Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [73]
The signs weren’t good, though. For one thing, the psychic had a profoundly neurotic dog, who tore back and forth across the room, flinging himself against the furniture with increasing and unnerving force. Couldn’t she see into his pain? Why didn’t the rods help with his obvious anxiety? Furthermore, she expressed considerable concern for me, told me that I desperately needed to love myself more if I was not to become very ill. Then she pointed the wands at me, asked the question, and they promptly indicated that I had AIDS, too. My trust flagged.
(People who don’t know are forever sizing me up to try to guess if I have AIDS or not—checking out my weight, whether my cheeks look hollow or not, how tired I look. As Wally became more ill, he actually gained weight as his activity decreased. I grew thinner, from tension, exhaustion, riding my bike, and swimming laps to dispel the stress. People told me I looked too thin. My friend Maggie said I looked worse than Wally; “In a way,” she said, “it’s you I’m worried about.” Bill said, “Well, of course, it’s harder on you and Phil; you’re the ones who’re going to have to live without us.” Just this week I ran into a straight couple I know casually, on the street. They asked me how Wally was, and after I told them he’d died, after the expressions of condolence, I could see them both—unconsciously?—checking me out, trying to guess. One of them asked me, “Well, how do you think he got it?” As if I cared, as if it mattered, as if it mattered how anybody got it.)
The problem with Jim’s perspective is the obverse of its strength; it presumes that we are responsible for our own reality, for our experience. This is seductive, in part because there’s such a clear element of truth in it; if we take care of ourselves, we do better. And seductive, too, because Jim, stubborn optimist, insistent on his powers over the virus, is alive; Bob, committed fatalist, is not.
(On a business trip back to Vermont, I walk down Main Street and find a U-Haul in front of Bob’s building, and a man I know carrying the frame of Bob’s bed down the stairs while someone else lugs a stack of boxes down from the little aerie over the movie theater. I think the worst, but in fact he’s moving to another apartment, no longer able to manage the stairs. He’ll die not in eighteen months but in two years or so, in that little Vermont town, his mother and sister taking turns caring for him. He and Wally had a last conversation, a month or so before, on the phone, Wally in bed, Bob in his wheelchair, both too tired to talk for long.)
Maybe it would be wonderful if it were as simple as this: take care of yourself, attune yourself to the inner life, rid yourself of negativity, focus on the light, and you’ll be fine. But this seems to me, finally, a kind of kindergarten spirituality, a view of the soul written in broad crayon strokes. Oh, meditation and thinking positively and attending to the transcendent can be profoundly helpful, I know that. These practices provide a structure for caring for the self. They help us to live well, even help us deal with those aspects of illness that arise out of tension and stress.
What’s good about taking charge of one’s life is obvious; the negative side is subtler, harder to see, and has to do with all that the philosophy of self-control excludes. You are calling the shots, such thinking argues. There are no accidents, no unruly rupture breaking apart your life, no brutal interruption. You’ve chosen this path, this plan. Illness has a purpose.
But isn’t transformation, the spirit’s education, most often effected by what is out of our hands, the sweeping forces—time, love, mortality—which shape us? The deepening of the heart, the work of soul-making goes on, I think, as the world hammers us, as we forge ourselves in response to its heats