Joan of it all
This book is called Digest All The Plague Years because while I was writing it I was generally preoccupied by the idiosyncrasies of digestion. I was interested in the ways in which the word “digest” functions as both noun and metaphor, a sign designating a physiological process that is also a literary form, and how the manifestations of each are invariably bound up in the other. I was interested in how what we consume–what we eat, what we ingest, literally and metaphorically–is penetrated by our language, about how the irresistible need to consume gives rise to our language, about how language does no justice to the depth of that need, or about the ways in which, through language, that need might be suppressed. I was interested in digestion as tethered to certain rituals of consumption, but also in the digest as a ritual of sublation, a repetition that is a reworking, for good and for ill. During the plague years, I suffered from irregularities of digestion, which was one of the many symptoms of the disease, although one that came later, like so many of the symptoms of the thing that, unknown, insisted on unfolding in all its novelty. To the best of my knowledge, I was never infected with the Plague, but who can say that I was not, that you were not, that we are not all infected right now. We all were, I suppose, in a sense, or perhaps not. Perhaps you were spared. Perhaps you do not know. We speak to each other in lies, so lies are all we know. Diagnosis colonizes metaphor: in the end, we are all sick. So much of the Plague came later, in the afterwords, and it is to the words that come after that we find ourselves turning, turning, the widening, the metaphor, the materiality. We tell our children lies so they will learn to lie better. This is the preface to many of the lies I told myself about the Plague. This is about how I learned to be sick.
Nothing about the Plague was simple, and it remains unexamined, even now, especially now, now that it is supposed to be over, now that its time has passed; or, rather, now that it has passed into the warp and the woof, the thin substance of whatever tattered garment we now stretch about our misshapen selves. Unobtrusive as embroidery, exotic as carpet, we dwell in the Plague, with the Plague, and it within us. In the time when it was new, when it had arrived, rudely, to our houses, I lost my mind, and I learned how slowly these things happen, how there are some illnesses that bide their time, that collect in the corners while pondering the room, that insinuate themselves those things you had thought you had forgotten, that force your insides to come out.
During the pandemic, I started to forget to eat, often for what seemed like days on end, although who could be sure since the time was out of joint. In practical terms, what this meant was that my digestive processes more or less stopped, and that, during the time of the Plague, I was routinely, however unwittingly, making myself sick.
Over time, as irregular abnegation became ostentatious habit, I found myself routinely dehydrated and weak, often unable to walk, and more and more given to emesis. There were times when I would vomit every hour, sometimes every quarter hour, for anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight hours, unable to eat or drink or to move without making myself nauseous, hoping that eventually someone would find me and force me out of myself, force me to confront some version of the world that was not constituted in depression. At these times, with nothing in my stomach, digestive acid would spew from my mouth, burning my throat, and eat away at my teeth. I found myself unable to speak, which did not really matter. The dinner was over and there was no one to talk to; and even if there had been, I had long since lost the thread of the conversation. And really, after all, was there anything left to say? Unable to speak, neither could I write; I could not make sense of the world, and eventually, this absence of sense became somatic. Walking down the street, standing in line at the bakery, pausing to open the door to my apartment, I would pass out, or appear to. Being locked into my home I became locked into my body and forced out of the world, overcome by the tears in the skein of lies by which we hold it at bay. The world flooded in and I passed out because the world is made up and this is unbearable; or, at least, unacceptable.
There were long stretches of days when I could not hold a pen. My writing became unrecognizable. Bereft of reflection or critical insight, unable to make sense out of words or to keep confidence with their efficacy, I began to record, to annotate, to make notes, to fill the time scribbling in the pages of books, on my windows, on my hands. With no program or plan, no system or design, I began to collate the things that I saw all around me, hoarding what I could of the unbearable abundance. I held to the wistful notion that somehow proximity implied relation, and thus, that chasing down every thought, every feeling in my whimsical tour of the archive offered a portent of some greater scheme, some subterranean, submarine, subconscious unity. Cast adrift on the surface of a dying sea, I gorged myself on everything I could find, with no consideration for order or discernment, not at all concerned about the preponderance of salt. An unhappy banquet, what Covid offered was often more abject than appetizing, but what did it matter since I couldn’t keep anything down?
This book is about illness and madness, but it was written, is being written, by someone who is routinely sick to his stomach, and who may well be mad. I do not plan to make sense. I no longer have the sense to plan. I have come to America and everyone is sick, but no one seems to notice. Everyone eats too much, and too often, and too often with no care or discretion. Everyone is sick and it is curious to observe. This book is written as a study in the specificity of illness as a commonality that is also an event, an event that is inevitably recurrent and that, as recurrent, is unremarkable, yet aso transformative. It is about picking through the literature to find the metaphors, to relate the metaphors to an experience that, while common, remains ineffable, and underappreciated. It is about the desire for diagnosis and the limitations of diagnosis to satisfy any desire. It is about becoming engorged on nothing, and all the things you are hungry for, all the things you are trying to say, when you cannot help yourself from giving up your custodianship of yourself; what happens when the body insists upon reminding you that the mind is in the body, and that neither are happy to find themselves living together in this world, or that the world does not care much for them either. It is about learning to live with illness and madness, because these, after all, are the only things we have. We may not claim them, but they are ours.