A Google search for the phrase “Stop hating on cutters” yields only one result, a posting on a message board called Things You Wish People Would Stop Hating On. Seriously the least they need is some idiotic troll calling them emo for cutting/burning etc. “Emo” being code for affect as performance: the sad show. People say cutters are just doing it for the attention, but why does “just” apply? A cry for attention is positioned as the ultimate crime, clutching or trivial—as if “attention” were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn’t wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human—and isn’t granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?
There’s an online quiz titled “Are you a real cutter or do you cut for fun?” full of statements to be agreed or disagreed with: I don’t know what it really feels like inside when you have problems, I just love to be the center of attention. Gradations grow finer inside the taboo: some cut from pain, others for show. Hating on cutters—or at least these cutter-performers—tries to draw a boundary between authentic and fabricated pain, as if we weren’t all some complicated mix of wounds we can’t let go of and wounds we can’t help; as if choice itself weren’t always some blend of character and agency. How much do we choose to feel anything? The answer, I think, is nothing satisfying—we do, and we don’t. But hating on cutters insists desperately upon our capacity for choice. People want to believe in self-improvement—it’s an American ethos, pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps—and here we have the equivalent of affective downward mobility: cutting as a failure to feel better, as deliberately going on a kind of sympathetic welfare—taking some shortcut to the street cred of pain without actually feeling it.
I used to cut. It embarrasses me to admit now because it feels less like a demonstration of some pain I’ve suffered and more like an admission that I’ve wanted to hurt. But I’m also irritated by my own embarrassment. There was nothing false about my cutting. It was what it was, neither horrifying nor productive. I felt like I wanted to cut my skin and my cutting was an expression of that desire. There is no lie in that, only a tautology and a question: what made me want to cut at all? Cutting was query and response at once. I cut because my unhappiness felt nebulous and elusive and I thought it could perhaps hold the shape of a line across my ankle. I cut because I was curious what it would feel like to cut. I cut because I needed very badly to ratify a shaky sense of self, and embodied unhappiness felt like an architectural plan.
I wish we lived in a world where no one wanted to cut. But I also wish that instead of disdaining cutting or the people who do it—or else shrugging it off, just youthful angst—we might direct our attention to the unmet needs beneath its appeal. Cutting is an attempt to speak and an attempt to learn. The ways we court bleeding or psychic pain—hurting ourselves with razors or hunger or sex—are also seductions of knowledge. Blood comes before the scar; hunger before the apple. I hurt myself to feel is the cutter’s cliché, but it’s also true. Bleeding is experiment and demonstration, excavation, interior turned out—and the scar remains as residue, pain turned to proof. I don’t think of cutting as romantic or articulate, but I do think it manifests yearning, a desire to testify, and it makes me wonder if we could come to a place where proof wasn’t necessary at all.
Wound #3
Recounting a low point in the course of her anorexia, Carolyn Knapp describes standing in a kitchen and taking off her shirt, on the pretext of changing outfits, so her mother could see her bones more clearly:
I wanted her to see how the bones in my chest and shoulders stuck out, and how skeletal my arms were, and I wanted the sight of this to tell her something I couldn’t have begun to communicate myself: something about pain … an amalgam of buried wishes and unspoken fears.
Whenever I read accounts of the anorexic body as a semiotic system (as Knapp says, “describing in flesh a pain I could not communicate in words”) or an aesthetic creation (“the inner life … as a sculpture in bone”), I feel a familiar wariness. Not just at the familiarity of these metaphors—bone as hieroglyph, clavicle as cry—but at the way they risk performing the same valorization they claim to refute: ascribing eloquence to the starving body, a kind of lyric grace. I feel like I’ve heard it before: the author is still nostalgic for the belief that starving could render angst articulate. I used to write lyrically about my own eating disorder in this way, taking recourse in bone-as-language, documenting the gradual dumb show of my emergent parts—knobs and spurs and ribs. A friend calls these “rituals of surveying”; she describes what it feels like to love “seeing veins and tendons becoming visible.”
But underneath this wariness—must we stylize?—I remember that starvation is pain, beyond and beneath any stylized expression: there is an ache at its root and an obsession attending every moment of its realization. The desire to speak about that obsession can be symptom as much as cure; everything ultimately points back to pain—even and especially these clutches at nostalgia or abstraction.
What I appreciate about Knapp’s kitchen bone-show, in the end, is that it doesn’t work. Her mom doesn’t remark on the skeleton in her camisole. The subject only comes up later, at the dinner table, when Knapp drinks too much wine and tells her parents she has a problem. The soulful silent cry of bones in kitchen sunlight—that elegiac, faintly mythic anorexia—is trumped by Merlot and messy confession.
If substituting body for speech betrays a fraught relationship to pain—hurting yourself but also keeping quiet about the hurt, implying it without saying it—then having it “work” (mother noticing the bones) would somehow corroborate the logic: let your body say it for you. But here it doesn’t. We want our wounds to speak for themselves, Knapp seems to be saying, but usually we end up having to speak for them: Look here. Each of us must live with a mouth full of request, and full of hurt. How did it go again? Mouthfull of love.
Interlude: Outward
Different kinds of pain summon different terms of art: hurt, suffering, ache, trauma, angst, wounds, damage. Pain is general and holds the others under its wings; hurt connotes something mild and often emotional; angst is the most diffuse and the most conducive to dismissal as something nebulous, sourceless, self-indulgent, affected. Suffering is epic and serious; trauma implies a specific devastating event and often links to damage, its residue. While wounds open to the surface, damage happens to the infrastructure—often invisibly, often irreversibly—and damage also carries the implication of lowered value. Wound implies en media res: the cause of injury is past but the healing isn’t done; we are seeing this situation in the present tense of its immediate aftermath. Wounds suggest sex and aperture: a wound marks the threshold between interior and exterior; it marks where a body has been penetrated. Wounds suggest that the skin has been opened—that privacy has been violated in the making of the wound, a rift in the skin, and by the act of peering into it.
Wound #4
In a poem called “The Glass Essay,” about the end of a love affair, Anne Carson describes a series of visitations:
Each morning a vision came to me.
Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul.
I called them Nudes.
Nude #1. Woman alone on a hill.
She stands into the wind.
It is a hard wind slanting from the north.
Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift
And blow away on the wind, leaving
An exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle
Calling mutely through lipless mouth.
It pains me to record this,
I am not a melodramatic person.
This closing motion—It pains me to record this, / I am not a melodramatic person—performs a simultaneous announcement and disavowal of pain: this hurts; I hate saying that. The act of admitting one wound creates another: It pains me to record this. And yet, the poet must record, because the wounded self can’t express anything audible: Calling mutely through lipless mouth
.
If a wound is where interior becomes exterior, here is a woman who is almost entirely wound—an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle. Over the course of the poem, she is followed by twelve more wounded visions: a woman in a cage of thorns, a woman pierced by blades of grass, a deck of flesh cards pierced by a silver needle: The living cards are days of a woman’s life. A woman’s flesh can be played like a game of bridge, or drawn like pulled pork from her body in the aftermath of a broken heart. Each Nude is a strange, surprising, devastating tableau of pain. We aren’t allowed to rest on any single image; we move itinerant from one to the next.
Carson gives us a fourteenth nude in “Teresa of God.” “Teresa lived in a personal black cube. / I saw her hit the wall each way she moved.” Teresa dies when her heart is “rent,” and her death is a response to the constant rebellion and anguish of her living: “To her heart God sent answer.” The poem doesn’t close with her death, however, but with the impossibility of representing it: “Photographs of the event / had to be faked … when the lens kept melting.” The melting lens means Teresa can’t be immortalized into any single frame, any single Nude, any single wounded posture. Instead her suffering demands our imagination—our invention and necessary acknowledgment of “fakery” and fabrication—each time we try to picture how she hurt.
Wound #5
Here’s the CliffsNotes version: girl gets her period, girl gets scared, girl gets mocked. Girl’s mother never told her she was going to bleed. Girl gets elected prom queen and gets a bucket of pig’s blood dumped on her head just when things start looking up. Girl gets; girl gets; girl gets. Not that she is granted things but that things keep happening to her, until they don’t—until she starts doing unto others as they have done, hurting everyone who ever hurt her, moving the world with her mind, conducting its objects like an orchestra.
Stephen King’s Carrie frames menstruation itself as possible wound: a natural bleeding that Carrie misunderstands as trauma. Carrie crouches in a corner of the locker-room shower while the other girls pelt her with tampons, chanting Plug it up! Plug it up! Even the gym teacher reprimands Carrie for being so upset about the simple fact of her period: Grow up, she says, stand up. The implicit imperative: own this bleeding as inevitable blood. A real woman takes it for granted. Carrie’s mother, on the other hand, takes “the curse of blood” as direct evidence of original sin. She slaps Carrie in the head with a tract called The Sins of Women while making Carrie repeat: “Eve was weak, Eve was weak, Eve was weak.”
I think Carrie has something useful to teach us about anorexia. The disease never shows up in its plot, but we see the plausible roots of an anorexic logic—to take the shame of that bleeding and make it disappear, to deny the curse of Eve and the intrinsic vulnerability of wanting—of wanting knowledge, wanting men, wanting anything. Getting your period is one kind of wound; not getting it is another. A friend calls it “the absence of blood where blood should be.” Starvation is an act of self-wounding that preempts other wounds, that scrubs away the blood from the shower. But Carrie responds to the shame of fertility by turning it into a weapon. She doesn’t get rid of the bleeding; she gets baptized by it. She doesn’t wound herself. She wounds everyone else.
The premise of Carrie is like porn for female angst: what if you could take how hard it is to be a girl—the cattiness of frenemies, the betrayals of your own body, the terror of a public gaze—and turn all that hardship into a superpower? Carrie’s telekinesis reaches the apex of its power at the moment she is drenched in red, the moment she becomes a living wound—as if she’s just gotten her period all over herself, in front of everyone, as if she’s saying, fuck you, saying, now I know how to handle the blood.
Wound #6
Rosa Dartle is a shrew with a scar. “An old scar,” says David Copperfield, protagonist of her novel. “I should rather call it a seam.”
When Rosa was young, the boy she loved—sinister and selfish Steerforth, who didn’t love her back—eventually grew so irritated by her that he threw a hammer at her face. It slashed open her mouth. “She has borne the mark ever since,” Steerforth admits, but she does not bear it quietly. “She brings everything to the grindstone,” he says. “She is all edge.”
Rosa literally speaks through an open wound: the scar is closed, but her mouth is almost always open. The scar itself is a piece of language. As David describes it:
the most susceptible part of her face … when she turned pale, that mark altered first … lengthening out to its full extent, like a mark in invisible ink brought to the fire … now showing the whole extent of the wound inflicted by the hammer, as I had seen it when she was passionate.
I should rather call it a seam: the ugliness holds her together, knits her skin like it was fabric, gives her shape. It speaks the hurt underneath: she was spurned by the first man she loved (spurned by hammer!) and now means nothing more to him than a “mere disfigured piece of furniture … having no eyes, no ears, no feelings, no remembrances.” No eyes, no ears, no feelings. Just a scar. She still has that: “its white track cutting through her lips, quivering and throbbing as she spoke.”
Her scar doesn’t make her compassionate or sympathetic, however, only bitter and vindictive. It grants her the sensitivity of keen awareness but not of human warmth. When Steerforth spurns another woman, Rosa takes a rapturous, almost sexual pleasure in the fact of this woman’s grief. When someone tells Rosa about the woman’s plight—“she’d have beaten her head against the marble floor”—we see Rosa “leaning back upon the seat, with a light of exultation in her face, she seemed almost to caress the sounds.” Rosa wants a companion in her damage: “I would have this girl whipped to death,” she says. She can’t summon sympathy for Steerforth’s mother, either—another woman he’s abandoned. David is shocked: “if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for this afflicted mother—”
Rosa cuts him off to say: “Who feels for me?”
Wound #7
Now we have a TV show called Girls, about girls who hurt but constantly disclaim their hurting. They fight about rent and boys and betrayal, stolen yogurt and the ways self-pity structures their lives. “You’re a big, ugly wound!” one yells. The other yells back: “No, you’re the wound!” And so they volley, back and forth: You’re the wound; you’re the wound. They know women like to claim monopolies on woundedness, and they call each other out on it.
These girls aren’t wounded so much as post-wounded, and I see their sisters everywhere. They’re over it. I am not a melodramatic person. God help the woman who is. What I’ll call “post-wounded” isn’t a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from wounded affect—these women are aware that “woundedness” is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much. The post-wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: don’t cry too loud, don’t play victim, don’t act the old role all over again. Don’t ask for pain meds you don’t need; don’t give those doctors another reason to doubt the other women on their examination tables. Post-wounded women fuck men who don’t love them and then they feel mildly sad about it, or just blasé about it, more than anything they refuse to care about it, refuse to hurt about it—or else they are endlessly self-aware about the posture they have adopted if they allow themselves this hurting.
The post-wounded posture is claustrophobic. It’s full of jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick-on-the-heels of anything that might look like self-pity. I see it in female writers and their female narrators, troves of stories about vaguely dissatisfied women who no longer fully own their feelings. Pain is everywhere and nowhere. Post-wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, apathetic, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity m
ight split their careful seams of intellect. I should rather call it a seam. We have sewn ourselves up. We bring everything to the grindstone.
Wound #8
In a review of Louise Glück’s Collected Poems, Michael Robbins calls her “a major poet with a minor range.” He specifies this range to pain: “Every poem is The Passion of Louise Glück, starring the grief and suffering of Louise Glück. But someone involved in the production knows how to write very well indeed.” I could take issue with Robbins’s “every,” or the condescension embedded in “starring,” but in the end I’m most interested in his conjunction. “But” implies that Glück can be a poet who matters only despite her fixation on suffering, that this “minor range” is what her intelligence and skill must constantly overcome.
Robbins frustrates me and speaks for me at once. I find myself in a bind. I’m tired of female pain and also tired of people who are tired of it. I know the hurting woman is a cliché but I also know lots of women still hurt. I don’t like the proposition that female wounds have gotten old; I feel wounded by it.
I felt particularly wounded by the brilliant and powerful female poet who visibly flinched during a writing workshop at Harvard when I started reciting Sylvia Plath. She’d asked us each to memorize a poem and I’d chosen “Ariel,” which felt like its own thirteenth line, black sweet blood mouthfuls, fierce and surprising and hurting and free.
“Please,” this brilliant and powerful woman said, as if herself in pain. “I’m just so tired of Sylvia Plath.”
I had this terrible feeling that every woman who knew anything about anything was tired of Sylvia Plath, tired of her blood and bees and the level of narcissistic self-pity required to compare her father to Hitler—but I’d been left behind. I hadn’t gotten the highbrow girl-memo: Don’t Read the Girls Who Cried Pain. I was still staring at Plath while she stared at her own bleeding skin, skin she’d sliced with a knife: What a thrill—my thumb instead of an onion. Sylvia and I were still obsessed with the density of a wound—thumb stump, pulp of heart—thrilled and shamed by it.
The Empathy Exams: Essays Page 21
