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.
There is also the problem of the wheelchair, which must be banished from the diorama, whereupon the wheelchair retaliates by barging into the scene too. One wants to camouflage it with garlands, or weeds like the ones soldiers in Vietnam wore on their heads, but that would only make it more obvious. I’ve thought of asking Jim to remove it, but doing so would make my faintheartedness too blatant. Instead let me look at it steadily and say, Yes that is my wheelchair over there. Oh no, that is too tough, so I close my eyes and enter a darkness where it wreaks havoc nonetheless.
From the first I heard of it, I was eager to see Pedro Almodóvar’s movie Talk to Her, which builds its plot around the erotic potential in the afflicted body. The two female leads occupy slots far from the center of the spectrum of possible incapacitation — they’re in comas. And the story makes use of doubles, two couples, two healthy men and two comatose women. One has been in a car accident when the movie commences, and the other, a bullfighter, gets gored while we watch. But it is the sight of the inert body being handled that makes the viewer squirm, as the male nurse, Benigno, rubs it with emollients. He opens her legs like the handles of a pliers so that he can perform the offices of the washrag and the menstrual pad. Her total pliancy is a parody of the pornographic ideal, and we soon grow confused over whether we are seeing acts of charitable love, or courtship, or duty, or perversion.
In the movie the women are, in a strange way, perfected. One good (if predictable) joke — when Benigno voices his intention to marry his Alicia — is that they will get along better than most married couples. The bullfighter’s boyfriend, on the other hand, has a normal relation to his lover’s comatose body, which means he is estranged from it and helpless in its presence. Hence Benigno’s advice: talk to her.
Most of us tend to panic when confronted with the mystery of stricken flesh — we do not know how to fix it, and this is the cause of our estrangement and helplessness. There is also an iota of fear: of contagion, no matter how irrational, no matter how nontransmissible the sickness. As lovers and nurses, the men in the movie have a choice of only the perverse relationship or the inadequate one. This is a neat cinematic dichotomy, of course, about which we know one thing for sure: that the body’s languishing will somehow be resolved in two hours, whereupon we will once again step out into the true and scary world that has no such finite starts and ends.