Writing

Review of Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz

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.”

—

Sources

  1. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Collecting for the Kunstkammer.” http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kuns/hd_kuns.htm (accessed February 25, 2015).
  2. 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).
  3. Funston Antiques. “Wunderkammer: An Introduction and Preface.” http://www.funstonantiques.com/2009/05/09/wunderkammer-an-introduction-preface (accessed February 25, 2015).
  4. Tate Britain. “History of the Wunderkammern (Cabinet of Curiosities).” http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/mark-dion-tate-thames-dig/wunderkammen (accessed February 25, 2015).
  5. Neault, Michael. “The Museum as Memory Palace.” http://blog.art21.org/2012/08/30/the-museum-as-memory-palace/#.VO9Io_nF_uM (accessed February 25, 2015).
  6. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Mental Imagery > Ancient Imagery Mnemonics.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/ancient-imagery-mnemonics.html (accessed February 25, 2015).

—

“Review of Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz” first appeared in Prick of the Spindle.

The First Wound, a Found Essay in Verse

The First Wound

The first wound was in the right hand
…………………..and occurred at the patrol car as confirmed
by skin tissue found on the car.
…………………………………..It was the only close wound.

The Body

The body weight is 289 pounds and the body length is 77 inches.
The state of preservation is good in this unembalmed body.
Rigor mortis is well developed.

The body is heavier than ideal weight base upon height //.
Lividity is difficult to access due to natural skin pigmentation.
There is no peripheral edema present.

Personal hygiene is good.

No unusual odor is detected as the body is examined.
There is no abnormal skin pigmentation present.
There is no external lymphadenopathy present //

The pupil of the left eye is round, regular, equal and dilated.
The scleral and conjunctival surfaces of the left eye are unremarkable.
The right eye cannot be accessed due to an acute traumatic injury (gunshot wound).

Gunshot Wounds

There is a gunshot entrance wound of the vertex of the scalp.
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the central forehead.
There is a gunshot exit wound of the right jaw.

There is a gunshot entrance wound of the upper right chest.
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the lateral right chest.
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the upper ventral right arm.

There is a gunshot exit wound of the upper dorsal right arm.

There is a gunshot entrance wound of the dorsal right forearm.
There is a gunshot exit wound of the medial ventral right forearm.
There is a tangential // gunshot wound of the right bicep.

There is a tangential // gunshot wound near the ventral surface of the right thumb.
There is a gunshot related defect present near the right eyebrow //.
There is a gunshot related defect present near the right eyelid //.

The Heart

The surface of the heart is smooth,
………………………….glistening and transparent.

Tissue Fragment

Sections of the tissue fragment from
the “exterior surface of the police officer’s

motor vehicle” are consistent with a fragment
of skin overlying soft // tissue.

There are features of desiccation/drying
artifact present within the soft tissue.

There is a granular layer present
within the upper layer of stratified

squamous epithelium.
Focally, lightly pigmented keratinocytes

are present within the basal layer
of the stratified squamous epithelium.

The Hair

The hair is black.
This represents the apparent natural color.
The hair is worn short to medium length.
There is a goatee present on the face.
The body hair is of normal male distribution.

He Came Around

he came around
…………………..he came around
………………………………………with his arm extended
…………………………..fist made
……..and went like that
………………………….straight at my face with his …
………………………………………….a full swing with his left hand

Mace

I know how mace affects me so if I used that
in that close proximity I was gonna be disabled per se.
And I didn’t know if it was even gonna work on him
if I would be able to get a clear shot or anything else.

Um, then like I was thinking like picturing my belt
going around it. I don’t carry a taser so that option
was gone and even if I had one with a cartridge
on there, it probably wouldn’t have hit him anywhere.

He Said

He said, “You’re too much of a fuckin’ pussy
………………………..to shoot me” and grabbed my gun.

Then

Then I took my left arm and I pinned it against
my back seat and pushed the gun forward
like this
…………………..took my left hand, placed it against his
and my hand on the side of my firearm
and pushed forward both of my arms.

Somewhat Lined Up

When it got there I saw
that it was somewhat
lined up with his silhouette
and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.
Pulled it again,
nothing happened.

Um I believe his fingers
were over in between from
the hammer and the slide
preventing it from firing.

Blood

The first thing I remember seeing is glass flyin’
and blood all over my right hand on the back side
of my hand.

……………..Um, he looked like he was shocked
initially but, and he paused for a second and then
he came back into my vehicle and attempted
to hit me multiple times

………………………….He had, after I had shot
and the glass came up, he took like a half step back
and then realized he was okay still I’m assuming.
He came back towards my vehicle and ducked in
again his whole bod …

………………………….whole top half of his body
came in and tried to hit me again.

……………………………………..Um …

Again

I tried to fire again, just a click.
Nothing happened.

…………………….After the click,
I racked it and as I racked it,
it just came up and shot again.

Dust

I was still in this position blocking myself
and just shooting to where he was ’cause
he was still there.

……………………Um, when I turned and looked,
I realized I had missed I saw, a, like dust
in the background and he was running …

A Grunting Noise

When he stopped, he turned, looked at me,
made like a grunting noise and had the most
intense aggressive face I’ve ever seen on a person.

Still Charging

Still charging hands still in his waistband,
…………………..hadn’t slowed down. I fired another set of shots.

…………Same thing, still running at me hadn’t slowed down,
hands still in his waistband.

He Went Down

He went down his hand was still
………………………….under his, his right hand was still
……………under his body looked like it was still
……………………………….in his waistband. I never touched him.

Swabs

Swabs from Michael Brown’s t-shirt / Swabs from Michael Brown’s shorts / Swabs from the palm of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swabs from the back of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swabs from the palm of Michael Brown’s right hand / Swabs from the back of Michael Brown’s right hand / Swab from the fingernail scrapings/clippings of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swab from the fingernail scrapings/clippings of Michael Brown’s right hand / Piece of apparent tissue or hardened nasal mucus from the driver front exterior door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swab from the driver rear passenger exterior door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swab from roadway in front of 2943 Canfield / Swab from roadway in front of 2943 Canfield / Swabs from RBS on the upper left thigh of [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform pants / Swabs from top exterior left front door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from exterior left front door mirror of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from interior left front door handle of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s “SIG P229” / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform shirt—left side and collar / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform pants—left side / Buccal swab reference sample from [Police Officer] Wilson / Bloodstain card reference sample from Michael Brown

The Deceased Hands

The deceased hands
were bagged with paper bags
to save any trace evidence

—

The text above was taken directly from the documents pertaining to the grand jury investigation of Michael Brown’s shooting. Omitted words are indicated with a double slash (//). Omissions do not alter the context of the information provided. Read the grand jury documents here.

May everyone involved in this tragedy find healing. May we all find our way out of this, of this and so much more.

Giving Thanks

I am thankful that my entry and exit wounds are only emotional, not physical. I am thankful that I have no gunshot-related defects. I am thankful that I am not lying dead on an examination table while someone makes note of my BMI, my skin pigmentation, the color of my hair, the scleral and conjunctival surfaces of my left eye which—at the time of examination—is my only eye.

I am thankful that my flip flops were not found lying west of me in the roadway.

I am thankful that the examiner cannot open me up and look at my glistening, transparent heart. Thankful that I have not left tissue fragments on the exterior surface of a police officer’s motor vehicle, that there is no dessication or drying present within my soft tissue. Thankful that I have not been described as grunting, as aggressive, as having the most aggressive face ever seen on a person. That I have not been described as crazy. Just crazy.

I am thankful that the only weapon I am perceived to have is my voice. Thankful that my hands were not bagged to save any trace of evidence, that I did not lie in the road dead for more than four hours. That I have not been reduced to the swabs taken from my shirt, from my shorts, from my palms, from the backs of my hands, from my fingernails, from the roadway, from the thigh of the police officer’s pants, from the left side of his pants, from his collar, from the tissue I left on the police officer’s front door, from his back door, from his door mirror, and from the inside of his door handle.

I am thankful that I did not lose consciousness immediately from the head wound to my face, that I was not unprotected when I collapsed, that the boney prominences on the right side of my forehead and cheek were not abraded as the road stopped my fall. I am thankful that my flip flops were not found lying west of me in the roadway and that my red baseball cap was not found near the police officer’s vehicle.

I give thanks on this day. Thank you. Thank you. Amen.

The Poem and the Body, the Body and the Poem

I intended to write a piece on poetry yesterday, but instead I experienced a tear in my retina. Right eye. Noonish. I saw white lights like fireworks, followed by a hovering gray blob that obscured my vision. It was roughly the shape of an acorn cap or a winter hat with a fuzzy ball on top. An ophthalmologist at KU Medical Center saw me right away. He looked deep into my vitreous gel with a fancy headlamp that made him look like he was about to go spelunking and exclaimed, I see the acorn in your eye! I thought he was making a joke, but apparently he could see a bundle of proteins torn from my retinal lining floating in the gel.

Why does the poetic image communicate faster than other forms? A few years ago, I asked this very question on Facebook and then proceeded to answer it myself. How annoying of me. My answer was as follows:

Arthur Koestler has an interesting theory. He says poetry requires thinking on a third plane, a kind of “bisociation,” meaning perceiving a situation or an idea in two individually consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference. This bisociation disturbs our patterns of thinking/feeling and causes a crisis, which requires a third plane of thinking/feeling to arise, one that is antithetical to but that does not negate the strife of the two.

Since this moment of entry into the poem is a moment of crisis, I would argue that we respond to the crisis the way we are hard-wired to respond to all crises—as quickly as possible. Our entry into the poem is similar to pulling a hand away from a scalding object before realizing on a conscious level that the object is hot. It’s instinctual, a survival tactic. Perhaps bisociation in poetry works on this level as well—because of the crisis the poem presents, we move swiftly to a different mode of thinking/feeling that allows us to enter the poem without completely fracturing our identities, without obliterating our ways of seeing and moving through the world. Bisociation is a way of surviving the poem, of seeing the world as we experience it on a day-to-day level, then seeing the world of the poem itself, then seeing a plane on which to stand, one that straddles the two and gives the reader a place to exist, to breathe.

Perhaps this is why poems work on us so quickly, why the image communicates faster in poetry than in other forms of writing. Precisely because poems put us in crisis.

I removed that post from Facebook years ago, but I stashed it in my poetry files. I came across it today and appreciated it as one way to understand how poems work. I also appreciated my former self for leaving me this trace. It could prove useful when people ask me what poems are, how the mean, and under what conditions they operate.

If you look at a vertical sagittal section of the human eye, you are supposed to see something that resembles a camera. That’s not what I see. I see an angelfish without the fins. I’m sure this says something fundamental about me. The watery fish in the head. The brain home to an aquarium. The two specimens that cannot swim, that cannot escape, that do my bidding, that are forced to document the production.

In his poem “Trace,” Eric Pankey writes: To occupy space is to shape it. / Snow, slantwise, is not white / But a murk of winter-black basalt. / In the gullied, alluvial distances, / On the swallow-scored air, / Each erasure is a new trace.

Having a torn retina is not without its consequences. I feel like a mean girl punched me in the eye. Maybe at a bar. Maybe after I looked at her the wrong way. Maybe after she mistook the fireworks in my eyes for something I never intended.

If you look closely enough at a poem while wearing a headlamp, you can enter its recesses and observe the detail held within its vitreous gel. What drifts and where. What has lost viscosity with age and use. What holds fast. But when you occupy the poem, you change it. We change things by looking. There is no way around this.

When I told my husband about my retina, he asked if reading poetry might have caused the tear. I said poetry had no bearing on what happened. He seems to think poetry leads to disaster. I’ve tried to tell him for years now that we all lead ourselves to disaster, with or without poetry. Poems simply document the path from cradle to grave; from point of entry to point of no exit; from one dark, craggy landmark to another.

Origami

I grew up eating okra, which my mother breaded and fried. I never knew until I moved to Kansas City and bought a bag of frozen okra that it was hairy on the outside and slimy on the inside. I didn’t know the seeds were soft and moved within the mouth in an unsettling manner, avoiding the tongue and slipping down the throat. Okra and I parted ways after our tryst in the frozen food section of the Piggly Wiggly at 51st and Main, but I see it sometimes in gumbo and imagine what we might have become if we had stayed together all these years.

I feel like I’m in a car driving down a dark road, just two headlights between me and the black world.

I read a poem today that was so good I had to stop reading poems. It wasn’t about okra. It was about family. It was one of those poems that makes me cry and pace and ultimately climb the stairs to the main bedroom, at which point I consider the unmade bed and its implicit invitation to ride out the rest of my day there in the disturbing drift of silence and synthetic down.

Now I’m sitting at the computer wondering what comes after silence. I looked to the moon for an answer, but it seems to have vacated the sky. I don’t trust this level of darkness.

My husband will be home soon enough to invade my senses in the best or worst of ways. My tongue is already burning. My arms tingle. I don’t know if my body will accept or reject the presence of another human being in its vicinity.

There are not enough light bulbs to illuminate this room. I feel like I’m in a car driving down a night road, only two headlights between me and the black world. But I am not moving. I just keep staring at the same two monitors and, behind them, the same set of bookshelves—one shelf sports a thumb piano, the other a rusted monkey with articulated arms and legs.

Maybe I want poems to be pop-up books or choose-your-own-adventure verses. Maybe I want them to be origami. You would buy them flat, and the poem would be revealed as you folded the paper into the proper form.

I wonder if I could sauté okra in water and if I could learn to like it that way, if I could ever eat it without thinking of my mother. I wonder if my husband could lasso the sun and place it on my desk like a lamp. If not, maybe he could take me to the lighting section at IKEA. I could stand under all those fixtures and pretend to be Cinderella at the ball. Someday I will make my own light, like the stonefish or the false moray eel. I will be the bright thing in the shadows.

My CPU warms my feet. The heat makes me think something is curled up next to me, a small being in need of comfort.

Abandonment and Chaos

I lost my favorite corduroy pants. How does one lose pants? They are big, and it’s not like I keep an untidy home. It’s also not like I leave the house with pants on and return with no pants, except in dreams. I lost this very same pair of pants in a recent dream, in fact. Actually, they were stolen by a plasma physicist from The Big Bang Theory. I woke comforted by the thought that the pants were safely folded once and hung on the appropriate hanger in my closet, loosely filed between my capris and my denim.

People in the poetry world are pressuring me to use the terminal comma. I’ve started using it haphazardly and am now living between two worlds.

I have resorted to wearing leggings today. Brown velour leggings. Someone should break into my home and arrest me for this fashion infraction. It’s not like I have a lot of things here with which to cover my legs. If I lose the leggings, I’ll have to wrap myself in tin foil. Then I might as well just put myself in the oven and get it over with. I could feed a lot of hungry people.

I have a woven dress that I am wearing over the leggings. The blasted thing is pilling. I hate pills on fabric. They speak to abandonment and chaos in ways I find unsettling.

When I talk to people these days, I become giddy and inarticulate. Others’ sarcasm is a strong wind my mind braces for, and it’s taking a toll on my ability to focus, reason and communicate. This is a complaint about my mind, not others’ sarcasm. I once watched a movie about a father, his daughter, and their horse. They lived in Nebraska or some such ugly country. There was little dialogue in this film. Just the three characters and the fourth, unseen character, which was a strong wind. It was relentless. It made walking from the house to the barn like the walk of Sisyphus. I once read that wind can drive a person mad. I don’t doubt it.

Last night, I giggled for a while in bed then woke up hours later with my legs twitching wildly. I’d had a dream about sharing my home with an uncaged hamster. My days consisted of picking up turds. Here a turd there a turd, everywhere a turd, turd. My home had four stories, all connected with steep ramps instead of stairs. Going down was fun, it was all sliding and WHEEEEEEEEE. Going up, I had to wear cleats or else I would slide back down, again a Sisyphus type of situation. It didn’t help that I sometimes polished the ramps with Mop & Glo. I don’t know who I am in dreams, certainly not someone with common sense, but at least I keep a clean house.

I blame the twitching on all the junk food I ate. Now I am punishing my legs with brown corduroy tights. I hope it teaches them a lesson.

People in the poetry world are pressuring me to use the terminal comma. I’ve started using it haphazardly and am now living between two worlds: world in which readers are intelligent enough to recognize simple lists without the crutch of punctuation and world in which readers must have simple lists spelled out in no uncertain terms lest interpretational disaster ensue. I feel like a Flying Wallenda, perched like a bird on the wire between two high rises.

Forty-Four Signs of Immunotypical Privilege

Every day, as an immunotypical person —

  1. I can touch door handles and other surfaces in public without much concern.

  2. I can go out during flu season without worrying too much about contracting the flu.

  3. I can read about the recent resurgence in measles without feeling alarmed. After all, the measles vaccine is not contraindicated for me, and I know my body has mounted an immune response to the disease.

  4. If I get a slight cough, I don’t have to worry about it turning into bronchitis or pneumonia.

  5. My health status never goes from relatively normal to life-threatening in a matter of hours.

  6. When I take antibiotics, they work quickly and I only need one round.

  7. I haven’t been on antibiotics dozens or even hundreds of times over the course of my life.

  8. I have never been on prophylactic antibiotic therapy. I don’t even know what that is.

  9. I don’t have to routinely take medicines such as prednisone that weaken my bones and put me at greater risk for osteopenia and osteoporosis.

  10. I don’t have to wonder what comorbidity might be lurking just around the corner and if it will be a noninfectious condition, a malignancy, or an autoimmune disorder.

  11. I have never heard the phrase “immune dysregulation” and don’t have to concern myself with what that might mean.

  12. For me, boosting immunity means popping more vitamin C or Airborne. I have no idea what immunoglobulin is or why it’s essential to the human immune system.

  13. When I attempt to eat out, I don’t have to think too much about how long items are left on buffet tables or how well food is washed and prepped by food handlers.

  14. When I am out in public, I don’t have to worry when people cough into their hands or without covering their mouths at all.

  15. I can be sure that, when I go to classes, movies or restaurants, I will find a place to sit in which I am free from issues that exacerbate my breathing problems, such as perfumes, fragrances and cigarette smoke.

  16. I know I won’t have to pass on social activities because they would put my health at risk.

  17. I know family gatherings won’t pose a threat to my health, even if young children are present.

  18. If someone I love is in the hospital, I don’t have to think about when I can visit, how long I can stay, or other health considerations. I can fully focus on that person and his or her health needs.

  19. I can attend school, have a full-time job, raise a family, and engage in recreational activities without also having to manage the many conditions that would affect me if my immune system did not function properly.

  20. I can leave meetings, classes and conversations and not feel excluded, fearful, attacked, isolated, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, stereotyped, or feared because of my immune system.

  21. If I pick up a magazine or watch television, I will see images that represent me and my experience of my health.

  22. I never have to speak on behalf of all those who are immunotypical. My thoughts about my immune system can be my own with no need for political alliance relative to my immune function.

  23. My actual and potential contributions to society will not be challenged because of my immune system.

  24. I can go for months without thinking about or being spoken to about my immunotypicality.

  25. I am not identified by my immunotypicality.

  26. I won’t lose friends who can’t relate to what I am going through, who think I am exaggerating about my symptoms, or who just can’t deal with having a friend with my health status.

  27. I know I won’t be discriminated against by employers who neither understand my condition nor have the desire to provide a reasonable accommodation, despite the legal mandate that they do so.

  28. I do not have to be afraid that, when I talk with others about my health, they will suggest unsolicited supplements, dietary approaches or exercise programs.

  29. I will not be told by friends, family, and even uninformed members of the medical community that my condition is really just a psychological problem such as anxiety or depression.

  30. I know nobody looks at me and makes assumptions about why I appear to be ill (or well), or why I am too thin (or too heavy), or why I am not fit (or manage to stay fit despite my illness), or why I do (or do not) eat what I do (or do not) eat.

  31. I don’t have to explain why I have a lingering cough, why I might sometimes need to wear a mask in public, or why situations and settings that are safe for others may not be safe for me.

  32. Because I have never had to wear a mask in public, I have never been asked to leave a public place because the manager or owner of the establishment believes I am putting others at risk, when in fact the mask is to protect me from the pathogens others carry.

  33. I don’t have primary immunodeficiency, so I never encounter people who make the assumption that, despite the condition being genetic, I somehow brought it on myself through my diet or lifestyle.

  34. People aren’t embarrassed to be seen with me because of my health status.

  35. When I talk about my health, I can be certain that friends, family, co-workers and others will not become uncomfortable and change the subject.

  36. My partner doesn’t suffer from undue stress and hardship because he or she is my primary or only caretaker.

  37. Nobody tells me I should feel lucky to have primary immunodeficiency because it means I don’t have to work or accomplish anything during the day.

  38. My doctors have seen a lot of patients who are immunotypical. This means I am not put in the position of having to educate them about my immunotypicality, since they are already familiar with it.

  39. When I present in a health crisis at the emergency room, I am given prompt medical treatment, not told I am merely having a panic attack.

  40. Since I don’t have primary immunodeficiency, I am never called belligerent when an emergency room resident refuses to believe I have the condition and I am forced to insist that I do.

  41. I’ve never had the experience of being misdiagnosed over and over again throughout my life.

  42. I don’t have old misdiagnoses in my medical record that can’t be removed without a great deal of time and effort on my part.

  43. I don’t have to deal with the financial burden of expensive, ongoing medical care and therapy.

  44. I don’t have to face insurance companies that must review coverage for my life-saving therapy before that treatment is approved; that sometimes make patients go off their therapy for months in order for those patients to prove they still have the condition; and that sometimes deny therapy because they don’t feel the patient is ill enough to warrant it, despite documentation to the contrary in the patient’s file.

—

I live with common variable immunodeficiency and wrote this piece for Primary Immunodeficiency Awareness Month. It takes as its jumping off point Peggy McIntosh’s 1993 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”

The Quest

My husband plays a lot of video games. That’s not too surprising, since he used to be a video game programmer. One of his favorite types of games has a “quest” theme. In the quest game, the hero is on a mission to accomplish something epic. The entire game is built around the hero’s ability to complete his or her challenge.

But in a capitalistic society, it seems to me that there are many more ways to deal in living beings—ways that might not seem obvious until they are deconstructed.

I realized recently that I am on a quest in real life. My “epic” goal is twofold: 1. I want to heed my calling to help others; and 2. I want to integrate my ethics and values—and the faith from which both stem—into my professional life.

This isn’t as easy as it seems, at least not for me. Part of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path addresses “right livelihood.” Dealing in living beings is listed as one way in which people can harm others while earning a living. For this reason, dealing in living beings is to be avoided for those aspiring to live their lives according to the path.

I’ve been sitting with the idea of dealing in living beings as it relates to truly helping others. Raising animals for slaughter and engaging in slave trade and prostitution are examples of dealing in living beings that are called out in the Noble Eightfold Path. These are obvious examples. But in a capitalistic society, it seems to me that there are many more ways to deal in living beings—ways that might not seem obvious until they are deconstructed.

We are all being dealt like cards every day, in one way or another. When a healthcare management company focuses on making its partnering physicians and its own executives wealthy instead of focusing on optimizing healthcare and minimizing costs for its patients, is that not dealing in living beings? When university-administered nutrition education programming is both funded and governed by the USDA—a deeply conflicted organization whose partnership with the dairy and beef industries impedes its ability to promote an optimal diet—is that not dealing in living beings?

In the first scenario, the profits are not possible without moving people through the health system. In the second, the programs cannot operate without the recipients of the programming. In each case, who is benefiting? Who is being exploited and potentially left in a worse state than before the interaction with the system? Who is being traded for profit?

At its core, right livelihood means doing work that is ethical. Since I decided to leave the field of communications, I have been trying to find the right path, one that supports and furthers my ethics. Because I want to live a life of service that is guided by respect—for myself and others—I need to find work that is in alignment with those goals.

Gaia University puts it aptly when they discuss the relationship many of us have with our work:

Most of us think in terms of “getting a job” as the primary way to earn a living—which means, of course, that we’re accepting a livelihood that’s been created by someone else and will be working on projects that meet the goals of other people’s agendas, not necessarily our own.

This is not, however, the only way to work in the world, and it’s certainly not the most fulfilling approach. As Ruth Purtilo, et all, state in Health Professional and Patient Interaction: “ … a life guided by respect depends in part on the ability to identify and shape one’s own life according to personal values and those that help to build a stronger community.”

This is what I’m looking for. This is my quest. And, like my husband’s game characters who get knocked down repeatedly in their efforts to find what they need, I’ll continue to get knocked down—and get back up again—until I become the hero of my own life and rise to this challenge.

Writing: The Measure of a Breath

Two days ago, we learned that Hayden, our beloved chihuahua, has kidney damage. There are things we can do to help her retain enough kidney function to live out the rest of her life before her kidneys fail. This is very encouraging because it means we can do preventive care rather than simply engaging in palliative care. However, there is no guarantee our measures will work. Serious illnesses like this take their own course. Sometimes intervention can’t change that course.

Hayden has done so much for my husband and me since we adopted her just under two years ago. I tell people she saved my life. They think I’m being hyperbolic, but I’m not. We adopted Hayden in part because we knew dogs provide excellent therapy for people with depression, anxiety and other chronic health problems. Now that we have her, I never feel alone. By that I mean I never move into an emotional state in which I am completely inaccessible, one in which I don’t know how to reach out to anyone for support, even myself.

Hayden tethers me to this world—and to her heart, my husband’s heart and my own heart. Each day, she shows me how to be gentle, playful and kind. Because of her, I feel more open. I trust the world more and want to fight for it more passionately. In her eyes, I see the beauty of all living creatures, and I understand the need to protect the environment that supports us all.

I still have so much to learn from Hayden, but right now I need to turn my attention to supporting her to the best of my abilities. I need to remain in the moment so that I don’t impose my own suffering on her. I don’t want my knowledge of her illness to cloud our time together. I need to remember that if, at the end of the day, Hayden has had a good day, that’s all that matters. At the same time, I must think about the future so my husband and I can intervene now on Hayden’s behalf. I can’t just be in the moment or her future could be compromised.

I have a lot of learning and growing to do in order to meet this challenge and be the caretaker and companion Hayden needs me to be. I hope I can do for her a fraction of what she’s done for me. Right now, she’s taking a nap and looks perfectly content. It’s hard to believe there’s anything wrong with her. Earlier, she ran and barked in her sleep. I like to imagine what she might be dreaming about: perhaps a warm day in the park, chasing squirrels up trees; or maybe a scene from her life before we adopted her, a place she only returns to in her sleep.

A train moves through the city; its hollow notes ride the air. This is a dark day, a cold day. Rain pads the windows like fingertips. Even the birds seem to be complaining about the weather in curt and muffled tones.

I’m going to join Hayden now. I will lie by her side and breathe with her. Measured in breaths, even a short span of time feels nearly infinite. I will count every breath and remember that each is a miracle, one we all share.

The Chosen Life

I knew before moving to Eastern Washington that the land—by which I mean the soil, the air, the water, the flora and the fauna—as well as many of the people here, including native people, had suffered and were still suffering deeply.

The poems have to come from life, a life fully and deeply lived. Even then, they are still only clues.

I knew this side of the state had taken in or had foisted on it some of the worst industries imaginable, from personal and industrial waste to toxic waste.

I knew unthinkable things were being done to animals in one of the country’s largest meat processing plants, that its walls housed extreme suffering.

The river was being poisoned. I knew that. I knew the ground was contaminated by the radioactive slurry left behind and improperly stored at the Hanford Site and that the ground water was also contaminated.

I knew all this and I came here not in spite of these realities but because of them. I’d been living in the Seattle Bubble for too long, going about my daily business without issues such as these entering my consciousness, let alone being at the forefront of my consciousness. I led a relatively easy life, one in which I believed that if I earned a certain salary every year, if I had a certain type of living situation, if I had this or that material object, then I could extend my sense of happiness indefinitely.

But I always knew that was no life, and that the “happiness” I sought out, relied on and through which I defined myself was as flimsy as the plastic cover that stretches over a swimming pool in the winter months. It was easy to break through that “happiness” and fall into the depths, into frigid water that could kill.

I lived for something more. I craved something more. I wanted to connect in a deeper way with the world. I tried to bring that about—to create some kind of transformation—in my writing. I attempted to write myself and those I loved into spaces of myth and healing. Writing poems also altered my consciousness temporarily by giving me the feeling, the fleeting feeling, of transcendence.

The poems were only clues, though. I realize that now. They were clues and little addictions. You can’t live from the high of one poem to the next any more than you can say you are living on a higher plane because you chain smoke cigarettes all day. The poems have to come from life, a life fully and deeply lived. Even then, they are still only clues. Yet they might become enough of a trail to keep you headed in the right direction, which is toward a life in which you place your faith in something and then act from that position—in the interest of other, of community, of the infinite within and without.

Moving to Eastern Washington was the best decision my husband and I have made in our adults lives, other than finding our way to one another in 1995. Coming here set me on a path whose end I cannot see, but I do know it’s a long journey—a life’s journey and one worth taking. It is here that I have learned true love in all senses of the word, including a true love of place. Though this place is not my home, the land has welcomed me and taken me in. It has led me down its paths and back roads, so I could see its scars and wounds. I have seen those wounds up close, and I worry that they are fatal. I worry that the land I have come to know and cherish is dying, and that is a grief I cannot tolerate.

I have no choice but to act. I must act in any and every way possible on behalf of both the land and the people. I must commit my life to this. And the poems will never tell the whole story. They will only be clues to the life I have chosen, the one I am leading.