Digest All the Plague Years (1.2)

I have been losing my words for some time, and it is in Paris that they disappeared completely. I fractured, then shattered. Unable to think, without means to discern, I started to leave pieces of myself behind, all those pieces of the world that held me together, strewn about, without thought or malice, everywhere and anywhere, a breadcrumb trail leading exactly nowhere. Like shell casings from the war, or the shards of glass that filled the streets after the explosion, this an exquisitely personal fragmentation to mirror my exquisitely fragmented surroundings, the drawing of a map with no earthly point. For a long time, I did not notice that it was happening, or just what I was composing.  

I can no longer speak I can no longer think there is only the absence of the other of the other of language this is the sea and I am adrift my mouth is locked and my throat fills with salt. My mouth has become an orifice of the excremental. The grinding of my teeth is a symptom of all that refuses to be said. I grind my teeth because I am no longer allowed to speak; what words there were have been forbidden. My teeth become loose because of the dream. The dream is an infection which now lives in my mouth, in your mouth, the mouth of another. It is the object of a monstrous drive. I have become the monster and the monster comes into the world and the monster finds the world with and without language, without hope, or maybe its promise, but without any reliable means of sorting through the inexorable assault of experience outside the hopelessness of the dream before words. Thus, and therefore, I no longer trust the imperium of narrative. It is pompous, demanding, declaratively regal but far from resplendent. A chimera and a fraud, it arrives bearing promises of fairness and justice, but its judgment is only ever a plague for the land.  

I wish I could tell you what happened but I have been forbidden to speak of it. I have told you all this. I will tell you again. There are no answers on offer and everything I have left is the flotsam of impressions, pieces of a wreck that have found their way to the surface of an ageless sea. What is here is yours to decipher. I cannot see the text except in reflection and whatever I see can only be delivered in the form of a translation of a translation. It is inherently and perhaps necessarily unreliable. Moreover, I have no confidence in my facility with language; nor do I have much confidence in yours. You rely upon the intimation of structure, as if there were some sort of constant that might serve as a point of orientation, a polestar by which you might navigate the whimsical menace of the swells. But this sea is old. It is ever more forbidding, twisted and irascible. You cannot see, you cannot understand, that its substance, the minim we call words, are but vibrations, sounds composed of toxins and radiation and applications of liquid smoke. 

You think the language speaks for you when it is you who speak for the language. When you cannot speak it is the language that will not let itself be spoken, and it is then the gendarme throw you to the ground and press their feet into your back, because they think you are high they think you are high and that you are an Arab and you are indelibly stained by the sand. You left Beirut two days ago and here you are in a police station somewhere in Paris with a boot on your back pressing your broken clavicle into the peeling linoleum because your inability to answer questions is taken as hostility, resistance. The radius of the pain is irregular and indefinite. It is everywhere. You scream the name George Floyd and even though you are insane you know that is not appropriate; moreover, for the gendarme it is just one more thing they find confusing. What do cops in Paris know about police brutality in Minneapolis? And though you hurt, you can still breathe.

Speech is of course forbidden, and you have no idea how difficult it is to write these things down. Once written they are indelible. Speech might be recorded but somehow it remains porous and inexact. Recording sound is not quite the same thing as manipulating surfaces, tracing the shape assigned a vibration. Speech is alluring, writing is conspicuous. Both are beautiful, but one moves with purpose. Jealous of each other, speech is forgiving; the written is cruel and demanding. While breath will disperse, ink is indelible. Whatever form it takes, the written will always leave a trace. But the breath, in the end, will inevitably win. 

           I am still a scholar and these are the things that are written on my flesh. The stain of the breath on my flesh. Another word for what is written on the flesh is hysteria. A leaden memorial that blocks the light of the sun, what is written on the flesh insists upon its veracity, but as ever, truthfulness is a slippery aim, less a destination than a course, a movement toward a point that is always in motion. All symptoms are stories if you know how to read them; but the stones are broken and the language is gone and what has been buried is better left in the ground. 

Whatever has lodged itself inside my body is no longer in any simple sense my illness. Or, perhaps more precisely, and against so much of what contemporary psychopharmacology declares to be true, my illness is no mere chemical imbalance. The drugs I am prescribed have their effect, but my illness has always been ineluctably, resolutely bound up in the social: I cannot tell if it reaches out to meet the social, or if the social—the broken promises of some minimum of shared responsibility, of care—has reached inside of me, an inhabiting spirit, a rough beast. 

            My analyst says confinement; I say lockdown. What has been locked up inside my body?

I say digest. You say digestion. This is Lebanon. I say we should order more arak, more khubuz. You say bring me the kibbe nayyeh, bring me the nargileh. 

            Raw meat.

Another word for Lebanon is death drive. To which we may have reason to return.

I say lockdown; my analyst says confinement. Associate, historicize, retrace your steps. I hear the echo of antiquarian sexualities, of pregnancies, upper-class ladies hidden away from the world. I hear a displacement: confined, hidden, suffocated, made to surrender to the shamefulness of the body and its sex by disappearing into ill-ventilated bedchambers, behind curtains, protected from the air and the light. I am still a scholar and I think of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, tortured by her wallpaper, forced into an ineffectual rest cure by an unforgivingly domineering husband, a doctor, with only slight interest in the etiology of her hysteria. I think of the woman behind her wallpaper, sickly yellowish green; I think of the ghosts I see in the window in front of my desk, the ones that sit at my side, on the sofa, waiting, pondering. I think of the madwoman in the attic, and Virginia Woolf walking into the river.

When I lived in America I was routinely visited by ghosts. In Lebanon they have not bothered me. Not until this year. Not until corona. Not until the explosion. They belong to me now. I belong to them. 

I am still a scholar but these are things about which I am no longer at liberty to speak, but for this dispensation: I will try to tell you just how it might feel, as if the language for feelings was somehow reliable, as if the feelings themselves were somehow straightforward. This is my body, there is my blood. There are spasms in my teeth and someone is laughing. My legs twitch, my jaw lock; my head swims, then dives. 

And then the stigmata; then we meet the thumb of the beast.

This is all that is left. This is the negative left by the flash. All that I know is what has been seared into my retina, the photogene of an impossible tableau, of something I saw but did not see and thus cannot remember. The image is necessarily incomplete. All that I know is printed from this negative, this cringingly obsolescent technique of image capture, the only materiality the image might still claim. To the extent I speak of myself, to the extent I claim to know about anything that happened, all is derived from this negative. This is what happened, this might be what took place; were you here, if you could examine this scrap of film, this is what you might see. But please do not look too close.

I am hollowed, a collection of shadows, obtuse angles, contusions and vacancies, things sewn. I am an equation that is unsolvable, irregular, unbalanced. The reaction is predictable, it is a chemical inevitability; it is ever about to happen. You might see my jawline, my cheek bones. You might see the bags under my eyes, the only piece of luggage I did not lose in Paris, one of the few pieces of Beirut I have managed to keep with me. If you could examine this negative you might see a set of disconsolate limbs moving of their own accord, obliged to dance a tarantella that mimics the vibrato that lives in my teeth. 

And now. Then. The ubiquity of glass. How strange that we should live in a world that thinks so little of the strangeness of glass, how common, how near, how familiar, how forlorn. All the delight we no longer feel in the magnificence of its presence. The wonderful, the grandiose, now made homely; the erosion, over time, of its regal inscrutability. We see nothing in glass but the image of ourselves. 

This glass, a window. A pane, this pain, another way of looking at the pain, the pane, the expectation of horror. A pane of glass in a window is a solicitation, an enticement, a refusal. It is the invitation to look, to see, to be seen. To be exposed in all the fleshy, ragged materiality of the most intimate, the most preposterous. It is an invitation but also a barrier. Nothing that is seen must ever be touched. The glass in the window is the elevation of the eye over the organ of the flesh; the pleasure in seeing even those things that hide in the light. 

That glass might break we are condemned to assume. But we put the fear away, for all the reasons we already know. 

The infernal bestiary of the sound. The sound, and the absence of sound. The absence of air. It is the the circumference of a vibration, of all the vibrations, the air through the cobs, along the angles of lost things, clotheslines, door hinges, the window, the glass. The sound, like the breath, an invasion, a vibration. It fills you, and inflates you. It takes up all the space you have ever known, will ever hope to know. 

All the air has been sucked from the room so it might speak to you alone. It tells you, caresses you. You are going to die, it says. You are going to die right now. 

Then the air comes back into the world and the world fills up and everything shatters. There will be no world for you anymore. There will be only this glass, lying in heaps, barring your path through the streets you must now tread. This is the glass. The ubiquity of glass. It reflects now the plume, which rises victorious in the sky beyond the reach of the buildings it felled, beyond all that was melted and fell into the sea. 

We look, we listen, we step into the tide of the remnants of plate. One day, we think, we will have drinks at that bar. We will consider the glass and all it holds, all the sound it contains.

My dreams for some time have been of things undead. Of vampires and werewolves and ghouls of all sorts. Of wolves and dogs. Of goats sitting at the windows, staring. Of irascible birds perched in viciously knotted trees. I have dreams of invasion, of being housed in camps and trying to escape and being shot down. In sleep, I find myself running down barely remembered streets in Old Cairo, in the darker corners of Sultanhamet in Istanbul. I dream of something that calls itself the Demon Killer that, draped in a burka fashioned of burlap (burka, burlap, a displacement, a rhyme), wields a sword, and hunts children, demanding, “Do you practice religion?” When the answer is not forthcoming, it wields steel against them. In the dream, I am trying to protect the children. Inevitably, I fail.

Father can’t you see that I am burning? The candles at the head of the corpse have come loose and I am being beaten. 

            I dream of planes exploding in the sky, of planes crashing, of bombers bombing. I find myself bobbing (bombing) in the waters of the New York harbor, looking back at the city, unable to reach the shore. I am looking for the World Trade Center, trying to find the towers, seeing an unfamiliar neon shard, ugly, oblong, topped with an inelegant spire. I find myself staring into the waters of the Mediterranean from the deck at the Sporting Club, wanting to dive, afraid to get into the water. I will be standing on the Corniche, looking southwest, into Beirut and out over the sea, past the place where the lighthouse should be, now replaced by the Statue of Liberty, its bust now outfitted with a bronze colossus of the Three Stooges, a trinity for our times; in the absence of Hercules, a hydra reborn. 

            It does not escape me that hydra slides into hydraulic and that both have something to do with motion and water and the properties of energy which is some kind of quantity that we understand but only barely and that my name is Waterman. It does not escape me that I was born on the river and have lived much of my life on the sea. That I have lived on the Hudson and just over the East River. That I cannot be rid of the Mississippi; that I have never left the inland sea. That there is a fire in the valley and it is calling me back. 

            I am still a scholar. But the pain is a screaming.

There is a wandering in the banishment. A refusal, rudderless and girthy. A barque, shuttered. Not empty. Tossed, but still. There, a sail. Stubborn with mast. The stars have gone out but there is a redness at the rim of the world. Whatever our course, we know our end. 

But still. We cannot begin until everyone is seated. Help your friend before you put on your masque. There is the sickness and the Sickness. There is the memory and the plague. The memory of the Plague. This. This. There are the infinite regressions you would have us endure. There is the origin and there is the beginning and there is a dialectic which will have none of it.  None of it. Nothing. There will be no clarity of unities but there will be movement, still. There will be fire, and there will be air. There will be the sound of glass after the blaze. There shall be wailing, and gnashing of teeth. 

All the things I am not saying, all the things that cannot be said. I cannot speak so I vomit, compulsively, routinely. I vomit so I do not have to speak. My body expresses something horrid and material, something that lives in liquid, not in breath. I worry after all the things that we are not saying, all that is grief. I worry for all the things that are not being said, all that needs to be said, but is held too close. I worry that there will never be words enough to say what must be said. I worry that we will not remember that we were supposed to write it down. 

This is our war. Intention, inscription, citation: these are the weapons of our choosing, these are our tools. With these things, we shall assemble the structure of our dominion. We will constitute ourselves as a class. We will submit to a syndrome of order in which every structure is a scaffold, every contrivance of paper a rope and a noose, all the more effective for appearing so delicate, so insubstantial. It is with writing that we build the gallows for our hanging, that we chop the wood that will bear us at Calvary. It is now to writing that we turn; it is to the stories by which I have tried to relate to what happened to me, the language from the past that I now employ to shape my present and my future; the words that I must remain vigilant around, because even the most finely expressed truth is only ever a really well-festooned lie. It is through writing that we propose to explore the time of the change, and the time after the change, just what had changed, and what could not be moved. I call this a digest because the digest is an all too common irregularity within the history of forms, an act of literary expediency if not complacency, a mode of imitation that consists precisely in unoriginal maladaptations of more praiseworthy efforts. Aesthetically bereft, forswearing deliberation, the digest proceeds by accretion and not by design, and it affords no role to the play of chance. Everything is meaningful and nothing is left out, but things become strangely mangled in the process. Condensed and reduced, the digest is a stock made of bones that have already been picked through, a sauce that bears no resemblance to the beast from which it was born. It is, in a sense, the only frame through which to approach this unstudied effort, this attempt at explaining an experience that refuses to be condensed, or really much remembered. The digest is a way of making sense that makes both too much sense and too little, and that smacks of both far too much effort and far too little concern. 

So put down your pencils and bite your tongue. Do not speak. These are the plague years: please cover your mouth and silence your pens. Do not breathe. This is a discourse from the hysteric and we intend to leave no trace behind. Respiration is communion, an inconspicuous commingling, and we will have none of that. To breathe is to be accomplice to murder, and no words are adequate for these times. To write is to confess. Leave no account, no notary, no scrivener. After all, these are the plague years, and peril is all about. It resides in the mouth, in what goes in, and what comes out. It resides in the hand, in gesture and in scrawl. Permeable membrane, transfer station: the mouth is the point at which we are revealed to the other, if not quite to ourselves; the place we admit the physicality of the other and some portion of those things that are other within ourselves. The hand is its adjutant, the locus of the haptic. This is the beginning of writing, if it was not yet clear. These are the places from which writing begins. When we are talking to ourselves, when we can no longer feel our hands, when the account arrives and commands the ship. 

These are the plague years, and we have become automatic. 

This is my attempt at understanding what has happened, what is happening, by listening to the words of others, the words we have written down, the words we preserve, if only as fragments. I listen for the lesson in the sounds of words I no longer understand, or am much disposed to hear. The cacophony is dwindling, but I hear the echoes as they fade away. I sit by the edge of the water and carve my words into the mud. I spin myself into the ground. 

What follows, here, is about this time. It traces the abrasions of this time through the period of my extenuated mental collapse, and it sets the stage for the more effusively discordant reflections that are yet to come. Because any effort at sorting through the wreckage of these unavoidably braided collapses could be nothing other than an act of sublime hubris, this account is necessarily untidy. There is, however, a structure. It is not a structure that can be told at the beginning, because it can only become apparent as we go. There is no way out but through, and no guarantee that we will not find ourselves trapped, lost to the detour that leads to some seductive backwater, left to the dark of the river at night. For now, we might as well begin with this proposition: What follows takes the shape of what some people might call a chart, a jazz score that records something of one person’s lonely pilgrimage to some undeserved joy. We will arrive somewhere, together, through improvisation, and what is being improvised is being recorded, yet it is not composed. In due course, we will get to the mania, and the seizures, the psychosis and the psychopomps, the birds, but for now, here, in this fractured moment, we have been instructed to begin with the Gospels and the gnashing of the teeth and the end of all things. From here, we will proceed to discuss the abnormalities and the nightmares, and the question of hysteria as it relates to our collective experience of time, about the morbid symptoms that come upon us, that wrap themselves around our bodies, now, here, at the very moment when the hands on the clock are spinning faster and faster and we are very clearly running them down though we have no idea when they might stop. In this story, Apocalypse does not arrive so much as creep about the house, occasionally pausing at the windows so it might be seen. 

What follows in these pages takes the shape of a tour through the literature of illness; or, if you prefer, a tour through the literature of illness where illness and madness appear as a function of capitalism, itself here conceived as a species of debility, a world devouring creature of infinite appetite that cannot help but consume, that advances debility as a condition of its being, its distended mouth, its engorged stomach, its prolapsed, perforated rectum. Debility is its product, if not its end, but it is inequitably distributed, aligned neither with the judgments of heaven nor with the spoils of sin, but instead with the congeries of deliberation and accident that constitute the substance of history, the tension of the surface over which the world floats. In this story, the substance of history is punctuated by events that rise from below, corrupting that which would abide in passivity. All we might know of the end, from this point here, is exhaustion, enervation. We cannot know what will come after. For now, however, in this moment, this hard won moment, let us continue to observe the fiction of the clock face and the calendar, certain in the knowledge that things will end but that the end is one of the things we can be certain we will never know. For now, we should pay attention to the gears and the motors and the things they try to tell us. We should agree to pretend that we still have all the time in the world. That the clock has not been damaged in its face and the mechanism continues to function despite the gears and the teeth coming apart in the hands of the mouth of the day before last. 

This is our covenant: to keep faith with the notion that any of this matters and that a moment devoted to the consideration of Frankenstein is as good as a moment dedicated to the Scriptures and that neither moment is a moment squandered, that all writers are prophets if you know how to read them and so we should perhaps also spare some time for Hamlet. After all, he was crazy too. Moreover, as we all know, the time is out of joint, and that is so because of course it is, because it could not be any other way; and now–after France, after the assault and the interrogation, the lights, the shackles, and the morphine–my clavicle is still broken, and of course it is because we must objectify the contradiction, which is the only thing we all are ever doing, we hysterics we historians we observers we holders of the time and the record of the time. 

We are about to attempt a crash landing. Please extinguish all cigarettes. We are all going down.

Everything begins with the gnashing of the teeth.