Part 3: Traction and upside-down-ness: The composed and composing body of the writer.
Divya Victor: Myung, this morning I went to the neurosurgeon. Have you seen the movie The Savages?
Myung Mi Kim: Yes!
Victor: Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character has to do that thing where he hangs from a door — it’s called traction. I have to do that. For three months. Three times a day for twenty minutes.
Mi Kim: Three times a day? Do they give you the whole apparatus?
Victor: You fill a giant bladder of water. Then you swing the bladder over a door. And hang it from a metal frame. You strap your face to it. And sort of … squat. There is a mechanical apparatus that stretches your neck so it can release the pressure that’s built up in it.
Mi Kim: Do you know why this is happening? You didn’t have an injury, per se.
Victor: I didn’t have an injury, but I have multiple torn parts. There is a thing called an “annulus” that covers and cushions each spinal disc. It creates the right space between each disc. And if it’s torn, the disc puts too much pressure on the nerve.
Mi Kim: But is it just from wear and tear? Like everyday life?
Victor: Yeah. The doctor said: “Either you’re eighty years old, or you used to play sports.” And, neither is true. It could have been a childhood injury. I used to throw discus.
Mi Kim: Well there you go.
Victor: I was a very mediocre field athlete.
Mi Kim: No, no, I am just trying to imagine you. And I can!
Victor: No, it’s probably a delayed reaction. Age, bad posture. Reading.
Mi Kim: Well. Now I have a picture of you hanging upside down like a bat.
Victor: Actually that’s how all my dissertation writing is going to happen. With the blood rushing to my head.
Mi Kim: You never know, it could kick something over. Right? Something that wouldn’t happen if you were sitting upright, pretending that you were writing. Now this way you just “write” rather than sitting down to write.
Victor: That’s a great idea. And just dictate as I’m hanging?
Mi Kim: Absolutely. Though I don’t know what will happen to your breathing.
Victor: Well, I hold my breath when I write anyways.
Mi Kim: No, this would be good. I want you to breathe when you’re writing rather than hold your breath when you’re writing. Yes, this could actually be quite useful as a process. Well literally to change your physiology — the breathing, the not breathing — I think it will have the potential toconvert what you think of as “writing.”
All joking aside, the complete reorientation and readjustment of everything that you associate with the scene of writing. And to be actually given an opportunity to, in some sense, have no “will.” To be upside down. Your body is actually going to be breathing a different way. Your pulse is going to beat in a different way. The sense that might be produced or evoked might alter or shift what it is possible to think. And one might imagine writing as somehow tracking those cracks — it’s not what you knowabout writing, it’s what you can’t in fact begin to imagine about writing that somehow presents itself or you’re able to catch it in the moment that its appearance starts disappearing. The image of upside-down-ness — and I know it is a product of physical pain — might actually, if nothing else, give you a kind of reprieve or will alleviate the trends and habits that you might have established in relation to writing.
Victor: Yes. I think we do observe (in the sense of religious practice) a very passive pose of the writer. It’s like we’re in the position of supplicants: you walk to the desk, pull out the chair, and behold the tablet on which you etch — I find it to be a very archaic, passive pose to assume — as a scribe.
When you were speaking of bodily exertion or upside-down-ness, where the body has turned into this precarious object that you have no illusion of controlling, I was reminded of an artist I saw last July in L.A. He was running on a treadmill on a public street, right outside the LACE[1] gallery that was hosting him, and right on Hollywood Blvd., wearing a business suit. He had a canvas and a palette. And, as he ran, he was painting portraits of the people who would stand in front of him. And he did this for hours. All evening. And he didn’t seem to stop. And he would line up the portraits. And each of these portraits seemed to get more desperate. I could sense a breakage of the body in the stroke, in his ability to control his hand.
Mi Kim: Yes, I think the cusp between what holds and what breaks as one is writing or as one is perceiving is important. Because we have the idea that in order to compose or make [poetry] something [must already be] holding steady, i.e. there is a perceiving unit at work which then somehow notates and converts via language, rhythm, prosody, if you are a poet. The idea is that something is going to hold in perpetuity. But I guess, for me, the most sobering and humbling and empowering and humiliating and vulnerable response to that is yes and absolutely not. [The act of writing or perceiving] is what holds but can only hold as it is constantly and necessarily shifting and moving and mobilizing itself, rather than calling more steadiness to itself, or it wills a certain kind of stability. So it’s this kind of completely tenuous, incomprehensible, undecidable space between whatever it might mean to “make something” — which is one ear toward the steady, the “upright” — and absolutely understanding that making can only happen literally because one has to be able to be upside down or attentive in ways that you did not know you knew how to be.
Victor: Conquered by something else.
Mi Kim: Yes.
Victor: By your very “position” —
Mi Kim: Yes. Or if not that, then one understands that to be “taken,” “conquered” is also a certain kind of response. It is the presentation again and again of something you don’t already have an experience of.
• 13 April 2013 • 5 notes
