Pathemata by Maggie Nelson

Posted by litlove

There is a dominant story of illness that goes something like this: you experience symptoms, and so you visit a medical professional. This skilled person interprets them and comes up with a diagnosis and a treatment plan. You follow the treatment plan and recover in a straight linear progression back to full health. It’s a simple story and such a powerful one that we cling to it and insist upon it, despite the fact that it’s rarely accurate. Diagnoses can be hard to come by, treatments often fail, and the graph of recovery is a line of manic peaks and troughs. Pain and illness often outstay their welcome and become chronic, until we reach the point where it’s hard to know how we feel or what the symptoms mean. At this point speculation and desperation go hand in hand, and the awful truth must be faced that this comforting story of illness and recovery is not going to work for us. We are in the fabulation wilderness, the story as broken as the sufferer, with a body that resists reading.

Maggie Nelson’s recent book charts just such an experience with chronic mouth pain, and is itself an attempt to tackle the problem of narration. ‘Each morning it is as if my mouth has survived a war,’ she writes. When the conventional route of the orofacial pain clinic can’t help her, Nelson sets off ‘into the uninsured wilds’.

I start a file on my desktop, wherein I catalogue the conditions of the pain’s onset, the doctors I’ve seen, the results of their imaging, the medications and physical therapies I’ve tried, the activities that seem to make it better and worse, and so on. I bring this document to each new appointment, hoping it might offer a useful summary of a confusing physical situation, as well as confirm my status as an organised patient, eager to participate in her treatment. […] It doesn’t take me long to realise that no one wants to read this pathemata.’

Instead, a colourful circus of alternative practitioners are altogether more fixated on offering their pet cures with alarming confidence. Anyone who has been forced down this route will recognise the kind of expert who, when Nelson expresses uncertainty about taking medications without ‘a firmer diagnosis’, snaps at her ‘Do you want to go on living with the pain or do you want to treat it and have it go away?’ Or the dentist whose glib explanation seems overly practiced, causing her to ‘marvel at my inability to know if the whole thing is a hoax, how the intensity of my desire to get out of pain vies with my intelligence, which, on a good day, I consider formidable’. Nelson spends more money than she can afford and does things she doesn’t want to do, aware that, ‘It feels reckless but the pain keeps demanding an answer.’

The medics may ignore her words, but there’s a gruesome satisfaction for the reader in Nelson’s taut and fragmentary account. Seeking root causes, she cycles back to childhood where she finds an unusual flu that left her with trouble swallowing, a history of tonsillitis, and speech therapy for taking too rapidly. She quotes the damning – if at the time good-humoured – comment of a family friend: ‘Does her mouth come with an off switch?’ A visit to the orthodontist brings the diagnosis of a ‘tongue thrust’ that must be quelled by means of a metal spike glued to the back of her front teeth. It’s a potent reminder that mainstream medicine can be utterly barbaric. But it also opens up a deep chasm of shadowy significance, in which our pains and ailments seem to arise out of the confluence of old unresolved trauma and the random variations in our individual bodies. The mind and the body are so tightly intertwined that even if the illness or pain is purely biological, our response to it and our experience of recovery is inevitably bound up with complicated hopes and fears. And on top of all that, Nelson is well aware of the ‘literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer.’ So much of who she is and what she does converges on this site of pain and trouble that readings proliferate in the absence of medical boundaries.

If what I’ve written about this slim volume so far gives the impression of a straightforward memoir, however, that’s misleading. Maggie Nelson mixes her timelines and her situations in a choppy text that bounces around between the experience of pain, her search for treatment and the Covid pandemic which ends her quest in a way that brings a kind of almost-relief. Inevitably, the pandemic has its own pains, however, in the form of a partner made alien and unsupportive by distance, and the difficulty of getting hold of vaccines for her son. By the time she’s driven him to several pharmacies in a state of enraged agitation, her son is begging for her to stop and take them home.

I tell him that even though it looks like I’m a hot mess driving all over town begging for one little orange-topped vial of Pfizer, I’m really more like the mom in the animated movie we just watched who says, I have made the metal ones pay for their crimes while wiping robot blood from her face.’

The pandemic writ large a feeling state that Nelson has been living in isolation: a fear of our bodies and all that can go wrong with them, all the unbearable suffering they can put us through without even the vaguest hope of reprieve. As she jumps about in her narrative, Nelson abandons plot in favour of a kind of thematic deployment of emotion. It’s sheer craziness that links one fragment to the next and keeps us propelled onwards, a highly particular kind of craziness that soars away from reality while turning the body into a boiling crucible of rage, despair and fear. It’s the craziness that the prospect of physical extremis causes, and which can grow to become a self-perpetuating terrorist of the mind.

There’s another element to this text but it’s one I can’t quite make my mind up about. The pain – and I presume the trials of the pandemic – that Nelson is experiencing causes her to have terrible dreams and accounts of these crop up regularly across the 70 pages. Nelson’s trick here is never to signal that they are coming, and so it’s only halfway through a fragment, when you come across a logical impossibility or something so horrific or humiliating that it can’t be true, that you realise it’s a dream. You have to hand it to Nelson – I can’t think of another writer who could find such an innovative take on ‘I woke up and discovered it was all a dream’, only it’s the reader who does the waking up here from the dream of story she’s spinning. But does it really work? Does it really add to what we’re being told? I’m not entirely sure, though it does give Nelson an opportunity to scatter the text with her trademark line in graphic intensity.

Still, it’s only a niggle in what is an innovative and original contribution to the literature of illness. If we could accept a wholly different kind of story for the travails of the body, I can’t help but wonder whether we might find much relief in the process.

Murakami: Imagination Overload

Posted by litlove

Reading your first Haruki Murakami novel is a bit like trying lobster for the first time. It’s got quite a culinary reputation: you know it’s a sophisticated dish, that it satisfies a refined palate, but fear it might be an acquired taste. You may be on the verge of an amazing experience, but you might also suffer a nasty allergic reaction. Well my first Murakami novel was Kafka on the Shore and I seem to have emerged from the odyssey undamaged. I found it mystical, engaging, clever and innovative, but I also thought it pulled its metaphysical punches.

Two strands of narrative intertwine. In one plot, Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway, is escaping the influence of a father who he fears will damage him psychologically if he stays. Kafka’s mother and sister left when he was only four years old. His memories of them are potent if hazy, for he knows something essential left his life with them. His father has placed him under a strange prophesy, one that claims he will kill his father and sleep with both his mother and his sister, and like Oedipus before him, Kafka is running away from the curse at the same time as he is running towards it.

In the other part of the narrative, X-File type documents detail a strange occurrence that took place in 1944, when a group of school children, mushrooming in the woods, glimpsed something in the sky that might have been a UFO before all falling into a comatose sleep. The children recovered without significant effects, apart from one child, subject that day to a violent attack by his teacher, who took months to come round and who was mentally impaired when he did. In the up-to-date world of the story, that small child is now the elderly Nakata, a humble harmless soul who understands very little and can’t read, but who can talk to cats. In fact, finding lost cats is what constitutes an occupation for him, and it’s on the trail of a lost cat that he is lured into the den of the evil Johnnie Walker. Walker traps and kills cats in order to eat their hearts and use their souls to make special flutes (still with me in the back row?). He taunts and abuses Nakata with his cat murdering until Nakata stabs him to death in a blind fury.

It’s at this point that Kafka wakes up covered in someone else’s blood after a blackout. A few days later, he reads in the papers that his own father has been stabbed to death in an enigmatic crime. Could he have unwittingly fulfilled part of his father’s prophecy? Is the evil Johnnie Walker the same person as the sculptor Koichi Tamura? Well, the horror of what he has done propels old Nakata off on a journey of his own, following unconsciously in the footsteps of Kafka, with only the kindness of strangers to help him and his own exotic abilities to make fish and leeches rain from the sky. Clearly the two destines of these men – one old and poor, the other young and homeless, both with nothing but uncanny intuition to guide them – are set to strike sparks off each other, but to what end?

Kafka finds himself a temporary home in a private library, acting as assistant to hermaphrodite haemophiliac Oshima (you don’t come across those every day). They both work for the enigmatic Miss Saki, a woman whose life has been stilled, Miss Haversham-like, by the pointless death of her fiancé. Kafka is quickly convinced that Miss Saki is his mother, particularly when her 15-year-old self starts appearing to him at night as a ghost. In the meantime, Nakata has found himself a companion in the form of a most endearing ponytail-sporting, Hawaiian shirt-wearing lorry driver, Hoshino, who has given him a lift in this truck and decided to stay on and help him in his quest, mostly out of curosity to see what Nakata will do next.

There’s a particularly engaging quality to Murakami’s prose that kept me reading despite the bizarre nature of the fictional events. I’m not normally very good with what’s not real, hence my tendency to dislike satire, farce and other exaggerated modes of narrative. But Murakami keeps one eye firmly on the metaphysical at all times. ‘Everything is metaphor’, becomes something of a catchphrase for the novel, as does the notion ‘in dreams begin responsibilities’. In this way, the real and unreal are tightly bound together, what happens clearly means much more than just ‘what happens’, and the reader is convinced that the separate quests of Kafka and Nakata must lead to climactic events dense with metaphysical meaning. Both men – like the cats Nakata saves from the clutches of Johnnie Walker – have lost their souls for reasons they do not understand, and are searching for that most alluring of human qualities – wholeness and integrity. At the same time, the narrative is rich with allusions and echoes, symbolism abounds, the story is packed with tempting little cul-de-sacs of meaning, that may or may not be the sort of red herring Nakata can make fall from the sky. This is what Murakami makes you do throughout the reading process – he invites you to I-spy your families of symbols, to mix and match the details of the two plotlines, to spot the clues in this most literary of treasure hunts.

But when it comes to saying what it all means, Murakami goes coy. The book made me think of controversial psychoanalyst Massud Khan, who declared that dreams don’t necessarily mean anything – the point is being able to dream them. For instance, noble savage, Nakata, has all the answers by never knowing what will happen until he he is in the moment. Murakami’s characters are rewarded by trusting to the unfolding of events; they may be overloaded with imaginative possibilities and full of suspicions but they move forward in a sort of protective ignorance, one that cannot be punctured. (Mr Litlove pointed out that this is a very common element in all male lone hero stories – James Bond, Indiana Jones, all throw themselves into a quest without thinking or feeling and get rewarded with special protection.) As the story progresses, more and more emphasis is placed on everything that is important being at the same time beyond words. Enigma rules.

And this seems to include emotions, too. This is very much a cerebral book, all head, very little heart. When Kafka ‘rapes’ his sister in a dream, the event steadfastly refuses to provoke any real emotion in him, and does its best not to arouse any in the reader. The two characters discuss the situation calmly, and whilst Kafka knows he has reached the part of himself he does not like, that he wishes to reject, there is no catharsis in this moment. Or if there is, it happens in an elsewhere in the narrative, beyond the words. (Kafka’s story disappointed me, I admit – I felt Kafka had a lot of the sort of sex a middle-aged novelist might well wish he’d experienced as an adolescent and not much else, in the end, but that’s just a personal point.)

These contradictions in the foundation of the novel were very intriguing, I felt. It’s a book about profound revelations that can only think them, conjuring them out of metaphors, and it’s a book rich in metaphysics that will not put words to the numinous and the ineffable – which is, after all, what metaphysics exists to articulate. It is a continual metaphysical tease, and how much you like it will, I think, depend on how much you like being teased with possibilities that rarely come to anything. Myself, I think teasers have to make good on their innudendo at some point, to show me what they’re made of, as it were. But at the same time, I understand the lure of going on an adventure and staying safe at the same time, which is the advantage of journeys of the imagination. Nothing need ever be lost in the imaginative world of Murakami, for that is precisely the greatest power of the imagination – it’s ability to transform and recreate and proliferate without end. For imagination he is justly renouned, but if you want explanations, you might break out in hives.

Chairs and Groundhog Dreams

Posted by litlove

You may recall that when we went on holiday to Yorkshire, Mr Litlove attended a furniture making workshop with the intention of making a chair. Well, that chair is now finished and here it is in all its glory.

Mr Litlove’s familiar gazes adoringly at what his Alpha Male can produce.

I’ve been thinking of it for a long while as a thing of beauty, so I was surprised when I sat on it to find how comfortable it is. The back is particularly supportive in a way that must surely be good for the digestion. But it’s pretty too, with lots of little details.

It’s the little things that count.

Thank you all so much for the wonderful comments on my last post – every bit as supportive and beautiful as the chair above. I really don’t know what I would do without this blogging community. I feel very badly, though, that I haven’t been around to visit you all as much as I’d like, what with one thing and another. My tooth and face are feeling better than they did last weekend. It turns out I have bruised a nerve and we are waiting to see if it will revive; if it does then all is well, so cross your fingers for me. It still feels odd and uncomfortable, but not as awful as it did. However, I have now come down with a cold, just to maintain my level of brain fogginess, and I have a mere five days to produce the next 3,500 word essay for my course with scarcely an idea to my name. Let us not give in to despair and call it instead an ‘interesting’ situation. Nevertheless, my intention is, over the course of the week, to get around all my blogging friends for a visit, and who knows but I might read something on one of your blogs that will inspire me.

I had the strangest experience a couple of days ago, that I’m sure was due in part to the new and revolting mouth guard that I have been condemned to wear by the dentist. I agreed to it out of the foolish belief it would be something like my son’s nighttime retainer, which was a clear, fine plastic thing that was almost impossible to see when he was wearing it. But oh no, my mouth guard is the kind I could play rugby in, a hulking great brute I can’t quite close my lips around. When it’s in I look like a member of The Simpsons, such is my overbite. It’s quite hard to swallow and since I’ve had a cold, not that much fun to breathe. I keep it by the bed but only put it in after lights out, in order not to scare Mr Litlove. Talk about a passion killer! I might as well pop my glass eye out and stick it in a jug of water.

Inevitably I haven’t been sleeping well while I get used to it, which is probably why, when I took my book back to bed after breakfast a few days ago (warmest place to be), I fell into a deep sleep. I am a lucid dreamer, and so once I realised I was in a dream when I really should be awake and doing other things, I told myself it was time to snap out of it. So I got out of bed, went downstairs and opened the fridge door. And I thought, hang on a minute, this isn’t my fridge. There were two of them, in fact, and they were black. Dammit, I thought, I’m still in this dream. So I had another go. I got out of bed and was halfway down the corridor when I bumped into my son, coming towards me in a white kaftan. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘You’re supposed to be in London.’ I wasn’t surprised when he gave me a nonsensical answer. After all we don’t have anything like a corridor in our house, and as for that kaftan…! I had a couple more tries at it, two attempts at getting out of bed and going to the bathroom to run a bath. This is my normal morning routine, and the bathroom was almost like our real bathroom, but I couldn’t feel the water on my skin, always a giveaway. By now I was quite frustrated. What was I going to do? I was stuck in the dream world and who would know how to find me here?

Just as I was beginning to feel properly anxious, I felt my eyelids begin to crack open with what seemed like the grinding noise of a portcullis being wheeled up. Oh they were so heavy and wanted nothing more than to close again. But I forced them open, blinking in the daylight, and recognised my bed and my bedroom and that they were nothing like the ones in the dream. I was so sleepy it was all I could do to stay awake, but no way was I risking going back into that dream. What a postmodern nightmare! But maybe it was the kind of dream to make me cling hard to my waking life, sore tooth, mouth guard, head cold, essay deadline and all….

Pootering

Posted by litlove

Where would we be without ongoing battles between professional journalism and blogging? We wouldn’t have the word ‘pooterish’ to describe the post I’m about to write, and what a loss that would be. I rather shot my bolt on the reviewing front this week because the only novel I read in full was the one by Cristina Garcia. I’ve been writing, which always drastically reduces the amount of reading I get done, and picking about in books here and there for my academic work. I’m changing direction in my motherhood reading now and starting to think about lost children. So I’m halfway through Carol Shield’s novel, Unless, which is very intriguing, and have lined up ahead Margaret Forster’s Over (in which a family comes to terms with the death of a daughter) and Amanda Eyre Ward’s How To Be Lost (main character thinks she catches sight of her missing sister, many, many years after she disappeared). I’m also thinking about good mothers, and have spent part of the morning watching Simpsons cartoons with my son (whose memory of their plots is pretty impressive). I love the one where Bart sells his soul to Millhouse for five bucks and then suffers all kinds of odd consequences, like being unable to see his breath on a pane of glass, or activate those sliding doors in stores. At bedtime Marge hugs him and says ‘Bart, your hug seems a little off. Is anything the matter?’ Just as he’s about to confess she shushes him with the words ‘A mother can always tell.’ Then she hugs him again, thinking about it. ‘It’s not fear of nuclear war. It’s not swim test anxiety. It’s almost as if you’re missing something.’ When Bart suggests he hasn’t got as soul Marge cracks up. ‘Oh no, sweetheart, you’re not a monster,’ she says, and exits smartly, leaving poor Bart staring wide-eyed into the darkness. I do like that bit.

The only other book I can report on is about dreaming, called Seeing in the Dark. It’s written by an academic, Bert States, but in a very accessible way. It’s beautifully written, actually, but it’s been annoying me a lot. States, a literary critic by trade, has become captivated by the process of dreaming and the range of scientific and neurological ways in which we might be able to account for it. The book is essentially a long drawn-out argument for the meaninglessness of dreams. They may be intelligible, States says, but they are not intelligent. They have nothing to tell us and are resolutely nothing more than the mind objectively processing images, unaware, as it were, that it has a witness.

Now I have nothing against this argument per se (except I should come clean at this point and say I don’t agree with it), but I don’t appreciate the way that States phrases it. To give him credit where it’s due, he is very polite about interpretative models of dream analysis, but his understanding of dreams is doubt-free and absolute, despite the fact that he begins the book saying that, fundamentally, we still have no idea why we dream, how dreams are created, or what work they achieve (if any) in the mind. Having got this out the way, he spends the rest of the book saying how things are – dreams are without meaning, dreams are nothing more than supercharged neurons colliding. As far as I know there is no hard and fast evidence to back up this approach, any more than there is for declaring that dreams do have insight to give us on the hidden parts of ourselves. I think there’s value in both approaches, but I also think they work best when helping to inform each other.

To be brutal, I have a problem with this kind of scientific approach because it takes hypotheses as the truth when they are often only best guesses. If you look back over the history of science, it changes, and absolute truths end up giving way to even more absolute ones, in tautologous succession. My experience has been that the best scientists are ruefully aware of the limitations of their knowledge, and do not make claims for their research that go beyond the cautiously conditional, but the popular conception of science loves answers and certainties. In a world of stem cell research, genetic engineering, and nuclear and biological warfare, I can’t help but think that keeping the nice, humble phrases ‘it doesn’t always work’ and ‘we don’t know the consequences’ in frequent use would be a good thing. Although he dislikes the misuse of science, my husband does fundamentally disagree with me about the dominance of scientific thought in our culture, being very much of the technical persuasion, and this leads to many lengthy and, frankly, fruitless discussions, as we are neither of us about to be convinced by the other. Perhaps any person just leans towards either the scientific or artistic perspective on the world, towards a preference for either answers or ambiguity, and there’s not much to be done about it.

Pushing the soapbox to one side, I’ll end with a photo of the new bookcases we’ve just had put into our sitting room. They were finished yesterday, and I spent the afternoon shelving books. I’m at the stage of just sitting and sighing over their beauty at the moment, and look – empty shelves! I really must try to be good and restrained as I am running out of free walls in the house.

Sittingroom