Surgery, and the Buddha’s ‘four sights’

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations for his enquiry do not strike a man at all'. (Wittgenstein)

‘I want to tell you, don’t marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it’s adultery.’ (Saul Bellow: Seize the Day)

I see a lot of apocalyptic hand wringing over the buffoonish apotheosis of Mr Trump. But there is no point being outraged. Being outrageous and transgressive is what got him elected. 

I came out of hospital this week. And in hospital you also get in touch with what was not supposed to happen. When I was changing into my surgery gear, long tight stockings, etc, I shared this oddly seductive moment with another guy going up with me and I asked him what he was in for. Cancer of the penis, he said cheerfully. Yes, life is sometimes transgressive. (They used to put bars on the windows of the penis ward, but not any more; they can do amazing things apparently.)

In my own case, I had quite good news before I had my operation. When we had the tests results meeting with the surgeon, oncologist and nurse specialist, the rather sickening presence of death had been there in the room as well. As a result, I didn’t really take in anything they were saying, beyond the fact that the cancer had not spread to the lungs, and they were ‘aiming for a cure’.

You could say that one aim of Buddhism is to have the distinguished presence of old man death walking with you wherever you go. I wish I could say that once glimpsed ‘he’ was going to continue to hang around, reminding me of the central Buddhist truth of impermanence. Well, I’m afraid by the time that meeting finished, the old bastard was gone. For now.

I had fairly major surgery on my face: removing a salivary gland with its tumour, and a whole load of lymph nodes in the right side of the neck. The surgeon could not do anything about the numbness all down the right side of my face or the failure of the muscles there. The nerves were too badly damaged by the time he had got to them. But in order to stop my mouth drooping on one side, he cleverly attached a line of some kind to the side of the mouth reaching up to the side of my head.

Afterwards, in the ward, I chatted with an old bloke with cancer of the jaw who was being fed through his nose and talked animatedly but without consonants. Having had half my face and neck peeled off and stitched back I was certainly not looking my best – I’d have given Boris Karloff a nasty turn if he’d run into me unexpectedly (and in the supermarket yesterday a small child looked at me and burst into tears). But this old guy – he really did not look ready for his close up at all. I mean, I couldn’t help thinking, why bother? Why not call it a day, a good innings?’ But then he said he was planning his usual skiing trip to Zermatt in February after his face had been reconstructed. He was eighty, he looked like he’d been dug up, but he had not done with joy.

Another chap in the ward looked quite ok – he was a courtly, southern European gent - but he had been told it was over for him. I saw him out of the corner of my eye with his family, the love between them. After they’d gone, when we chatted, one thing we agreed was that life comes and goes, but that what we have done with it – and I would say done, not experienced – is never really done with us, and it runs like a river through the world we leave behind us.

The Buddha’s quest for Awakening began with what are called the ‘four sights’, each of which struck him with its significance for his own life: The legend goes that on four separate occasions he saw an old person, a sick person, a dead person, and a person engaged in practice, a wandering holy man. We don’t want to acknowledge the central significance of these aspects of life. They are not part of our facebook profile. But at some point they do break into our lives anyway. They were certainly, in my case, getting a bit close to the bone, a bit more ‘in my face’.