Love's Work by Gillian Rose

Author:Gillian Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-411-1
Publisher: New York Review Books

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Suppose that I were now to reveal that I have AIDS, full-blown AIDS, and have been ill during most of the course of what I have related. I would lose you. I would lose you to knowledge, to fear and to metaphor. Such a revelation would result in the sacrifice of the alchemy of my art, of artistic “control” over the setting as well as the content of your imagination. A double sacrifice of my elocution: to the unspeakable (death) and to the overspoken (AIDS).

Not that I haven’t been wooing you continually by the moods of metaphor; but we have kept the terms of our contract: you have given me free rein, and I have honoured my share of the obligation by not using up that freedom, by leaving large tracks of compacted equivocation at every twist in the telling.

Yet, do you not know and fear even more about love? Yes, yes, of course you do, but while the sorrows of love in their monotony are endlessly engaging, illness is intrinsically not. So why should I deliberately spoil this narration by reduced equivocation? I must continue to write for the same reason I am always compelled to write, in sickness and in health: for, otherwise, I die deadly, but this way, by this work, I may die forward into the intensified agon of living.

I do not have AIDS. Yet I seek to convey the impasses, the limitations and cruelties, equally, of alternative healing and of conventional medicine. I would insinuate démarches of healing that have not been imagined in either canon. I would oppose to the iatrogenic materiality of medicine and to the screwtape overdose of spirituality of alternative healing, love’s work, the work I have been charting, accomplishing, but, above all and necessarily, failing in, all along the way.

If I were now to explain that, in my early forties, I have cancer, say, advanced ovarian cancer, which has failed to respond to chemotherapies, and is spread throughout the peritoneum, the serous membrane lining the cavity of the abdomen, and in the pleura, the serous lining of the lungs, you would respond according to the exigencies of taxonomy, symbol and terror, according to ignorance rather than knowledge, although there is, in fact and in spirit, no relevant knowledge. For you, “cancer” means, on the one hand, a lump, a species of discrete matter with multiplying properties, on the other hand, a judgement, a species of ineluctable condemnation.

To the bearer of this news, the term “cancer” means nothing: it has no meaning. It merges without remainder into the horizon within which the difficulties, the joys, the banalities, of each day elapse.

Dare I continue? Are you willing to suspend your prejudices and judgement? Are you willing to confront and essay a vitality that overflows the bumble mix of average well-being and ill-being—colds and coughs and flu, periodic lapses in the collaboration with culture, or headachy days, when one feels gratuitously lacking in inclination, never mind inspiration? For what people now seem to

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