The cicatrice

I have a confession to make: I love drugs.  Not your everyday socially- acceptable addictions like caffeine or alcohol, and certainly not the more crazily destructive ones like heroin or cocaine.  No, the drugs I like are the ones any doctor will give you.  All you need is a little disease.

Not that I like the diseases, and neither would I trivialise the general state of being seriously ill.  But whenever I have needed to visit the doctor's surgery for medicine to alleviate some minor ill, I have felt like a child approaching Santa's Grotto.  I go in, tell the man or the woman what I want - a cure - and marvellously and miraculously it turns out to be Christmas again, and he or she gives it to me.

I love these drugs with their haunting poetic names that sound like Aztec gods, because they usually work.  I apply the unguent to the relevant part of my body, and whatever it is I have I get rid of.  In doing so, they offer a true magic.  For me they are like other thaumaturgical manifestations of modern life: the huge, improbable aeroplanes that take us to other lands with little sense of travel; the powerful little consumer gadgets that fill corners of our daily lives we never knew existed; the clever computers whose abilities seem to know no limits.

Drugs are another testimony to the power of technology, and their efficacy makes us believe that we are indeed in control, that life with all its vagaries is ours to command.  They make us trust medicine and its power to give us health, and so life.  They grant us leave to hope that even death, the ultimate disease, will in its turn be wiped away with the right ointment, one which the doctor can and will give us.

Perhaps such a need to see this everyday redemption of the flesh was present even in my childhood.  It would certainly explain an equivalently morbid fascination I had then.

At that time, I was frequently knocking and grazing myself.  My knees and knuckles and elbows were a rich tapestry of scratches, scabs and scars.  Like all children, I loved the scabs.  It seemed miraculous the way what was a bloody, seeping hole turned into the dark-red crusty mass.   And the way in which that crust would gradually begin to lift at the edges, to detach itself from the skin, until - with a little help from me as I picked at it obsessively - it finally came away, leaving behind some new, pink young skin, and the miracle of the heal.  Each cicatrice was like a sign that everything would be all right, that the body simply repaired itself, that the knocks of life were nothing to fear.

My more recent delight in healing drugs seems an advance on this position.  I know now that the body does not always succeed in repairing the damage, that the knocks of life could indeed by serious.  True, I have also discovered that we are not totally defenceless.  With their armoury of pharmaceuticals doctors may help that less than perfect body, allowing us to regain something of the childlike simplicity of the scab and its healing.  But even with this new hope of a tiny resurrection of the body, I cannot ignore the scar of knowledge that remains underneath.

(22.3.92)

See also Moody Sonnets - Clapham Uncommon

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