In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
— Carl Jung
This morning, my chihuahua threw up on me in bed. I was curled up in the fetal position, and she was behind me with her chest against my back. You could say she was the big spoon and I was the little spoon, as preposterous as that might sound, given that I am approximately eighteen times her size. But there it is: big spoon = chihuahua, little spoon = human.
Understandably, being woken in this manner led me to believe I might not be in for the best of days. As I took care of my dog, got myself cleaned up, and cobbled together all the linens that needed washing, I felt defeated before I’d even brushed my teeth. Then my centralized pain set in, along with intestinal distress because I dared to eat out yesterday afternoon. As if that weren’t enough, I felt like I was being strangled. Yesterday, my new thyroid surgeon examined the scar on my neck from the thyroidectomy that my old thyroid surgeon performed last fall. He needed to assess how much scar tissue was present. Turns out, there’s a significant amount of scarring, and manipulating the area has made it extremely tight and painful today.
I needed to get it together, and fast. My first session with a holistic therapist was scheduled for noon. This meeting was important to me. I didn’t want to arrive at the therapist’s office sweaty, whiffling, and redolent of dog vomit. I needed to be lucid, solid, maybe even likable. (The last one is always a longshot for me, but I hold out hope with every new interaction.)
I made it to the session with my pestilent body in tow. A sack of pain I was. The therapist put me at ease by pointing out her Carl Jung action figure and saying, Not everyone has one of those.
They don’t, I thought. But they damn well should.
She also had a stuffed Yoda on her desk. He was wearing spectacles. I should probably show her my bright orange, 3D-printed Yoda head at our next meeting. I don’t have any Jung tchotchke to share, but I do feel Jung at heart, so at least I have a pun lined up for next week’s session.
The therapist knew things were serious when she began charting my immediate family, and I was in tears by the time she asked me what my father’s name was. I would have totally lost it if she’d asked my mother’s name. (It was Merry, which is heartbreaking considering how much trauma she was born into and lived through. Given her life circumstances, my mother’s name was a cruel, impossible demand—a mirthful adjective that would never find its occasion. What were my grandparents hoping for, beyond hope, when they fitted her with that albatross?) In short, I wasn’t able to mask my physical or emotional pain, and that made me feel as vulnerable as a fledgling swallow leaving the nest for the first time.
The therapist asked how I was feeling. I told her I was a burning tumbleweed careening down a hill, setting the countryside on fire.
She seemed to understand.
I asked her if she thinks there’s more merit to the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress than other DSM diagnoses. She said she doesn’t give a hanging chad about diagnosis. She only cares about hearing and seeing the person in front of her.
You are not a diagnosis. You are a human being, she said. What I’m hearing and seeing is you.
I tried not to cry because I don’t want Therapy Dana to be someone who is weepy throughout an entire session. But I’m not sure I’m in charge of who Therapy Dana is or isn’t, let alone what she does and doesn’t do.
I chose the Jung quote above because it makes me think about the DSM and its litany of disorders. The DSM is a dead end that never leads back to order. How do you make your way out of that book once you’re in it? My therapist says you have to stop looking at the disorder and start looking at what will help you heal.
I don’t always know where to cast my gaze, but I’m looking.
If you cannot find it in your own body, where will you go in search of it?
— The Upanishads
My freeze response this morning was kind of like this, but without all the great scenery and gentle animals. A Fairy Tale, by Arthur Wardle, oil on canvas. Image used in accordance with U.S. public domain laws.
This morning, I felt like a length of fossilized wood, my body having turned to stone. I was lying in my bed, white sheets a blanket of fresh snow glinting near my mineral-laden bark. Every time I imagined getting up, my torso and limbs tightened. I was stuck. I wasn’t able to move for more than an hour.
This happens sometimes. It’s one of my responses to trauma. Most people have heard of fight and flight, two physiological reactions to threats and perceived threats. There are two other, related responses: freeze and fawn. Many people who’ve been traumatized have some combination of these four responses. I’ve experienced all four, but my primary responses are flight and freeze.
Of the two, I like flight more. Much more. At least with flight, I’m in motion. I feel like I’m getting away from a threatening situation, my body moving, machine-like, under its own direction. Freeze is worse because I have all the emotions associated with flight, yet I have to experience them wherever I happen to be when the freeze response starts. Inside, I might be saying, “Just move. You’ll feel better if do. Start with a muscle, any muscle.” Yet I can’t move. I can’t speak. I can’t even think properly because my limbic brain has sand bagged my neocortex, which can only watch on, enfeebled.
You wouldn’t have known what you were seeing if you had walked in on me this morning. You would have seen a woman in seeming repose staring at a ceiling fan, its faux-wood blades smearing with soothing regularity.
Aside from the discomfort of the freeze response, I hate freezing because it’s triggering. The first time I froze was when I was thirteen years old and my father’s best friend began molesting me. I also froze in 2009 when I was sexually assaulted. Powerlessness, shame and despair are associated with the freeze response. It’s no surprise that people who freeze when being molested, raped, and sexually assaulted have higher rates of post-traumatic stress than those who don’t. There’s more self-blame associated with freezing than with the other responses to trauma.
I had physical symptoms this morning, too. A migraine. A tinnitus flare-up. Burning mouth syndrome. These issues, along with my freeze response, were my body’s way of dealing with distress I experienced yesterday. Along with three other psychiatric survivors, I was invited to share my account of abuse within the mental health system with a local healthcare organization. As I listened to the other women’s stories, I felt like my heart was being fed into a meat grinder, stuffed into a casing, and sewn back inside my chest. Those are the strongest, bravest, most intelligent people I’ve had the pleasure of sitting alongside in a long time. The day took a toll not just because I shared my story, but because we shared our stories. Nobody should endure what we and so many others have endured. Nobody should have to live with the trauma that led us to seek care or the additional trauma that seeking care can lead to. Nobody should have to face the very real risk of being retraumatized every time we tell our stories in the hope that healthcare might improve, that others might understand us, and that we might be able to speak and write our way back to life.
Though I still feel crystalline, I am moving, albeit slowly. I’m writing slowly, too, with my fossilized mind.
Everything I need to know is in my body and always has been. The body is a great teacher, and I am trying to learn from what it is telling me rather than vilifying it. The more I can see why I am freezing, as opposed to resisting the response, the more I am able to see what my body wants me to pay attention to. Today, I am paying attention.
Throw roses into the abyss and say: “Here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The Roses of Heliogabalus, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1888), oil on canvas. Image used in accordance with U.S. public domain laws.
I am alive, despite having experienced trauma for years. You could say trauma is my monster, a hydra that’s reared various heads over five decades, from infancy into middle age. Sometimes all the heads appear at once, like a giant air balloon tied to another, identical balloon—and another and another—a train of memories and flashbacks as real as the window I’m looking through now at the world beyond. But there’s never glass between me and the trauma, not a single pane. I meet it with no shield and no weapons.
Nietzsche says we can’t live as the vanquished. We have to live as the victorious. To do this, we must show our thanks to the monster for not knowing how to devour us. We must throw roses into the abyss. For him, the monster is what lies within us. For me, the monster is both internal and external—and never exclusively one or the other. A thing happens. As a sentient being, I respond. Now the “thing” is within me, kneaded into my response, often long after it has raised its tail and returned to its bottomless lake. This works in reverse, too. As a sentient being, I can’t perceive anything that happens without being informed by my lived experience. The external is never simply external, and the internal is never simply internal. Within is without and without is always necessarily within.
Trauma starts outside us, but it twines its way through each of our two hundred six bones, ninety-thousand-mile nervous system, and more than six hundred forty skeletal, visceral and cardiac muscles. The sequelae of trauma are significant and can include disruptions to nearly every system in the body, behavioral and cognitive changes, high rates of retraumatization, changes in our core beliefs and values, difficulty with living a “normal” life, and much more.
So the monster is not just internal. It is also external. And the two are perpetually engaged in a simple but exquisite water dance. For me, throwing roses at the abyss performs three functions. First, it’s a way to honor the parts of me that have worked together to survive. Second, it’s a way to begin forgiving the monster that is trauma. And third, it’s a way to bring greater presence and beauty to my past, present and future—even if trauma continues to be there, hissing in the margins.
I am alive, and this site is where I throw roses into the abyss. Let them fill the chasm.
I spent part of the afternoon with a downy woodpecker.
I had a dream about two secret words. I held their names on my lips when I woke, but a waking word entered my mouth and I lost the secret words. They meant, During wars, the only ones left in this small town are the unemployed, and they sounded a little bit like okey-dokey.
There is a seam in the sky where a backgrounded opacity meets a foregrounded opacity. We have been painted in.
The female cardinal is neon in this light.
I caught my dream words this morning before they leapt from my tongue: I am hunting words through an increasingly gentle forest that opens onto a faceless marsh of mallow. Stop, please. Language, stop me. Stop until words make me hungry again. Then I’ll eat them like durian, treaded skins and all.
Every day I live with this illness is a day for me to take stock. That is how my illness is the gift I never fathomed it could be.
This season, I have a favorite chipmunk. I should love them all equally, but only one is my darling.
My words from three dreams ago swam back to me last night, the ones I lost on waking but that reminded me of okey-dokey. The words are “ini k’ani.” I looked them up, and both are Asomtavruli letters used to write in the Georgian language. Ini is the equivalent of an English short “i,” as in “hit.” K’ani is the equivalent of an English “k,” but glottalized. Who knows why I would dream these sounds at all, let alone on two different nights.
Musical instruments have humble bodies, yet their voices are bold.
When did the poetry community become a bare knuckle boxing ring?
Visions are what happens when the mind is ever so slightly batted away from its cultural trappings, when certain centers flash that are typically dull and systematically made duller by the very culture that produces and sustains it. But the visions are still steeped in the culture in which the mind lives. They are not free from it, though traces of free thought can be made out, like the echo of a long overgrown trail within dense forest. As a friend says, visions are “trances and traces.”
Tra(n)ces.
Living and dying are not two things. They are one thing. They sit side by side, as intimate as young lovers.
Moments after the samara wheels to earth, it stands upright, like a ballerina doing a revelé, poised to tunnel the soil with its gaunt root.
Death is kneeing life in the groin today.
Sentences make words feel like they have friends.
My darling chipmunk is staring into a puddle as if it were a reflecting pool.
Some people spend their whole lives polishing a lump of coal, convinced they’ve gotten hold of a diamond.
The whole point of living in Kansas is to be lost in the world and to lose the world.
There is definitely more to life than poetry acceptances. For instance, there’s poetry.
Sometimes there’s not much bridge left to burn. Better to let the elements deal with what remains.
When you continue to speak despite the fact that nobody is listening, you must be saying something that is either of no importance or of grave importance.
I am not the world’s ornamentation.
Maxine Kumin says Anne Sexton lived a year longer than she would have otherwise because a priest told her something that kept her going: God is in your typewriter.
The first bird of spring has emerged, but it does not sing. It screams.
I have work to do. I can’t be bothered by small fish who want to rub against my ankles to irritate me or to pleasure themselves.
The buds on the trees are a form of pointillism.
I think I’ll change my first name to an open parenthesis and my last name to a closed parenthesis. My middle name will be empty space.
My body is like a barn left to the field.
If I were an animal, I would crawl off to die on days when my body feels like this. Then I would start to feel better and come crawling toward you. I would be the one with detritus hitching a ride on my flanks. Everything wants to make its way back to the living, even rubble and scraps.
I filled Easter eggs with lines from my favorite poems and hid them at my alma mater with the help of a dear friend. I did this because poetry is action and poetry is love.
Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz Four Way Books, 2014 ISBN: 978-1-935536-47-5 Perfect bound, 72 pp., $15.95 Review by Dana Henry Martin (aka M Ross Henry)
The wonder chamber, or cabinet of curiosities, occupies a unique space in history. These rooms emerged in the sixteenth century and functioned as encyclopedic collections of objects belonging to three classes: “naturalia (products of nature), arteficialia (or artefacta, the products of man), and scientifica (the testaments of man’s ability to dominate nature, such as astrolabes, clocks, automatons, and scientific instruments).”1 Wonder chambers were regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and as a memory theater.2,3 Also known as wunderkammern, these rooms grew out of an age of unprecedented European discovery whose essence was only partially captured by returning ships full of objects from uncharted lands. Noblemen, scholars, and merchants were eager to add these objects to their personal wonder chambers so they could have a miniature representation of the world located within the walls of their own homes.3
The Tate describes Renaissance wunderkammern as:
… private spaces, created and formed around a deeply held belief that all things were linked to one another through either visible or invisible similarities. People believed that by detecting those visible and invisible signs and by recognizing the similarities between objects, they would be brought to an understanding of how the world functioned, and what humanity’s place in it was.4
It is this context that we must bring to a reading of Cynthia Cruz’s third collection, Wunderkammer. In this work, the poet continually defines and redefines the concept of a wonder chamber and, in doing so, suggests a new group of visible and invisible lines that connects all things to one another. People and places, health and illness, dream and reality, and time itself (past, present, and future) weave and unweave in the creation and subversion of order and meaning. In Wunderkammer, Cruz explores the dark side of wonder and the implications of believing that by cataloging the world we can at once understand and control it.
Throughout the collection, we encounter a series of wonder chambers (wunderkammern), side worlds (nebenwelts), self-portraits, and poems set in all manner of locations, including gardens, hospitals, hotels, passageways, and sanitariums. Taken together, these poems transmogrify the wonder chamber into a phenomenon both tethered to and unmoored from history, myth, geography, culture, and cultural artifacts. A bombed Berlin meets ancient Greece meets a Greyhound station bathroom. Hades meets Eden. Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood meets South America’s Orinoco River meets an unnamed airport city. Swarovski meets Warhol meets a boombox meets the Bathysphere.The products of nature, the products of man, and the testaments of man’s ability to dominate nature glimmer and whir inside the rooms Cruz constructs, each poem another cubby or display case spilling over with necrotic, narcotic-laced secrets.
The collection opens with the first of several poems titled “Nebenwelt.” In this piece, we find a speaker “drowned in a cream velvet / Mini gown, mind blown out like a city” who vanishes into a “… silvery paste of vapor on the ice.” The poem concludes with a sweeping gesture away from the speaker to the greater, fetid world:
A row of pretty blonde dummies in the Dutch death
Museum, death dressed in Chanel and Maharaja
Paste jewels, a vibrant green bacteria of sea and decay.
This side world sets up the collection as a whole, moving from the personal to the larger, and largely human, forces that shape and limit identity. The dummies in the museum speak to a cultural representation of women in life and after death, as well as referencing the historical role of wunderkammern as precursors to museums. In the last line, the sea is invoked—that body of water humans have crossed time and again on quests for discovery and domination, the same body Renaissance ships traversed in search of artifacts, relics, and natural objects with which to build miniature worlds.
“Wunderkammer,” the second poem in the collection, turns to ancient times—“A Greek crime mars the pastoral. / Charts and maps, an atlas of anesthesia- / Laced nostalgia.” The preoccupation with memory that wonder chambers embody seems to have grown out of their precursor, Italian scholar Giulio Camillo’s “theater of memory.” Its architecture was similar to an amphitheater, and its function was to allow its users to memorize all the world’s knowledge.5 Camillo’s work was informed by mnemonic techniques adopted by ancient Romans and Greeks in which visualization was used to organize and recall information. Cicero described this technique as the method of loci (also called the memory palace).5,6 By taking us back to ancient Greece at the beginning of Wunderkammer, Cruz both situates her collection within a larger historical context and also sets up one of the work’s main themes, which is memory—from its “incessant rush” early in the collection to its effacement near the collection’s close:
This is not meant to be a koan Or a fable.
I am telling you everything.
One day they’ll remove The memory out of me.
— “Hotel Feral”
Rather than facilitating memory, Cruz’s vision of the wonder chamber is one in which memory is haunting, failing, or entirely absent. The wunderkammeris not a means for sharpening memory. Instead, it has the capacity to preserve trauma, promote amnesia, and dissolve identity.
In “Self Portrait in Fox Furs, with Magic,” Cruz draws on the concept of the “memory palace” while subverting the idea that a microcosm of the world can be representative of the world at large. “In the city / Of palaces,” she writes, “I lived / Inside a doll house.” Other types of chambers appear in the collection. These include cages, jewelry boxes, mansions, palanquins, wards, a music box, and a locked motel room. These chambers fit together like a set of nesting dolls—some smaller, some larger, but all of them conscribed the way the wonder chamber itself is conscribed.
Throughout the collection, the wunderkammeris imposed as well as self-imposed. The imposition is evident in the poems “Junk Garden” and “Hotel Oblivion,” respectively: “I move my body / But I never leave this room” and “We are promiscuous / In our thinness, don’t leave the green mansion, / Are trapped inside the snow box, noiselessly / Splendoring.” But self-imposition is also articulated. In “Atlas of the Molecular Kingdom of Girl Orphans,” Cruz writes: “In the end, I made my way through the never-ending / Atlas of my own making.” The imposed and self-imposed seem to converge in the poem “Kingdom of Cluttering Sorrow,” in which Cruz writes: “I am frozen forever in this wonder / Room, this zoo of one million / Diamond machines.”
The closing poem, “Some Velvet Morning,” comes back to the marred pastoral introduced at the beginning of the collection. The poem is set in an undetermined point in the future, in a “Garden with its brilliant white / Hives of memory, its mausoleums / Of locked, oblong boxes jam- / Packed with history.” No longer just a chamber, a memory theater, or a museum, the wunderkammer has undergone a transition. It is now a mausoleum whose locked, oblong boxes are reminiscent of the neatly housed and organized specimens of the wonder chamber. Rather than reflecting the world of the living, the wunderkammer houses the world of the dead.
Wunderkammer starts in death and ends in death, but its central question seems to be whether we can come to know the self, to develop an identity, when the impulse to see the world through the lens of the wunderkammerhasprevailed, when an entire sea and its suffering has been compressed into “Spots of water on crystal.” Perhaps we can’t. In the collection’s third poem with the title “Nebenwelt,” Cruz writes: “Like you, I am / Incapable of interpreting my own body, / Its soulless and mollusk iterations.” Though the speaker is addressing a specific “you,” the lines feel as if they are being directed at the reader. With this utterance, we become more than visitors at the wunderkammer. We leave the chamber-turned-museum-turned-mausoleum to reckon with our own sense of terror, knowing that the wunderkammer has been handed down to us, too, and that it informs our perception of ourselves, each other, and all that is. What have we tucked away in our own memory theaters and what shadow puppetry is enacted on the scrim? In a world where even language is implicated, we are left wondering what part we have played in what Cruz describes as, “These words, this terrible song.”
Mendoza, Bernardo Uribe, Rodolfo Ramirez, Neslson Cruz, Manuel Guillermo Forero, and Patricia Cervantes. 2000. “A ‘Virtual Worlds’ Theatre of Memory (Scheme for a Contemporary Museum).” In Virtual Worlds, ed. Jean-Claude Heudin, 205–213. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-45016-5_19 (accessed February 25, 2015).
My knees were hung with tin triangular medals / to cure all forms of hysterical disease. — Carolyn Kizer
[1997. Kansas City. Figlio Italian Restaurant, Small group dinner for an iconic poet before her poetry reading. I am in attendance.]
The poet sits down at the table. She puts on her earrings. Clip-ons. She explains that they fall off. She removes them every time she goes outside so she won’t lose them. She tells her dinner companions that the earrings are expensive, not like the turquoise found in Mexico. These earrings are better, she says, because they are from Europe. The food comes. The poet complains that her companions aren’t eating enough. She insists everyone have some of her fish, cutting off a large piece for the person sitting to her left. She puts it on his plate. He eats it. She passes her squid around the table, too, for all to pick at. She orders a bottle of wine. She drinks several glasses and tells her companions about the time another iconic poet tried to rape her. She laughs as she tells the story. It’s the second time today she’s told it. The table orders more wine.
We are told that the birds with the faces of women are horribly foul and loathsome. They steal food and they smell. I am half partridge. You can tell by my graying legs and thick skin. I go by the name Stormswift. I go by the name Swiftwing. I have no name.
The internal structure of the bird is elegant. Crop. Proventriculus. Gizzard. Pancreas. Intestine. Ceca. Cloaca. Vent. These organs hang like baubles from a charm bracelet.
I used to think internal organs were ugly. Now I think they’re the most beautiful thing we never see.
When there is no movement, there is only a series of incidents that temporarily interrupts the system like electroconvulsive shocks to the brain. When there is a movement, someone else decides what it will be and won’t, who will be part of it and who won’t. The movement becomes a system whose structure mirrors that of the larger system it is attempting to reform or overthrow. The movement is the pill swallowed to counteract the effects of another pill.
What is individual consciousness when the oppressor is inside everyone else’s mind?
When I envision it, I see him handling my body as if it were a corpse. I am floating above, looking down on the ruin.
When encountered in society, Nietzsche says, intelligent women lose their intellectual amiability and throw a harsh light on themselves, their tactics, and their objective of a public victory. The same women “become female again” and “rediscover their intellectual charm” in a dialogue for two. Charm is a bauble easily broken from the chain. Charm is the cheap way into discourse, nothing more than a token from a strip mall jewelry store.
It was as if I had been cloned, but one of me was all body and the other was no body. The part of me that was body could not move my body. The part of me that was no body had no body with which to move.
My body is not ready to emerge. Where others see rain, I see snow. Where others see spring, I see winter. Let me sleep a moment longer in the arms of Hades, my keeper.
I long to be as clear as the urine of a well-hydrated man.
I am in the field. Do not talk to me about the neighboring highway.
When did I misplace myself, what year? Where is my garland of intestines? My skin sack? Who is using my brain as a doorstop?
If my life were a video game, then I would have just leveled up from the pajamas level to the nearly presentable leisurewear level.
Look up. Today’s clouds are the sky’s continents.
Dizziness. Exhaustion. Problems with word recall. General brain fog. This is what I get for leaving the house.
I love my body in the long shadows of evening light.
God and Satan both appeared in my dreams last night. God was being aloof, and Satan was pretending to be God.
God is a slight wind through a cracked door.
Mannose-binding lectin deficiency impairs the body’s ability to utilize the immunoglobulins it creates, as well as those imported through infusions. That’s because mannose-binding lectin is what both earmarks and breaks through the hard casing of bacterial, fungal, viral, and protozoan pathogens. You can bring in all the fighters you want, but if you can’t penetrate the source of the problem, those fighters will be reduced to witnesses. Or worse, they will wander, aimless, unaware that the pathogen is even present.
The bird flew through me and emerged as a clot of blood.
There are no shades of gray because gray is a tone, not a shade.
My medical conditions are not a death sentence. They’re a life sentence.
Today, I stooped to a new low. I used a Facebook sticker as a weapon. Do not follow me into that darkness.
Contrary to popular belief, Roman vomitoriums were not places designated for vomiting. They were a means for quick escape. Large crowds could pass through the amphitheater’s vomitorium and into open space.
There’s always something dead crowding something living, like the mouse lying motionless beside two owlets. Like the clapper rail beside the mouse. Like the squirrel beside the clapper rail.
The more I want to speak, the more my mouth burns.
“At least he didn’t rape me.” That is the kind of logic many survivors of rape and child sexual abuse employ when someone revictimizes them in ways that fall short of outright rape. “At least he only did x and not y” is our way of creating a sense of empowerment and protection in the moment and not allowing the person who has hurt us to strip us of who we are. We feel that as long as it could have been worse, we can still move forward. We can become whole again, or at least we can live with the hope of becoming whole.
I am committed to the fight, not to the spats.
A poet I’ve known for years said her abuse is buried so deep she can’t imagine touching it. I don’t want to live like that, with a splinter that’s made its way to my heart. My voice keeps the splinter from going deeper.
This is not the time for easy conversations.
Conversation is the only route to understanding and even then, who knows.
Before language, my body was a verb.
Maybe a poet friends us on Facebook because they want to market their latest collection, or because their friend’s friend friended us. We might not even be acquainted with anyone beyond that first-level friend, the rest being nothing more than piggy-backed apparent connections which spread out and out from that one person. In this case, a true network is not forming. Instead we are seeing a proliferation of non-networks—collections of strangers that have the appearance of connectivity. And those strangers now have unprecedented access to us. We are no longer invisible to them, either.
I have eighty-four friends on Facebook. I have known sixty-eight of them for years or even decades. Twenty-five of them are kindred spirits. Sixteen of them are among my closest friends. I have school and work ties to twelve of them. I have the same rare disease as six of them. I will love seven of them until the day I die, and I am unwavering in my commitment to them. I have connections with each of them that extend well beyond Facebook: We are bound by shared experience and shared purpose. I know who they are. I trust them. They are neither strangers nor strangers who appear to be friends.
Theorists such as Robin Dunbar posit that our brains don’t allow us to manage more than about one hundred fifty close or relatively close relationships. We just don’t have the ability, even with established and emerging technologies, to increase the mental and emotional requirements to closely follow, and to emotionally and intellectually engage with, more than one hundred to one hundred fifty other people.
Only I can see my list of friends on Facebook. Many people make that list public, but I won’t. I don’t want to give anyone using Facebook—even someone I don’t know at all—the ability to peruse my friends list, message or send friend requests to my friends based on their connection with me, or otherwise create the impression of being something other than they are, which is a stranger.
What happens when we have more than one hundred fifty close or relatively close relationships, even on social media? Robin Dunbar says we can neither closely follow nor emotionally and intellectually engage with our connections. I argue that something else—something more important—happens as well, which is that we give rise to virtual communities which are unsafe, ones in which the bloated network’s intrinsic dysregulation leads to infractions that take on many forms, including denigration, harassment, manipulation, coercion, assault, and even rape. All the while, those who commit the infractions walk among us, glad-handing the network’s other participants, both buttressed and seemingly protected by his or her connection with those members. The perpetrator’s continued acceptance by the network seems, in itself, like a vote of confidence in the perpetrator and also a motion of no confidence against the victim. Who wants to stand up against someone so many seem to stand with? For half a decade, I did not stand up. Even now, I am not standing. Though I am no longer crouching, I’ve only half-risen. If you can’t see me, look down: I’m the one on my knees.
Just as you’ve destroyed your life, here in this / small corner, so you’ve wasted it through all the world. — C. P. Cavafy
Just as your life has been destroyed, here in this / small corner, so it has been wasted through all the world. — M Ross Henry
I am at risk of becoming the apath, the element within a broken system that enables the system to continue by tacitly accepting and supporting the role and work of the sociopath. Though I was a victim several years ago, I alone am responsible for the ongoing, relentless process of compromising myself in order to carve out a role in the system. To continue on the same path would have required becoming the very element that is essential for feeding the system’s engine, as the sociopath cannot do his or her work without a throng of apaths to actively support and further that work (or to passively look away as that work is being done). I will not victimize others indirectly. I will not shave myself off in pieces, leave gaping silences out of fear, or turn a blind eye to the truth.
I want to be as spare as an empty table, to be white and plastic and to cast off light as if it’s nothing.
Antibodies are one component of the immune system that is designed to identify and destroy pathogens, but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, the pathogens are not recognized as a threat. Sometimes the self is seen as the threat and attacked instead of the pathogens. Sometimes the threat is known, identified, but the antibodies cannot work together or with other parts of the immune system in order to overcome that threat. These are the lessons my body as taught me, that the disease process within me mirrors the disease process in our external systems, the systems created and advanced by mankind.
I am the apath. Spend a day as the apath and you are the apath. Spend a moment as the apath and you are the apath. A decade. A lifetime. A year.
I’ve always seen the dust on surfaces.
In the literary community, the commitment should not be to safer and more inclusive spaces. It should be to safe and inclusive spaces.
Pardon me while I cough up this wandering womb.
A dry rice cake is stuck inside my dry throat. My body imitates the dry cask model of waste disposal.
Browsing the dictionary: closet, cloven, corset, cove, cover. Do you know how many words are a variation on cover? A fungus called covered smut enters through the seed and affects the plant systemically. Passed during copulation, covering disease leads to paralysis and death in horses. The outer garment worn to conceal untidy clothes is called a coverslut, which in itself is another form of cover known as a cover-up. Cover up, coverslut, before you are covered in smut. Will you ever recover from this covering disease? Will you waste away with ease, with ease?
I think the abuser becomes part of the abused more than the abused becomes part of the abuser. With the former, there is a form of chimerism in play. With the latter? I have no idea what is in play. I can’t enter the mind or body of the abuser, other than through my role as the abused.
He appears in paintings. Once, I saw him slumped over the red wool gathered under the arms of Saint John the Baptist. He was just another animal in the wilderness that rises from the dark and returns to the dark. His skin did not cast off light.
Music interspersed with static. A static that brambles the mind. I am tired of being on hold.
The music, the static, a form of reprogramming. A piano, faint, in the background. It’s easy to play only the white keys.
The music sounds like it’s coming through water. Like a dream of the Titanic.
Finally an answer, then a transfer to the wrong line. More music. More static.
The music is the song of the abuser, dancing underwater, his suit clinging to his body like kelp.
And coral is a dead dress that tears the skin.
This hold music. Please hold. Just hold. Hold on. Hold me.
Now the word hold is foreign. The music behind the static has shifted to something more hopeful. The music is walking onto the shore, shaking off its water.
Trying to make a phone call to the South is like trying to call another era. Where is the telegraph when I need it?
And when they finally answer, their speech is heavy and slow, as if they’ve been up all night drinking. How can such an outdated processor function in today’s age of quick thought and quicker response times?
I spread molasses on my tongue to match their speech, using my long-suppressed Oklahoma drawl to my advantage. I lace my sentences with phrases they might like. I say “bless your heart” and find myself meaning it.
The indoctrination is working. The static begins to sing.
I ask them to show me the water. They take me to the cove. They ask to be alone with me. The water is static.
I ask them to show me the field. They take me to thick brush.
Their thoughts open like magnolia blossoms.
We talk of Tennessee, its sibilance, the snakes suffocating its midsection.
Tennessee is a single closet where I hid from the man who was made of hands.
We do not talk of Carolina. Sweet Carolina. The South and I will get to that in time. First, I must remove the thorns and bring up the salt I have swallowed.
They ask if I was the first. The first what, I reply. The first to swallow the water, or the first to purge it?
They ask for the name of the person I’ve called to speak with, not knowing the name has already been uttered beneath static. It is in the cove, in the thick brush. I arrange burs into small groups. I label each group: the ones that pricked; the ones that drew blood; the ones that tangled my hair.
A dream of partridges flies through the moment. I tell them the name is Daedalus, master craftsman. I wait for Icarus to fall.
Avoid the cove. Avoid the thick brush. I am being as clear as I can be. I am speaking with partridges in my mouth.
A Greek crime mars the pastoral.
Now he has a name, but is it Daedalus or Icarus?
I am wearing the dress of dead coral. I have a funeral to attend.
I ply the needle until I am stitched into this garment. I am the fixed place, the fixed time, the in-and-out motion of metal. I am the point and the empty head. I will wear my brittle gown to the ball.
—
The line “A Greek crime mars the pastoral” is from Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz.
The last section is in response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation that “Women … speak like creatures who have for millennia sat at the loom, or plied the needle, or been childish with children.”
I have all these memories, but I don’t know if they are of the life I had or the life I wanted.
I’m so nice to people these days, they have trouble understanding why they don’t like me.
We feed words to the air, not to each other.
The dangerous poem is the one that maims, not the one that describes the maiming.
The people who tell you to forgive and forget? They’re the ones who stand to benefit from your doing so.
Too many people are writing about boring things.
No power without sociopathy.
Show me the figurative language in the office memo and I’ll show you the employee who’s shown the door for wasting that much time crafting an office memo.
The book of faces. The book of names. The book of facades. The book of shames. The book of fables. The book of famines. The book of sames. The book of lames. The book of dames. The book of games. The book of games. The book of games.
I am done saying too little. I’ve said too little for too long. I’ll probably say too much until I figure out how to not say too little without saying too much. (Even that sentence was too much about too little. Are you taking notes on my nothings?) Bear with me or don’t. (Don’t bare with me. I know that’s how it sounded, but it’s not what I wrote. I’m the one who feels naked and vulnerable in this status message, not you, so grin a bear it, even if barely.)
Don’t say I got this way on my own. I’ll give you the names of my makers. They’re all right here in this book of the face. This book of the farce. This scrolling book of names a Rolodex of shames. They are never far, never far, until they share space with grubs, like the first man who made me, not Adam but his descendant. He was bright as the sun. That’s why they called him Ray. Now I’ve named. Now I’ve named. Now I’ve named the first name.
Dana Henry Martin 