Page 54 - WTP Vol. X #7

Head of a Pin (continued from preceding page)
little about the workings of viruses, of the language they speak and the messengers they sometimes
are, couriers of tidings that we hardly understand, mysterious companions. We know almost nothing of other orders of being, whether zoonotic or seraphic. I only mean to insist that there is a reality to the felt experience of illness, that it had something to say to me, that it is not merely an inexpert understanding of what’s really going on.
I hate explanations that shut down wonder, that explain away. I don’t think it is a useful definition of the spiritual to consider it what’s left over after you have snuffed out each of the candles you can reach with an explanation.
What we experience is shaped by our imagination, where encounters with unseen forces are interpreted, in personal terms, in one mode of language or another. The imagination is a vast realm where myth and music, stories and visions, hold sway. Our lives are always interpretations. Consciousness is a profoundly metaphorical
drama staged by the imagination. This is how I understand these lines by William Carlos Williams, himself a physician, who wrote in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.”
Only the imagination is real! I have declared it.
Time without end.
In Catholic school, in first grade, we were often re- minded by our teacher, Sister Anne Catherine, that we should skootch over and leave half the sculpted wooden seat for our guardian angel. We all obeyed. Not one of us smirked. And I am not smirking now.
I happen to think it is a beautiful idea; it was a real comfort to me, a wise, reassuring, and generous gift given to a nervous child. Each of us had our own Guardian Angel, she told us, who knew us long be- fore we were born. I tried to turn my head quick to maybe surprise my angel, to see him. Once I had my- self convinced I’d caught a glimpse, just a movement and a light, out of the corner of my eye. And so, when I explore the experience of being ill, I find there’s an angel there, an elusive being born in my imagination as a Catholic child.
But it isn’t necessary to embrace the cartoon angels offered to six-year-olds, any more than it is re- quired to believe a virus is “some kind of bug.” It is possible (I am doing it now) to reach into the un- seen with questions and a wondering imagination, and to follow our intuition, knowing that we are in
relation to much that is unseen and unknown but nevertheless important.
I was discharged the day before my 72nd birthday. The next day I woke early, and whether by simple contrast to my illness or because I’d returned home to sleep in my own bed, I felt better than I had in years.
Fifteen years earlier I had been diagnosed with a condition called Essential Thrombocythemia, a disorder of the bone marrow that produces too many platelets, the blood’s clotting material. It is a blood cancer, often a precursor to leukemia, but it is not itself a mortal danger. It puts those afflicted at higher risk for vascular blockages and stroke, and in my case it slows me down. “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow,” as Theodore Roethke wrote. It has always taken me half the day to come fully to consciousness, and some days I’m not sure I ever get there. I have thought—secretly of course but I’ll confess it, sheepishly, here, that it is because I am a genius; I have so much to gather up, from so many different provinces of self, so many dimensions
of the mind, that of course it takes me a long time each day to reintegrate the many parts of me and bring them to bear on the day’s obligations! But the more likely explanation is that the thrombocythe- mic thickening of my blood means my poor heart is pumping syrup, so it takes a long time to get up to speed. The experience of that torpor is sometimes a delicious languor, other times a maddening frustra- tion. Treatment for Thrombocythemia includes care- fully monitoring platelet levels in the blood; mine were consistently an alarming 500 or so points above the normal range.
In addition, microscopy showed that in addition to an overabundance of platelets, I had somehow incurred a mutation called Janus 2. As the doctor explained to me that a normal platelet is designed to adhere to others by means of spicules radiating from one side of it, and that mine had suffered a mutation that resulted in spicules jutting from two sides of the platelet, I understood immediately, or was at least able to envision that platelet as Janus, the two-faced god of doorways. I remember that I quipped, “No wonder I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.” The doctor looked at me blankly; he didn’t know who Janus was.
Two days after my hospitalization I received the discharge report, which included a full battery of blood tests: my platelet count was inexplicably back in the normal range. Excited, I called my doctor who
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