the peripheral man

The diagnosis of chronic renal insufficiency marks the beginning of a clear divisory line between one way of living and a totally different one, experienced by the same person. Hemodialysis, the standard treatment for that, shall we say, condition, is a procedure which changes the very biochemistry of the individual who undergoes it. Let alone his personality. For, once on dialysis, philosophical outlooks and ways of undesrstanding reality which applied before, cease to have much import. Being dependant on a blood cleansing machine for survival, makes a person feel like he is looking into a black chasm from the edge of a cliff, and sort of swaying to and fro with a whimsical wind. The solidity which the world tended to present before the disease appeared, is all but gone. The sky is now full of sinister symbols of fire foretelling the end of the world and the uselessness of willing positive outcomes, recovery, mercy, regeneration. Something is stubbornly working against the body within its very blood. And, what is more, something is insidiously sapping the strength of the mind, and leading it to a dark place, to panic. So that the dialysis patient has to learn how to live with panic without collapsing into anguish and irreparable sadness.
What I write I never make prints of, because I write it quickly and in despair. I only write when the sorrow of being ill and seeing the world with the eyes of someone touched by the shadow gives me the necessary anger. And I don´t care who read or what they think. My aim is merely to convey the strange mixture of sadness, fear and BEAUTY which my disease has caused me to feel constantly. A lot of what is written here, therefore, is spontaneous to the point that it might lack sense at times. The great poet went to the seashore to get rid " Of the great sorrow that is in my mind" I go to the computer and start pounding on the keyboard, actually wishing it was a piano. The inability of writing machines to make loud,even deafening sounds, is disturbing. They can be like people, filtering all the pain in the world without uttering a sound, keeping an expresionless, frozen countenance. But as I write, inevitable thoughts about the way life was before dialysis come to me, and i see myself in the place where i used to live, with the people I used to know. One day I moved away from the place I knew and ended up in a desolate world where everybody was faceless and tongueless and moved silently among beautiful old, silvery buildings, under a shiny, steely, sunless sky which seemed painted by UTRILLO during a bad hangover . Many times I told myself that if Iwere to be found dead in that world there would be no one to give the news to, no one to phone anyone about it. An oblique light sometimes breaks through the clouds in the early afternoon, as I walk to dialysis, and engulfs the walls, the strees, the trees along the streets, in dreamy golden tints . Everything is distant and a little false, like a backdrop in a theater. And i am watching this cold place full of beauty and regret from a spot where no one can see me. I don´t mean anything. I´m just an observer and I won´t be looking for too long a time. Also, I will leave without passing judgement and without critizising, because I am the peripheral man, whose life, whose reality, continues only because of a machine. In such circumstances, it would be silly to speak of historical memory, religious fervour, progress, or the possibility of being loved by one of those healthy people ever again. The only thing that makes sense is to ponder about this strange loneliness which is in itself beautiful and terrible, and which surrounds the unhealthy like a spell.