Trauma / Rochester

The Imperfect Enjoyment

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.
With arms,legs,lips close clinging to embrace,
She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.
Her nimble tongue, Love's lesser lightening, played
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should prepare to throw
The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.
My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,
Hangs hovering o'er her balmy brinks of bliss.
But whilst her busy hand would guide that part
Which should convey my soul up to her heart,
In liquid raptures I dissolve all o'er,
Melt into sperm and, and spend at every pore.
A touch from any part of her had done't:
Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt.

Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise,
And from her body wipes the clammy joys,
When, with a thousand kisses wandering o'er
My panting bosom, "Is there then no more?"
She cries. "All this to love and rapture's due;
Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?"

But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,
To show my wished obedience vainly strive:
I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
And rage at last confirms me impotent.
Ev'n her fair hand, which might bid heat return
To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,
Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more
Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.
Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,
A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.
This dart of love, whose piercing point, oft tried,
With virgin blood ten thousand maids have dyed;
Which nature still directed with such art
That it through every cunt reached every heart -
Stiffly resolved, 'twould carelessly invade
Woman or man, nor aught its fury stayed:
Where'er it pierced, a cunt it found or made -
Now languid lies in this unhappy hour,
Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower.

Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,
False to my passion, fatal to my fame,
Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove
So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?
What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore
Didst thou e'er fail in all thy life before?
When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,
With what officious haste dost thou obey!
Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets
Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets,
But if his king or country claim his aid,
The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head;
Ev'n so thy brutal valour is displayed,
Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,
But when great Love the onset does command,
Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar'st not stand.
Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most,
Through all the town a common fucking-post,
On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt
As hogs do rub themselves on gates and grunt,
May'st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,
Or in consuming weepings waste away;
May strangury and stone thy days attend;
May'st thou ne'er piss, who did refuse to spend
When all my joys did on false thee depend.
And may ten thousand abler pricks agree
To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

*

I think some of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester's bawdy verses are packed full of trauma, anxiety and tragedy. A lot of the time, sure, he is the epitome of hideous misogynist privation, ploughing through whores with a zeal that borders on the psychotic, almost as if he was suffused to bursting point with all the phallic, rakish, libertine spirit of the Court and of the age, the cool satiric voice somehow not prepared to contain all the disgust and hatred without the side-effects of reflection, whimsy and sadness rearing their ugly heads. This poem I think is really fascinating, and tragic - a feisty rake prematurely ejaculates and is furious at his bastard cock for failing him at the very moment "great Love" (not just regular whoring) demands it performs its task - and it is very much a performance within a performance, the theatre of ruptured desire in a satirical verse on contemporary base lustiness. I'm reminded of the section in Brecht's Mann = Mann where Bloody Five shoots his own cock off. Anybody dig?

x

Never remember / Anything longer than its own duration

I could not, without instant death
Gaze into a crate at a drained face
Of some person once familiar to me from the water's surface
Into which a man looked who, so I realise, died.
Therefore I am unable to open this crate
Because this fear is in the both of me, for perhaps
I am the Both which has just come about
On our earth's transformable top surface:
A chopped-off batlike thing hanging
Betwixt rubber trees and hut, a night bird
A thing that would gladly be cheerful.
One man equals no man. Some one has to call him.
Therefore
I would gladly have looked into this chest
As the heart clings to its parents.

Given a forest, which would still be there
If no one walked through it, and the very man
Who walked through where a forest once was:
How do they recognise one another?
When he sees his own footprints among the reeds
With water spurting into them, does that puddle mean anything to him?
What is your opinion?

By what sign does Galy Gay know himself
To be Galy Gay?
Suppose his arm was cut off
And he found it in the chink of a wall
Would Galy Gay's eye know Galy Gay's arm
And Galy Gay's foot cry out: This is the one!?
Therefore I am not looking into this chest.
Moreover in my opinion the difference
Between yes and no is not all that great.
And if Galy Gay were not Galy Gay
Then he would be the drinking son of some mother who
Would be some other man's mother if she
Were not his, and thus would anyway drink.
And would have been produced in March, not in September
Unless instead of March he had
Been produced only in September of this year, or already
In September the year before
Which represents that one small year's difference
That turns one man into another man.
And I, the one I and the other I
Are used and accordingly usable.
And since I never gazed at that elephant
I shall close an eye to what concerns myself
And shed what is not likeable about me and thereby
Be pleasant.

Noise of moving trains

...

from Brecht's Mann = Mann, after the newly "reassembled" Galy Gay performs the mock burial of an empty coffin supposedly bearing his own remains after he is (mock) executed by his fellow soldiers.

San Bartolomeo

LEAR

Er steigt herab vom Thron. Er dünkt sich groß.
Sein eigenes Denkmal, so hat er sich aufgestellt
Steht auf der Erde, die sich nackt und bodenlos
Dreht unter dem fleischernen Denkmal, das fällt.

Regen wäscht ihn. Da merkt er: das ist kein Spaß.
Er brüllt, gestreckt auf Leichen. Kein Sarg bleibt leer.
Überm Gewäsch des Narren (Fleisch wird Aas)
Gelächter der Lokomotiven. Er hört es nicht mehr.

(Heiner Müller, LEAR)

title / title / title

title

http://www.ddg.art.pl/kantor/obraz-20.html

>>Selfportrait - I have to tell you something, 1988<<
~Taduesz Kantor

I have something to tell you /
perhaps, for many people, these reflections
on the question of what it means to be
a person, __________________________ happen,
or occur, not in mind, in minds, but
in an imaginative engagement with
physical actions, living, in specifically
lit minutae, or openly, under aspects of
light, where the individual comes into
an apprehension of meaningful selfhood
by imagining the body / figure occupied /
who has these thoughts / is on film / or is
briefly enframed, aber multi-dimensionally
in a filmic, filmed mode and operation whose
duration is concurrent with time remembered
through apprehensions of other persons,
in other
contexts altogether / in films or

''it is only by the trial of work that space and time
are presented to me, always together, time as the
condition, and space as the object, of any action;
the law of work prescribes with regard to my action,
that it has duration, with regard to the world, that
it is extended.''
(excerpt from: Simone Weil: Oeuvres completes I, p.145)

title

across the world.
a heart. an encourage.
that delusive desire
in one place given to
those whose keener
placatory sense is
smelt. ours. and the
rest than projected to
comes from this satiate
freshening broke a stitch
slight. mouthed wretched
tears sweet smelling into
a piece of cloth.
language impassable

title

title, a clown poem descant
trigonometre would take none
by the mouth sat an open st
ate where point on painting
close owned null far actions
palate, stable conditions of
impact, the dances lit here
her straits pattina election
measured breath, sonority
on graze, bell pepper borderer
stomach pent in lids awaken
premodelling calls outwards
down
stop

Lethal marks in the Iliad

"The potentially destructive force of writing is emphasised in a passage of the Iliad (6.170-175) where a writing tablet instructs the recipient to kill the bearer: here the letters are described strikingly as "lethal marks (semata)" (Bellamy 1988)."

From John-Paul Wilson, "Literacy", in K.A. Raaflab & H. Van Wees (eds.) A Companion to Archaic Greece.

Erotic iambi of Archilochus (fragments) & Encounter in a meadow (extract)

Erotic fragments

I replied:
"Madam, you mustn't be at all afraid
of ill repute. As for...
I'll deal with it. Don't you be angry with me.
You really think I'm such a wretch as that?
You must have seen me as a low-class churl,
not what I am and what my forebears were.
I know the art of loving him that loves me,
hating my hater and foulmouthing him
with an ant's venom. So I'm quite sincere.
This citadel that you are walking in
was never sacked by any man, but now
your spear has conquered it, yours in the glory:
so be its queen, enjoy dominion.
I daresay quite a few will envy you"

Their nurse brought them along, with scented hair
and bosoms, such that even an old man
would have desired them. Oh Glaucus...

She had a myrtle-sprig and a beautiful rose
that she was playing with; her hair hung down
shading her shoulders and her upper back.

...right through the myrtle-spray.

They lay down in the shadow of the wall.

There is this wall that runs all round the yard.

Every man rolled back his skin...

...his tender horn...

...wet mound of Venus...

Up and down she bounced
like a kingfisher flapping on a jutting rock.

Like a Thracian or Phrygian drinking beer through
a tube
she sucked, stooped down, engaged too from
behind.

And his dong
...flooded over like a Prienian
stall-fed donkey's...

...foam all round her mouth...

They stooped and spurted off
all their accumulated wantonness.

...through the tube into the vessel.

The virgin priestesses
with cudgels drove you away from the door.

Oh fortunate man, to have
such daughters to his name!

...a growth between the thighs...

I won't use surgery,
I know another sovereign remedy
for a growth of this description.

...and severed the tendons of his middle parts.

But the sinews of his wick are ruptured...

I wish I had as sure a chance of fingering
Neoboule -
the workman falling to his flask - and pressing
tum to tummy
and thighs to thighs...
as sure as I know how to start the lovely round
of singing
lord Dionysus' dithyramb when the wine has
blitzed my brains in.

Encounter in a Meadow (extract)

But please, my dear, don't grudge it if I go
under the arch, though the gates;
I'll dock at the grass borders,

be sure of that. Now as for Neoboule,
someone else have her. Dear me,
she's past ripe, twice your age;

her girlhood's flower has shed its petals, lost
all the enchantment it had.
She never got enough;

she's proved her [...]'s measure, crazy woman.
Keep her away - for the crows!
I pray no friend of mine

would have me marry somebody like her
and give all the neighbours a laugh.
No, you're the one I want.

You're not untrustworthy, you're not two-faced,
but she's so precipitate, she
makes friends with crowds of men.

I don't want babies blind and premature,
like the proverbial bitch,
from showing too much haste".

Trans. M.L. West. Archilochus, one of the first lyric poets and ranked in antiquity alongside Homer and Hesiod, wrote such scandalous and scatological verses concerning one Lycambes and his daughter Neoboule it's believed they both committed suicide.

"Photographs of torture victims are often so brutal and blatant that the viewer looks away. It's a reflex. Anonymous x-ray images can be viewed more objectively. The images make the viewer think about the issue of torture, but in a bearable way. That is my aim."

Professor Hermann Vogel has been collecting x-rays of torture injuries for almost 30 years. The project started organically; Vogel had just qualified as a professor of clinical radiology in Germany, and was travelling to developing countries to study the physiological effects of tropical diseases. "I was going through x-rays, and I began to notice that you have to pay special attention to Friday night. In the developing world, that is pay day and if you are paid, you drink, and then violence occurs."

Vogel realised the potential x-rays had for charting patterns of violence and uses of force worldwide. "At first I thought I should create an atlas about the radiography of war. I started to visit regions which had been or were at war, but as the project went on I knew it would be incomplete if I didn't deal with torture, too."

Obtaining x-rays proved tricky. "Victims of torture don't normally get treatment, or are kept in custody until the injuries are not apparent any more. The military regime in Chile dealt with evidence of torture by tying their dead victims to pieces of railway track and throwing them into the sea.

"I had to find other sources. I went to the rehabilitation centres of torture victims in Europe and Turkey, studied international x-ray archives and was sent material by colleagues who knew of my work. I was actually invited to Chad by a new regime which had just staged a coup. We were allowed to use two local hospitals to x-ray and find evidence of torture that had occurred under the previous regime."

For Vogel, the x-rays have a unique power. "X-rays reveal what the naked eye cannot see. A forensic investigation will reveal fractures, foreign objects and needles, but x-rays provide plausibility. Does the story match the pattern of injury? Does the age of the injury correlate with the time-span of when the torture occurred? Does the torture method correspond with the region, organisation, military or militia responsible?"

They also have a practical purpose, and Vogel is campaigning for the EU to accept the use of x-ray for non-medical reasons. "In some countries, x-rays can be used as evidence in court and a few of my x-rays have helped prove that torture has occurred. They are also increasingly being considered as part of the asylum process."

From the Guardian website, accessible here http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/31/x-rays-of-torture-victims. The image shown is of a knee-capping from Northern Ireland - the black dots are pellets.

King Pelican (Extract)

-the character of Edward Lear addressing the character of Johnny

Only recently have I come to understand something that Lord 

Westbury said to me. We were talking on one occasion, I made a 

foolish little joke about ducks, a silly pun — this is it, you see, exactly, 

a pun is no more or less than an irreconcilable tension and really we 

were talking at some metaphorical remove about the American Civil 

War. 

 

 He said to me: “Lear, I abominate the forcible introduction of 

ridiculous images, calculated to distract the mind from what it is 

contemplating.” 

 

 

LEAR laughs, though his distress is evident. 

 

 

 At the time I thought he was being an old stuffed buzzard, but now, 

God damn it to hell, you come around here and ask if I want your 

company and what am I to say? 

Everything I can possibly ever say to you, including this, and this, and 

this, and this, I write it all on your mind. Do you see? I speak, or I 

gesture, or I whistle a tune or blow my nose, and whatever it is, if 

you’re here to see it, it’s something I’m doing to you, that gets inside 

you. I get inside you and scribble on the inside of your brain. My silly 

little cartoon men with broken arms and jutting beards. I forcibly 

introduce images into your contemplation. I have only to lift a finger 

and my finger’s inside you. Yes?

It used to be my heart’s delight to see you in the afternoons, and talk 

about my travels, and sound off about painting, and blow words at 

you and enjoy your pleasure. But ever since I killed those innocent 

animals — those sixty-three creatures that need never have existed, 

and I brought them into the world simply for the pleasure of 

destroying them... Like some blind stumbling God. You see? I killed 

them for my sport... 

 

 And now I’m all but paralysed by my capacity for violence, which 

exceeds all else. I may love you, Johnny. But what a thing to say to 

someone! Surely I haven’t the right to commit such a horribly 

disruptive act? It’s like shouting ‘fire!’ in a theatre! It’s too 

irresponsible.

-Chris Goode

Eroticism (extract)

The flesh in sacrifice and in love

The external violence of the sacrifice reveals the internal violence of the creature, seen as a loss of blood and ejaculations. The blood and the organs brimful of life were not what modern anatomy would see; the feeling of the men of old can only be recaptured by an inner experience, not by science. We may presume that they saw the fullness of the blood-swollen organs, the impersonal fullness of life itself. The individual discontinuous existence of the animal was succeeded in its death by the organic continuity of life drawn into the common life of the beholders by the sacrificial feast. There remains something slightly bestial about consuming this meat in an atmosphere of surging carnal life and the silence of death. Now the only meat we eat is prepared for the purpose, inanimate, removed from the organic seething of life where it made its first appearance. The sacrifice links the act of eating with the truth of life revealed in death.

It is the common business of sacrifice to bring life and death into harmony, to give death the upsurge of life, life the momentousness and the vertigo of death opening on to the unknown. Here life is mingled with death, but simultaneously death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite. Nowadays sacrifice is outside the field of our experience and imagination must do duty for the real thing. But even if sacrifice and its religious meaning escape us we cannot fail to know the reactions concerned with certain elements in the spectacle, namely nausea. We have to imagine a sacrifice as something beyond nausea. But if the divine transfiguration does not take place, taken separately the different aspects may finally induce a feeling of nausea. Cattle being slaughtered or cut up often makes people sick today, but there is nothing in the dishes served at tables to remind them of this. So one might say of contemporary experience that it inverts pious conduct and sacrifice.

This inversion is meaningful if we now consider the similarity between the act of love and the sacrifice. Both reveal the flesh. Sacrifice replaces the ordered life of the animal with a blind convulsion of its organs. So also with the erotic convulsion; it gives free rein to extravagant organs whose blind activity goes on beyond the considered will of the lovers. Their considered will is followed by the animal activity of these swollen organs. They are animated by a violence outside the control of reason, swollen to bursting point and suddenly the heart rejoices to yield to the breaking of the storm. The urges of the flesh pass all bounds in the absence of controlling will. Flesh is the extravagance within us set up against the law of decency. Flesh is the born enemy of people haunted by Christian taboos, bus if as I believe an indefinite and general taboo does exist, opposed to sexual liberty in ways depending on the time and the place, the flesh signifies a return to this threatening freedom.

- Georges Bataille, Eroticism [Marion Boyars, 2006, trans. Mary Dalwood], pp. 91-92.

JUSTINE: Who’s this then? 

 

 Give you a clue. We’ve seen him before. Last 

week. 

 

 She mimes Jesus on the cross with his tongue 

sticking out. 

 

 Actually he’s not normally portrayed with his 

tongue sticking out. 

 

 All right, well, it’s Christ, and... St 

Thomas, and... 

 

 This picture is just over four hundred years 

old, it’s Caravaggio, ‘The Incredulity of St 

Thomas’. 

 

 Can I assume you know the story? Doubting 

Thomas? Who didn’t believe that Jesus had 

actually risen from the dead, right, and then 

Jesus turns up and invites Thomas to, like, 

check out the wounds, guy. And Thomas... 

 

 You see I think this is a painter looking into 

an abyss. Two abysses, in fact. I don’t know 

what the plural is of abyss. I think it’s just 

a bigger abyss, isn’t it? 

 

 I mean there’s an abyss of sexuality here, of 

Caravaggio completely lost in this homoerotic 

moment, the finger disappearing into the 

wound, look, look at the face, look at Jesus’s 

face. He’s totally getting off on this. Isn’t 

he? Look at that voluptuous flap of skin. Look 

how he’s holding Thomas’s wrist. He needs this 

just as much as Thomas does. He has to hold 

Thomas steady because how would it feel to 

feel somebody flinch inside you? 

 

 So there’s this vertigo of blasphemy and 

homosexual desire and Caravaggio is utterly in 

thrall to both these forces and yet at the 

same time the real horror in this picture is 

what it tells us about painting. 

 

 Not just for Thomas but for Jesus as well, the 

proof of his resurrection is not in his 

appearance, it’s not in his image beaming down 

in front of people. There has to be this 

encounter with the body and that means getting

inside the body. You don’t trust the image. 

 

 The wound is a little local glimpse of the 

interior of the body. Its carnality, its 

complexity. It says this is not an apparition. 

This is not a rumour. This is blood and warmth 

and the erotic collapse of the distance 

between us. Only the body can do this. The 

image of the body cannot. The mere painted 

image of the body is, abysmally for 

Caravaggio, not sufficient to dispel doubt. 

 

 More than that. Only the wounded body can do 

this. Or the sexual body. As the wound heals 

the body becomes more like its image again, 

more superficial. The wound has to be open for 

the doubt of the body, the incredulity, to be 

alleviated. So healing becomes a kind of 

forgetfulness. A kind of amnesia. The only 

ways to confront the body faithfully are to 

fuck it, or to fuck it up. 

 

 How can you not respond to that? 

 

-From Speed Death of the Radiant Child 

                                      by Chris Goode

Proud Flesh (extract)

Proud Flesh: "Overgrown flesh arising from excessive granulation upon, or around the edges of, a healing wound." (SOED)


She assimilates all comparison into her like
no-one can seize for a limb; & the milky
way of the colonies has to turn far short

& seep in the nimbus of blue & deteriorating
photo-cells, that starve for the limited
blush of time a comparison would carry

What choice remains for us then but amputate
the nimbus, the diseased limb, how else
our sugars were to imagine or to repine

after the battered torso we'd long conceived
recombinant; pig-ignorant we fly to work
to fail before her, fleet & sound of limb

incorporating music while her ears are waxed
against a suitor's leaning rock we cleave
from clouds of so like her, the fontanel

we could neither hear nor watch nor mutilate
Fatigued by this we dabble in chance
over the foil, scraping free the pounce

disguising ranks of symbols of such aridness
they seem lush, choking earth with eager
compacts for renewal, grist for gangrene:

the readier we are the more we seek the same
atonement, suitable when the shorthand
of the admonished things, these our pranks

frequent her like witnesses, o intense inane
they jostle, even the stars are like stops
that shearing a torso out of fierce love

colonize its phantom limbs to prove her body


- John Wilkinson, Proud Flesh [Salt, 2005] pp. 76-77

Symposium (extract)

The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word ‘Androgynous’ is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: ‘Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.’ He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them,—being the sections of entire men or women,—and clung to that.

Part of Aristophanes' encomium to love in Plato's Symposium.
Translated by Benjamin Jowett and accessible in its entirety here:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/plato/p71sy/

WAR BOY (extract)

                      I'm watching Finn and Critter climb the steps into

the bus and this thought suddenly hits me and I mean upside

the head.

        They go inside each other's bodies.

        And it does seem kinda weird. It makes me wonder if I

really am prejudiced deep down. Then I remember how I felt

when I first found out my mom and dad did that and talk about

weird.

         It's impossible to stand still very long on the side walk be-

cause the crowd is like two rivers converging and going sud-

denly into rapids on the pathway through the trees. There's a

current that carries you along and we're already moving with it

when the bus pulls away but I can't help turning back to scan

the windows in case Finn and Critter switched sides. They 

didn't but the blonde did and now she's sitting where I was

and looking right at me or actually a little over my head which

means she's looking at Jonnyboy.

        Who's looking noplace but straight ahead and charging for-

ward with one hand locked around my wrist and the other

clenched above his head and I can't see his lips but I know

what they're saying which is vintage Johnny Rotten.

        As in Follow Me!

        Where the trees stop and the open field starts the sudden

heat from the people and the sun is like an airlock into another

world. Everyone slows down and there's room to move apart a

little and head for the different ticket kiosks. There's portable

chain-link fencing between them topped with blue and yellow

helium balloons instead of barbed wire and most of the people

taking tickets are Asian types in robes the color of those

crushed velvet ropes you see outside restaurants with valet

parking. We're at one end of a huge long grassy space too

narrow to really be an oval that slopes uphill toward a giant

stage built on scaffolding maybe three stories high. Bright col-

ored boxy tents with streamers and flags around the edges

make it seem like the midway of a carnival.

        Before the semis hauling the rides get there that is. Before 

the drivers discover there's no room for any rides with all the 

people. Who knows how many but all of Monterey has like

25,000 total and there must be twice that here. With more

than half of them boyz with their shirts off or else taking them

off right now the way Jonnyboy is because the field is com-

pletely surrounded by trees that shut down the natural San

Francisco air-conditioning from water on three sides and since

it's the middle of June the sun is twelve o'clock high in the sky

even though it's more like three. The film of sweat on Jonny-

boy's chest just emphasizes how built he is in a natural way

from surfing and sk8boarding and the letters of the Team Pain

tattoo on his left upper arm are distorted from climbing up the 

swell of his biceps and it almost shames me into keeping my

own shirt on but I just figure what the hey and tie mine around 

my waist too. 

- Kief Hillsbery, War Boy [Picador, 2000] pp. 41-42 

Operating Room Technique

PREOPERATIVE PREPARATION

OF THE PATIENT

Regardless of the physical setting in which an invasive or

surgical procedure will be performed, each patient should 

be adequately assessed and prepared so that the impact

and potential risks of the surgical intervention are 

minimized. This involves both physical and emotional 

preparation. Preoperative caregivers should establish a

baseline for the patient's preoperative condition so that

changes that occur during the perioperative/perianasthe-

sia care period can be easily recognized.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 

For centuries before the proliferation of operating rooms

(ORs) in hospitals, surgical procedures were performed

on battlefields, in barber chairs, and on kitchen tables.

Hospitals focused on the care of the poor, crippled,

chronically ill, and insane until the eighteenth and nine-

teenth centuries. Even then, and on into the early twen-

tieth century, many surgeons operated in their offices and

in the homes of their patients. Nurses were dispatched to 

the homes to prepare a suitable room and to prepare the

patient for the surgeon.

     From the late nineteenth century, the achievements in

surgery as a medical discipline can be attributed to an

increase in the understanding of physiology, the introduc-

tion of safe anesthetics and methods of blood transfusion,

the development of antimicrobials, and the management

of the patient before, during, and after invasive procedures.

As surgeons moved into the OR arenas of hospitals, nurses

became responsible for physically preparing patients for

surgical procedures. In the early 1900s, patients were

admitted 4 or 5 days before the procedure; by the late

1930s, this time was reduced to 24 hours or less.

      From around 1920, nursing leaders advocated the

importance of both the physiologic and psychologic

preparation of surgical patients. The individual needs of

patients were recognized but were not emphasized in

nursing education until the 1940s. During the 1950s

patient teaching became a limited part of preoperative

preparation as surgeons recognized the value of early

ambulation. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that

nursing research studies validated a link between pre-

operative preparation and postoperative recovery. The

risk of postoperative physiologic complications can be 

reduced by teaching deep breathing, coughing, and leg 

exercises and by preparing the patient for early ambula-

tion. Attention to the patient's preoperative psychosocial

and spiritual needs also has important consequences for

the management of post operative pain and the promo-

tion of desired outcomes. Studies showed that the patients

who recieved structured preoperative teaching had a

smoother postoperative recovery. During those decades,

OR nurses were encouraged to visit patients preopera-

tively and prepare them psychologically for the surgical

experience by helping alleviate their fears and anxieties.

PREOPERATIVE PREPARATION OF

ALL PATIENTS

Specific activities such as the preoperative history and

physical examination are completed and documented

before the patient arrives in the OR. This process can be

performed before admission to the hospital or ambula-

tory care facility, other activities are performed when the

patient arrives. The preoperative physical preparation is 

designed to help all patients overcome the stresses of

anesthesia, pain, fluid and blood loss, immobilization,

and tissue trauma. Preparation often begins before the 

patient's hospital admission with the institution of nutri-

tional or drug therapy. An attempt is made to bring all 

patients to their best possible physical status before

surgery. Appropriate consultations, such as cardiac

workup, are sought when necessary.

                                              

- Berry and Kohn's operating room technique, pp. 364, 365

A SHORTENED SET (first movement)

All the connectives of right recall

have grown askew. I know

a child could have lived, that

my body was cut. This cut

my memory half-sealed but glued

the edges together awry.

The skin is distorted, the scar-tissue

does damage, the accounts are wrong.

And this is called 'the healing process'.

Now nothing's aligned properly.

It's a barbarous zone. The bad sutures

thicken with loss and hope

brilliant, deliberate

shaking patients in an anteroom

refusing the years, ferocious to be called.

So I'll snip through the puckered skin

to where they tug for re-aligning. Now

steady me against inaccuracy, a lyric urge

to showing-off. The easy knife

is in my hand again. Protect me.

-Denise Riley, Stair Spirit [Equipage, 1992]

The steel workers’ proposal for the decommissioning of Beaubourg

Start into sleep sleep the truism ‘frigidaire’

the emu ‘today’ kiss kiss poor plastinated Scotus:

             which gosub homesick tight to the gut projection

             fail fails to convince. Mr Bojangles eats dog,

             tap shoes. Aghast at ‘The Dead Sea Experience’,

             the number of the beast you dialed has not been

work works like a dream go to work on an edge go

pet a hairy flipchart are you receiving

over. Shame is her swimsuit-round manifesto, lime

mint soap up the wretched ball queen perfidious

             sow / up for gonzo dog treat paddle-assed

             hokum still still selling in Japan see adipose

             four. That wrecking-ball trustafarian

             guinevere trapped in the afternoon concrete

prairie flip flip six second glimpse of Duran Duran,

or the chemical wad that blinds the part-time

poodle valet. Gin and alfalfa mousse it’s for washing the

car with, or maybe Heimlich Manoeuvre’s the

             name of a German porn director.

             Are we asleep yet? How does the honeycomb

             get in the hive? Now yellow round the tree

             and trumpets shall sound (novelty goddamn

door chime funniest thing) your sheet of interests

and accumulations and multiplex whatnot kitty kitty

tube sox my but the LAPD are so

vulgar. What do you point to? Evidence

             swig say vanilla essence burn up the hissy-fit

             carpool lane like grease and slash or

             lightning. Hands turn spin thrift uptake

             inhibition every one wants to be

childlike. Script says ‘cheep cheep’, mother says

never wear diamonds to the ob-gyn we say

stow it. We saw Fanny By Gaslight it’s a

band you freakazoid. Nothing ventured nothing

             earwax everyone stay stay calm the

             millipede in the salsa what’s he doing the

             backstroke slash-fic butterball spell spell

              license as in driver’s license

as in rammed to the hilt on cranberry meth

stroke scrotal bouillabaisse up your chimney howdy

pardners. Free’s free. Free as the tawny doodad.

Free as a kite in the reckoning up of critical

              influence using avoirdupois for the

              craic dude huffing a dream from the bag the

              milk came in and we have twenty-one

              dogs and they’re all called Arson damn we

stand in the park ‘n’ shout Arson Arson

twilight verdigris thriftstore parakeet underscore

Jim Beam doobie doo Whitney’s an oreo

whore. Dionne’s wig’s on funny honey look at the 

             sky ha made you look. Let’s kick it.

             Teenage girls always slit their wrists in the bath

             week in week out you can set your

             watch and Jesus comes like a gift in the

cereal. He’s a healthcare magnate. Sure you do. Sure

you do. Sure. It’s a matter of private conscience®.

Knife. Knife. What in the picture says knife. Where

you live that goes knife. Kissing his boyfriend’s eyelids

             knife. Pride in authority / grace in deferral

             knife. The climate deranged in Kyoto

             matinee knife. Knife by the way of

             leaves that fall and the boyfriend sleeping

barely near as adrenalin when the emergency comes.

How they will face their long-lost families, dearly.

- Chris Goode, No Son House [Barque, 2004] pp. 4-5

WOUND RESPONSE (1974)

"Of particular interest in the present context are
the observations made on patients whose middle
ear had been opened in such a way that a cotton
electrode soaked in normal saline solution could be
placed near the cochlea. A total of 20 surgically
operated ears were studied. Eleven patients heard
pure tones whose pitch corresponded to the frequency of the sinusoidal voltage applied to the

electrode. . . . One patient reported gustatory
sensations."

                                        

-Touch, Heat and Pain (1966), p. 11

                      

THE IDEAL STAR FIGHTER

                           l

Now a slight meniscus floats on the moral

      pigment of these times, producing

displacement of the body image, the politic

      albino. The faded bird droops in his

cage called fear and yet flight into

      his pectoral shed makes for comic

hysteria, visible hope converted to the

      switchboard of organic providence

at the tiny rate of say 0.25 per cent

      "for the earth as a whole". And why

go on reducing and failing like metal: the

      condition is man and the total crop yield

of fear, from the fixation of danger; in

      how we are gripped in the dark, the

flashes of where we are. It pays to be 

      simple, for screaming out, the eye

converts the news image to fear enzyme,

      we are immune to disbelief. "If there

is danger there ought to be fear", trans-

      location of the self to focal alert, "but

if fear is an evil why should there be

      danger?" The meniscus tilts the

water table, the stable end-product is dark

      motion, glints of terror the final inert

residue. Oriental human beings throw off

      their leafy canopies, expire; it is

the unpastured  sea hungering for calm.

                           ll

And so we hear daily of the backward

      glance at the planet, the reaction of

sentiment. Exhaust washes tidal flux 

      at the crust, the fierce acceleration

of mawkish regard. To be perceived with 

      such bounty! To put the ring-main of

fear into printed circuit, so that from the

      distant loop of the hate system the

whole object is lovable, delicious, ingested

      by heroic absorption! We should 

shrink from that lethal cupidity; moral

      stand-by is no substitute for 24-inch

reinforced concrete, for the blind certain 

      backlash. Yet how can we dream of

the hope to continue, how can the vectors

      of digression not swing into that curve

bounding the translocal, and slip over, so

      that the image of suffered love is

scaled off, shattered to a granulated pathos

      like the dotted pigments of cygnus?

                           lll

What more can be done. We walk

      in beauty down the street, we tread

the dust of our wasted fields. The

      photochemical dispatch is im-

minent, order-paper prepared. We

      cannot support that total of dis-

placed fear, we have already induced

      moral mutation of the species. The

permeated spectra of hated dominate

      all the wavebands, algal to hominid.

Do not take this as metaphor; thinking to

      finish the last half-pint of milk,

look at the plants, the entire dark dream outside.

- J.H.Prynne, Brass [Ferry, 1971] 

Welcome

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