116. Collapse of the Body

Travis Chi Wing Lau's poem "Epistle to the Body in Pain" contains the kind of poetics that I wish were in biomedical discourse and medical scholarship:

I am amazed, body, that you have
not buckled into ruins. . . .

Damnable gestation,
this thing called stigma:
repeated strikings because
the word is so much like a lash. (lines 1-2, 10-13)

I misread the last line every time, seeing instead "the world is so much like a lash," which feels truer to how my flesh simultaneously encounters "the flesh of the world" (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968, p. 144) and itself. In an extemporaneous series of sensory descriptions on Google Chat, Sara and Mary riff on the same, gestation and ruin, nests within ruin, the ways the flesh of the world contains the lashes it delivers:

Bricks in my face
Sand in my head
Molasses in my air
It's all mine
Fire ants in my nerves
Knives in my joints

Bees in my brain

Mold in my muscles

Sludge in my joints

Rot in my crevices
Needles in my fibers

Vomit in my blood
It's all mine
And it's yours
Should it be
If so, is it true
Either way
Collapse of the body
Of mine, of yours, is true. (M. Krienke & S. Fuller, personal communication, June 30, 2020)

Stigma is a damnable thing: denying cultural validation; obstructing social and medical belief. The poetics and lifeworlds of pain are like an ancient Kandyan elephant trampling, but there is something beautiful in the accuracy of these descriptions and the communal, communally painervated practice that creates them, and words like them, every day.