. . I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.
This is a run-up to the climactic gag of the poem (“I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on”), but it also contains a serious possibility that troubles me, how the body will contaminate whatever it’s making if allowed to pester the writer with its pings and squawks.
In fact, I have become something of a nudist these days — at least a nude-ish nudist. Since my shins sizzle at the rasp of even the lightest silk, they go naked in all seasons. On my feet I wear boots made of sheep-fur because socks have come to feel like thorns. Through winter sleet I wear these boots, and shorts, cutting a figure unlike anyone I know except a schizophrenic woman who calls herself “the ghost of Jim Morrison.” She too goes bare-legged, though she also favors headbands and ponchos that dip to a triangle below her waist. She looked strange until a few years ago, when a tidal wave of ponchos rode back into style.
In addition to my two “good” pairs of shorts, one of which, the khaki pair, I just realized the other day was badly stained, I have a collection of others that my husband has passed down to me when they became too threadbare for him to be willing to wear. I also have a few flannel shirts that belonged to my dead father, and though they too are now unraveling I can’t bear to throw them out. I have some “normal” shirts of my own, but because I push myself in a wheelchair their sleeves are frayed at the wrist. And because I sit almost all my waking hours, some flab often pushes its way to light above the waistband of my shorts.
My paranoia leaves me feeling that I appear abnormal, to my mind absurd — with this look that I have not wrought or sought. I suppose I could “work on” the image I present to the world, but this would require too much collusion with my objective self. That person is free to amble around in the world, whoever she is, but I will not traffic with her at all. No thank you, I’ll stay here inside my head where the hearth is always lit.
For my job at the monastery, which I arrived at with only a Smokey the Bear hat and a box full of park ranger uniforms, I bought some dowdy conservative clothes in the Goodwill store to camouflage my true self, which I envisioned then as “Amazon slut-poet of the wilderness,” a persona I concocted to compensate for my insecurities. To further complicate my self-presentation, sometimes my brain felt as though it had been struck by a mild bolt of lightning: a wave passed from my nape to my temple, and in its wake I was left with no idea what I had been thinking. A couple of times a day I had to think my way back into my life from scratch. A theater professor asked me if I wanted her to train me to overcome my stage fright when she saw me swoon at the first faculty meeting when I stood up to introduce myself.
In addition to remedial English, I also taught some Japanese students, whom I led on nature walks down the labyrinthine sentences of Charles Dickens. The students often seemed to be weighted with sorrow that they lugged around on my behalf, and I could not fathom what I’d done to cause them to adopt this body language in my presence. All I could think of was that, at the Christmas party, I volunteered to lead off the singing of “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” and dove into a key not to be found in either our Western tonal scale or their Eastern one and which caused their faces to redden, as if my clothes had gotten blown off by a tornado. I remembered an Asian proverb: One breaking of wind takes away the learning of an entire semester.
When the Japanese students arrived at the beginning of the semester, they were escorted by a gracious older man who had at great expense procured a heavy gilt-framed mirror, more enormous than a standard sheet of plywood. Etched into it were the words You Mirror—which confused me at first. I thought it meant the mirror was supposed to be its own autonomous being: Hey you! Mirror! But then I learned that the students were supposed to pause before it, in order to consider the image they were presenting to the world.
Naturally, the job required me to be open to the mysteries of foreign cultures, but still I had to restrain myself to not take a hammer to that mirror. It summarized the injustice of having an objective self that moves in an external world — if it exists, I am not so sure — the world that is a processing plant, grinding the meat of the me and churning out the sausage of the you. And even though my limp was barely visible back then, I scurried by the mirror, wishing I were a vampire who would vanish in its gaze.
Last year’s therapist said: our society wants to make disabled people invisible. I said that being invisible would be all right with me.
Another memory from college: my tall friend Janis jumping wildly and whipping her arms overhead, after we walked into a smoky upstairs loft in Montreal that was packed with people dancing. Janis making a joke by winking at me as she shouted into the din: Look at me! Hey, everybody, look at me! Her joke was that our exuberance was fueled by our vanity, our desire to be seen, a problem Janis solved later that semester by starving herself into a skeleton that was barely visible when she turned sideways.
More recently, Susan Sontag has written, in connection with the pictures of the prisoners confined in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison: “To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and therefore to go on with one’s life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, of the camera’s nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act in the community of actions recorded as images.” I try to shed this burden of modernity, this requirement that we be photographed and suffer through additional replications of our bodies. The actual one I have to live with is quite enough. “There is the deep satisfaction of being photographed,” Sontag writes, “to which one is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee.” But not me — I remain as stern as a Victorian before the lens.
This is undoubtedly a manifestation of my childish wish to undo reality, this not-wanting the photograph to weld my objective presence to the wheelchair. If I were to rob a bank, the witnesses would identify me by the chair, even if I were Frankenstein. My green skin and scars and bolts would be noted as secondary observations. What could override the image — a chartreuse muumuu? A large fur hat like a guard at Buckingham Palace? Even if I wore nothing at all my nakedness would be subsumed.
A scholar might call the wheelchair A Transcendent Signifier. The only thing I can think of to put in it, to strip its black-hole type gravitational power — the way it sucks everything into it — is to put a bomb in the seat. Or a baby. A bomb and a baby might work best.
Animals go naked, and the duck in extravagant plumage is the exception, because ordinarily they want to blend in, they want to travel camouflaged. This generality has not prevented the evolution of bright-red poisonous frogs whose color announces their lethal meat and the danger of their being consumed. Or the evolution of what is known as dazzle camouflage, like the zebra’s stripes or the loon’s op-art breast and neck, configurations that prevent predators from being able to tell exactly where the prey is, by turning the body into a blurry confusion, especially when it’s in motion.