Practicing the Ars Amatoria via Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’

Day 49   

General status update: 

Hair: staying in the Smurf hat/snood until I feel able to deal with it, which is not going to be today. It’s Day 5. I feel like HELL; I am IN Hell. Hell is all around.

Nausea demon: Vicious, vicious, vicious. He’s ruining the Australian Open final. That’s the second Grand Slam final in a row ruined by this f***ing cancer. After waiting all these years for Andy Murray to get to the top, watching all those matches as he fought his way up through the ranks, I am forced to witness his greatest moments in a state of either mental or physical torment. I never say ‘why me’, but couldn’t you just have left me alone for the tennis? Or arrived earlier, for that matter – there were a lot of agonising Tim Henman Grand Slam matches from which I would have been only too happy to be distracted. 

Chemo Muse: Working her a*** off to get me through this, keeping me going, driving me on.

Chemo Brian: Keeping out of the way on the sofa with

Chemo Rat Brian: who has settled in so quickly it’s as if he’s always been here.

Fatigue/weakness: entirely incidental in the current situation.

Joints: aching 

 

Mouth: sores appearing on gums

 

Taste/smell: food tastes like mud, coffee tastes of iron filings, wine smells and tastes like vinegar; everything cooking smells atrocious. And yet, I MUST EAT.

Limbs: that bizarre sensation of being inflated again, as if I am swelling up into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters – remember him?

Sleep, lack of: pharmaceutical sedation beginning to look very attractive, but I don’t want to wake up Chemo Brian and have my brain go all blurry.

Anxiety level (1-10): No anxiety, because what I most fear is HERE. Plenty of room for incidental

Rampant Paranoia, though, about all manner of things. 

State of mind: This too shall pass, this too shall pass, this too shall PASS. 

 

the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

 

It’s Day 5, the much-dreaded Day 5 of the third cycle of FEC.

 

 Physically, I am feeling beyond wretched: tormented, despite all the anti-emetic drugs, by constant rolling waves of nausea, with aching joints, and the entirely illusory but still unpleasant sensation of the skin on my arms and legs puffing up and swelling. Sore patches have appeared on my gums, it hurts to eat, and everything tastes like mud, but I have to keep eating small amounts anyway, to help combat the nausea. 

There is nothing I can do to make it go away, and it's becoming more and more unbearable.

‘This is why I am here’ says the Chemo Muse, speaking more gently than usual to the shivering, retching, aching thing that I have now become.

‘I know you hate me sometimes, but I am here to help you.  You are feeling so sick, and so tired, and all you want to do is to lie down and close your eyes, but that won't work for very long. To escape from what is happening to you now, from this unbearable reality, you need to release your mind from your body, and let it float away. You have to recreate yourself in a different, happier place.’

She takes my hand. 

‘You’re going through absolute misery right now, physical torment, but you’ve also experienced some extraordinary happiness over the last two years, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, yes I have…’

‘Let’s go back there, then. Let’s go back to the time when you started being happy again, after being lost and alone for so long…’

It’s the autumn of 2010, and I’m in my camel barn in Ayvalik, on the north Aegean coast of Turkey, the old camel barn I have had restored and converted into a library to house the 5-6,000 books I have spent my life collecting, but never previously had the space to shelve. Creating my own library has been the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition; I moved here 2 years previously, after spending a few years teaching in a university in Ankara, taking time out to supervise the restoration of the Ottoman Greek house I have bought by the sea, and the camel barn which is attached to it.

I can’t afford not to work forever, but I have enough to keep me going for a few years, if I live carefully, and I’m giving some English classes at a local language school to bring in a few quid. Ayvalik, on the north Aegean coast of Turkey, is an old Ottoman Greek market town, a remnant from the time when the western coast of Asia Minor was Greek, and is a haunting and beautiful place, a strange mix of deserted ruins and beautifully restored houses.

This odd, half-ruined olive-growing and fishing town is way off the radar of most European tourists, but tends to draw to it foreigners working in Turkey who like historic towns and old houses, and Turkish writers and artists from Istanbul or Ankara who feel much the same, unlike most Turks, who tend to prefer new, shiny houses, what with the whole country being so full of thousands of years’ worth of crumbling ruins from the many different civilisations that that have swung through Asia Minor over the last few millennia. I’m alone in life, as I have been for a long time now, but there are plenty of interesting people to hang out with in Ayvalik, and I have a lot to do.

The restoration of the house and barn has been the usual nightmare, but it’s finished now, and I’ve had all the bookcases for the library made with reclaimed oak from an old demolished grain warehouse in Bursa, and with a little help from my friends have unpacked the 70 or so boxes of books and shelved them, very roughly arranged, by broad subject area. The contents of these bookcases follow the progress of my intellectual and working life through a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and extremely ill-thought out career choices - Latin and Greek literature, philosophy – ancient and modern, political theory, corporate finance, financial analysis, molecular genetics, human physiology and evolution, evolutionary theory, the philosophy of biology, demography, evolutionary psychology - and the channelling of my leisure hours into a  truly world class collection of crime fiction, covering all eras and sub-genres and geographical areas, with a particular fondness for the literary skills of Reginald Hill and Donna Leon, and for American crime fiction set in the freezing winters of the snowy Midwestern states of Minnesota and Michigan.

So I’m just about to get on with the proper cataloguing and arrangement of the books, I’ve been writing a blog about Ayvalik and Ottoman Greek history and the camel barn, and am doing some research into Byzantine and Hellenistic Greek history (the Greeks were in in charge of this part of Asia Minor for some 2,000 years, before the Turks rode in from the steppes and took over), and I’m busy and happy and occupied, and then R suddenly waltzes into my life from out of nowhere, and puts everything into a spin. 

As previously related, it is an entirely random meeting on Twitter that first brings R and me together and starts us talking, and once we start talking, we just never stop. We have a great deal in common: R is a philosopher, a Professor of Bioethics, and his intellectual hinterland includes mathematics, philosophy, the history of science, and all areas of philosophy that combine the problems of ethics and human medicine and biology; his leisure reading, meanwhile, is rather more challenging than mine in both range and content, including history, poetry, and literature of many kinds and from many languages, not to mention his own genre speciality, science fiction.

R introduces me to the poetry of Cavafy, the extraordinary meditations on the philosophy of cricket and colonialism in CLR James’s ‘Beyond a Boundary’, and Burton’s ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’; as I am currently immersed in books on libraries, and the history of the Greeks in Asia Minor, I introduce him to Alberto Manguel, to Bruce Clark’s ‘Twice a Stranger’, the definitive account of the catastrophic Turkish-Greek population exchange in 1922, and to Giles Milton’s harrowing ‘Paradise Lost: the Destruction of Smyrna, 1922’. 

We spend a lot of time, that autumn, exploring each other’s minds, and happily exchanging ideas; eventually, we start to exchange emotions, too.

 

And for a variety of reasons I’m resisting emotional entanglement with R, who is 2,000 miles away in London, but all’s fair in love and war, and laying siege is common practice in both; R, as ever drawing on an eclectic range of sources, takes inspiration from the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu in his celebrated 6^th century BC treatise ‘The Art of War’, when he advises ‘Hold out baits to entice the enemy’. 

Accordingly, he decides to send me, in my far-off corner of the north Aegean, a present.

What bait should he hold out to entice the enemy?

He ponders long and hard, and cunningly thinks of the one thing he can send me that will utterly beguile me, and engage me, draw me into yet more conversation and render all further resistance entirely futile:

R gives me a year's Overseas Subscription to the London Review of Books.