Metaphor, Metastasis, and Memory

Monday morning, I led the kids in an excursion to the fantasy world of Fluorides, amalgams and Panorex portraits. Shortly after our arrival in the waiting area, Gabriela's "tween" intrigue seized upon both copies of People magazine a few feet away. Their wrinkled cover pages were a stark contrast to the airbrushed youthfulness framing the facade of the pop star de jour. As Gabi turned the pages, I noticed two images within a particular array...Melissa Etheridge, the pop/rock star, and Robin Roberts, the Good Morning America news anchor. Both of the photographs captured their curvy crania in an unexpected state of undress, conspicuous connotations of their encounters with the chemotherapeutic. I smiled at the assertive display of these alopecic moments. (Gabi commented in a matter-of-fact manner, "Oh, they must have breast cancer too.")

I turned back to the graphic novel I had carted with me, and continued reading an alternative tale from Tangent Comics (1997), the Joker re-imagined as female anti-villain and chaotic do-gooder. The last page of this issue features her dark silhouette in black, staring at the ground. The silhouette is unmistakably hairless. The story's ending had revealed that this anti-villain was the daughter of survivors, survivors of a nuclear geo-political accident, her anti-villain persona a vehicle inextricably bound by multiple undercover identities...each with its own mask and wig. After the caries-detection amusement ride ended, I paid the bill and made appointments for the next dental fair in August.

Throughout the day, I kept dwelling upon the choices Daniela has made, from her patient tolerance of my C.B.D. (Compulsive Blogging Disorder) to her decision to forgo the faux filaments stranded atop the Styrofoam perch. I started to compile mental notes on the range and manner with which some women displayed, exhibited, exalted, sequestered, veiled, narrated, muted and even berated these metastatic moments in their lives, a vast expanse of experience.


Susan Sontag, one of my favorite writers, memorialized her first metastatic moments with Illness as Metaphor (1978). She qualifies her enchanting rant and tells the readers of her introductory page that she wants to describe, not what it is really like to "emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there, but rather the punitive and sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation." She begins her narrative with these two indelible phrases, among others.

• Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick [...] sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

• My point is that illness is not a metaphor [...] and that the healthiest [...] way of being ill [...] is one purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.

I love (re)reading this book. And I enjoy it every time despite my issues with her pronouncement to inoculate against metaphor. My issue with her idea of metaphoric quarantine is that those afflicted are literally creatures of metaphor...beings that communicate in language (at its core a metaphoric system). We cannot escape the gravity of metaphoric thinking. We are drawn to metaphors, and sometimes are drawn by other metaphors. We are also capable of drawing our own...in reply, in retribution, and in reciprocity, sketching our way through utterances and inheritance, language and culture.

At the end of the day, I find myself summoning that dark silhouette in the graphic novel, a powerful outline of hidden narratives. I know of a few survivors that choose not to tell their story or instead choose to ration it’s telling. Perhaps, they fear the encounter with what Sontag so poetically labeled "punitive and sentimental fantasies." Perhaps, they fear being pitied.

I go back to Sontag's words and (re)read the introduction. I go back to the comic book and (re)read the ending. Today's interplay of text and image has left me intrigued...by how metastatic moments and their experiences are minted and the currency of that experience is exchanged, or not. I am enticed by this marketplace of memories, its rules, its boundaries, its ability to elicit extraordinary encounters, as well as its ability to conjure illicit fears of certain social transactions. I wonder how she (both the literary critic and the comic book character) would have reacted to my syncretism of artifice and admiration...curiosity and consumption.