What do we do with the fragments of writing (self) that never found a whole to belong to, that didn’t assemble a recognizable whole around them? Fragments that stay fragments. As if excised from something unknowable. The essay fragment below is one of my favorite things I’ve written. It’s related to my book Excisions, so that I think they may be interdependent. It’s from an essay project, a book that isn’t a book, which I was writing between 2015 and 2019. Pieces of it were published but not the whole. The whole (which doesn’t exist really) was/is called Not Yet. It’s largely about, or in response to, reading and rereading the three translations into English of Mahmoud Darwish’s long poem Mural. Though that doesn’t come up in this passage. But it’s there. Lately I’ve been thinking of going back to this not-book—which I worked hard on then abandoned—looking for something though I don’t really know what it is or if it’s there. Lately I’ve been missing people I was lucky to know in the past, and I know we still know each other, though circumstances mean we talk less, in the present. (When something is excised from you, it was you, though you are what remains.)
HP
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Between yesterday and tomorrow
A tumor results from life’s fecundity, life’s proliferations, though it turns growth to threat. Metastasis means a change of place, but this is from the tumor’s perspective; the body knows itself only as whole. In the case of tumor, life continues in excision. Through subtraction the body is made more whole. Again and again the doctors’ work is to distinguish, to remove diseased organ, leave enough healthy tissue to go on. It is not in a literary sense that this work is critical.
My husband’s cramps and vomiting went on for three days before we confessed this was not a hangover, though I sat and ate toast, two kinds of jam, before driving us to the ER. On the screen of the ultrasound—a pixelated gray sea in which through shadowy error one expects the curl of a fetus to appear—the flecks are traveling, the doctor notes, in two directions. They should go just one way.
A month before, a surgeon had predicted the chain of cause and effect that brought us here now: a hernia in the diaphragm, he said, caused by the last tumor (a tumor he had removed, and the tumor before that). To prevent a bowel obstruction you’ll need another surgery. We’d been planning to make an appointment when the small intestine twisted through the flaw in the diaphragm and began a process called strangulation. It’s not a total emergency, the trauma surgeon said upon entering the room, explaining we could wait an hour.
Through the week in the hospital his face is gaunt. He goes ten days without eating. His eyes open whenever I enter the room. One by one they remove the tubes keeping one lung drained and expanded, and the tube through the nose that releases the bilious fluid the sleeping intestine neglects. Violently the intestine awakens, eight to ten centimeters shorter and stitched back up to itself. Everything is green or black or red.
There is a pornography to this description that has no place in the slow walks through the corridor, gown round the front, gown round the back, hunched to push the pole that’s now part of you, with a nurse or wife beside you, carrying the briefcases, as they’re called, in which the lung’s fluid brightly accumulates. When one patient steps aside for another there is a slow process and only a brief, if any, meeting of eyes. Everyone tries not to see anyone here, so as not to be seen among them, all these refugees from daily life, from wearing pants, from lack of decoration with dried blood the nurses call crusties. I pour milk into a cardboard cylinder of shredded wheat cereal. Days later I find gummy candies loose in my purse, green, yellow, and red.
From lying down to standing takes two minutes or twenty. He rests his head on my abdomen. There is a pornography to the speed at which I purchase two air conditioners, declining every opportunity to save money that the cashier steadfastly offers. A series of emails tells me I bought two air conditioners. I empty a bowl of chocolate pudding into the sink, water hot to pummel it down the drain; I make a new bowl of chocolate pudding. Any morning I decide between one and two apricots. It’s a dual port, we tell the nurse, meaning the port just under the skin at his collarbone into which chemotherapy was every two weeks for seven months of each of two years dispensed. When does it expire? she asks, but we can’t see it, we don’t remember, we don’t know. They put it in here, I say, meaning this hospital. I know, but we just got a new system, she says, clicking again at the screen.
They just left it in? she asks.
To answer a question I say wife or spouse. I choose. Trump signs the biggest arms deal in US history, a sale to Saudi Arabia, but our nation has sold theirs so many weapons for so long this hardly seems like his choice. For a year or two we were amused by the names of the floors of the hospital’s parking garage, each a tribute to Ben Franklin: the fifth floor Aversion to Tyranny, the fourth Idealism in Foreign Policy. Now I don’t note the names except to commit to memory the location of my car, except to remember at the end of the day that I drove here, don’t forget, don’t take the train home. I didn’t mention the catheter, the first tube to go. I buy the cheapest yogurt at the most expensive grocery store. Almost everyone who enters the room discards two purple latex gloves, sometimes four. Only to me does he note that it’s been six months since his last surgery, the surgery he didn’t want to have, since it would keep him alive, he argued, only to have more surgeries, only to have, he’d said then, another surgery six months from now. It’s better not to have a choice, I say, noting the difference between the surgery we might have had to repair the hernia and the surgery the hernia has just compelled us to have.
I say us, though no one here touches me. I say choice, meaning not strangulation. One month ago over one thousand Palestinian prisoners began a hunger strike, in nonviolent protest of the occupation and the Israeli legal system that imprisons them. The body of the Palestinian prisoner is a site at which it is hard to distinguish Israel’s military from its political from its legal systems, a concern the strike expresses, though its demands are simple improvements in the living conditions and rights of those incarcerated. Dignity Strike, it’s called, the body yielding to the indignities of starvation, an ironic tension different from that offered by the salve of the phrase political prisoner. The charge will be said to be a crime but will be a political identity, this phrase argues. Some politics have been criminalized; others erase their own status as political every time the jailer turns his key. The news here barely reports on the strike, and if an article appears it becomes an occasion for the tireless argument over whether the criminal convictions of the strike’s leader vacate his moral authority. At his trial he refused even to defend himself, since a defense would have recognized the authority of the court, which he denies; thus was he convicted of murder, having survived an earlier attempt by the Israeli military to assassinate him by missile. I have read about the leader but can no longer remember the precise arguments for or against his guilt, or for or against the righteousness of his crimes if he did commit them. I know that if he were freed I would feel a sensation of hope to which I have no claim and which may be beyond justification. I know that much is justified on behalf of the dead; I know that for the dead there is no justification.
At Yale University a group of graduate students has begun a hunger strike to protest the university’s refusal to negotiate with the union they were trying to form. A dean at Yale writes a long op-ed to say that the students are too privileged to use this strategy, that by using it they drain it of power, and it should be safeguarded for those who need it. Evidently she believes she can distinguish between those who need it and those who don’t; so she dismisses the needs others sacrifice themselves to prove. That the position from which she speaks and is amplified depends on others’ lacking access to the same is a context she does not address. The wealth of an institution supports and affirms her, while everywhere in the academy jobs like hers have been eliminated, replaced by low-wage part-time gigs. Yale’s students will fare better than most amid this scarcity, an advantage they may know, in their activism, as a responsibility.
A critical act exists in a field of choice. You may not enter the field by choice. Does love light the path of the difference? Abstraction begins and ends beneath the skin; tongue becomes word. All week every raisin I eat is imported.
Curled up on a couch watching a screen I lie very still.
Hilary your final sentences always drive a stake of love through my heart
Oh this is fantastic. I might need you to write the book