*

(Roque Dalton -- San Salvador, El Salvador, 14 May 1935 – Quezaltepeque, El Salvador, 10 May 1975) 

May the minutes of our own lives now be revered, unsold and forever unsellable.

“Illness presents a problem for emancipatory politics, and likewise poses a challenge to political art. If an artist’s politics are expressed in an art based on corrective representations, like exposing the ‘real’ that lurks under the ‘idealised’, illness creates – at least – a double bind. Illness is, as Spence wrote, the ‘ultimate crisis of self-representation’,15 and part of that crisis is inherent in any attempt at making illness legible without reproducing the reductive heroics or violent sentimentalities attached to sickness. An image of a sick person – especially of one enduring the kind of illness, like cancer, that can render dramatic changes in appearance – can present upper-level pathos, but this is for a reason: to be a person who was once strong and vital and who now wastes away and dies is sad. How do you take a photo of a victim that doesn’t look like a victim or like a victim’s opposite? For Spence, it seems, the answer was you don’t.”

To manipulate the middle aged: real comfort. 

I want to tell the internet things.  Like how yesterday was my birthday, and every birthday after cancer, no matter how calm you play it, is at once somber & ecstatic,  how it is both announcing your life extended & your life reduced, how it confuses you with a push & a pull of time & of expectation -- this age what you didn’t expect to happen, what you always expected to happen & then learned could so easily might not, how a birthday is also a reminder to of how you were once an infant & unmutilated, & now, mutilated and amended, is a reminder of how you are intact as a mutilated person, too, in a world in which to be be mutilated is also a mark of having survived.  A birthday marks everyone, too, who once passed your birthdays with you and went away from you & never came back, who left you because you were ill or because you were ill in the wrong way or who came to your life because you were ill, too. The sun right now is like the sun when I was diagnosed: it’s the same chlorinated bug-bitten late-summer heat and same cut-off jean short and sandals, the 2nd anniversary of diagnosis so close -- that 2nd year, that 3rd, the toughest ones to not die in, now also a new pain next to the site of the formerly deadly one.  I look in the cards to see what it says: it says I will feel now like a wet dog and her best friend another howling dog and a lobster crawling up from the ocean and howling at the disapproving moon, or like the feeling queen on the tiny island of only feeling, or the hoarder of upright sentiments, or the bird who keeps her head under her wing.  I am a sunny leo, made mostly of fire and air, and love to think all day and get dressed up  and feel only in the most general linguistic and utopian ways, now facing a survival which asks me to feel about it in so many specifics, like how does time feel (too short and too long), like how does the world feel (too hot and too small), like how does the garden feel (possible and hard), like how does it feel to have a body?  astonishing, of course, after all these years. 

” -- Christa Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative” 

-- Jo Spence, 1990, from “Could do Better... Towards a personal and political theatre of the self?” 

— Roque Dalton