Constellations

by Sinéad Gleeson

  Spreading, Radiating, Penetrating, Piercing

  A scald, or St Sebastian’s arrowed flesh.

  In the breast clinic, women with pale faces watch the rolling news. Blue-gowned handmaids. Mastectomy matriarchs. Waiting for names to be called in the hand-sanitised air.

  Granular is a new word. Of cereals, grains of sand, salt marshes, mountain grit.

  Moon dust and space rock, asteroid belts under the flesh.

  The sharpness is a surprise. I expect soft dullness among all the flesh of my breasts.

  An ultrasound shows charcoal circles, non-planets.

  Please don’t be cancer.

  A needle pushes in, the sting of penetration

  Dark orbs liquefy, a fetid flood

  filling the syringe.

  Lumps still lurk,

  but I know

  Each crater and black hole,

  Every inch of the body’s solar system.

  Tight, Numb, Squeezing, Drawing, Tearing

  Side Stitch

  Nostalgic for the stab

  In the side

  From running too fast

  Aged eight, or maybe ten, hazy.

  Over hedge hurdles, long grass

  A triumphant soundtrack in ears.

  The burn meant you were the winner.

  In a race as distant as mittens and milk teeth.

  Cool, Cold, Freezing

  Nerve Damage

  There are parts of my skin

  That never heat up,

  As though shaded by trees

  On hot days.

  Nerves tingle and underperform.

  A stray scalpel

  Offers a bladed kiss.

  Nagging, Nauseating, Agonizing, Dreadful, Torturing

  Labour

  A planned date for both births,

  No wait-and-see

  Nor spontaneity.

  Or so I thought.

  Both early,

  Contractions rolled in,

  Depositing aches like driftwood

  My son lay on my spine,

  Or maybe hiding behind it.

  My daughter’s contractions

  started weeks too soon.

  Tumble-tugged. Oblivion.

  As bad as they all said.

  Iced spinal block

  as entrée.

  My belly cut open

  As if for a feast.

  My obstetrician drove

  250 kilometres

  to welcome you.

  Your babies are always in a rush, she says.

  A Wound Gives Off Its Own Light

  A wound gives off its own light

  surgeons say.

  If all the lamps in this house were turned out

  you could dress this wound

  by what shines from it.

  Anne Carson, from The Beauty of the Husband

  Illness is an outpost: lunar, Arctic, difficult to reach. The location of an unrelatable experience never fully understood by those lucky enough to avoid it. My teenage years were filled with hospitals and appointments, calendars circled with dates for surgery. The arrival of unfamiliar objects under skin. This malfunctioning version of me was a new treasonous place. I did not know it; I did not speak its language. The sick body has its own narrative impulse. A scar is an opening, an invitation to ask: ‘what happened?’ So we tell its story. Or try to. Not with an everyday voice, no, that doesn’t suffice. To escape illness or physical trauma, some turn to other forms of expression. It can feel necessary. Illness tries to diminish the sufferer, but we resist it by containing its expansion. The patient’s attempt to understand their predicament is akin to applying a tourniquet. Art, for some, becomes a source of distraction, a welcome focus to blot out the boredom that comes with this new patient life. I gravitated towards writers and painters. People who told the stories of their illness; who transformed their damaged bodies into art.

  At the age of eighteen, a bus accident changed Frida Kahlo’s life forever. Later, she said of it, ‘The handrail pierced me as the sword pierces the bull.’ The explosion blew her clothes off, and another passenger, possibly a decorator, had a bag of gold powder among his painting tools. It burst on impact, showering an already naked and bleeding Kahlo. Her boyfriend recalls that when people saw her, they cried, ‘La bailarina, la bailarina!’ Gold mixed with red on her bloodied body, and they thought she was a dancer, limbs decoratively twisted among the wreckage. Surgeons who initially treated Kahlo didn’t think she would survive her injuries – a fractured pelvis and collarbone, broken ribs, a broken leg and a mangled foot. Her spinal column shattered in three places, a triptych of bone.

  Over the course of her life, Kahlo had more than thirty operations, including the amputation of her leg at the knee. Grappling with childhood polio had been bad enough, but the accident and its effects were catastrophic, and her pain was chronic. Kahlo married Diego Rivera in 1929, when she was twenty-two and he was forty-two. Their connection was founded on art and politics, volatility and attraction. For all his support of her work, and the omphalic nature of their bond, Rivera could not put himself in Frida’s place; her suffering was hers alone. Pain – unlike passion – has no commonality with another being, it has no shareable fragments.

  I found Frida during my teen hospital years. Our health issues differed vastly; hers were debilitating in a way that horrified me. I didn’t dare equate her suffering with mine, but our experience felt kindred. Then, and even now, my body is rarely without it. A life with pain is a distracted one, where every thought is always second to the source of where it hurts. Pain is a reminder of existence, bordering on the Cartesian. Sentio ergo sum: I feel, therefore I am. Some translations suggest patior ergo sum: I hurt/suffer, therefore I am. Yet, the physical experience resists words, refuses to reside within letters. They fall short. Woolf, in ‘On Being Ill’, writes:

  Finally, among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is the poverty of the language [. . .] let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other [. . .] so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.

  My admiration of Kahlo has always been about the work; the transference of her life onto canvas, the self-reflection, the engagement with the taboos of illness and the female body. In 2005, I went to see a major retrospective of her paintings at the Tate Modern. To wander from room to room was to be confronted with several versions of Frida. The multiplicities of her: as artist, as woman, as patient. On every wall was a different her. I stood rooted to the spot in front of her painting The Broken Column. In it, a huge opening runs through Kahlo’s torso, revealing her ruptured spine. Instead of bone, it is depicted as an Ionic column, an indication of Kahlo’s stoicism, refusing to give in to suffering. Hundreds of nails are embedded all over her and tears run down her face. The painting is not just a representation of pain, it physically epitomises it. Whenever I see it I almost wince, complicit in the sensation it evokes. Kahlo longed to have a child with Rivera but her body, damaged by the bus accident, was unable to carry a baby to term. Her first and third pregnancies ended by surgical abortion because of the risk to her health, and her second pregnancy in 1932 ended in miscarriage. Kahlo’s compromised body conspired against her, denying her not just health but the chance of motherhood. Henry Ford Hospital, Frida and the Miscarriage and Frida and the Caesarean (unfinished) were all painted in 1932. Art and motherhood became mutually exclusive, but motherhood – spectral and unrealised – recurs on the canvas. In the history of her body, the maternal lurks just outside the frame.

  The twisted bones, the diminished sense of self: I connected with Kahlo. Every night before surgery, after every post-anaesthetised fug, every needle, cut, puncture wound, I thought of her. The sense of a body that refuses to keep up its end of the bargain. In 2018 I saw another Frida exhibition, but this one – at
the V&A – focused on objects from her life. There were nail varnish bottles and face creams; clothes and books. But I was really there to see the detritus of her medical life. The exhibition was lowly lit, the rooms small and busy. Rounding a corner, I suddenly found myself looking into a glass case of her plaster casts and surgical corsets. Unexpectedly, I felt tearful. This was the reality of Kahlo’s life, the objects that both helped and constrained her. Essential, but also the source and symbol of her suffering. My mind pulled up the image of my own plaster cast, from years before; of feeling miserable and immobile, wondering how permanent the effects would be.

  In many of her self-portraits, Frida is pictured as pierced, penetrated or slashed. They are unflinching images, often paired with zoomorphic versions of herself. In The Wounded Deer (1946), she depicts herself as an animal shot with arrows. In the bottom left corner of the painting, the word ‘karma’ is visible. The appearance of the word initially baffled me. It seems inconceivable that Frida thought she deserved her pain, or that she felt she was being punished. But perhaps my assumption is based on thinking of karma as a cause-and-effect concept, of reckoning and rebirth, when it can also allude to action and work. That Kahlo chose to make an active life of art out of the confines of her predicament. I think of the word – one of the few words that appear in Kahlo’s paintings – as a testimonial. An acceptance of what she cannot change. If you are fortunate, illness is a car that leaves the road and ploughs harmlessly into a ditch. You throw open the door, dazed, and walk away. If luck deserts you, the car dives over the cliff into a ravine below. An orange explosion of fuel and contorted metal.

  After the bus crash, in 1925 doctors placed Kahlo in a full body cast to help her bones heal. It fulfilled its medical purpose but was, to Frida, a prison. Bored and confined, she began to paint. Unable to sit, her mother bought her a special easel, and later, a mirror was positioned above her bed so that she could paint herself. A medical cast is one way of obscuring the body. Kahlo tried to capture the self that was hidden beneath. For the months I was sealed into my hip spica plaster I thought of it as a tomb, but Frida saw the possibility in her cast. All that was done to Kahlo’s body is revealed in her work. She decorated the plaster and painted an ornate dragon on her red, prosthetic leg, which was the closest she ever came to using her physical self as a canvas.

  The word ‘stillness’ also contains ‘illness’. My bedbound years formed in me a constant reader. Books made being indoors and unable to move more bearable. In the months after her accident, Kahlo took refuge in painting – but what if there had been no collision? If Frida had been somewhere else on the day of the crash, would she still have become a painter? Her plan, before discovering art, was to become a doctor. Immobility is gasoline for the imagination: in convalescence, the mind craves open spaces, dark alleys, moon landings. Her paintings are a lesson in corporeal panic, body-in-peril, a way of communicating pain to those unversed in it. Illness and art may be subjective, but when I first encountered Kahlo’s paintings, they represented exactly what I felt, in a way my teenage self could not describe.

  In all her years of painting the problem of her body, her brokenness, her infertility, Kahlo never painted in detail the scene of the accident. Never the carnage, the ripping apart of bus and bones. She only drew the aftermath once, in one rough lithographic sketch called The Accident. Rivera and Kahlo collected Mexican ex-votos – small paintings offered to saints as thanks for surviving illness, injury or death. Frida painted over one that contained a bus crash scene, altering the destination to ‘Coyoacán’, and the face of the prone victim to her own, unibrow included.

  In her painting The Bus (1929), she depicts herself alongside her fellow passengers just before the accident. It captures the moment before her life changed forever, the moment before her near-death, the last moments of her life that would be pain-free. When I look at her work, I am struck by the way the language of the body, with all its heat and movement, is at odds with the medical words of science. For Frida, no words were enough. They were too slight or generic. In illness, it is hard to find the right words. Jo Shapcott’s 2010 poetry collection Of Mutability was written after a diagnosis of breast cancer. The word ‘cancer’ never appears once in its pages, and the book is dedicated to Shapcott’s medical team. Words can fail us, and they failed Frida. They could not harness what she wanted to say. For her, art – not language – was the medium of her agony.

  When Lucy Grealy’s health began to dominate her life, she immersed herself in language – poems, essays – to express her situation. Born in Ireland in 1963, she relocated to the US with her family soon after. At the age of nine, she was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare facial cancer that required the removal of most of her jaw and three years of chemotherapy and radiation. By the time Grealy was in her mid-twenties – and on her way to becoming a feted writer – she’d had close to thirty operations (the same number as Kahlo). Ongoing surgery was a battle, a fight with her own face. The regularity with which doctors opened her up with scalpels, removed bone and grafted skin, took its toll. It was highly invasive, and – because the site of the disease was her face – there was no question of privacy. There was no way to hide this part of herself from the world, unlike a spine or a leg. Her face, sutured and scarred, was on constant display. Illness was a burden, her deformity inescapable, but this was not the worst aspect of her experience. In one frank interview Grealy admitted: ‘It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy in my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.’

  The confidence in her writing contrasted with the insecurity prompted by her post-surgical face. Autobiography of a Face was also the only book that spoke directly, intently, deeply to me about the self-consciousness that physical illness brings, especially at a young age. Grealy evokes the physicality of scars, of imperfection, but she also captures the loneliness – the aloneness – of illness. She recalls that no one – doctors, teachers, her family – ever asked about what she was going through, or how she felt.

  In her writing, Grealy examined her surgeries from every angle. Medical intervention and the prepping of a body to be cut open involves contact and tactility; interaction with doctors, nurses, porters: it is a transaction, an exchange. Intrusive to many patients, but to Grealy a form of connection, an acceptance of help and a means of gaining attention. ‘It wasn’t without a certain amount of shame that I took this kind of emotional comfort from surgery: after all, it was a bad thing to have an operation, wasn’t it? Was there something wrong with me that I should find such comfort in being taken care of so?’

  Perhaps writing offers more cover than art – there are thousands of words to hide behind. In writing, unlike painting, and specifically Kahlo’s work, the writer does not explicitly put the body on display. Words are fig leaves, a modesty patch on the nakedness of the ill body. Frida worked primarily in oil and seemingly left no part of her physical self unexplored on canvas. Is paint or sculpture more distancing than having to take a photo of ourselves? The form of the modern self-portrait has evolved, the months of labour in an oil painting now expedited in a selfie. Would Kahlo have rejected the instant nature of such images? The idea that a photo, taken in one second, cannot represent months of pain. That layers of oil and reworked brush strokes hold something more of the experience. But Kahlo also hid her body using colourful clothes, many from the matriarchal Tehuantepec region of Mexico. In the 1934 charcoal drawing Appearances can be Deceiving, she depicts a see-through self, her injuries visible beneath her dress. ‘I must have full skirts and long,’ she remarked, ‘now that my sick leg is so ugly.’ I think of the long list of clothes I avoided when younger. Anything tight or short; fabric that clung to the body, accentuating my lopsided walk, the loathed limp. Unavoidably, my leg has shortened more with age. I’ve been advised to add shoe lifts to my wardrobe to combat the disparity in length, to offset the daily pain in my spine. Sometimes everyone hides, perhaps protective of
the self we offer to the word; resisting the props that become necessary to living. In the end, we all take cover.

  In using her body as subject, photographer Jo Spence (1934–92) was absolute. The decision to point the lens at herself was directly linked to her health. After a diagnosis of breast cancer, Spence made it the subject, the very centre of her work, documenting parts of her body, pre- and post-surgery. In the collaborative series with artist Terry Dennett, The Picture of Health? (1982–6), there is a particular image that makes my heart race, even now. The photo is taken on a hospital ward, at a slight remove. It is a patient’s-eye view, possibly Spence’s, from a couple of beds away. The camera is trained on a group of doctors crowding around the bed of a patient. In medical attire, uniformly white, they are indistinguishable from each other. The viewer sees only a throng, not the individuals that comprise it. There may be safety in numbers, but in a hospital scenario, it has the opposite effect. The result evokes a sense of threat. In such a confined space having strangers flank a bed is oppressive. There is no privacy, rarely greetings. Those who talk are brusque; those who don’t simply stare. Impassive, committed to the medical narrative being explained to them. ‘The patient has X and presented with Y and is being treated with Z.’ These team visits used to frighten me so much. I felt scrutinised and voiceless, a specimen in a jar. I was present, but not invited to be part of the discussion. In Spence’s photo, the entire group is male.

  In Cancer Shock, Spence wrote of one such encounter with a doctor:

  One morning, whilst reading, I was confronted by the awesome reality of a young white-coated doctor, with student retinue, standing by my bedside. As he referred to his notes, without introduction, he bent over me and began to ink a cross onto the area of flesh above my left breast. As he did, a whole series of chaotic images flashed through my head. Rather like drowning. I heard this doctor, whom I had never met before, this potential mugger, tell me that my left breast would have to be removed. Equally I heard myself answer, ‘No’. Incredulously; rebelliously; suddenly; angrily; attackingly; pathetically; alone; in total ignorance.