Hypochondria part 2

It is not the visible ailments which bother me; the bruises and sore muscles and other afflictions of the limbs and skin. These things affect the levers and coating of the body, and can be looked at, prodded and dismissed. What I am concerned with are the more intimate rebellions of the dark damp places at the core of the body, the sticky internal revolts which cannot be gauged from close examination of the surface. What excrescences may be slowly growing across the blood-flushed surfaces there, what sudden failures of lymph might be occurring, what rampant multiplication of cells? These things are as mysterious to me as the workings of an electric circuit, and thus as prone to sudden and inexplicable breakdown.



And so I live in frightening and turbulent times. On the surface, all is calm. I wake in the morning and drink my tea, reading a recipe book, watching the football. Slowly my resentment at being conscious at this obscene hour wears off. I leave the house just before sunrise and pedal by the calm reaches of Canada Bay, all rosy and benign in the pre-dawn light, and over the mouth of the Parramatta River. I am thinking about money, our trip to Asia, a photocopy I have forgotten to make, a book I'm reading. Some days I feel stronger, some less strong. Some days there is wind and some days I need gloves to keep my fingers functioning in the cold. I take a shower, turn on the heater, sit at the computer. I sign some papers, give some advice (they are not orders in this business) and the day is over.



Superficially it is an ordinary existence. But there is another life I live where I am struck down day after day with terminal ailments: I poke at my underarms and groin, looking for unexplained swellings, obsessively fingering sore places. I watch myself for forgetfulness or lack of balance which may indicate a tumour of the brain. Any pain or abnormality is magnified into something critical. The internet assists in this; a google search of a single given symptom can provide a thousand unpleasant possibilities. My workmate (unaware of my private preoccupations) says, "Cancer always seems to start in the wet places, doesn't it? The mucous membranes, the lymph nodes, the organs." I shudder and spend the day visualising chaos in my own wet places. Then I wonder what effect the chemical accelerations of anxiety might have on this hidden activity.


Neurologically speaking, our brain is not developed enough to allow us to fully conceive of consequences or make rational decisions until we are in our twenties. I am now thirty years old, with a well-formed amygdala that allows me to consider the possibilities for the future, and I am suddenly afraid of dying.

I have been a hypochondriac for my entire life. My first phantom illness was at the age of two, when I developed a mysterious limp which lasted for several months. My parents hauled me around the country to all sorts of different specialists after my mother had watched me like a hawk for some time and realised that I was hobbling consistently and not only when I thought somebody was looking. Family wisdom has it that I was inspired to do this in order to compete for concern and attention with my brother, a year younger than me and sickly from the beginning with chronic diarrhea. The specialists found nothing wrong and the limp eventually passed, leaving me with a slightly shrunken leg and my parents none the wiser. I proceeded onto the usual childhood illnesses, the most memorable being a series of bouts of raging tonsillitis, which brought more concrete rewards in the form of special invalid foods: roast chicken and exotic juices and nectars sold in exclusive one-litre cartons instead of cans or plastic bottles.

The next serious imaginary illness developed in my teens. At the age of thirteen, I stopped eating. Anorexia was suspected, but in fact it was a conscious ploy to keep me out of school where I was the current pariah amongst my group of female friends. It's a feat which mystifies me even today: I put myself on strict rations of a cup of milk a day, and stayed home in my nightie getting thinner and thinner. I don't know what eventually convinced me to give it up and go back to school; it might have been the get well card which came from my class, signed by my tormentors in a way that made me believe that all was forgiven. It turned out to be a ruse, because on my first day back at school they followed me into the toilets where they loudly declared that they knew I hadn't really been sick, while I cowered in a cubicle and considered my options.

After the uncertain success of this illness, the hypochondria went into abeyance for a while. In my early twenties I developed a few real ailments which seem to have kept me busy over this period: cerebral malaria, cervical dysplasia, a Cambodian parasite which had me projectile vomiting for three weeks, a broken collarbone, anaemia.

In the last year or so, the phantom diseases have returned. They always have their basis in a real physical symptom which is then magnified into something terminal, helped along by google-diagnosis and a consciousness that I'm now reaching an age where things really might go wrong.
They serve a different psychological purpose than their predecessors, which I didn't really believe in but used as means to an end. Now they form part of an elaborate game of worst scenarios which I have started playing, in order to second guess my own physical vulnerability. If I treat every swollen lymph node as lymphoma, I will always be prepared for the worst. This is a hypochondria for the mature years, and probably the thing which convinces me more than anything else that I am ageing.

The connection between armpits and blogging

Today I caught sight of my winter-pale armpit in the mirror as I tried to remove my cycling shirt and put on a jumper at the same time, and realised that I haven't looked closely at my own organism since the end of summer. This led to an equally unexpected craving to return to the public self exposure of blogging. Maybe the strange bodily secrecy of this time of year can find its counterpoint here.

Our first death, a drug overdose. Fergus, blue faced and stiff on a Saturday afternoon. The irrevocable words have reverberated all week: Fergus is dead, Fergus is dead, Fergus is dead. I'm unaccustomed to death, and masticate this pronouncement as I go about my business, needing to be convinced. What is the protocol, in these circumstances? He wasn't my friend. I was paid to know him. Nevertheless, I had a great affection for him- lazy, dishonest Fergus whose collection of pornos gave the lie to the claim that psychiatric medication ruins your libido. Well-mannered Fergus who shoved Cum in my Bum out of sight under his couch cushions when we came into his house. Gentle Fergus, who loved his mother and got upset when she split up with her boyfriend. Fergus who loved movies and good music and wrote short ecstatic poems about the small joys of life- trees and birds and the breath in your lungs.

I mourn him in a sneaky and sporadic fashion, listening to Union Station (to which he introduced me), looking at the order of service with his grinning bearded face on it, crying sometimes when there is nobody to challenge my right to do so. I look at our other clients and wonder that they are alive and he is not. Mostly, I just wish it hadn't happened.

Australia Day in Portland

Heading out of Sydney for the long weekend- ten minutes to the freeway, half an hour to the foot of the mountains. Out past Mount Victoria the sky starts to open up and the concerns of city life dissipate perceptibly: here there are too few buildings or people for anxiety to reverberate as it does in the crowded psychic spaces of the inner west. Paranoid fantasies develop, detach, and float off into the ether like clouds, lost in a wash of light.

In this state of beautiful unconcern, I miss the turnoff for Rylstone. We drive along a minor road, passing through rural backwaters which are bleached and empty under the midday sun. Until, unexpectedly, after another wrong turn we find ourselves in the main street of Portland.
The road has been blocked off for Australia Day celebrations. There is a tattered jumping castle, a one-horse carousel and the air is rich with the smell of frying sausages. At the very front of this scene, there is a formation of line dancers, none of them younger than 60. One of them has yellow flowers on her hat and a surprising sense of rhythm: her post-menopausal flesh, bulging around her belt, moves in precise time with the music. She sings along, her eyes fixed on the horizon; kicks her leg up, pirouettes. One of her companions dances alongside her carefully on chalky bones, with her fading face obscured by an enormous Stetson.

We walk through the sun- blasted streets, smirking at each other. I cannot decide whether it's a scene possessed of some odd dignity, or the most depressing thing I've ever seen.

A long time between blogs, an indication that life post-thesis is no less frantic and fragmented than life before. I am moved to write today after resurrecting the ancient anecdote of my encounter with a Turkish would-be rapist to tell Marcin. Having not repeated it for years, I was overcome with melancholy memories of my fearless twenties, and relief that I actually managed to survive them. My father's theory is that an understanding of consequences is a result of sophisticated biological developments which don't come about until the mid- twenties. In any case, I'm not that ferocious penis-biting creature any longer: my current profile is closer to that of a middle-aged hypochondriac. What a difference a decade can make.

My annual revelation this year is the sheer variety of ways in which a human being can feel bad. My least favourite is the sensation of cold shock, where your soul shrinks into a tiny kernel deep inside, leaving your extremities frozen and useless. This sensation cannot generate tears, but brings on an urge to smoke cigarettes which has been dormant for more than 2 years . This is the king and queen of bad feelings, but it brings with it a retinue of lesser bad feelings to do its dirty work when it is not available: general malaise, loss of the will to live, a sort of magnetic (as in opposite-poles magnetic) anti-enthusiasm which makes my mind turn away from any thought of the thesis and bolt, scattered, in a million different directions. Today I am under the influence of lost-the-will- to live. Tune in tomorrow for more of the same.

Yesterday evening after three hours editing my single chapter in the library I got on the train in Redfern. It was six o'clock, the sour hour of the homebound commuters, and I went upstairs and sat down next to a thin young Asian girl who looked like she wouldn't spill over into my seat. As the train pulled out of the station, I slowly became aware of a voice reciting quietly in the corner of the carriage.

At first I thought it was somebody on their mobile, but instead of the usual public-transport monologue (I'm in the train. We just left Stanmore. Etc. ) I slowly became aware that the voice was preaching. I looked around, surreptitiously, (already knowing that it wouldn't do to catch the eye of the reciter) and easily spotted her , marooned in a desert of unoccupied seats, surrounded by sullen work-worn faces all staring stubbornly in another direction. She was a middle aged woman, with long grey hair tied in a pony tail: on the seat beside her was an old ladies handbag which she stroked to the rhythm of her own voice as she recited a litany of natural disasters (2003, earthquake in Pakistan, 137, 000 people killed. 2004, tsunami in Asia, 200, 000 dead. Mudslide in Bali, 25000 dead. And so on). When she ran out of natural disasters, she started on the glory of Jesus (Jesus can do anything. He can save the lives and souls of everyone on this train...It reminded me of the stickers we used to see around school advertising TAFE courses. Girls can do anything- take up a trade! They were supposed to convince us to become automechanics instead of teenage mothers) . When she got fed up with Jesus, she went on, in the same measured tone, to blessing the contents of the train.

She blessed the train back to front and upside down, with all its sorry human cargo included. She blessed the young suit squeezing his pimple as he looked at himself in the window and the lady in red polyester with her red vinyl bag cushioning her head while she napped. She blessed the woman with the grimy child who had somehow contrived to shove her pram through the doors of the train at Town Hall and colonise half the ground-floor of the train and she blessed the train driver and she blessed the students reading their economics notes and she blessed the plumber with the blue esky and the nagging wife and the silent moustachioed husband hunched down behind the Daily Telegraph.

The blessings started to get on our nerves, more than the mudslides and the earthquakes and far more than baby Jesus. By the time we arrived at Petersham there was a growing groundswell of irritation in the carriage, the averted faces starting to turn warningly in her direction like a field of fractious sunflowers. The people sitting in the seats closest to hers got up and moved downstairs to hang off a pole in peace and quiet. The relentless tempo of the blessing started to sound ominous- a drumbeat in the jungle warning of impending disaster.

Eventually, somebody shouted Shut up!!!! I looked around, but none of the closed faces gave anything away. We were at Lewisham. The lady got up, collected her bag and walked, soft-shoed and still blessing us, out onto the platform.

Spam to brighten your day

This is from a catholic elementary school test. Kids were asked questions about old & new testaments.
1. In the first book of the bible, Guinessis. God got tired of creating the world so he took the Sabbath off.
2. Adam & Eve were created from an apple tree. Noah's wife was Joan of ark. Noah built an ark & the animals came in pears.
3. Lots wife was a pillar of salt during the day, but a ball of fire during the night.
4. Jews were a proud people and throughout history they had truble with unsympathetic genitals.
5. Sampson was a strongman who let himself be led astray by a jezebel like Delilah.
6. Samson slayed the philistines with the axe of the apostles.
7. Moses led the Jews to the red sea where they made unleavened bread which is bread without any ingredients.
8. Egyptians were all drowned in the dessert. Afterwards, Moses went up to mount cyanide to get the Ten Commandments.
9. The first commandments was when eve told Adam to eat the apple.
10. The seventh commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery.
11. Moses died before he ever reached Canada. Then Joshua led the Hebrews in the battle of Geritol.
12. The greatest miricle in the bible is when Joshua told his son to stand still and he obeyed him.
13. David was a Hebrew king who was skilled at playing the liar. he fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in biblical times.
14. Solomon, one of Davids sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.
15. When Mary heard she was the mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta.
16. When the three wise guys from the east side arrived they found Jesus in the manager.
17. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.
18. St. John the blacksmith dumped water on his head.
19. Jesus enunciated the golden rule, which says to do unto others before they do one to you. he also explained a man doth not live by sweat alone.
20. It was a miricle when Jesus rose from the dead and managed to get the tombstone off the entrance.
21. The people who followed the lord were called the 12 decibels.
22. The Epistels were the wives of the apostles.
23. One of the oppossums was st. Matthew who was also a taximan.
24. St. Paul cavorted to Christianity, he preached holy acrimony which is another name for marraige
25. Christians have only one spouse. This is called monotony.

I would like to disagree with the Buddhists and say that the absence of desire is a horrible thing. In support of this claim I will describe an encounter with it from a number of years ago.

December 2004 , Northern Sudan, some days before Christmas
I arrive in Dongola after six days cycling on a dirt road which runs beside the Nile and at times has trouble imprinting itself on the plain of glittering gibbers which stretches out on either side. I am not especially fit and have been permanently dehydrated throughout the trip: also, at some point in this six days I have succumbed to the ubiquitous fiction that the Nile water of northern Sudan is the 'best in the world', and drunk from the river. Somebody has given me a kilogram of dusty dates from their store and it's hard to tell if the culprit is the dates or the water, but I am quickly losing the will to live and am feeling a creeping malaise which seems to originate in my stomach. When I arrive in Dongola and feel bitumen under my wheels I start to cry with relief.

I stay in Dongola for three days. In this time I meet Marcin, his friend Anka and two Czechs all travelling together in a mobile new democracy whose decision-making process seems to me like a good argument for dictatorship. He gives me some medicine for intestinal parasites and I am charmed by his accent, his scarf, his black rimmed glasses which, I will discover later, can only be worn in circumstances where peripheral vision is not required. He is very nice and this encounter will change my life, but it is not a matter of immediate concern to me.

What I really want is my appetite back. And it comes, slowly, in increments, as I revive. On the first day, I eat a piece of fish. The parasites revolt. They want green apple fanta and cake. They punish me for the rest of the day. On the second day I manage two meals by placating them with heavily sugared tea. But it is not until the fourth day that I am really hungry again.

It's difficult to explain the quality of the feeling of wellbeing which the desire for food creates in me. I leave Dongola with a packet of bread, some cheese and a couple of tomatoes: enough to last me a day or so. By 11:00 I have already had five meals, stopping to scoff sandwiches in patches of shade beside roadside hits and wells, under a tree at the periphery of a cornfield, between the crumbling mud walls of towns abandoned to the flooding river . There is a metallic smell of earth and vegetation coming off the alluvial flats in waves where the sun hits them, reminding me of the market garden my parents had when I was a child.

For this day, I don't think of love (following me at a distance in its black glasses and scarf), or literature, or the future. It is enough for me to feel this hunger, which tells me that I am alive.

A weekend depression of a black and comprehensive variety, brought on by too much coffee and a less than impressive PowerPoint presentation on my goddamned thesis last Friday. More or less cured by Monday morning by the therapeutic combination of 30 episodes of the Gilmore Girls, a leg of lamb, ten bottles of wine and the vision of a pair of mating stick insects on our window (would a stick insect give a flying fuck about a thesis?). I can throroughly recommend this cure.

My thesis is starting to coagulate, slowly, at the back of my mind. I catch frequent glimpses of the edge of it emerging and feel it lying there at the very limits of the known world like Australia on an old map, amorphous and incomplete, a temptation and a terror. (Terror Australis) It is guarded by sea monsters that rear their unrealistically long necks and bare their nightmare teeth when I turn towards land, hissing at me as I make for the shore.

But I am entering the territory of total panic where doubt is not an option, the zone of compulsion where there is no choice but to proceed, sea monsters in hot pursuit and an unmapped coastline veiling its face behind the white spume of the shorebreak ahead. Arriba!

Warning to Jorge: contains rodents

There is a family of small creatures living in the long grass near the train line in Lewisham where I cycle on my way to the university. The first day I notice them, I see a ginger cat too, lying in the sun with its stomach to the sky, eyes narrowed. The weeds around it are alive with something but I don't see what it is. The things don't flap like birds or bound like kittens- it is more of a scuttling motion, and they are fast enough to avoid identification, at least on this first encounter. The ginger cat is undisturbed.

The third time, I see that they are rats. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, skinny ones, racing industriously back and forth on their rat business between the retirement home and the train tracks. Every time I pass they are there, and they seem to be getting bolder. After the initial surprise wears off, I start to get squeamish. I am glad that I'm on a bike and that there's no chance that they will choose to run their rat errands between my feet.

Then I start to think about the ginger cat. Why doesn't it do something? I get more and more disgusted and start to metaphorise : the cat is an analogy for the human race, which has lost its hunger and is no longer intent on survival; it aims to get through its days as comfortably and uneventfully as possible. We lie in the metaphorical grass by the train track, balls to the sun. scratching our ginger arses and waiting for the next tasty morsel to be dropped into our plate. This line of thought occupies the remaining four kilometres to the university, my disgruntlement with the species definitive proof that my internal weather is synchronising with the tantrums of spring: squalls and sunshine, sunshine and squalls, five times a day.

Dinner with my colleagues at a Chinese restaurant in Manly, owned by the father of a Chinese- Australian social work student. The job attracts a strange mix of migrants, misfits and dogooders- E, a middle- aged Argentinian with a handbag collection to rival Imelda Marcos' shoe stash: C, a stud in his early 50s with Indian parents and a freshly trimmed moustache that sits stiffly just above his upper lip like a broomhead: T., sexually abused as a youth and now involved in suspicious cult-like activities with a woman who promises to change his life (this information gleaned secondhand through another colleague who apparently invites confidence more than I do, though an indiscreet soul lies under that trustworthy face): D , a Maori woman with a consuming passion for cigarettes who has been heard to claim that she would rather die than give up, and her Fijian husband hiding at the corner of the table under his cap and occasionally muttering unexpectedly funny additions to the conversation; J, the social work student, and me. A motley assortment of human creatures out to save the world, make a living, and thrive on the proximity of extremity.

It's springtime in Sydney and outrageously beautiful Australian wildflowers are vying for supremacy with vulgar and excessive European imports.. our room has windows on three sides and I wake up every day before dawn with a feeling of possibility, girding myself for war with Soula and thesis. It would be a brave real estate agent who chooses to do battle with me at this time of year. (I have never seen her but from her name imagine a moustachioed Greek who grows squatter and more unattractive in my mind with every conversation we have). Love and life are reconstituting themselves slowly after the trauma of the move, though my thigh muscles still retain the memory of two thousand trips up and down the stairs. Perhaps everything will be alright after all.

Hard to imagine how love can survive a relocation without dying under the weight of strangeness and logistics. I go back at night to a stranger's house which has, by some miracle, been populated with my possessions, with a distant view of the city and an ancient Moreton Bay fig probing the foundations of the building with its curious old roots. What is home? Is it a lampshade, a chair, the fall of light or the view from a window; a habit, a person, a smell, a language? Currently I feel totally uprooted, and as if anything can happen in the hiatus between two zones of comfort- things can fall irreversibly apart in the chasm that separates Alexandria from Summer Hill. This general sense of disruption is compounded by the fact that we are fighting a rearguard action with Soula of Century 21 over being classified Dirty Tenants as well as (of course) over money, which only confirms my opinion that real estate agents are worms in suits.

I am terrified of my thesis supervisor. It's hard to imagine why, as he is a gentle and mild-mannered man who is also several inches shorter than I am (which means in evolutionary terms- I like this perspective-gaining exercise- that I should feel superior) . But this is the human jungle, where being bigger and stronger doesn't mean anything- and so, whenever I have to see him, I am overtaken by a completely irrational and strongly somatic attack of panic: pounding heart, sweaty palms, dry mouth, blank mind. He is more powerful than me (says who? The oppressive patriarchy, if not the law of the savannah) and I live in dread of exposing my stupidity.

So: it's the beginning of August and three months of hernia-inducing effort and panic attacks of the aforementioned variety lie ahead. Blogging for this period may be very boring, and I warn you in advance.

Meditating on the evolutionary value of a constant feeling of anxiety about matters which are (at least on the evolutionary scale) minor events: does it have a purpose? In Poland I was in a constant state of vigilance trying to work out what was going on and what was going to happen next, which seems to me like a fairly productive if not entirely comfortable form of the beast. Australian worry is a different species and seems entirely disproportionate, but maybe it's more serious because I also have to generate solutions for my problems rather than looking on as a disinterested spectator. Here are the problems, in order of time frame:
1. Where are we going to live?
2. how am I going to write this fucking thesis ?
3. what am I going to be when I grow up?

Interestingly, when worrying about these things, I usually start at 1 (around 3 am) and work myself up over the following hour or two to 3. If I lose interest in these things I have several optional issues to gnaw on: organising a new magic button to open our garage, whether or not Marcin has enough friends, and that old chestnut: money. It' s boring. And exhausting. Over and out.

It's my birthday. In Pruszkow it is 6 am and has already been light for two hours- I am the only one awake and I'm enjoying this situation. There is still a sort of ringing in the air (or maybe in my ears) after an enthusiastic dinner yesterday which served as our Polish wedding party- it started out demure and awkward and closed with a furniture breaking tango that necessitated the removal of two of the guests under pretense of 'going for a walk'. This veiled eviction led us to the railway tracks where we drank beer in the rain and watched the trains go by with Remigiusz (Kuba's faithful friend who he speaks to almost every day on Skype) and Marcin's friend Macek, who started training to be a priest but left and went to work in a porn shop (women being his downfall). We squatted on the weedy verge amongst the beer cans and cigarette packets, eaten alive by mosquitoes, and Marcin told me, This is my Potato Point and Broken Hill...now you understand the forces that shaped my character. On arriving home he started to vomit and is expected to spend the day in a state of pale green dormancy.

Seven hours in front of the computer, typing like a fiend on the first real day of winter, leaves me with a strange sense of elation- although, like Frankenstein, I have no idea what I have created and am far too pleased with myself to take a critical look. It has taken me six weeks to get this far with my bastard of an honours paper. SIX WEEKS!!!!!!!! Nevertheless I am feeling cheerful and as if I've reached a turning point in this horrible year. I have even answered the phone a couple of times this week, and read Bernard Schlink's The Reader again, scanned and briefly wept over before falling into a corpse-like sleep that lasted 11 hours. Currently revelling in a long-suspended feeling that everything is going to be alright- thank you and goodnight.