Answers arise by sitting with breath. An open heart/mind. No Atman. No permanent Self.
Face the mirror, Janus. Face the wall.
3. MEASURE OF AND CONCEPTUALIZED CURIOSITY
In certain geographical regions curiosity is a blight, one that spreads virally,
destroying hectares and administrative terrain
more expansive than a city,
though smaller than the breadth of curiosity.
4. HEMISPHERICAL BRAIN
Fated to a lonely meadow.
Pines will grow.
Pine needles suture you to earth,
your seams burst as you attempt to soar,
one-of-a-kind buttons, eye hooks:
an orchestral setting of notions.
Patterns pervade, override the redesign.
5. THE CURIOSITY MODEL
Mapping the microcircuitry of the brain
6. CURIOSITY TYPES
Bone flap and blooming flight
Toward the spiral house
Stations of the stars crossing the parting sky
We wave at it as it passes
Old passageways
That have been renovated
Look inside your bones
For your bonus
A safe delivery system
7. THE ARCHITECTURE OF CURIOSITY
Psyche fades into a hungry ghost, following streams to quench fiery passion
that cannot be cooled. She is dressed daily in fresh tears and rented underwear
by Worry and Sadness.
Questions arise from the stem of the body.
It might start as a rapid pulse, roots balancing your strength.
It might start as a bend in streams and a surge
To upending, an opening. It might
Start as a stand of soft wood trees, useless wood.
A cowbird’s egg dropped in a black-capped vireo’s nest.
The Migratory Bird Treaty cracks.
Questions float over spaces of water,
Fog thick.
There’s the gamble, the hunt, the chase,
And addiction to gambling, hunting, chasing.
Soul and Desire sit on opposite sides of the gaming table.
Mystery Religion cutting Major Arcana cards.
The questions appear answered,
And yet you cannot complete your study,
Cannot believe the data. The infinite tug for more.
Tides of welling language rebleed sterile fields with brain irradiation. Swelling.
Psyche: When I lit the candle, I dreamed of beholding the prince whose heart
and bed I shared. And there he was! Shouldn’t we see with clear vision those
we sleep beside? What wrong had I committed? Who is he? Who am I?
Think of a dream seamstress, a songster, a siren,
A shore breeze with wavy tresses
Blowing out the beaks of pipers,
The hollow low notes that dip on the concave clavicle
Wending viola strings
Think of the pattern cutter, a dreamstress,
Tree witness and earlobe globes.
Nothing permitted, permanent
The writhen octopus
Or octave written in wind
Cupīdō; (or desire) compels our hunting drive.
A rocking horse whinnying in a dense forest, leaden trees too close together to slip past the tongue
For self-defense
Psyche: My search for reasons the gods invaded my life began for real after he vanished to heal his wound.
8. THE MORAL AMBIGUITY OF CURIOSITY
Right? Left? Yes, both! Thrice! Across the spectrum, here and not. Chase it?
9. CURIOSITY AND LOGIC
Psyche’s glass tower from which she defenestrates breaks into whirling word.
Her curiosity leaps to sleep, tumbles into a wind dance of muted mutterings,
tongue-tied, tone tongs, when sleep seeps through the gateless moon gate.
Though on a more speculative note, curiosity requires immersion and loss of
control,
requires specters and speculums,
requires the sacrifice of reflection.
10. EXPLORATION AND CURIOSITY
Windowpanes frame blowing glass,
bowing grasses, skeletal ice ghosts
Surging, rolling on your side.
Sand clogging the joints of doors and joinery, eye sockets
Glued tight. Outside the grains of time, outside the time machine
Washing dream, waves wishing away our gains
spitting out sand
You wash up in your hourglass house,
The bell jar du jour
(Blessings are bestowed on Psyche for each of her impossible
trials … the most trivial creatures sort out her problems, and
she stops asking why.)
The story ends at a wedding fest in which Soul and Desire fuse.
But now they are wounded,
have wandered long in wondering,
are wiser though wrenched.
The soul is less interested in knowing. Knows too much.
Searches for forgetfulness.
The Mystery seeks form, then language to express form, then transforms.
A low-flying dragon, slash-and-burn cultivation of a young soul.
Father, Ether, Sea
Maud Casey
Like all of the hysterics from the belle époque, she seemed to deny her past, and when questioned about the slightest detail from that part of her life, she responded with a refusal tinged with anger.
—“Quelques souvenirs de la Salpêtrière”
A. Baudouin, Paris Médical 21 (1925)
When the hunger comes, bread, onions, artichokes, herring—I douse it all with vinegar and stuff my face until I cannot breathe.
I was born to go nowhere, the doctors said. Still, every day, there is a choice and I make it. I go somewhere. What next?
Let me begin again.
When I lost my hand all I wanted was the ether. With amyl nitrite, a burst of kaleidoscopic colors too quickly gone; with chloroform, dreams both pleasant and painful but mostly painful. With ether, agreeable and voluptuous dreams, a brightening, the infinite moving through me. I feel nothing, which isn’t nowhere at all. In the days when I was queen, I’d sip from stolen bottles—the doctors often careless, leaving the bottle after they’d applied the cloth. Twelve years after the great doctor’s death, the death of the diagnosis, the death of my queendom, and so on and whatnot, no one cares to put me under. Now I work in the radiology lab. I work in it and it has worked in me. Still, for everything sharpened, everything crisped, I look everywhere for the little bottles. When I find them, in that expanding light, something floats up from my past, that great well of surprise. The apple stolen from a basket of fruit and candy a visitor brought to a patient, eaten in a back corner at the Hôpital Temporaire, where I worked years or decades ago as a ward girl. Only slightly bruised, that apple is still the sweetest I’ve ever tasted.
Today, the new doctor wandering the radiology lab startled me with a question and my father floated up out of that well. There he was, promising, as he forever was, to take us to the sea, by which he meant the Seine, that dirty river. Even the blocks of ice bobbing in it in the winter were dirty. It doesn’t count, my brothers and I would say. What exactly were we counting? We’d never seen anything else.
“They say those attacks were simulated,” the new doctor whispered to the intern I had recently spurned, as if it were all a secret. The new doctor has a droopy, yearning mustache. A young man but terrible posture, all of him a little wilted. He nodded his head in my direction, curious as the rest. Tucked inside his sentence, questions: Did you and the great doctor or didn’t you? Why did you tear the linens? Why did you break the plates? And questions he didn’t have the imagination to ask: Do you dream about your missing arm? What is the difference between abandoned and unfortunate? Why did your father throw you o
ut the window?
Bread, onion, artichoke, herring, vinegar, vinegar, vinegar, vinegar.
Let me begin again.
Was it soon after he lost his job as a carpenter that my father piled my brothers and me on a train to the sea? He’d found piecemeal work with a milliner who wanted him to go to Dunkirk to visit a business on his behalf in Saint-Omer, where he hoped to sell some of his hats on consignment. Maybe my father knew an engineer who snuck us into a compartment? That day felt, it feels, like the beginning of everything, not the end. Surely my mother could not have given up a day of work, particularly since my father had been for a while between jobs. I wish I could come, she said, but why would she wish that? She was glad to be rid of us for a few days. Maybe, even fleetingly, she wished us gone for good because when we wish these things how can we ever know it might actually come true?
We lived next to one of the largest metalworking factories in Paris, outside of which were piles of thick iron sheets, waiting always to be moved. In the winter, my brothers and I watched as men chipped ice from them. Next door to the factory was the ironworks with a puddling furnace where my brothers would eventually work, loading pig iron into a wheelbarrow, heaving it into the furnace, removing the slag. One day, not long after he took us to the sea, my father wandered in. Someone pulled the chain to the weight that opened the scorching furnace door, and he tried to crawl inside. The men working the furnace pulled him back. Only his pants caught fire, which disappointed him greatly. The delirium lasted weeks. It landed him in bed #40 of the Saint Charles Ward, where a nun gave my mother a vial containing six drops of some mysterious thing. After that, he was carted off to an asylum never to be heard from again.
“They say you were only making fools of them,” the droopy, yearning doctor said again as if my lost hand meant I was deaf too. He sidled up gently, not understanding it was never gentleness that brought me around in the amphitheater. Bright lights, strips of magnesium, whistles. There was an enormous gong. Bang that, I’m yours.
“The doctors?” he added, as if my silence meant confusion.
He wanted the truth, as if it were a bottle of camphor or a bone. I kept my eyes on my work. I said nothing and he said nothing more, perched on the edge of his imagination where I was on my knees. Who among us hasn’t been? His eyes threw heat, not altogether unpleasant.
“One of those hysterics who has had her moment of fame,” said the spurned intern, who is never not watching. After I wouldn’t let him maneuver me into the closet a second time, he would have liked to perform the amputation himself. Women have their fragility but men are so easily wounded. He had rough, unspecific hands. I only had the burns then. That was when I first began working in the radiology lab. I hadn’t yet lost a single finger.
“This is not the amphitheater,” I said, gesturing with my stump. It usually scared him off. There was a time I would have said oh leave me alone, every night I am put under I no longer know what I’m doing or what I’ve become but that was a long time ago, when I would lie down in the courtyard for hours and refuse to get up.
“She’s better since she lost the hand,” the intern says, not as though he wants me to hear, as though I’m not here at all.
“I’m missing a hand,” I said. “I’m not deaf.”
“Dead, not deaf,” the intern said. Subtle he is not. Still, there are days when I would rather be as lost as my hand and the era when I was queen. All of it vanished—where did it go?
That’s when the droopy, yearning doctor startled me. “What comforts you?” he asked. His curiosity was a door opening. The intern took him by the arm, steered him elsewhere in the lab. “What are you on about?” the intern asked him. “Don’t get mixed up in that.” His own curiosity so often swerved into meanness. Still, the new doctor’s question lingered. It lingers. I misinterpreted his mustache. Yearning? Maybe, but not drooping, not wilted.
Let me begin again.
From Paris to Dunkirk, did my father tell us stories as the train heaved in and out of stations on its way to the sea? After he climbed into the furnace, my brothers said everything he told us wasn’t true but what is life if not the lies we tell about it? Truth is not camphor or a bone. The stories we tell, adjacent at best. Even the moon is a liar; it appears to be waxing when it is waning, waning when it is waxing. When I was a plastic mass of flesh and bones molded at the will of the doctors, a soft wax figure—the queen!—on to which the most fantastic emotions could be imprinted, truth seemed beside the point. They said we had an essentially perverse nature, that we sought to fool those around us in the same way our impulse was to steal, falsely accuse, set things on fire. We had a need to lie for no reason and to no end. They said this as if it were some great discovery, as if it had nothing to do with them. They had never lied out of desperation, or just because they could? They hypnotized us and told us ammonia was rose water, charcoal was chocolate, a top hat was a baby to be cradled. Who among us hasn’t tried to wring a little fun out of the struggle?
Let me begin again.
The hospital has always been a museum full of dead things. Anatomical drawings. A cabinet full of skulls. Spinal columns. Entire skeletons. When the great doctor died, he became one of the dead things. Still, there he is, hanging on the wall in the painting by André Brouillet, nine by thirteen feet, the greatest success of the Salon of 1887, according to a review in The Temp. A million sets of eyes came to the Palais de l’Industrie to see A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière. Twenty-seven men (doctors, philosophers, two novelists, an art critic who was also a collector, the artist himself) and two nurses, larger than life-sized, gather around a swooning woman with spectacular bosoms, a woman who is me. By the time the painting was finished, I’d been there ten years, the Marie I was when I arrived painted over, and there was Blanche, all swoon and fiery revelation. My face says tragedy, mystery; my clenched fist, the contracture—that long-gone hand, as alive as the long-gone great doctor—says hysteria. How odd to see the shape someone makes of you when a whole life of days can go by, a hunger with no shape at all. The gap between how we are measured and how we feel—isn’t that called life?
The painting, born from a desire to look; in it, I look. The eyes on the back of my head look onto one of those endless Parisian rains that double blur the days. The slick courtyard stones, damp and cold as the stone floor of the church where my mother sent me for confession as a girl. “What next?” the priest asked. “What next, my child?” Inattention to prayers, the sin of gluttony, no end to what next. “What next?” In the painting, the doctor cradling my swoon, does he feel my child’s heart racing ahead of itself, racing up ahead years later to what next? I was an imaginative child but never could I have imagined my way into that painted swoon. My searching child’s heart, like my father’s when he was a boy, raced ahead, curious about its future. One day, not able to read a sign on the door, he walked into a random home to beg a scrap of bread. The home turned out to be the office of the mayor, who walked him directly to the jail for violating the local ordinance against begging. There wasn’t one against not being able to read.
What next? What next? Ticking inside me, a hunger clock. Bread, onions, artichokes, herring, vinegar, vinegar, vinegar, vinegar.
Let me begin again.
“My father, I loved him more than anyone else in the world,” my father told us as if we were not his children but strangers he met on that train. His father was a miller. His mother died when he was a baby. That he was ever a baby, that seemed strange enough; that he grew from a baby into a boy stranger still. We listened, his life rushing by us like the world outside the train windows. One day, he was that boy and he was leaving school. He saw people running, his uncle among them. There must be something extraordinary! What could it be? He was thrilled by the possibilities, that wide-open feeling of anything, anything one has before it becomes clear that anything, anything contains every possible thing from delight to wreckage. He would find his father. His father would tell him what it was. Up ahead,
his uncle fell to the ground. When he saw how badly the mill had been damaged, he fainted rather than see more. The windmill was not turning. A lightning bolt struck one of the vanes and it broke apart, trapping my father’s father underneath. People led my father away and he never saw his father again. You are abandoned, his aunt said, you must come live with us now. “What are you saying?” his uncle shouted. He isn’t abandoned, he insisted, only unfortunate. “This distinction,” my father said to me and my brothers, “it is everything. I am not abandoned, only unfortunate.”
“You are not abandoned, only unfortunate,” he said when he gathered me up after he threw me out the window. Whenever he said it, he was telling our future, mine and my brothers. He was telling us how to live after he was gone, which would be sooner than any of us thought.
Let me begin again.
What next? My curious heart races ahead.
The placid and delectable Alsatian, that’s what they called me when I arrived at the hospital twenty-eight years ago. Placid? I could put it on. Delectable? Perhaps. But Alsatian? I was born in Paris but it did not fit their story made not of camphor, not of bone, these doctors, these emperors of anecdote. The queen of gongs and tremors and tuning forks began in the City of Light. When the lights sharpen to the point of sound, take me to the city of shadows. Bread, onions, herring, artichoke, vinegar, vinegar, vinegar, vinegar.
The first thing they wrote when I arrived was: She is tall (five feet three inches) and corpulent (154 pounds). She is blonde and has a lymphatic complexion. Her skin is white and freckled. Her breasts are very large. There is a scar on the upper outside of her left thigh.
The first thing I did when I arrived was leave. Eighteen years old, I snuck out of the hospital. I was gone for hours but I never left the Grands Boulevards. Where would I have gone? Those first nights in the hospital, I was not yet Blanche, only Marie. I cried out in my sleep, “Blanche! Blanche! Come quick!” This is what they told me. This was before the ether; still, I have no memory of those nights. Was Blanche a dead sister? they wondered. I thought, well, somewhere there’s a dead sister named Blanche, but she’s not mine. I have two brothers who might be dead, but I did not tell them that. I love the name Blanche. It’s always made me think: bosoms. Even now I have spectacular bosoms. I became Blanche and then I became the queen. Throughout Europe, the doctor became great but I was the queen and even he, in all his greatness, understood the queen was greater.
A Cabinet of Curiosity Page 28
