IN 1978, IN THE OPENING PARAGRAPH of her book Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag wrote: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” I still remember reading these lines for the first time at eighteen, in a little dorm room in western Massachusetts—my crutches leaning against the narrow twin bed, my legs in spasm from cold and fatigue—and being utterly taken in. I felt simultaneously the central truth of the passage—the inherent fragility of the body, its essential determinism over our lives—and the twinge of the way the perfect sentiment didn’t quite apply to me. A citizen of neither place, exactly.
My earliest memory is of the hospital. I’ve written about this before: the anesthesia mask, the doctor’s hand, the chemical butterscotch mingled with the drug. I think I remember sliding from the rolling gurney onto the operating table under bright lights, but that could be a recollection from a later procedure—at eight, ten, thirteen. I know I recall a small thatch of faces leaning over me. The way they gazed, then disappeared. My childhood was punctuated by doctors’ offices and operating rooms, orthotists’ clinics and research labs, the physical therapy center in the basement of the Baptist hospital. As a girl, I was only sick with the same cadence and severity as most children: a case of croup as a toddler, bouts with chicken pox, pink eye, strep throat, the flu. But I was intimately familiar with the territories of illness and, as someone with a permanent, significant disability, I have never in my life been what the world would call well. I belong cleanly to neither of Sontag’s kingdoms, inhabiting instead what I’ve come to think of—in the many years since I first found her work—as the bus depot in the canyon between the two: a place many people only ever pass through, but where I have had to put down roots. I’ve learned the names for the flora and fauna breaching the concrete, choke weed and white clover. I’ve made a life studying the frames and faces of the travelers streaming by, noting in the improbability of their moving bodies what artist Becky Moon calls “the surprising tenacity of a fragile structure.” It’s the most moving cliché in the world, how unlikely it is that any of us remain upright, collected and alive.
Moon’s paintings are, she tells Image visual arts editor Aaron Rosen, “mainly about giving physical forms…to invisible faculties of the mind, like belief and memory.” In Ganglia, a work in acrylic on canvas, bright, winding pathways somewhere between neural and arboreal coalesce into a structure, part building and part body in a deep blue space. As we prepared this issue, I found myself thinking of the painting as a kind of transit map of the in-between: the border territory of mind and body, human and terrestrial, sick and well.
Liminal is one of those words my students tend to fall in love with the moment they learn it. Denoting something more than transitional, this adjective describes a heretofore indescribable state on both sides of a threshold at once. Often, they are so taken with it that I have to ban it temporarily, to keep them searching for other language, and eventually the word becomes a kind of joke. Everything is liminal: ice cream, the notion of the lyric, friendship, definitely deadlines. Here, though, I find there is no better vocabulary. This issue of Image is occupied with the thresholds of living, a collection of liminal states.
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“Jacob is dying,” begins Sharon Pomerantz’s story “Line of Credit,” and the whole story inhabits the suspended transition of that gerund: the way someone you love and have known for a lifetime in one shape whittles down into another. “His cheekbones are sharp,” she writes, “his hair gone, and his eyes are noticeably larger and more hazel.” And yet, in concerning itself with the process of ongoing dying, the story is not simply a record of gradual erasure. Instead, Pomerantz builds a portrait of love and friendship magnified in dying’s suspended slippage, as if seen through a microscope. An ordinary thing made magnetic and new.
Much of the work in these pages takes up the material of health and medicine, but it would be more accurate to tell you that these pieces look, sometimes uncomfortably closely, at the fleshed fact of living and dying: at engines of imperfect diagnosis, at giving birth and being born, bleeding and breathing. In the opening stanza of Maryann Corbett’s “Emergency, New Years Eve,” a couple is
Riveted by the shock—
his fall flat to the pavement, his bloodied knee,
his wrenched pinky bent at a fearful angle
and disinclined to move in the normal way—
They are able to breathe only once the ambulance arrives. And yet, though the man is tended, gets an X-ray and a CAT scan, has his wound cleaned and stitched, the feeling that persists is not one of comfort or relief, but that sensation of “long silences between, and the hard brightness / of clinical fluorescence, stainless steel.” And, longer still than those long silences, there’s the woman’s memory of the agony she overheard behind hospital doors: a damage beyond diagnosis or cure, a kind of room she knows there is no leaving, even as she speeds away in a taxicab, pretending she can go back to the kingdom of the well unchanged.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about how language makes a kind of body when we put it to the page. And reading these pages of Image, in my home in the territory between sick and well, I’m struck by how much of the work in this issue insists on new and unexpected shapes. It arrives at meaning not through linear narrative but by associative accumulation; the gradual compounding of living; the gaps between fragments; the way an image, rendered without explication, always suggests another image in relief against it. Earlier, I made a joke about my students referring to the lyric as liminal, but the work in this issue suggests that there is something to that notion. That the ways language reaches for the thresholds of our lives—death; birth; transformative sickness; the brain’s unpredictable degeneration, invisible until it’s not—ask us to think differently about understanding, about what we know and what we can’t.
In his “Alzheimer’s Translations,” Alex Chertok builds a world in the cadence of a father’s new reality:
…Calla lily
meadows. Whenever
eurekas havoc. All momentary
because involving
love.
The poems are ciphers, aware of themselves as encoded in a neurological reality that necessarily conveys meaning only through fragments. But still, you can feel your way through the poem’s landscape: the lushness of calla lily meadows, the revelatory sonic clamor of eurekas havoc, the words suggested in the fissures of grammar, slipping away, the last strains of their echo still almost audible. “One of the miracles of poetry,” the writer Rebecca Gayle Howell reminded me in our conversation this February, “is how it travels through time and space to say, ‘I’ve got you.’” Poetry can accompany us across the border between the known and unknown.
Howell describes her own relationship with both poetry and scripture as rooted in an unexpected period of quiet: time spent alone in childhood immediately after her father was diagnosed with lymphoma. In the years during which his spiritual imagination was reactivated, Howell found solace in the company of the Bible, and in the paperback editions of T.S. Eliot and Gwendolyn Brooks her father brought her.
It doesn’t strike me as a coincidence that, having forged her own spiritual imagination in the unlikely silences engendered by a time of upheaval, Howell grew interested in erasure as an engine of creation. Her new book, Erase Genesis, investigates what happens if we remove our assumptions about dominion and power from the story we tell ourselves about our own humanity. What abundance might flourish in the space that leaves? How might it root us in the earth?
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Space, fragment, chasm. All this pulls me back to what grows in the canyon between the sick and the well, the notion of the threshold state. In her remarkable essay “Mother as Event,” Leila Chatti considers the collision of the medical and the miraculous that brings another being into the world, that takes a person from the before into the after of motherhood. For Chatti, this metamorphosis into motherhood is arduous, colossally fraught, and extraordinary. And the stakes are mortal. In an accumulation of fragments, she searches for the precise moment she crossed the threshold from one state to another. The language and mechanisms of diagnosis, science, and solution converge with questions of selfhood, magic, and faith:
But when did it happen? Was it the first time that miracle began in me? Even though it sputtered out? Or was it when I started the shots, my ovaries swelling like balloons, or was it after, those glorious blastocysts burgeoning in a dish? Or maybe it was when the doctor slipped her in, that little firework burst on the screen, or maybe once I felt the pinch so strong I winced? Or the heartbeat heard, the movement glimpsed, the turn inside like a fish?
It isn’t a question with a clean answer. As Emily Rapp Black reminds us in her own lyric essay just a little later in the issue: “The whole business of life, death, and the spaces in between is a long process of disarticulation, of moving one light from here to there, a bone to a socket, a hand to a mouth.” To be alive is to be always engaged in the process of rearranging ourselves, renegotiating our position in relationship to Sontag’s kingdoms and the wild space in between.
Here I am, calling to you from the canyon. I hope the work here keeps you company on the road.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
