Fragments of good things and difficult ones; much administration, many students (most of whom seem rather smart, charming, alert this year; as D. said, sometimes it seems as though changes in students are like the weather – who knows why they happen – which means, I guess, we should be grateful for good weather).
A seminar in Darmstadt, high modernism, and my favorite Difficult Musics of the 1950s and 1960s: and the students seem interested and as though they're absorbing everything. It might be actually fun to teach it.
Meanwhile: I remain internally mildly volatile, chaotic, in the process of unstable change, of unpredictable thinking....
M. said this blog was sounding "a bit bipolar" – I objected immediately: if I were bipolar, wouldn't I at least sometimes have the energy and euphoria of the manic phase?... as opposed to this fragmented but mostly low-to-middle-mood existence. But I suppose what he means is the energy of depression versus anxiety... which would be – a sort of poor man's bipolar disorder?...
•••
But all of this, activity and work, thoughts and responsibilities, fades into a rather pallid, two-dimensional unimportance in contrast to what my eldest sister is going through. Several years of diagonoses and tests, good and semi-bad prognoses, have accelerated into a bout of chemotherapy – and several attendant crises: liquid in the lungs, great difficulty breathing, a sudden hospital stay, etc.
The situation is serious, but perhaps not disastrous: I get the sense – from thousands of miles away, through the hearsay of her husband, passed on to my younger sister, and my brother and sister-in-law – that doctors are expecting her to pull through the panicky, painful experiences of this week, and hopefully to respond well to treatment – over time. My sister herself, always calm and articulate in the way of the take-charge eldest child, and her husband, whose ex-Navy toughness prevents him from even thinking of panicking, both tend to sidestep any expectation of catastrophe – but fortunately they don't sugarcoat anything either.
One thing that is obvious: that even if she will be all right, her physical experience over these weeks can't be anything but deeply frightening – even when your mind knows that things are being handled, when you have an experience like difficulty breathing, or (as in my first 'body shock' experiences around a failed surgery, back in the early 1980s) you have rapid internal bleeding and your blood pressure suddenly drops over a matter of minutes, your immediate physical experience is one of panic and an acute need to act, to prevent what feels like dying.
So, of course, I worry, fret, wonder if there's anything I could do.
It feels as though the best thing I could do with my time would be to throw aside all this teaching, this administration; a trip to Los Angeles next week, fussing about the projects this year – to simply drop it all, and go sit by her bed at the hospital. Not to be tragic or overwhelmingly sympathetic about it, but just to be there: maybe read some books aloud, listen, talk. Or just sit.
Frankly, that seems to be the only thing that would really make sense, these days....
Comments