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.
Joan of it all
Joan of it all
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.