Tropic of Cancer

Sunday, 07th May 2023

Glancing at the clock on the cooker I can see that it’s 0404 in the morning. I’m sitting in the kitchen (I guess you know where a cooker usually lives?). Which is not unusual because I often write in this room. And often early in the morning. When I was last in this room, even earlier, it was 0300 ish and even then I’d been awake half an hour. ‘Even’. When something’s level; when two halves of an equation balance, when a number’s divisible by two.

Sometimes we’re awake at these ‘ungodly’ hours because we can’t sleep. Obviously! Here I mean in the insomnia sense. Ususally that’s because we’ve got stuff on our minds, our brains are operating at too high a frequency, a thinking frequency, not the frequency of sleep.

Occasionally it’s for other reasons. I was introduced by a friend once a few years back to the notion of ‘psychic weather’. I like the idea of psychic weather. It’s like there’s a storm somewhere in the vicinity, but not at the cyclone and depression pressures of everyday weather measured on a barometer. Interesting weather words, ‘depression’, ‘pressure’. Dead, or rarified, metaphors. At frequencies (a different polarity of pressure) operating in a different dimension.

Even in 2023, science is at odds with psychic-stuff, and science is the dominant paradigm of popular truths. My own AOI, Area of Interest, actually, one of many, is Quatum Mechanics. My ‘A’ levels at school, way back in the (pre-historic) day, were Pure Mathemattics, Applied Mathematics, Physics and, er, English. A fascination with the physics of both very big things, weather, the universe, and very small things, forces, particles, has endured. In a later life, I had another friend who was very spiritual. In the holistic sense, not of the religious kind. I was very struck how the language of temporal spirituality and quantum physics is very similar. And in a funny way, they’re examining the same kind of things. Unseen, difficult to measure, more abstract and less concrete forces. Notions. Yet science is kosher, spirituality is suspect. It’s funny how the snake-oil salesmen and women of spirituality give it a bad received-wisdom rap whereas the snake-oil salesmen and women of science are merely on their way to discovering a better hypothesis.  

Psychic weather is where something ‘bad’ is happening, but off-stage (ob-scura to the Greeks, hence the modern word obscure), you can’t see it or measure it but you can feel it. Sense it. On this occasion, I don’t think it was psychic weather keeping me awake long before the dawn-chorus, or insomnia. It was a desire for creativity. Not the creativity of this, writing words on a page, or musical notes in the ear or dollops of paint on the canvas — do proper artists do dollops? Or is it merely amateurs? — or ingredients in the pots of this kitchen. It was the desire for creativity in relationships. Relationships with people. Relationships with new people, new relationships with the people I already know. Like my best friend who’s a girl. She is not my ‘girlfriend’, a specific if loosely defined type of relationship, technically she’s my landlady. She’s also not my friend whom I’ve known the longest who’s a girl, that’s Kate who bought me this machine I’m typing into. And not my best friend who’s a boy. What does ‘best’ mean here, and why do grooms have a ‘best’ man but brides don’t have a best woman? (Answer, the best man was the squire’s best swordsman in the days when the squire had first dibs on a newly married woman and her new husband might object. Honest, look it up.)

How many ‘best’ friends can you have?

Ant, with whom I went to school and have known since I was eleven (it will be half a century this September), Fudd with whom I shared my fist day in the Army in ‘82, Charles who is my son’s Godfather and who has looked after me in many ways. Dunc and Max (also Godfathers — slow down, I’ve got more than one son), whom I’ve seen the most over the decades; Daniel and Alan and Emerson (sounds like a band) who guided me in my new world (then) of IT? Different kinds of friendship on different days as the world turns, resonances with different kinds of people.

All of the people I’ve known and have got in touch since they found out I have metastatic cancer. 

When something’s going ‘wrong’ in the lives of a friend, and I don’t know it because I haven’t spoken to them for a while but ‘somehow’ I can feel it without ‘knowing’ I can feel it, that’s psychic weather. And what’s it telling me?

Speak to the friends I haven’t spoken to for a while. Create new connections, in the renewal of old ones. But maybe not at four in the morning.

Wednesday, 03rd, May, 2023.

Thinking about the 12^th, December 2022

Deep within our DNA is the resistance to and honed ability to avoid, change. Change takes effort, energy. Energy is our most precious resource. We harbour energy for use in staying alive, falling in love, building a shelter, extracting nutrients from food and turning sugars into glucose (combusted by muscles and organs). It is easier to seek prey at the waterhole we prowled to yesterday and know the way to, well, the known well, rather than seek, possibly fruitlessly, a new one. Finding a new one takes risk, uncertainty, confliction. (Physical) energy. Resolving these takes even more (mental) energy. Fine if you’ve got some to spare, foolhardy if you’re running on reserve. Einstein’s famous equation, E= mc2 is about the conservation of energy. Great if you surround yourself with people who have energy to spare, foolhardy if the people around you suck yours out.

Yet change is all around. The weather, seasons, day into night into day into night. We grow up, we grow old. We fall in love, fall out of love, back in love again. We ‘fall’. And rise again. New is novel, different. Scary but attractive. New job, new house, new friends, new year.

It takes less energy to run along the road, follow the laid-down tracks, than to beat a new path through the bush. Sometimes the tracks go off in a new direction. The points might slide effortlessly and our metaphorical journey by train continues without interruption or notification. Sometimes the points clunk and jar. Maybe we’re halted by a signal. Pause while we consider choices. Study the signposts or a map. Thinking takes energy. Decoding signs and stuff takes energy, unnecessary at times. Sometimes we stop at a station, do or don’t get off, sometimes we stop in the middle of nowhere for no obvious reason why. Sometimes the other person’s on another train. Or another track.

Enough of the UK train system metaphor.

A diagnosis of cancer is the points juddering, jarring. Not clicking in engagement. The train’s at a halt. And it came to a halt pretty bloody quickly. All of the passengers want to get off, there’s only you left. However many, however loving and caring, however empathetic friends and loved ones, there are times in life when you’re utterly alone. That’s just how it is, it’s nobody’s fault. 

[Editor’s (me) note. This next bit repeats itself (but only if you’ve read previous entries), but I feel it was on my mind, it was important, so I’ve left it in. Oh, and, editing it out depletes the word count …]

My own diagnosis came in code. Codes take energy to decode. There was room for interpretation, differing readings of the signs. Prostate cancer releases a protein into the bloodstream. The quantity of protein per volume of blood can be given a number. This number, relatively, encodes information about the tumour. The normal number for a man of my age, 60 [December, 2022, other than the last three days of it], is about 4.5 per thingy-ma-bobs. The mean number for my age group at which the men died, according to studies coming out of the States, is 165. My number was 196. This puts me into a term I refer to as The Killing Zone. Rhymes with ‘chilling’.

Here’s the thing. These kinds of scenarios do strange things to the mind. Waste a lot of energy.

But not for a day or two. After the numbness has worn off.

Sunday, 23rd April 2023

I like dates. Not the shrivelled dried-fruit fig-like variety, although I do like those, and not the ask-a-girl-on-one, in truth I’ve not been on one of those for many, many, years and my last exposure to one was my then girlfriend saying she’d been asked out on one and was going to go, so not those kind either. Dates in the calendar.

Today it’s Sunday, 23rd April, 2023.

I don’t like this date. It’s St George’s Day. I’m Welsh so prefer March 1st, but have lived much of my life, including most of the last dozen years, in England so it’s ok. It’s Shakespeare’s birthday (and the date of his death fifty-five years later, hell of a birthday present that one). Shakespeare’s been a big part of my life one way or another. Neither of those reasons are the reason I don’t like today’s date.

At 12.45 two years ago today, only just creeping into today’s date, my dog Zen died.

I miss him very much. 

Still.

Both my parents are dead, I have seven ‘friends’ on Facebook who are no more. The second girl I asked if she’d marry me — she said yes — died in ‘05. Yesterday, funnily enough, by date, if that isn’t an inappropriate expression. April 22nd, 2005. She would have been forty five when she died, on the day my sons’ mother was forty two, the Meaning of Life, according to Douglas Adams. Although not for Sheridan. Since November 2017, I’ve been close to death a few times. My Pulmonary Embolisms were ‘large and numerous’, in both lungs. ‘What’s the good news?‘ I asked the Emergency consultant after his list of my ailments. ‘You’re still alive, son.’ They’d already travelled through my heart to get to my lungs, so fortunately only large in lung terms, not heart arteries. My Full Blood Count of .60 in January 2018 was a killing number, and the CTEPH of the May to go with January’s PV were both killing quantities of killing diseases. Really? Break out the acronyms? Chronic Thoracic Embolic Pulmonary Hypertension, and Polysethia Myvera. It’s all Greek to me.

So why is death, and talking about death, in Western culture so taboo? And why is this cancer, for me, so different?

I read once that taboos like shitting and fucking persist as taboos into the modern age because they were activities that left us vulnerable to being taken unawares and eaten. A while ago, now, mind. By Sabre Tooth cats and the like, that kind of while ago. Unlike a man, when a woman orgasms she looses all sensory awareness — other than the obvious — thus leaving her extra vulnerable. Maybe men do too, they just don’t last as long. There’s a joke in there somewhere. So, by getting it over and done with quickly they (men, us) can revert back to awareness of the surroundings. A modern unnecessary bit of biological functionality that has led to more than one unfulfilled relationship. I think the post-coital cigarette business is a modern phenomena. Records from long ago don’t exist. And they didn’t keep diaries.

19th April 2023

It’s early in the morning, the birds are a-twitter outside. They, the birds, know nothing of Elon Musk and twittered long, long before the doyens of Social Media. I’ve come downstairs to the kitchen to write. Normally, in an old, different, life, when I woke up and came downstairs it was to read. It is unusual for me not to read for a couple of hours when I first get up of a day. But it’s as if I read when I come down at civilised hours and write when it’s still dark and the world, my part of the world (or at least the sensible members of it) is / are still asleep.

Dorothea Brande’s seminal 1929 Becoming a Writer, still my number one go-to self-help writing book, recommends a daily exercise where the would-be writer gets up and before exposure to any other kind of wordage, writes. No radio, internet, newspaper; just write. Anything. Doesn’t matter what. The idea is to tune the subconscious. There have been three or four occasions in my life where I have carried out — and sustained — this exercise and I think it is the best bit of advice I’ve had. Maybe there’s something residual in my psyche that returns to that habit in the early hours. 

And yet. This morning there’s something else, too. 

Something has changed. There are only three questions I can’t answer:

What?

How?

And Why?

Let’s feel our way in.

How. The easiest answer is I feel different. I often do though, as if about to start out on a new venture, or adventure, but the feeling fades by 8am when reality kicks in. This feeling of difference feels different in a different way. For a start it feels permanent, but permanent usually requires the fixing agent of time. 

And there it is. How much time have I got?

This different is not the feeling of being at the start of a new journey, it is the feeling of the end of an old one. A speech by Winston Churchill, or a lyric by Brian Houston, conflating what are ends and beginnings and the morphing of one into the other. Not all ends need be the start of a beginning, surely?

So what are the instruments?

Creativity.

Creativity is one, somehow this feeling of creativity today comes with a direction. Not the steel outer casing of the compass’s container, the silky liquid of the vehicle or the fluid movement of the needle, but the liquid crystal of a laser, all molecules aligned. A new kind of compass, not one that points to North, for the north of a compasses attraction is forever changing, but one that points in the direction I need to go and is arrived at from a cumulation of all the wanderings and wonderings of the past. This ‘now’ that we’re all supposed to live in is an aggregation of the past. And anyway, if we all lived in the Now all of the time, we wouldn’t have pensions. 

Creativity has always been with me, now it feels different. Tuned, layered. Purposeful.

This morning as I sit in someone else’s house, as dawn breaks and I turn off the supporting light and can still read Lars Mittens’ excellent ‘The Sixteen Trees of the Somme’, maybe it’s the flow of multiple coffees? creativity comes in a broad front with interlocking patterns. A new poem, the cartography of its terroir embedded in the text. A clear ‘vision’ of changes I need to turn ‘Silence’ from a functional OK novel into an artistic ‘Ahh!’,  and this blog post from a tool of the past into a tool of the future. A triptych, three panels at the same time, three (components), one artist.

Yet. More than that too. I know what to do with the dog book, not ‘Zen and the Art of Woofery’, that too has been a constant companion, but ‘Tails’ (‘A Twist in the Tale’). I know why it’s lain dormant for half a decade and why there’s been a nagging doubt of completeness — in truth lower beneath the surface than nagging — and what it needs doing to it to finish it. To make it better.

As I’ve been writing the morning has morphed into daylight, the clock has ticked round to civilised, it’s time for another coffee. And to read.