"On Leading Multiple Lives" [by David Lehman]

Dusty Sang, editor of Stay Thirsty, asked me to contribute a guest column to his on-line journal. It is in three parts bearing the title "On Leading Multiple Lives." Part one is below followed by a link to the Stay Thirsty page on which the column appears in full. -- DL

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During the nearly four years when I battled bladder cancer, I didn’t think about it too much. I thought about getting through the day, taking my medicine, heeding the doctor’s instructions. I joined no support groups, read little about the disease or the procedures I was to undergo. I preferred to get on with my own work, to meet deadlines and fulfill commitments. Also, there were legal and financial necessities to handle in the event of my death.

Death: sometimes I pondered death, oblivion, and the big questions. But it wasn’t easy to do. I was distracted by pain, or by the medical directives, or by the various procedures I underwent. Much of the time I spent waiting, reading old magazines in the waiting room, or watching sports or an old movie on television when I was immobilized. I read little, though I am a big reader. But I wrote every day. I wrote to affirm my existence, my identity. As Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote:

         Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
         Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
         Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
         Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

Myself I spoke when I wrote.

And at the same time writing was a way not so much to confront the situation but to escape from it. Reality is what it is, after all, but the mind is a house with many doors, corridors, hotel rooms, closets, a balcony or two, a front porch, a back yard, a widow’s walk, a cellar, an attic, a garage. Behind one door a sick man in a hospital bed is really a crooner in a white dinner jacket at the Copacabana. Behind another an amnesiac impersonates a psychiatrist.

By writing I could become a different person. By merely changing the pronoun I could slip into a different time period, change my personality and profession, end fact, try fiction.

You’re about to go on a trip. There’s hardly time to pack a suitcase, and only in the train do you realize you are lacking the necessary documents. It’s as if you’re in the hall of mirrors. There are one hundred of you – one hundred possible lives – and someone is shooting at you. You have to get away, and down the chute you go. But there’s still one murder unaccounted for. In the courtroom, the celebrated lawyer on crutches cross-examines himself. In the war room they are fighting the last war.

You can escape from one room to another, and you will, you have no choice.
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Click here for the rest of this essay.

Comments

[Kent Johnson]

What a beautiful piece.