Our soma (σώμα) in the world
“I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles” Sinead Gleeson
“… Assume there is goodness all around / unless there is not / and even then, be the goodness” By Sinead Gleeson for her daughter
In today’s post I’ll be writing about Constellations: Reflections From Life, Sinéad Gleeson\s memoir. It is a story about a life in a body as it goes through sickness and multiple surgeries, loss, health, motherhood and creativity. The book is comprised of powerful and sometimes raw essays that delve into illness, disability, love, grief, the politics of the body, health and religion, oppression, art and music. It is a reflection on womanhood in Ireland and the importance of artistic expression. Some themes were eerily familiar. During my own journey I have written about similar themes as I have attempted to record and create new meaning of my own life journey, and the more memoirs / essays one reads, particularly those written by women, the more one notices a pattern of recurring pains, themes and references. Below I have tried to provide glimpses into Gleeson’s reflections, chapter by chapter and theme and by theme.
In the first chapter Blue Hills and Chalk Bones Gleeson begins by noting that we rarely stop to think about our bodies. I think to some extent many of us take our bodies for granted, living in our heads most of the time, forgetting to appreciate our body and its miraculously complex functions. We tend to pass our bodies in silence until something goes wrong.
Gleeson writes: “The body is an afterthought. We don’t stop to think of how the heart beats its steady rhythm; or watch our metatarsals fan out with every step. Unless it’s involved in pleasure or pain, we pay this moving mass of vessel, blood and bone no mind. The lungs inflate, muscles contract, and there is no reason to assume they won’t keep on doing so. Until one day, something changes: a corporeal blip. The body – its presence, its weight – is both an unignorable entity and routinely taken for granted. I started paying particular attention to mine in the months after turning thirteen. When a pain, persistent and new, began to slow me down. My body was sending panicked signals, but I could not figure out what they meant. The synovial fluid in my left hip began to evaporate like rain. The bones ground together, literally turning to dust…… Hospital stays became frequent, and I missed the first three months of school four years in a row.”
Gleeson takes us back to her early life. She weaves in the cultural and we get glimpses of the sociopolitical and religious reality of Ireland, which might not be that dissimilar to our own experience. Memoirs have the potential through the personal story not only to reveal the local sociopolitical, but also, the universal.
She writes: “… there is a story in Genesis of Jacob wrestling with a stranger, thought to be an angel. When the angel couldn’t defeat him, he touched Jacob’s hip, dislocating it, leaving him with a limp for life. …. I was a pious child. Weekly Mass, regular trips to confession, and above all a fervent and deeply held belief in God, heaven and all the saints. This was reinforced by heavy indoctrination at school……And elsewhere, she says: “Doctors replaced clergy as healers, but medicine and religion remain heavily intertwined in Ireland.”
This memoir is the story of a woman’s body as it fails her, as it recuperates, as it gives her joy, and as it births new life. Through the stories of the body we learn about its broader container and we glimpse at the bigger picture. She reflects on the shame, the sense of difference and alienation, the feelings of less than and of disempowerment, of the power imbalances in medical contexts and of kindness.
“What I felt more than anything in those years was overwhelming embarrassment. Ashamed of my bones and my scars and the clunking way I walked. I wanted to make myself smaller, to minimise the space I took up. I read that shrews and weasels can shrink their own bones to survive.”
“My grandmother used to work at another local pool, and convinced her old colleagues to let me swim there when it was closed. Alone, with the underwater lights, its tiled bowl felt eerie. All that blue, and quiet, the water shadows on the ceiling. I scared myself by imagining what lay beneath. Each week, I swam faster and got stronger. My body became an inverse: strong arms, while the weak left leg refused to move or build muscle. It withered, and is still thinner than the right. My lack of symmetry endures.”
“Paddy the bus driver told me I never look him in the eye when I speak as he lifted the wheelchair from the bus. I refused to get into it. Missing the first three months of term in a new school had left me in a hinterland. Fast friendships had already formed, and although I was trying to catch up, I was separate; an island away from my classmates. Now, eight or nine of them, boys and girls, stood silently regarding the chair, while I sank into my own stubbornness. …. The boys grabbed the chair and began to whizz up and down the road outside the hotel. They pulled wheelies, spun each other around, and it had a domino effect: everyone wanted a go. Our sense of others is frequently wrong. We second guess, and make assumptions. The chair became a comic prop, without making me the butt of the joke. There in the French sunlight, we laughed, and I loved them for their kindness.”
“The doctor– patient relationship had its own imbalances. I have never forgotten the sense of powerlessness in the face of instruction: lie down, bend forward, walk for me. I have felt it when counting backwards from ten under the stark lights of an operating theatre. Or when skin is sliced cleanly through. You are in someone else’s hands. Steady, competent hands, hopefully – but the patient is never in charge. The kingdom of the sick is not a democracy. And every orthopaedic doctor who examined me during those years was male…… Our hospital body, all rivers of scars; the day-to-day form that we present to the world; the sacrosanct one we show to lovers – we create our own matryoshka bodies, and try to keep one that is just for us. But which one do we keep – the biggest or smallest?”
“The cast covered two thirds of my body, from chest bone to toe-tips, and required two people to turn me over. …… It held fast for twenty years, until two pregnancies sixteen months apart were like a bomb going off in my bones….. After ten weeks encased in my hip spica (I’m my own alabaster statue) a doctor attempts to remove it with a cast saw. Blade meets skin and I try not to imagine what’s happening beneath the plaster. The pain feels like a scald, of heat spreading. I explain this to the orthopaedic doctor – this man I’ve never met – and he does that thing I’m used to male doctors doing: he tells me I’m overreacting. A rotating blade is slicing into my flesh, but I need to calm down. The room fills up with screaming. Me, as ventriloquist throwing pain across the room. When my mother starts to cry, he demands that she leave the room. The blade cuts and cuts, with its own rhythm, and this man urges it on, like a horse in a race. Fifteen minutes later, I plead with him to stop and he finally gives up, visibly annoyed. In an operating theatre the next day, the plaster is cut away like a sculptor’s mould. Under the cast, there is old skin and new scars now: open, jagged lacerations, running down each leg like the broken line of a border. Around them, my limbs look tanned, but this is just weeks of dead skin layers. The leg swells that night and a nurse applies a compression bandage. Every time it’s removed, it pulls at the new scabs and the bleeding starts again.”
There’s a chapter with the title Hair. Gleeson writes:
”On a whim, months later, I tell my mother I want to cut off my hair. The hairdresser, my aunt, lives in a terraced house and cuts hair – only women’s, never men’s – in her kitchen. She is always immaculately made up, lip-glossed and kohl-eyed, with elaborate ash highlights. In less than an hour, mousy chunks are scattered on her lino. I regret it instantly, and for years beg my mother to let me grow it back. She refuses, saying that short hair is ‘easier to manage’……. On a trip to a family wedding in Liverpool, a man mistakes me for a boy and calls me son. I cry for hours……”
“Each strand [of hair] contains everything that’s ever been in our bloodstream. Are memories there too, lurking between medulla and cuticle, embedded in each lock? Not dead, but ‘terminal’. Protein and protean. Like blood, it’s difficult to tell male and female hair apart, but it is women who have been historically judged for their crinicultural choices…… there are other possibilities that come with the loss of hair. As a teenager, I learned that there was power in absence…..My first head-shaving was aged sixteen, but there have been many occasions since…….. The last time was in 2003. From motivation to method, I had little control over this particular haircut. This was the only time I removed the hair myself and the incentive was practical, not aesthetic. There was a diagnosis – a rare and aggressive type of leukaemia.”
“During chemotherapy, a patient ‘loses’ their hair….. It falls out, and many health insurance companies cover the cost of a wig. …. I have no recollection of this night. Or of other nights wearing it; of having long hair, or a simulacrum of it, falling down my back for the first time since childhood. I know that our brains selectively archive trauma, in illness or grief, but why was the wig censored?”
And there’s a chapter on blood, seen from different angles_ personal experiences that trigger visceral reactions in the reader and commentary and gratitude for the kindness of strangers: “Blood donation is that rare and uncomplicated incidence of a selfless good deed”
“The shedding of blood has historically been seen as a male act of heroism: from rite-of-passage fistfights, to contact sports and combat. Infrequent, random events seen as standalone milestones; stories to tell once the pain – and enough time – has passed. Female bleeding is more mundane, more frequent, more get-on-with-it, despite its existence being the reason that every single life begins.”
“A blood disorder is a whole body issue. Unanchored, migrant – blood is its own diaspora….. Marshalled by the heart to locales of trauma, panic and arousal….. It circles unceasingly within us, even in sleep, or paralysis and comatose states.”
“In my late twenties, six months to the day since I married my husband, I found myself in an ambulance on a cold, glass-clear January morning, a paramedic holding me upright because it was too painful to sit, or lie on a stretcher. Later, in the hum and chaos of the hospital, I was told that something of concern lurked in my blood. I hadn’t suspected there was anything wrong until I found I could not bear any weight on my right leg. I guessed at a pulled muscle; and tried elevation and tight bandages. The throb and sear of it continued, and a doctor dispatched me to casualty, where I waited on a trolley in a tiny room beside two pensioners. That I was stationary for seventy-two hours now seems terrifying given that the eventual diagnosis was deep vein thrombosis (DVT). The blood in my calf vein had slowed and coagulated into a blocked knot…… The clot in my calf expanded and broke off, scaling my thigh like a rogue climber, making its way up to my lung…..”
“I’ve had blood transfusions for various surgeries, including the hip replacement. Having a previous lung clot meant taking a pass on full anaesthetic. During the five-hour surgery I was sedated, but mid-operation, I woke up. Not fully, but enough to know I was awake, and to wonder what was wrong with the spinal block, or if this was some sort of chemical trip, to feel a shove in the area where a surgeon was trying to insert my new joint….”
Poignant narratives on pregnancy, hospitals, trauma and love:
“This pregnancy starts to resemble drowning. My lungs are bad sails, refusing to fill with air. They slump, not billow. Doctors conclude that the problem might be heart damage, caused by the earlier chemotherapy, but after tests – more wires and screens and measurements – nothing conclusive is found. The only evidence of this pregnancy is the weekly photos of my growing stomach that my husband takes. The thriving bump at odds with my disintegrating hip.”
“I look at her face. The tiny pulse in her neck and the soft seams of her eyelids, shut tight against the world……. Her small belly can only handle minuscule volumes and although her intake is consistent, in her first days, she nearly chokes. Before we are allowed to go home, a nurse insists that all babies must demonstrate that they can eat a certain amount. I explain her incremental appetite, that she was born early and in ICU, as the nurse forces the silicone teat of a bottle into her mouth. The comma of her body uncurls, her skin darkens and she goes limp. The nurse whips her away, holds her upside down. With my daughter hanging bat-like, she thumps her back, shouting commands. I watch in horror, stuck to a chair. The sound of those slaps, her body turning purple, the feeling that after all we’ve both gone through for her to be here, she is slipping away. Sore, panicked, afraid to move, I am watching someone else’s life, not mine at all. It takes a minute – too many seconds – before she cries and I grab her back from the nurse….. And a fear, familiar as night, creeps in. That the implicit trust we put in the medical world has been misplaced. My hospital experiences have been good and bad, and childbirth is no different.…… The memory of her suspended by one leg has never left me. My skin chills even now. It is imperative to replace this image with something else. Thetis holding Achilles above the River Styx. Maybe this act, this first encounter with trauma, has made her immortal, inviolable.”
“The air conditioning goes unnoticed by me for weeks. Until it appears like tinnitus, and the rattle becomes an anti-earworm. Nurses and cleaners tell me they can’t hear it, but it thunders through every night. The tell-tale heart beneath the floorboards, the woman inside the yellow wallpaper….. Do you hear that? The haematologist addresses the student doctors ringed around my bed, a white-coated picket fence. A clot sounds like a creaky door, he says. When they leave, I listen for its hinges.”
“Hospitals are not unlike galleries. Interactive spaces; a large-scale installation of sound and colour, evoking emotion and working on the senses. The art on the walls here mixes modernity and old votives. State-funded canvases alongside Sacred Hearts and religious statues. On the longest corridor, the hospital’s spine, black paintings hang at clockwork intervals. Abstract, inked, their form and meaning unclear.”
“After her daughter spent time in an orthopaedic hospital in the 1940s, British artist Barbara Hepworth met the surgeon Norman Capener. Hepworth was better known as a sculptor, but Capener invited her to sketch and draw operations over a two-year period. In ink, chalk and pencil, Hepworth captured not the gore and invasiveness, but the work of fixing the body, of surgical intervention….”
The writer weaves in narratives about many artists, artists I was familiar with and others that I could potentially explore and get acquainted with, artists who transform their physical experience into art or become the art process and product themselves. Artists, who through the recording of their experience have attempted to retain some control and agency and to assert that their body belongs to them, resisting invisibility and objectification and becoming a mere statistic.. Perhaps an artistic representation of our suffering is part of recovery and of asserting that we are more than our ailments. Gleeson also recalls the moment in hospital when the decision to write this book arose as a means of expression and continued existence.
“I gravitated towards writers and painters. People who told the stories of their illness; who transformed their damaged bodies into art…… My admiration of Kahlo has always been about the work; the transference of her life onto canvas, the self-reflection, the engagement with the taboos of illness and the female body…”
“I have no memory of this but my mother told me years later that I looked into her face and said, ‘I’m not going to die. I’m going to write a book.’ To commit to writing, or art, is to commit to living. A self-imposed deadline as a means of continued existence. It has taken me a long time to write that book and here I am, so very far from that awful night. Art is about interpreting our own experience. Upon entering hospitals, or haematology wards, our identity changes. We move from artist or parent or sibling to patient, one of the sick. We hand over the liquid in our veins to have it microscoped and pipetted. Beneš [Barton Beneš (1942– 2012)] used his art as tenancy. If hospital tubes could house his blood, so could his own work. Beneš knew that if his blood had to be anywhere other than in his veins, he might as well use it as an aesthetic agenda; a declaration of possession.”
“And it is all right. When there is a day that is pain free, or the sun shines, or my curious children ask about the lines on my skin. I explain my good luck, grateful that things were not worse. I am an accumulation of all of those sleepless nights and hospital days; of waiting for appointments and wishing I didn’t have to keep them; of the raw keel of boredom and self-consciousness illness is. Without those experiences, I would not be a person who picks up those shards and attempts to reshape them on the page. If I had been spared the complicated bones, I would be someone else entirely. Another self, a different map.”
The book like life is a tapestry of interwoven threads of pain, of endurance, of living, of gratitude, of love, and of art and creativity. In reading it one feels the writer’s resilience and courage, not only to have faced so much physical pain herself, but also, to have written a daring book. And one is also left with wonder and appreciation of our bodies, which we often pass in silence, semi-oblivious to their complexity and generosity even amidst pain, brokenness and suffering.