Empurpled and Detumescent Simultaneously

There is always that one line in novels when the main character is finally all tangled up in the weeds of the plot and the author will hit you with: “I could hear the blood rushing in my ears” or “my heart was beating out of my chest.” The lines are overdone, sure. But they get the point across. And I think once we’ve all actually felt those things we kind of realize how incredibly apt those cliché lines are for describing how it feels when your body is under extreme duress. I feel inclined to not use the word “we” there because I can hear my professor saying: “I just don’t see how there’s any way for you to know that.” As in like, I can’t possibly know that you all agree with that and that the generalization and assertion is going to make me look like a dumb fuck but fuck it. This is my blog and if you don’t know those feelings or don’t really agree with the fact that those clichés are apt, first of all, as Eden would say: that is your prerogative. The second option is that maybe you just have a really healthily regulated central nervous system and you don’t really experience the physical manifestations of anxiety in which case, maybe your experience disagrees and that is alright. But you know what, I’m leaving it! Either way welcome to my post! Out of all of that the only thing you really need to do is hold onto the idea of the blood.

At the end of the semester, I had 60 pages due pretty much all at once. With a week to go in the semester course work was all said and (decidedly, not literally) done, leaving me with around two weeks to meet my deadlines. There were three papers, and the deadlines were staggered a little bit, but they all fell within a week of each other. In school terms, that basically felt like it was all happening on the same day. Like my damn C-Section was scheduled and I was waiting for time to slice me open and force me to give birth to whatever was going to be born of my brain after trying, for 15 weeks, to do mental cross fit and train myself to write in an entirely new fashion. To be honest, right now I am so tired, and I really don’t think that this is going to be very well articulated. It may, loosely, borderline follow the “c” in coherent. As in the logic is going to be bendy but, my friends, it’s going to come out how it’s going to come out. I just have a lot that I’d like to say and in my brain it all connects, but I don’t think I can make the synapses fire right now that would make all the words come out exactly right or in the correct order.

One of my professors wrote back to me in response to one of the papers with a similar rendition of a criticism that she gave to me earlier in the semester: “The essay is still in a somewhat cryptic state: you sometimes have, for instance, the right words in the sentence but not playing the right grammatical roles.” She is very right. I don’t think that’s exactly what I was just talking about right here, but it has the same spirit. Writing is subjective. Grammar is subjective. (It’s really kind of not.) But to me – what if I’m doing a Virginia Woolf thing, or a Clarice Lispector moment where I abandon all functional grammar rules and I use commas and words how they are meant to be in the flowing state of my mind. Bendy, like I said. That’s kind of what I do, I think. The problem is that they were both novelists and I am not. It can work on here because this is me and this is mine and if you’re reading this you kind of, more-or-less, signed up to read my brain. But academic writing follows strict rules. Not the Lispector school of comma usage. But it's weird because I'm allowed to make stuff up, but it's kind of within these parameters where it's like... make it up but make it legible. Make it new and something no one else has ever said before, but don't make it optional like a novel. And I just feel like it should be legible if it's written how it feels in my body. But my pride gets in the way on that and I know that. And while I have pride I also feel like I don't have the authority to say absolutely anything about anything. What's that thing Fitzgerald said in The Crack-Up? "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." I don't bring that here to say that I think I maintain a first-rate intelligence, because I don't think that. But I did prove to myself this semester that I can function under competing ideas, often times more than two, and that's something that I humbly will say I am proud of myself for. This semester was not easy, but I survived. And I think the simultaneity of a healthy amount of pride and insecurity is another competing thing that I live with and am learning to navigate.

Anyway, I do really like and appreciate her criticism. (Currently experiencing a sharp pain from my endometriosis and my brain is telling me, “Throw in an ‘ow!’ to the post and maybe someone who reads it who knows you will dissect it like scholars have dissected Ulysses, how they have connected Stephen closing his eyes in “Proteus” to the eye problems Joyce had in real life, and so someone will make the connection on here that although the ‘ow!’ was out of place, since they know you have endo they’ll put two and two together and infer that that’s what that was.” Yeah, right. That’s like asking someone to put two and two together and come up with 1 million. That is literally what Joycean studies are in some respects. “The Arranger is fashioning the novel because of x,y,z…” like, BRO. How could you explain the Arranger to another person and not sound like an actual schizophrenic.) I digress… I do truly appreciate the criticism that she offered to me. I think she’s right; sometimes I am unintentionally cryptic, especially when my ideas are so far away from the page and I can’t figure out how to close the gap from here to there. There being where my brain is living and here being the keys that I am typing on right now. Someone who does this really well is Shaun Ross, a scholar I read who wrote on Donne's Eucharist. I’ll link his book here. But anyways. So, there I was… BBQ sauce on my… no. There I was… three weeks ago, my face, slack jawed and dead pan, staring at the impossible, three headed monster in front of me while my stomach made all kinds of weird noises signaling a rejection on behalf of my nervous system. The deadline stared back unforgivingly, tauntingly, absolutely malevolently and it followed me everywhere that I went.

I can tell you that these last four weeks (I keep changing the time scope. Let’s say November 30^th to December 17^th) have intimately acquainted me with that blood feeling. As if someone had taken those cliché words out of the 54 million novels that use them, personified them, and placed them right inside of my ribcage and between my ears. I felt them every time I sat down to write, every time I spent time reading for the papers, every time I took a brain break, every time I tried to go to sleep. I think I washed my hair more frequently in those three weeks than I have since I was 7 years old because washing my hair was the only time that I could kind of get the feeling to stop, but even then, I felt like I was wasting time in the shower. Washing my hair has always helped me when I’ve felt really bad. Nasty inside feelings have always led me to trying to scrub them off in the shower. But even tonight, December 23^rd, I got comments sent back to me on one of the essays and I immediately could hear and feel my heartbeat in my ears. I could hear my heart beating in my chest. What is that Raymond Carver quote? “I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark,” except it wasn’t as beautiful as that because it was just me, on this couch, hearing my own human noise from inside my body that became activated again by reading something that was even remotely associated with my paper. I just can’t physically bring myself to read them. Usually, I am pretty excited about the papers I write, and I read them a few times especially after receiving a grade and feedback, but I literally cannot bring myself to even look at these papers. I am excited about them... well 2 of the 3, but they make me feel ill a little bit. When I was taking my written exam (which also fell into the two week deadline but was separate from the 60 pages) I threw up in the middle of taking it. My brain, since being home, has felt detumescent and it feels so tired in ways that I have never experienced before.

In line with the blood, I think I want to post a poem that I wrote just over a year ago. I was sitting in the Global and International Studies building at IU when I wrote it. I had the idea during French class, and I didn’t want to walk home and forget it, so I just stayed there and wrote. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, that building and that specific bench thing that I’d always sit on helped me purge a lot of the grief and nastiness that lingered in and all around me last year. The showers only did so much and unfortunately I was drowning in it so badly that in French class it was all I could think about anyway; another time in my life when all I could hear was my own human noise and the blood that was rushing in my ears. Anyway, here is the poem that is a little bit about my blood, but a lot about my body.

“What purpose is this anger serving you?” she asks. My ribs feel like they’re cracking.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, “And I don’t know what to do with it.” I wish I had something better to tell her, something better to tell myself. Instead, I rest my throbbing head against the wall at that angle that I’ve realized makes my neck look broken.

I tell her there are three parts to it.

Le Sel que J'ai Volontairement Ingéré – “The Salt I Willingly Ingested”

I feel like I have been flayed alive and salted like raw meat. I’ve been left alone in the sun to bake and cure wrapped in that stupid, ugly, discolored white sheet. My skin is shriveled up, my face is gone. What used to be soft and pink has hardened and turned into the deepest shade of red that harbors no moisture or life. My heart has stopped beating, and my eyes and my tongue taste bitter. I am angry because I ate the salt. I wrote about the salt. In the morning, I used to lick the salt and it would make me happy. Now the salt is curing me, it’s killing me, it’s slowly drying the life out of me.

La Chambre de Durcissement – “The Curing Chamber”

If he really could see what he’s done to me. If he could come into my body for one day, step into the curing chamber, and feel the dead weight of all of the love that I drag around with me, unable and unwilling to discard it yet. The weight of the lies and the deceit and the disrespect and the choices that say “I don’t care if you live or die.” If he could feel the density of the half of my body that’s rendered a corpse. If he could feel it, if he could taste it, he would die, too. It would kill him. The salt would draw out every bit of love and moisture and softness left in his body and he, too, would die alone, dehydrated, and burning in the sun.

La Chair Cuite – “The Cooked Flesh”

I am what this has made me. Before it all he had me as I was, as the person that I hope to be again someday. Soft and unwavering, loving, kind, and warm. It is unfair to punish someone for an inability to remain as those things when he has sawed through my neck and disemboweled me by his own hand. He felt my teeth, so hungry and desperate around his arm, and he swung hard and knocked them out leaving my mouth jagged and dripping and bloody. It cut his fist, no doubt. I’m sure he can feel that. Did it feel odd to hear my blood running onto the floor? Was it off putting to see the sharp, jagged edges he has created in my mouth? Did it scare him? Did it make him want to run away? He did run away, so it must have. The dripping sounded like screaming and it felt like “fuck you”. It felt like the desire to claw his face off of the bone. If I don’t look like myself anymore, neither should he.

I am in a much, much different place now. And I am thankful that the blood that I am so well acquainted with now is the kind that rushes in my ears when I am nervous about school rather than the type of blood that I felt like was being constricted out of the gash in my femoral artery last December. I am so excited not to be that person. Someone asked me today about Frankenstein, about why when I read it last December it sent me into a deep (I told them deep, but what I really meant was deeper) depression. And I can tell you right now why it did with a quote from Victor Frankenstein: “Thus not the tenderness of friendship, nor the beauty of earth, nor of heaven, could redeem my soul from woe: the very accents of love were ineffectual. I was encompassed by a cloud which no benefical influence could penetrate. The wounded deer dragging its fainting limbs to some untrodden brake, there to gaze upon the arrow which had pierced it, and to die - was but a type of me.” I read that last December, probably before I wrote that thing up there if my memory serves me, and I had to close my book. I read that in the dining hall at the IMU and I think that if anyone at IU paid even a lick more attention than what they did when I was there, they would have wondered why I looked like I had been shot and was bleeding out on the table with my food from the Whitfield. Shelley's blood flowed from the arrow, mine flowed from betrayal, but it was blood nonetheless. The blood, the blood, the blood.

I’m not bleeding like that anymore, thank you God, and my life has changed so much in such a short time. I plan on writing more over my break about the semester – maybe a little bit less exasperated and a little more coherent – about what I specifically loved so much from this semester. I will share some of the things that I learned that I have been able to add to the list of literary insights that have and continue to shape my life. I hope someday for my students the things that we read together will inform and shape their lives too, things they want, things they are, things they will be. I was not Raymond Carver’s “human noise” tonight, but I was when I sat in Ulysses class every week and passionately talked with my peers about our readings. I was not “the wounded deer” tonight, but I was one year ago, and I carry that around with me in my heart. And I will leave you with this: I think I am and will always be on Featherbed Mountain in some sense.

God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun. A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man. Old Father Ocean. Prix de Paris: beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely. Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there? Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect, Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum. No. My cockle hat and staff and hismy sandal shoon. Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself. He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make their end.

                        James Joyce, Ulysses