MEAT AND BONES

The skeleton wasn’t in the closet. It was hanging in my father’s study. A human skeleton. There was also a shelf of fetuses suspended in liquid. Animal fetuses, though I thought they were human and that one was my elder brother, if he’d been born. I knew my mother had had a miscarriage before me. My father was a medical student and then a doctor. This wasn’t some macabre hobby. It was professional.

But I didn’t find these things strange or macabre. They seemed natural. Just part of my dad’s work, part—or parts—of all us.  It was the equivalent of listening to music and then seeing the instruments. Or listening to language and knowing it was made up of letters. Bodies as signs in the language of living.

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I made these artworks: the pelvis is half bone and half butterfly. The hip is a bone wing. A W is also a kind of pelvis, hippy and with spaces where other things go. There’s an actual W wedged in the pelvis. I hate it when that happens. 

I make these things because there’s magic in transforming the body. Making with words, with the letters of the body. The idea that the world is made of the body, but also we are embodied, made of our body with all its archives of injury, pain, joy, pleasure. Its stories.

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Remember those anatomy illustrations in the encyclopedia made of layers of transparent pages? Turn a page, and the skin disappears. Turn another and the nerves are gone. Then arteries and veins. The heart. Lungs. Other organs. The last page was the bones alone. More naked than naked. It ain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones. Then like playing a movie backwards, you could reclothe the body in itself, gift wrapping the self in its own skin. Then finally, close the encylopedia and clothe the body, front and back, in encylopedia pages. The book was a bed or a coffin for the naked body.

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Things I’ve seen. The inside of my wife’s gullet and stomach. The inside of my own. The inside of my own ailmentary canal. My bum. Endoscopy. Colonoscopy. I’ve seen scans of my wife’s brain. Of her uterus. Ultrasounds of our babies still embryos or fetuses. What my teeth look like inside, their roots, dark spots. I know how flexible my liver is (not flexible enough, apparently, according to my gastroenterologist.) I’ve seen my fractured spine after a car accident—a hairline fracture in C2, the vertibrae second from the top. (I discovered in psychology 101 how unbelievably fortunate that it was only a hairline fracture at my literal hairline.) The subluxed disc around my lower spine, thankfully cut out. Once they searched for one of my testicles with an ultrasound. They couldn’t find it. Apparently, it was “floating,” a buoy, a dolphin, a message in a bottle.

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In writing and art, the body is made of parts. It can be taken apart. Nevermind that it is always someone’s body. There may be feelings involved. 

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In earlier times, we didn’t know what was inside the body. At least not when we were alive. It was like what was in the sky beyond what the naked eye could see—those crazy moons of Jupiter—or what was deep below ground. We knew bones because they remained in our remains, but our insides were like the distant places of the world. 

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Once I saw an internist because I felt lousy. My son said, with the exception of dermatologists, all doctors should be called internists.

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Making art, I often conceive of the parts of the body as signs or images, language or icons. A pair of legs walking on their own. A head separate from the body, still speaking. Lungs as the wings of a butterfly. An image, half ribs and half brain. Hands instead of the head of a deer. 

Until something is wrong. Pain. Injury. Disability. The skull and crossbones were someone’s skull,  someone’s thighbones. Something happened to the flesh that surrounded them. This flag is about that. Beware. 

Perhaps exploring the body as a constellation of signs teaches by contrasting it with our experience of the actual body and unpacks the assumptions within symbols, signs, and icons. The toe of St. Somebody-or-other, the thigh of the blessed Otherperson. The reliquary of our body. An ossuary  of thinking. What have we encoded and what encodes us? 

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When I was young, I learned from my father to long for perfect moments, iconic scenes with their textures and tones just right, part of an identifiable script, platonic forms of a life or lifestyle. These were what were beneath reality, what was the potential, the “bones” of the matter. Mood, atmosphere, and emotional heft expressed in unfolding time, in words, light, objects, interactions. Sometimes attained, frequently aspired to. I’d try to arrange things just so. Coordinate props and set. Light a fire. Have the appropriate clothes, books, and music. I felt the powerful bittersweetness, the beautiful melancholy for the nostalgia of what could be, as if the present was a kind of remembering or recreation. As if I were a historical reenactor. 

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One night I walked out of my high school dorm room and saw what looked like actual stardust sifting down through the air. It wasn’t possible. It was magic. This was the wished-for, dreamed-of beneath-the-surface, a Platonic form realized. Revealed. Eventually, I figured out it was a trick of the streetlights, the light covered in inverted pyramids which created this effect. I was disappointed. Relieved. Disappointed. Maybe I’d have to do the work myself in this world. 

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How unhappymaking was this narrative: wanting life becomes to become narratized. Storified. And sometimes wishing for events to occur, both good and ill so I could have the deliciousness of the protagonist’s position, as hero or victim.

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It took many years to learn to experience what was there, what was actually unfolding in front of me, something that could be newly experienced because it was the first time rather than the enaction of a template. This isn’t even mindfulness, but allowing the messy flow of the actual. This isn’t the same thing as seeking the more authentic lurking beneath the skin of accepted convention. Perhaps it is simply the struggle between the Platonic and the materialist actual, the ideal versus the phenomenological.

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I was 16 and went to visit my girlfriend in a different city. She’d baked a heart-shaped pie. Things were going to be “so beautiful they’d hurt.” I went to the washroom. I flushed. The toilet overflowed. Shit flooded the room, and because there was a hole in the floor, it rained down from the ceiling of the floor below. My shit flowed over the clean laundry and all over the room. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut writes, “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”  This wasn’t war but I was a teenager. My girlfriend’s older sister cleaned everything up. 

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I think about how we literarily develop in response to the world, in response to our experiences. The experience of the world is encoded in the structures of our bodies. We become what we think and feel. Our experiences of the world are encoded, both the physical struxes and the physiology of the brain develops in response to what it experiences. When we learn language, our brain changes in a certain way. As we learn to walk, our brain follows. A new pathway, a developed neurological structure. Then this organic everchanging innernet goes on to colour our experience. 

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We visited a cemetery in Cuba with our sons and daughter. The gravedigger guided us, plucked horny goatweed from a grave and gave leaves to me and my sons. Then he laid his open hand again his other elbow and bent the arm up. The universal sign for a sproingy erection. He showed us graves which were glass-fronted room-sized mausoleums showing the former life of the deceaseds as single rooms. A child’s bedroom, a doctor’s office, a youth’s room with a motorcycle smashing through the wall for he had died in a crash. Then he led us to the ossuary, boxes of bones stacked on shelves. He lifted a stone lid one and handed my son a skull. We have this picture, my son, surprised, his big curly hair a flourishing bush around his head. The surprisingly small yet adult skull resting in his hand. The broad smile of the gravedigger.

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I’d like to think that when someone we dies, they don’t disappear because our bodies have encoded them in its structure. We may not see them, but we see with them. they are (in) us, in our way of being, in the honeycomb of our self. Not that we don’t feel as if a team of burly men were tug-o-waring on our nervous system, attempting to haul it and the weaving of our memory out of our body, but maybe I can see if I can find the one I lost in my body, not only in its ache but in its structure or in the shape of my thinking, the texture of my perceptions. I may hurt but they are always with me; are, in someway, literally part of me. 

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A doctor friend described looking in a small girl’s painful ear. Spelunking with one of those little lights they use to illuminate the inside of the ear. The girl’s mother sitting beside the girl, patiently expecting to hear what the doctor saw, what was the cause of this discomfort. I looked, my friend said, and there was an eye staring back. Inside the little girl’s ear, there was an eye gazing unblinkingly back at me. Ok, I said to myself, I’m the doctor. I must be calm. I must try to understand what is here, what it is that I am seeing. She looked again, trying to be dispassionate, the eye continued to stare back at her, from inside the girl’s ear. It shone like glass from the narrow cubicle of the ear. Glass, my friend thought. A doll’s eye. Somehow, this girl has a doll’s eye, pushed like a pea up a nose, deep inside her ear, looking out at the world through the aperture of the ear, looking straight at the doctor, wondering what she would do now?