There are postures that are extremely difficult to explain, but which constitute something like the epicenter of all our choreographies, the step that we can never evacuate from ourselves, the one that serves as our “hard core”. This posture, for me, reveals itself as a sort of construction that is admittedly a little wobbly, but which holds up all the same, despite the attempts at destruction it has undergone, from the outside as well as from the inside. Construction whose genealogy still escapes me a little, despite my three mortgages in psychoanalysis and all this time spent writing. It is in these zones that, no doubt, dance would manage to say much better, much more precisely, than all the words in the world. So, allow me to dance a little with you, in this column from the beginning of August, to try to bring to you something that again struck me this week as a reality that demanded, and not only for me, his part of the speech.
Mammography day. Excuse me, yes, I’m going to talk about my cancer again, even though, technically, I’ve been almost two years “without evidence of disease” since a surgical oncologist who didn’t know he was a poet gave my listen to this magnificent phrase: Oh, this is the tumor bed (Oh, that’s the tumor bed). On the ultrasound screen, instead of the dark continent before the chemo, there was now only a small spot, the one that would forever bear the trace of a passage. Like what, even the detestable things, when they leave us, leave in us the traces of an absence which, eternally, will demand its share of poetry.
I also specify, for those who would like to take me back, telling me that it is not “my” cancer, but “the” cancer, that I am a very bad candidate for this way of going through the ordeal.
It is here that, already, a small dance step appears, a kind of refusal which would say: “how I hate being told how to think about my life, my illness, my death”. If I still don’t know how to think of it, like Marisol Drouin, I continue to think that there is, in the public space as in that of grocery store corridor conversations, an immense noise that does not has the sole purpose of covering up another noise: the white noise of our common finitude. There is then a lot of fuss to cover it with a series of hollow sentences, resulting from this strange mixture which combines benevolence, awkwardness and denial, the one which says “let me colonize your thought of my defense against nothingness”.
There are many kamikazes of the existential who, then, in the greatest of solitudes, continue to stand upright in their tragedy, refusing the dripping, refusing the pink ribbons, refusing to be told how much more suitable it would be, more reassuring (for the others) that they agree to remain “fighters”, soaked in a positivism which serves to establish an idea in the minds of all, enthroned at the top of all the others. “Fortunately it’s not me”, as in De la Chenelière’s poem.
Mammogram day, I said. I’m still the youngest on the floor. I am received as people are usually received in a system that works hard to not only bleach the jackets: technically in an irreproachable way, humanly without warmth. Eyes are avoided, the instructions are clear.
But, I know it well, we go on, we are focused on the time that flies, on “not making mistakes”
— thank you —, on not escaping anything, but also, on putting our own humanity in a small container at the entrance to the hospital, to be certain of surviving this system which puts pressure on us. I know, I hear it, I am in solidarity with the generalized ethical suffering among all caregivers who are required to feel nothing.
And, in addition, we made an effort, which I commend above all, since it is certainly a step in the right direction, that of restoring aesthetics, life, to places that smell of death. We put a lot of pink there and, on the walls, we wrote in big words “sublime”, “beater”, “brilliant”, “courageous”. I’m sure that for a lot of women, these efforts have the effect of an immense balm on their anguish. After all, 85% of breast cancers end in remission, provided you are diagnosed after age 50.
However, for those who receive it, like me, before the age of 40, this cancer remains the primary cause of death by cancer for this age group. My dead friends, my high risk of recidivism, the visceral fear I have of being stuck in my stomach as I prepare to see an ultrasound screen again do not feel at all concerned by this language, even finding the superimposition of these words on walls. These are dead words for me, in fact.
No wall will have the expected warmth on a face.
As I put on the jacket, avoiding the mirror, I find this little dance step inside me, the one that says: “I’m sorry, but even destroyed, even in pieces, objectified, even crumbly like a wandering exile from the world under a bleached jacket, I always stand in the middle of what constitutes my original anger” and I say: “thanks for the advice, but I prefer white”.