So easily spilled and yet still a commodity: blood has a market value. In the years from 1998 to 2003, it trebled in Ireland. In the US, start-up company Ambrosia harvests the blood of under-25s, with wealthy donees over the age of sixty paying more than $8,000 for a transfusion of youthful blood. Transhumanists are interested in what has been called parabiosis (which initially began decades ago, with the stitching together of rats’ vascular systems). Billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel has reportedly been injected with the blood of others, and has contributed financially to research on the process. Naturally, it’s an option open to only the very rich, fixated on eternal life.
Prick a spot anywhere on the surface of the body, and your blood is instantly summoned. I conjure up a super-cut of every gash I’ve ever had – bloodied legs after a bike crash, nicks from teenage leg-shaving, a small, red crevice after a rock was thrown at my head. I didn’t bleed when a car knocked me down, and I’ve never had an accidental cut so big I needed to be sewn back up. Platelets knit the skin back together, pooling at the site of an opening, literally plugging the wound. Blood helps the body to fix itself, and yet still, like everything else, it has a price.
A-
If you take all the blood vessels in an adult body – veins, arteries and capillaries – and lay them out in a continuous line, they’re said to measure 60,000 miles. Typing these words, fingers depressing keys, there is the movement of tendons across a pale landscape of skin, but what I notice most is the blue of the veins. Every slim stream, each a messenger of the blood, working away unacknowledged. Over the years, several cannulas have been attached to my arms, pre-surgery, or when the veins at the elbow collapsed like a coal tunnel. Each time, a phlebotomist offers words as preparation, but they are never the right words, always inaccurate about the sensation that follows. ‘You’ll feel a scratch, or a nick,’ they say. It feels like neither.
In my late twenties, six months to the day since I married my husband, I found myself in an ambulance on a cold, glass-clear January morning, a paramedic holding me upright because it was too painful to sit, or lie on a stretcher. Later, in the hum and chaos of the hospital, I was told that something of concern lurked in my blood. I hadn’t suspected there was anything wrong until I found I could not bear any weight on my right leg. I guessed at a pulled muscle; and tried elevation and tight bandages. The throb and sear of it continued, and a doctor dispatched me to casualty, where I waited on a trolley in a tiny room beside two pensioners. That I was stationary for seventy-two hours now seems terrifying given that the eventual diagnosis was deep vein thrombosis (DVT). The blood in my calf vein had slowed and coagulated into a blocked knot.
A doctor speculated that it was caused by the contraceptive pill, so anticoagulants were administered in elephantine doses. Weekly visits to a Warfarin clinic followed, an airless room where I sat among old women, a sea of silver, heat-treated hair, the youngest person by decades. Warfarin, a mass-market blood-thinner, comes in a trio of strengths and colours: pink the strongest, followed by blue, then brown. A handful of pinks is an indicator of having treacle-thick blood. No matter what colours I took, in rainbow combinations, my coagulation level bounced around like a skimmed stone on water. A persistent cough percolated in my lungs, and one day I woke to find my legs dotted with black bruises. Not just a handful, but more than twenty mottled circles. They weren’t trauma-inflicted so they didn’t hurt – and I now know that this phenomenon has a name, ecchymosis, from New Latin, and Greek ekkhumōsis, ‘to pour out’. The cause of the bruises was blood leaking from a blood vessel under the skin. The colour frightened me. It wasn’t recognizable as anything from the usual bruise spectrum – night sky, purple, pond-green. Everything felt ominous. Night sweats woke me constantly and it felt like there was worse to come. What was happening to me?
With illness, there is always a sense of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. The before time when everything is bright and even-keel and normal, a word that loses all meaning in the face of disease. The final moments of ‘before’, just as it slowly dawned that bad news was coming, was when a haematology registrar – kind, blonde, about my age – used the word ‘blast’. Her reference was not to having fun, or Star Wars gunshots, or a wind gust that cuts you in half, but to myeloblasts, immature white blood cells that spill out from the bone marrow. This was a new word, and, used in a medical context, was enough to ping the synapses, to make me ready myself. I didn’t yet know that a ‘blast level’ – having 20 per cent or more myeloblasts in the marrow – is a strong indicator of blood cancer. I fished for answers, dropping a line into this new, terrifying water. The haematologist was circumspect, eventually admitting there was an irregularity in the bone marrow. ‘Like leukaemia?’ I asked. In that moment, I did not know where that question came from, or how I made such a leap from bone marrow to cancer, but what did I know in this land of ‘before’? To be an undiagnosed patient is to be in a constant state of fear, of waiting for the revelation. Offering a hazarded guess is an attempt to compute, or accelerate the truth. On that Sunday, it felt like weighing up the facts of my body.
The black bruises and night sweats and chest-heaving cough were coming from somewhere. It took me weeks to realise where that panicked guess had come from. In the late 1980s when I was a teenager, my mother’s friend was diagnosed with leukaemia. I had heard the words ‘bone marrow’ used about her cancer. At the time she was ill, she was treated in the same Dublin hospital that I was now in. The haematology ward was in an old building, one that I still attended in the early days of my diagnosis, and all kinds of blood disorders were treated there. In another room on her floor was Irish TV presenter Vincent Hanley. I had religiously watched his music show, MT-USA. He had introduced me to Kraftwerk, by playing the video for ‘Musique Non-Stop’. I duly taped it, showing its robot graphics solemnly to a friend to gauge her reaction, and became an instant, committed fan at twelve.
Hanley had been moved from a private hospital to St James’s, and was under the care of a team who were keen to protect his privacy. The first cases of HIV in Ireland had been identified in the early 1980s. Many were haemophiliacs who had received contaminated factor VIII and factor IX, pooled blood products to aid normal coagulation. Sex workers, intravenous drug users and gay men were also being diagnosed, and with it came stigmatization. In 1987, the press was already speculating that as a gay man, Hanley was dying of AIDS.
In the first months of my illness, I spent many outpatient hours on the ground floor of that old building. I thought of my mother’s friend often, who had succumbed to her leukaemia in 1992, and of Hanley, who had just turned thirty-three when he died in 1987 of an AIDS-related illness. The corridor was dreary and under-lit, the accrual of old gloss on the doorframes a 1950s throwback. I now associate the dull rooms off that main corridor with the small increments of bad news: infections and a large haematoma. The high-ceilinged waiting room with its porthole windows that made everyone wish they were sailing away, or already far out on the ocean. That they were anywhere but here.
The clot in my calf expanded and broke off, scaling my thigh like a rogue climber, making its way up to my lung. Doctors took turns to listen with stethoscopes while a professor explained to his accompanying interns – as if talking about changing a tyre – that a lung clot has a very specific sound, its own sonic signifier. I coughed up part of it that first week. Against the pristine enamel of the hospital sink, it looked like a crushed raspberry.
The diagnosis was Acute Promyelocytic Leukaemia (APML), a rare strain of AML that is aggressive and advances quickly. 2017 was the sixtieth anniversary of its classification by Norwegian haematologist Leif Hillestad. When it was discovered, the average survival time on diagnosis was less than a week. Today, most people survive longer, but the usual cause of death is a bleed in the brain or pulmonary haemorrhage (similar to the one lodged in my lung). These death stats came from the internet, even though I knew at the time that googling an illness was a bad idea. Online diagnosis is compulsive,
but without nuance. On the first night in hospital, I had several transfusions of blood and platelets. Hooked up to a drug pump, I watched bags of gloopy fluids funnelling into my veins. How ironic that blood cancers start in the marrow of the bones, given my troubled orthopaedic history. The two diagnoses were distinct and decades apart but now shared an odd, osseous connection. From my bed, I called my brother in Australia and listened to him cry down the phone. In the morning, full of drugs and blood, I vomited up litres of black. Is that the cancer? I wondered.
Chemotherapy started the next day, and a triple-prong Hickman line was inserted into my chest to administer it, as well as other drugs and anticoagulants. Its plastic tube was inserted under the skin of the chest wall and into the superior vena cava, a large vein leading to the right atrium of the heart. It sat there, a casket buried in my chest, with cell tissue growing around it. When it came time to remove it six months later, it refused to budge. It had become a part of my body, and part of me clung to it. A nurse attempted to part us with a scalpel and no anaesthetic, and blood geysered everywhere. Her efforts have left four permanent scars on my neck.
B+
A man, knees tucked under him, kneels on a white stage, his body an upright L-shape. From heel to shaved head, he is painted in thick, white paint. A droning, anti-orchestral soundtrack plays. Artist Franko B, born in Milan in 1960, also paints and draws, but is best known for his performance pieces involving him bleeding from needles in his arms. In I’m Not Your Babe (1995–6), the viewer must consider if he’s performing pain, or in pain, genuinely depleted by the blood loss. It’s a disorienting work, one that could be both funeral and resurrection. Of all of his blood pieces, it is Oh Lover Boy (2001–5) that I watch over and over. An audience sits behind hospital privacy screens, which are removed to reveal the artist lying on what could be a blank canvas, bleeding at an angle. Franko B is both artist and object, served to the viewer, minimally plated up for our consumption. When I watch it, I see an operating table or mortuary slab. This piece is the most surgical of his work. Painted garish white from head to toe, save for the blood exiting his arms, the pose is of a medicalised Christ, a static stigmatic.
Unlike his previous performance pieces, there is little motion in Oh Lover Boy, except for when Franko B clenches his fists to speed up the blood flow. The white paint exaggerates his Caucasian masculinity, but his nakedness emphasises how vulnerable he is. His blood streams into a gulley, where it’s collected, and at the end, he sits up and looks puzzled, almost childlike. He removes himself from the table, leaving behind rivulets of blood and the imprint of his body. A near perfect facsimile of the self that had lain there. I find it mesmerizing and moving, this work that explores our mortality, the sheer ephemerality of a body, of a life.
It was filmed for posterity (or perhaps permanence, unlike the blood he loses?) and there is an overhead shot, a full contemplation of the scene that’s like an out-of-body experience, a pietà, without the Virgin Mary. As I watch it, I see life and death, stillness and vitality, art and biology. Franko transforms the corporeal into something philosophical. Watching his performances is a complicated encounter: this isn’t a canvas or sculpture, it’s alive. Franko is not merely the artist representing something thematic; he is the work, and the work is him. His bleeding makes sense to me and feels vital, in a way that a static painting could never achieve.
Watching this blood-spill-as-art, or the methodical drip of my own transfusions, made me notice more about the liquid itself: the depth of colour, its thickness, its weight. Blood in bags is darker, and slightly sinister to behold. In its sealed vacuum, it has an intensity that blood from a cut doesn’t possess. Those who have never been proximate to blood only have screen props as reference points, as cinema attempts to capture it. The liquid circling the drain in Psycho’s shower scene is chocolate sauce. The most vivid scene in Carrie centres not just on blood, but its provenance and texture. Sissy Spacek in sash and crown as prom queen is reeled in from the margins of Outsiderland, until a waterfall of pigs’ blood, syrupy and paint-thick, is tipped over her from above. Haemoglobin-soaked, Carrie takes her telekinetic, red-misted revenge. The scene is a masterpiece in pacing and tension. Of the entire film, it’s the colour and texture of the pigs’ blood, sloshing around in a bucket, that I remember most.
B-
There is no equality without reproductive rights, there are no reproductive rights without respect for the female body, there is no respect for the female body without knowledge of blood.
Christen Clifford, from I Want Your Blood
From a bloodstain on a wall, it’s impossible to distinguish if a person is male or female. Unless you look for certain markers in a laboratory, or the presence or absence of a Y-chromosome. Men have higher platelet counts and haemoglobin levels, but this isn’t a definitive means of identification. The shedding of blood has historically been seen as a male act of heroism: from rite-of-passage fistfights, to contact sports and combat. Infrequent, random events seen as standalone milestones; stories to tell once the pain – and enough time – has passed. Female bleeding is more mundane, more frequent, more get-on-with-it, despite its existence being the reason that every single life begins.
Periods are by now well documented as inconvenient and painful, and for most women, a cyclical ritual to be endured for half a lifetime. The red slash and knicker-flash of it; the declaratory scarlet of day one, to darker, viscous fragments. During a period, the lining of the womb detaches itself and is shed, along with the unfertilized egg. Period blood is actually only 50 per cent blood: the rest is made up of cervical mucus and endometrial tissue. This monthly evacuation makes this substance an oxymoron: even though it symbolises the possibility of new life, it is more akin to waste. Bleeding as fecundity, as a signifier of fertility: blood as not-pregnant relief, or not-pregnant disappointment. In The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer suggested – long before her anti-trans rhetoric and problematic views on rape – that for women to get to know their bodies, they should sample this secretion for themselves: ‘If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go, baby’, she wrote. It has a tang of iron, and in the early days of my first pregnancy all I could taste was metal. My mouth full of rust.
Despite the biological truth of its redness, it’s not long since the days of blue liquid being used on television adverts to demonstrate sanitary towel absorption. It took until 2017, in Bodyform’s ‘Blood Normal’ campaign, to show red liquid in an ad. The horror of showing actual blood was too much. A generation of young women laughed at the adverts showing TV versions of ourselves on roller skates or frolicking in white trousers. There was never a leaked streak of red in sight – not a chance – unlike Period, the photo series by sisters Rupi and Prabh Kaur, first posted on Instagram in 2015. The images chart Rupi Kaur’s experience with her own menstrual blood: lying down with blood visible on her clothing; with blood-stained legs in the shower; a stained bed sheet spilling out of a washing machine. Kaur’s work makes visible what women are meant to conceal. It obliterates the taboo of menstruation as something to be dealt with secretly, to be endured indoors and kept hidden. These images render the private public.
Two decades earlier, when Tracey Emin’s iconic installation My Bed was first exhibited in 1999 at the Tate Gallery, reactions were swift and varied. There was particular horror at Emin’s inclusion of her underwear, stained with period blood. Art encourages the shedding of boundaries, but Emin was said to have transgressed. She had revealed something she shouldn’t have: something that came from her body, her female self. This is despite the fact that the artistic body has always been public. If Emin had lain on the bed herself, fully naked, as her own installation, it would have caused less consternation than the fact of her bloodied underwear.
In 2015, then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took part in a debate on Fox News, moderated by journalist Megyn Kelly. Trump, not k
een on the line of questioning, remarked afterwards: ‘You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.’ Sarah Levy, a Portland artist, heard Trump’s remarks and painted a portrait of him – in her own menstrual blood. Trump’s sexist critique of a woman was turned back on him. There have been many women artists to do this before Levy: Judy Chicago’s solo work in the 1970s and her group installation with other female artists on Womanhouse; Christen Clifford’s I Want Your Blood (2013), ‘a Feminist Public Action in three parts’; Jen Lewis’s period-blood fish tank photographs; New York artist Sandy Kim’s images taken post-period-sex; Ingrid Berthon-Moine’s Red is the Colour (2009), with its portraits that resemble fashion headshots of women complete with statement red lips of menstrual blood. In 2000, artist Vanessa Tiegs, who paints using period blood, coined a collective term for this medium: ‘Menstrala’. Naming it not only created a movement, but legitimised a community united in its experimentation and its championing of something natural that had made women other. Women have been shamed for bleeding, encouraged to hide the process and their response to it. Using it as a medium in art is a feminist act of reclamation and confrontation.
Blood as a tool of confrontation was central to the art of Ana Mendieta. Born in Cuba in 1948, Mendieta dedicated her life’s work to using her body as a political tool. In performance art, film and photographs, she repeatedly returned to the idea of blood as a symbol of both patriarchal male violence against women, and the power of female sexuality. In the 1973 short film Sweating Blood, Mendieta – eyes closed – is immovable, as blood appears to trickle from her hair. One of her most confrontational pieces was in response to the 1973 rape and murder of a fellow student at the University of Iowa. Mendieta recreated the crime scene in detail, and invited students and professors to come to her apartment at a specific time. There, they happened upon the scene of Mendieta bloodied, naked on a table and ‘dead’. Mendieta used blood to remind her audience of the impermanence of life and the materiality of a body. For her, blood was sex and magic; and a visceral memento mori steeped in female experience.
Constellations Page 4