Straylight

The book remains because it registers our death. In reading a book, we are conducting an anatomy, perhaps of ourselves, that is possible only through the corpse of a book.

Fritz Kahn, Das Leben des Menschen... (The Life of Man). Vol. 5, Stuttgart, 1931. Relief halftone. National Library of Medicine.

Romanae archetypae tabulae anatomicae novis, Rome, 1783. Hand colored copperplate engraving. National Library of Medicine.

To open the skin is to come in contact an opaque, viscous fluid with a quiet odor and alkalinitic composition. Blood transports vital materials throughout the body, removes harmful agents and it maintains internal integrity through regulation (temperature, water content of cells, pH levels) and resistance (clotting, white blood cells). Blood is iron-rich and wet, blood is dark and things are sometimes written in blood. Drink too much blood and you will get sick, expose it to oxygen and its color will change. In the body of the book, ink is blood. Ink drips, pools, stains, flows, overflows and fills. Ink is the liquid life of a book that eternally circulates. Also susceptible to evident transformations in color depending on a sensitive chemical balance, ink is the carrier substance of the book’s vital material. Ink is what enables the book to function as such; it is a fugitive mediator that runs and is arrested. Like blood, ink also has types. Blood type is the signature of sanguine unity in a given body; it is an antigenic classification of presence and absence that in the book becomes a compound endorsing the presence and absence of microscopic elements that contribute to the chemic definition of a printed object. In addition, the pullus liquidis of the body and book is ordered and controlled by elaborate interconnected systems. Blood is held within a convoluted series of tubes – arteries, arterioles, capillaries, and veins – extending to every part of the body, at once steering and creating the viscera of existence. The blood of the book inhabits linguistic contours– drops cohere into shapes, shapes into letters, letters into words, etc.– that cohere to authorize the course and verve of the text. The amount of blood circulating in a given body depends entirely on its size.

The plurality of what is not seen permits a singular shape. The word “body” involuntarily hides what it so readily suggests. Pieces bound within the protextive derma of this impulse to singularize threaten to leak, spill, explode, ejaculate and expose the injustice of their relegation to a word that signifies nothing without them. Though excised from ‘the body’ and given words of their own, the articuli corporis vero innumera lurk beneath the cover of “body,” they are unmistakably present in their problematic absence. We speak and write “body,” but what we mean is the multitudinousness of the body enabling the illusion of a solitary object. Devoid of cells, skin, muscles, veins, arteries, blood, lungs, intestines, cartilage, tendons, bones, a brain, etc. ‘a body’ is an empty shell and perhaps not even that. It is the invisible carcass of a signifier incapable of fertilizing the linguistic loam that buries and surrounds it. Yet when we use the word “body,” we mean these things too. We simultaneously recall and deny these elements them every time we think, speak, read, and write the word “body.” For Jean Luc Nancy, “body is the word without employment par excellence,” it is “the word in excess” and to carry this idea further, it would seem that “body,” paradoxically, is also an expression of moderation and restraint; for “body” is the language of our death (Nancy 21). At once excessive and restrained, “body” as text manufactures an immanent / imminent procedure of resistance that both welcomes and denies its own material existence. See: Jean Luc Nancy, Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

Fritz Kahn, Das Leben des Menschen; eine volkstümliche Anatomie, Biologie, Physiologie und Entwick-lungs-geschichte des Menschen. Vol. 2, Stuttgart, 1926. Relief halftone. National Library of Medicine.

Human skin is the throne of touch and a protective covering for the body’s deeper tissues. To align the physiology of the book with the human body, the cover of the book – its anterior and posterior shell – most readily recalls the binding properties of derma and the epidermis molded atop the papillary layer of the derma with the attendant medial orifice. The derma and epidermis produce the effect of wholeness, they apply material boundaries to the body and they arrest its contents.  Skin holds bodies together; it is the connective tissue that defines the threshold of interior / exterior and it is by opening the skin that we can read what is inside. The critical opening of a book creates functionality; the book does not function without being opened. Skin that is shut restricts our gaze. However, If we open the human body we damage and potentially destroy it. For ourselves, this type of reading is forbidden. Our body as text – with those multiple layers of interpretative possibility – is sealed, contained, hidden, secret. The book requires an invasion, it invites us to fold back its skin.

Juan Valverde de Amusco, Anatomia del corpo humano, Rome, 1559. Copperplate engraving. National Library of Medicine.

[1] D. W. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

First edition of William Gibson's Neuromancer. London: Gollancz, 1984.