How To Write When The World Has A Broken Back
Now here I am at a loss. If not for words, for an approach to words. An approach that has some kind of significance. Forgive my hyperbole – think of it as the inevitable emotional response to the trajectory of something ballistic. I had been planning a life-writing project focused on ideas around the failing body; scoliosis, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, bone spurs, compression, decay and herniation of the L4 and L5 disc, interleaving textual references from various literary, medical and historical sources with life scenes of gardening and other mundane tasks, and the physical effects and social consequences of this tectonic deformation of the body, of the spine, of this chain of bone, of this tree of life.
How it could parallel both the collapse of social presence, social identity, and environmental collapse; perhaps an elaborate metaphor drawing a connection between humanness as experienced at a personal level and the dehumanisation we experience when the no longer productive body becomes subject to the dictates and principles of inhuman systems and regimes. Where not only, as Foucault suggests, the body becomes surveilled and controlled by the state, but the body becomes subject and unsubject; objectified as less than human.
While Foucault’s dehumanised subject is rendered as less than in medical, carceral and military regimes of production, I am left asking even in the politically and theoretically charged parallel, how can I write life, drawing connections between my complacent bourgeois discomforts, my ease and dis-ease, my relatively insignificant issues, when our governments and institutions are complicit in Israel’s brute genociding of Palestinian men, women and children?
If we are one humanity, one blood, one bone, one ashes, one dust – one earth of many soils – how can I write myself, my body, when our governments, our corporations, our universities our institutions are complicit in relentlessly tearing other bodies apart on this too small world?
As the German dissident pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis said,
Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.
I have seen those held wise claim that by acknowledging their privilege, they abrogate all other responsibility. As if this is ever enough.
To write the self in such circumstances is an act of silence.
An act of complicity.
An act of inhumanity.
An act of death.
So we reach an inevitable conclusion;
This is not life-writing
it is death-writing.
The Blasted Tree
There is an old tale goes that Herne the Hunter
Sometime a keeper here …
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns;
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 4, Scene 4.
Gardening: One
The sun is mild today, the sky hallucinatory blue. Still, there is sweat beading where the brim of a cheap straw hat meets my brow, prickling on the warmed khaki cotton of an old Levi’s shirt on my back. There is a dull, constant ache lower down, like the memory of someone kneeling. A white electric signal when I turn a little, readjust, and I think of the plasma like flame rising between parallel conductors amongst the Rorschach prosthetics of an old Frankenstein movie.
Doctors think pain is a scale, a number.
How much does it hurt? they ask. Give me a figure between one and ten.
Pain is a colour –at this moment a faint pink blush. I push the tip of the heart-shaped spade into soil hard despite last night’s smattering rain. In the wound it is the colour of shit and bone, concrete dust and motor oil, fragments of asbestos still bright as abraded coins. The rose stump with its medusa hair of bare, bone dry tendrils and collapsed in face, frowning in the dismay of its imminent departure.
Muerte, it says to me, quietly. Muerte.
Earth/Story
This house was once a cottage. Roses in manicured rows, or clambering over arched trellises. Now, below dark, black spotted leaves and heavy headed blooms and knotted strands of thorns the underlying lattices gone to rust. Cracked, rendered walls the colour of river sand below peaks of lichened terracotta. Wurruk, this place is called. Once, Wurruk Wurruk in the language of the Gunaikurnai – a word that means both earth and story. Once a forested ridge beside a deep cut river, now a satellite suburb on the margins of a midsized country town. It was and still remains an industrial centre; old wrecking yards and the cranes and rigs of steel manufacture next to the blank faces of new self-storage lots, other manufactuaries abandoned to rust and weeds, a fractal of crevices widening in expanses of aging bitumen.
The rail line bordering suburb, industrial land and swamp trapping the amalgamation of 1970s and 80s asbestos and red brick housing commission houses in amongst slick new facades as if time had, not stopped, but staggered, stalled. Past and present merged in jarring incongruity. There is a prison nearby.
Our street is leafy, serpentine, with wide verges and greensward islands.
A Sound Like Gunfire
Cixous frames the body as discourse, Foucault that discursive body subject to
regimes of surveillance and control that leave it an object, that object according to
Baudrillard reflexing in a system of signs that has no ground. The book has been bent
back too far. If there are only symbols, with a sound like gunfire, we have broken the spine
of everything we ever had to say.
Gardening: Two
The stump still watches me with knots like eyes.
In this blood and claw embrace, I once held kingdoms, it mouthlessly says.
Still for that it comes up easily, roots an octopoid glutton of pale tongues and coarse hairs, creased, inflexible fingers with only a clumsy grip. Exposed below the concrete laden earth, the sand and pebble of an almost forgotten shore. It scratches at my arms in impotent shudders. The last few withered heads and spider holed leaves fall away. I drag it across the yard the way a craven does, bent over, as if still in harness, in thrall, one or two red spots blooming through the fabric of my khaki denim shirt.
The Spine Is God’s Gun
We can think of the spinal column as a kind of temple, the substructure from which all human life depends.
Hear our prayer;
The Cervical Spine has seven vertebrae
The Thoracic Spine has twelve vertebrae
The Lumbar Spine has five vertebrae
The Sacrum has five fused vertebrae
The Coccyx has five fused vertebrae
Cartilage pads separate each adjacent vertebrae
Facet Joints join vertebral processes
The Vertebral Foramina is a central canal
to protect the transmission of impulses along the spinal cord
Fibrous ligaments join bony projections
to hold the temple together
Or perhaps as a chain drawn from a barrel of plastic monkeys, or a column of
swaying acrobatic crabs, or as God’s gun;
This is my spine. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My spine is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me, my spine is useless. Without my spine, I am useless. I must fire my
spine true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot
him before he shoots me.
I will.
My spine and I know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of
our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit …
My spine is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I
will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I
will keep my spine clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of
each other. We will.
Before God, I swear this creed. My spine and I are the defenders of my country.
We are the masters of our enemy.
We are the saviors of my life.
So be it, until victory is America’s [sic] and there is no enemy but peace!
The Genocide On My Screen
Saw a child, shoulders, head, torn in half like wet bread, spine trailing from rags of flesh like the tail of a kite. It is spring there, the sky above the toothed horizon the blue of broken tile. It is always spring somewhere.
English Roses
QUEEN MARGARET
Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar, saints pray,
To have him suddenly conveyed from hence.
Cancel his bond of life, dear God I pray,
That I may live and say “The dog is dead.”QUEEN ELIZABETH
[standing]
O, thou didst prophesy the time would come
That I should wish for thee to help me curse
That bottled spider, that foul bunch-backed toad!William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Richard III, Act 4, Scene 4.
Gardening: Three
For something dead she scrapes at the fence, at the silvered Merbau decking of the back verandah with a nail hard tenacity. Her claws slip, perhaps charmed as I hum a wordless hum about my sad English rose. I will have your eyes, she scrapes and shudders again through her own murder ballad.
I drag her through the long grass to a steel fire pit – a rusting bowl of Corten steel on a tripod stand, Delphic in its simplicity, lift her in as those husk dry tendrils still and sigh. She lies on an altar of ashes and scrap wood and garden cuttings and weeds and newspapers and the slick decaying skins of discarded catalogues.
When I throw in a match, smoke rises the colour of distant thunderstorms. She burns with a fast blue flame. I turn, warm my back. The pain, where I have for so long endured the weight of her knee, melts away with a warmth like ecstasy.
Vitruvian
Cixous theoretises the body in counterpoint to the phallologocentricism of humanist
materialism, proposing a female mode of knowledge, a discourse of the body, centred on
the physical in opposition to the idea that we can only approach understanding through
the processes of logic, reason; a masculine where the world is not lived, but measured,
rationed, calculated through a supremacy of mind.
The body too has its rationality. Think of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, proposed as the
mathematical and spiritual perfection of the body in the traditions and ratios of classical
Western sculpture and architecture. The state, the body, the corporate; a being with a
single, erect spine. A perfection sought in fascist ideology, the control and eradication of
impure, imperfect bodies; of eugenics, of death camps, of supremacy, of nation. The
triumph of the spirit is also the triumph of the cult of the body. An arena, a temple, a colloseum
where Rome never died.
Opposing, as counter, as binary to the rational mind, the rational body, we
approach the irrational mind, the irrational body. Against Da Vinci’s Vitruvian precision,
against the golden mean, against the perfect circle; the painted faces of the Yolngu
or the carved masks of Gabon,
against the ideal, against the superior body of the champion; the irrational body of the
wounded, the injured the unformed.
Against eternity, the ache of our inevitable decay.
I Am Joe’s Spine
Sacral Thought
Our words outlive us. In that distant context, our intentions, our meanings are transformed in a process like decay. If everything we say is returned to that sea of undifferentiated words, exposed like sherds of bone in some archeological attempt at understanding, should we then accept that posterity is a shell, an afterimage, a stain, a corpse?
To live, to truly live, we can only plant seeds and grow saplings. We can only make of this a kind of song.
We can only write for now.
Coda: On The Unexpected Blessings of the Degradation of the Spine
I fall like Gulliver. The scent of fresh mown grass is bright and drunk as Sunday
afternoon. If the distant four stroke chug of a Victa is a prayer, I suppose the scent
scraping at my nose is a kind of sacrament for a secularised culture that valorises
mundane and spectacular rites of competition and order. Every lawn blood and bone,
every lawn a stadium. Botanists say that scent is the grass screaming; a warning echoing
on the wind across discontinuous fields; in defence, the plant hardens, winters, gathers
up the resources for regrowth, for renewal, for life in its roots. What else that cry means,
we can only imagine.
Here, for a moment, where my ache lays me down, the grass is knee high. I have not
mown for months. Cool, wet, soft, no longer a field of sparse, gladiatorial spears, but
pulsing the way the sea does, in unheard murmuration.
There, with a deep and abhorrent cynicism, they call the regular slaughter of men,
women and children mowing the lawn.
Here as I rise again, carefully wend my way through, I see lizards, scarabs, the gleaming transparency of new made snails, under dandelions and wild strewn Gerberas hear a cricket’s cautious silence, the the patient dark of cicada burrows, the moon pale flutter of moths, staves of webs hung with dew – countless small signs of life as an invasive, alien monoculture is subsumed in the flood – this tide a more honest ecosystem, a living system, a biome, a wonder – and I realise, this is life-writing after all, just not human life writing, and I understand that, amongst the torrent of words, between the burgeoning silence, as in my ache I slowly recede, there are so many other ways to read.
Bibliography
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy Of Richard III, The Folger Shakespeare
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Folger Shakespeare
National Spine Health Foundation, Spine Anatomy, https://spinehealth.org/article/ spine-anatomy/
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan, Routledge, 2003.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972.
Helene Cixous, ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, in Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 875-893, trans. Cohen K and Cohen P, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1976.
William H Rupertus, The Rifleman’s Creed: The Creed of a United States Marine, United States Marine Corp History, https://www.usmcu.edu/Research/Marine-Corps- History-Division/Frequently-Requested-Topics/Marines-Rifle-Creed/
J. D. Ratcliffe, I Am Joe’s Body, Reader’s Digest, https://archive.org/stream/IAmJoesBody-J.D.Ratcliffe/joebody_djvu.txt
