Sun in Days
Page 3
8.
The gym I used to practice in was stuffy, with two blue landing mats, a whirring box fan, and an urn of chalk beside the uneven bars. Girls in leotards and scrunchies clapping the excess powder from their hands, giggles and the silence of effort.
At practice, I stretched and made myself small and still
doing a split on the red felt beam
pushing the stretch past comfort into pain
9.
to be elegant,
self-forgetful.
10.
I loved the clean container of my leotard, the bright spangles.
11.
A year earlier, something had gone awry in the minute biological particulars of my body. No one understood what it was. Trapped in a body that wasn’t working right, I couldn’t work, couldn’t think. Time got sticky and meaningless. The fatigue so profound it swallowed me.
Everyone’s tired, a friend said, from across the chasm, one day when I managed to get out of the house.
12.
The gymnast was very slim. Her hair was always in pigtails or ponytails, tied with thick bright yarn. Her body was taut from hours of practice. Yet in competition it appeared almost as if she had forgotten her will, had come to effortlessly inhabit her own grace.
13.
I had no fear, she wrote, and I never said, “I cannot do that.”
14.
I was terrified that I couldn’t get my mind to work. I was terrified of the pain, with the unpredictable electric shocks buzzing up and down my legs. I was terrified in the way I’d been when, as a child, I suddenly realized I was going to die. The rocks I gathered at the stream by the red barn country house suddenly weighing me down.
15.
In my diary I listed what I’d done in practice: thirty back walkovers; ten valdezes; three handstands on bars, the double turns on beam, a half-on, half-off. By the end of the year I know I will beat Marta on the beam.
At practice the coaches told us to stay tight and create a space under your arms and to stick it keep your legs tight. We were always hollow and light, we were always spotting, choosing a place to look and looking for it alone.
16.
To want something so much that you become that thing. To defy the container of the body through the obsessive remaking of it.
17.
Maybe what I’m saying is that I wanted the possibility that the female body could become numinous.
18.
Through extreme self-use, through obsession
with the spiritual potential of obsession—
19.
My palms tore open from the friction on the uneven bars—a “rip.” At lunch, a friend offered me a palm reading. The rip, she told me, had torn through my heart line. There goes love, she said, laughing.
The pain was clean and clear. The tear never fully healed.
20.
Mastering a skill is an invention of authority. But any invention is anti-authority. The writer Paul Valéry said once, “Two dangers never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.”
21.
Once a week I took the bus for twenty-three minutes to get my blood drawn. The room smelled of urine. The lab technicians put on latex gloves, tapped my vein, and stuck a needle in. At first they were diffident. Then we had an understanding. The kinder one patted me on the shoulder, told me about her two-year-old. The tougher case called me “Ms. O.” She never said hello.
Once, though, she let me hear her complain about the other patients, then said, “I use the smallest needle on you, because your veins are tiny.”
22.
A subplot: I was trying to conceive a child, and I could not. It took a long time before I understood why: my body had fallen out of immunotolerance (the understanding that parts of the self, organs, blood proteins, the like, are not to be attacked by the body’s own immune system).
Instead I lived in—well, we could call it immune-chaos. It was difficult not to think metaphorically about this:
I was under attack from myself,
attacked by the very biology that was designed to keep me “safe”
23.
and the result was that I was not myself.
24.
There is no way to demarcate suffering. What one “feels” when “suffering” is not like a date in history but like a day that cannot be logged.
25.
The thrill when you try something difficult for the first time—reaching blindly for the bar as you jump backward over it. When I was sick, my head throbbed in the mornings, my limbs heavy as the ocean. The lymph nodes on my neck swelled to the size of mothballs.
26.
I spent half of most days on websites dedicated to the identification of “mysterious ailments.” Mainly I read comments threads for hours. The chains of thought and argument were peculiar, even pathological—but also comfortingly predictable.
I wrote comments and didn’t post them, but as I wrote my heart rate went up and my cheeks flushed, as if I were exercising or aroused.
27.
Keats, ill, said to his friend Charles Brown:
I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.
Charles was going to go with him to Italy, but never did.
28.
There was one upside: mosquitoes no longer bit me.
I was me but in disguise.
29.
My muscles, my skin, got molded, my brain got firm.
My will got girled and fierce.
I took the bus home by myself
in my Adidas gym socks and shoes,
continuous and used up,
muscle by muscle,
tricep to adductor, oblique
by oblique, psoas to calf.
Having stuck the landing
my rips bleeding.
Everything was measurable, improvable.
30.
But improvement wasn’t the only goal.
We had stickers on our hands and glitter on our shiny blue leotards with white zigzags. Mastering a skill was a joy, an addiction, unhurried and luxurious, a way out of yourself and a way in all at once. A girlness fabricated and internalized, but shimmery and ribboned—useful, not useful, it didn’t matter.
It’s play, which is its own process. The point is joy.
31.
I kept trying to apply the model of will to the sick body to rise off the bed, like a phoenix. All I had were clichés.
32.
One day I went for a run determined Just do it. I told myself Whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. Gray clouds, an ichor air. The pine needles browning. My legs shaking and numb, my arms full of heavy sand. Home, I collapsed back into bed.
33.
The chalking up, the grips, the stretching, the Ace bandages, the velvety feel of the floor mat, the bounce of the fiberglass bars, their give underhand. Trying. Then doing it again.
The slightest loss of attention leads to death, the poet said.
34.
Then puberty.
The little plush pockets of fat on the inner thighs.
“Menstruation,” irregular because of all the workouts.
Plum-black blood, stains on the perfect sheen of the leotards,
as if we soiled them just by becoming ourselves.
35.
All winter, I kept track of time from my blue couch, reading comments on the Internet, taking my pills, making lists with a fine black pen, watching videos of the gymnast. It made the panic slide away, put some light back in.
36.
(all I can say is the illness was like that state between sleep and wakefulness when you aren’t sure where or who you are—
37.
“I” a ghost in the machine, a surreptitious invention, a robot mind, a white noise, a soul whaled in, a hoard.)
38.
Because I was told my sickness was exacerbated by stress, I played at being “normal”—cooking, resting, slowing d
own. The irony is, this retraction to a narrower set of possibilities was similar to the experience of my friends who were new mothers.
39.
Early on, you learn not to be scared bending backward unable to see where you are going.
The process is control and letting go, surrender to whatever will happen.
Once you get used to reaching backward
you do back handsprings on a line on the basketball court, then the low
beam, the coach stacking mats next to it.
The body learning what your mind wants to do with it
One morning my hands miss the beam,
my wrist snaps back, tearing the tendon.
X-ray, splint, the doctor tells me I can’t compete for six weeks.
I have a meet tomorrow, I say. My mother lets him tape it up.
Always that backward reachtrusting your body knows
more than your mind.
40.
It’s when you think about it that things go wrong.
41.
My acupuncturist told me, “You think too much.” I wasn’t sure how to stop. I practiced blankness for a while, read the newspaper.
42.
Another definition of process is “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.” But I thought there might be no end, except the end I didn’t want.
43.
Before summer camp, boys, or calculus, before stonewashed denim, before we threw away the Keds, the Benetton shirts, the friendship bracelets, before college. Long before we threw away the leotards with their fine stitching, shiny bodices—
44.
What begins as a kind of ordered disorder (trying to fly) becomes a disordered order (trying to control your body, keep it a child’s).
45.
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir.
46.
It is not coincidental that the gymnast later got breast augmentation and became a spokesperson for Botox.
47.
One day I went to a new doctor. He asked me if I wanted children, and said, “Time is not on your side.”
48.
When I was twelve, I wore a blue windbreaker every day, even in ninety-degree heat. I didn’t want my changing body to be seen. By August, the windbreaker was filthy, with streaks of dirt on its sleeves, the cuffs turned gray. Take it off, my mother always said. Take off your coat and stay a while. But I didn’t want to stay—I wanted to go back.
49.
The terror of adolescence is the terror of being seen; in this case, seen as female, your thoughts made as comical and disgusting as your habit of bleeding.
50.
At thirteen I thought I could hide my body under clothes. Then I thought I could hunger it into androgyny. I could be a self that was not exactly girl.
But I also wanted to be as girlish as the gymnasts I loved—all glitter, no earth, gaps between their thighs.
51.
Even as I got better and stronger on the balance beam, I felt more uncertain. Did what I look like match who I was?
I tried to remember the joy I used to feel.
52.
The sick body is always having speech seized from it. One day, when I pleaded for help, the doctor frowned.
You don’t have a bad disease, she said.
When I told her, I think something else is going on, she took the speech and hid it away. Even as I say this, I worry my words appear to be without grounds.
53.
Always at the back of my mind: I had tried, but had I tried hard enough?
54.
There are many scripts for proceeding but of course you want the one that is denied to you, a friend told me.
55.
I mean the possibility of grace, which is something.
56.
I object to certain kinds of masochism, the way that some women like to glamorize their sexual neediness.
But maybe I just like the part of female pain (or bravery) that insists on its privacy. This may be a failing in me.
57.
There is a video of me speaking in public at this time, a low pilot flame of myself. After the event, I told someone I was not sure I wanted to continue to live.
58.
Then in the snow one day something happened.
It—a part of me—broke inside my body.
At the hospital they said I had internal bleeding, problems they could find.
After blood tests, probes, and EKGs
they prescribed me medicine, rest, treatments
—and I began to return from the gray world of stinging skin and sand-heavy limbs—
59.
When I tell the story I speak of this nadir and of the eventual turn.
But it would be wrong to pin the drama of transformation on one night—
60.
I thought of what the gymnast said. “To me, competing was about the next time and the one after that. It was about improving my body and mind.”
61.
Alice James, Henry and William’s sister, was unwell all her life, and diagnosed by doctors with hysteria. In her forties she learned she had breast cancer and would soon die. “To him who waits, all things come!” she exulted to her diary. For years, she had “longed and longed for some palpable disease.” Until now her illness had been a “monstrous mass of subjective sensations” she felt “personally responsible for.”
She died months later.
62.
What if—and this was the question I couldn’t bear—the rest of my life was just this:
the process of surviving?
When in fact I had not survived.
63.
I was the mouthpiece for the illness, I could translate it, but even I was not sure what it was saying.
64.
My handwriting in the log got smaller and smaller.
More and more went unrecorded.
But I will not speak of that.
65.
(When I got sick, I did think, if I die now, I have spent way too much time listening to men talk.)
66.
There is nothing sustaining about sickness
and because there is no end, there can be no “goal”
and because there is no goal there is
no process
: so what is there?
67.
Of course you could say all life is exactly like this.
“I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all,” Beckett wrote.
But I think the good life is more like gymnastics—
a futile grace.
68.
After all this time, I am not sure how to describe the gymnast’s mystery. But for a moment that night under the white-black sky I understood:
69.
the distinct moment when the snow coats the streets
enough that our passage can be seen through it
tracings of pure being—
a will that could burn you, filling a form she made with her own mind—
70.
I wanted to believe the process of watching the days go by was enough.
Even in a body whose processes were corrupted,
71.
through long months when death, the body’s failure, waited down the block.
But.
72.
Imagine a line like the one at the gym on which you practice
just for the sake of trying,
for the value of it, which is its own joy.
Landing. Sticking it.
Not because the judge is waiting in the corner
for your final salute. But just because.
To land it. To do it over and over, to feel it.
It’s like a hunt for light in the body.
The line is uncorrupted even if the body might be.
No, I don’t like that old-fashioned, purist way of thinking.
How about: the body is
exhausted b
ut the line is not,
and look glitter on the floor
and the leg a little ribbon shine!
III
Some Aspects of Red and Black in Particular
One of the destructive assumptions of our time is that ideas have no originators.
—DONALD JUDD
I know large forces move us
like tides, and yet in the salt flats
of this desert I sometimes think I see
a horseman riding through the scrub
at first a speck, then a small dot, a growing
dark blotch sorting itself
into hat, head, horse, mind—
Mistaken Self-Portrait as Demeter in Paris