āOn Being Illā isnāt just making a case for illness as a literary subject, but for the brute, bare fact of the body itself. By insisting we acknowledge that we sweat and crave and itch all day (āall day, all nightā), Woolf reminds us we have the right to speak about these thingsāto make them lyric and epicāand that we should seek a language that honors them. The man who suffers a migraine, she writes, is āforced to coin words himself, taking his pain in one hand and a lump of pure sound in the other.ā What does it sound like, this strange, unholy language of nerves and excretions? How do we articulate the kind of pain that refuses language? We throw up our hands, or we hurl our charts: one through ten, bad to worse, from the smiley face to its wretched, frowning cousin.
Woolfās argument may have been more urgent in her time than in oursāwe have more records of the ādaily drama of the bodyā now than we did thenābut when I first read her battle cry, her call to arms (not just arms but legs and teeth and bones), it felt like encountering a long-lost relative: the banner Iād never known Iād always been fighting under: Bodies matterāwe canāt escape themātheyāre full of storiesāhow do we tell them? Her argument might have the urgency of a battle cry but itās also vulnerable; itās posing questions; itās got mess and nerveāitās leaking some strange fluid from beneath its garments, hard to tell in the twilight, maybe pus or tears or blood. Even her syntax feels bodilyāfull of curves and joints and twists, shifting and stretching the skin of her sentences.
People have often told me my own writing seems to be all about bodies. A woman from a writing workshop once suggested I call my collection of stories Body Issues. (I didnāt have a collection of stories: If I did, I wouldnāt have called it that.) But Iāve never wanted to write about āthe body,ā by which I mean Iāve never set out with that explicit intention; Iāve only ever wanted to write about what it feels like to be alive, and it turns out being alive is always about being in a body. Weāre never not in bodies: thatās just our fate and our assignment. (In her beautiful memoir The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso writes that she despises āthe bodyā whenever it describes anything but a corpse, and I love that, though I use the phrase constantly anyway.) To my mind, the more aggressive choice is writing that isnāt physical; this insistence carries the burden of intentional absence.
All that said, Iāve always felt a certain shame about the ways my writing keeps coming back to bodies, which is why I loved finding Woolf. My shame felt such relief at the prospect of her company. My first novel was all about addiction and eating disorders and sex, and there was food everywhere, some of it gone rotten. I used the word āsweatā too many times (my editor told me); there were too many fluids (my editor told me) and far too many bruises (my editor told me) and even worse, too many of these bruises were āplum-coloredāāfor this last one (my editor told me), we would both get mocked, if we didnāt get rid of some of these plum-colored bruises right away. A certain shame hung over the whole narrative, like a faint body odor I couldnāt smell because it was mine: There was too much body, and this too-much-body risked banality and melodrama at once. Iāve always wondered if this shame about writing about the body is connected to the shame of quasi-autobiographical writing, that sense of failing to imagine beyond oneās own experience. Is writing about bodily experience somehow the extreme form of this failure, the ultimate solipsism? You havenāt even gotten beyond your own nerve endings; itās no accident they call it navel gazing.
I often think of an old painting I once saw that shows an injured body pointing at its own open wounds. The most graceful victim, of course, is the one who doesnāt need to point at his holes or ask for sympathyāwho doesnāt take up the lump of pure sound, who just keeps quiet. The way I imagine being scolded goes something like this: Thereās something selfish about talking about bodies too much if the bodily experience fueling everything is your own.
I often think, also, of a cross-country race I ran in 10th grade: I tripped on a slab of concrete sticking up from the dirt, about a hundred meters after the start, when the pack was still dense; and I was trampled by the horde of 15-year-old girls running behind me. It was pretty minor, as tramplings go. But still, it was a trampling. I got up to run the next three miles of the race but I was shaken up and bleeding. I wasnāt running well at allānothing close to what Iād need to do to place well for our team.
When I reached my coach, who was calling out our one-mile splits, she said something to the effect of āWhy are you running so slow?āāonly perhaps not so delicately phrased. I remember the awkward way I tried to point at my own wounds without slowing my (turtle) pace; and I remember how badly I wanted her to see the streaks of dirt-clotted blood; I almost stumbled again in my urgent need to show her the proof of my stumbling.
That memory has become the vessel for a certain kind of shameāthe shame of pointing too overtly at what hurts, jamming the laser-pointer of language at some wound and then expecting it to yield wisdom or explanation. My coach didnāt want the epic or lyric account of my damaged body, she just wanted me to keep running, and hopefully pick up the pace.
Iām still haunted by the specter of myself in this momentāa mute form pointing, bleeding. A few years after that race I spent a couple months actually mute: Iād gotten jaw surgery and theyād wired my jaw shut to help it heal. During those months I wrote quite frequently but it was mainly practical, because I couldnāt talk. I requested things by scribbling them in a little notebook: vicodin, please; okay ensure (my mom was always foisting Ensure on me), but are there any cans of dark chocolate left? HATE butter pecan. I asked for sheets draped over the mirrors, so I wouldnāt see my swollen face; I asked for the pair of scissors that I was supposed to keep on-hand in case I vomited and needed to cut the wires between my teeth.
Eventually I started writing poems about those quiet weeks, and the surgery before them, the days in the hospital. The poems were full of IV lines and numbness and feeling returning after numbness like water oozing back into crab holes in damp sand (ācrackling lines of hurt,ā I wrote). I imagined myself the bard of swelling; I wanted to write toothache lyrics for swellingāto evoke the chronic panic of its deforming sculptural practice: it shapes you into something like you, but not you. I wanted to bring that aching knowledge to my nonexistent reading public.
I turned the poems into a series and then I turned them in to my undergraduate writing workshop. The series was called āWaiting Room,ā meaning the waiting room before surgery but also the injury afterward as a waiting roomāget it?āthe aftermath as the cramped little chamber where you wait to get better; where you have to keep waiting even once it seems like you should already be there.
I wasnāt satisfied with the poems. Pain was hard to describe. I encountered Elaine Scarryās famous formulationāāpain does not simply resist language but actively destroys itāāwhich recognized but did not solve the problem. My workshop wasnāt satisfied with the poems either. Everyone wanted to know: What were they about? I thought it was pretty fucking self-evident, but no, it was a different problem: My classmates got that these poems were about pain and injuryāmaybe in a dental office?ābut what were they really about? My workshop was thinking everything must be a metaphor for something else: the cut lines on raw gums, the self-quieting sparkle of anesthesia. But in truth, nothing was a metaphor for anything. It was more or less this happened, and it hurt. There was nothing below the surface.
At the time I took this as a verdict of poverty and lackāwhich is why I loved finding Woolf, so many years later, who seemed to be saying, the surface of the body isnāt poverty; it isnāt lack. She rose from the dead for the express purpose of silencing that workshop, or at least arguing against the notion that there had to be something besides bodies for these poems to matter. She was saying the surface is poetry; bodies are poetry; or poetry can be made of what these bodies need and crave and bleed and feel.
I felt her summoning an army, everyone Iād ever read whose language does some justice to the way our bodies are, the ways they betray us or bind us together: Walt Whitmanās greed to catalogue the physical forms of his countrymen, William Faulknerās fixation on muddy drawers and the waft of honeysuckle; Marcel Merleau-Pontyās insistence on the body as an āeloquent relic of existence.ā
Woolf writes: āIt is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions; love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104; jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica.ā I can see the way these marching orders have infected my own proseāeven this piece, with its twisting, bodily contortionsāand the way theyāve helped me claim a dialect Iād been afraid was junk, a ledger of the bodyās travails, not the āWaiting Roomā poems (which werenāt really that great) but the notebooks I kept when my jaw was wired silent, full of their banal complaints and requests: Vicodin, please. Where are the vomit scissors? These are daily dramas of the body, charged with force and longing; the record Woolf never found, the words that pain and pure sound made.
