There’s a lot to report, but my head is still very cloudy. I sat up very late last night to finish Peter Cameron’s Coral Glynn, a novel that went down like the silkiest of desserts but then left the most perplexing aftertaste, which I shall eventually sort out, I suppose, but not this morning, when it is all I can do to remember that I myself am not a character in Coral Glynn.

Earlier in the evening, we saw Cynthia Nixon in Margaret Edson’s Wit. Kathleen completely crumpled for a few moments afterward, out in the street, overcome by the sadness and grief, still abiding, of a very close friend’s death a few years ago. I felt doubly terrible about her pain, because I hadn’t thought about the close friend at all. I’d thought of my mother, who died of chemotherapy over thirty years ago; of my aunt, who almost certainly saw Wit at some point in her theatregoing life and who very well may have been persuaded by it to avoid aggressive medical interventions when she failed to recovery properly from appendicitis last December — my aunt, as I knew her, was someone who would do anything to avoid being reduced to yelling, “It hurts like hell!” in an empty hospital room, and who would certainly prefer to die quietly in hospice, as she did; and I thought of myself, because I am much more familiar with some of the machinery that rolled about onstage than I was when I saw Wit the first time, long before Remicade came into my life. I didn’t think of Kathleen’s very close friend, and I was deeply ashamed for a minute or two. Then Kathleen spotted a taxi and we went to dinner.

***

And I thought about John Donne, whom I haven’t read in years, but whom I’d studied closely enough in school to know why he came to be considered a metaphysical poet. It’s ironic, really: at the very moment when the Aristotelian world-view, with its essences and epicycles and magnificent Judeo-Christian appliqués, was beginning its Inception-like crumbling into the sea of discarded ideas, just when Galileo and Newton were about to recreate the universe with very different laws, the English poets (Shakespeare certainly among them) created a gorgeous liturgy of love and divinity, set in rigorously “scientific” terms.

If they be two, they are two so
  As stiff twin compasses are two;
My soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
  To move but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
  Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
  And grows erect, as it comes home.

The reflorescence of Donne’s popularity among smart people coincided with the push to turn the humanities into sciences, with rules as geometrically invariable as anything in Euclid. Vivian Bearing, the poetry professor who is dying of ovarian cancer in Wit, embodies this dream in her stern teaching. Her course is so demanding that students take it simply to burnish their resumes, and what supreme irony it is when one of her former students, motivated by ambition, not love of learning, to do well in her course, reappears in her life as an apprentice chemotherapist, a student in training to learn how to see right through her animal wretchedness to the treatment’s toxic effectiveness.

How ironic — Edson is to be commended for muffling what might have been an insistent and therefore dulling chord in the composition of her play — for a scholar of metaphysical poetry to be treated by her doctors as a “specimen jar,” as she puts it, containing deadly tumors. Isn’t that way of becoming metaphysical oneself? A sympathetic nurse alerts the audience to the horror of the professionals’ callous disregard, but, as one of them herself, Vivian Bearing understands that the doctors are doing what they must (however roughly). Whether the moments of kindness that grace her ending amount to more than palliative care for the audience, I couldn’t say.

***

Do I have the right word here: how ironic it was to read Peter Cameron right on top of Edward St Aubyn? I will say this: between those two authors, Wit, and a gargantuan backup project that kept this computer busy throughout the night and now has me somewhat on tenterhooks, I feel rather like Patrick Melrose in his room at the Pierre, in Bad News, wondering what to next in order to counteract what he has already taken in the mad course of his self-inflicted chemotherapy.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2012 at 9:27 am.