Every whisper sounds like thunder
Everybody stares in wonder
When the saints begin to speak
[Manhattan Transfer, 'Brasil']
Yesterday was the usual AIDS/HIV patient group presentation to medical students. ("Usual" – this is one of the things I do here, in this otherwise rather isolated place – it is both my claim to actually do something useful in my life, and my attempt to make contact.) Four patients, plus two professionals framing us; everyone in a particularly reasonable, undramatic, slightly distracted mood. The stories were frankly a bit incoherent this time, but not at all nonsensical – our dramatically tattooed ex-con straight guy hectoring everyone on the Coming Plague, our relaxed mother of two explaining the details of her pregnancy and childbirth, and the rather clueless Belgian professional stumbling through the discussion from time to time with one or another insensitive comment. (He rarely attends – I must confess I won't miss him when he goes.) But it was, as usual, a deeply powerful connection, even with its minor and fragmentary appearance – these presentations are apparently the high point in a year of teaching for these students (according to their evaluations), and they are always fairly amazed at our everyday humanity, and probably simply that we're alive.
It's a saintly act, really. It doesn't sound like one, I'm sure – questions of sex, guilt, the personal mistakes we've made and the professional mistakes made upon us – but it is the closest thing in my life to an unafraid confrontation with being, to real and undemonstrative courage. There are glints of that in teaching, of course, but they are rare – perhaps because of academic egos, perhaps because the students are young and selfish, perhaps because I teach in a discipline that doesn't really have the quality of necessity (as would medicine, perhaps, or engineering in a poor country). Perhaps it's just because I'm so self-involved in my academic work, obsessed with my own productivity above all.
But the privilege, the luck, of being able to remind myself of these confrontations, of this being, on a regular basis - a very good thing; otherwise I would undoubtedly forget about everything that mattered....
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