Compacted notes

In which Bhanu "excavated a space for [this] body" and I stuck my toe in.

Bhanu asked me to speak about “compacted”, I think, because of something I said to her recently in a late night email regarding some piece of language in her forthcoming Humanimal. The word I was referring to in terms of “the compacted” looks like a neologism, when in fact it is an old word originating in another tongue. And yet, I think it has fallen into sufficient disuse as to now be a kind of neologism. The inferred definition (consider definition as that which gives something shape by exacting form out of larger masses of shape), the look and feel of the word, yields a sense of the compressed over time, of that which is overlaid rapidly and lightly like in such structures as wings, and also that which is simultaneously exposed. The technical definition of this word and the biological system it enacts in its sentence sits at an angle to the actual context of the sentence, the words that make images there. It is, technically, a bit out of joint with the sentence which, instead of making it an unsuitable word choice—I think that was the what we were discussing in the email) rather creates the entire quality of movement of the sentence and the sentence’s image—not so much syntactically, but organically. This one word and this sentence are so important because it a gestative moment in the text supporting the central figure—or the central half-figure of a hybrid subject—in the book.

It was easy to speak of this word choice with Bhanu and use my words to refer to it—compacted, and by which I also meant impacted—but outside of that I froze. It is easy for me to plug my words and idea-clusters into B’s work like graphing live tissue from one organism into another. But outside of my body and on their own, these word-tissues shut down, disconnected from a larger living system.

And the body itself is what shuts me down entirely. A fear of the reductive, as in—there is nothing to “my ideas” of compacted/impacted because their mystery can be explained away by my direct lived experience. That is, a notion of the “compacted” comes from the definition that I have taken on in the physiological. Here are the parts of speech.

Age2, my toe swells up and turns red. I begin to limp. A doctor dismisses it an tells my mother I am looking for attention (How does a body look for attention aside from ego? This is question I want to explore later.) But I stop—walking, crawling, crouching, running, climbing, and sticking my toes in my mouth as toddler s are prone to do. I grow skinnier around all the extremities and the joints that move them puff up, become inflamed. I am host to an autonomic form of childhood arthritis. Or, I am host to my self, which happens to want to much on the cartilage cells. When the cartilage is eaten away, the body runs of scar tissue, knees ankles, hip and neck use it to pivot on—but scar tissue is less thick. It is corrugated and grows irregularly. It can be worn down by persistent movement over time into something smooth, but ultimately, functions as a fixative. It is the body preserving itself in the form left to it. And like with a fossil, all the best information is stored inside of hard structures in which one living part retains its definition by being replaced by another kind of organic matter.
As a post-diagnosis child, I found new ways to move. I was carried—across backyards and parking lots, in high school and college—upstairs and through large dark indoor spaces. In SF, I am carried by a machine and so, one could say I have gained my independence. But at the cost of the social-construction of look away kind of etiquette (i.e. if it rolls and talks, it must be robot). My body, in an urban environment among strangers, ceases to engage others in movement (i.e. please move out of the curb cut so I can pass does not compute). But it does make me aware of other bodies disconnected from the overall body system.

And so for me, there is:

Compacted as the many layers within a structure maintaining their integrity, while also being inherently movable, portable
--to be physically moved by another person
--have this experience often enough and also infrequently enough that is jarring and familiar

Impacted as in one thing lodged or stuck with force into another.
--Not necessarily a foreign agent but a part of the body (including the mind) that becomes disjointed or skewed in such a fashion that it impedes itself but also articulates itself
-- as in to be tightly packed together, also—a contract or agreement

A body which functions as a question mark, curvature and uncertainty motored by a small wheel beneath
with symmetries being shoved inward

What has remained most mobile in me was thought and language. So much so that it becomes over run by the amount of logistical slack it has to take up i.e. how much time will it take me to cross this room or put on these socks. And if I sit in this chair, can I get out of it again? But while thought was bounded by physical experience—if not in content than at the cellular level, the way a plant or animal’s growth is tempered by its domain, language remains unbounded. There is always the potential to harness more and new energy from someone else’s language and that explains why I always prefer reading to writing. There is nothing much I want to express. I want mostly, intrinsically, in terms of what my body wants, to experience different options for movement and skimming left and right along a page made sensate by someone else is my biggest opportunity. Plot and action are such great facilitators of movement. Scenarios are limiting. Momentum comes out of variations of pressure, release, valves in the push pull of receiving sensation from other texts.

What derails me from my own language, as in compacted/impacted is not that it is too personal or autobiographical, but only the fear that it is. That in exploring it, I will be run into the obvious gutters of pleasure and pain

To write about pain or pleasure, so much emotional language is impacted in those concepts that they actually repel any real sensory communication. They impede the formation of words/language/books that can explore the liminality of sensation, of sensations still unnamed but intrinsic, not to humanness, but sentience I would say. Of the body, self and other bodies as interwoven and interchangeable subjects and objects that make any real movements through a substratum of sludgy impulse-habit, a snail’s progress, head-foot first, through a moment just before and just after a process of mineralization begins, a moment before and after bone mass that supports and connects organisms in a reader and across readers.

I am thinking toward a kind of sensation fieldwork in which the grid of circumstances and subjectivities around sensation are documented. To truly write inside one’s own sensate bubble going away from abstraction and invention and toward distillation and intensification which does not mean that writing on sensation would be expository or representational or solipsistic in the normal sense. Such writing would require the formation of a new language, just as experimental writing always does, but it would also mean a pivoting off of and a touching back to old tropes, fragments of and instances of familiar language because those instances of language, when used in the a certain context, are valuable for the kind of sensory charge that they have accrued over time.

This seems to me to be a way into writing about social work and activism and identity and gender and ability. To write about it through the body because one’s body is the site for all fieldwork. The body is not personal or owned. It is a sensate lens.

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The disabled body is the site of its own ghosting in that one is compacted/compounded in status and ability by ones limitations ands needs and all the personal, social or political work that goes into those concerns. Also compounded and compacted by the highly visible nature of one’s apparent efforts—the dragging leg will be read as effort, agony, or a blank in order to make it interpretable or appropriate. Meanwhile, the disabled body is cut of from the realization of its form’s function in the world “compact” comes from a pervasive physiological experience, my own. It also comes from the charge of its opposite, as in, my experience of being thus compacted there s my experience of being loose, floating, dis-integrated not so much in terms of my place in the world (because my mind; my views, my ideas, my social or familial connections can make that mesh) but in terms of my body’s relation to the world. Disability is less like being an Other in relation to a group but being an Other in relation to Self, to internalized group ability.

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I think of the other, more functional version of the word disable in our society. It means to stop the code, to break the chain of computation, to disable and allow for your own programming, a different kind of conveyance than what has been set up….To write new code at the most autonomic level and allow for greater of syncing across physical histories.

Compacted/impacted is also being completely contained while witnessing that container as one in a set of shifting exteriors to other containers.