Digest All the Plague Years (2.1)
Everything begins with the gnashing of the teeth.
2.
I had been the author of unalterable evils, and I lived in daily fear lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness. I had an obscure feeling that all was not over and that he would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost efface the recollection of the past. There was always scope for fear so long as anything I loved remained behind. My abhorrence of this fiend cannot be conceived. When I thought of him I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly bestowed.
—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
The gnashing of the teeth. When did that start? As with many things, I cannot remember, but it became obvious well into the Plague, as we slid headlong into our third month of quarantine. One morning I woke up, my mouth full of blood and bits of enamel. My tongue was swollen and I was unable to speak. I had no memory of just what had happened or how it had happened or when, but it was all too obvious that something had happened while I was asleep. That this seemed eminently reasonable was another sign of how far gone we had become: it was around the same time that I would find myself waking up in the night frantically trying to recall the day, the month, the year. The texture of what was normal had long since started to fray. Moreover, long prone to somnambulism, I was all too familiar with my body going on unplanned nighttime journeys; and while I could only imagine what I might have done to myself on this particular occasion, it was more than clear that somehow I had managed to crack a tooth.
I would find out later that I was just one of many who shared this complaint. During the pandemic, oral physicians all over the world reported a concurrent epidemic of wretched oral hygiene, something that included extreme temporomandibular distress and an uncharacteristically exorbitant number of cracked and luxated teeth. While they agreed this phenomenon was somehow cognate with the circumstance of the pandemic, they differed as to how best to understand the correlation, but most agreed that it seemed–at least in part–to have something to do with a newly generalized anxiety, the miasmatic sense of peril that enveloped even those who were not immediately touched by the disease, heightened by the generalized sense of loss and loneliness, of entrapment, suffered by all those who found themselves locked inside.
The stress of the quarantine, researchers believed, coupled with our slow yet unwilling submission to the syrupy joy of that thing we had only just started to think of as Covid time, was prompting a variety of what used to be called hysterical symptoms, untimely somatic manifestations of affective distress, unprovoked instances of the body holding forth, a companion, a hostage, to some lonely need. Our cracked teeth, it was held, were the most conspicuous sign of linguistic abundance of the pandemic over and beyond its all too substantial viral body; all of the ways in which our bodies, were burdened by the materiality of the virus, of the virus as a sign and as a symptom of the less than conspicuous disorders of our virally disordered times.
The gnashing of the teeth, the cracked molars, the bleeding gums: these were symptoms of a trauma that was collectively held, all the illness and death and the physically debilitating afterlives of the disease manifest as part of a general madness which went beyond the scope of the pandemic itself, to what truths the pandemic might still portend, all the things it could not reveal. We were cracking our teeth, whether awake or asleep, because our trauma–this trauma, some trauma, all the trauma–had to go somewhere, and for some reason it decided to go into our mouths.
At first it was coughing, later a sickness, nausea and emesis and a hallucinatory dyspnea, the sense that I could never breathe deeply enough. As time wore on, the symptoms compounded. I certainly did not notice it until it had happened, so I do not know quite when this began, but at some point, or somewhere, sometime one summer, I found that I had taken up residence somewhere in my body. That every ounce of my life was lived as if trapped within the shell of my frame. Illness, whatever it was, whatever its etiology, became permanently lodged under my skin, weaving its way into my nerves, slowing seeping, insinuating itself into my bones. I became resident of my body in the sense that my body was now possessed by a creature that was diseased, disordered; that was confused about where it had left itself, and could only express control by imposing a conditional debility, by making the body ill.
Please forgive these solipsisms. They are not unimportant. And they have to go somewhere.
This had happened before. But irregularly. Never for more than a day, maybe two. After July 2019, however, I found myself prone to more punishing, more complete melancholic absences of sense. For days on end, sometimes stretching into weeks, I would stop eating. I would stop showering or dressing or leaving my bed. I would forget to take care of myself. I would forget how to take care of myself. I would starve myself until I became nauseous and started vomiting, and I would keep this up until I was so physically weak I could barely get out of bed. My larynx would become swollen and inflamed and I would lose my voice just as assuredly as I would lose the thread of my life in a tangle of dirty clothes and sheets and empty bottles and the same four unhappy walls. Eventually, when the pain became too overwhelming, I would make the effort to get to the kitchen, to grab some bread or some crackers, and re-train my stomach to accept food, to rebuild my strength, to come back from dehydration. Barring that, I would call my housekeeper and she would come and make me food and clean up my mess and start to bring me back to the world.
I have lived with, or suffered with, some form of bipolar disorder, or manic depression, or melancholia, whatever you would like to call it, for years now. I know its movements, and its manifestations, often only in retrospect, but, by this time, the patterns had become more or less clear. Understanding that these were symptoms of bipolarity did not, of course, mitigate the effect of the symptoms in the slightest, nor did it cast any light on the circumstances of which bipolarity was itself a symptom. Nonetheless, bipolar was a name, and a liferaft, a way of stowing away upon the irregular sea of my personality.
What was beginning to happen to me, in this moment, was new, different, something that was increasingly physical, as emotional and intellectual turmoil started to lodge itself within the structure of bone and sinew. This was the beginning of my hysteria, which would manifest, most conspicuously, through the pains in my mouth. Biting my lip, grinding my teeth, I twisted my tongue and my speech became suspect. Swollen, enflamed, I swallowed my words and withdrew from the world, of the world made of words and the precarity of voice. I stopped writing. I could not write. My hands would go numb. My joints became engorged and my fingers went rigid. I could barely hold a pen, or bring myself to peck at the keys. Language, as it were, became an enigma, a mystery and a fixation, a light I was determined to blot out from myself. I found myself pining for a world without fiction, without structure or metaphor, a world without predicate, subject, or plot. I became myself a question that no one could answer; eventually the demand became lodged in my face. What was it? What is it? Why was it here and what did it want from me? There was no one to ask and so no one to answer; and even if there had been I would not have believed in anything they said.
This was the beginning of the gnashing of my teeth: the point at which it seemed to be obvious that I had to hold my mouth shut for fear of what might escape, that it was better to contain myself indefinitely because to let the inside out was to open oneself to reprisals, to exposure, to the end of the masquerade, or the realization of the truth of the falsehood and all the things I could see but was not supposed to say. My mouth was one of the sites upon which these anxieties were compacted; not a place but a process, and sometimes an object, a thing that, despite being silent, began nevertheless to suddenly speak.
Hysterical illness is never not illness but nor is its illness in any sense simple. Hysterical illness is never not illness but also and always a sort of demand, an exclamation that is a question but also an invitation and sometimes an answer, whatever that means. Hysteria is the body undone by its history, by the relationship of the body to its history and to history; which is to say, to the agony of history before history becomes history, to the distress of the profusion of meaning made nonsense, to the surfeit of the material from which history is forged.
Whatever it was–whatever it is–it began to happen regularly, this it, this thing; it would happen often two or three times a month, and for increasingly extended periods of time. Suddenly my body was not my own. It belonged to me only intermittently. I became increasingly disinclined to leave the house. I would stop speaking for days on end, and writing became all but unthinkable. In the mornings, I would get up from my bed, and would be overwhelmed by a lightheadedness so sudden and so pronounced that I could not take the four steps across the hallway to the bathroom. During these periods, going as far as the kitchen–less than ten steps from my bedroom–was unheard of. From bed, I would order food. When it arrived, I would find it nearly impossible to answer the bell, much less wait by the front door for the delivery person to ascend the three flights of stairs to my flat. On at least two occasions of which I am aware, the delivery boy–in Beirut it was always a boy–would arrive to find me passed out on the floor, slightly bloodied, with a new gash on my face. I began to fear the stairs in my building, or the stairs at my office, the irregularity of the pavement of the achingly familiar streets between Karakas and Bliss.
This was the beginning of the seizures, markers of an advent for the psychosis, which is when I went into my mouth and devoured the world. While the seizures, at this time, were never more than irregular, my fear of falling began to manifest itself in a new welter of symptoms and physical complaints. Every time I was in public, whatever the occasion, I was consumed by a near crippling sense of peril, the fear that I would pass out, or that the sense of vertigo I was increasingly prone to experience would translate into a slip, a fall, something broken, a new problem, a new opportunity for a punishingly long bout of something doctors call recovery. In my waking life, depression became an increasingly physical companion, a hysterical pain that I could not overcome, while the sustaining grace of mania exited the stage, abandoning me to an unsympathetic audience of supernaturally-endowed backbiters, all the voices in my head now crowding around me to critique my performance behind their hands, in hushed tones.
As time wore on, the symptoms of my depression became ever more somatized, routed through the network of nerves and joints and muscles, presenting themselves as random inflammation, headaches, joint pain, tremors in my limbs. When at work, I was always tired; when at home, I could not sleep. I could not untangle the knotted strands of physical and emotional pain. I could not bear to navigate stairs. I began to dream routinely of vampires and ghouls, of zombies and ravenous, rabid dogs, of hideously efficient killing machines, the peeling walls of dilapidated houses, abundantly haunted by demonic goats. In dreams, at times, I found myself wanting to talk, wanting to scream, but the words would be crushed before they could reach my lips, mangled by the uncanny presence of too many bones, the broken pieces of so many teeth. My throat would be swollen and no breath could escape and my words would be strangled, uttered so meekly as to be rendered inaudible, a passionate excoriation that went unheard. In these dreams, I would find myself at parties, resplendent with the most sumptuous preparations of the best kind of foods, but compelled for some reason to yell at the hosts, to refuse what they offered, to scream myself hoarse in defense of myself for some perceived slight or minor offense.
The hosts were never more than indefinite, shadowy wraiths slipping in and out of my field of vision, outside the physical range of audible sound. No matter to whom these defenses were addressed, I could never explain to them–nor to myself–what I was doing, what I was saying, or why. My explanations were garbled before they were formed. However I strained, whatever I tried, I could not give an account of myself, nor was I physically able to eat. In these dreams, my mouth became useless, neither an organ of the voice and passionate ejaculation, nor an organ of ingestion and consumption, of taste and discrimination and desire and incorporation. My speech was garbled. My digestion irregular. Waking or sleeping, it no longer mattered. My mouth had become shut, my throat was raw. Vomiting became a comfort, the only means of effecting control of my jaw.
This is the fate of the mouth as an organ: being subject yet object, it is never not open or never not shut. All that it is saying is there to be heard; but most would prefer to go on as if it were not. A voluptuary of the most wildly eccentric cultural fictions, of institutions and practices so long established as to appear absolutely reasonable if not automatic, the mouth is a transfer from instinct to experience, the site of a breach in the body that comes to be filled by the word and its claim. All the things we choose to eat, all the things we choose to spit out, the melodramatic playlets we stage around the things we ingest: these and more are indicative of the depth of our unremitting commitment to the fact of the mouth as an element of a digestive process that we are careful to disguise, a fact that is adorned in, and enlarged by, and any of conspicuous literary figures and cultural tropes.
The gnashing of my teeth had something to say about the mouth as a function and the mouth as a fantasy, the mouth as a client of the excremental and the emetic; about the mouth as a delight that is only ever unfolding as horror. To consume is a necessity; to speak is a choice. To eat is to enter into a relationship with the world, a world in which sensuality is permeated by words, and those words by the others from whom they emerge, those who issue the words by which consumption is endowed with a sense of significance beyond the act itself. To eat is to enter into a relationship with loss, which is to say, to enter into a relationship with a world that will only ever be unsatisfactory, if not distasteful, but is, in the end, the only sampling on offer, the only gruel on which we might dine. To eat is to attempt to repair the loss of which we cannot be relieved, the loss of the loss of the absence of the other; with the absence of the other in spite of the other, the loss of the substance of the other, in spite of ourselves.
In the refusal to eat, we are revealed in our obstinate attachment to the fact of this loss, to that loss, to the loss of the substance we might have been, they might have been, but have never been, neither we nor they, for us; in refusing to eat, we swallow that loss and hold it within as if it ever were or ever could be something that might be something at least moderately nourishing. We hold to that loss as a mode of destruction; a means of living inside a death that seeks no refuge for itself in the ways of the world.
The manifestation of the symptom is impossible to conceive absent its means of iteration, as if consideration of the means did not imply the meanness of ends. Throughout our various and varied literary worlds, the clenching of the jaw, the gnashing of teeth, appears, more often that not, as a supersensible physical remnant of an otherwise aimless linguistic excess; less a refusal to eat and thus to interrupt the relationship between consumption and digestion than an ungainly engagement with the idiosyncrasy of loss, in which the loss of the object is only ever a manifestation of the loss that cannot be borne, the loss of the word, the loss of that which is inside the word. Language rushes in to fill the void, the void that appears at the center of itself, the void that troubles all who are condemned to seek their consolation through the manifestation of its infernal device.
“Gnashing of teeth” is what is left in the wake of the literary sediment, an inconceivable object that is caught in our screen. A symptom, an outline, a story untold, “gnashing of teeth” appears throughout our literature as a means of illustrating a reflexive otherness that is otherwise always and wholly unexpressible, an unplumbed vastness of something so wildly insufferable that language itself offers no adequate means of expression or conveyance, pointing, finally, at the nothing but desolation which lurks at the heart of language itself. The gnashing of teeth marks the point at which the words have come to fail at the moment of their utterance, the threshold moment before the end of all things, which is also the beginning, but also the same thing, or so it would seem. It is the starving and the saving; it is the deep breath before the maddening dive.