Digest All the Plague Years (1.1)
This will never be finished. And it will never be published. But I am done with it now.
It is psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express–verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other matter–the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
–André Breton, “Manifeste de Surrealism,” 1924
Since every beginning is different, and since there is no hope of dealing with every one, I arrange examples in series whose internal rule of coherence is neither a logic of simple consecutiveness nor random analogy. Rather, I adopt a principle of association that works, in a sense, against simple consecution and chance.
–Edward Said, Beginnings, 1975
What goes by the name of hysteria is a set of opposing and even contradictory statements. This set we will call knowledge. The sequence of those statements can be treated as history: they can be arranged in chronological order, their constants can be determined, their patterns and gaps revealed. But, at best, such a history would demonstrate the failure of knowledge to unveil the mystery, as can be seen from certain historicist interpretations. Still, this history describes the conditions under which a mystery triggers the production of knowledge. It is not the history of hysteria but the history of medicine, or of hysteria as a body of statements. Some of these statements have been invalidated in time while others have not. Yet each fails to state the whole truth, that is, none can take hold of its object and fully master it.
–Gérard Wajcman, Le maître et l'hystérique, 1982
The healthy stomach is nothing if not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.
–Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912
There are things I’d like to say
But I’m never talking to you again
–Husker Du, 1984
1.
Overture: August 2022, Paris
The fists, now a screaming; there is a rag that sits on a stick. Falling. The dream of falling. Stars are swimming in the mud of this stone, this lightness and what is it now but abandonment. Arcane stars on this floor and this abandonment. And now. Again now. The taste of your teeth. The jaggedy jim dandy jim dandy jim dandy. Now the redness. The roar. The roar. It is far. Vowels are not adequate to the shape of this sound because it is distant. But this. Here. Now. There. The memory of glass. Green and orange and occasionally purple and sometimes blue. Touched with a bit of the light from the plume. Which is the name we give to the smoke that now lives in our lungs.
You see the blood, the blood and the pool, cerulean blue with clouds of crimson. You are a pile that lives on the floor. Two days, five seizures. Now: a dream a delusion a fantasy of jackboots, of handcuffs and rubber bands and shreds of cotton, a choir of nurses a chorale of police.
Do you know where you are?
You don’t know what happened?
You don’t need to know what happened?
Stigmata present. A present of stigmata. A gift. A box. Now I am wrapped.
They ask me questions I have no answers for, and I do not believe any of it is real. They ask me questions in a language I barely remember and they scoff and they hit me when I cannot respond. They insist they are helping. Everyone always insists they are helping. The cure for what ails you is to submit to the pain. Harm is the best help. Now, why won’t you tell us what we want to know? Where have you been and where are you going? Why are you naked in a pool of your own piss? Where did you get all those cuts on your forehead? What is the secret meaning of all these red marks?
The ravings of the sick were once the secrets of God, but they want to hear what I have to say, so they demand that I should speak. I am in Paris, I want to tell them. I am in Paris and I am traveling alone from Beirut and I am going back to America. I am going back to America which is home but not home like Beirut and I do not know where I am supposed to be except I was supposed to be on that plane but it left without me and now I am naked on the floor and everything is wet a dog is barking at me and now I am being beaten now why am I being beaten now I am being chained to a trolley and why are you hitting me in the face. There are injections or is it the dream of injections and this is a night ride through Paris and now there is morphine that sits on my lips.
We are screaming through Paris now looking for prison. We are keeping our pace with the old revolution. We are looking to Vincennes because remember Vincennes or was it Vincent who went crazy while in the shower who could not stop showering who asked Patrick to be his token who had to be taken away. I want to tell them where I am and where I am going and I want to tell them to stop it to just stop it but I cannot because I do not know where I am going or where I am and after all I am the monster and I have just woke up to the cruel absence of my creator and his blank gaze and the realization that he is quite done with me and that I am about to be destroyed. I am abandoned. Nothing left to myself. Nothing left to destroy but the pieces of where I was, which is not where I am going, not now not ever not ever again.
I am psychotic but no one can know this. I tell them: the seizures always seem to begin in my mouth.
I want to tell them but I forgot I forgot to tell them that is I forgot to remember. This is what happens when you are too much yourself that you must leave yourself behind.
By the time I got to Paris I had long since abandoned myself, but I had mostly forgotten to notice that I had not noticed. This is not quite when everything started, but it is when the seizures began; or, rather, the point at which they made themselves known such that they could no longer be ignored. Over four days, wandering the airport, waiting for one flight or another after multiple delays, cancellations and reschedulings, there were at least five separate episodes that I can remember, each one more grave than the one just before. During at least one of these I was physically assaulted and my belongings–my wallet, my passport, my computer, sheaves of notes I had taken while conducting research for the book I was planning to write–were stolen.
I do not remember any of this but the evidence is etched into my body, which is now the map of a territory deep in my mind, the map that precedes the territory and heralds egress. After coming-to in a pool of piss and blood, naked, I was picked up by the police. They took me into custody. They asked me questions. While I was being questioned, I was bound and beaten. I was dosed with morphine. I entered into a fugue, overwhelmed by a density of riotous misapprehensions about where I was and the people who stumbled into my path. In a fugue, we are told, the unconscious goes wandering, while taking the body along for the ride. In my experience, the sequence was multiplied, and simply reversed: I went for a ride and my unconscious appeared, a surly gate agent, taking measures to ensure that I would never arrive at wherever it was I was meant to be going.
What happened, of course, was neither a dream, nor a hallucination. It was both, and neither, and also something more: something more like history if history is the real that we cannot touch or hold or signify or know, something that roams the streets, an inhabiting spirit, the temper of intemperance, an inconsolable rage. This could not really be France, I reasoned, because nobody in France could possibly wear such dismally shabby uniforms as my tormentors; and certainly, no one in France could have been as fat as the one who liked to punch me in the face. This is not France, I told myself. You are hallucinating Algeria, you are dreaming of the windows in your apartment in Algeria. The metaphorical torture of Algeria–the sometimes literal torture of Algeria–has become a dream of being beaten now literally in France.
As it happened, after some time–with the intervention of someone higher up the chain of command–I was taken, eventually, in an ambulance, on a wild joyride through the streets of Paris. I was delivered to a hospital, where I was held in the emergency ward, where I was bound for another thirty-six hours. I remember much of what happened, but only as impressions, a play of shadows cast under low light, each image more sharp than the one that preceded it, each form more belligerent than the one it announced, the whole of each scene ever more evidence that each act was purposeful, personal, a torrent of violence that fell in a cascade, breaking over the irregular angles of my scattered remains.
At times I was certain I was dreaming. At others, I knew that I was not. Despite my best efforts, I could not wake myself up. So I did what I do, the dutiful student. I did what I could do and do not: I began to take notes.
This is a record of the things you think about when you wake up in Paris only to find that you have gone missing. These are the things that you write down after all the sewing is done and you rip out the stitches so you can trace the shape of your face. Nothing about them is ever intentional. They begin to make more sense the less sense they make. Hallucinations follow no logic but that of the unconscious, which is a digest of all things but is bereft of all tense.
These then are my notes from the skin of psychosis. Hysterics suffer from recollections, schizophrenics from language. Psychotics endure the labor of the dreamwork, which like all work will expand to fill both the time and the space. I could not, I cannot, I would not distinguish between one moment and another; everything is happening, will happen, has happened, all at once, over and over again, as it was in the beginning now and ever shall be world without end amen. I remember the mylar, the manacle, the boot, and the chair. The handcuffs and the laughter, the screaming in the quiet. I remember the letters but not the language, choking tears of laughter but never the dreaming, but mostly the rough cut of the runes that some brave tattooist left on my skin.
That is to say. This is to say. These are the things that might have been said. Here are the things that might have been written, had we the time or the temperament for this unwieldy instrument. La pluma, the plume, the style and the stylus, the smoke and the colors in which it ascends. The weapon that strikes at the heart of the thing; every cut a reparation, every reparation a cut. No one gets out of this thing alive.
This is the coda to an unsung cantata. Fragments of pieces of memories that form a mnemonic, elements that together tell a kind of story, albeit one that does not begin or end or offer any sort of clarity, but that speaks of itself in riddles and rhymes, jingles and slogans. We start with the ending to probe for the latencies that have come from the beginning, to figure out just what the beginning is supposed to be. We start with the ending because we are hoping for some clue as to what might be coming, what new monstrosities might yet emerge, those beasts that have heard our anguished call and are coming to meet us, just over the knoll, somewhere along the blasted horizon.
This is my aria, and it comes at the finale, which has now been moved into the overture. It is an instrumental corrupted by words. What is the difference between any of these things and what does it matter? How can I perform with my wrists tied to the bed when I wake on the floor of the airport, Leo’s rainbow beside me, six firemen bending over me, a leash and a dog and the gendarmerie, my unwilling, ungrateful audience.
Still, someone is singing.
No hay banda. Es una grabacion. It is a tape recording. Llorando. Llorando.
The puzzle box and the key. Dora and the jewels. In this box I keep my secrets. Sickness. Death. The pain of expectation. Pan Dora, pan d’ora. All Dora, the bread of gold, the feast of the undigestibles, a banquet of chestnuts.
The old world is dying. The new struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.
It begins with blood. It ends with blood.
Remember man that you are dust.
It rings. It echoes. A burning of palms.
Do this in remembrance of me.
My friend–welcome to the Carpathians.
I belong to the words, not they to me. And thus we enter, into the world.
Fragments of old songs. Sung without consideration or system. Sung without consequence and hopelessly out of order. A liturgical abomination. Images float on the surface of disorder. And darkness is on the face of the deep.
The seizures are part of the lyrics to my postlude, the words that hang about this music for an exit. This is a misal, and these are the hymns. The world is broken and I cannot tell you where I am, but when the surety of that knowledge arrives, it arrives with all the grace of a diminished seventh in the minor scale, an elegant triad enriched by the inelegance of its corruptibility. It arrives with all the weight of a miscued chord, sounded out of place and all the more resonant for having stepped on the silence that surrounds the other notes.
There is something in my head that is a screaming. I can hear only the screaming in the ungodly silence. Drowning in the river of broadcast television you know where you are, but in your eyes you can hear the sound of the seizure, you can taste its hoofbeats.
You frighten people. But of course you know this. You have always frightened people. You are frightening them right now because dark days will come. This much is certain. So much is certain. You are a reminder of the weapon, which is always and ever and will be the word. This is why. This is why. This is why they run. You see things that are not there. The goat in the window. The moon in the glass. When they look they can tell that you know what they think that you know. When you are near, they speak in pauses and inartful evasions; they stammer and creak like so many old stairs, as if no one has walked them for hundreds of years, as if common speech is just so many runes and you are a tablet, worn by the water, planted in the sand, away from the shore.
You who listen who talk to yourself you do not want them to hear what you have to tell them. You who dig in the sand for the stones that are deep. They know you can see things that they do not see. They do not believe in the things that you see because you have told them you are making an accounting for their company of ghosts. You have become the monster you always knew and they are afraid. Now, the villagers have assembled, and they are waiting. They have called the quorum, they have held their caucus, they have taken a vote. They have lit the fire in expectation of your return. You can never go home. Knives are out, forks are up; it is you who are meant for the meal.
And then you wake up and it’s America. You wake up outside and it’s America. You wake up and it’s Iowa, of all places; it is Iowa and you do not know how you got there or why or what it wants from you now or what it might take. You cannot distinguish from one moment or another, but there are still things you do not care to remember. You remember the handcuffs and you remember the chair. The mylar, the manacle, the boot. You remember the screaming you hear in the quiet. You remember surfaces and markings and fragments of script; words without letters, sounds without voice, a subject with no subject, other than space.
The times are hopeless. But something has happened. Something is moving. A train, a vibration. You cannot hear it, but yet. Something is happening. And many things are yet to happen. We do not know what they will be. Or where this will end. The way is treacherous but the roads cannot have been blocked because the trails are not yet cut. Moreover, the prairie is still here. It is not wild and it was never wild and we should not pretend otherwise. As with iron, oak, and ballast, this abomination that calls itself grass is a novelty, a travesty, a parasite; it sucks at the marrow of all that is beneath us, the life of the dead and the life of all the things we cannot see, the lives through which we consume the air and the sun. What is below is much greater than the thing we call history, but for now that word will have to do. What is below is intransigent. Nonetheless it is still. Still. It is the eye of the tempest, the heart of the inland sea. The prairie lies in wait.
I am at the river and I feel nothing. It is majesty but muted; nothing but a hollow, the shape of something lost, an attachment undone, forsaken, this mud. I had assumed coming back here would awaken something, something other than the creature, the monster, the scar in this stone. But now, there is only the echo, the sadness formerly carried along by the current, once pooling in the shadows of these islands, once breaking quietly upon these banks. Now littered with boutiques, bordered by concrete and wandered by eccentrics, the river has been robbed of its voice, its sorrow. Even in the dying light, the embers of fall now lit in the trees of the islands. If it sings, I cannot hear it. It does not sing so much as groan.
I am in Iowa and no one is well. There is a madness no one can hear but I hear it lowing, stomping. Insisting upon the veracity of its physics, its proofs. Insisting upon bullets over opiates and industrial trauma. Everyone is nursing some work-related injury. Everyone eats at the body of the Sacklers. Everyone returns to the river hoping their demons might drown.
And then it is nighttime and now there is the train. The train. The train is the screaming that cuts through the dark. The train. The freight. All the wealth of the Plains. Hurtling through the gloaming, inexorably toward the east. The monster hears the story in the wailing of the train. It hears the plaintive maw of the enfeebled yet voracious; it watches the corn spill onto the tracks, a memento from the automobile, lost to the fog. Whoever made him did not know what he was doing, and he hears every sound, smells every smell, but still he is not allowed to see more than he needs. And somehow he knows there is much to see, much that is being kept from him, the knowing of the rocks and the corn and the kernel of the thing that will not go away. He can hear it. He can hear it. He can hear the scar. He can feel its vibration. Somehow he knows it unfolds as a map. He knows that he is the progeny of a demented geography. He is inside out and halfway twisted. The rock and the river no longer offer the promise of hope..
Your reflection has gone missing and all that is left is the voice. You cannot see. A house is not a home and a home is not a fun house and all the mirrors are cracked. This is a train car but all the doors are jammed. We stand at the threshold but cannot move. The glass of the compartment is stained and leaded and the lead has been spun by a spider made of flame. The flame is blue and the glass is red. The light is gray and green like the bruises on our face. Death travels in pairs and is the only reflection, the masquerade ball with its ticking clock. The monster, the creature is outside but inside, staring in at all the things that are twisted in the wash that comes out of the wash and needed mending needed starch and iron and steel and stone to the kiln, to the kettle and the slag that seeps through the cracks and rolls down the stones and over the water under all is slate.
He has come from France. He has crossed the Arctic circle. He has seen the ice of Lapland. There were no tiny men. There were no magical deer. The world begins to take some kind of shape. The monster is learning about the bitterness of saline, about the wrath of a world that will not look back. Looking back at the journey one seeks a new course. But there, in the end, is nothing to see. There is nothing to see but still there is this. He knows that he is being followed. He has heard the approach of footsteps, flat and dead and drowned in the depth of the night. He does not know the name of his pursuer; but he has come to know the length of his stride. What is it he wants? Why does he stand just out of sight? The map, the scar, they offer no clues. We are left with no prophecy of what yet may come.
The world is large. They have made it small. The question of home, the salty and the sweet. The trees at home are gone, denuded by the philistines who took the house. Still, Oxossi waits for you by the trees. In dreams he attacks, his beak splintering the pane that separates you. Glass recurs again and over again. Windows, windshields, broken and shattered, the metamorphosis of Hamra after the explosion, the now glistening streets flooded with the shards of hope, of confidence, the trick now exposed. We are not safe, we are not well. The glass was a promise. Something has changed but nothing has changed. The trees of Hamra must remain hidden lest they tempt the bonecutters, petrol-fevered osteotomes wielded against wood, making kindling, making lumber, the cruel substance of a different sort of kin, a kiln, the fire and the clay. He keeps his distance, but Oxossi alights in these trees as well, so near to the doomed sea, so far from the necrotic river, choked with the blood of cattle. Oxossi knows how to act, but he also knows how to wait. It is a potent spice, this blend. For Oxossi, the roads cannot be blocked because he can fly.
Nobody says it to me, but I hear that I am fragile. I heard it in the scream of the train. It takes more than work to hold these together, these pieces, these fragments, these tokens of art. I am the ruins of some modern sculpture, weathered and broken before its past time. I am tired of being looked at, to be on display. I am tired of this museum, this gallery, this crypt. I am tired of having to explain myself. No one gets my jokes. I may as well be back in Paris, speaking my broken French through the mist of the wakeful nightmare, trying to prove that I was real, that I could hold my parts together by force of will, and failing, because none of the rest of it was real so how could I be so what did it matter. I could say whatever I liked because my mouth did not belong to me anyway. These seizures are mine, but there is no one to listen. They are a message that is meant only for me. People ask me questions and I have nothing to tell them: when I know that I know I will let you know what they mean. When the frame is complete and the thing comes into focus, perhaps everything will make some kind of sense. Maybe then you will listen without hunting for answers. As if answers were ever somehow readily abundant.
The psalmist tried to tell us. “There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun.” We belong to the language, and it resides in us; it is not a thing we are owed, or a thing we possess.
They always begin in my mouth. The seizures. Or whatever we want to call them. This is one of the reasons I do not eat. Or speak. This is why I throw up. Unable to form words, I vomit instead. This is a noise I am permitted, a noise I am forgiven. Speech is pedestrian, everyday, repetitive; it makes the world, it is the light in the dark, the tip of the spear, the promise of order; it is the activation of meaning within the order of the absolute, the extraction of purpose and the vanishing of its detritus, of all that is in the word but not of the word but of the relationships among words. All that is said that we do not mean to say even when we are certain we know just what we have said.
I vomit rather than speak. And this is another word for writing. A sound that is substance, a mark, a sight, a smell.