84. Balut Theory

Honestly, the spoons in spoon theory feel easy, easier than they should. I have never cried over a spoon. I have felt, at most, mild annoyance, fishing for them in the standing water of a kitchen sink. But it's the disability metaphor everyone adores, originating with Miserandino (2010), who uses a dozen diner spoons to visually quantify for a friend the energy rationing that goes into the chronic fatigue of lupus. A spoon is assigned to each task, and before the work day begins, the friend is down to half.
I feel impoverished by these spoons. I prefer T.S. Eliot, whose Prufrock preceded this in musing I have measured out my life with coffee spoons, richer and less reductive with its harkening to disillusionment with society, to eternal pretending, to eternal paralysis at the fear of being found out, to being exhausted to death.

Like Berkowitz (2015), who dissects fibromyalgia and trauma in a series of prose poems, I hate Miserandino's spoon theory. It's awkward, imprecise, domestic, cute, a fragile pixie made inert in the kitchen, waiting for a man to carry her to bed. It "does little to alter certain people's misogynist misperceptions of fibromyalgia as a fake disease invented by middle-aged women because they're lazy" (Berkowitz, 2015, p. 97).
I hate Berkowitz's take too, which argues against feminine metis and the slippery, oblique speech of poetry, in favor of precise, clinical language as the way to be believed.
In my experience, neither one guarantees trust.

Neither Miserandino nor Berkowitz pay much attention to the fact that the spoon is a metaphor designed for ocularcentrism. Each domestic item becomes a visible unit of energy; each unit is exhausted when a spoon slips back into the kitchen curio drawer. A spoon for getting out of bed. A spoon for getting dressed. A spoon for making breakfast; possibly, a spoon for consuming it, which cancels out the spoon gained from eating. A handful of spoons for the morning commute. A spoon always held in reserve, just in case.
The battery or cell phone theories aren't much better. In the cell phone theory, you begin your day with an erratically charged smartphone, and your energy depends on battery life, airplane mode, unexpected glitches. It's a differently gendered model, what with the masculinity we ascribe to technology, but one that glosses over the human-nonhuman assemblages that mediate the body through prognoses, diagnoses, technical rendering, course of treatment. It's one that unfleshes fatigue and surmises a subject without metis, incapable of troubleshooting or hacking her phone or phreaking someone else's. It's less ocularcentric than spoons, but it's just as willing to promote the individual and biomedical over the collective and biocultural.

Spoon theory hints of the ceaseless plotting and frustration of a life lived by another's logistics, but there's nothing in spoons to indicate minor increments, the complexity of each decision, the anguish of an inaccessible, endangering world, or that it takes a collective social effort to extract meaning from pain or profound exhaustion. We have called it the effect of an angry god, impurities in the blood, female hysteria, stress, and overwork. Rarely do we call it catching, whether that means contagion or pey pidichittu. As in demonology, we want to believe that pain and fatigue are contained in those who have called them forth, whose bodies are bounded by impassable contours. We don't want to believe we live at the same address.
Miserandino's spoons demonstrate an enervating exchange with no impact on a recipient who might as well be imaginary, prefigured to get nothing out of the trade. In her world, we barter hardware with a black hole, but black holes grow. Fatigue and energy are contagious affects and constructs that are intersubjectively defined in terms of scorn, empathy, pity, and mystery.

At the front of an enthusiastic classroom, my aura inflates, wilts on a miserly commute with strangers, everyone turned inward, no one willing to express. I'm no tourist, but an exuberant subway "Showtime" performance draws me in for its promise of an extra spoon or a few moments to recharge my battery.
As Haraway (1991) has argued, "the machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment" (p. 180), but the battery theory overlooks the connections through which technologies link to the body and become temporarily organic; it also assumes that the machine-like body is a perfectible body, an ableist metaphor that propels eugenic attitudes towards misabled bodyminds like mine (Thomas de la Peña, 2003).

To try to make spoon theory apply, I picture a mismatched, cross-cultural set, contingent on time, place, and giver. I don't remember the set I began with. I imagine all my students have some of mine, and mine is now a jumbled drawer of gold collectibles, diner spoons, tarnished ladles, wooden mixing spoons, Ikea spoons, David Mellor spoons, rice spoons, spoons made of sugar, plastic takeout sporks. Spoons respectable enough for barter, spoons I can snap in half, spoons I can consume for sustenance, spoons that convey the intensities of logistical life.
Spoons fail because my energy deficit grows more and more with age, in a postmodern society that rejects slowness and care as unproductive incompetence, and prides itself on exhausting its undesirables to death.
I might be clumsy at it, but Tamilians prefer to eat with their hands.

We deserve better.

So here's a new theory, a metaphor that would evict me from any clinic or baffle any professor who expects a passing I am fine. I'll say my infra-ordinary day breaks like balut, a fertilized duck embryo boiled alive in its shell, bought on the street to gird me for the 16-hour journey of a given day. Balut is a street food in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Unlike spoons, balut connotes across cultural boundaries: Asian-ness, fertility for women, toughness for men, sexual vigor for both, and, as a cheap protein and calcium, the working-class. It's not a visual metaphor. To look is to open yourself up to horror.
Balut is all smell, mouthfeel, and taste. Unlike spoons, it's visually repulsive. An ugly desire not so easily satisfied; not an object to guiltlessly pick up or spend. Not a thoughtless transaction of silverware or battery life. Each self-sustaining bite an act that feels like murder.
Even Kronos couldn't spare a glance for the children he devoured, which proved his undoing when he failed to taste the difference between innocent flesh and stone.
Post-sundown, the saying goes, you don't have to see what your teeth have wrought.

So imagine: hunger sucks out voids to live in, and you have to make your one egg last. You can't save it for long. In the heat of your pocket, it begins to turn. You peel off the wet shell and punch a hole in the top of the cooked membrane ribbed in veins to slurp up an infant's universe. Some people stop at drinking the broth, but you can't be so picky. You have to pick the thing apart, and locate, with your fingers, in the dark, the fetus anchored to a quarter-shell. Pass your palm over it and the wet scraggly feathers spike up and off; the soft pneumatic bones drag, but hold their shape, the eye a nipple, the long humerus flexing a nubby wing. The albumen, chewy as a pencil eraser, is more expenditure than reward. But maybe you can eat the yolk, softer, more delicate, less sulfurous than a hardboiled egg, without distress over how it nourished the chick up to two days before its birth. You can justify it by reminding yourself, if you want to move, you don't get a choice.

This is what spoons and batteries, reassuringly ordinary and durable, Western and "civilized," miss. You need to eat the baby. Every increment of energy spent, and gained back, is a nibble at a fetus boiled to death for you to consume, which is to say you may never want to do it, like the constant, maddening self-doubt that the second you cease hoarding your energy, you'll find yourself deprived and in need. So you can carry it until it spoils. Or you can accept fresher offerings. Like energy, it's sharable. You can give it away for nothing and lie down in the dark to die.

The violence we do by masticating a duckling is the violence of colonialism and late capitalism on a body like mine.
Even the most broken of spoons and phones doesn't say this.

Fibromyalgia on its own is nonfatal, but this isn't true of exhaustion. A heart like mine, 110 to 137 beats-per-minute when I change my position, chronically hypotensive otherwise, wears the body down. Fatigue is a straight road to heart failure, memory loss, gut dysfunction, a compromised immune system, myoclonic spasm, dementia.
It's not just intense flare-ups driving me to the lip of the abyss, and no amount of cunning will protect me.

In online discussion boards, even some Filipinos, for whom balut is native and commonplace, find it repulsive. The taste may be acquired, but how much can you really acclimate to the dead infants who make themselves felt, always, on your tongue?
My culture is different, but my membership in nonwhite disabled communities is the same. Disabled/white and Asian Pacific American (APA) communities render us both invisible. A 2016 informal survey conducted by Alice Wong's Disability Visibility Project confirms that the APA experience of disability differs from the white disabled experience that mobilizes disability justice efforts — and mainstreams metaphors. The model minority myth, colonialist beliefs, religious and folk superstitions, and familially imparted shame ensure we are effaced in all our communities. The common experience of disability does not prevent racist, colorist, or ethnocentric antagonisms within the community (Wong, 2016). My initial thrill at connecting with other chronically pained people is often tempered with disappointment at the stereotypes they assign me, their hierarchization of model minorities, their implication that my darkness and firm, matter-of-fact demeanor makes me scary.

Being a disabled Tamil American makes me feel like a unicorn. I need a collective of us. In the absence of that, I want names and metaphors that bond me with subjects who, for reasons of geographical origin, skin color, or political orientation, are intermittently visible as model minorities, less represented in biomedical clinical trials and the disability community in the U.S.

Gibbs (2005) tells us that "metaphors have philosophical consequence" (para. 14), and I want you to feel that something's at stake. Something like chewing a fetus that has become itself enough to be hailed into recognition.
You're eating me alive.

On good days, when the decisions are easy, when every choice that presents itself is expected, every outcome anticipated and planned for, the duck embryo is emulsified fat and flesh, a savory mousse that dissolves with each mouthful. You can believe it's chicken soup in an egg. Bad days, the choices are multiple and unforeseen and all the outcomes poor, and the baby revives in a panic in your throat. You can cough it up or choke it down. But you know what's next, when the energy taps out. You don't have to see it to know.