Once upon a time, a girl put things up her nose, repeatedly. Another girl only pretended to have swallowed marbles and required that her parents attend to her complaint, repeatedly. Once upon a time, a professor of Irish literature had a member of the class bake the kind of traditional cake that appears in James Joyce’s Dubliners for the final day of class. Objects are buried inside each slice of cake, and the object received foretells the recipient’s future. The professor, an otherwise respectable and dignified man, slowly pulled a wadded-up “rag” from inside his mouth, at which point the student baker volunteered that it was a square she’d cut out of an old pair of her jeans. The rest of the class, meanwhile, fished inside their slices for an object clue, only to realize there weren’t any: all the other tokens, baked in, were made of plastic and had melted into the cake.
Once upon a time, a boy put a raisin up his nose and never told anyone; he often wondered whatever happened to that raisin. Later, he put a pin into the stomach of a stuffed animal and wondered what happened to the pin thereafter. Nobody but he knew that the stuffed animal had been altered, and he enjoyed imagining the pin floating around inside its plush interiors.
Ask your guests at a dinner party to remember some momentous swallow, and even if such a question doesn’t seem in the least bit appetizing, each will have her say, because each of us has at least one formative swallow, one out-of-the-ordinary episode at the threshold of the mouth that made us who we are. All acts of swallowing are psychosocial at the core, not just cases of hysterical swallowing, because we don’t come into the world self-integrated (our egos perfectly continuous with our bodies, our bodies confluent with our sense of self) but experience the body as a thing to be explored. We test the body by putting things into its orifices, and we test our relations with others by projecting onto the body’s surface an idea of those relations to such an extent that the body is never reducible to a conglomeration of cells and systems, however complex on their own, but is a literal place and a figurative emblem of intrapsychic, interpersonal, and interenvironmental conflict and surprise.
The body is a perfect hiding place: into its folds, bypassing its flaps, melding, the thing you give me or the thing you force upon me or the thing you want from me disappears inside me, and it’s anybody’s guess whether I can make it rematerialize—but the fact that I think I’m keeping it for you from me, from you for me, is clear. Some people cultivate literal “throat pouches” for carrying contraband, while others experience their mouths simply as the most convenient repository of withholding: if I want to attach to something, I don’t just cling to it, I swallow it. I make it mine by making it me.
Let the record show: Ella May S. of 2942 East Victoria Street in Philadelphia, aged two and a half on March 19, 1931, was treated at Temple University after she was “given a dime by her mother in order to coax her into taking some cough medicine. The mother turned her back to reach for the medicine and the child put the dime in her mouth.” You turn your back, and unk. So much for mother-daughter corruption: maybe the baby knew the mother hoped to coax her to swallow something off-the-beaten path and was being dutiful, or maybe she was being defiant by choosing which strange thing should enter her.
On May 25, 1933, here is Beverly W., twenty-two months:
Patient’s mother states that yesterday morning, May 24, 1933, she was sweeping the floor when she noticed a small open safety pin. She asked one of the children [the girl’s four-year-old sister] to pick the pin up and give it to her. The patient was also near the pin and seized it first and when the mother asked the child for it, she pushed the open pin up the right nostril. The mother could see the end of the pin and tried to get it out of the nose but the patient pushed the mother’s hand away and then rubbed her nose. When the mother looked again there was no sign of the pin but she could see a slight cut, jagged and bleeding, where the pin had scratched. Patient was taken to the family physician, Dr. Owens, but he could see no evidence of the pin either in the nose or throat. However, he told the parents to take the child immediately to Dr. Buzzard, who is a nose and throat specialist. Dr. Buzzard, upon hearing the history, referred the child to the Mercy Hospital for an X-ray examination. X-ray revealed an open safety pin lodged either at the bifurcation of the bronchi or in the esophagus. When Dr. Buzzard received the X-ray report he referred patient to Dr. Chevalier Jackson at Temple University Hospital—he states: “we are referring this case to you and wish you success.”
Of course Jackson succeeded, but so did the patient in taking the pin out of reach of her mother. We can only guess what her next move was in the interplay of give-and-take with Mom.
Ingest. Digest. Gestate. In 1927, Jackson wrote an essay for American Success Story listing the twenty-one facts two thousand children had taught him but that mothers the world over had not yet learned. Number nine on the list is that “the idle chewing of pencils while thinking of what to write is a filthy as well as dangerous habit acquired in childhood, and becomes an exceedingly difficult one to break.” Yet chewing and thinking seem entirely bound up with one another in humans. Though I personally have trouble thinking, writing, and chewing gum at the same time, rumination applies to mastication as well as to “higher” brain functions like thought; chewing, swallowing, and digesting in humans are understood to be unconscious symbolic analogues to thinking. The ruminative creature is a cud-chewer, munching on stuff regurgitated, and a contemplator. When I worry, I grind my teeth; when you worry, you bite your nails. To think through something, we say we need to “process” it, by which we must mean break down, absorb, assimilate, even if some of our best “processing” happens while we’re asleep, while conscious thought is in subsidence but digestion carries on. Still, I can wake up and feel something stuck inside, an indissoluble, lodged, worried object that was there the day before and the day before that and that cannot be gotten rid of with a forceps, and that, even with further “processing,” I don’t “excrete” but can only hope to transform.
Sometimes orality is just about the contact of skin on skin in which the thing—that pencil in the mouth—figures as a substitute for a maternal body, just as, thumb in mouth, we invent a pacifier. I put something in my mouth quite aside from any nutritive need or gustatory aggression but only for the pleasure of a play of surfaces meeting, the acknowledgment that I am here.
Let’s go back to the beginning, to the place where life, in a sense, originates, inside the mouth: the human infant apprehends the physical world at first through the lips, tongue, and mouth. The mouth is an erotogenic zone—Freud suggested that—and, we might want to add, an epistemogenic zone (desire and knowledge are forever linked). Chevalier Jackson admits this, very briefly, at two points in Diseases of the Food and Air Passages of Foreign-Body Origin. Infants do test items in their mouths, he conceded, and biting things is an aid to dentition (DAFP, 73). Putting things in the mouth is “one of the natural ways for a child to learn the physical character of things,” but “some children, natural born research workers, are more prone than others to test with their mouths every object they can handle” (DAFP, 31). From Jackson’s point of view, rooted in his bronchoscopic clinic, that tendency must be combated and curbed; we must “teach by reproof” (DAFP, 73; see figure 13).
From another point of view, the tendency to know the world by putting it into our mouths should not be stopped, checked, or interrupted, but indulged and allowed to evolve. The objects, the everything that the baby puts in her mouth is eventually replaced by words (in her mouth). Words not just as mediums to things she once orally bit or sucked or caressed, but as thing substitutes, things in themselves, things that the mouth forms and reforms and emits. “Spit it out,” we say when we want someone to talk who is having trouble talking: we understand that they are holding something in their mouths. Most poets, I think, know what it is to hold words fully, tenderly, entirely in the mouth.
Ingestion of foreign bodies, then, is one effect of the human tendency to get to know the world through the mouth—whi
ch isn’t even about tasting it but about forming judgments about density and shape, weight and elasticity, of gauging the edges of things and the borders between things, me and it, the place where I begin and the world ends, all that stops at me without going through me. I continue not just to represent the world but to learn about its difference from me and me from it, about extension and breadth, porosity and fit, exteriority and interiority, with the advent of language: words taking shape inside my mouth.
Be careful lest you swallow your words: the human larynx initiates a body into the realm of precarious proximities. The descended larynx distinguishes us from most other animals. It makes possible speech in humans—a necessary vibrating surface inside our throats—at the same time that it makes us one of the only mammals that cannot breathe and swallow at the same time: our sound-in-the-form-of-word-making capacity also seems to be the feature of our physiology that makes it more possible for us to choke. Was it simply evolution that made foreign-body inspiration in humans possible? The larynx forced to descend when we decided six million years ago to stand upright? Did foreign-body ingestion initiate the fall of man? (Think of Eve.) Call me a poet, but what interests me more than the pinning of a first and final cause on fbdies swallowed is the fact that the plural of “larynx” is “larynges,” which sounds like “lozenges.” That so many words relative to our mouths begin with L-sounds, as if there were a relation between a languid lolling and a lollipop that you lick with your lips loquaciously lapping its liquid. Jackson accompanied his practice with a seemingly nonreferential language, hallucinatory coinages and onomatopoeic thrums, a weird and delightful lexicon for life inside the life of the body, a life athwart, a life beyond our instrumental catch of it, as when he describes a bronchus “lined with exuberant granulations” or records the sound of a “peculiar eolian note,” when he listens for an “expiratory rale” or hears “no whispered pectoriloquy.” He conjures a language of expedition (“in cases of prolonged sojourn”) and of fascination (“chicken bone transfixed in trachea”) to approximate a reality outside of observation, requiring a leap of faith.
Fig. 13. A baby, bronchoscopically framed, nibbles on a (rather large) piece of toast surrounded by examples of the object world she might, if unchecked, swallow or inhale. Chevalier Jackson, “What Does Your Baby Put in His Mouth?” Hygeia 1, no. 561 (December 1923), reprinted 1937, in the Chevalier Jackson Papers, 1890-1964, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.
By the end of Diseases of the Air and Food Passages of Foreign-Body Origin, one does come to believe: you become convinced that you must have ingested something, even a filament, some bit of sparkle glue, and it’s only a matter of time before it kills you, especially given long periods of symptomlessness. The book convinces a reader of this, and at the same time wants us to believe that artificial ingestion is within our control.
Once inside the book, we experience Jackson’s struggle to deny that we are porous. We move across and through space, but we generally don’t like to consider ourselves as entities that are also moved through. Reading Jackson, there’s no getting around the fact that the body consists of orifices, portals, entryways, and exits: “Our records show an infinite variety of foreign bodies that have passed safely through the intestines, coins, nails, tacks, small toys, parts of large toys, wrist watches, chains, all kinds of hardware and jewelry, teeth, natural and artificial, in fact almost every kind of small object found about a dwelling” (DAFP, 277).
In an X-ray, an object stops a flow or interrupts a course, bisects a plane, is permeable or seemingly impervious to the X-ray’s eye. As in the diaphanous billows and mist-laden hues in which buttons and safety pins float and scatter, dot and tilt, in the X-ray of M.M., just ten days old (see figure 14). At first glance, the image appears to document a case of multiple fbdy ingestion, until it becomes clear that most of the buttons and pins are outside the baby and attached to its diaper and clothes. One button rests at the baby’s elbow, while two pins turn at unrealistic angles to the right of her lower body in 3-D. Adult hands appear in the X-ray too: they hold the fierce, reluctant arms in place; they’ve dressed the baby in crinoline or a bridal veil. Only ten days in the world, and to be pinned and buttoned so (this baby is bedecked); only ten days in the world, and to have already been X-rayed with no protective covering; only ten days in the world, and to be forcibly held back and down. What this baby swallowed was a safety pin and a button that then lodged in the upper third of her esophagus. The open safety pin’s point—either before or after lodgment—had improbably pierced through the hole in the center of the button and left her with a “small areola around the buried point” (DAFP, 4).
Fig. 14. Fbdy 415, the case of Margaret M., age ten days, June 26, 1915. Dr. G. C. Johnston, radiographer. Collection of the Mütter Museum, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
The floating objects in M.M.’s X-ray, or fbdy #415, converse with the objects that are their more banal counterparts in the realm of the naked eye. Outside the X-ray, they serve a practical function; inside, they play their part in an anomalous collage. Outside the X-ray, hands hold the baby down at its wrists. Inside the world pictured by the X-ray, gravity seems not to exist. There is no inside to the body over and against an outside to the body in X-ray, only an interplay of opacities and transparencies. Until 1918, radiographers were known as “skiagraphers,” literally “shadow writers.” In an X-ray, because the foreign body dominates, the human body appears to be its swallowed object’s shadow. Not “the shadow of your smile when you are gone that will color all my dreams and light the dawn,” but the self as shadow of some Thing.
There’s not a person among us who isn’t invaded. We are creatures bound and beholden to our mouths, and thus ingestion of foreign bodies is one among many of the natural catastrophes of childhood, not because most babies are at the mercy of hopeless bunglers (though that might be one way to describe humankind), but because our mouths are a major mechanism by which we come to know the world and also distinguish ourselves from it. We never stop putting things into it. We never can.
Still, there’s a rub, some sense that through sleight of hand or a wave of a bronchoscopic wand, we’ve been distracted from asking an even more pressing question: not how does someone swallow that, but how does it occur to someone to put a foreign body into the mouths of others? How does it come to be understood as acceptable, allowable, OK to insert a metal instrument into the mouth of another person as an act of human kindness, an act of care? Never carelessly, Jackson would say, always carefully, I put the instrument in. Never accidentally, I might reply, always deliberately. Yes, but not because I really wanted to, he’d say. It wasn’t I who did it in the first place. I’m in the clear; my actions are accounted for. You made me have to look you in the mouth and enter in.
Dear C.H.E.V.A.L.I.E.R., aka CJ:
I’ve retrieved a number of things from within your first name, and shall post them to you forthwith. They include: vale, vile, lever, liver, heir, some rice, some lace, and a chair. Some telling verbs also nest there, including reach, ache, heave, relieve, relive, and care. Hail, revile, and reel. There’s much more where these came from. I do not mean to scare you by suggesting that words are magically revelatory. I only mean to say that, like the stomach, they may contain more than at first glance meets the eye. Please inform me of your wishes. Do you want me to keep going? As you know better than anyone, there is always more to plumb.
Your devoted reader,
M.C.C.
Chevalier. Let him revel. Let him see. Let him never be a liar. Let him veer.
Chevalier Jackson’s Traumatic “Phases”
It is well also to mention the fact that he may have his breath shut off; but that you know when this happens and you will not keep it shut off too long. . . . The patient, if over 2 years of age, may be alarmed at the inability to speak. He should be assured that this is only because the air leaks out through the cannula, and that in about ten days he can talk as well as ever by putti
ng his finger on the cannula. . . . A child worn out by a prolonged fight for air may fall asleep.
—CHEVALIER JACKSON, “Tracheotomy”
The Chemist laid a few shillings, one by one, in his extended hand. To count them was beyond the boy’s knowledge, but he said “one,” every time, and avariciously looked at each as it was given, and at the donor. He had no where to put them, out of his hand, but in his mouth; and he put them there.
—CHARLES DICKENS describing the “ragged orphan” in “The Haunted Man”
A palm thick with calluses grasps a boy’s thin ankles, and in a second he is overturned, not knowing which way is up or what to feel for. His face is flushed, scarlet to bursting, his hair seems to change color from its roots to its tip, his ribcage protrudes beneath a tight jacket and shorts, and his shirt falls down toward his face, exposing his spindlyness. Maybe he’ll die. He’ll never see his mother again. That’s what the big-fisted creature who holds him over a quarried chasm, threatening to drop him, says.
Even as a puppy, a white bull terrier can be vicious if mistreated, but with the boy he is gentle, as if learning from an expert teacher how to love. The puppy is a gift from a woman who lost her husband to the mines. One day, the dog, named Billy, goes missing. The boy’s father discovers this dog nearly dead on the roadside trying to find its way back to the boy. The father delivers Billy’s “limp, tooth-marked, blood-streaked, dead body” to the son: he’d been snatched for a dogfight and fatally wounded (LCJ, 8).
An idea comes to the boy (but where does it come from?) to make things, to make something out of scraps. Pieces of remnants of jagged, floatable wood. He smooths the wood and shapes it into a small sloop capable of carrying his body and a lunch pail across a pond. He names the boat Fanny and joins the boards with leftover tar from the mines. His fellow humans have their own ideas: what the boy intends as a vehicle for passage they see as a container for feeding oats to underfed horses; what he had in mind to cast and rise and fall on subtle waters they turned to mire. It ends up a trough for wallowing hogs.
Mary Cappello Page 9
