70. Sisyphean Persistence and Reward

This is not a trickster myth, or a story in which upaya-kausalya or thanthiram are explicitly named, but in The Mahabharata, the beautiful Amba is abducted from her svayaṃvara by the formidable and celibate warrior Bhishma. Bhishma presents her to his younger half-brother, the crown prince of Hastinapur, but Amba declares her love for another man, so Bhishma sends her to her suitor. However, the man rejects her, saying Bhishma rightly won her. Heartbroken, Amba returns to Bhishma and demands he restore her honor by marrying her, citing kshatriya dharma, but Bhishma refuses because of his vow of celibacy. Her prospects destroyed, Amba seeks vengeance by performing severe austerities for decades, until Shiva himself appears to her and promises that she will be reborn as a kshatriya man, with her memories as Amba intact. Pleased, Amba kills herself, proclaiming, "For Bhishma's destruction!" Eventually she is reborn as Shikhandi, who — depending on the story — is male at birth, or a eunuch, or male but considered transgender due to Amba's lingering memories, or female at birth but considered transgender after swapping sexes with a yaksha. Regardless, she becomes instrumental in Bhishma's death: Bhishma cannot violate his dharma by attacking a woman and perceives Shikhandi as one, and so Arjuna uses Shikhandi as a shield in the Kurukshetra War and, from that position, fires the volley of arrows that slays Bhishma.

The trickery in this story is layered enough, but there's also this detail: Amba is not immediately reborn as a man, so she persistently, resolutely keeps killing herself until the propitious moment of her reincarnation as Shikhandi.

Persistence is not an explicitly named skill in trickster's wheelhouse, but it's implicit in many myths. Persistence is central to developing and redeveloping fibromyalgic fascial cunning. I persist because brain fog made me forget I already performed the action. I persist because I need the action to work. I persist because persisting in various dissembling ways — playing up the stereotype of the foolish, exotic South Asian girl or the astute model minority who can intellectually keep up — is an important tool for obtaining diagnoses, tests, medication, doctor's appointments. I persist because I keep fucking up, accidentally thwarting my own plans, giving myself away at inopportune moments. I persist because persistence transforms the fascia. I persist because frustration and hostility galvanize feminist political action. We persist because we're unwilling to lie down and die.

In "The Myth of Sisyphus," Camus (1955) considers the Greek myth of Sisyphus, whose metis outstripped that of the gods, and who is best known for temporarily rearchitecting the laws of mortality by briefly capturing Thanatos and, after his own death, deceiving Hades to revive. For this, he is punished with endless labor without culmination. However, Camus considers that the eternal, futile task is not a source of torment for this man of metis but a source of satisfaction and ultimately a reason for resisting. Sisyphus must embrace as a raison d'être a consciousness of the absence of remedy for the absurd unfairness of existence, and living for it is synonymous with finding a way out.

This is also a story of persistence.

Selfish a figure as Sisyphus is, we can extract the common from this, just as Trickster slips the traps set for him not only to escape, but also to reveal the trap for what it is and preemptively thwart its future iterations, performing what Hyde (2010) calls "dirt work": moving the taboo exclusions of polite society into the places of its exclusion. In doing so, Trickster seeks to introduce a "third thing" to disturb the webs of signification that create and reinforce the binaries that bind us. Through such dirt work, the fibromyalgic patient can transform the eternal, futile task of daily survival into finding a way out, can become adept at using parts of her body that are invisible to human and mechanical eyes to subtly challenge the efficacy of visual assessment.

Trickster is "the character in myth who threatens to take the myth apart" (Hyde, 2010, p. 14), the character who desires the recovery of Metis from the gut of the state, though "recovering Metis from the body of patriarchy requires a willingness to face personal and collective history, complete with its deep shadows, with rigorous honesty and to make provision for it. It requires a grounding in specific bodily experience so that new theory does not take on the abstraction that characterizes dominant theory" (Wilkinson, 1997, p. 59). The academic and biomedical institutions, as they stand, encourage leaving the body behind. The nervous system — the densely innervated gut, the impressionable fascia — has its own spontaneous life that is continually disregarded in academic and medical institutions in favor of "enthroning the rational, the orderly, the manageable" (p. 43). Gut counsel, metis, tells me to read myself in ways that do not reinforce masculine epistemology and acknowledges, practically, that I have to survive. It urges me to persist.

Fibromyalgic fascial cunning becomes a mode of movement inscribed in how the fascia slides or sticks, a way of negotiating space, tactile habits, deep touch, morality, accident, failure and consequence, persistence. It must have once been intentional and tentative, but now this enactment is so habituated for me, it adventitiously solicits misapprehension and typically achieves the desired result, even if the road to victory is full of twists. This disposition preserves energy for the chronically painervated individual, who acts unthinkingly or with pain- and fatigue-induced disinhibition, but also strategically, having developed a cunning that is expedient, discerning, judicious, and compassionate. Like the Sri Lankan handball team, she is not above a thanthiram and evasion of the law.

Take your eyes off of me for a second, and what you thought you saw is something else. ↩