If Puns hide pain...
Or at least mask it, then I should be 100% pain free by... oh wait, they were talking about mental anguish... not raw physical nerve endings...
So rarely is it that you get to have such an open and honest relationship with your colleagues that you can make a joke like:
"Exeter? I hardly know her..."
and not be banished from the Academe forever, and yet there I was, unable to control my tongue that slips out with the most highly inappropriate of thoughts, well, that's my brain, but my tongue is its partner in crime. I really should learn to filter, to not go those places, to not take that extra step... ah yes, but then I would not be such a fabulously flawed and broken individual. Then where would we be?
GCI, and his pornographic punning as(s)ide, though, and I can fully understand why people with chronic pain opt for suicide. The easy way out seems so much easier (why am I not allowed to take the easy way out, ever? why do I always have to take the hard way? the past of most resistance? what good does it do? I still always end up with myself in the end)
I have only been experiencing 35 hours of constant and applied pain, and here the self-anhilating thoughts creep in. (someone should really put me out of my misery). I sleep fitfully for a few minutes, miss my chance for any sort of meaninful interaction with hands, and sit in the darkness and cry about everything that is lost. And there is so much.
In the darkness, in my darkness, there is a parade of images, black and white police cruisers, flashing lights. There are nights of dreams in which strange players bring together people who will never break bread together, not in this lifetime, not under these circumstances, and I wish that I could have met myself back then, you know, back when I could have been different, and it could have been different. Back when the world was filled with some sort of tremulous possibility, not foreclosed upon, not condemmed, the way it is in this no-time and no-space.
"Why didn't I meet you 10 years ago, woman?" the question, asked again and again, by a kaleidoscopic array of interlocutors. What is wrong with me now? I wonder, why is it always then? I am eternally late for the boat, no matter how early I think I am, how prescient my thoughts, how prematurely optimistic my acts and actions. And I want to curl up inside myself, find that fetal whole inside my own womb, nurse myself back to health, stretch my arms wide, not on this quartering rack that threatens to rip me limb from limb, not in the ways that I was told that my flexibility would someday make "some man very happy" and the eyebrows raised, and the quirky foreign accent. Why some day? and not now? Why always, some other time and some other place, and some other man, than the one that utters the affirmation? And why, when my body twists itself up into deformed knots, not the gems that I claim should be the essence of a good essay, strung on a delicate silver chain, to lay flat on the skin, to adorn, in crystaline perfection, can't I make the noise just go away? There is no protection from any of it, not for me, not by me. I cannot shield even myself, no mask to hide behind anymore, just naked want and pain, whose only recourse is self-liquidation.
And little by little I will lose everything that I love, as it goes, one ounce dripping away, one set of shutters closed, packed up, dispersed. The need to move, constantly move, derives, perhaps, from just such a fear: always be the one leaving never to be the one left behind. A rolling stone never grows moss, or was it mold? well, a rolling stone can't grow much of anything, not even itself, just beat itself into some sort of smooth, innocuous form, something that will seem perfect, or beautiful, or shiny, and utterly banal when lining the shores of another ocean, just one more pebble worn down to nothing, to turn under our feet. My feet, their feet, your feet. I can't feel emotional pain if I don't slow down to perceive it, but the physical imposes itself, and makes me take the time to see everything that I am not, that I was and no longer am, that I want to be and am unable, that to which I will be forever denied access. And it seems an excercise, one more in a long and glorious line, in futility, and I wish I could close up shoppe, with a "ppe" in the obnoxious Brittish way, or the pseudo-Brittish way, the way we envision the other, and prefer the exotic over the home-grown: Ye olde liquor shoppe, the one where we are forced to buy from the government, that appropriates a right over our vices, while underhandedly moralizing, funded by the dollars it collects.
And there is no hope, I think, no way to avoid the inevitable, but I don't know how to proceed from here, when I have given up fear for lent, even though I am no Catholic, and there are no chiming bells to tell me what next to perform. I want to dissipate into the whiteness of the sky, the ceiling, the blank page, to wear a cloak of invisibility, because to be visible, and physical and never be invoked or provoked, or required when one is fully extant, and foolishly manifest, is perhaps a pain too great to endure. To be always in some other time, and some other place, on some other plate, in a foreign land.
So rarely is it that you get to have such an open and honest relationship with your colleagues that you can make a joke like:
"Exeter? I hardly know her..."
and not be banished from the Academe forever, and yet there I was, unable to control my tongue that slips out with the most highly inappropriate of thoughts, well, that's my brain, but my tongue is its partner in crime. I really should learn to filter, to not go those places, to not take that extra step... ah yes, but then I would not be such a fabulously flawed and broken individual. Then where would we be?
GCI, and his pornographic punning as(s)ide, though, and I can fully understand why people with chronic pain opt for suicide. The easy way out seems so much easier (why am I not allowed to take the easy way out, ever? why do I always have to take the hard way? the past of most resistance? what good does it do? I still always end up with myself in the end)
I have only been experiencing 35 hours of constant and applied pain, and here the self-anhilating thoughts creep in. (someone should really put me out of my misery). I sleep fitfully for a few minutes, miss my chance for any sort of meaninful interaction with hands, and sit in the darkness and cry about everything that is lost. And there is so much.
In the darkness, in my darkness, there is a parade of images, black and white police cruisers, flashing lights. There are nights of dreams in which strange players bring together people who will never break bread together, not in this lifetime, not under these circumstances, and I wish that I could have met myself back then, you know, back when I could have been different, and it could have been different. Back when the world was filled with some sort of tremulous possibility, not foreclosed upon, not condemmed, the way it is in this no-time and no-space.
"Why didn't I meet you 10 years ago, woman?" the question, asked again and again, by a kaleidoscopic array of interlocutors. What is wrong with me now? I wonder, why is it always then? I am eternally late for the boat, no matter how early I think I am, how prescient my thoughts, how prematurely optimistic my acts and actions. And I want to curl up inside myself, find that fetal whole inside my own womb, nurse myself back to health, stretch my arms wide, not on this quartering rack that threatens to rip me limb from limb, not in the ways that I was told that my flexibility would someday make "some man very happy" and the eyebrows raised, and the quirky foreign accent. Why some day? and not now? Why always, some other time and some other place, and some other man, than the one that utters the affirmation? And why, when my body twists itself up into deformed knots, not the gems that I claim should be the essence of a good essay, strung on a delicate silver chain, to lay flat on the skin, to adorn, in crystaline perfection, can't I make the noise just go away? There is no protection from any of it, not for me, not by me. I cannot shield even myself, no mask to hide behind anymore, just naked want and pain, whose only recourse is self-liquidation.
And little by little I will lose everything that I love, as it goes, one ounce dripping away, one set of shutters closed, packed up, dispersed. The need to move, constantly move, derives, perhaps, from just such a fear: always be the one leaving never to be the one left behind. A rolling stone never grows moss, or was it mold? well, a rolling stone can't grow much of anything, not even itself, just beat itself into some sort of smooth, innocuous form, something that will seem perfect, or beautiful, or shiny, and utterly banal when lining the shores of another ocean, just one more pebble worn down to nothing, to turn under our feet. My feet, their feet, your feet. I can't feel emotional pain if I don't slow down to perceive it, but the physical imposes itself, and makes me take the time to see everything that I am not, that I was and no longer am, that I want to be and am unable, that to which I will be forever denied access. And it seems an excercise, one more in a long and glorious line, in futility, and I wish I could close up shoppe, with a "ppe" in the obnoxious Brittish way, or the pseudo-Brittish way, the way we envision the other, and prefer the exotic over the home-grown: Ye olde liquor shoppe, the one where we are forced to buy from the government, that appropriates a right over our vices, while underhandedly moralizing, funded by the dollars it collects.
And there is no hope, I think, no way to avoid the inevitable, but I don't know how to proceed from here, when I have given up fear for lent, even though I am no Catholic, and there are no chiming bells to tell me what next to perform. I want to dissipate into the whiteness of the sky, the ceiling, the blank page, to wear a cloak of invisibility, because to be visible, and physical and never be invoked or provoked, or required when one is fully extant, and foolishly manifest, is perhaps a pain too great to endure. To be always in some other time, and some other place, on some other plate, in a foreign land.
posted by ilana at 11:05 p.m.
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