Steinbeck: East of Eden

“The wound had not worried Charles, but the scar did. It looked like a long fingermark laid on his forehead. He inspected it often in the little mirror by the stove. He combed his hair down over his forehead to conceal as much of it as he could. He conceived a shame for his scar; he hated his scar. He became restless when anyone looked at it, and fury rose in him if any question was asked about it. In a letter to his brother her put down his feeling about it.
‘It looks,’ he wrote, ‘like somebody marked me like a cow. The damn thing gets darker. By the time you get home it will maybe be black. All I need is one going the other way and I would look like a Papist on Ash Wednesday. I don’t know why it bothers me. I got plenty other scars. It just seems like I was marked. And when I go into town, like to the inn, why, people are always looking at it. I can hear them talking about it when they don’t know I can hear. I don’t know why they’re so damn curious about it. It gets so I don’t feel like going into town at all.'”

-- pp. 53-54, Toronto: Macmillan, 1952.

Dana Jennings: Our Scars Tell The Stories of Our Lives

Our scars tell stories. Sometimes they’re stark tales of life-threatening catastrophes, but more often they’re just footnotes to the ordinary but bloody detours that befall us on the roadways of life.

When I parse my body’s motley parade of scars, I see them as personal runes and conversation starters. When I wear shorts, the footlong surgical scar on my right knee rarely fails to draw a comment.

And in their railroad-track-like appearance, my scars remind me of the startling journeys that my body has taken — often enough to the hospital or the emergency room.

The ones that intrigue me most are those from childhood that I can’t account for. The one on my right eyebrow, for example, and a couple of ancient pockmarks and starbursts on my knees. I’m not shocked by them. To be honest, I wonder why there aren’t more.

I had a full and active boyhood, one that raged with scabs and scrapes, mashed and bloody knees, bumps and lumps, gashes and slashes, cats’ claws and dogs’ teeth, jagged glass, ragged steel, knots, knobs and shiners. Which raises this question: How do any of us get out of childhood alive?

My stubborn chin has sustained a fair bit of damage over the years. On close examination, there’s a faint delta of scars that brings back memories of my teenage war on acne. Those frustrating days of tetracycline and gritty soaps left my face not clean and glowing but red and raw. The acne also ravaged my back, scoring the skin there so that it still looks scorched and lunar.

I further cratered my chin as an adult. First, I sprinted into a cast-iron lamppost while chasing a fly ball in a park in Washington; I actually saw a chorus line of stars dance before my eyes as I crumpled to the ground. Second, I hooked one of those old acne potholes with my razor and created an instant dueling scar.

Scanning down from the jut of my chin to the tips of my toes, I’ve even managed to brand my feet. In high school and college I worked at Kingston Steel Drum, a factory in my New Hampshire hometown that scoured some of the 55-gallon steel drums it cleaned with acid and scalding water. The factory was eventually shut down by the federal government and became a Superfund hazardous waste site, but not before a spigot malfunctioned one day and soaked my feet in acid.

Then there are the heavy hitters, the stitched whips and serpents that make my other scars seem like dimples on a golf ball.

There’s that mighty scar on my right knee from when I was 12 years old and had a benign tumor cut out. Then there are the scars on my abdomen from when my colon (devoured by ulcerative colities) was removed in 1984, and from my radical open prostatectomy last summer to take out my cancerous prostate. (If I ever front a heavy metal band, I think I’ll call it Radical Open Prostatectomy.)

But for all the potential tales of woe that they suggest, scars are also signposts of optimism. If your body is game enough to knit itself back together after a hard physical lesson, to make scar tissue, that means you’re still alive, means you’re on the path toward healing.

Scars, perhaps, were the primal tattoos, marks of distinction that showed you had been tried and had survived the test. And like tattoos, they also fade, though the one from my surgery last summer is still a fierce and deep purple.

There’s also something talismanic about them. I rub my scars the way other people fret a rabbit’s foot or burnish a lucky penny. Scars feel smooth and dry, the same way the scales of a snake feel smooth and dry.

I find my abdominal scars to be the most profound. They vividly remind me that skilled surgeons unlocked me with their scalpels, took out what had to be taken, sewed me back up and saved my life. It’s almost as if they left their life-giving signatures on my flawed flesh.

The scars remind me, too, that in this vain culture our vanity sometimes needs to be punctured and deflated — and that’s not such a bad thing. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, better to be a scarred and living dog than to be a dead lion.

It’s not that I’m proud of my scars — they are what they are, born of accident and necessity — but I’m not embarrassed by them, either. More than anything, I relish the stories they tell. Then again, I’ve always believed in the power of stories, and I certainly believe in the power of scars.

(New York Times Online, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/health/21case.html?_r=1&emc=eta1) A version of this article appeared in print on July 21, 2009, on page D5 of the New York edition. Thanks to Marilyn Casselman (http://www.freebornproject.com/) for sending me this article.

Jeannette Walls: The Glass Castle

“I’d never met a man I would rather spend time with. I loved him for all sorts of reasons: He [sic] cooked without recipes; he wrote nonsense poems for his nieces; his large, warm family had accepted me as one of their own. And when I first showed him my scar, he said it was interesting. He used the word “textured.” He said “smooth” was boring but “textured” was interesting, and the scar meant that I was stronger than whatever it was that had tried to hurt me.”
(p.286, The Glass Castle. New York: Scribner, 2005)

Eli Claire: The Marrow's Telling

I pour a bath, dissolve a handful of mineral
salts, catching each crystal in the stream of hot
water, crack a window, try to light the candles. They
float in a bowl of water, and as I touch match to wick,
my hand jumps, tremor climbing the ladder of my
arm. I swamp one candle, then the other, give up.
Strip my clothes—t–shirt, high tops, jeans, boxers.
Pull off my binder, breasts coming free. I think about
the not–so–long–ago laws against cross–dressing,
about old–time butches and the price they paid. Their
stories of bar raids, strip searches, jail cells scare me.
Heat stings. Right arm loosens, body buoyant.
Tremors rock water, no longer locked in shoulder and
back. I finger the appendectomy scar stretched from
navel to pubic hair, a thick, ropy trail cut down my
center. Cup the knobby glob of tissue on my right
knee, remnants of one fall among thousands. Trace
the ridged line across my left palm, mark of a chisel
slipping from wood to flesh.
Except for that thick ropy braid, my scars don’t
come from a surgeon’s scalpel, an unusual circumstance
for anyone physically disabled since birth. My
quad muscles were never cut, sewn back together.
Achilles tendons, never severed. Pins, never inserted
into hips and knees. The bodies of disabled people so
often end up criss–crossed with scars, childhoods
punctuated by surgery. But not mine: my skin didn’t
become a map. For that, I need to go subterranean.
Muscles knotted, tendons inflamed, vertebrae too
sore to touch.

-- 'Scars' from The Marrow's Telling (p. 77)

Various/Ted Meyer

The following are quotations cited in an exhibition essay about the work of Ted Meyer. He does imprints of people's scars and collects their narratives, too. Thought-provoking work, it can be seen at http://www.tedmeyer.com/ .

“Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to
reveal. A scar is what happens when the world is made flesh.”
Leonard Cohen

“Scar tissue is stronger than regular
tissue. Realize the strength, move on.”
Henry Rollins

“We are spinning our own fates, good
or evil, and never to be undone.
Every smallest stroke of virtue or of
vice leaves its never-so-little scar.”
William James

Bukowski: Documentary

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)

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.
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.”

- Paulo Coehlo, ‘The Art of Trying’ in Like the Flowing River, Trans. Margaret Jull. Thomson Press: India, 2000.

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.

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.

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.

Jaques Derrida: Positions

"Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably, be undone." (24)
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.

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.

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.

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.

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).