There are parts of the body you don't feel until they're broken. Like bones. Who feels their femur as anything more than part of a leg generally, and part of a pedestal for the body more generally, including the feet, hips, etc? It's when something snaps or cracks or pops; when an x-ray could reveal a fracture (hairline, they say sometimes, which I find utterly charming) that you become acutely aware of the bone itself. That it is longer and thicker than you thought or thinner than you thought, or just placed differently than you had expected when you came crashing down on it. "Funny, I don't remember that there...not exactly like that..."
I've never had a broken bone (knock on wood, or bone, or china, whatever works), so I'm not entirely sure of the analogy. Of course, you knew it was an analogy. Or a metaphor. Or a metonymy. (I'm not on the clock, you figure it out.) In any case, I've never felt just like this -- the physical sensation of nausea so near to me at all times. All I need do is recall, think, remember, feel in a certain way (or in several certain ways) and suddenly I'm mock heaving. The heave is real, of course, but no organic cause determines it. There are parts of the body you don't feel until they're broken, and they're not all bones apparently.
I should be smelling burnt pudding, be aphasic or Germanophobic (wait, I already am the latter), or at least beset by a grand mal, as the quaint expression went. How am I stuck here with my paltry nausea? My silly little stomach-churning anguish, my faint-feeling languish? I should find myself in an anatomical book illustration, a stick figure peeling her skin back coyly so the gaze can penetrate beneath. Am I not transparent? Do you people not see the cause and the effect? Do you not smell the burnt pudding? How can I write under these conditions?
11.3.07
a question I cannot answer
May I quote you, dearest Leo? "Did something precipitate his sudden lack of imagination?"
It is very telling of your character, comrade, that the word imagination is the anchor of your question. I like it. A sudden lack of imagination can stop one dead in one's tracks, or send one straight into therapy, or force one to withdraw affect entirely. What is powerful enough to stop one's ability to imagine? When things seem too perfect, maybe there's only one thing left to imagine or maybe that's how one is made to feel (by me, for example)?
One can mull over a sense of foreboding, a state of tension, but the feeling of danger? I don't know. Maybe that's the kind of thing one can't imagine one's self into or out of. It gums up the works. Full stop. Don't look back. Looking back would entail imagining, beginning to imagine again. And that would entail recognizing that something could have happened differently, that it almost did, that it still could. The 'could' leaves room for the as-yet unimagined. And that seems ... well... dangerous? Difficult? Overwhelming?
Leo, what made you imagine differently?
It is very telling of your character, comrade, that the word imagination is the anchor of your question. I like it. A sudden lack of imagination can stop one dead in one's tracks, or send one straight into therapy, or force one to withdraw affect entirely. What is powerful enough to stop one's ability to imagine? When things seem too perfect, maybe there's only one thing left to imagine or maybe that's how one is made to feel (by me, for example)?
One can mull over a sense of foreboding, a state of tension, but the feeling of danger? I don't know. Maybe that's the kind of thing one can't imagine one's self into or out of. It gums up the works. Full stop. Don't look back. Looking back would entail imagining, beginning to imagine again. And that would entail recognizing that something could have happened differently, that it almost did, that it still could. The 'could' leaves room for the as-yet unimagined. And that seems ... well... dangerous? Difficult? Overwhelming?
Leo, what made you imagine differently?
6.3.07
mornings, hating them
I"ve always been a little lazy about mornings. I think the only times I bound out of bed with energy is when I have something to do immediately--something exciting (like running a race or travelling), or something pressing (like having to finish grading or work). So it has been especially hard that this recent time has been punctuated for me by early morning clarity.
I hate early morning clarity. It literally makes me sick to my stomach; like the surge of hormones in a pregnant woman's body suddenly pooling nausea in her belly and throat, my morning clarity seizes my entire digestive tract. The snooze on the alarm isn't enough to cloud the thoughts streaming in like daylight; the thoughts are already burrowed in my mind, and only a new deep sleep would erase them. If only I had gotten drunk the night before, I think with grim sadness, I could have slept through it. But now I'm too restless for a return, so I fitfully toss around my bed, amongst pillows and cats, and I do something like moan. Moan is the right term, although no sound comes out--a silent moan into bright morning air.
I hate early morning clarity. It literally makes me sick to my stomach; like the surge of hormones in a pregnant woman's body suddenly pooling nausea in her belly and throat, my morning clarity seizes my entire digestive tract. The snooze on the alarm isn't enough to cloud the thoughts streaming in like daylight; the thoughts are already burrowed in my mind, and only a new deep sleep would erase them. If only I had gotten drunk the night before, I think with grim sadness, I could have slept through it. But now I'm too restless for a return, so I fitfully toss around my bed, amongst pillows and cats, and I do something like moan. Moan is the right term, although no sound comes out--a silent moan into bright morning air.
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