Geoff Dyer - Out of Sheer Rage - Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence

As we sat there, waiting for the train to move, it occurred to me that being illness-free was probably a form of compensation for being so ailment-and injury-prone. Ailments: the myriad minor malfunctions and mechanical failings the flesh is heir to. Sensitive skin, for example. I have extremely sensitive skin. I don’t know anyone whose skin is as sensitive as mine. I am allergic to everything, even those hyper-allergenic products designed for sensitive skin. As a child I had terrible eczema. As an adult my eczema is either getting better or worse depending on your point of view. I am no longer prone to the terrible attacks of eczema which used to leave my fingers unusably brittle. Seen in this light my eczema has improved. On the other hand, mild eczema has spread to parts of the body never previously affected (behind my knees, for example, on my neck and forearms, on my feet and around my eyelids) and the general health of my skin has deteriorated to the extent that there is no longer a sharp distinction between the parts of the body which are eczema-free and those which are eczema-afflicted. If I no longer notice eczema on my fingers that is partly because, in a sense, I am covered in eczema from head to foot. My skin is so dry that I might as well treat my whole body as if it had eczema since any attempt to alleviate my dry skin by moisturisers almost inevitably leads to an outbreak of eczema. I am allergic to bath oils. I am, in short, a man who can never fill his bathroom with sweet-smelling, strawberry-coloured lotions from The Body Shop. Other men my age use their bathroom shelves to display a range of seductive-smelling, fruit-coloured lotions which can also be used for erotic massages but I keep tubes of prescription-only ointments hidden in a bathroom cabinet along with Anusol and Canesten. My idea of sensual bliss would be to lie, Marat-style, in a bath full of warm Betnovate, the cortisone ointment one can use only sparingly because it ruins the skin, apparently; even as it repairs, it ruins, as it heals it destroys.

The train was still stuck in the darkness. My fellow passengers were becoming anxious but I was thinking about how, when I contracted athlete’s foot recently, my various skin disorders became so intermingled it was difficult to say which bits of the body were suffering from which ailments. I contracted athlete’s foot, that much is clear. I then began to suffer from a mild itchiness between my fingers, an itchiness so similar to the itchiness between my toes that it seemed to me that I was suffering from athlete’s hand. Logically enough I began to treat my athlete’s hand with my athlete’s foot cream — only to find, or so my doctor explained, that the athlete’s foot cream set off a terrible reaction in my hand which led to the original itchiness being consumed by an appalling outbreak of eczema.

‘Let me make sure I understand this,’ I said to the doctor who outlined the origins of this sudden rash of skin trouble. ‘What you are saying, effectively, is that I am allergic to athlete’s foot.’

‘Effectively, yes,’ said the doctor.

Then there are my knees. Oh, don’t get me on my knees. What’s wrong with my knee? Everything. Everything that can go wrong with a knee has gone wrong with mine. Muscle, bone, cartilage, tendon. My knee exists in a bewildering variety of hurt: the pain is throbbing, aching, stabbing, dull, acute. Where does it hurt? Above the knee-cap, to the side of it, below it, and in the knee-cap. Oh my poor knee. Knees , I should say. Plural. Both knees are in bad shape but it’s the right that takes the biscuit. I waited for years to have something done about it, about them, because with all of this moving around I was doing I was never in a position to seek sustained medical treatment. In New Orleans I happened to make the acquaintance of a knee specialist who diagnosed chrondo malacia of the patella. He recommended strength-building exercises which I did for two days and then gave up. Since then I’ve been waiting for my life to stabilise sufficiently to seek serious, sustained medical treatment. As soon as I moved to Dullford I registered with a doctor who made an appointment with the knee specialist. Six months later, the big day: my meeting with the knee specialist, a tall man with a perceptible limp. I’m sure it comes from having played too much squash in my late twenties and early thirties, I said. I played squash for eight or ten hours a week and it was too much. No, said the doctor, the knee-cap, the patella, is misaligned, it’s not tracking properly. When my legs straightened out as an adolescent or a boy or whenever it was, my knee got left behind, apparently. It’s turned inward. Invasive surgery was not required, said the doctor. I was surprised, a little disappointed. I wanted a new knee. Instead I was sent to see the physio who told me to do the same strength-building exercises suggested by the knee specialist in New Orleans. These simple exercises, she said, would help to pull the knee back into place. And yet, incredibly, after waiting all these years to have my knee sorted out I am not doing the exercises . I have waited three years to get my knees repaired, I thought to myself as the train tugged itself into motion once more, and I am not doing the exercises, the simple, strength-building exercises which are necessary to prevent my knee causing me untold and probably intolerable pain in the future. These exercises are intended not just to repair my knee; they are intended to save my knee — and I am not doing them. For the first two weeks I turned up with feeble excuses about why I had not done my exercises. Then, on the phone, I made feeble excuses about why I had not turned up to my appointments; then I stopped phoning and made feeble excuses to myself. Instead I stay at home with my knee, my aching knee, asking myself why I can’t do the exercises. In a fraction of the time spent sitting here thinking about my knee and how much it hurts I could get on with the exercises which would eliminate the pain in my knee, I thought to myself as the train gathered speed, but instead of doing the exercises I sit here thinking about how I should be doing them. And I shouldn’t be thinking about my knee or the exercises, of course; I should be getting on with my book about D. H. Lawrence, instead of which I am fretting about my aches and pains. My knee is not the problem, that’s for sure: it’s a symptom of this larger disease, this inability to carry on with anything, this rheumatism of the will, this chronic inability to see anything through.

That’s the big problem but there are lots of minor ones too. Like the way I keep pulling muscles in my lower back. Being tall and weak and narrow-shouldered I am always waiting for my back to ‘go’, as they say. I avoid lifting things because I am terrified — especially after the moped crash on Alonissos — of a slipped disc. As for my neck, I don’t even wait for that to ‘go’. It’s always about to ‘go’. Either it is about to ‘go’ or it has just ‘gone’. Cricked neck: a quaint term for an agonising near-paralysis which, fortunately, only lasts for a day or two and which, unfortunately, only mends for a day or two before it ‘goes’ again.

I was getting in a terrible state on the train, thinking about all my ailments, but I was also aware that my ailments were taking my mind off the woman with flu who had taken my mind off the fact that the train was running late and would be running even later after the unscheduled pause in the countryside. .

Oh, and there’s my alopecia: my beard has stopped growing in two patches. This has happened twice before: on each occasion — if the word occasion can embrace periods lasting for a minimum of eighteen months — my beard stopped growing in two 50p-sized patches on either side of my jaw. If I don’t shave I look like a mangy dog and so I have to shave every day which makes my sensitive skin come out in a rash. The doctor did not recommend a specialist for alopecia because it is only a cosmetic problem — a cosmetic problem which, of course, has deep-rooted psychological causes and consequences (I can never grow a Lawrentian beard to hide behind). Alopecia is a nervous affliction, apparently, a sign of inner malaise. The best cure is not to think about it but one of the symptoms of alopecia is that you think about it every time you look in a mirror. Every time you think ‘I wonder if my alopecia is getting better’ you postpone your recovery by a month. Since I wonder about my alopecia between ten and twenty times a day I would need to live to over two hundred in order to stand a chance of recovery from my current bout of alopecia.