Читать книгу Visual Inspection - Matt Rader - Страница 8

I was born with difficulty breathing. Doctors guessed cystic fibrosis. They were wrong. My first memory is of being in hospital. Several internal organs were enlarged; they were testing for cancer. Rows of cribs. Large hands. Wires and machines. I was less than a year old. I did not have cancer. My mother carried me, blue and gasping, into the Emergency Room more times than she can recollect over those first three years. At four, when we moved from the city to a small fishing village on Vancouver Island, my mum insisted on a house within minutes of the hospital. 1980s. We’d go to the hospital in the evening. They’d shoot me with adrenaline. After, in the late hours of the night (it is always night in my memory), my eyes wide, my heart racing, I’d dash through the house, careening off the wainscotting in the basement, jumping from the back of the good couch, collecting myself from the carpet, from the linoleum, full of the drug our bodies produce when we most fear for our lives. I don’t remember fearing for my life. I imagine the nurses and doctors feared for my life. In saving my life, they injected that fear into my body. Literally.

I know my mother feared for my life. She spent the first eighteen years helping me seek an answer. We searched daily. We accepted some stories. We rejected others. Nothing explained what happened with me beyond the idea of hyperactive immune responses to my environment. To my emotions. All treatments addressed symptoms, nothing else.

When I took over the search in my twenties, my largely inexplicable medical history continued to accumulate—I had the rarest form of appendicitis the weekend my mum moved from my childhood home after her divorce; I saw five specialists to address why half my lip had been swollen for a year (Guess what the answer was? No answer); and I did trials of breathing medications for three years, measuring the “peak flow” of my breath four times a day, every day. By the time I was thirty I was wracked by pervasive and debilitating pain.

Sometimes searching for something guarantees you’ll never find it. Sometimes what you are looking for obscures what it is you find in your search; you have to see not what you’re looking for but what is there.

Pain is different from suffering. Pain is a condition of the physical body. It can be assuaged, or it can’t. To suffer is to insist, emotionally, that things be different, to refuse clarity. “Be whole beyond confusion,” Robert Frost writes in “Directive,” the poem from which I’ve borrowed the epigraph to this book. In that poem, to return to a place that no longer exists, and to become whole again, can only be achieved by getting lost. Though many people in pain suffer, this is the basic difference between pain and suffering: clarity or confusion. To be sure, clarity can, often does, increase pain; but it relieves suffering.

I’ve rarely suffered from my health. I’ve even more rarely written about it explicitly. My health, in all its qualities, good and poor, is a basic fact of my life and indistinguishable from my existence. Where do you locate health in your body? Easier to ask where you locate poor health? Curious that only certain qualities of health seem to assert themselves on the conscious level. In my writing—in my poems specifically—I’ve always felt my health—my body—as a silent, invisible, but active presence; it is there because the materials of the poems—the language—are sifted through my body. I didn’t know how to make it explicit and I didn’t feel a need to.

Robert Pinsky writes, in The Sounds of Poetry, that the instrument of the poet is the breath of the reader. And if the poet is the first reader, as Paul Muldoon asserts in The End of the Poem, the poet’s breath is the instrument of composition. If you listen, you can hear Charles Olson in the hazy Blue Ridge Mountains sighing wearily, I told you so.

The world is experienced through our bodies. Our ideas are formed less than we’d like to admit through intellect; we have feelings (or experiences, as T. S. Eliot would have it) and through them we arrive at what we say we know.

From 2015–2017, I conducted a research-creation project at the University of British Columbia Okanagan called Visual Inspection. “Research-creation” is the term the Canadian academy uses to describe academic research projects with artistic outcomes. Though dressed up as academic inquiry, Visual Inspection was always, first and foremost, an art project conducted by artists.

Originally, the project asked a basic question: If the page is a field of visual composition in contemporary poetry—and it is such a field—how can we as poets make this field available to non-visual learners in a manner that is consistent with our own individual aesthetic preferences? What would we make?²

At first this seemed like a translation problem: How to account for the white space and typographic experiments in a poetic composition through audio or haptic renditions? Think recordings of poems read aloud, braille, or even poems printed in 3D according to a particular algorithm. With this wrinkle: How to also appeal to the poet as a poet, to be consistent with the poet’s compositional practice, with the pleasure and realization of that practice?

It was important that this was a compositional question rather than a critical one. It was not praxis even but something more instinctual, something approaching from the opposite direction having yet to encounter the need for a term like “praxis.” It was important because the site of inquiry existed beyond the scope of critical assessment as such in the realm of beauty, art and the good.³

But soon, even more a priori concerns appeared.

It is axiomatic, but worth stating nonetheless, that our lives are shaped by our bodies, how our bodies function, how they interact with our environments, both social and ecological. And if our bodies shape our lives then they must also shape our poems.

When I began the project in the fall of 2014, I was having considerable difficulty typing as the result of several immunological conditions, some that had been with me from the start, and others that had developed in adulthood. At times, I couldn’t even hold open a book.

Over the course of the project my life was dramatically shaped by these conditions. Among other things I made upwards of three hundred visits to the Rutland Aurora Health Clinic, a space dedicated to people with complicated health histories and/or precarious socioeconomic statuses. I received more than six hundred injections. I travelled throughout British Columbia to see specialists in rheumatology, immunology, respirology, internal medicine, dermatology and psychiatry. Both at home and away, I received massage therapy, Trager massage, physiotherapy, chiropractic treatments, acupuncture, hypnosis, cupping, moxibustion, chakra healing, Qigong and traditional Chinese medicine. Twice I received emergency, life-saving medical intervention. I spent four days trussed to an IV on a hospital bed across from a room called “Dirty Service” in the hallway of 4B at Kelowna General Hospital. For two years, I spent sixty to seventy minutes of my day, every day, attached to a machine that helped me breathe. Never mind the details of my austere diet and the regime of pharmaceuticals I experimented with. Never mind the hundreds of hours travelling for treatment or given up to convalescences.

How did this shape my poetry? The list above is a chain of references awash in connotation: it employs specific elements of my life to suggest something more general about what it was like in this body over the years of the Visual Inspection project. This book is a similarly devised response to the question of how bodies shape poetry.⁴

Under the Hampton New Scholars Award, the primary grant funding Visual Inspection, I named two formal collaborators: poet Jordan Scott and social practice artist Carmen Papalia. Both Scott, who has a significant stutter, and Papalia, who is legally blind, had, through close attention, used their bodies as sites of artistic composition.⁵

In one such composition, Scott designed poems to challenge his ability to say them out loud, thus creating a collaboration between the text and his body in which his body became a vehicle for endless variations of the poems.⁶ In one of Papalia’s works, he has a small marching band follow him through a city street playing directional cues as he performs everyday tasks like buying a burrito.

And this too is axiomatic but bears repeating nonetheless: There is no body from which all other bodies might be assessed for deviation. Only the body of our imaginations, of culture. Similarly, there is no normal poetry, syntax, grammar or typography. There are only the normative categories cultures practice at any given moment in history.

A while ago, Papalia stopped using the word “blind” to describe himself and replaced it with “non-visual learner,” because there is also no normal blind body, only many iterations of bodies with differing relationships to sight and visual information.

The narrative frame of the text that composes most of this book is an “eyes-closed” walking tour Papalia led for about thirty-five people in July of 2016 through a portion of downtown Kelowna. Just as that tour stretched and accordioned, stumbled and stalled and continued, as people called out obstacles down the line and slapped railings so we could hear what was coming, as the presence and commentary of passersby became important aspects of the tour experience, this text proceeds in fragments, associations and leaps, dragging in a number of histories, references and preoccupations. Like the tour, it is possible, likely even, that it arrives where it began. Like the tour, this may even be by design, though that is probably revisionist history.

As I write elsewhere, in the end, perhaps the best I can say about the questions raised by this project is that I’ve had thoughts. This is a record of some of those thoughts.