CHEMO IN THE CLASSROOM: Stories, Meaning — and the Sense of It
Gazing toward the Pacific during a chemo session.
There’s something I say to filmmakers in my classes, for many years at AFI Conservatory but now online worldwide, to the effect that as we follow the course of a story we long for a victory of some kind while fearing a defeat, yet in a good story what we discover at its end is a sense of meaning, often paradoxical, often hard to articulate, but with a resonance that renders either outcome almost irrelevant. The tragedy we dreaded, we find, offers a reward. The painful ending reverberates, stays with us while the happy dénouement we longed for withers in our memory from the moment we leave the movie theater (in the days when we could attend such venues) — unless it’s come with a cost so that along with the victory comes the pang of defeat. This sense of meaning — and it generally comprises of questions, contradictions and mystery rather than easy answers or moral reassurances (Spotlight went dark for me the moment the lights came up, if not some time before) — is what story and storytelling offer us. Through paths of emotion denied the philosophical treatise, story speaks to us in all aspects of our humanity. Yes, I love philosophy: Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Kant, Aristotle, Locke, Lao Tzu — but it’s Hitchcock, Kubrick, Lynne Ramsay, Lucretia Martel, Andrea Arnold, Barry Jenkins, Martin Scorsese and Ari Aster who get to me deep down in my heart and guts. It’s through their work that I find connection, a sense of meaning, of truth. A story, Nobel laureate Alice Munro says, has a sturdy sense of itself, of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. Those filmmakers don’t seek to shelter or beguile us, don’t attempt to make everything “alright”, but to show us what they’ve let be built out of its own necessity: a story, like it or not, to take us to the core of something we cannot deny, ignore, still less escape, but to the contrary must come to accept.
This weekend marks exactly eight years since the procedure I underwent that saved my life. That transhiatal esophagectomy left me deprived of a couple GI tract components — let’s not dwell on the details — but otherwise left me in one grateful piece. Thanks to the craftsmanship of the surgeon, my guidance from the oncologist and the care given me by the health workers who made my treatment so much less unpleasant that might otherwise have been the case, here I am today, sitting down trying to do justice to what I want to say. I may be several superfluous pounds lighter, may not be able to scarf down a burger and bun with bacon, cheese, pickles, tomato, lettuce and all the rest of it, not able to scarf down anything for that matter, perhaps a little askew physiologically, and a touch more fragile to be honest, but I remain above ground, on the planet, and struggling still to work out what’s going on with the world, with my life, with the lives of everyone around me — a bewilderment now all the more puzzling given the events of the last few months.
Where’s this going? you’re wondering, as you ponder any unlikely connection between the golf ball-sized obstacle lodged in my craw eight years ago, the treatment that rid me of it, and my pontification on the nature of story and why it proves so essential to the lives of so many of us. To explain, I need to recall those days of chemo and radiation, the surgery and recovery period after, and the course of brutal “insurance” chemo following. Chemo does you in — no profound revelation in my saying that. The nausea, the shriek of pain as your hands and your feet morph into shrunken talons one moment, and a polystyrene numbness as they succumb to neuropathy the next, tend to wear one down. The radiation doesn’t help either, although the radiation folk accuse the chemo folk of the side effects as the chemo folk accuse the radiation folk — such Hitchcockian transfers of guilt offering only passing amusement. Then comes the surgery, the cut in the neck, the slit down the front. The snatching out of what lies in between. Post surgery the feeding tube arrives, conduit for nutritional substances distinctly less than appetizing. Not a bundle of fun.
And still… it wasn’t all bad. The biweekly chemo sessions, the major hits, had me gazing, over my feet, out of the window before me to Santa Monica Boulevard, hurrying away to the Pacific and a distant glimmer that struck me as the sparkle of hope, the infinity it intimated seeming the harbinger of some manner of timeless permanence. There were the aforementioned health workers too, people who seemed to enjoy a selfless devotion to those of us fortunate enough to be in their charge. Diversity, along with kindness, reigned supreme among their ranks, so that for once, despite my English predilection for outsiderness and miserablist alienation in general, I began, somewhat unusually, to feel a part of humanity.
Yet there was something even more profound, if that’s possible. There were moments when, lying back plugged into dangling sac-fulls of chemo agent — the heavy artillery as I used to describe it, irony the means of consolation — I thought of the opening title sequence of the first Star Trek episodes, a show my family would watch together after “tea” when I was in my early teens and living deep in leafy southern England. (Each ep was as good an introduction to philosophy as any book). Cosseted under my blanket and in my reclining chair at the UCLA Medical Center, I one morning discovered myself hurtling at warp speed into that all encompassing cosmos, clusters of stars, of galaxies rendered speeding pinpricks of light to rush past me as I tore forth into the darkness ahead. Stars, stars, and more stars, as if the big bang was never going to stop — not much a bang as one perpetual roar of joyful existence. This was me, nano-sized, accelerating forward; this was the universe, fathomless in its unimaginable dimension, coming at me at the speed of light, inviting me into its heart… Somehow, in that moment, I became a part of it, at one with it, and no matter how minuscule I might have been — a Lilliputian dot so tiny I barely existed at all — without me it could not have been the same universe: different only imperceptibly, admittedly, but different nevertheless. I could not escape belonging to it, nor, sentient or insentient, could it escape my belonging.
People talk about “battling” cancer, about “beating” it. I never battled or beat anything. What was I supposed to be fighting against? Myself? The replicating cells were a part of me, not of anyone else. What what was I supposed to be battling with? And how? I found myself not so much battling as traveling, and with those brief seconds of interstellar overdrive came to see I might accept my place in the universe, accept it as I’d previously found it difficult to accept very much of anything, so that although I have not the slightest wish to return to the predicament of that fall, winter, and spring, I came to accept what it was I was going through. There was a truth in it, a mystery, one I neither had to “battle”, nor resign myself to passively, but one I found I could accept actively. This was my decision, my agency, and yet with the rescuing humility it presented. Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it, Henry Miller wrote. No certainties, no homilies, no easy answers, but a truth like that derived from a good story built of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you, but to have you live with it, in it, through and by it.
I wore my chemo pump in my sleep. I wore in the shower. I wore it to class. I wore it as I worked with the students on the stories they wanted to tell. It made my hands and my feet shriek as they morphed into talons, then tingle with the numbness of neuropathy, then twist tight again like the dead contorted feet of a bird clinging, as if still for dear life, onto thin air. But with this pump came the memory of that warp speed Star Trek epiphany and the acceptance it afforded, just as with the stories and films those students were striving to put up on the screen might come the acceptance of paradoxes known and accepted only through the journeys along their narrative paths.
We know when we see a good movie, when we follow a good story. We know, and it pleases us, when we can do nothing but accept it. We know when the sense of meaning it offers connects us to ourselves, to each other, and to the universe of which we form our human part. And with movies there’s no need for sickness, for chemo, no pump, no talons, no polystyrene feet, just the screen, the drama, the emotions, and the sense of meaning that only story can deliver, taking us deep into its core as its stars rush past, so that we may live with it, in it, through and by it.
Peter Markham October 2020
Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)