I became beautiful
where pretty nippers fingered my outlet.
But far too soon thereafter
fat with suet, my seams split.
And out seeped all the jolly worms
I’d been hoarding.
In this Plate My Illness Splits Time
I’ll never manage a big enough hole. I mean,
I’ll never tack down this hole. This hole
is in fact expanding, and I call it future hole.
I put money into its velvet clutch, and wait
for the hole to tremble.
I look a man, Grandmother, a folk singer,
I look something squirrel and vomit.
Hungry.
Something is wrong with the buildings, here.
The audio is off, and explosions
come hours after collapse.
I need a shave, or maybe I’m sitting in shadow.
I walk like Princess Scab Bitch,
who just happens to be performing
in the gutted gymnasium.
I have heard that blood expires, but I’m keeping
this sack close by. It’s tied to a body
holler in the bedroom, and I will use it
to scuttle my way back in.
Rusty Morrison
TO SATURATE THE MATTER OF THE PRESENT
Iam walking in Manhattan on a warm afternoon, looking at the glass and chrome and polished marble of skyscrapers, at micro-mini skirts worn with cargo boots or high-tops on beautiful bare legs, at children who are the only New Yorkers who return my stare, and who do so with pure interest. I’m looking everywhere, but at my feet, when I trip on a concrete lip of uneven sidewalk and hurt my knee so badly that making it back to the hotel room seems laughable. I remember seeing the edge of up-risen pavement just as it catches my foot unprepared, though this seems logically impossible. How could I see it, since the instant it would have been in my vision is already passed, once I realize that I am falling. But the distinct sharpness of its edge and the gray density of its concrete are embedded in my memory nonetheless.
I am lying on the hotel bed, before dawn, the day after my incident, icing my knee, staring back into memory, into what seems the cellular grain of that gray edge of concrete, at its absolute clarity. I don’t feel a sharp-edged density in the pain when I am icing my knee, only a vague, almost incorporeal, slowness, like the slowness of the sidewalk opening a crack in its pavement: it might take decades for such a crack to form, but only an instant for me to find it.
I am re-translating my understanding of pain. What I thought was a distinct and immediate sharpness when I hurt my knee, I realize now was only a surface sharpness: beneath that is a more potent expanse, an expanse that is continuing to widen. And in the pain I realize that the idea of “immediacy” too is false: pain’s provenance is more porously languid than immediate, more akin to the drift or mis-direction of my attention, which brought it on.
Somehow, both the pain and this failure of attention are as old and as continuously forming as the crack in the pavement, which I seem to recall so vividly, though this isn’t logically possible, given the circumstance of my falling.
“While we perceive something, we simultaneously remember and forget it,” says Giorgio Agamben. Maybe it’s also true that while I perceive something, I am simultaneously perceiving more and less than I understand can logically exist within the limits of my perception. Maybe every act of particularly fraught or shocked perception is partly a shock because it is accessing a new aperture through which perception might focus. Maybe a shock is a kind of creation, if only because it opens the opportunity to de-create at least some of my relationship to perception. I might say to Agamben that the color and texture of a crack in the pavement I didn’t see have been working on me; interestingly, the crack has grown very large, larger to me now than it was during the incident in which it may or may not have existed, at least as I qualify existence.
“Memory does not follow perception, but rather is contemporaneous with it...and can produce a ‘false recognition’... ‘a memory of the present’... Such a memory, [Bergson] writes, ‘is of the past in its form and of the present in its matter’” (Agamben, quoting Henri Bergson). I can imagine that a shock can thoroughly and continuously saturate the matter of the present, seeping right through its formal container, made of time, drawing perception with it into an emptiness outside of time and sense, or into an experience of what is beyond or outside the idea of physical containment, where all is encompassed, or all is un-encompass-able, though I might, from my limited experience, simply call this senselessness.
I have hepatitis C. It’s a disease that steadily consumes my liver, but it seems that its symptoms can be slowed or heightened by how well I am caring for my body’s needs, which do not remain steady, and to which I must apply a diligence of attention unparalleled in my past experience. Of course, the disease proceeds as it will, not by my will, so there’s both hubris and naïveté in proposing that I have control over its periods of onrush. Still, I have seen that when I overindulge in sugar or salt, or overwork, or put myself into a stressful situation, then the next day is usually not a good one. And so it feels increasingly important that I must not walk into a day without attending devotedly to how I will choose to take each step. Yet sometimes the pull of my old expectations regarding what I should be able to have, or to accomplish, can thrust me forward, compromising my intention, and I’ll miss seeing some critical rupture that I’m entering, some dangerous crack, and I will fall—I’ll fail myself. The shock and the shame, the confusion of falling into illness—of failing myself—seems sharply concrete and immediate; yet it too is a false concreteness and immediacy. Like the pain in my knee, the feelings that I sum up as failure are porous and larger than the immediate moment.
Whenever my symptoms flare up, I spend a few days outside of what I think of as my usual clarity and intellectual acuity. I drift; the direction and dimensions of that drift are difficult for me to locate in my usual repertoire of mental states. I say to myself that I am not fully alive to my senses, but I’ve come to realize that this is a traditional, and possibly limited, understanding of what senses can perceive.
“It is above all the unexperienced [event], rather than just the experienced [event], that gives shape and consistency to...personality and historical tradition,” writes Giorgio Agamben. It’s curious that the Latin root of the Middle English word for tradition, tradere, means not only to “impart” and “give over,” but also to “betray.” What of my old understandings, my historic traditions—those that are so innately a part of me as to be impossible to observe—is my illness giving me the freedom to see as a betrayal? What has illness begun to alter within the traditions in which I act, or that act upon me and upon my awareness?
I’ve begun to imagine that such an opening of awareness might have a shape or a latent structure, and that it might be reproducible, in the way that a grammar is reproducible, and that I might be able to shape myself to hear and to speak such an opening. I’ve begun to think of my chronic illness as a new language that my body is acquiring. I don’t mean to suggest that my mind, when under the sway of illness, is speaking in words that are foreign to me. Rather, I believe that the way my body incorporates the information offered to me by experience is altered by illness. This alteration, which is a different form of communication between myself and my world, I am calling a language. Learning to hear it and to speak it with increasing fluency will allow me access to certain departures from understanding, departures from acuity as I have known it—departures that, at least initially, can be spoken in, or through, this new or altered language, which the fluencies of illness are offering to me.
Last week, I read a New York Times article about the ways that language influences how we perceive and understand our world. One of the simplest examples the author offers is that “the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to cer
tain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.”
Nothing I’ve said in this essay changes the fact that I also perceive my illness as a terrifying constraint: physically limiting, but also psychically limiting when fear of the future takes hold of me. But by thinking of chronic illness as a language, I can become engaged in an observation of what fluency might mean, the fluency to speak in a language entirely different from my body’s language of health. I can then try to use words to communicate this fluency, recounting my experience of body, of this opening to what is the altered or increased or dispersed perspective that illness provides or simply stimulates. But words are the second order of speaking in my body, through my body, and I have to be sensitive to the histories that each word calls forth, the traditions, which will reflect meaning in a different way than a healthy body would recall them, or understand them. I’ve discovered that the body is a surprisingly “elastic” medium for appreciating, for translating the languages at its disposal. Perhaps there are more than these two—the body’s language of health and of illness—but these two are where I begin.
So, it seems essential that I stay attentive to their difference, and that I do not fall back upon the language of health, the syntax of my relation to body and world that health has given me, when I attempt to give words to this translation, which my body is already the active record of. “Bodies are always re-converging around the elasticity of their becoming” (Erin Manning). But to translate my body’s changes, my voice must allow itself to become foreign to itself. And I must allow myself to examine, even to give up, my previous understanding of “translator,” if I am to become one.
The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language (Walter Benjamin quoting Rudolf Pannwitz, from Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”).
Interestingly, the more I think of this work as a translation that I find and follow within my body, the more I feel that words are a formal limitation to what I can communicate about it. But, of course, as a poet, I have experienced directly the ways that a formal constraint can hone the clarity, intensity and inspired power of a writing project. In similar ways, a physical constraint, such as illness, can engender surprising perceptual attunement in the body. With hepatitis C, the physical limitations that I suffer always come seemingly “ill-timed,” and exhaust my powers of thought. Yet there is a different form of “time,” and “power,” and even “thought,” involved in the language that I want to learn to translate.
I don’t say this to minimize or conceal the anger that I have when facing the physical effects that this illness has had on my body, or the sadness, fear and frustration that also accompany those effects. It is, in fact, the ways that these especially debilitating emotions and sensations shift as I attempt to clarify them that will offer me glimpses of a deeper grammar of relation in life than I previously have understood. Interestingly, once I become aware of this alteration, I can begin to listen for it in the most subtle of experiences, those that I have not always taken the time, or had the fluency, to translate into understanding.
Of course, I am not surprised by either the volatility or the subtle variability of my emotions or my experience of physical sensations. “Breathe into the feeling, label it,” the Buddhist practitioner will tell you, “and watch how the feeling shifts.” What has surprised me is a deeper coherence beneath these shifting emotions and sensations—a coherence I hadn’t seen before. Or maybe it’s simply that I hadn’t needed to look beneath them when my darker, more disruptive, feelings were not as overwhelming or as common, when they were more balanced by those of a healthy body that was more able to right itself, to maintain its equilibrium, even buoyancy.
I am tempted to use the word “gravity” to describe the pull that draws me to sense a deeper coherence, to label that coherence, since it seems to be a force of motion common to all my experiences when I am deeply engaged with the illness. But to use a word like “gravity” will create just the kind of falseness, the kind of limitation to meaning, which keeps it constrained in my old understandings, and that is what I want to avoid, what this illness has taught me not to trust.
Instead, I will say that there is a focus to even my most enervated lack of focus; I’d almost call it a “yearning toward,” but toward what? The sense of “yearning toward” seems both diffuse and expanding, as though its presence were enlarging the stillness in what may be the empty, non-individuated core of every moment.
I find myself wanting to say I’m drawn into the inexplicability of focus itself, to its undifferentiated core where there is a force of emptiness or fullness, rather than be limited by the old architectures of meanings I would ascribe to the word “gravity” or “focus,” meanings which are barriers that my yearning, when I let it exist outside of logic’s parameters, neither legitimizes, nor recognizes. But this kind of talk is circular and returns to concepts that my language of health can understand. Instead, the writing I am doing in order to attend to this new fluency wants to move in the force of experience itself, and let those experiences work out their own language.
I am icing my knee. I am looking out our Brooklyn hotel window as the light on the building outside, which is the light of just-coming dawn, reaches a white stain on the red brick wall across the street; the stain surrounds what might be a deserted window, with a fire escape ladder. I could say that the light is a language in which the red brick and white stain on the brick and the fire escape ladder all gain meaning as morning comes on. But I could also say that the dark out the window, before dawn, the dark I hadn’t been paying attention to, was a language communicating my inability to perceive the stain, the window, the bricks.
We are leaving New York today, so I won’t be in this hotel room again tonight to look out the window. I am tired, my knee isn’t much improved and my hepatitis C is flaring up. I can feel it coming. I could compare it to the inevitable return each morning of dawn, or of the loss of light that is night. But such comparisons are heavy with the language and symbolism that health has taught me to speak. Illness is less sure, less accurate, more hazy; its seeming intangibility, its dizziness frightens me. But dizziness can be the opposite of a loss of stability, of acuity—instead, though sometimes for only an instant, it seems as though I’m feeling too many points of stable contact, of acuity, at once.
The hotel window has become very bright with morning, too bright for my eyes to tolerate. I know better than to force them. It will be another very warm day in New York. Already, the automatic air conditioner, just below the sill, is blowing the sheer cotton curtain up at such a gravity-defying angle of stillness that my interest in anything else in the room pales. Its motion’s life cycle, of course, has its own grammar, which I have not the skill to translate. But I am learning to give over to observing what I fail to understand, and let that “giving over” have a space in my translator’s diary.
ill-timed (24.1)
Outside my window, construction workers use an electric compounder to compact the sand that will support the bricks of our new driveway.
My drifts of thought
between actual thoughts
are similarly condensed by any happenstance of sudden sound—
the pounding, a ringing phone, my husband’s voice from the other room—
condensed within the entire accumulation
of now inaccessible meanings that are my
unremembered past,
w
hich I feel this morning as light
through my window, arriving from an
incomprehensible distance.
Ill-timed (24.2)
A slight texture to the book’s first pages,
discernible to fingertips alone. Blank pages,
which I thought were meaningless, are now adding texture
to my attention.
A slight book, readable in one morning. This morning.
Which had seemed, at first, a slight morning.
Which my habit of ‘simply thinking’
would have otherwise
unaccountably absorbed.
A space within thought that the texture of illness, too, unaccountably amplifies.
ill-timed (24.3)
I close the toilet lid and sit down to listen
to what you are telling me from the shower,
an easy thing, about our day’s plan, but the easy
choice I make to listen
splits in two,
and what I follow
is the other thought. Its face in profile
could be anyone, since the street it travels is growing dark,
I see only how its pale cheek has caught the darkness,
and all the parts of my day’s plan—my pack of acupuncture needles
still in my hand, your voice beside me, coffee
waiting in the kitchen—all
the privilege of inventing future
as a thought
Beauty Is a Verb Page 27