The Small of the Back

Some Venus

The folds of this ancient goddess' stomach. Her foot's low arch.



A memory:
When I hear the crunch of steps on gravel, outside the apartment, I know it's not him because he is so quiet. I lie there on the bed, wrapped in sheets, waiting. It is warm. The plastic blinds click together as the breeze runs through them. The word rustle. Later, his hand on the small of my back. A hand on the small of the back is a beautiful gesture. Resting there. On the small of the back. 





I wrote this down in my small blue leather notebook:

The new way to live: reading and reading and coming up to take a look around

I don't know if I heard that or thought it myself, but it's a good one.







I'm dipping into Toni Morrison's new book The Source of Self-Regard, and I've just begun Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. I'm finishing Sigrid Nunez' novel The Friend, and I've loved it. Sigrid was at Hedgebrook with me, finishing that book. She is a lovely person, someone I wish I knew better, especially after reading her book. It's curious and funny and sharp and original. I wish I could finish my book. Maybe I will later this month when I retreat to Mexico with the Bird Photographer. Immediately after I type that, I feel I need to explain. Explain how I can go to Mexico, explain how I can get away. Do I need to explain? I have a free place to stay, a generous gift from a dear friend. Sophie's father and Saint Mirtha will take care of her while I'm gone. I am determined to get away, to take respite when it is offered, by whatever means I can. Yet, I explain. We define ourselves by how much we can suffer, and who am I otherwise?







In other words, I'm reading and reading and coming up to take a look around.

Meditation on New Language

I need a new language to express my feelings when I read headlines like this on respected medical websites:

Surgery in Drug-Resistant Children? It's Worth It!

I imagine a group of marketers and branders, the people a medical consortium has hired to spice up language, maybe make it more upbeat or appealing in the way that television ads for drugs show people running through fields of flowers even as a litany of side effects are listed. Perhaps these people -- the ones in the rooms brainstorming, the editors of medical websites -- not the ones running through fields or having seizures or being constipated -- are the same experts who come up with pharmaceutical drug names -- Lyrica to conjure soothing musical notes instead of addiction or constant diarrhea or Banzel with its suggestion of a premier fashion house for accessories instead of an antiepileptic whose side effects include increased seizures and psychotic behavior. How about Fycompa with that tiny little nod to coma, like Fie On That Seizure-Induced Coma! Its side effects include increasing belligerent behavior and aggression, even homicidal ideation.

There's the language assigned to pharmaceutical side effects: irritability for psychotic, behavioral disturbances for head-banging or clawing one's skin to blood, increased secretions for drooling cups of liquid, and insomnia for never sleeping again.

Drug-resistant children is a phrase that implicates the child, doesn't it? It smoothes out the anxiety and insanity inherent and provoked by an inefficient treatment. It's language that covers for hideous drugs that don't work for shit to control seizures in children.

The degradation of language.

No more plums in the icebox. This is just to say.

How casual it all sounds, in this, arguably, well-intended iteration.

Brian Surgery!

It’s worth it!

There shouldn't be exclamation marks after brain surgery but rather a new sign from a new language that amplifies cutting into the brain of your child and removing a part of it, her, him, they.

Actually, I don’t need a new language to describe my feelings. You can probably surmise them. No probably. You surmise them. Your gift for recognizing irony is intact, Reader, if you’ve been coming here a while.  

We need a new language to discuss these medical things.  

We need a new language to express things like brain surgery for children — a language that could encompass possibility, gravity, and hope but also fuckery and absurdity. 

Also, specificity.

The possibility, gravity, fuckery, absurdity and hope of brain surgery.

so much depends upon a red wheel

barrow glazed with rain water beside the

white chickens

William Carlos Williams

How We Do It, Part (Lost Count) in a series

photographer: Carl Jackson

When I was a small child, I lay in the grass or up in the cherry tree and stared up at clouds, floating. I did more than imagine shapes when I was a child, a rabbit, a snowman, a man shaking a stick. I called a tree, flower and a flower, tree. Cloud, sky and sky, cloud. I thought Smell and then pick that tree. Climb up into that flower. Words. What they meant when I said them, how I made them up. It was the same with God. How I made Him up. Or wondered if I was making Him up. I imagined Him like the clouds, floating, shaped. And what of it and what of Him? Were we His dream? Were We his dream? Had He made us up? I saw the world through God's eyes, made up, a ball, a sphere, a reflection. Trees, clouds, flowers, grass, me on my back, ground, perched on a branch, bark, cherries. I had a lover once when I was very young and when we left one another (we left one another, over and ever), I was certain that I'd made him up, yet I made another again. Another lover. God is now god and He is he or him. I made a baby that we named Sophie. I made her up. She has no words and yet is made.


When I sit in meditation, breathe in, breathe out, my thoughts are words. I make them up, I make them clouds. I watch them float. On by.

Suprasternal

The birds are singing me back this morning to last year and an apartment filled with slanted light, their song on air through plastic blinds, the drift, a breeze and quiet. I found a Buddha necklace curled in a little box on my dresser, pulled it out and remembered it falling apart, worn by water and too many knots, but I loved it so. The chain is fabric and beaded and fell apart in my hands even now, leaving the medal with its tiny notched saint sitting cross-legged in my palm. I threaded a pink ribbon through it and tied it around my neck. He (she) sits slant in the shallow hollow between clavicles, the suprasternal notch. That sounds like the moon or a star, a hand at my throat, smooth dark places that take touch. I sing words, let go notch. Aster a flower, the n celestial, something with wings, sound in body, shadow and light.

Word Sips

Henry

No, things don't usually go on as if nothing ever happened, because something did happen and more will probably happen and until it does, we'll all be subject to despair and worry and grief and anxiety and -- well -- annoyance, particularly for me --  at the yammering and yammering on and on of opinion. I'm going to sit tight and be quiet and maybe dip my toes in one article or another but politely decline from engagement in anything but an assertion of peace, love and my vote when the time comes.





On another note, this afternoon I am going to hear the great Ursula K. Le Guin speak at Royce Hall. I'm so looking forward to her and then to Patti Smith tomorrow night. I bought both tickets months ago and feel a tad self-indulgent going two evenings in a row to an event, especially given my deadlines for work and just all the other stuff, but those feelings are tads and as soon as I'm in my seat, I'll be thrilled. And grateful.

Reader, what are you reading? I'm immersed in City on Fire and thrilled that I'm once again able to plow through a 900-plus page book. I had thought that skill was lost as the last few tomes I'd attempted were ditched around 150 pages in, with 500 pages looming. I wasn't sure if I was getting old and decrepit and losing my mojo as a reader extraordinaire or that those other books were just duds for me. They were duds for me. I might also be losing my mojo, at least in tolerance for what I don't love. I don't feel like being a critic, so I won't tell which ones, but they were literary sensations and best-sellers by wunderkinds. City on Fire, on the other hand, keeps getting better and better. It's a great story about numerous characters in gritty, 1970s New York City, and the writing is plot driven and literary. I'm generally a hardback novel reader, but I downloaded this one on my Kindle, and other than having no idea what page I'm on (27% through so far, but I'm IN), I'm enjoying the ability to look up some words that I'd never seen used. All you have to do is push on them with your finger and the definition pops up. This never ceases to amaze me and make me glad to be alive in 2015. Here they are:

horripilation: the erection of hairs on the skin due to cold, fear, or excitement

oubliette: a secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling

vigorish: an excessive rate of interest on a loan, typically one from an illegal moneylender

monorchid: (of a person or animal) having only one testicle

Here's a sentence using all the vocabulary words:


I knew I owed him, so I descended into the oubliette, the sack of coins a monorchid hanging in front of me, a horripilating woman with the vigorish he demanded.

I challenge you to give it a whirl.

Intimidating Words, Part Two

Skeletal and labyrinthine

Pharmacoresistant:
(from Dictionary.com)

Did you mean pharmaco-?

More suggestions:

Epileptogenesis:
(from Dictionary.com)

There are no results for: epileptogenesis, but we are adding new words daily.

Here are some of our most recent additions:

• metacognition
• epigenetics
• tranche
• digital divide
• nano
• declutter
• paradigm shift
• confusticate
• aha moment
• workaround
• eco
• munge
• artisanal
• exoplanet
• aggregator
• ultracrepidarian
• input device
• multiversa
• kaizen
• pixelate

1. 
   

I received an email from MedScape this morning with Targeting Pharmacoresistant Epilepsy and Epileptogenesis in the subject line. This was the exact title of the article referenced, and I shrank when I saw it. My mind wanders to wondering. The names for drugs and the words cobbled together by the Science Powers That Be make me squirm. I can't find their definitions in the dictionary. There are, apparently, not even suggestions for these words or even substitutes. I do like the word confusticate, as referenced above. It means to confuse or perplex; bewilder. 

Epileptogenesis is the gradual process by which a normal brain develops epilepsy. Pharmacoresistant epilepsy can be practically defined as failure to achieve seizure freedom following adequate trials of two tolerated and appropriately chosen AEDs.

The weight of metaphor. 

Oh, to be a person who embraces literalism.

literalism

[lit-er-uh-liz-uh m] 

 

• Word Origin

noun

1.

adherence to the exact letter or the literal sense, as in translation orinterpretation:

to interpret the law with uncompromising literalism.

2.

a peculiarity of expression resulting from this:

The work is studded with these obtuse literalisms.

3.

exact representation or portrayal, without idealization, as in art orliterature:

a literalism more appropriate to journalism than to the novel.

I love the word skeletal. I love the word labyrinthine. Our Chinese flame tree has finally dropped all but a few clumps of brown leaves, and its branches reach up to the blue sky and cast skeletal shadows on the grass, the patterns labyrinthine.

I hate the word pharmacoresistant. I hate the word epileptogenesis. Sophie's seizures resist a vast pharmacy of chemicals, and the gradual process by which she acquired epilepsy - - the epileptogenesis and resultant pharmacoresistance  -- have stripped me to the bone, rendered me skeletal, clanking and clinking the labyrinthine paths.





Intimidating Words, Part 1

Having a good sneeze

Some days, I just like the quotes thrown my way. Here are three:


I like to write when I feel spiteful. 
It is like having a good sneeze.
D. H. Lawrence, via Brainpickings


Congratulation: The civility of envy
Ambrose Bierce

Animadversion: the act of criticizing; an unfavorable comment

Again, Life is a Loaded Gun

I've posted this before and was in need of it.

Fan yourself.