Force of Nature
by Michael Nagle
Kirk Read, Good morning, Good night, analog collage, 10 x 13 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
FORCE OF NATURE
Michael Nagle | DEC 2024 | Issue 40
When I hear someone talk about “the silver linings of cancer,” I am so immediately turned off by the framing that it’s made me wonder if I’m just disinterested in being happy.
There is a question that is popular in the cancer world: “If you could go back in time, would you say yes to your cancer?”
I want to consider that this may be a trick question. The “spiritually correct answer” — spirituality less in the sense of looking headfirst into the wide-open gaping maw of transpersonal existence, and more in the sense of viral Instagram memes — is, of course, yes.
I want to return the mystery to illness. The wonder to cancer. The awe of a process of disease that straddles the line of self and non-self, where the boundaries between self and other are no longer abstract contemplations but have real, immediate and fatal consequences.
I want to look at cancer like we look at nature. Not something we say yes to, or no to, or try to have the right mindset about. But something we acknowledge, accept, make room for. Something we surrender to and become students of. Something we yield to. The endless pull of gravity. The sudden strike of lightning. The venom of a rattlesnake bite.
Being diagnosed with cancer was like being struck by lightning. Sudden. Violent. But also: awe inspiring. Mysterious. Wondrous. A first acknowledgement and first contact with a force much bigger than me.
What if the right question isn’t “Can we say yes to cancer?”
What if the right question is “How can I expand my universe to make room for a force of nature that will scar me to the point of no return?”
*
When I was a boy, it was important to my Dad that we go camping every summer. We would just go an hour north of L.A. to Lake Castaic. Set up our tent, park the beige Volvo station wagon, and enjoy life making smores and eating travel size Froot Loops out of durable plastic bowls and walk around and go fishing. Dad never got me to fish but I loved the times I got to drive a motorboat out on the clear blue waters.
As I hit adolescence, the weekends became two-week trips, north and south along the Pacific Coast Highway. Some part of me jonesed desperately for home. The familiarity of indoor air conditioning in the sweltering L.A. summer heat, time to play Starcraft morning and night. I would have trouble not playing video games while we camped. I learned which campsites had coin-op video games in their lobbies, which cities had makeshift arcades I could drag my Dad to.
But then, I would fall in love with the redwoods in Big Basin. The majesty, the nobility of these trees, so old, so proud, bursting into the skyline.
And the sea otters at Monterey Bay Aquarium. That I wanted to see every year. That I insisted on calling “sea kitties,” even as a teen. That had captured my heart so effortlessly, so willingly.
To stop along Jade Beach out by Big Sur and look for the eponymous jade rocks on the beach. To sharpen my sense of rocks and minerals and crystals. To be in awe of the lustre of the cat’s eye sold in seaside shops.
Kids aren’t far away from loving nature, from a wide-eyed wonder, from an innocent, unnamed spirituality. I was no different. I would jones for civilized life, and then, we’d be in one of our familiar PCH haunts, and there I was, in love with the world again. Just a psychic hair’s width away.
*
Cancer means mortality and cancer means treatment.
Perhaps if it was just the end of life, the invasion of an evil double self overpowering an innocent formerly single self, it would be easier to see cancer as a force of nature.
But cancer is so dominated by its treatment arc. And treatment is barbaric. The treatments are notoriously toxic to both the cancer self and the innocent self. Treatment is so toxic that even the question: of if and how to do treatment, of what treatment even means, takes center stage. Cancer is a force that scars so deeply that we recognize the damage, its signature way of ravaging a life, but we can not even begin to agree on the cause.
I remember when I learned Big Basin was caught in the California fires. That the redwoods which so effortlessly inspired me when I was twelve and thirteen, the trees that gave me a spiritual feeling far before I knew how to name that kind of thing — that they were obliterated to ash. Stripped of their majesty. It disturbed me. Something important, precious, and sacred to me had been desecrated.
I had no idea I would feel that way. I had forgotten all about Big Basin. It was only when I stopped to connect the dots from my childhood camping trips to the damage done by the California wildfires that my heart sank.
Perhaps cancer does not strike us like nature because it is so easily eclipsed and overshadowed by its industrial era trappings. The tragic beauty of a self growing out of control is eclipsed by the soulwince of the treatment options.
Like wanting to worship the Great Plains, only to come face to face with the Keystone XL Pipeline.
*
Having cancer as a young person means that very few of your peers know how to relate to you directly. For the most part, thankfully, their lives have been naive to this medical storm. Chemotherapy alienates in its discomfort and its strangeness. It is not just one drug which knocks you off balance. It’s the layers. The base of my treatment is three cytotoxic drugs. One is given for ninety minutes. One for forty six hours through an external chemotherapy pump. One for two weeks through an internal chemotherapy pump, that lights up like an air hockey disk just left of my belly button in a TSA scan. To keep my liver from failing and the initial nausea from overwhelming I’m given a steroid in two dosing schedules — an initial burst, and a slow 24/7 drip through my internal pump. I’ve been prescribed an atypical antipsychotic to further offset the side effects of nausea and insomnia. I don’t like to take it because it dampens brain activity, correcting for a body that didn’t evolve to be chemically poisoned, that tries to throw up its empty stomach in the most innocent and futile attempt to come back into balance, and so it cuts off all access to psychedelics, my lifelong refuge of the sacred.
So when a friend asks how I am? I resort to saying “I feel sick” when what I mean is “I’m uncomfortable, I’m scared, I’m depressed, and I’m unrecognizable to myself.”
*
Transformation is an endless pursuit in our modern era. Colder showers and less dairy and more morning sunlight and microdoses and macrodoses — sometimes I think what all of this really points to, out there in a field beyond influencers and podcasters, is that we as a culture are united by a fundamental unease, a fundamental unrest, something so core to the common time: a basic discomfort, a resistance to life as it tends to be.
A livewire feeling in so many of us: there’s got to be something better than this.
In my world, a community of care has appeared around me. The same way community can rise up to meet the force of hurricanes and wildfires. A basic humanity restored — people just helping each other out.
I could wax endlessly about my curiosity about this community. What it does to people in their thirties and forties to suddenly be so in touch with mortality and cancer and chemotherapy. With the wonder of life and death and the monument to an outdated paradigm that is cancer care in 21st Century America.
My closest family member has not had a mental health flare since my diagnosis. The shock of it all has rooted her to the ground. It used to be that she could not distinguish social media from reality on the Internet, and had powerful, proto-schizophrenic experiences of believing the people she was reading about online were talking directly to her. No one from the computer has talked to her in the past year. She texts me good morning and good night everyday, despite the Parkinson’s tremor.
My best friend of twenty-some years has re-established himself as my best friend, after years of drifting apart. I have a terrible time asking for help when I am sick. Even when someone is at my home to take care of me, he’s still the person I’ll call when I’m feeling scared.
Friends I didn’t know were best friends have flown once, twice, three times to take care of me. When I say thank you, they say “I’m happy to be here” so quickly I know it’s true.
Sometimes I become a symbol for the people caring for me. Of a former mentor. Of a dying sick person. Sometimes my illness and I get used as a way for people to work things out for themselves. Occasionally people care for me and then barely speak to me again. The erratic, raw, angry parts of me don’t match their expectations.
The same way that folks respond to a natural disaster, my community has responded to me. Simple, persistent, DIY care. A chance for folks to become the people they always wanted to be, and show up for someone. Show up for me.
*
I have no interest in diminishing anyone’s sense-making around cancer. But for me, I need to birth a world where cancer is a great destructive mystery. Where on a good day I can shake off the rivulets of fatigue, the grief bursting at my heart, and surrender myself on bended knee.
I cannot relate to cancer as a phenomenon that I, weak and mortal human, have sway over.
All I can say is come walk with me in this exiled land.
Put your hand on my tumors. Put your hand on my heart.
Come let this mystery stop your diaphragm short.
A young life, a promising life. An early ending.
Let it take your breath away.
Come walk with me in this exiled land.
Turn with me toward the great mystery, towards this unending void.
And consider who you are, when we finally do the great and simple work our life has always been asking us to do: acknowledging what is actually here.
What is actually real.
Michael Nagle is a queer, Sri Lankan-American writer living in his hometown of Los Angeles, where he’s undergoing treatment for metastatic colon cancer. He is deeply interested in writing as a vector for raw, messy, vulnerability that slips under our collective defenses and wakes us up to the more beautiful lives we know in our hearts is possible. And doing this with humor, joy, and wit. Portland, OR and Cambridge, MA both feel like second homes and if he had a choice he would take rebirth as a well-pampered cat.
Kirk Read is the author of How I Learned to Snap (Penguin) and has an essay in the forthcoming anthology Witch from Dopamine Press. He won a Bronze award from Contemporary Collage Magazine for his series of abstract telephone pole collages and was shortlisted for a series of collages done on the walls of outhouses at Wolf Creek radical faerie sanctuary. He was recently a resident at Kolaj Institute in New Orleans. He lives in Portland, OR and co-leads the Pacific Northwest Collage Collective.