Reuven Tsur

Take a Message

So I’m ill again. The usual with a side of falling to the floor hard this evening when my lower extremities tightened and everything from my toes all the way to the middle of my thighs contorted until I looked like something with gnarled roots—maybe Donne’s mandrake—that had been unearthed and hosed off before being tossed to the ground until it could be transplanted elsewhere or fed to the wood chipper or cut into little slices as part of a fiber-filled culinary adventure.

I mean, I know I’m not fibrous. I’m meat and bone. But I’m doing an extended tree metaphor thing here, so just let me be fibrous for the purposes of this essay.

My floor routine went on for several excruciating minutes and I couldn’t get my legs under me and I couldn’t pull my legs and feet and toes back into their proper shapes and relationships with each other and I couldn’t massage the tension away and the pain was like someone had exposed me to a nerve toxin and I couldn’t reach my phone to call my husband for help and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because he’d misplaced his phone and so I had to scream as loud as I could and don’t worry the neighbors never come when I do that and my husband burst into the room and found me splayed and broken like a cow that’s about to be scooped up from the fecal mud and dropped onto a truck headed for the rendering plant because she’s too sick to walk herself to her own death like all respectable—all good—girls should, even ones with spongiform encephalopathy.

I’m just working the cow metaphor with that encephalopathy reference. Don’t worry, I don’t have mad cow disease. My diseases have other names, and so far at least one has eluded naming. That disease is all experience, the way Hellen Keller’s whole world was before water ran over her fingers and forever changed the way her body and mind met the world.

Reuven Tsur talks about Keller in his theory of cognitive poetics. I’m not making baseless statements about her just to illustrate my point, so please don’t get all, You’re being ableist and using Hellen Keller to do your dirty ableist work, Karen. The name’s Dana, and I’m trying to tell you how bodies break and how we live in them anyway. I’m trying to tell you I took a little spill. I’m trying to put that spill in a larger context that some of you may find important. Bear with me. Bear down. Grin and bear it. I’m trying.

My husband panicked the way he does when he has to confront the fact that I’m seriously ill. He got me up off the floor, then went into a fugue state in which he forgot about everything other than his lost phone. He flitted around in flight mode looking for the phone because it’s easier to be upset about the phone than it is to live through more than two years of thinking your wife could die, on top of fifteen years of intermittently thinking your wife could die, let alone this very moment when you’re seeing more evidence of your wife’s potential death on the horizon or at least more data that suggests whatever’s going on with her isn’t going to go away any time soon, if ever. And what do you do with that as a spouse? How do you live with a splintered wife for the rest of your life?

I almost said upper thighs in the first paragraph of this essay, but we don’t have tiered thighs. We just have the one main set, one main set of thighs. It’s the way I also think I have two noses, when I just have the one nose with two nostrils and the way I always think I have two butts because I have two butt cheeks.

The body is confusing. Taking inventory isn’t as straightforward as it seems. At one point in American history, a window was considered a single pane within a larger window. So a window with six panes counted as six windows. Why? Taxes. Taxes were assessed per pane, so each pane became a window. At least I think that’s true. My rhetoric professor, Dan Mahala, told our class that in college. This was in the ’90s, when institutions still taught actual history—or at least tried to—not the ticky-tacky history being peddled today.

If U.S. politics applied to bodies—which of course it does, mainly those of women and trans and nonbinary folks, but bear with me again for the purposes of this essay—we might very well have been taught that we have two noses and two butts, especially if that meant we could be charged more for lugging all that flashy and fleshy gear around. Two butts! Two noses! How indulgent of you. One of each is subject to the luxury tax! You clearly have spares that are purely ornamental. (Don’t tell the tax collectors about the set of kidneys dangling in our trunks or the lungs or whatever else is doubled up in there like sets of animals shuffled onto a dingy for safekeeping during what looked to be the makings of a pretty big storm.)

All that contrived body taxation would be a real pane, wouldn’t it? I mean pain. And trust me, the body is definitely a pain.

But I digress. Who turns to stone? I’m asking because that’s what my body felt like today. Sisyphus, maybe. You could argue that pushing stones turns him into the very thing he’s pushing: Something that moves but that isn’t quite alive; someone whose stony but who isn’t quite mineral.

Demosthenes filled his mouth with stones to learn how to speak clearly. But that’s not the same thing as turning to stone.

Oh, I know, I know! It’s those who gaze into Medusa’s eyes!

Whose stare must I have returned to be cursed this evening? It must have been someone in my dreams. I’d just woken from a nap when the compacting began, soles first, a crushing invisible force making me denser and denser. I felt the hardening creep upward. The stiffening. The molecular tightening. I couldn’t do anything about it. It was like watching a virus spread through a computer taking out file after file after beloved file and replacing them with junk code.

I realize I can’t make the stone metaphor work alongside my earlier tree metaphor. Adding the computer-virus reference is making things even worse. Let’s just acknowledge all of that and move on. I don’t have time to put the right slant on this truth. (My apologies to Emily Dickinson.) I’m sliding downhill, and everything I write is sliding with me. Besides, wood can turn to stone. I know. I’ve seen it. I have a chunk of opalized palmwood right here that makes my case for me.

That rock is science. It’s fact. And like science and fact, opalized palmwood is beautiful when you place it on a black light in a dark room. It looks like magic and could be passed off as such if your audience doesn’t know any better. A divining rock. A soothsayer’s stone. Not the soft, boring sandstone my body is becoming, the kind of stone miners here tossed to the side when looking for the good stuff like silver and uranium.

But guess what? I tricked you, and you didn’t know any better. Petrified wood isn’t stone. My science wasn’t science, and my facts weren’t facts. Here’s the truth. You ready: Though the phrase petrified wood or petrified tree comes from Ancient Greek πέτρα meaning “rock” or “stone,” literally “wood turned into stone,” petrification doesn’t change organic wood into stone. It merely preserves the wood’s shape and structural elements.

Sometimes language gets things wrong. Sometimes, even the Ancient Greeks got things wrong. Is it so hard to believe that sometimes we get things wrong? That we get things wrong most of the time, actually?

Maybe I’m not turning to stone. Maybe parts of me are just undergoing a change, being preserved. My shape. My structural elements.

My husband found his phone. It was in the garage. He went out there frantically looking for it like a prospector trying to lay claim to a seam of silver in a sandstone reef in a town called Silver City in the 1870s. He cast aside all the piled-up crap garages tend to take on as his world was reduced to two things: phone and not phone.

When he found his phone, the world made sense again. I was in a chair by that time live-tweeting the unfolding disaster. My upper body still worked, which meant I could be a writer and write things down. So I wrote things down just like Richard Siken says we should. What else would you have me do? Come unglued?

This is marriage. This, too, is marriage. Sometimes it’s broken. Sometimes there’s no diagnosing what’s wrong with it. Sometimes it’s all experience and no name and no remedy. Or maybe no remedy is needed because legs are not roots and flesh is not stone and a phone isn’t something jacked out of the Earth for profit or for prophets.

Sometimes a phone is just a phone, and we can use it to hear the voice of the person we love more than anyone else on the planet. Sometimes we can take that call. Sometimes we can’t no matter how much we want to. We just let it ring through to voicemail and hope the love of our life leaves us a message that we can receive when we’re ready.



On Hélène Cixous

The first and most important things that strike me about Hélène Cixous’ theory, and her life, are that both are positioned at a time when the very nature of writing and speech, and the relationship between the two, were being fundamentally questioned by some of the foremost scholars of her/our time. Cixous’ work is directly related to philosophers such as Derrida, who argued that neither speech nor writing can lead us to any fundamental truths, since both are caught between the signifier, the word, and the signified, the meaning.

It goes without saying that dichotomies are one way to achieve the rapid categorization our culture pushes on us like dime bags full of skank weed.

What Cixous was working, writing and theorizing against, then, was a concept as old as the Western world—what Derrida framed as logocentrism, which relied on dichotomies such as mind and matter, light and darkness, presence and absence, and nature and culture. This opposition resonates with me in terms of my own writing, in which—in line with many feminist writers and theoreticians—I hope to overtly and covertly challenge binary oppositions, including self and other, male and female, sentient and nonsentient, dominant and submissive.

Cixous, however, manages to sidestep one of the pitfalls many feminists (and other champions of a non-oppositional way of thinking about relationships between human beings and among and within elements throughout the world) inadvertently stumble into, which is to favor or articulate only one “side” of the story: that of the oppressed or shunned group. Instead, she “ … did not simply privilege the ‘female’ half of an existing binary opposition between ‘male’ and ‘female’ … she questioned the very adequacy of an either/or logics to name the complexity of cultural realities .”*

The result, of course, is that some have in turn questioned or shunned Cixous’ ideas. Those who frame the world in terms of binary oppositions might find it confusing or frustrating to interpret or confront thoughts, speech, writing and theories that don’t conform to such dichotomies. In contrast, I argue that Cixous’ approach could serve as a model for all poets. (It’s absolutely a model for my own poetry.)

For what is poetry if not a lifting of the veil of culture, even if only for a few moments—an opportunity to delay categorization, as cognitive theorist Reuven Tsur would argue, in a world that is increasingly (at least in the West) prodding us to rapidly categorize our surroundings, experiences and interactions? As if the experience of the experience weren’t enough—the one we are currently engaged with at any given time—we are seduced into gazing out as if along a rural Kansan horizon at the next experience, and the next, and the next: All of them lined up before us like diary cows waiting to have their teats automatically milked, those heavy udders of potential experiences ready to burst if we don’t tend to them immediately.

It goes without saying that dichotomies are one way to achieve the rapid categorization our culture pushes on us like dime bags full of skank weed. When we can see the world as this or that, that or this—or being the operative word in each case—we don’t have to use much cognitive (and hence emotional) space to relate to that world, its objects or its inhabitants at any given moment. This frees up even more time to rapidly categorize new experiences and move on to the next (and the next), as if living as a sentient being were simply a matter of peeling out at 60 miles per hour from one drive-through window to another.

Furthermore, overturning dichotomies momentarily only to shift the power (in theory more so than in reality) from one group to another or to reassign blame from the latter, shunned group to the former, desirable one—that adhesive rat trap so many well-meaning theorists and activists fall into—is merely a matter of executing awkward acrobatics on a stage, as opposed to pulling down the props, dismantling the stage, removing the exhausted, underpaid aerialists and then taking a seat in the audience to see what’s left occupying the now-empty space.

Creating empty space in place of dualities and other cultural and cognitive assumptions—space the mind can inhabit and move through unhindered and uninhibited—is the job of any good theorist, any good thinker/feeler.

And hence it’s the job of any good poet, or at least any good poem, or at least any poem I personally would actively take the time to seek out and read and sit with and return to. For if poetry won’t help us resist fast, easy categorization of this tremendously complicated world we live in and instead encourage us to slow down, remove our blinders, snap out of our cultural trances and realize all that we can never realize, it’s hard to say what, if anything, will do the trick.

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* From The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by William E. Cain, et al.