Bukowski: I was on some fucking bus, with a girlfriend, and here came a guy walking toward us, looking for a back seat. His [facial] scars were deeper than mine. And you wanna know something? I was jealous.
Interviewer: Jealous?
Bukowski: Yeah! I said, “Jesus.” I said, “Did you see him?” And she said, “Yes I did.” I said, “Aw shit.” What a beautiful man he was.
(from the 2004 documentary 'Born Into This', directed by John Dullagen)
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
Coelho: The Art of Trying
“It’s…natural that unexpected conflicts should arise, and it’s natural that wounds may be inflicted during those conflicts. The wounds pass, and only the scars remain.- Paulo Coehlo, ‘The Art of Trying’ in Like the Flowing River, Trans. Margaret Jull. Thomson Press: India, 2000.
This is a blessing. These scars stay wit us throughout our life and are very helpful. If…the desire to return to the past becomes very great, we need only look at those scars. They are the marks left by the handcuffs, and will reminds us of the horrors of prison, and we will keep walking straight ahead.”
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Mary Gaitskill: Secretary
"Each cut, each scar, each burn a different mood or time. I told him what the first one was, I told him where the second one came from. I remembered them all. And for the first time in my life, I felt beautiful. Finally part of the earth. I touched the soil and he loved me back."
Closing scene from the film Secretary, an adaptation of the story by Gaitskill.
Closing scene from the film Secretary, an adaptation of the story by Gaitskill.
Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking
On hearing that her comatose daughter needs a tracheotomy.
“Everyone in the neuro units got a trach, they had kept saying to me that day … A trach could be done with fentanyl and a muscle relaxant, she would be under anesthesia no more than an hour. A trach would leave no cosmetic effect to speak of, ‘only a little dimple scar,’ ‘as time goes by maybe no scar at all.’ They kept mentioning this last point, as if the basis for my resistance to the trach was the scar. They were doctors, however freshly minted. I was not. Ergo, any concerns I had must be cosmetic, frivolous. In fact I had no idea why I so resisted the trach.” (125)
The Year of Magical Thinking. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2005.
“Everyone in the neuro units got a trach, they had kept saying to me that day … A trach could be done with fentanyl and a muscle relaxant, she would be under anesthesia no more than an hour. A trach would leave no cosmetic effect to speak of, ‘only a little dimple scar,’ ‘as time goes by maybe no scar at all.’ They kept mentioning this last point, as if the basis for my resistance to the trach was the scar. They were doctors, however freshly minted. I was not. Ergo, any concerns I had must be cosmetic, frivolous. In fact I had no idea why I so resisted the trach.” (125)
The Year of Magical Thinking. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2005.
Michael Ondaatje: Anil's Ghost
About a doctor in Sri Lanka during civil war.
"His duties made him come upon strangers and cut them open without ever knowing their names. He rarely spoke. It seemed he did not approach people unless they had a wound, even if he couldn't see it..." (211)
Anil's Ghost. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
"His duties made him come upon strangers and cut them open without ever knowing their names. He rarely spoke. It seemed he did not approach people unless they had a wound, even if he couldn't see it..." (211)
Anil's Ghost. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Jaques Derrida: Positions
"Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably, be undone." (24)
Positions. Chicago, 1981.
Positions. Chicago, 1981.
Camilla Gibb: Between Wars
“’War,’ she repeats. What is the worst thing that ever happened to you?’ she asks him then.
He lifts his shirt and shows her a belly riddled with scars.
She gasps because she is a girl who loves tough men, because she is a girl who longs for a hero, she gasps and falls in love in that instant, wants to kiss his stomach and see him punch out one of the assholes who sits in the coffee shop after his shift and drinks until he cannot restrain himself from trying to untie her apron string, to drag her down onto his lap.
Because he is a man who didn’t grow up with this American romance, Amir doesn’t know what to make of her reaction. Is she horrified? Is she sickened? Does she think he is at fault? He is embarrassed to have been so bold. But she puts her palms against his shoulders then and leans her whole body against him. He remains still while she kisses him tenderly between the sparse black hairs on his chest.” (146)
Between Wars, in Contemporary Canadian Women's Stories, Ed. Lisa Moore.
He lifts his shirt and shows her a belly riddled with scars.
She gasps because she is a girl who loves tough men, because she is a girl who longs for a hero, she gasps and falls in love in that instant, wants to kiss his stomach and see him punch out one of the assholes who sits in the coffee shop after his shift and drinks until he cannot restrain himself from trying to untie her apron string, to drag her down onto his lap.
Because he is a man who didn’t grow up with this American romance, Amir doesn’t know what to make of her reaction. Is she horrified? Is she sickened? Does she think he is at fault? He is embarrassed to have been so bold. But she puts her palms against his shoulders then and leans her whole body against him. He remains still while she kisses him tenderly between the sparse black hairs on his chest.” (146)
Between Wars, in Contemporary Canadian Women's Stories, Ed. Lisa Moore.
Jeanette Winterson: Written on the Body
“The lining of your mouth I know through tongue and spit. Its ridges, valleys, the corrugated roof, the fortress of teeth. The glossy smoothness of the inside of your upper lip is interrupted by a rough swirl where you were hurt once. The tissues of the mouth and anus heal faster than any others but they leave signs for those who care to look. I care to look. There’s a story trapped inside your mouth. A crashed car and a smashed windscreen. The only witness is the scar, jagged like a dueling scar where the skin still shows the stitches.” (117-118)
Written on the Body. Vintage International: New York, 1994.
Written on the Body. Vintage International: New York, 1994.
Petra Kuppers: The Scar of Visibility
“A scar: a meeting place between inside and outside, a locus of memory, of bodily change. Like skin, a scar mediates between the outside and the inside, but it also materially produces, changes, and overwrites its site. If skin renews itself constantly, producing the same in repetition, the scar is the place of the changed script: mountains are thrown up, the copy isn't quite right, crooked lines sneak over smooth surfaces. You can feel your scars itching, or pulsing, or, after a time, you can experience the sensation of touching yourself but feeling the touch as strange – nerves might not knit into “appropriate” lines. In these moments of strangeness, the core of phenomenological experience comes into the foreground of perception: that you are oriented toward the world, pressing and surging toward it from a place, a body, an origin. When this place becomes unfamiliar, sense, perception, and meaning making become experiential as spatial and temporal phenomena. There is a location to knowledge and sensation, and the scar can mark this insight.
The scar is also an image: it holds strong connotations of social violence, of outsider status, of negativity. And yet, mysteriously, it holds the gaze – the scar incites the look, invites the narrative, fuels the story, and anchors it back into (some version of) bodies, time, and space. Creative practices at the site of the scar can play with the mechanisms of repulsion and attraction, self and other, identity and production of difference. The scar as experience, image, embodied trope, then, moves its way through my study.” (1)
The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, University of Minnesota: Minneapolis, 2007.
The scar is also an image: it holds strong connotations of social violence, of outsider status, of negativity. And yet, mysteriously, it holds the gaze – the scar incites the look, invites the narrative, fuels the story, and anchors it back into (some version of) bodies, time, and space. Creative practices at the site of the scar can play with the mechanisms of repulsion and attraction, self and other, identity and production of difference. The scar as experience, image, embodied trope, then, moves its way through my study.” (1)
The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, University of Minnesota: Minneapolis, 2007.
Erica Jong: How To Save Your Own Life
“Sometimes I think I could tell the story of my life through the scars that mark my body. I could write a whole novel in which the heroine, standing naked before the mirror of her memory, enumerated the scars up and down the length of her body, and for eah scar told the story of how it came to mark her flesh, the pain she suffered, whome she suffered that pain with, what healing was attempted and by whom. Each chapter heading would name the scar, and each chapter would begin with a recounting of the accident that “caused” the scar. Except that the reader would instantly become aware that the “cause” was much deeper than mere accident.
I would tell of the opalescent, crescent-moon-shaped scar on my right knee, made by a equally opalescent shell fragment on the beach at Fire Island the summer I was eight, I would tell how I sank to my eager knees in the sand, not feeling the shell pierce through the moony white bone until I stood and bright-red arterial blood spurted out onto the white sand. I would tell of the six pale stitches on my left palm, made by a huge bread knife the summer I was fifteen, mserably unhappy with my job as a kitchen maid and waitress at Camp Merryhill, and wanting a reason to stop slicing sandwiches so I could languish in the infirmary, read Dickens and feel like an oprhan along with Pip and Oliver Twist. I would tell of the twelve-slice-high stack of uncut peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hw I suddenly brought my palm down on the blade I had unwittingly pointed toward the ceiling, slicing open my own white flesh instead of the spongy white flesh of the bread. I would tell of the strange fibrous lump in my backside, made by the quarts of blood released into the tissue of my back and thighs when I was deliberately given a too-spirited horse at the Ft. Sam Houston Riding Club and was later thrown spine first onto an outcropping of rock. I would tell how I was lucky enough to lose only blood rather than the use of my legs, how I landed on my ass rather than my spine, how my guardian angel spared me paralysis, how i was taken to the army hospital, and suddenly, in the middle of 1966, realized that a whole secret war was being fought in Vietnam as I passed my three weeks in the hsopital among baby-faced quadruple amputees and napalmed children from Vietnam.
Then I would go back in time more than thirty years and tell of the tiny hole in my neck, created in my mother's womb, the disturbing remains of some mysterious prenatal event whose traces remain to this day. I would tell of the three stitches above my left eye, made when I catapulted over the cord of my electric typewriter in one of those fits of despair abut writing which are as much a part of the writer's trade as the typewriter itself. I would save for last that almost imperceptible swelling in my left shin, the remains of my fractured tibia, snapped on the icy slopes in Zu:rs in 1967, when Bennett was so deeply involved with Penny that he hated having to go on vacation with me and consequently bullied me into skiing on slopes which he knew were icy and anyway too difficult for me to handle.
Oh I could tell the story of my marriage to Bbennet throught the accidents we had together. Interestingly enough, I was always the one who got hurt. And he – who felt like a perpetual victim of the world's injustices and therefore justified in committing any cruelty – was always angry at me for getting hurt. But one accident will have to do, will have to serve for all the rest.” (102-103)
How To Save Your Own Life: Signet, New York, 1977.
I would tell of the opalescent, crescent-moon-shaped scar on my right knee, made by a equally opalescent shell fragment on the beach at Fire Island the summer I was eight, I would tell how I sank to my eager knees in the sand, not feeling the shell pierce through the moony white bone until I stood and bright-red arterial blood spurted out onto the white sand. I would tell of the six pale stitches on my left palm, made by a huge bread knife the summer I was fifteen, mserably unhappy with my job as a kitchen maid and waitress at Camp Merryhill, and wanting a reason to stop slicing sandwiches so I could languish in the infirmary, read Dickens and feel like an oprhan along with Pip and Oliver Twist. I would tell of the twelve-slice-high stack of uncut peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hw I suddenly brought my palm down on the blade I had unwittingly pointed toward the ceiling, slicing open my own white flesh instead of the spongy white flesh of the bread. I would tell of the strange fibrous lump in my backside, made by the quarts of blood released into the tissue of my back and thighs when I was deliberately given a too-spirited horse at the Ft. Sam Houston Riding Club and was later thrown spine first onto an outcropping of rock. I would tell how I was lucky enough to lose only blood rather than the use of my legs, how I landed on my ass rather than my spine, how my guardian angel spared me paralysis, how i was taken to the army hospital, and suddenly, in the middle of 1966, realized that a whole secret war was being fought in Vietnam as I passed my three weeks in the hsopital among baby-faced quadruple amputees and napalmed children from Vietnam.
Then I would go back in time more than thirty years and tell of the tiny hole in my neck, created in my mother's womb, the disturbing remains of some mysterious prenatal event whose traces remain to this day. I would tell of the three stitches above my left eye, made when I catapulted over the cord of my electric typewriter in one of those fits of despair abut writing which are as much a part of the writer's trade as the typewriter itself. I would save for last that almost imperceptible swelling in my left shin, the remains of my fractured tibia, snapped on the icy slopes in Zu:rs in 1967, when Bennett was so deeply involved with Penny that he hated having to go on vacation with me and consequently bullied me into skiing on slopes which he knew were icy and anyway too difficult for me to handle.
Oh I could tell the story of my marriage to Bbennet throught the accidents we had together. Interestingly enough, I was always the one who got hurt. And he – who felt like a perpetual victim of the world's injustices and therefore justified in committing any cruelty – was always angry at me for getting hurt. But one accident will have to do, will have to serve for all the rest.” (102-103)
How To Save Your Own Life: Signet, New York, 1977.
Gloria Steinem: In Praise of Women's Bodies
On her experience of a week-long women's spa retreat.
“Gradually there was also less embarrassment about appendectomy scars, streth marks, Cesarean incisions, and the like. Though I had always resented the anthropological double standard by which scars are supposed to be marks of courage on a male body but marks of ugliness on a female one, I began to realize that I had been assessing such wounds in masculine terms nonetheless. Dueling scars, war wounds, scars-as-violence – those images were part of the reason I had assumed such marks to be shocking on men as well as on women.
But many of women’s body scars have a very different context and thus an emotional power all their own. Stretch marks and Cesarean incisions from giving birth are very different from accident, war, and fight scars. They evoke courage without violence, strength without cruelty, and even so, they’re far more likely to be worn with diffidence than bragging. That gives them a moving, bittersweet power, like seeing a room where a very emotional event in our lives once took place.
There were other surgical scars that seemed awesome to me, too, but not as evocative as those from childbirth. How do women survive even the routine physical price of skin stretch to its limit? After one Cesarean birth, where do some women find the courage to attempt several more?
True, there are tribal societies that treat women who give birth like honorary male warriors, that is paying too much honor to war. Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense and as courageous as either one. Yet one of the strongest, most thoughtful feminists I know still hides in one-piece bathing suits to conceal her two Cesarean scars. And one of the most hypocritical feminists I know (that is, one who loves feminism but dislikes women) had plastic surgery to remove the tiny scar that gave her face character.
Perhaps we’ll only be fully at ease with ourselves when we can appreciate scars as symbols of experience, often experiences that other women share, and see our bodies as unique chapters in a shared story.
To do that, we need to be together unself-consciously. We need the regular sight of our diverse reality to wear away the plastic-stereotypical-perfect image against which we’ve been encouraged to measure our selves. The impossible goal of “what we should look like” has worn a groove in our brains. It will take the constant intimacy of many new images to blast us out.” (163). Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York, 1983).
“Gradually there was also less embarrassment about appendectomy scars, streth marks, Cesarean incisions, and the like. Though I had always resented the anthropological double standard by which scars are supposed to be marks of courage on a male body but marks of ugliness on a female one, I began to realize that I had been assessing such wounds in masculine terms nonetheless. Dueling scars, war wounds, scars-as-violence – those images were part of the reason I had assumed such marks to be shocking on men as well as on women.
But many of women’s body scars have a very different context and thus an emotional power all their own. Stretch marks and Cesarean incisions from giving birth are very different from accident, war, and fight scars. They evoke courage without violence, strength without cruelty, and even so, they’re far more likely to be worn with diffidence than bragging. That gives them a moving, bittersweet power, like seeing a room where a very emotional event in our lives once took place.
There were other surgical scars that seemed awesome to me, too, but not as evocative as those from childbirth. How do women survive even the routine physical price of skin stretch to its limit? After one Cesarean birth, where do some women find the courage to attempt several more?
True, there are tribal societies that treat women who give birth like honorary male warriors, that is paying too much honor to war. Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense and as courageous as either one. Yet one of the strongest, most thoughtful feminists I know still hides in one-piece bathing suits to conceal her two Cesarean scars. And one of the most hypocritical feminists I know (that is, one who loves feminism but dislikes women) had plastic surgery to remove the tiny scar that gave her face character.
Perhaps we’ll only be fully at ease with ourselves when we can appreciate scars as symbols of experience, often experiences that other women share, and see our bodies as unique chapters in a shared story.
To do that, we need to be together unself-consciously. We need the regular sight of our diverse reality to wear away the plastic-stereotypical-perfect image against which we’ve been encouraged to measure our selves. The impossible goal of “what we should look like” has worn a groove in our brains. It will take the constant intimacy of many new images to blast us out.” (163). Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York, 1983).
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