Towards the middle of the poet, essayist and teacher, Anne Boyer's meditation on her experience of going through treatment for breast cancer; " The Undying ", she gives us two quotes on the difficulty of writing;
" A writer must, wrote Brecht, be courageous enough to know the truth, keen enough to recognise it, skilful enough to weaponize it, judicious enough to know who might be able to use it, and cunning enough to help it find its way. And the truth must be written for someone, a someone who is all of us, all who exist in that push and pull of what bonds of love tie us to the earth and what suffering drives us from it. "
Then, after this gem, she goes on;
" Back in the Roman Empire, Aelius Aristides had a problem. He wanted to write a book, but he didn't know how to organize the information of his experience:
Since I have mentioned the river and the terrible winter and the bath, am I next to speak of other things of the same category and am I to compile, as it were, a catalogue of wintry, divine, and very strange baths ? Or dividing up my tale, shall I narrate some intermediate events? Or is it best to pass over all the intermediate things and give an end to my first tale, how the oracle about the years held and how everything turned out? "
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The writer doesn't have to write, but often feels compelled to. Amongst the most momentous and life changing experiences is serious illness and for so many reasons, a good writer, a serious poet, will surely find it both necessary and difficult to find a way that feels appropriate to process and communicate what happened and how it felt.
It has taken to this point for Anne to be able to relate briefly a salient moment she shares with her teenage daughter when they have witnessed a deer being hit by a car. Watching the deer struggle and finally get up, an opportunity is afforded for her daughter to be able to voice her fears about Anne's illness and for Anne to make a firm, well-researched attempt to allay them. Anne is the epitome of strength and defiance in the face of this shared terror, but nevertheless, ends this short, poignant description with the words;
" Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born. "
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Anne also talks about her devastating loss of sense of self, of feeling like a ghost and links it to her awful loss of memory, poignantly making a small joke about how her autobiography should be called " The Medically Induced Failure of the Remembrance of Things Past. "
Having not been through aggressive chemotherapy and surgery for cancer, I can only try to imagine the kinds of pain Anne writes about in her book, but I can relate to and understand the struggle with writing about certain kinds of pain, and also the loss of sense of self and memory.
Sometimes I write to try to remember properly and this involves facing truths that have lain buried deep within for a long time and the act of delving, remembering and writing can feel like being one's own pathologist with the scalpel-pen making a deep, deliberate wound as it is employed.
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