By Jon John
I have cancer.
I was given a slim chance of surviving. My first reaction was fear and self-blame; somehow I caused this sickness. My experience with this life threatening disease is the inspiration for this work.
This new performance Love on Me draws strength from conversations with the performance artist Ron Athey and readings from Illness as Metaphor, by Susan Sontag. Susan Sontag prevailed over the harsh treatments of two cancer diagnoses. She denied the fatalness of her final cancer and treatment until her last breath. Ron Athey, self-describe as “living corpse” has survived decades with HIV. From Ron I have learned how to live with this dying body.
Every person gets sick.
Every person will wonder why he or she is the one to get sick, no matter if that illness is a bad cold or a terminal cancer. Metaphors help us understand the world. Metaphors for illness can comfort the anxiety of not knowing. Many are tempted to make sense of illness metaphorically, as a punishment, a sign, an opportunity, or a war raging in one’s body.
When referring to cancer and its treatment, medical professionals and patients use phrases such as “bolstering” the body’s “defenses” and “battling” the “invasive” tumor. Blood cells get “counts,” like surviving soldiers at the end of each day of war. With treatments, we use words such as “bombard,” “neutralize,” and “kill.” People whose diseases go into remission are “survivors.” Sontag notes obscure facts about chemotherapy and warfare, explaining how the earliest cancer drugs share lineage with mustard gas, just as an early syphilis treatment used arsenic—a dark irony being that the treatments, when approached with warfare mentality, are believed to cause a whole set of new health problems.
For Sontag, cancer was associated with certain inhibited personality types. The metaphor attached to cancer is repression of a desire. This suppressed longing gets, literally, “balled up” as a voracious tumor.
If cancer is a disease of passion, will love aid my struggle with this disease? Following some the modern myths that my disease is rooted in: sexual repression, inability to express emotions, failure, punishment, or an inhibited personality type— as oblation, I offer this performance and installation.
