Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  moving ahead of me to hold

  whatever I ask of it, simply splits in two

  any meaning I could make of a face, now entirely in shadow,

  already having turned a corner on the street

  in the story I was reading last night, Aschenbach

  and his boy—

  lean, aristocratic,

  pale with illness, or made pale

  by the eye of illness

  that splits in two any purpose I might

  make of following wherever illness draws the eye

  to see how everything pales,

  delicate, almost unearthly—

  tiles on the bathroom wall, these celibate cups of coffee

  before the coffee is poured,

  which I want to string one beside another

  to secure my usual passage from object to object

  through a day,

  all of their surfaces curiously similar,

  as illness sees them—

  like beads

  polished nearly to transparence,

  so as to mirror back to me whatever surrounds them,

  even shadow,

  which can turn from inquisitive, a fawn’s gray,

  to inquisitional, the hoarder’s black,

  changes that split along what I sense are a moment’s

  natural fault lines,

  moment within moment, as I follow the feel of the ‘splitting’ itself,

  its sharpness, which is everywhere this morning,

  arising now as coffee too hot on my tongue, or the sun, too bright from behind

  the curtain, or the acupuncture needle

  I’ve learned to guide into my skin, into the thickness,

  so as to feel the shock

  of piercing through—

  as though, under the skin, an emptiness

  might be reached,

  where a boy-feeling is turning a corner

  within a shadow, within

  the illness, within this sharpness most of all.

  This morning, a slight shine

  along a ridge of my hand, yesterday’s needle marks

  beginning to scar,

  which I stare at too long. The dizziness,

  its prickly wounds, might be a menagerie of sharpnesses,

  or might be one sharpness

  that the rest are only mirroring, and sharpness itself

  another bead to string

  along the formlessness of deep pursuit, which is more painful

  today than usual,

  as though the core of something

  were wanting to be exposed, to have its mirrored surface scratched,

  too easy

  to call it emptiness.

  I had a blue stuffed rabbit, given to me when I was three

  that I carried everywhere for years.

  I don’t know what happened to it, but I do remember

  looking into its eyes and no longer feeling it

  look back.

  Something always looking back

  in everything I’ve forgotten—in the origins

  of this illness,

  or now, years later,

  in the origins of its healing—

  another city

  always sealed within the walls of this city,

  seemingly unreachable,

  where the intuition that follows

  sharpness

  naturally is drawn

  where the needle goes, which won’t

  be hurried.

  Aschenbach decides he will go on a journey; this is what he tells himself. “Not far—not all the way to the tigers.” (Thomas Mann)

  ill-timed (24.4)

  In the middle of the night, in the kitchen, I find the loaf of cranberry nut bread in the refrigerator, and I eat a slice. It isn’t the worst thing in the kitchen for me to eat. It will do my liver the least damage, of the possible damages I could choose. It is grainy and sweet with the flavor of failed discipline,

  which tastes like staring at a mirror into my own eyes

  long enough to see nothing but surface

  evaporating into shape drenched with sky, its dark blue skirt swirling

  within all the surfaces that

  surface

  denies to sight.

  Licking the last bread crumb from my finger, I sense

  a whorled crevice of warm shadows within the crumb’s flavor, a home

  to slip inside of,

  where I want to stay

  but can’t,

  though it surrounds me,

  being both sides of memory at once—

  behind me, as what I can’t ever return to

  and before me, as what I still can’t wake up to.

  ill-timed (24.5)

  Lifting a necklace—

  a polished piece of oddly-shaped ivory on a thin leather strap, which I

  haven’t worn in years—

  from its hook on my bedroom wall, next to the window,

  and another bedroom wall lifting itself from out of my forgetfulness

  where there had been a necklace of thought I’d draped daily

  around the hope

  of moving on from that room,

  though I was mostly just looking out the window at an evergreen,

  probably a pine, taller each year,

  but, in any given moment,

  its absolute stillness seeming entirely beyond the life I was living,

  or beyond what I understood life to mean,

  a lifelessness

  in such stillness, shot through with green, would sometimes

  fill the window,

  until looking itself was

  a lifelessness

  that, years later, could coincide with whatever self

  I hadn’t understood I’d been becoming.

  David Wolach

  BODY MAPS AND DISTRACTION ZONES

  just as certain building types remain missing

  because their functions are yet unknown,

  certain functions are unknown because their

  behaviors are still untried.

  —ROBERT KOCIK, from overcoming fitness

  from poem to (or as?) a poetics of action

  The writing of occultations and a smaller “companion” book, as yet unpublished, hospitalogy, began as a subtle loss of motor function, which followed a sudden loss of balance. in late 2004, while it was becoming clear that the iraq occupation was going to last a long time (along with the bush regime), questions of domestic surveillance (just how are we being watched?) began to more publicly meld into questions of outsourcing law enforcement and the suppression of information (just who is watching us? and how are we watching one another? in what capacity/to what end?). nearly at the same time, while working as a labor organizer and as performing artist, this so-called body began to underline its own becoming, showing itself to be as degenerative (or as on-the-move) as our supposed “rights.” this head would fall to the side. these arms wouldn’t move as quickly or as accurately as before. widespread pain took up residence without paying rent. what strange processes were at work here? what i could not see or feel was what was really happening, said doctors. and what was really happening was programmed before i was born, they said.

  the body as occulted and occulting metaphor, that evidentiary “social becoming,” which both makes perceptible and hides (at once) its histories, identities and vulnerabilities—this is more than “merely metaphorical.” finding myself increasingly closed off from what, in the early part of a lifelong illness, i called “primary” information sources, i.e., being part of an alt. news story, being involved (in the case of labor activism, lgbt rights campaigning or anti-war activism) rather than getting information online or in the newspaper, and “closed off” from particular activities i had taken as primary to at least one identity, i asked not: what is this situation of accelerated becoming good for? but: in what ways has this so-called body always been a site of occultation, a deluded witness, where m
y understanding of agency has been predicated on layers of mediations much thinner than anything here should allow for? to frame things this way is to think of the body, or poem, as shorn predicament, where its languages, this predicament’s public utterances, are not only muted and constricted and shaped by the catastrophes of late capitalism (including the medical industrial complex), but are also in some ways necessarily complicit in the making (narrating) of catastrophe. as constantly shifting locus of where the felt and yet to be felt touch, a body becomes associated with the wound, its constant chatter the reaction to, and evidence of, its violation or deletion, such that the mythos of body-as-enclosure is either reinforced or, at least temporarily, obliterated. to choose to speak or to say under such conditions is supposedly to choose to act in this way instead of that, but choice here becomes part of the predicament: there’s an open question as to whether under constant surveillance, constricted, this degraded motor of constant utterance, the becoming subject, can meet kocik’s ideal of taking its-self as -selves, a desiring multiple, capable moving outside of its (their) usual environs, habit (at)s, poetic quarters, and make new (and salubriously new) behaviors.

  and yet i take it as imperative that the question of capability, hence one formulation of agency, be temporarily suspended, that we lay bare, as poet rob halpern writes, to the possibilities that suspending a “proprietary relation to one’s own enclosed individuality” might afford us (brolaski, kaufman, and grinnell, 77). or in any case that we must act under the assumption that we can make new behaviors however confined or vulnerable our situation becomes. when poet and activist allison cobb reads from the poems of guantanamo at public gatherings, i am viscerally reminded that if the tortured prisoner of occupation can assume the responsibility of putting voice to occulted atrocity, then so might any of us act. and so a couple years into the writing, after doing the first few corporeal procedures/performances for the books (and sometimes of necessity), various connected urgent questions, many of them informed by nonsite collective’s discussions on agency and somatic practices, began to emerge. i mention again one of these: what is this situation of accelerated becoming good for? where by “good” i mean this body’s (bodies’) potential as site(s) of resistance and re-narration. as i got deeper into occultations, i felt a growing sense that what this body-poetic might be good for is a blanket unknown, and should be, cannot help but be: as kocik notes, to conceive of new functions entails active construction of new behaviors.

  in conversation with somatic practices found in dance, in body work, and lately in the work of several contemporary poets, occultations and hospitalogy begin as site-specific corporeal procedures, or “live arts performances,” the output of which is the written, the oft-called “poem.” i think of both “projects” as forming non-enclosed investigatory aesthetic ecosystems, where the poem is (as can be argued to be always the case) more than or beyond what occurs at the site of the page. hospitalogy, at one point part of occultations the book, is an ongoing series of poems, many of them epistolary, written in hospitals and medical clinics, and reciprocally performed or shared in hospitals and medical clinics. i’m interested in “queering” these landscape, registering affectively the systemic reductionism that is the medical industrial complex, exploring the “sick society” contra the “sick” or “disabled” human animal (to paraphrase writer susan parenti). occultations likewise (but written away from hospitals and clinics) makes use of (four) different corporeal practices, one per section, ranging from collaborative ritual (thanks to performance artist and poet kythe heller) to staging “distraction zones in miniature,” which, as i note at end of the book, involve writing poems that:

  ...are transcriptions...the object was to create an environment, a “distraction zone in miniature,” part of which would be the “subject-body” attempting to “voice” thru signing, thru lyric, thru direct address, its struggle to “enunciate” or “speak” or “articulate” its fractures, multiples, constrictions, and, it turns out under such circumstances, its univocality, under staged duress, not to compile or to shape what has been compiled...these poems struggle to (un)map and (de)articulate the body’s position within a zone of pre-established discomfort, distraction, “noise,” indicative of the surveillance-industrial complex, allegorizing and modeling larger or more systemic zones of distraction which, in often hidden ways, mediate experience and construct the subject, in which necessarily, more thorough apprehension, re-narration, or articulation of that zone and its effects is precluded by the establishment of the zone itself: the increasing difficulty of voicing anything as distress presses down. how might one see, or hear, for instance, the logic of privatized militarism, not through a poem but through a degraded poem-attempt, and in what ways does that logic construct (constrict) how we see or hear? in what ways can the distraction zone in miniature make legible such occulted phenomena, or at least make visible the traces or imprints of such phenomena on the poem (body)? such a “staging” hopes to, in some small way, radicalize the participant...

  perhaps as someone marked as “disabled,” or as gendered by heteronormative discourses, i’ve become acutely interested in a militancy or radicalism of vulnerability, leading me, in collaboration often, to draw out the unacknowledged redundancy of everyday alienation, that the subject becomes so alienated (“super-alienated”) that merely staging in domestic space crude recapitulations of the partitioning violence that is already pervasive, simply framing it, shakes us up, produces rather new feelings and behaviors, not least of which, the affective, somatic, kinesthetic, and not merely cognitive acknowledgment that we’ve been enduring such repressive conditions for a long time without giving such endurance that much affective attention—the resulting behavior that of relating to one-another (as collaborators) after the fact as if experiencing alienation or violation for the first time. such a project is, in a sense, a sort of abject erotics but also a sort of mediation, and owes much to the investigatory-somatic work performed by david buuck and ca conrad, among others, and to poet’s theater generally. examples of distraction zones performed (usually in groups of 4, where solitary actions are performed in rotation over hours, days or months) are:

  • writing while being fed my writing—one hour of handwritten “confessional poetry”—as exploration of appendix m of cia memorandum on use of food as tool for interrogation.

  • writing while watching 1) online homemade pornography (no audio), and 2) surgical imaging stills of the inside of my urinary tract. oscillating between viewing (1) and (2), 30 second intervals.

  • writing in rain 34f, just after running for one hour on treadmill at midnight with neuromuscular disease— exploration of appendix m of cia interrogations manual: stress holds.

  • writing in silence after sitting in a chair and being watched by collaborator for 9 hours. trading positions afterwards.

  • writing a poem after staying in one room of a house alone for 4 weeks (“home-bound”). followed by recorded sounds of sex as collaborative poem.

  so, in thinking about the ways our aesthetic practices both hide and make perceptible occulted phenomena (including our utterances/practices themselves), i began tracing out what i kept calling (to myself) body maps and distraction zones, a set of site-specific and corporeal procedures that would interrogate “this body,” what “the body” can do as both metaphor and metaphor-maker. i was and still am interested in mapping social hot zones through bodily response and sensorial archeology, doing so through various language games. in occultations i focused on this shorn predicament in relation to the larger sociopolitical frame as a problem regarding how to imagine mapping (undermining the notion of the map brought to us by colonization) a so-called body’s invisible alleyways, its (their, as after all, “the body,” again, should not presuppose locational or temporal unity) hidden, often invisible “marks” left by social forces not benign. i started with the body-as-map, and the body-map as abstracted constellation of sensed differences, gaps, causal movements, traced wounds
, home-bound presuppositions, contradictions and mediations, where tracing this body’s symptoms in relation to an ableist neoliberal world, a world in which the hospital industrial complex makes “obsolete” different bodies, becomes one that resists, at the same time, referentiality and the sort of identity politics that potentially makes of “the body” or “a body” a visible commodity, a “bland fetish,” as halpern once called such sedimenting discourses, an abstraction lacking the contradictions and stakes of real bodies, the boundaries of which are, contrary to normative ascriptions, unknown, perhaps nonexistent. in both occultations and hospitalogy the poem hopes to be both affective and a data-like (lyric as data, as score?) form of care, a place that lays bare, and in so doing, hopes to be that derridean “gift of death,” or as i’ve been thinking of it since, an abstracted commons, where, crucially, this commons becomes habitable, a shared space for nourishment, through submitting itself as document and investigation to further use, further action.

  both of these frames, or lenses, that of the body as shorn predicament and as potential commons, i brought to the writing in very different ways in both recent books. this is by no means to suggest that the books in any way succeed in offering a kind of care, or help us towards forming a common or aggregate space/body of non-enclosure, or do trace out relationships between the political and the personal body. nor is it to imply that i think “success,” or poetry simpliciter, would come from a sort of legibility. rather, care-taking, performance of reclamation of our lived and affective environments, a sort of radicalization and attempted trigger for action, are, for me, among just a few ways i’ve been thinking of lately viz. how poetry, and here, a poetry emerging from post-ableist disability, could be potentially useful—beyond, of course, as sensuousness mode of production, as simply useful in and for itself.