Bodies – Andy Jackson

strangers and the responsibilities of being strange

Most of us in the West feel increasingly isolated from each other, monads with our heads craned towards our smart-phones, or wandering the aisles half-conscious. The proliferation of both social media and cafes is part of the same dynamic – we long for human contact, yet we’re nervous about stepping outside our comfortable circle.

Talking to strangers is unsettling, in both senses – a little frightening and potentially liberating. That goes for all of us, but for those of us who are visibly different, whose bodies are obviously non-conformist, the approach of a stranger carries some peculiarly acute dilemmas.

I want to mention just two examples, and dwell for a moment in the gulf between them.

Late last year, at the local organic grocery, my partner and I were placing the last few items in our basket. Pumpkin, kipflers, silverbeet, most likely. It’s a narrow shop; you have to breathe in or walk sideways to pass people in the aisles. As we were leaving, a woman approached me with a vague smile on her face, her posture leaning slightly towards me. “Hello..”

I used to run a cafe, and I’m visibly memorable, so I assumed she recognised me; I smiled and said hi in return. She asked me how I was going, suggesting things must be pretty difficult. She told me she had a friend who specialised in alternative treatment, and that her own back pain was greatly relieved by visiting her. Oh, ok. She didn’t know me. It was going to be one of those “unsolicited charity conversations”.

I was in a reasonably optimistic mood and felt ok about being open with her. People rarely talk about embodiment, so perhaps this was a chance to share my own version of being human, and move pleasantly onwards. I told her I have Marfan Syndrome, which for me has meant an unusual shape, but actually no pain, luckily and gladly, and smiling while I said how ironic it is.

“Oh, you must have pain”, she said.

“Um, no, not really, no more than anyone, probably less, actually”.

This went back and forth for a while. I kept telling her my experience. She kept insisting she could help me with the problem I didn’t have.

Eventually the pointlessness of it ate away at my resolve. I was polite, direct, with perhaps just a hint of impatience. “I’m sorry, I really have to go, I’m really fine, OK?”.

She was stunned, almost mortified. “Ughh, I was only trying to be helpful!”. I’m reminded that my body seems to raise all sorts of questions that “demand” answers, and that fundamentalism is not limited to religion.

Fast-forward to just a few weeks ago. I’m in the middle of a busy period, wrestling with a thesis and other obligations, rushing into the local supermarket to pick up a few essentials. I only notice my own low-level stress when the little girl in the pink princess outfit cuts me off, running obliviously through the aisles – “Daddy! Look at me!” – and I’m instantly irritated. I try to avoid them, head down another aisle. Of course, being tired, I become indecisive and end up staring at a wall of condiments, unsure.

Suddenly, there’s “Dad” at my side. “Uh… hi…”, he says, casually but nervously, “my daughter was just asking me about your back, and I told her it’s better to ask than to stare, so I’m sorry to bother you, but is it ok if I ask you?”.

At these moments, a certain texture of solidity in my body comes up against a fluid world. I’m face to face with my own reluctance to engage, but underneath there is a way of being that accepts, even relishes, interconnection and the blurring of boundaries. Decision time, in a split second.

I tell them both, as simply as I can – yes, this is my spine, it’s just more curved than straight, and I’m healthy. Everyone has different shaped bodies. The little princess smiles, shyly looks down at her feet, then around the store. She’s obviously happy to meet someone unusual, but just as obviously awkward and a bit bored now.

Dad tells me they’ve asked other people before, and apparently she likes to hug people goodbye. Sure, why not? So, a hug and a brief chat later, we go our separate ways. Through the aisles and towards the checkout, with a slight crack in normality.

For a long time, though I wouldn’t have said it this way, I deeply resented my body and the kind of attention it attracted (and continues to attract). I wanted to be invisible, to move through the world with the anonymity I imagined everyone else had. Peoples’ eyes were like the rays of a harsh summer sun, the intensity magnified through the glass of my own discomfort. They burnt and hurt.

And nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Ecce Homo’

I have come gradually, fitfully, with some reluctance, to a realisation that this is the life and the body I have. Autonomy and self-determination is a mythical horizon. The love and support that I have been given over the years is evidence of that – without it, I would still be rushing back to the shadows, wishing for the impossible. In the face of the current neoliberal economy and consumerist culture, in spite of my own self-doubt and fragility, I want to build the connections that nourish myself and others. I want this life.

So, I think that being strange carries a kind of responsibility. There is no prescription, but I would suggest two guiding principles – openness to the unpredictability of the encounter, and respect for the particular embodied subjectivity of the other person. These principles go both ways of course.

For those of you who are strange and are often approached by strangers, I can’t tell you how to respond, though. We all have to find our own way of dealing with this “responsibility”, whether it be a repertoir of answers or a reserve of attitude that we draw on. Each body is unique, and each person makes their way through difference with their own temperament and aspirations. After all, we are more than what makes others stare at us.

For some other thoughtful and useful perspectives, try Carly Findlay’s blog post, Carly’s guest blogger Bailey, and Haley Morris-Cafiero’s provocative photography project.

Feel free to suggest other links or your own suggestions or insights – I’d love to see them.

reverberations and affinity

Sometimes an acquaintance transforms into a friend. Time passes, random events intervene and affinities flower. Recently, I went to a Quippings event at Hares & Hyenas bookshop in Fitzroy – one of the most mind-blowing literary/performance events you are ever likely to encounter. The next one is on 30th November and is entitled “Piss on Pity”, if you want a hint. And you really should go. Even if you’re not from Melbourne.

Anyway, at the last one, I re-met Carly Findlay, prolific blogger, appearance activist, writer and all-round great woman. We got to talking, and she asked me to write a guest spot for her blog, basically telling my story of visible difference. It starts like this –

In the last twelve years, I’ve had the pleasure of quitting four positions – the Commonwealth public service(Child Support Agency, would you believe?), a cafe-venue-bar I co-owned called “Good Morning Captain” in Collingwood Melbourne, Medicare Australia (yes, in a call centre), and a claustrophobic admin job for a micro-managing tax lawyer. And I’ve lived in eight different houses in the last twenty-five years (though, yes, all of them in Melbourne). But there are two things that I could never leave, even if I wanted to. They define me. I’m as inseparable from them as wings from sky, pith from fruit, thought from words.

Those two things are Marfan Syndrome and poetry.

The blog post is here, if you want to know how it ends, but it doesn’t end, really, does it? Poetic language and just being in the same room together can build bridges, sure, but the gulfs between us are perpetual and always at risk of expanding. Everything needs reinforcing, extending, exploring…

Carly herself has just written an amazing post called “On ‘normal and cures and pride”. She writes,

I see two sides to a cure: a medical cure and an appearance cure. I don’t want either. A medical cure (or treatment, as things stand now) may hold worse side effects than Ichthyosis itself. And I think that an appearance cure is conforming to what society expects of me – the expectation that I would want to look ‘normal’ and de-identify with a condition that I’ve become accustomed to and accept. I see it as a bit vain, even.

In the future, I plan to introduce you to other writers, thinkers and activists who I feel affinity with. Virtual community is also real community – full of arguments, passion, embraces, patience and complexity. ‘Normal’ is incredibly narrow. And ‘abnormal? It’s not singular, it’s multiple, innumerable in all its manifestations of beauty and becoming. It’s you.

poetry is an utterance of (the) body

Poetry is an utterance of the body. Not the best utterance – which is pre-linguistic and made of salt water – but the best a body can do given it has language. It is language in thrall to the corporeal, to the pump and procession of the blood, the briefly rising spirit of the lung, the nerves’ fretwork, strictures of the bone. Poetry is matter that can string itself between the pulse of a life and the silence of its death… Those who reject form in poetry, reject form in body. What they do is alien to what’s human… Take the iambic pentameter for an example. Its regularity shadows the poem: something must shadow the poem, and that something must in some way make the sound of the body at rest, so that the body in thought, at play, when it is heard can be believed… The arrogance of obscurity is medieval, is of the cloister. Obscurity cannot be poetry because the body is not obscure. It may be interesting, it may be exciting, but only until we need oxygen.

Glyn Maxwell, from “Strong Words” (ed. WN Herbert & Matthew Hollis)

When I read this, my own body made a little joyful shudder of recognition. Yes, poetry is an utterance of the body, and that is how it travels from one person to another, across the gulf of difference and experience – through its biological affinity. Then, one word stood out, awkward and almost arrogant – “the”. Is there such a thing as “the” body?

Arguably, there is a human body. But what of variation? Male, female, intersex? The disabled and the TABs (temporarily able-bodied)? Does poetry travel seamlessly across all of these distances in the same way? Or, to look at the question from another angle, are there as many poetics as there are bodies? Is there such a thing as “women’s poetry”? “crip poetry”? And I don’t just mean in terms of content, subject-matter – I mean, in terms of rhythm, flow, metre, the way the words appear on the page and in the air.

Recently, as a result of Pi O urging me to check out the poetry of Larry Eigner (by the way, this video of Larry reading poetry is great), I came upon a fantastically provocative and sensitive essay by Michael Davidson – “Missing Larry: the Poetics of Disability in Larry Eigner”. Davidson explores why it may be that Eigner’s cerebral palsy is so rarely mentioned in critical discussions of his work – why that “blind spot”. But he also reminds us that this omission isn’t just a biographical issue, but a poetic issue. Eigner’s use of space on the page, his compression and brevity, his use of indentation and double-columns, the meticulous intensity of his poems – this is the way he chose to write, but it is also inevitably influenced by his physical condition. He only had effective control over his right index finger, his body leaning on the (manual) typewriter, eyes close to the page, each word painstakingly pushed onto the page, each tap of the space-bar an effort.

What we write is shaped by our embodiment. Not determined, but certainly shaped. And this isn’t just about those bodies that are more visibly and obviously “disabled”. Think about this –

What would it mean to think of Charles Olson’s “breath” line as coming from someone with chronic emphysema exacerbated by heavy smoking? Robert Creeley’s lines in “The Immoral Proposition,” “to look at it is more / than it was,” mean something very particular when we know that their author has only one eye (125). To what extent are Elizabeth Bishop’s numerous references to suffocation and claustrophobia in her poems an outgrowth of a life with severe asthma? Was William Carlos Williams’s development of the triadic stepped foot in his later career a dimension of his prosody or a typographical response to speech disorders resulting from a series of strokes?

Michael Davidson

These are big questions. I’m just starting to think them through… You, in your body, may be way ahead of me…

Am I my own other?

Should I have been surprised that a meeting about marketing poetry would lead to sobbing in a toilet and pondering phenomenology?

One of my “day jobs” is at Australian Poetry, and of late I’ve been organising the 2011 itinerary for our mobile poetry library, the “Omnibus”. Basically, we take poetry books around to regional towns, run workshops, put on readings, give people the chance to browse, read, talk about, and buy books they may not normally get a chance to. I had organised to meet with Marcus Powe, RMIT’s “Entrepeneur-in-Residence”, to chat about how to position and promote the Omnibus, but also how to think about it. And, no Marcus didn’t make me cry. The meeting wasn’t the problem – it just put me in a certain place.

I’d arrived earlier than I expected, so I sat on the lawn outside the State Library of Victoria, one of the few green areas in the CBD of Melbourne. On fine days, it’s bathed in sun and swarming with students and workers of all shapes and colours. Pigeons and seagulls jostle for crumbs. The atmosphere is casual; friends meet and greet, some kind of communal recognition just below the surface, we’re all here to rest and take in the sky while the trams rattle past.

One guy, in his mid-thirties, baseball cap and 3/4 length pants, slows down as he passes me, looking back at me with bemusement. He turns around, walks up to me, directly. “What’s that?”. He touches my back, then lifts my shirt, looking and poking. I can’t remember exactly what I say, but it’s something like, “It’s me. Do you mind?!…”. And, as he’s walking away, “maybe you should ask before you touch someone…”. To that, he says, “don’t fuckin’ talk to me like that”.

Let’s get two things out of the way first. He wasn’t insane in any way. He was just your run-of-the-mill working-class tough guy. And me, I have a genetic condition called Marfan Syndrome – it’s reasonably rare, and within that rarity, my particular manifestation is visually obvious spinal curvature.

I spend a quick half-minute in the bathroom, try to push out some of the excess emotional energy, before the meeting. You could call it sobbing. I am sick of being people’s object, people’s Other.

This encounter, both mundane and extraordinary, raises some critical questions. What does it mean to have a body? What is normal? Why is it that now and then something happens to rupture our habitual ignorance of embodiment? And, do I, as an apparently different-looking person, have a different sense of self?

From my meagre understanding of him, French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that we engage with the world not as subject examining objects at a distance, but synesthetically and implicitly. Our body opens onto the rest of the world, is the very condition of our experience. Our senses resonate with a unity of perceptions. In a way, the world is made for us, through the medium of our bodies, bodies that are situated and inescapably relational. Experience is a continual, complex flow, where meaning and relationship is ongoing and always incomplete.

So, in that vast rushing flow of experience, as a universe of different bodies surround and pass us – the gaggle of school-girls, a ragged man rifling through bins, a meticulously groomed business-woman, towering Somalian boys, waddling overweight children, people of all shapes and colours and ways of moving – some kind of sense of “normality” emerges. Edmund Husserl believed that our bodies seek always to normalise, to assimilate, to incorporate abnormality within the realm of the expected, through understanding or empathy. Oh, that person is blind, this man is drunk, that woman must be lost. We build our understanding on familiarity, push experience into categories, to ensure that we can move on, ready for our next encounter. And, yes, sometimes that process of normalisation stalls; the person appears so other to us, we stare, in confusion, discomfort, anger.

When I mentioned my experience outside the library to people, the overwhelming response seemed to be “how rude!” or “what’s wrong with him?!”. Fair enough. What I want to know is this – what does what he did reveal about abnormality in our culture? What sort of experiences help us to recognise self-hood in others? How is it we can fail to recognise self-hood in others, or disregard their bodily integrity? And what does poetry encourage?

Alexander Kozin, in his article “The Uncanny Body: from medical to aesthetic abnormality” (Janus Head, vol.9, iss.2, 2007), says that the experience of some bodies are purely unassimiliable. He seems to have his epiphany at the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf, Germany.

“It is there that I saw a person whose appearance broke any and every anticipation of an embodied human being… She was a collage made of odd objects; her arm stub and her twisted legs looked as if they came off from a non-human creature… Her body, small and fragile, half a body, appeared to be torn apart by some mechanical mangler of flesh. This strange assimilation of incompatible parts made her movements as bizarre and as majestic as if she was a royalty raised from some underground dream-world, invading one’s peace and usurping it, leaving us with nothing but emptiness in the wake of explosive astonishment and awe…”

I’m tempted to say, Alex, calm down. This woman, whose mother took the drug Thalidomid during pregnancy, can hardly be said to have “half a body” – from her perspective, her body is entire. And I doubt she came from an “underground dream-world” – more likely, her home in a typical German suburb. But what he is says is revealing, on many levels.

Earlier in his essay, Kozin asks “How can abnormality of the body be available to us most generally?”. Whether he realises it or not, just who is implied within this “us” is absolutely critical – and it is this that is potentially the most “explosive” element of his encounter with abnormality. Think about it. Does he mean “those of us who have normal bodies”? It seems to me that the person he calls “the Contergan woman” is not included within the “us”. By definition, she can’t be.

Based on what I know from my own experience of having an unusual body (though certainly not as unusual as hers), I expect that, to her, abnormality is normality.

I also know that the normality of an abnormal embodiment doesn’t cancel out it’s abnormality. For some, of course, certain tasks, movements, journeys are immensely difficult or impossible, due to their bodily situation. But even for those of us who are not “disabled”, we get our sense of self through our interactions with others and the world. If I am continually reminded of my otherness, then I am other. Self and other simultaneously.

I see people with unusual bodies and, yes, they are other to me. Yet very often, something in me also feels a tone of recognition, affinity. Self and other.

Kozin also unwittingly tells us something about poetry, too. Whenever he discusses the appearance of “the Contergan woman”, he shifts from academic philosophical language into a heightened, almost ecstatic tone. He crams his sentences with metaphor, analogy, hyperbole, disjunctions. His experience of her body can’t be assimilated, doesn’t make sense – instinctively or deliberately, he drops the authority and detachment of rationality, dives into a disorienting, passionate poetry. Then, as an academic should, he composes himself and returns to discourse.

What exactly is otherness? What make us look at other people as Others? Is that “making other” inevitable, primal, tribal? Is it fuelled by an inability to empathise, a simple lack of familiarity, or a kind of shock at seeing repressed aspects of ourselves in other people? And is poetry the natural home for that space between self and other?

By myself, I have no answers. But then, I’m not by myself, am I?

Bodies of Poetry (an introduction)

Poetry is an artform of language, with its roots firmly within the body – in its fascination with embodied experience and in its incorporation of bodily rhythms. But whose body are we talking about? Apart from the question of male and female bodies, how are bodies that are deformed or unusual treated? Does poetry reinforce a clear line between “human” and “abject”? Or can it complicate our perception of normality?

This was to be the starting-point for my Masters thesis this year. As it turns out, I was accepted into the program but missed out on a scholarship. Since I don’t have a year’s income saved up, I’ve decided I’ll pursue this topic of mine outside of the University. Masters without a Masters. Who knows how long it will take, or if I’ll drop it half-way. But the reading and thinking will be worth it.

My interest in poetry and physical difference is intrinsically linked with my personal experience. I was born with Marfan Syndrome, which has resulted in severe spinal curvature, yet without any significant physical impairment. My own poetry seeks to express the subjective experience of being visibly different, and is in some way an attempt to reverse the usual dynamic of naming and identification.

And, since I don’t want to be doing this “non-Masters” alone, I’ve decided to post short mini-essays on this blog, in a series entitled “Bodies of Poetry”. I’m interested in how non-standard bodies find expression in poetry. Poetic licence of the body. I’d love your feedback, ideas, suggestions, personal stories, rants, whatever you feel fits into the topic, from whatever angle.

My partner and I just recently found a great little shop, upstairs at 381 Sydney Road – Mr Kitly – which has some great books on design, art, architecture, and some gorgeous tea cups and crockery. Yes, very “new Brunswick”. Anyway, we found this book – “Difference on Display: Diversity in Art, Science and Society”.

It’s a mix of artists, film-makers, performers, theorists and activists – Donna Harraway, Tom Shakespeare, Bruce Nauman, William Kentridge, Patricia Piccinini, Louise Bourgeois, Critical Art Ensemble, and a lot more – and it approaches diversity and normality from a huge range of angles. I’m sure it will find it’s way into my thoughts as they emerge here…

Again, yes, any suggestions and thoughts are very welcome, particularly on poets I should read…