My Blog

a use to which fear is put

“At the blind boy’s asylum someone asked
Where do you keep the kid with the wings”

-Apollinaire (trans. D. Revell)

no one is authorized to speak for or in place of another—a basic un-graspability of that which is experienced outside one’s body, in fact in the body of another, renders this so, to the point that claims to the contrary register as violation of another’s not only physical but psychic integrity. at least if you get it “wrong.” and if one accepts bodily boundary as a kind of absolute, which also means accepting implicit limitations of the physical organs of the senses and mind consciousness—and thus what is possible to know. through science and love humans attempt to exceed these boundaries—but it is through violence that we most recognize their crossing and perhaps violence is implicit to the attempt itself, no matter the form of its articulation– thus lovers enter each other through their bodies, the same bodies that science dissects. and both forms of knowledge are necessarily incomplete.

Perception deceives—objects appearing solid are in fact in motion—the terrain of self and other are constituted as continually shifting fields—what appears as a singularity in a moment of time is more likely a constellation of singularities—we co-exist—thus I respond on a cellular level even to your thought of me. thus the air in California responds to the wings of a butterfly in Argentina.

So I met a witch last night who told me I once had a clubfoot in a Dickensonian time and I believed her. The clubfoot lingered that is migrated with me across the borders of life and death so that it is still with me, only invisible, though some of you may see it—its traces, a hip rotated inward, torquing of the knee joint, the downward pointing of the toes on that foot, a desire to walk on the wrong side of it, and a posture that goes with. Maybe you recoil a bit to imagine this or the shame of the one who made me, my deformity reflecting back to her the figure of her imperfection. thus we see and are seen and are marked by those visions. but my clubfoot is a secret weapon for once I know I have been bared from the ranks of beauty, I cannot fall in love with her image and so am granted another kind of sight.

This vision is not the same as Kristi Yamaguchi’s, whose long list of medals and honors do not cancel the corrective surgery, casts, and special shoes she wore to overcome the same condition, though her discipline and perseverance testify to what it is possible to make a body do. And certainly my sight differs from that of the young woman whom I met on the beach at Nha Trang, Viet Nam, who wore sandals on her hands and drug her body over the sand to sell post cards to tourists, both legs so deformed she could not walk. I have no aspirations to be a world-class figure skater but I walk and pass for normal. Shit, I am normal. You only know about my clubfoot because I’m telling you. And I didn’t know until the witch told me—though I used to play that I was a “cripple” as a child to gain pity from strangers.

What I’m saying is that the body is the thing we leave behind, only not entirely. I’m saying these bodies appear to divide us, and yet we cannot separate one from the other– The body that we see and a body that we don’t see. And I’m wondering what Kristi did with her club feet, now that I know their name. I think they serve her so far as she does not forget them. So I wrap my head in a scarf and tell you I am looking to make myself a body without organs and so the first thing that I retract are my eyes.