Forty-five

A month after turning forty-five, every last egg in her body is a Rockette doing the can-can. Use me use me use me, they cry, I’ll be the easy child, the I-won’t-wake-you-up-in-the-night child. Wasn’t she through with all that – after years, on streets, in restaurants when all she saw were schlepping, wrung out, haphazard, misbuttoned mothers pushing strollers loaded with groceries, a dreadful toddler riding shotgun?

Now every city block boasts the popular miracle of children’s faces. Keep away, she says to civilized men who stop at crosswalks, Do you see this glittered fertility, this fishnet stocking hunger?

The possible calls and the body lunges – rapacious – for what? – every last urgency to be the body?


--Victoria Redel, "Suddenly" just published in Granta  (2010) [Follow link].
 
A very interesting vignette that explores the physical origins of what we might suppose are merely psychological urgings.   Redel's piece does not offer the sentimental rendering of last chances that we might expect, but instead, leaves us to contemplate what one becomes when one is no longer a "productive" body.   Can one pass this threshold without a "lunge" ---smoothly, gently, oblivous? 

A Flood of Lava

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon.  She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trails, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her  mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.  A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott and around and below , wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows .

---Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

The Little Burst

Today's lengthy selections are devoted to a scene taken from the short story, "A Little Burst," included in Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize winning collection of stories, Olive Kitteridge.   The stories focus on the life of a retired schoolteacher in coastal Maine.  A 21st century counterpart  to Sarah Orne Jewett's late nineteenth century stories about the changes of the once familiar coastal communities of Maine in the aftermath of the Civil War, Strout's collection documents change, loss,  and disappointment as well as life's unexpected tendernesses.  Much like Jewett's unconventional heroine from The Country of the Pointed Firs, Mrs. Todd, Strout's own heroine looms large, literally and physically.  She is a formidable and yet comforting presence in the collection, which is told not only from her perspective, but from those whose lives are entwined with hers.   In the best of the regionalist tradition, we grasp the importance of perspective from the collection's own shifting viewpoints, which position Olive at center-stage as well as on the periphery.  (This aspect of the collection reminds me a bit of Jewett's Strangers and Wayfarers).  In this story, Olive introduces a theory about life that she describes as  "big bursts" and "little bursts":

 Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents.   Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

Yet this wholesome definition of the "little burst" is soon revised when Olive is at her son's wedding and she overhears her new daughter-in-law (the perfectionist therapist, "Dr. Suzanne Bernstein, MD PhD")  making fun of her flowered dress and critiquing her parenting of Christopher.   Crushed, she retreats to the couple's bedroom. Snooping in the closet and drawers, she is further humiliated by Sue's petite clothing, which only reminds her of her own large physique. Soon, however, she discovers a way of diminishing Dr. Sue: 

Olive slides open the top drawer of the bureau.  Once a place for a boy's sock and T-shirts, the drawer is now filled with her daughter-in-law's underwear---tumbled together, slippery, lacy, colorful things.  Olive tugs on a strap and out comes a shiny pale blue bra, small-cupped and delicate.  She turns it slowly in her thick hand, then balls it up and pokes it down into her roomy handbag. 

Then, she marks a sweater: 

The beige sweater is thick, and this is good, because it means the girl won't wear it until fall.  Olive unfolds it quickly and smears a black line of Magic Marker down one arm.  Then she holds the marker in her mouth and refolds the sweater hurriedly, folding it again, and even again, to get it as neat as it was at first.

And finally she steals just one shoe, satisfied that in introducing chaos into her daughter-in-law's life, that she will subject her to the common denominator of self-doubt:   

It does not help much, but it does help some, to know that at least there will be moments now when Suzanne will doubt herself.  Calling out, "Christopher, are you sure you haven't seen my shoe?  Looking through the laundry, her underwear drawer, some anxiety will flutter through her.  "I must be losing my mind, I can't keep track of anything....And my God, what happened to my sweater?"   And she would never know, would she?  Because who would mark a sweater, steal a bra, take one shoe?

The story ends with a sharp revision of the earlier notion of a "little burst." As it turns out, life's little lifts are not simply a matter of human kindness, but are equally produced by our  less magnaminous acts--our attempts to correct and compensate, even devilishly, for life's injustices:

 As a matter of fact, there is no reason, if Dr. Sue is going to live near Olive, that Olive can't occasionally take a little of this, a little of that---just to keep the self-doubt alive.  Give herself a little burst.  Because Christopher doesn't need to be living with a woman who thinks she knows everything.  Nobody knows everything--they shouldn't think they do."

---Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge (2008)

Damn straight.

Hands and Feet

   "Mentally, it is tough cutting into the foot because I know how sensitive my own feet are.  Cutting into any part of my body could hurt, but there is something about the feet (as there was about the hands) that makes me squirm at every poke." 


---Marcus 


   "Today we did the hand.  Now I am on the crosstown bus back to the West Side, and I can't stop looking at people's hands.  I feel like tapping someone on the shoulder and saying, 'I know what it looks like inside there---it's beautiful!'
     What incredible organization:  it's simple and complex at the same time.   I strum the back of my seat with my fingers and try to visualize all that is going on inside, like which muscle groups are involved, which nerves, and the order of their electrical commands. I think of my son and how small his hands are and how everything is there functioning, but in miniature.  It's miraculous.  And then I remember backing into our cadaver's rigid left hand, splayed open, palm-side up at the end of his outstretched yellow arm."


---Michael

Journal entries from first year medical students in Gross Anatomy class.  Excerpted from
Anatomy of Anatomy: in images and words (2000)  by Meryl Levin

Dementia

The word dementia has its root in the Latin dementare, meaning "senseless."  Yet I have found my senses heightened folllowing the loss of intellectual force.  My responsiveness to odor is so strong that sometimes I think I've become a beagle.  Intense spices---Indian, Thai, Mexican--feel exaggerated in their richness; I can become exhausted and confused by eating these foods.  My skin often tingles, sometimes for no discernible reason, sometimes in response to the slightest stimulus.  The same process that stripped me of significant intellectual capacity and numbed my mind seems to have triggered an almost corresponding heightening of sensory and emotional awareness.  Sometimes this can be a maelstrom, sometimes a baptismal immersion.  So when "demented" breaks down into "de" for "out of" and "ment" for "mind"--literally "out of mind,"---I interpret the verbal construction as having positive connotations. Not loony, but liberated.  Forced out of the mind, forced away from my customary cerebral mode of encounter, I have found myself dwelling more in the wilder realms of sense and emotion.  Out of mind and into body, into heart.  An altered state. 

--Floyd Skloot, "Wild in the Woods:  Confessions of a Demented Man" in In the Shadow of Memory (2003)

In 1988, Floyd Skloot contracted a virus that invaded and damaged his brain. Here he describes his loss of "intellectual capacity" in terms of a gain in "emotional awareness.""  Skloot's account is not a saccharine one, however, and his description of his enhanced sensorial perceptions and feelings (throughout the book as a whole) is at turns ironic, humiliating, surprising, bittersweet.  I love his attentiveness here to the etymology of dementia and the way that his reading of the word through the lens of his own experience draws our attention to the ways in which we tend to privilege the intellect.  If clarity of thinking illuminates our world, it does so only by limiting what we can perceive. 

Small in Stature

Insults for tall people will follow in another quote:


Hermia: "Little again? Nothing but 'low' and 'little'? Why will you suffer her to flout me thus? Let me come to her.


Lysander: Get you gone, you dwarf! You minimus of hindering knotgrass made! You bead, you acorn!

---William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Gone

In Maile Meloy's short story, bodies and hopes fall away. Missing limbs--dismemberment--signify not only crippling loss but impotence. More quotes to come that feature missing limbs, amputation and bodily damage.


       Cort set his water glass down by the sink. "The baby's feet are falling off," he said. "One of them's already gone."
     "The tendon isn't growing back and there's nothing there to hold the feet on," he said. "Perfectly good horse except she's not going to have any feet." His voice cracked on the word "feet." He turned and rummaged through his kitchen drawer, beneath unpaid bills and Kite's registration papers, until he found two small keys on a ring that jangled in his hand. I watched him go into the laundry room, unlock the file cabinet there and bring out a pistol with a revolving chamber. The gun dangled awkwardly in his hand [...]
He made a noise that sounded like a sob but couldn't be; I'd never seen him cry. The baby was outside waiting, and Cort's hair against my face smelled like shampoo and hay. He put his arms around me and pulled me closer, and we sat there a long time, not saying anything, so the filly could stay.

---Maile Meloy, "Kite Whistler Aquamarine" in Half in Love (2002)

Mystic Gardening: Two From Jewett

These wonderfully rich and evocative quotes from Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece afford us a view not only of coastal Maine in the nineteenth century, but of alternative medicine during this period. Mrs. Todd's work is understood as an indispensable supplement to that of the town doctor and prompts reflection on our own contemporary commitment to seeking therapies outside of traditional medicine--a sense, perhaps, of the inadequacies of medicine as practiced today. But the pleasure of these passages comes from the sense it gives us of abundance, of a fragrant space filled with plants and people--a fragrance that signifies a human presence.

"Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be."

"At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarites among the commoner herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar or spriits in a small cauldron on Mrs. Todd's kitchen stove. They were dispensed to suffering neighbors, who usually came at night as if by stealth, bringing their own ancient-looking vials to be filled."

---Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

Glorious Amplitude

Lois Palken Rudnick's edited volume offers this rich nugget from Mabel Dodge Luhan....a celebration of one very large body that defies conventional expectations:

[In the summer of 1912] Gertrude and Alice came to stay at the villa. The year before, Gertrude had lived in Fiesole--and she had trudged down one hill and across town and up another to see us. She used to wear a sort of kimono made of brown corduroy in the hot Tuscan summertime, and arrive just sweating, her face parboiled. And when she sat down, fanning herself with her broad-brimmed hat with its wilted, dark brown ribbons, she exhaled a vivid steam around her. When she got up she frankly used to pull her clothes off from where they stuck to her great legs. Yet with all this she was not at all repulsive. On the contrary, she was positively, richly attractive in her grand ampleur. She always seemed to like her own fat anyway and that usually helps other people to accept it. She had none of the funny embarrassment Anglo-Saxons have about flesh.

---Mabel Dodge Luhan, European Experiences, in Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edited by Lois Palken Rudnick, 1999.

Degenerate Tourists

John Kennedy Toole's novel refers to hot dogs as "gimmicks." Oddly enough this portion of the pollen suggests the broader category of food and its strange manifestations in literature and elsewhere:

     "I'm gonna put you down in the French Quarter."

     "What?" Ignatius thundered. "Do you think that I am going to perambulate about in that sinkhole of vice? No, I am afraid that the Quarter is out of the question. My psyche would crumble in the atmosphere. Besides, the streets are narrow and dangerous there. I could easily be struck down in traffic or be wedged against a building."

     "Take it or leave it, you fat bastard. That's the last chance you get." Mr Clyde's scar was beginning to whiten again.

     "It is? Well, please don't have another seizure. You may tumble into that vat of franks and scald yourself. If you insist, I imagine that I shall have to trundle my franks down into Sodom and Gomorrah."

     "Okay. Then it's settled. You come in tomorrow morning, we'll fix you up with some gimmicks."

     "I can't promise you that many hot dogs will be sold in the Quarter. I will probably be kept busy every moment protecting my honor against those fiends who live down there."

     "You get mostly the tourist trade in the Quarter."

     "That's even worse. Only degenerates go touring. Personally, I have been out of the city only once. By the way, have I ever told you about that particular pilgrimage to Baton Rouge? Outside the city limits there are many horrors."

---John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)

Body Parts

This new exhibit at Houston's Menil Collection assembles a wide range of representations of fragmented bodies, including reliquaries, surrealist paintings and sculptures, and tribal arts that meditate on this theme.  Upon entering the exhibit, the visitor encounters a set of mirrors installed at an angle that produces a fragmented reflection.  The visitor is thus made a part of the displays in a manner that underscores the centurality of identity and selfhood to any discussion of bodily fragmentation:

Exaggerated scale is also deployed in a fifteenth-century French reliquary that contains bone fragments. Depicting an erect and over-sized index finger, it speaks to the continued vitality of the body, even after death, from which the bones issued. Similar themes can be addressed through a reduction of scale...In one photogram, Light Borne in Darkness, ca. 1951, the artists' hands appear ethereal and weightless. This, combined with the hands' diminutive scale, would seem to allude to those immaterial aspects of the subject--intentionality and consciousness--that cannot be captured by its physical boundaries.

--Mary Lambrakos, Curatorial Assistant, Menil Collection. From the exhibition pamphlet for "Body in Fragments" on display at the Menil from August 21, 2009--February 28, 2010.