Where to Find Me

For the next couple of months, 3 times a week, find me on the Bitch magazine website. I will be a guest blogger exploring representations of the body on my blog, The Body Electric. See you there!

Field Guide to Gross Anatomy (Rough Draft) from "This Fragile Fortress"

Note: This looks like a traditional field guide (i.e. Audubon's) on paper, but I can't translate that formatting here.

ORIGINS:

Anatomy, from the Greek anatom, meaning a cutting up. Its roots, as a science, are in death: the dissection of the nonliving in service of the rest of us. By definition, then, it is a science divorced from the vital reality of personhood: the glory and defeat and tedium that characterize a life. Just as a map of the topography of France or a botanical drawing of an orchid cannot really communicate their inherent beauty, the anatomical study of a body does not explore the heartbreak of its loss. We cannot know a body by naming the systems that power it. We can only know what is visible through the lens in which we look.

DEVELOPMENT:

What we are concerned with here is classification, structure. Systems: endocrine, skeletal, digestive, cardiovascular. Nervous. How can you ever know me? I swim alone, shirt off, my chest flat and white in the sun. My body, unrecognizable. No map to overlay, no system to explain my evolution. Who are my ancestors? Monkeys smile at me and I smile back. We are unconcerned with the tenuousness of our relationship. When I swim, I leave my shirt on the shore and I do not care what the tourists think. I only care for the fish, and the waving seaweed, and the buoyant saltwater that insists on holding me.

WONDER:

The heart never stops. It is a muscle, like the muscles that line our arms and feet but it beats beats beats beats even in slumber. The heart does not grow tired, does not try to understand the choices of other hearts, does not even know its place in metaphor. How could a dead heart reflect any sort of truth? What answers are found in the postscript of the closest thing we have to infinity?

EFFECTS:

What is the order of things? There is life, and there is death. There is a cycle and we rub up against it and that is the mystery. Flatten the landscape, for we are all equally caught, animals and minerals and plants. What matters is the cycle, and the body as it moves through space and the mind that translates this ever quickening journey. What matters is the blood and the bone and the tissue and the heart, of course, the heart that propels us, the heart that eventually stops.

COUNTER-EVIDENCE:

It is true that I was anesthetized and my heart did not know what my mind knew and that a doctor versed in the anatomical model of the body took a scalpel to mine. It is true that I am a product of science, of the knowledge derived from the fractured study of death. It is true that I am in the skin I’m in because of the wonders of western medicine and the doctor who studied it before he cut into my tissue and fat and it is true that when he did this, he set me free.

ORIGINS, REVISITED:

Anatomical plate by Juan Valverde de Amusco

EFFECTS, CONTINUED:

How can you ever know me? I exploded into being, reborn in the crevice between science and faith. My systems are in place: circulatory, lymphatic, muscular. Nervous. I am defined, as you are, by my body. My body, a collection of systems that bind me to you, to this lifetime, to this order of things that I did not agree to but that I must love. Because this is my world, too, and I will swim in it with the help of the ocean, the doctors, the ancestors I will never meet; they are the mermaids but they are also the imaginations that gave birth to them. The truth is that I am here, with the fish and the seaweed and the tourists, too, who watch me from a distance, greasy with sunblock and driven by hearts that echo mine and an occasional awareness of the incredible fleeting nature of their place in the order of things.

Whale from "This Fragile Fortress"

"Jonah Cast Forth By the Whale" by Gustave Dore (d. 1883)

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Gospel of Thomas, vs. 70

We know, in the ways of all sick animals, exactly how to manufacture biological transformation. It is profoundly human to seek, and we use placebos to mend wounds, balance neurobiology, and remap neural pathways embedded in narratives of trauma and grief. A pill without active ingredients, infused instead with faith, can kick the immune system into gear, send cancer into remission, conquer degenerative conditions. The subconscious cues the physiology. Somewhere in the neocortex, expectation intersects with the incredible will to be well.

Ultimately, we heal ourselves; but we illuminate the path with torches shaped like mirrors. A placebo is organic as hope and as miraculous as regeneration. It is a vessel, concrete as medicine; but also as ethereal as trust or love. A placebo inspires. It is a mediator, a reminder of the intimacy between body and mind. It’s about ancient history, the story of humanity, carried in our blood, waiting to be noticed. It is about sitting, expectant, in the dark with a candle in hand.

Perception is a system, a foundation, and often the guard of illness. When we actively choose a placebo, we are broadcasting what we think has been lost to us. What we often find is a guide to the location of the very mechanisms that have quietly propelled us all along.

The hero’s quest in mythology, the confirmation ritual of religion, the healing role of the shaman, the transcendent interaction with art--we have always translated external sources into internal answers. Here, what we know to be true is toppled by faith. Shamans alter the chemistry and belief systems of their communities. They find truth in visions, they dispense narrative placebos.

The simple organic process of ingestion is the base of shamanistic practice. We deal in energy: we eat to move, to think, to love. Shamans incite change through manipulation of the metabolic processes of body and mind.

The power of the shaman is linked directly to his ability to transform suffering, illness, and strife. The shaman reminds you of your most basic coordinates, locates you in a reality that he may have constructed but, nonetheless, is realer than real.

To truly change is to integrate the history one carries, to reclaim, to cast out and to reframe. The world is waiting of you, and the body knows this; the body wants to believe what the mind resists.

There is a universe where a shaman waits for me, ready to lead me to my story, mapped out in my own ropy muscles. There is a universe where love becomes a machine I crank in my chest, translating the swampy remnants of my lineage into language, into placebo, into energy metabolized, into altered reality where we are all together: you, me, the shaman, the muscle, the swamp, the pills I have swallowed, the people we have been, the lanterns I have carried, the path, bright before me.

So call me Ishmael, call me Jonah. Allow me this story. Give me a belly of a whale and the roughest, coldest slam of our deepest ocean. Give me a heart a child could crawl through, a language that is not my own, a consciousness of breath. Let me choose whether to live or die inside a cave of dwindling air. Give me three days among a hail of krill and shrimps and squid. Give me faith in my body, in the water, in the fish and its hurtling wisdom, in the symbolism I have created.

Give me the face of death and let it be beautiful and wild. Give me an adventure placebo, a myth placebo, give me a hero’s quest placebo and let my body decide the physicality of my healing. Give me a spike of dopamine, a slingshot of hope and pleasure in my brain. Watch as my chest stretches like a tiny horizon in the darkest place of all. I am water propelled by twin balloons of air so see me float. We know what will happen: I will recognize the mercy that grows in my fingernails and regenerates in my organs and is larger than a whale or an ocean or the stories I tell myself. There will be a vastness of possibility, a reality that is awesome and strange. There will be crank and a lantern and I will escape and I will swim.

And after the whale, you will call me home. You will turn on the lights and find me already there, my whole story dripping salty onto the kitchen floor. You will recognize me, you will see the anatomy of humanity overlaid and transparent on my skin, and you will say my name and I will hear you, I will answer.

Notes on Building Bridges

What San Francisco needed was a bridge, and the Poet wanted to build it. People said the intense fog, the dangerous currents, the strong winds were impossible to contend with. But the Poet wanted a statue in his honor, and people wanted to stand over the swirling Pacific and feel bigger or, maybe, they wanted to stand over the choppy, endless ocean and feel profound and small but either way the poet wanted to build it and the people needed a bridge and so the Golden Gate was born.

A California story was born with the bridge and it is my story, too: a stranger comes to town and a hero goes on a journey and the Poet builds a bridge and the ocean is all that matters, and that never changes.

I. All forces are interactions between objects.

We travel between points, we move with a baffling, sudden precision. I drive to you across a span of impossibility. I leave my hometown and all its decaying industry and I cross a country that does not understand me and a gulf of doubt expanding inside my chest and I arrive, somehow, in California just in time to see the fog descend. I exit a six lane freeway and then I am in your apartment, stunned by the concreteness of destination, the disrupted sense of home, the crooked tooth in your smile and the extent to which I am charmed.

The thing is, it needed to be the longest bridge in the world and it needed to not snap. There could not be a catastrophe, no blood on the Poet‘s hands. Two cables had to hold the tension of forty million cars a year and the rocking effect of torsion. The bough could bend but never break.

A stranger comes to town on a hero’s journey. The compressed narrative is here and it was true for both of us, just as it true for the builders of the bridge and all the bridges before it. I followed you three thousand miles from any reference point and so we drove to the ocean straight away because it was familiar to us both. We watched it, we saw that it was an animal moving with the moon. I needed you to be like the water, more powerful than my history and flexible as the waves. You wanted me to expose something soft in your depths and so we rocked like cables, the tension of our differences acting upon each other. We found the vantage point of the seagulls, and then we anchored ourselves to land.

II. A bridge is only as good as its cables.

(The Golden Gate has two, mighty as redwoods, and it took months to spin them into something strong enough to carry the weight of so much life.)

What didn’t we fight about? Everything was a collision of perspective. A stranger came to town and knocked the hero off the horse. The hero came to town and led the stranger to water and the stranger was shocked at the span of the ocean. How do you build a bridge across something so intimidating, with the cold wind screaming by and the fog wetting your hair? I had the relentless faith and you had the stable hands and we tested the torsion, over and over but we never snapped.

Tension supports the bridge. The cables pull the tension towards the anchorages. The engineers knew not to fight physics. They knew to transfer all that movement from an area of weakness to one of strength.

Sometimes you have to rewrite the story and sometimes you have to trust the truth that you remember. You were the first to bend and I followed you. It’s like the ocean, you said. The ocean, monstrous and correct. We drew up plans and we became two cables that looked like trees and we were gentle and strong as a wave, as a bridge shifting in the fog.

III. To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Tension lengthens, compression shortens. The contradiction is what make the suspension bridge successful: the tension holds the weight until the compression can transfer it to the Earth.

We are not created or destroyed. We appeared to each other one warm day in October and we studied the space between us and then we built a bridge. We never forget that the wind is powerful or that the ocean is the constant; the ocean is the measure. We know the grief of the snap, the way things can disappear and we say a prayer for all that has existed and ceased to exist so that we can be here, in the sway of it, above it, beyond it.

The Golden Gate was completed by the Poet to great fanfare. He got his statue, and the people got to stand above the water and feel small or powerful or both. All forces are interactions between objects and the ocean knows this and the bridge knows this and the Poet knows this and we know it, too. We are the Poet and the people and of course we are the bridge and the dynamic tension and the anchorage and the Earth but aren’t we the ocean, gigantic and impossible as it seems--in the end, aren’t we that most of all?

1991

First, you are right about more than you suspect. You are right to look at the stars and not see light and death. And your physiology may have twisted to save you; and your neurons may be grooving foreign pathways, angry little gravel ones--but you are a force. You read meaning. You bear stories. You are an alchemist with language because you are not the people who taught you to speak, only of them. You are right that you can create a new universe and you will.

That universe will not be parallel. You will not collapse time, only touch it. You will bend but the facts will not.

A person cannot be a problem or an answer. We are not equations. But your math is sound. You were right to lock your big, heavy door and sit in the middle of your bed and wait for something inside of you to happen.

The world is not so small. You are certain of this, I know. You imagine New York with its gritty gracefulness and its people, faceless as history, but that is not what I mean. New York is small. The world is infinite and will fit together in a way that is precise and completely unexplainable someday and you will be baffled, bowled over by wonder.

You are small but not in the way that you think. You are not the size of his cracked and dusty love. You are not a sapling, waiting for water. You are small in the way that centuries are small. You are small in the way of borders, or the split lightening makes with the sky. You are small as the cells that contain you.

You are also endless. Cells cannot contain you. People cannot contain you. Words cannot contain you. I cannot contain you.

You are right about more than you suspect. You are relentless as fingernails. You wait for the space to open up. What you believe feels as flimsy as magic but there is magic waiting for you; magic is exactly what endures. You are a heartbeat, a century, a universe in a cell. You are the rip screaming through the sky and you are the sky, bared and unbroken.

Adventures in Non-narrative, Part I from "This Fragile Fortress"

Words fail. What is lost in translation:

We are, you and I, propelled to know and yet we are forever dwarfed by the immensity of that which surrounds us. Though sometimes awed by it, aren’t we also uncomfortable with our smallness? Isn’t that why we tend to focus instead, in our fuzzy way, on how well we are able to describe? We illustrate in order to inspect, to clarify, to master. It may be that human knowledge is fueled by our curiosity and wonder, but perhaps it is the terror of being unseen, unknown, or left behind that causes us to paper over everything with descriptors, clichés, tropes, and classifications.

In psychology as well as literature, in the aftermath of devastation and grief, in the stories we tell ourselves and each other--we utilize narrative to make meaning out of experience. Though the benefits of this are clear, the intolerance of non-narrative on a larger scale can lead to an interpretation of some untranslatable moments and their encompassing silence that takes on a troubling texture. What of the experiences that we circle around, flailing in our attempts to contain? What of the mysterious, the resistant, the lost?

Words transcend. Words fail. Our parents do not name us into being, they name us into a shared storyline. Everything is mediated by language. Despite this, there is an exquisiteness to finding your story in the words of another, which is why we are here, isn’t it? I look for you and you look for yourself in these black lines--so broken, so delicately arranged.

Language is more than simple communication. The words we use are, in fact, symbols that become vessels between us. We map the world through the words we choose. We are imprecise, but verbose. We aim widely and hope for the truest truth to emerge.

The writer, in particular, relies on language as connective tissue. If I verbalize myself, I am made more real. Somehow, the gauze is lifted; the problems of physicality and its inevitable borders are solved, the messy ambiguities are sharpened just a little. I make myself familiar. The trouble occurs when narrative becomes blubber--insulating, layered, removed.

Alternatively, the sounds of our bodies are universal, rhythmic, animal. We are located in the rumblings and squeaks. It is the immediacy of the body’s call that takes us beyond the alien echoes of the external world and leads us back to the unmapable reality of our most unmasked selves.

In moments without language, there is faith in something larger. In a determined sort of silence, it seems inevitable that the individual stories we subscribe to be washed away by the boom of blood throbbing in our ears, epic as any part of the grand chorus occurring around us.

Babel is reversed when one sits, quiet as an animal, among other animals. In the Quaker tradition, meetings for worship involve silent meditation. Unsurprisingly, the Quakers are also committed to equity--social structures fall away and it is impossible to justify hate or oppression when navigating the defenseless contours of your own expectant heart.

It seems inevitable that silence can equal tolerance and humanity, so why should it equal a murky, bubbling swamp of ignorance, hatred, and fear? Silence as what we should say but don’t; silence as the stories that never get told; silence as the ways we are made less than human. How can something be so divine and debasing, simultaneously?

How else can I say it, writer or not? Perhaps language is to blame.

It is language that gives us the capacity to tell our stories, which allows us to claim them. However, isn’t it the specificity of our stories that make us separate? This parallel truth exists in all of us. I tell myself who I am and, therefore, I am. I tell you who I am and, therefore, you know me. But you will never sit with me in a gravel parking lot outside of Pittsburgh and watch planes land, as I did with my best friend many times in high school. We smoked cigarettes and barely spoke. Did he know me then better than you do now? It is impossible to tell. Though we passed much of those years staring out windows and sharing space in moving cars, my favorite memories of our friendship are the ones where we spoke to each other about that which mattered most to us. Over the harmony of all that silence, our words carried such gorgeous meaning.

So, this is what I try to tell you, now: the reality of the details, so you can imagine with me. You, too, can understand the way a warm Pittsburgh summer evening could be perfectly pitched to the story of a couple of high school misfits in a beat up old Toyota with a portable CD player playing through the tape deck. I want you to see the way the outline of the chain link fence through the windshield looked menacing after dusk, how we never knew if the people pulling up beside us were there to make out or drink beer or hassle us, how maybe it was all of this not-knowing that prompted us to notice the way the quiet we welcomed so completely could sometimes give you the creeps. I want you to see us out there in our t-shirts, windows down, a light breeze moving the hairs on our heads. I want you to believe me even though I am making this up, even though I don’t remember, really, more than a passing detail of those nights many years ago; I want you to remember what you don’t remember, too, I want you to understand me and I wish I had something more to give you, something tactile and exact but I only have this paperboat and this water to float it on and this fire to set to it so of course

I do.

Believing the Bird from "This Fragile Fortress"

“When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."

-James Audubon

Children are interested in the unfamiliar—it’s what allows them to return excitedly from a hike bearing the bleached skull of a lizard or a mangy raven feather. I once worked at a summer camp where we encouraged kids to treat mystery with reverence. Upon discovery of a spider hole or a wayward raccoon, it is a faithful act to believe that which you don’t understand is only a lesson waiting to be learned.

I find myself on the receiving end of this curiosity frequently. Whether I’m teaching in pristine classrooms, sweltering school portables, or the belly of a museum; whether it‘s a shy whisper, a genuine inquiry, or a vague accusation, the question is inevitable: “Are you a boy or a girl?”

I crouch down so the child and I can face each other. I smile and ask, “What do you think?” They see my collared shirt, my boots, my baseball hat, the sprawling tattoo on my forearm. They propose a clarifying question. My favorite came from Andres, a ten-year-old I taught poetry to in Fruitvale: “Do you skateboard?” I tell him I used to. “Boy,” he says confidently.

They always say “boy.”

“I’m a girl that’s more like a boy,” I tell them on some days, to make it easy. Nods all around. Of course.

I know that parents release kids into a world where they are charged with recognizing incomprehensible dangers. It is true that children can lack literacy around what might hurt them, so it seems that, often, a bit of shorthand develops. The older the child, the more pronounced the sentiment: unknown = dangerous.

Though there are protective qualities in this idea, the result is that an ignorance has been transmuted—often unwittingly—through yet another generation. To be afraid of what one doesn’t understand may simplify things, but it also makes the world a claustrophobic, violent place.

Like most children, I grew up with positive ideas about hybrid creatures. Centaurs were majestic, mermaids were beautiful, unicorns were innocent, a dragon played a starring role in my favorite folk song. During a class at the natural history museum in Pittsburgh, we were to draw objects from the Egyptian exhibit. I picked the friendly-looking Anubis. What could be more magical than the strangely familiar?

It seemed appropriate, years later and a week after surgery, to think of unicorns when I saw my new chest for the first time. Smooth and scarred, hairless and flat, nipples and pecs—I was a myth of my own making.

However, my exposed and tender flesh unnerved me a little, as I remembered the heartbreaking tapestry I once saw at the Cloisters in New York. Intricate and relentless, the rendering from the Middle Ages was of a brutal unicorn hunt. The unicorn, muscled and docile, stepped out of a creek and onto a bank, only to find himself surrounded by waiting spears.

Unlike a unicorn, my scars are not benevolent and clear. They are, instead, reminders of the blades that made them, of loss and ritual and a new kind of myth. That first day, they glowed bright red and bold on the white of my skin. I, too, am a hybrid, a volcano erupting naked, human parts from my core.

I am a product of massive integration. Every moment I absorb and add to the stacks of moments before it—I categorize when possible, I learn to tolerate what cannot be categorized. I study science with a poet’s heart.

My body grows older and my skin and bones are all new and my breasts are gone, which mostly means that my hand can cover my heart without interruption. I regenerate. My anatomy is mine alone. I am four, the day my father discovered me reading a book on the human body. I am fourteen and it is my first kiss with my first girlfriend in the pouring rain under a makeshift canopy of trashbags in the park behind her house. I am twenty-four and eighty-miles-an-hour to San Francisco in a beat-up Nissan. Time moved along and space collapsed into it.

The space between breaths is a tiny, suspended glimpse at death. The focus on the next breath, the next step, the other side, can cocoon so tightly around us we forget that there’s even a mystery that we’re being protected from: for each of us, at some point, the crest will not come. When we forget the space between, we forget the wonder of that.

Despite my affectionate childhood understanding of hybrids, both centaurs and mermaids are vilified, portrayed in their unclassifiable bodies as violent and primal or wild and lonely creatures. They are warnings, used traditionally to promote the importance of man’s separation from the baseless, animal world surrounding him. The truth is that these mythical creatures were also uniquely qualified to see, with clarity and understanding, the spectrum of life around them.

Unicorn hunters believe that force makes you powerful. Real power, however, is as invisible as love, mutable and omnipresent as rushing clouds. I am the unicorn, torn open at the chest, healed and scarred, at once; but I am also more than that. Listen: I am the mermaid calling sailors home, not to a watery grave but, instead, toward a clear and complete reflection of themselves.