Cargo Cult logic
Posted by Chris Clarke on October 13, 2008
“You know,“ I said to my old friend, “I’ve been thinking.“ She was in a better mood than the last time we’d talked. The news had sunk in, I guess, for bad and good, and she was chuckling again, and we were chatting more or less happily. Eight years of our not talking, until I wrote her in February, and after a brief flurry of catching up it was as if nothing had changed. Except for our old ardor having died out. And her being married with a kid and goats and horses in New Mexico. And me getting the divorce she’d quietly hoped for for years despite her best self squelching the feeling. And her beloved friend Zeke having died. Aside from that. The same.
“I could write an article about you. And we’ve already done the not-talking.“
“That could work, huh?“ She chuckled again. “Make it really self-serving, too.“
“It worked before, right?“
“Couldn’t hurt.“
It’s one of those typical conundra writers face, dissected endlessly in workshops and late-night discussions and online fora. The duty to preserve the privacy of the people in the writer’s life conflicts with the need to write about life as the writer lives it. Most of us find a balance that works. Most of us have old stories that fell off the balance beam. Twelve years ago when Sharon was first writing for the magazine I edited she submitted a story on the surprising prevalence of breast cancer in two disparate neighborhoods in the Bay Area, one quite affluent, the other poor. A friend of hers had been diagnosed with breast cancer that year. Sharon mentioned the friend’s story, providing no identifying details but relating her friend’s soul-searching about how she might have brought the cancer on herself. Excess negativity? Living an impure life?
The next paragraph gently debunked the ineffable causes and talked about pollutants, diet, genetics; the state of the science as she was known in 1996.
Sharon’s friend was outraged and hasn’t spoken to her since. She and I spent a lot of time going over the details, that next month, talking about privacy and propriety and boundaries and ethics. Each friendship has a mythology and that loss of her friendship became a central metaphor in ours, a partnership between writers that was at once crucial-feeling and inappropriately personal.
When she called me in tears two weeks ago from the clinic, the results of her biopsy in hand, each of us thought of her friend and the odd not-exactly-irony of the turn of events. Neither of us said anything. The possibility of metastasis was all the meta we needed for the moment.
But a few days later she was more upbeat, having come partway to terms with the prospect of surgery and chemo, and was resolved, among other things, to see her son reach adulthood, and she was chuckling and wry, in between yelling to her son to stay where she could see him in the park. She mentioned that old article.
“I know she made a full recovery,“ she said. “She’s working and really doing well. Still hasn’t talked to me, but she got well.“
“You know,“ I said to my old friend, “I’ve been thinking. I could write an article about you. And we’ve already done the not-talking.“
“That could work, huh?“ She chuckled again. “Make it really self-serving, too.“
