A self-portrait of Bradley Penner who is currently in medical quarantine. He will rejoin us in person later this year.
Back from cancer treatment, Street Spirit editor Bradley Penner reflects on the larger impacts of prognosis, both of the personal and public body.
I want to talk about malignancy and its relationship to the body. Not just the human body—and specifically my own—but a metaphorical one, too. A larger, convoluted body steeped in its own histories, traumas, aggressions, and mythologies. It’s important to distinguish between these two bodies from the jump: one is the physical form and constitution of a person, the latter an assembly of people living and operating as a system. “Society,” to put it plain—as small or large as the metaphor demands.
As I’ve navigated my own cancer treatment over the past six months, I have felt the visceral weight of malignancy as it spreads through the body. I have collided with the looming threat. I have watched malignancy be weaponized in both exam rooms and the streets, have been pressured by officials to alleviate the body from suffering in the ways that they deem fit, have been told that malignancy will continue to trespass if it isn’t immediately resolved. I have confronted the mortal impulse to continue living by any means necessary. I have witnessed first-hand how suffering in the body becomes an imposition to the body. Illness disrupts the status quo, and the body understandably reacts in a fit of rage and anxiety. But as Susan Sontag wrote during her own battle with breast cancer, when the symptoms continue to grow bulky and apparent under the skin, “judgment tends to fall on the individual rather than the society.”
These days, malignancy is really just a fancy medical term for cancer, but at its etymological root, the word malignancy comes from the Latin mal- (bad) and -nascor (to be born)—literally, born to be bad. That’s fucked up. I don’t think it’s fair to ascribe a predetermined destiny to anything, and especially if what’s assigned metaphorically is an impetus to be bad. That would imply good has been decided already, like the system is already fixed. I don’t believe fate should be sealed like that, in some rigid moral binary of what’s good and what’s not, who’s deserving of either distinction, who’s moving in and who’s subsequently swept away.
But words hold onto old meanings, and ethos is an ancient dictionary. So much so that the mere utterance of malignancy can elicit a somatic reaction—its phonetic existence feels bad. It evokes an undeniably morbid frustration, a repulsion towards the uninvited. There’s a steadfast rejection of any perceived threat to an already vulnerable system, and with that comes the tendency to blame.
As I bunkered down in my West Berkeley apartment in a neutropenic quarantine, every cell in my body perpetually on fire, another war raged on the streets. The Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson opened up the floodgates for governments to write a new, unrelenting prognosis, one that ignores the years of datasets and peer-reviewed recommendations that advocate for actual affordable housing and effective supportive services. Instead, these new policies, these treatments, will target the easiest scapegoat—individuals. People misdiagnosed as malignancy, the “mysterious disease of individuals,” who are somehow, for some reason, spreading down the sidewalks and spilling out into the gutters.
“Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning,” Sontag continues, “that meaning being invariably a moralistic one…Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance…The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then…using it as a metaphor…that horror is imposed on other things.”
Since Grants Pass, that horror has metastasized in cities across the Bay Area. Encampments may now be swept without viable offers of shelter or services. Attempting to support, intervene, and document these daily operations is now punishable by citation and arrest. Officials release statements and submit comment to the record promising that these efforts will lead with compassion, that this is about upholding safety and integrity of the body. It’s infuriating. These executive orders trickling down from Sacramento to Oakland do not target the true malignancy, the gross accumulation of property and capital among developers, landlords, and banks, but have instead hung a surgical lamp over unsightly expressions of suffering, the symptoms—not the cause—of a truly sickened body. That is not compassion. There is no such thing as compassion devoid of empathy.
I had no choice but to step away from Street Spirit earlier this year to target my own malignancy, a localized disease of the lymph nodes that, if left untreated, very quickly becomes systemic. This wasn’t my first encounter with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I had been in remission for over five years and clinically considered “cured.” But after a series of tests this past April, I was suddenly back at the hospital, sequestered in medical isolation, quarantined from my life, and all in an effort to save it.
What was recommended by oncologists—but required of me—was to engage in an all-out assault, a campaign to banish malignancy, once again, from every far-reaching corner of my body. But the body wouldn’t be spared in the process, it too would be subject to side effects, chronic complications, and possibly even death. I didn’t care, not this time or the last. Whatever it took to rid the body of malignancy, to cure my body of disease, I was willing to do it. I still haven’t accepted, nor do I understand, the extent of what that means—the extent of the damage to my body.
Near the end of my inpatient stay at UCSF late this summer, bed-ridden and writhing from an autologous stem cell transplant that totally eviscerated my body, swept my immune system clean, and left me with no choice but to start over on a cellular level, I watched Gavin Newsom clear an encampment on the evening news.
“I’m here on behalf of 40 million Californians that are fed up,” he told reporters on scene, “I am here because I am one of them. I want to see results. I don’t want to read about them, I don’t want to see the data. I want to see it, by believing it.”
I want to believe, too. But I want to believe in lasting results, in long-term survival—not ineffective surgeries. I believe that the societal body has been misdiagnosed. I believe we are all afforded the opportunity to live as more than a simple, objective vessel, blamed and subsequently punished for the illnesses in our bodies.
I would rather allow the body to live, to give it abilities, purpose, and meaning, to let it breathe and dance and eventually reconcile on its own accord with the cacophony of this mortal coil. To give the body a chance, and to do so compassionately. To offer support and care and more than enough space as the body begins to recover.
Then again, maybe it’s too late. Maybe all we have is hope that the body will find the strength to start all over.
To find, as Anne Boyer did, “the freedom that can come from being thoroughly reduced.”
How do we diagnose the body, the larger, contorted body, and root out its true malignancies? What kind of treatment, then? Have we factored in all the carcinogens of a larger “economic catastrophe: that of unregulated, abnormal, incoherent growth?” How is that patient assessed? Where is the second opinion? How many years will this process really take? How many years of my life? What’s this obsession with needles? Where’s the social worker and nurse? Who lost the pile of intake forms? Where can I find some water? What are they being arrested for? Where are you taking those tents?
Who was reduced to the skin on their bones after years on the absolute fringes, holding on for dear life without a cure, much less respite, or a housing voucher crumpled softly in their hands?
Bradley Penner is the Editor and Lead Reporter of Street Spirit.