Lucia Perillo - I've Heard the Vultures Singing - Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature

The machine is about the size of a tuna can. Before it was implanted, the surgeon showed me how it looked: gleaming and pseudoliquidly silver, like my high-school track team’s stopwatch. Its top side is flattened, which creates a point on either side of that flat spot where the metal feels to be just one cell-layer away from breaking through my skin. The surgeon whom even Jim calls Doctor Dreamboat (tall, handsome, flies plane, etc.) made a pocket under my skin and slipped the can into it like a large item zipped into a small coin purse, so that now it rests just forward of the wingbone on my right hip. A three inch scar runs above it, and because the incision did not close properly there is a dry purple lozenge of scar tissue at the center of the slice, where the incision puckers in, just above the place where the device’s arc is flattened.

When I volunteer to show off the machine, men in particular usually turn down the opportunity, though it’s a party trick in which I take some glee — if the body has to be defiled, one might as well spread the discomfort around a little. Only after the operation was I struck by the lightning bolt of sexual implications, having changed my frontal view forever. But this is how time iterates itself for everyone, I know, I know, by hacking us to bits — the breast removed, the kidney taken. This is the storyboard of the modern body. Or we are remodeled with added bits, with titanium under our skin or inside our arteries.

The pump and its scar fit exactly in the palm of my hand, with my thumb resting on the flattened spot. When I am trying to give an erotic purpose to my nakedness and do not have an appropriate piece of drapery, I leave my hand there like Napoleon with his wrist curled into a pocket.

Even though the disappearance of one’s young body is a tired lament, it is especially galling to me not only because of how I once worshipped at the temple of physical fitness, but also because of the extremity of my body’s being sacked. When I asked Jim the other day how he could stand making love to such a freak, he said: “That’s what eyelids are for.” (Of course, the word freak is somewhat confrontational, somewhat melodramatic in its assessment of the body, and in slang usage it also refers to a person who is willing to defy sexual convention. Which is another form of aggrandizement, this defiant persona used to fill a vacuum caused by the body’s losses.)

So we keep our eyes shut, though actually the dropped lid was always my preference — I never wanted to see the face that makes the cry that poet Louise Glück calls “the low, humiliating / premise of union.” Before her, Charles Baudelaire elaborated in prose, and at greater length, on the subject:

Do you hear those sighs, those groans, those cries, those rattles in the throat? Who has not uttered them, who has not irresistibly extorted them? These unfocused sleepwalker’s eyes, these limbs whose muscles spring up and stiffen as if attached to a galvanic battery: the wildest effects of drunkenness, delirium and opium will certainly not give you such horrible and curious examples. And the human face, which Ovid thought was created to reflect the stars: there it is, bereft of speech, with an expression of wild ferocity, or slackening in a kind of death. For certainly I think it would be sacrilege to apply the word ecstasy to this sort of decomposition.

The face is embarrassing and also frightening: the body at its moment of utmost concentration, as if it were in the midst of committing a violent crime. But then also, oddly, the face looks almost bored, as if it is about to drop off into sleep, as if it were a decoy face we concoct to camouflage the oddity of what is going on. This is probably why female praying mantises chew off their mates’ heads: so that they never have to see that face again.

Especially maddening is the knowledge that we are being looked at just as we are looking: in order to proceed, I have to make myself forget this, and then I soldier on alone. But when I close my eyes and conjure images, the merest whisper of disease will kill the romantic urge; so my real body must be banished, forgotten, in a fudging of the facts. To do the work of my delusion I call on what I call “the dirigibles,” zeppelins made of skin, my surrogate inflatables — (that archetypal taut flesh) — from the planet of their silk bedding. From the journals of Anaïs Nin with their fringed lampshades and brocade pillows. From the cranial basement’s leather chambers with its pneumatic apparatus.

When I was a kid, the inflatables were treasure, buried under my father’s mattress where I’d find not just Playboy but also higher-toned men’s magazines like Argosy , which featured hoity-toity nudes photographed through colored filters. I remember bringing a copy to the storeroom of Mr. Phillips’s fourth-grade class, where we girls — and only girls, as the boys did not seem courageous enough to invite — scrutinized the torsos that ultimately yielded none of their secrets despite the intensity of our interrogation. The secret of buttocks’ rolling countryside and the nipple’s artsy silhouette.

In my imagination, these surrogates are like elephant seals — the male-to-female ratio among their population is low — and possibly this is because of how they entered my childhood brain, as a girlish preoccupation. The bodies called like sirens, and the quest for them took me to my father’s nightstand and through his drawers, then to tree houses and crawl spaces crisscrossed by sunlight coming through the lattice that was supposed to beautify the creepy darkness underneath the porch, the place where cats gave up the terrifying screams that accompanied their love. I am brought back to this childhood territory by the better side of the dirigibles’ nature. Common earthly life was present in them (in many respects a body is just a body), but its form had been so transformed that it seemed they must have swallowed a potion, like Mr. Hyde with all his majestic lawlessness.

But their ability to work spells over us also can seem, at least in adulthood, like a degrading trick — the stack of porno magazines left beside the toilet at the fertility clinic, so insultingly unscientific. Now the flesh arrives daily, whenever I dial in to check my vapor-mail, and it is like Mr. Hyde’s, if he had set up a drive-thru franchise for his fizzy beverage. Relentlessly, this flesh scuttles after novel permutations, having exhausted the more conventional ones. But there are no novel permutations anymore, and I think of a line from John Berryman’s Dream Songs : “We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.”

This is the primitive world we’ve re-created with our electronic wizardry. But way before humans arrived at any sophisticated ideas of commerce, sex in most animals made use of the economies of scale — lots of reproduction, lots of offspring produced with the slim hope that one might make it to adulthood. One of the most cherished books I own is my ninety-nine-cent 1976 copy of Haig H. Najarian’s Sex Lives of Animals Without Backbones , replete with line drawings of protozoa blending and splitting. It contains also a sketch of the various copulating positions of squid. The breaching of various species of ovum, gametes moving like the harlequins of Cirque du Soleil. There is a drawing of hermaphroditic snails who pile orgiastically one on the other, penetrating whatever orifice is most proximate.

Professor Najarian doesn’t come right out and state it, but his book is a testimony to the primordial birthright of our desires. We cannot help them, so we are innocents. He dedicates the volume to his mother.

With the combined forces of money and evolution and electronics at work, it seemed bound to happen that naked skin would exhaust itself. This exhaustion sends me back to my pathetic self, the self I have banished — and of course as soon as the mind banishes the actual body, then the actual body insists on barging into the Jacuzzi in the Hawaiian isles where one was attempting to build a modern-day diorama modeled after, say, something from a painting by Paul Gauguin.