Illness, through its form and its incidences, can generate a methodology.
Here, the fragmentation of time by pain, the fragmentation of interrelations.
Writing in fragments, like those shreds that detach from a uterus
to come inhabit, devour, necrotize, transform the form of other organs,
to generate new forms of life.
These physiological fragments and writing experiences evolve.
Through various surgical and pharmaceutical treatments,
the physiological fragments are reabsorbed, transformed.
They become ghosts:
phantom pains on one side,
on the other, the writing of situations that have themselves become ghosts
and that construct an identity through
lived experiences, landscapes crossed, texts ingested.
I am a library of ailments.
Invisible ailments.
Realities are constructed in hollows,
in assemblages of language that designate intangible, invisible things.
This library that I carry—my ailments are its ghostly sum.
Paul B. Preciado calls this library
the somatheque, and says that:
The modern idea of the body as a set of organs, the biological object-body, is only one political fiction. And that today it is necessary to make room for the notion of the somatheque… The notion of somatheque surpasses and includes the anatomy-body in order to think a living political and cultural archive made of representations and languages and traversed by organic and inorganic flows.
C. sent me an email; she tells me that what we have
are carnivorous flowers devouring us from the inside.
Since then, I imagine my belly as a seabed,
inhabited by aquatic plants, a kind of hairy mollusks
made of large trunks that run from their mouths to their anus,
and that day and night inhale and exhale to absorb my vitality.
Endo-chrono-timing is my new world.
I swim and see my blood coagulate with coral masses.
I restore vitality to seabeds that have lost their colors,
or perhaps I have read Hervé Guibert too much.
The Paradise (1992)
It is
the story of Jayne, that idiot Jayne, who died
disemboweled on a coral barrier off Saline Island,
and in whose belly a coral flower grew.
Guibert’s narrator explains that if one gets even a very small wound from coral,
one must immediately disinfect the injury very carefully with alcohol,
otherwise coral finds in human flesh a tissue highly favorable
to cellular proliferation.
On the edge of the Mediterranean, facing Caprice,
to deliriously invent a new eco-system.
Everywhere I go, I see these carnivorous cells wandering.
In Paris, London, New York, Cairo, Rome, Athens, Lyon, Berlin.
Chocolate cysts are near me.
I wander, trying to understand:
How did they arrive?
Have they lived inside me for a long time?
It is often at night that questions arise,
perhaps in relation to what the doctor says:
Pain works at night.
Chantal Akerman and her mother
My Mother Laughs, 2013
I had to hide the book somewhere in the house.
Afraid that by reading it, the people I love would discover things—
things about how one burns oneself out.
For example, when she recounts:
When it doesn’t matter, then I can scream a little, even if deep down it doesn’t matter, and I am very proud of having been able to scream. But when it matters, then the anger stays inside me and exhausts me. It turns against me and exhausts me so much that I stay in bed sometimes for several days, wondering why I am so tired, so I take vitamins. I tell myself it must come from my anemia. Sometimes I even go to the doctor and he prescribes blood tests and nothing is right in my blood, but it’s as usual, yet the doctor still wants to give me some injections. I ask him whether I shouldn’t change my blood altogether. He says no. Sometimes he says he must think about it; one does not change blood like that, and besides, even if your blood were changed, yours would come back—and suddenly I am relieved. Deep down I wouldn’t like my blood to be changed. I don’t know why I am attached to my blood. It’s an obscure feeling, and I wouldn’t like to bring it into the light.
I too often wonder whether the ghost is in my blood.
Is the secret of history hidden there?
They said, Wait till you’re 50 then everything will be ok
Government reports recommend the use of the conditional tense
when drafting medical texts and legislative proposals.
Each of the words that surround us
would therefore define what inhabits us as a possibility.
A new vocabulary for the body.
Long words like chronic,
long because they imply the unfolding of illness over time,
or more precisely, throughout a lifetime.
Incendiary words like inflammatory,
to speak of a defensive reaction of the organism
to infection or tissue injury.
Gagging words like hormone-dependent.
In consulting rooms, interrogations follow one another
as if it were necessary to find those responsible for our anarchic bodies:
Sex consumed to excess?
Cosmetics with unpronounceable ingredients?
Alcohols too strong?
Food eaten at night?
The vagina of a mother who was told
she was incapable of sharing her mucosal microbiota?
Those who know pass over our bodies
with their penetrating instruments, their signaling devices.
The language that comes to me changes; we speak of the body I inhabit
as if it were a place where social order must be imposed,
as if this body were a site of war.
This new language that surrounds me—its words, its expressions—
rings in the ear like rigid forms:
invasive stage
colonization
surgical field
relapse
immune defenses
to fight
infiltrations
to win the battle
There are the words ending in -dys:
Dysfunctional bodies
Dyspareunia
Premenstrual dysphoric disorder
PMDD, which defines a form of depression
due to violent hormonal changes
Administrative acronyms:
MDPH
RQTH
ALD 31
Pain does not destroy language; it transforms it.
Outside, exposure to an authoritarian, rigid language, as if petrified,
used to speak of these warm, soft, shifting viscera.
Everywhere I go, I see these carnivorous cells wandering.
In Paris, London, New York, Cairo, Rome, Athens, Lyon, Berlin.
I wander to understand.
29.07.23 / Athens Airport / Hall 3 / Nail salon
diethyl phthalate, toluene, formaldehyde, xylene,
The stuccoed salon smells strongly of synthetic flowers,
neither magnolia nor lily, only their olfactory images.
It also smells of ammonia and certainly acetone.
In my hands, a book whose cover shows a woman
with her face wrapped in bandages.
In the text, the author undergoes an interrogation
that I ingest by proxy:
Describe your work environment at the time your illness declared itself: type of building, ventilation, toxic exposure, etc. Have you ever had to change residence or job for health reasons? Have you suffered a chemical injury or major chemical exposure? Do you wear dry-cleaned clothes? If so, how often and in which room are they stored? Do you use candles in your home? Do you regularly dye your hair permanently or go to a beauty salon? Have you ever had acrylic nails or been in a beauty salon where acrylic nails are done?
Endocrine disruptors penetrate through the pores of our skin,
melt into our hair follicles,
dissolve in keratin,
cling to the walls of our mucous membranes,
slide from our glossy lips to our stomachs,
are released into our blood,
our urine.
On the back of the nail polish bottle it says:
be bold and courageous be bling bling
My silver manicure—endocrine—wanders across my phone screen.
Clink
Incoming message
J. shares with me a text by Johanna Hedva
Sick Woman Theory (2020)
Once we are all sick and bedridden, sharing our stories of therapy and comfort, creating support groups, testifying to our histories of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, painful, costly, sensitive, and fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, then perhaps, finally, capitalism will suddenly reach its so necessary, too-late, and fucking glorious end.
A pronoun would need to be invented for bodies in transit,
those that slide from one atmosphere to another
and whose organs will have to adapt to a new ecosystem.
A pronoun that would contain the mystery of what was left behind
and what is yet to come.
An organic pronoun, like a kind of mud
that would accompany tenses and verbs.
I am fascinated to observe that my body generates its own time.
The different molecules I ingest make me a place of passage.
Bent with pain by pelvic lightning, I swallow pills of every color:
emerald anti-inflammatories
ruby anti-hemorrhagics
topaz painkillers
diamond antidepressants
sapphire anti-nausea drugs
Like a book falling apart,
she tries to bind herself together through pharmaceutical molecules,
gems that act as glue
to keep the girl in pieces standing.
