Letter to doctor

If I take the liberty of writing to you instead of going to see you, it is for two reasons. You would probably not have the patience to listen to me until the end; I will tell you later the other reason, which is more serious.
I'm doing well at the moment. Or rather, I'm starting to feel well, and I don't know what I'm exposed to. I don't quite like these periods of uncertainty.
Not that I can expect any surprises. You have treated me, in recent years, for illnesses that seemed different to you; and you offered me new remedies each time.
Different, it’s true. But they had become one. At the beginning, all gave me the same sensations, and the same information; as if they were due to a continual disposition, to some habit of my body, which you have not yet taken care of. I happened to overhear this habit.
I think I sometimes feel that several drops of blood lose their way within me, move apart and form a sort of lake. I recognize the place by the embarrassment that occurs there. I hear, with my inner ear, a worry settling there.
No doubt you sometimes, like me, imagine, during these small tasks: putting on a collar button, washing your face, getting out of bed, a whole company of little men who are restless: an inventor offers a machine to extract you from the sheets, an entrepreneur undertakes to carry out the affair in three seconds, a bettor puts five hundred francs on your luck, the general brings together a team of workers. It also happens that the contractor and the workers are simply there; they have nothing to do; however I think them. I now recognize by this sign that a lake will form. It immediately gives brief, but regular waves.
The lake sometimes moves. It passes, during the night, from the temple to the neck, from the forehead to the eyelid. He rarely leaves the figure, he started with it. An injury to my thumb, which caused me to bleed, led last summer to the disappearance of the embarrassment and the waves. It happens that the lake is finally dry, and I no longer hear anything. Most often, after four or five days, a lump forms: it is red and turns purple. If I press it with my fingers, I feel a crumbly floating, the blood has taken on the consistency of snow. Later still... You know all that.
The more inland lakes have another progress. I lose sight of them as soon as they have caused their first embarrassment. After about a week they reappear tracheitis, bronchitis, and worse. But there is not one that I have not guessed in passing in this first state where they seem to warn me. As if my body was trying to give me an indication that I couldn't hear. Only, he gives it to me with more force, if he has remained silent longer. In my health, I feel fragile. And even, if there is a suspect idea which does not entirely belong to me - I mean which takes root, elsewhere than in my mind, in the delays and stops by which a lake tries to form - it is indeed the one in which I find myself powerful and assured of a joy, the maintenance of which alone requires attention.
It is usually in dreams that I first see myself warned. I wake up immediately. It seems to me that if I do it quickly enough, I will understand the warning.
But I discovered little. Or rather I discovered it in all directions. Sometimes I find myself worried for a few days, and agitated by troubles: yes, I have caused bad blood. Other times, I encounter a consciousness that is better than usual, a calm that is too sensitive. At the start of a throat abscess which passed through my neck, I found - I was a child - only an afternoon of games with two little girls, who had enchanted me. (It is true that evening and the cold had fallen early.)
At the origin of the bronchitis you told me about cured, I see a month of pleasures and lightness. (It is true that during that whole month I had given up, I don't know on what advice, drinking at the table; and I often forgot to drink between meals.)
I still feel tired, very thirsty, some fear, some despair. Elsewhere, it all starts at the lake; but perhaps it will be a sufficient sign for you. If it is true that a single disease is inserted into this defect of the blood, into this deviated current, and then spreads in all directions, you will be able to impose on me the remedy, or the diet, which will protect me from it. I still have to tell you the hardest part.
One day, one of these accidents was misplaced: at the base of the nose, so that sinusitis seemed to be feared. You have decided to protect me from their return. So I received fifteen to twenty injections of a new vaccine (or serum); each ampoule contained, by the millions, and even by the tens of thousands, bacteria whose name was given. (To tell the truth, I didn't understand whether the bacteria were dead - and in this case did they remain effective? - or alive - and how could we be sure that, left to their own devices, they did not go from two million, I suppose, to two million five hundred thousand? But it doesn't matter.) The effect of the injections was clear: I surly soothsayers. My wife herself, when she talks about this period of our life, cannot refrain from recalling the refusals and the oddities that I showed. She must have told you about it. I didn't stay put, my friends found me independent. Cinema alone gave me peace. The pleasures I owed him were so great that there is no film today that does not disappoint me. A financial problem later precipitated everything. I ruminated on it for three days. On the fourth, I woke up restored, lightened, fixed: I felt, above my right ear, the same anxiety, which I had thought I had lost. The thing took its course and I was delivered.
This deliverance is not without worrying me today. It seems that I am ill disposed to give up an accident, the absence of which is enough to throw me into such disorder. (Or what if the vaccine alone was the culprit?)
I must also admit that illnesses do not give me the embarrassment or shame that is common among most men (and even some women). Rather than a victim, I feel complicit — to the point that I sometimes feel remorse. You think I'm courageous when I go out and return to work well before the set date. It's about something completely different: I find it hard to avoid the feeling that I've been ill on purpose; It’s this feeling that I struggle with.
After all, perhaps this is precisely the case with other men. They would not be upset at being ill if they did not take some pleasure in being ill. You don't get angry with yourself for no reason.
I think I see the links by which I hold on to my illnesses, and I have foolishly made them familiar to myself.
I'm like everyone else: I don't always have the certainty of leading a true life. And certainly, I have no doubt that I will one day discover the thought that will assure me, almost at any moment, of delight, of freedom from boredom. I have more than one reason to believe that this discovery is near. (I don't actually know what it will be, or even if I will be able to say it.) But as long as it is not there, it must be admitted that illness, fatigue or fever - with certain surprises of the passions, which it is difficult to predict - hold, almost, its place. (They don't hold it exactly, I know: however, these interior landscapes where the body fades away, the big and the small merge, the fast and the slow, the abrupt and the gentle... nothing seems to me to resemble the discovery so closely, and already crudely announce it, as so many metamorphoses.)
I'm speaking badly to you about it: it's that I am cured. I have already delayed writing to you too long, I could not wait to see you again.
However, here is what I must add: I still fear the effects that will result from the sudden disappearance of a habit, for which I have so strongly sided that there are times when I wonder if it is anything other than a defect in my ideas. If complete recovery seems possible to you, teach me how I can escape its danger. Somewhat exciting, perhaps... You don't have to be worried: I told you, it's a matter of a few months, a year perhaps.
I don't tolerate wine well, and opium makes me vomit. I don't drink much coffee, but enough to feel angry from time to time. I smoke. I've never tasted peyote.

(The doctor's response was something like: since you are doing so well with your boils, the wisest thing is to keep them.)

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in Exchanges, n° 2, 1930
and Jean Paulhan, O.C., Tchou