The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Morality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer and Care

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Morality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer and Care
By Anne Boyer

“The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Morality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer and Care” by Anne Boyer

Yup, that’s one hell of a title and yup the book is about all that and it is pure genius. Shout out forever to friend, colleague and book tipper Angelica, aka @existentialbodywork for the tip and to @openpoetrybooks for having it on the shelf. 

This book is on my short list of bests. I think every healthcare provider should read it and disabuse themselves of the nonsense they might be inclined to say to patients dealing with cancer. That sounds harsh, I know. But bear with me, when I was in grad school, relatively recently cancer free, I would listen to people in their 20s and early 30s, having not had cancer, regularly spew utter bullshit that usually began with the vapid generalization; “people with cancer…” fill in the blank of them saying things they had no clue about. And this attitude pervades in natural medicine circles and it's offensive and will, hopefully, run folks right out your clinic door if you speak this way to them about the cancer they are dealing with. 

Boyer’s book is criticism and memoir of the highest order. She weaves in ancient Greek dream medicine via Astrides Sacred Tales (which I have an oped pdf of on my desktop, strange text that it is…) with scathing critiques of the medical-industrial complex as refracted through the cancer-industrial complex which includes the American Cancer Society and all the pink ribbon paraphernalia, etc… Those groups exist to serve themselves and generate their own internal economy preying on the suffering and fears and needs of those diagnosed with breast cancer.  

There are so many quotable passages I could rewrite the book in quotes or lose myself re-reading the entire book in the midst of writing this little essay. But let’s try this:

The system of medicine is, for the sick, a visible scene of action, but beyond it and behind it and beneath it are all the other systems, family race work culture gender money education, and beyond those is a system that appears to include all the other systems, the system so total and overwhelming that we often mistake it for the world. (P. 66)

The last word in the title, care, is a concept I have been orbiting around since the beginning of the pandemic. I think it is a concept that requires critical thought amongst all of us healthcare providers within a deeply corrupted healthcare system. The politics of care run to the ugly center of racialized and gendered capitalism in the U.S. It’s not possible to engage a meaningful critique of economies of care without engaging both race and gender. Boyer offers a scaffolding for this critique through the specificity of her personal experience and then continues to refract that outward into the various systems at play. And, she does so incisively and creatively (again, Astrides Sacred Tales and dream temples and snakes, among other beguiling reference points). 

I can’t leave discussing this book without referencing this passage. For me it contains both the critique of the medical industry that exists around cancer diagnosis and care but also can be read as a critique of pervasive attitudes within alternative medical education, pedaling in mystifications in the guise of medicine. Check it out:

Enchantment is not the same as mystification. One is the ordinary magic of all that exists existing for its own  sake, the other an insidious con. Mystification blurs the simple facts of the shared world to prevent us from changing it. (P. 41)

We get lured into natural medicine by the enchantment with what is simply the ordinary magic of the body, its capacity for moving energy, the reality that energy and matter are entangled in a dance that creates life. The educational system, especially that of Chinese medicine, creates mystifications around these ordinary facts, reconstitutes them into a bloated degree and dimensionalizes the mystifications it has made if ever it comes under critique for creating a field whose economic terms are unrealistic, not able to be held within the ordinary magic of the world. 

-Michael McMahon