the hospital – some friends are for life, and I have known her quite literally all mine since the age of five. She will come, we will laugh together as we always do, there will be some warmth coating this enduring nightmare. I will tell her about my eye, and more importantly I will see her face again. Because that was the point I was trying to convey to the sad-eyed doctor – will I be able to see my boy’s face again, before the other eye go? But with all his foreseeing, knowledge and knowhow, this fake Teresias was not going to give me an answer: he simply did not know.
I sit with Olga outside, visitors in time of Covid are not allowed in. This is a warm summer night, the air is calm and restful, unlike the madness of the hive inside. We laugh as I’d hope, her caring voice makes life come through “the crack were the light gets in” – she used to share Leonard Cohen to convey her love, another life ago.
27th August. Oedipus is watching.
Woken up at five thirty, the nurse has a lot to do, and now is her time to get the 28 blood samples out of my arm. Even by her standards this is a tedious job, let’s hope we don’t need to open another well in another arm. Later today I will be sent to do another RMI, and a lumbar puncture before lunch. But other than that I am free to roam, although not outside the hospital itself.
Family and friends will bring me books, reading is getting very uncomfortable but is still just possible with the remaining eye. I venture across the street to the park, waiting for Vanya, his belle and son who will come and visit – When they do we gradually move from the Hospital courtyard to the other side of the street to enjoy the Parisian café vibe. Expensive but always necessary.
28th August. Oedipus is making me tired.
The Saturday feel is here, offices and corridors are empty and contrast with the quiet but busy room floors filled with the ill, showing all at once and in the same people the human misery and hope, the love and concern. Here everyone is affected, the bug may live in one body, its presence spreads through everyone closely connected emotionally, and to everyone else in the same room, in the same corridor, in the same building. Like with ophthalmologist Misail two weeks ago, we are all in this together – almost immediately my bedroom partner affects me as I affect him, and the fear and compassion felt by his family members who come to visit or speak on the phone inspire respect and inexorable empathy.
How much of this sense of being connected one to another have we lost in our increasingly groundless virtual culture? Someone told me of a language where instead of saying “they are ill”, one says “I am ill with them”, in this language the grammar does not make possible to separate oneself from the other. The opposite of “each man is an island” heresy that we are so fond of, and which is certainly not what the experience of this place is.
And so it is conceivable that my biology is affected by, and also affecting, all that is happening around me. Then let’s consider illness also as a consequence of the relationship we have with the world and the people that make it. It is by understanding these relationships to the world that I can find a new, more durable balance between myself and what I am in relationship with. I want to learn from this, I want to hear what Oedipus has to say, to see what is behind these blinded eyes. I have no choice as anyone in relationship with me is also “ill with me”, I owe it to them as much as I owe it to me. There is no separation possible, as I am part of the world as much as the world is part of me.
29th August. Sunday
This morning I take a walk in the park before breakfast. It is 7:30 and gloriously sunny and light in a calm Paris Sunday dream. You can hear the birds, and you can smell the pine trees.
And then for the very loud and sudden sting in my head - Oedipus is shows himself this time in my right eye, clear as a black line at the bottom of the globe.
I will be blind, it is happening. I am drench in fear, walking as the rain pours from me. This cannot be.
Will I ever see my boy’s face again?
I am drained, and now that Olga is here, to visit me on her usually precious Sunday sleepy morning, I am so very grateful and so in need of company. I can hardly stand up though, closing my eyes as we speak, comfortably private in the empty waiting room on a deserted hospital weekend. And I feel like my head is swimming on a body without limbs, unclear of where the bottom or the top is.
She soothes my head with her special skills and healing hands – she’s never tried them before but has been told, and we laugh, it is a sunny lunchtime, and in the quietness of this hellhole, there is something hopeful and sweet and alive, her smile covering the deathly scent of this hospital.
No matter what this is, Oedipus is teaching me and allowing for the unexpected and the unheard.
I am exhausted and battered, but I am not defeated, I am changing and charging against despair, I am becoming, I am alive.
It has been exactly three weeks since Oedipus has first shown his ironic smil to me. It is now clear that this is a very serious illness that will not go away, and is already decisively changing the course of my life.
Will I lose the use of the other eye completely? Will the crew and captain of this notorious ship-clinic be able to kick-start a healing process? Will I be a one-eyed man, or a blind man, or some hybrid super-powered hero-king in between?!
Or have I done something, ANYTHING?!, to deserve this – concretely, or even spiritually, have I been guilty all this time?
I have let YOU down my child. (The only guilt I feel is for you) - this is not what I intended! – And suddenly,
Suddenly, not Philip Larkin’s “thought of High Windows”, but Fellini’s last ronde in 8.1/2, with Morricone’s melody played on a child’s flute, and the echo of Mastroianni’s softly uttered words: “È una festa la vità, vivialmo la insieme”
– and if there is a reason for all of this, let it be to live better, to know better, to fail better. And to embrace all, as all is yet to be offered.
A love of my life said to me, years ago as I was drowning in the arms of a previous serious illness, that I was in a war and in need of a military strategy, not of self-pity and romanticism. Medical treatment is technical at best, and results in gruesome infringement on personal integrity no matter how prepared you are – survival is everything and takes everything.
Well I did not think that I was that kind of soldier, and as I protested wanting the reason, crying for empathy, she conceded with laughter and acquiesced with her soft voice – “You are an artist Mr. M. you have to create the meaning and make sense of all that is affecting you, that’s how you are and that is what you do“. I could feel her excruciating pain as she realised that her love alone would not save me. She was unravelling in the most unbearable grievance when no amount of love or empathy can ever bridge to the solitude of the suffering friend. She was “ill with me”.
That continues to bind me to her, as much as it binds me to life. Yet I never told her that it was the desire to not let her down, and the irresistible call to be with her again, that kept me fighting my way to recovery then.
I remember a picture of her blue-deep eyes, her beautiful face smiling at me through the window of a house where we lived. Today in this room made of plastic, in this white and empty vessel on the margin of life, I suddenly feel more alive, able to breathe, and I can stand.
Eager to go for a walk, ready to learn from today a bit more of who I am.
END OF PART ONE
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