The mind is strong but the body weakens

I've written this column long enough to have milestones, though they weren't intentionally placed. They are column titles or particular statements that anchor a place and time in my thoughts.\nThrough every column I look back at, critically or otherwise, there's a screaming, obvious lack of definition and evidence. I write about the head more often than the body, about a type of change that occurred as a result of AIDS. The body, worried over for corpulence, fussed at for dysfunctions, is just a stretched canvas in front of a ready palette.\nThe raw facts of AIDS don't exist in that blank space. Ephemeral attacks of pain are connected to other things -- a nauseous stomach and a sinus infection, sore knees and lots of walking.\nIn January of last year, I wrote about lab results that pleased me. The beautiful numbers were Fantasia creatures in my head. They showed progress over progress -- breakthroughs in function. The body couldn't feel bad because the numbers were good.\nYet it did. Like a recalcitrant jury, the prosecution proved a case for survival, and all the body saw was guilt. In each floating, infected T-cell, it was reading its own case law.\nIt would send up flares of problems, small and often unconnected messages at either end -- a jolt of pain through the bones of the big toe, an extra dryness on the face. These were never connected, though if they had been, the dots would have spelled out SOS as surely as Gilligan.\nIt is surely human arrogance to believe that only one type of evidence matters -- that the spiritual, if kept clean and tidy, can always overcome the physical. The clean soul is more than a relief, it is also a purgative. Passion overcomes fact. I do believe this.\nThis January finds, instead of resolutions, a necessity to reinvent -- to make the physical matter again to me.\nAIDS is so much more than a singular experience of something's failure -- a failure of immunity, morality or luck, however you view it. It is testament to the medical genius of the word syndrome, infinite combinations of symptoms that make up a neat whole. It is the stepchild of the viral equivalent of an invertebrate, able like the octopus to push through impossibly tight spaces and tolerate great pressure. \nI started to see patterns in its randomness even as I wondered at its spontaneity. The two weeks when jolting pain accompanied walking, the alternate aching knees (Monday, Wednesday and Friday are the left knees; Tuesday and Thursday belong to the right; Saturday is reserved for head colds; Sunday is sinus infection day), this morning's ghoulish stabs in my left testicle. Ouch.\nThe mornings, too many lately, with the heaves, the gut an angry waker on the wrong side of the bed; night -- stuck awake thinking of an algorithm I use to hyper-operate my mind into numbness.\nEvidence mounts of problems that don't really exist. Shingles in December, lymph nodes in my groin the size of a golf ball, these were real enough. But no arthritis, no testicular cancer, no diabetes to explain the other problems- because they aren't problems. They don't exist.\nThey are the byproducts of the kind of livestock raised on the kind of farm I am -- and like the methane emissions of a billion cattle, it's equally self-destructive. The mind is far away from all of this -- the body is always on the front lines.\nThat's why you can read a thousand different ways that HIV has changed those who have encountered it. The rush to uncover the self is the unconsciousness grabbing control of the reins - it's forced life in the face of an imagined death.\nThe signals sent out by the body are uniformly different, if not downright bad. This is not the flu -- the body goes into war mode, and it stays there like the needle stuck on a fast 78 rpm. The news is bad -- the mind stops hearing the news.\nInstead, a whole new life is constructed around an idea of survival, and one that is of epic proportion. In a culture of redemption, the potent symbol of regeneration is too big to be done poorly. Survival is crawling; rebirth is the goal.\nPerhaps we are all meant to see, eventually, that we are little more than what we are able to do each day. That we are bound by our ability to walk to the boundary. That, each day, our claim to life is entirely premised on the physical. Even the power of a mind, a driving churn of unconscious ambitions, cannot compensate its loss.\nI can see beautiful numbers that fulfill those ambitions in a column a year ago. The mind keen on its proof. Then, in the summer a falling off, in the fall a faster slide. And, I know a bit of fear in winter, the extra burdens of the cold weather upon the weak. \nOr not the weak, just the poor of body. The strong of mind can scoff at all that, I know I would have a year ago. I wouldn't have foreseen anything but an acquittal of the guilt of HIV. Who would believe the body wouldn't go along with it, would see some evidence beyond a reasonable doubt? That it might begin to believe its own pain?