Wallace Stevens starts his famous poem with the same line as its title, “The house was quiet and the world was calm.” In this poem, the word “calm” repeats six times, lulling the reader into a sense of languid, expansive openness. “The world was calm.” A person could continue, could go on. This lived moment, in this poem, is given meaning through its rearticulation and recurrence.
An ideal. A memory.
“The house was quiet and the world was calm.” My own world is returning, slowly, back to the familiar figureheads of normalcy. I say “figureheads” because my life’s markers are symbolic, not entirely trustworthy, images of what used to be. My hair is a slow-growing helmet, no longer a velvet crust, for example. And yet I don’t entirely rely on its long-term presence.
My health is in stasis, no better, no worse. Chronic shoulder pain has become my companion. Every day is monitoring, listening into the body’s conch shell and hoping for echoes of normal.
The figurehead of my family is clearer, but I know the undertow of sorrow still holds sway. Look around, the world seems to say. Touch the shore again.
I try to. The world goes on “as if,” the sun also rises. And yet to re-enter the old life again and again in this new body, with its losses and fears, can feel like a lie. Each day feels not so much an entry as an attempt. Hello how are ya goes the sincere greeting to the mail carrier, the grocer. No ill will towards anyone. And yet I close my eyes and feel the fractured, unmoored elements of this body pulling me towards falling.
Equilibrium, even the appearance of it, takes much more work.
“The house was quiet and the world was calm.” Stasis. The dash between words, a valley. The musician John Cage has a famous work called 4’33”, and it is complete silence. Four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence. Quiet. The audience sits and hears – no, the idea is to listen– to coughing, the rumble of the ventilation system, seat creaks, rustling, and the quiet. To just sit. The piece is a statement to be here now. To be present, a reminder that ordinary sounds, attended to, can become song.
Or simply: Stop. Break. Wait. Beauty is everywhere.
“The house was quiet and the world was calm.” For now, for now.
There’s no resolution here. No closure. I’m aware that my hunger for resolution is a hunger for a certainty that cannot come. We who live in Cancerland, stage IV or recurrent or just diagnosed, have stepped into a world of mirrors and aberrations, in which the life we saw before is distorted. Figureheads on ships that used to guide us can’t be believed. Music has more minor key, or no familiar notes at all.
And what can we do? We return to our seats, or to the doorway, again and again, and in either the silence or the new music we make some way.
What is your new way? What are the new experiences, sounds, sights that you are attending to as you recover?
Pink Stinks 
Beautifully written. I find myself much more keenly tuned into little moments now. Birdsong, which flower is in bloom, time with people I love. On my last visit to my family, I felt far less critical of everyone. I was just glad to see them. I look ahead to traveling, but don’t plan father away than a few months because I don’t want to have to cancel anything. And discomfort has become a baseline. Tolerable if not pleasant.
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