Bone pointing
For Christmas, some thoughts on Saint Francis, Aboriginal curses, AIDS, cancer, death and life.
In the year 1225, Saint Francis of Assisi composed a hymn to God’s creation. It begins with praise to the sun, and ends with praise to “Sister Death, whom no man can escape.” Most people prefer the better-known “Prayer of Saint Francis,” the one that goes “make me a channel of your peace,” but that wasn’t actually written by Saint Francis.
Canticle of the Sun, that one, he actually wrote. Francis wanted his followers to understand the inevitability of death, to love death as a pathway, to embrace death as what makes us human. Our physical delicacy and the number of things that can cause us to suffer, these were things he was intimately familiar with. Because he’d chosen to eschew his family wealth, he starved, slept in caves, and endured a painful eye infection that caused him to go blind. The treatment was cauterizing the eyes with hot irons.
The other pain Francis felt that drew him closer to Sister Death was the stigmata he received toward the end of his life. The five wounds opened and bled and had to be swaddled in bandages at all times to prevent Francis from dying by exsanguination. Brother Leo, who was with him when the wounds appeared, wrote simply that it happened in the midst of a vision. The stigmata were a gift. Suffering led him out of his body.
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In the breast cancer group just after I’m diagnosed, a woman tells me I can’t just live for myself. That won’t get me through what’s to come. Instead, she says, I have to live for someone else. In her case, it’s her daughters. But finding out I don’t have children, she isn’t sure what to say. “Who will you live for?” she asks. “Everyone,” I tell her, shrugging. “I guess I’ll live for everyone.”
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When Aboriginal Australians have a falling out, a shaman performs an act called “bone pointing” to curse the guilty, who will fall sick and die of a mysterious malady. According to one anthropologist:
The man who discovers that he is being boned by an enemy is indeed a pitiable sight ... After a while he ... crawls to his wurley. From this time onwards he sickens and frets, refusing to eat and keeping aloof from the daily affairs of the tribe. His death is only a matter of a comparatively short time.
But the cursed, sick person is not simply cursed and sick; now, they are socially outcast too. “His people regard him as being no longer in the ordinary world of the community, but rather in the realm of the sacred and taboo.” The social ostracization wrecks them mentally as well. “Utterly conquered and entirely hopeless, he is in the most profound sense a victim. Barring supernatural intervention, death is inevitable and imminent.”
The cursed, sick person, in other words, has been marked for death.
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A colleague who developed breast cancer in her late forties. When she survived treatment, she and her husband, childless, adopted a child from Russia. As soon as the child arrived in the USA, my colleague’s cancer returned. She was dead within months.
A friend who developed breast cancer in her early sixties. When she survived treatment, she talked about wanting to live into her seventies. The cancer returned, and she was dead within months.
A friend who developed gall bladder cancer in his late forties. He was diagnosed at stage 4. When he started talking about wanting to live to see Christmas with his family, he was dead within months.
Another colleague who developed a rare form of lung cancer in his mid sixties. He told some of us that he wasn’t angry, that he didn’t resent it, he’d had a good life. He died within weeks of diagnosis.
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Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will,
for the second death shall do them no harm.
Giotto, The Death of Saint Francis, 1325
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From “Bone Pointing: A Modern Entity,” Helen-Ann Manion, 1976.
“The victim [of bone pointing] becomes a pariah, wholly deprived of the confidence and social support of the tribe.”
We are reminded of Sam, a 47-year-old male in a group of cancer patients we worked with in Los Angeles in 1975. "You know what happens to you when you get cancer?", he once said, "You become a pariah."
Not only is the cancer patient avoided, but there is a complete change of attitude,even by the closest kin. Marked for death, he is no longer permitted a living role.
***
The stigmata is only given to the holiest of saints, the bloody wounds that killed Jesus pressed into his flesh by foot soldiers of the Roman empire, men conscripted into an army mostly against their will, told when to walk, drink, eat and shit. Soldiers kill because the empire feeds on death.
Cancer rates have risen 1% a year, every year, since 2012. Diagnosis is highest in higher income countries, but mortality rates are double in lower income countries, primarily in Africa and the Caribbean, where few people have access to early screening. Here in the USA the disease advances, step by step, scything its way through the population, while health insurance companies earn record profits. Sick people are expensive, and when treatments are denied diseases kill. The empire feeds on death.
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Saint Francis went to Egypt to meet the Sultan and try and convert him to Christianity, the equivalent of what we might today call a “suicide mission” in military terminology. Francis knew that he was marked for death, so why not die for the gospel? Devotion was his entire being, his fervor for God so strong they called him a holy fool. Except that he instead, accidentally, survived. But his eyes were destroyed during the journey, so in his survival, he was still marked for death.
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In the militaristic language of cancer, oncologists talk about “the will to live,” and some tell you that people who have more of it are more likely to survive. There is, of course, absolutely no empirical evidence to back this up. How do you measure a person’s “will to live”? Does that woman in the breast cancer group who tells me I cannot live for myself have more will because she has a child? More than my friend who did not have a child but spent her entire career working for environmental causes? More than my gay colleague who was from a generation that could not marry, have children, hold hands in public, but whose partner walked with him for forty years?
All of us with cancer are marked for death. So why do some of us get to live?
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To plan ahead is to pretend that death does not exist for you, that you might outfox it in some way, for the sake of your beloveds, for the redwood trees of California, for your students, for the sake of hearing music in a quiet room, for the sake of staying around to praise God. To plan ahead is to ignore the rustle of death, the whisper coming through an open window.
Jesus is born marked for death. In the AIDS epidemic, a Catholic priest painted Jesus covered in Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions, painted saints ministering to dying gay men, and, of course, the priest later came out as gay. I remember in those years being just out of college, playing in a band in San Francisco, backing up a Nico impersonator during queer cabaret nights at Popstitute, and I remember thinking, oh these beautiful friends, they’re marked for death, and yet, they’d cover the lesions in pancake and sing.
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If the body of Christ has AIDS, the body of Christ also has breast cancer.
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From “Bone Pointing: A Modern Entity”
The doomed man is in a situation from which the only escape is by death. The organization of his social life has collapsed and, no longer a member of a group, he is alone and isolated. During the death illness which ensues, the group acts with all the outreachings and complexities of its organization and with countless stimuli to suggest death positively to the victim, who is in a highly suggestible state. In addition to the social pressure upon him, the victim himself,as a rule, not only makes no effort to live and to stay a part of his group, but actually through the multiple suggestions which he receives, co-operates in the withdrawal from it. He becomes what the attitude of his fellow tribesmen wills him to be. Thus he assists in committing a kind of suicide.
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Maybe some of us live through cancer treatment not because of a will to live, but because we know we are marked for death. “I don’t fear death,” my friend Greg once said, shortly before he died, “I fear leaving my family.” Death is abstract, murky, unknown, but suffering is acute and concrete. We are a visible representation of both the abstraction of death and the physicality of suffering. Some of us will live past cancer, some won’t, but just like AIDS or the cursed Australian tribesman, just like Christ’s stigmata seared again and again onto the hands of saints, we live on to exist as a reminder of death. Catholics call it Memento Mori. You are dust, and unto dust you shall return.
Or, maybe, not just yet. Not today, anyway.
So much of our trouble begins with the denial of death, the fear of it, the capitalistic obsession with living longer and looking younger so you can “maximize” life, for what? For what do we actually live? For who?
We live for everyone. We have to live for everyone.