Month: August 2019

“Our selves were all we had.”

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

A hospital in Boston; a corridor beyond the Styx

Clearer than glass, the crystal shatters: He reaches between her ribs. Veins spider-web, they branch like cypress. She tosses and turns beneath the surface, in a corridor slick with scarlet and chrome: curtains of almandine and silver thread, tongues of flame and scrying bones. Above those fathomless depths, a patient immersed in ether prays for mercy on a table. Fingers clasp her shivering wrist, colder than surgical steel. I writhe between sheer white sheets as bare walls glisten: a snow-swept sight. A sightless moon peers in all the while. It filters between the window blinds and through cracks in the hot, dry earth. It chills the poppy vase beside the surgeon’s masterpiece; it licks like frost along the edges of consolatory crimson. It soothes the Beast’s ivory prize, adorns each petal of her fatefully plucked narcissus. In this alchemy of moonlight, the two scenes entwine.

Time and again, the mythology fails us: our history grants neither justice nor peace. Look no further than that wayward child, led astray by a single bright flower, condemned to horror by the Other’s errant desire. Did she learn, as I did, that the darkness does not relinquish its subjects so readily? That there are experiences you cannot recover from, advances you cannot withstand? Some fragment of her lingers there now, nourished by the furtive seeds she tasted, taking root in the underside of her soul. She had fed, where her only hope was to starve. Now a part of her belongs to Him and I am just as lucky. Whenever I leave a hospital, a piece of my mind remains there.

Ours is the masochistic art of unbecoming. Down, down, down we delve: each level we descend draws us nearer to the earth’s warm pulse. Swept up in an ecstasy of terror, these bare limbs seize their motion from beneath subduing hands. Madness—my consort, her captor—compels us to dance in our chains.

At first, the blood howls in our separate worlds. We spurn the eyes that rake and rove. We rail against our stated roles; to wound, to witness, to obey. In plutonic clutches—the scent of dry sweat, the gleam of metal instruments—we revile the steady surface beneath our backs. In splitting gasps, something private and utterly shameful is unearthed, breached in thrusts of agony. She loses her youth to His savage ways, and I lose mine to the miracle of medicine. Both of us languish like twin fleshly sacrifices: struggling beneath the men we serve, while their conquest—their victory, their profound fucking cleverness—shivers its way to completion.

So when we fall to pieces, lose our meaning, break apart, we know to abandon the fight. Flayed and forsaken, the intricacies of our bones laid bare, we belong to ourselves no longer. We are lost to hands that are not our own, tethered to the savagery that lends us form and meaning. In the throes of some forgotten brilliance, of some solace beyond sanity, we lose the capacity for fortitude. Our palms are filthy with our failure, our mouths stained a thousand shades of crimson: communion wine and pomegranate, iodine tincture and slowly drying blood. Every drop tastes of inevitability. There is no turning back any longer: we learn to love our misery.

But that was three years ago. When I left, they swore I would be free. They promised I would forget that cloying haze. So I eschewed the blank walls, the grotesque factory, the shining cogs. I became apathetic and obsolete. Now I am deficient, I cannot love, I cannot be—but I still remember everything. I never stopped. I never could. I can’t not remember it, the blasphemous white. How wretched I was, the structures that were, the stone-strewn necropolis, the vacuum of disfigured thought—where was I, when was that, and why are you not with me? Which strange twist of fate’s knife brought me here—what cruelty, or memory, or mercy?

If she saw me now, that girl beneath the earth, would she envy or pity these bloodless remains? I wonder if she ever wished to lay me bare with her own hands: to strip back the flesh and raw sinew, wrench forth the slippery heart of our grief, unearth the cancerous core, wrest each chemical from the entrails. Or maybe it was I who wanted that. I loved her so much, I can still feel her absence eating away at me. I feed and I feed and I starve all the same, lost in her emptiness, gnawing my own skin: errant and addicted, I erase her into being. She was born of nothingness, without title or form, and in truth I hated her more often than I loved her. I resented her passiveness, her frailty, the way the world would shape her as she lay there, unresisting. I loathed myself and her still more every time she tried, and failed, to restrain me: to narcotize me, to placate me. I was afraid of myself. I was afraid that she was afraid. We were caught on our heads between jaws of treachery, nine circles down in the company of the faithless. When all of this ends, will she bury me? She has to. She must. Someone should.

How, how, how could you have forgotten? Did it not matter? Did you not care? How could you bury that, subsume it—you were the last, the only thing. You were what I had going, what I wanted and worked for. I can feel the brittle bones beneath your paper skin, my printing press, my opus. You bled my words, my ink, my shame, you fled some hell we found—

But there is nothing to pity me for. Because when all was said and done, it was I who left her in darkness. Once, she wrested rhapsodies from my tongue: her body was composed like notes on a twelve-bar staff, her candid eyes trained in a gaze I could not match. For this Eurydice, I mastered the art. I drew music from her fractured thoughts in torrents of tortuous, glorious sound; I learnt her mind like strings of the lyre. In her sycophantic melodies, I perfected the Orphean craft: to rise from sleep, from death, from madness.  My own sights were set forward, then, willing her to come after. But she was faithless at her core, and slow to follow where I led. So when I turned to face her, that look was not a loss. It was an indictment—a banishing. I chose to meet those eyes.

That is how it came to this, how our story starts and ends. In that glance, I made my choice. It is a terrible thing to know someone, to see them, and to understand that you can only love them while your fingers are on the strings. She was my best thing and my nothing: she was the cartilage of a dream I could not retain. So I relinquished her. I watched her fade. I will live with that knowledge for the rest of my life.

How could I have gone through with it? She was the only friend I have ever known, and I undid her. I prised each loving finger from my wrist: I extracted the teeth from my heart.

I cast her off in a fit of ascension. I rose: she remained below.

I unbound her arms from my neck like a tourniquet.

I tore her apart and let go.

What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

Sylvia Plath, Three Women

A balcony in Rome; a desert in Egypt; two cities in Palestine; a café in Venice; a Garden

Let the wolves cry out and the loss subsume itself; let the last light falter in fixity and the mountains emerge like a cipher when the rain subsides. Writhing spires give way to weeping tides: ruins mutter like smoke beneath the rising Tiber. Salient currents flood the silent streets: ivy clasps and climbs. I am iridescent, etherized even now. But I am less undone than I have been of late, and not so disconsolate as I often used to be. This is just another kind of loneliness—another ancient city and another Troy to burn. So I grapple, and I grimace, and I bare my broken teeth. I try to be all that is asked of me. When the dawn light falls in daggers, I try to smile. When the night comes howling, I try to sleep.

It has been a long time. It has been such a long and thankless time. Maybe I am maudlin, melodramatic, obsolete. But I fear sometimes that I can no longer write; for my work is my blood made legible, and lately I seldom open the vein. I think I am afraid to—after all, it nearly killed me twice. I felt and I felt until I barely knew myself. Until I forgot what it was to be intact. And in the end, it never really felt worth it.

In the far, forgotten refuge of some city astride the Nile, in houses of red clay and sun-burnished gold, I resided for a time. I waited and wondered until my countenance changed utterly, my waking mind mired in torment and talk. Then reverent, trancelike, I set off once more. Barefoot in the burning olive groves, I dragged my ruined carcass and my self-appointed cross down the narrow streets of Bethlehem, the caustic stones of Calvary, the gardens and the glory of a land I was not promised. With my pride and my memories and all my fucking medication, I walked for as long as my health would allow.

I strayed far from time and intent, lost utterly my self and my certainties, until I came to rest at last, asleep upon a sea of sand. There, through a half-mad poet’s Spiritus Mundi, and the thirteenth verse of a forsaken story, I saw a beast sedate in stone. I watched its barbaric splendor: dim with prowess, drunk on saints’ blood, drenched in holy water. But in that waking nightmare, in the thrall of a prodigy awaiting its genesis, it was I who committed the cardinal sin. Crowned in the dark glamour of Babylon, baring each inadequacy like a prophetess of false pretense, I kept my eyes open. When the world turned away, I looked on. I bore witness.

At first, I tried to atone for this, to exorcise my fantasies and phobias like confessions. I wielded the pen like a craft-knife, its barbed diatribes, its poison and promises. I took my long-festering vitriol and turned it upon myself. But when I carved the memory back out of me, all the secrets and untruths, the vicious multitudes, the visions and consequences—it all amounted to nothing more than the sum of my scars and the stains of a history I scarcely recall. I wanted to move past it. I wanted to start over. But I am condemned, all of us are, to live in the worlds we have built.

So in the end, I let it happen. When dry sands gave way to Venetian canals, and desert winds to the sensual bite of warm summer, I knew I had a choice. And under the sputtering gas lamps, in the sordid splendor of a silk-strewn café where the moon hung low above clouded waters, I made it. In foreign muscles of finality, I leant back, gave myself over, became myopic and mundane. I lent myself and my longings to those eyes—that scourge, that purgatory, staring back into mine. And what a resolution it was.

Hands moved soft across ivory keys—like Camelot, Troy, Pandæmonium before us, this world of ours was built to music. I wrote into the dawn when she slept, filling that room with growing things: lotus boughs and reams of ivy, garlands of juniper and night-blooming jasmine. Threatened with the specter of inevitable expulsion, we endured. And in that quiet chrysalis of thought, we created a kind of folklore: crystallized and bound to an irretrievable past.

And yet it felt too soon, to feel so gone. Losing with conviction, with precision, with wonder, I grew weary in the far-flung fields of starlight. I only ever wanted to hold you; to drink of your shadows and dance in your tangles; to rove the hazes of hyacinth, the woodbine and myrtle; to swim the wandering rivers of my Theanthropic lover when prisms of light adorned your opened skin. Our courtship was realized in the taste of bare flesh—sweeter than virtue, riper than knowledge—and the blossoms and briars of our Eden, raised again. But when the season faded, I dreamt alone in the dying light—I mourned the dusk of the girl I had loved, with a faded crown of asphodel and one foot forever in the earth.

They say that women change the world with their grief. In what little remains of our garden now, I recall Demeter’s last prayer. Hands unclasped, eyes upon the quiet earth, palms clenched like trowels, she digs: down below the surface, down towards the god she seeks, down to the lover and keeper of her last, most desperate desire. I will follow for longer than the sinew allows, scraping my knuckles to the bone, breaking my hands against the surface to attain my object. When the Earth withers and dies, when the grain weeps its last life away and the doves fall silent in the heather fields, I will take no notice. I will brave the barren lands where nothing grows. I will find my way back to her beneath the fertile soil.