-scribes-
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[Part I of this meditation can be found here] (POST-)PANDEMIC MELANCHOLIA II Chronic Illness, or How to Survive Asthma Wheezing is a sound echoing in the lung chambers, resounding the raucous blockages of long-term disease. It is a noise circulating and bumping into el choque of the air tunnels in the lungs. The sound is a distortion of breath, my breath. Inhala, exhala. Tremors, constrictions, discordance. Our gaspiness is ordinary for we are the asthmatic body-with-fucked-up-organs. I become too self-aware of my diaphragm, how I open the lungs and disturb the gut, pushing against a full belly. I inhale and the dirty winds struggle to find its way into the air sack, expanding my ribcage. I listen to the condition, to the ugly struggle of the vital organ. I exhale and the reverberations prompt me into a horrible music of illness. I cough lightly, and suck in and let out air once more in a fit. Wheezing is a sound that terrorizes my body, a signal to alert me and feed on my fears. As a child I became part of a new machine. The machine was the colloquial name for the nebulizer that kept me alive. My medicine made my bones weak, my body fragile, my existence into chronic illness and stunted growth. I breathed against the plastic of my mask, sweaty, fragrant, and cloudy. The medicine for my lungs a repulsive taste mixed with a sweetness on my tongue, the liquid lingering on my top lip. My facial expressions constantly changing, as I hold onto time and time and time for it to end. Asthmatic time as breathing time. The red marks of the mask imprinted on my baby skin, my adolescent flesh, my youthful face, a reminder of the machine impressed on my memory. My lungs became an organ-machine coupled with the technology investing in my future breath. So, when the inflammation threatened me, I could not do anything but be coupled to the medicine-machine. I, the asthmatic-machine. I find it difficult to name my disabled body, again and again, searching for truth in my condition. It is a sensitive body. I have no words to think about the chronic illness I carry. My lung as organ has become the object of enchantment. The numerous inhalers and disks that I have inhaled stunt me, morph me into a body in pain, make me cry. How I struggle to make sense of the air I breath. As I write to make sense of my disabled body, a body I struggle to identify as disabled as much as a diabetic person might struggle in the medical institutions to be recognized as disabled, I realize disability to muddled in appearances—for what is a chronic and uncurable disease if not below the surface? If I am not bound to a machine, I am an abled body. It is as if the portable machine of my purple plastic disk, Advair (fluticasone propionate and salmeterol inhalation powder), was not the machine bound to my body to prevent me from flare ups or asthma attacks. As an asthmatic, the discus contraption called Advair is both steroid and bronchodilator, meaning I take a drug to relax my inflamed lungs to breath “correctly” in my everyday life. With all asthmatics, we experience degrees to our disease. As I sign up for appointments for new asthma medication and vaccines for the flu and covid-19, I am given a sheet to understand my life-long condition: “Asthma is a lung condition that causes wheezing, coughing, shortness of breath and/or chest tightness. It is caused by inflammation (swelling) of the lining of the airways in your lungs.” “If you have asthma, the airways in your lungs are always somewhat inflamed, even when you do not have any symptoms. When your airways are exposed to irritants or allergens, the airways become more swollen and begin to make excessive mucus. The muscles in the walls of the airways begin to contract. These reactions cause the airway openings to become smaller, making it harder for air to move in and out. Wheezing is the sound of air moving through the narrowed air passages. The extra mucus in the airways causes coughing.” “Asthma is treatable but not curable.” Born in the post-industrial ruins of South Gate, environmental racism and catastrophe looming in the winds—there is no speculation on how I was genetically vulnerable to this disease. My father, a first generation Mexican American, was born in these conditions and has suffered with asthma his entire life—still till this day he takes a hit from Albuterol. It is the material conditions of my history that awakens in me the critical perspective in confronting a post-pandemic fantasy. There is nothing to rejoice when millions of people living in the United States are dying from infection. In South Gate, life goes on. The working class and the poor struggling in the degradation of their lives. In the name of freedom, we are free to die. I feel the sickness in my body, a remnant of covid-19, buzzing in my brain, hiding in the shadows of my lungs. I am terrified of the consequences of our social desires to abandon masks. The vaccine a dimension to our health, not the equivalent of full protection. Surviving asthma is and has become surviving the destruction and realization of the pandemic condition, accelerated by the reactionary state apparatus. I fear for this future. I am afraid despite the joy of hugging others again. How do we risk our lives and sacrifice our health for the presence of the other? Wheezing is a sound in the winds of life and death. I live on borrowed time dependent on steroidal futures. Year 1: The Blow-Up You overlook the fact that your self-image and history (autohistoria) are not carved in stone but drawn on sand and subject to the winds. —Gloria E. Anzaldúa I thought I knew the world. I witnessed a glimpse of a future where we might have taken care of each other. I felt the love and friendship of those around me, close and far. I held onto the picture of my reality as it was torn apart, holding the pieces in my hands, as tender canvas ripped from its fibers. I have self-witnessed my own process of sadness as an enduring and residual form of emotion in my body with no end in sight. I survived. Year 2: Coatlicue State You look around, hoping some person or thing will alleviate the pain. —Gloria E. Anzaldúa As we experimented going back to work, the depression set in. I found myself stagnant. Unable to read, unwilling to write. I was helpless. I looked to new addictions. I didn’t have it in me to take my studies so seriously nor my teaching with all my ganas. I went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on with not once feeling like I was ready to enter the world again. I hoped for touch, for smell, for the sounds of a university campus—but it did nothing. I felt anxious and tired. I was exhausted in days with socializing. I needed rest, to burrow in my bed, and doom scroll social media. I found solace in video games, TV shows, and movies. I consumed film and media as if it would save me. And in my moments of joy, I found pessimism. In times of optimism, I was a realist. I was in my own way. Year 3: Coyolxauhqui You shed your former bodymind and its outworn story like a snake its skin. —Gloria E. Anzaldúa I desired a picture. Something to smell. A thing to taste. The image to imagine color, density, and texture. In the arms of a lover, to witness together. This picture, a portrait of my existence. I set it on fire, and I start again from the ashes of burned image. For a long time, I wondered of this fire, its act, its ritual. From its metaphor (and real animation) I became interested in “excess” as productive force, or unproductive force. How working from ashes of the portrait was using new raw materials of transformed matter for a re-configuration of the self. In the struggle toward a new reality, to stitch together another picture, I thought not of the self but of a collective image of care. What does it mean for friends to share the stories of excess released from the anus? What does it mean for friends to share the stories of excrement, shit, wretched bowel movements? What does it mean for friends to share the stories of filth exuding from the body? I have collective stories of defecation that go far back to 2017, where chiapaneco cheese destroys the gut and forces a motion of excess to leave the body in a rush. I know the loud, vicious noises of taking a shit in small apartments—the moans, the rasping, the breath. The text message that alerts me to someone’s bad day shitting on the toilet tells me a story of capitalism. It tells me a story of care. In its true capaciousness, these stories are reciprocity of waste-giving life. Often, we speak to the good, the bad, the ugly, and the forgettable in our bowel movements. How we speak of our guts, intestines, and rectum reveals the care taken to go beyond embarrassment and to be attentive to one’s wellbeing and comfort. When I share my story of food it consequently leads me to the embryonic feces free from my body. How I hate shitting on university campuses or unknown locations. And the friends might share how they fight for their lives on the toilet, struggling to push out a beast. When I struggled with constipation as a young person, stretching the anus from backed-up shit, the tear of the anus was always a concern. For hemorrhoids was a serious fear, as was the constant shitting enabled by bad food. This might just be our poetics of bodily waste. The care friends generate in a verbal or textual conversation about fecal matter and its release from our bodies as a natural process is a labor of love without judgement. This labor re-constructs the brokenness of the singular reality from its shattered remains to alert the mind and emotions that I have a body and it is not an autonomous system, but it exists in a web of life. This alerting to the body is the other(s) care in taking the broken pieces of numbness back into a body re-constituting a potential self for sense of togetherness. Three years into the pandemic, the collective storytelling of “dropping a masa” has become for me a reminder that I am not alone, and that my reality is one constructed with others too. Suspended Damage, Disabled Life The mutation and re-circulation of the virus that haunts us in the fantasy of a post-pandemic life is the reality being faced by a multitude of people, bodies, and experiences in varying scales—thus, it is an appearance of life hiding away in the shadows the afflictions of death. How does one grieve the end of the world? How does one grieve death forgotten in the rumblings of memory? How do we grieve each other, in the style of the shift we are unable to name but have experienced in the last three years? How do we grieve in the world of catastrophe? I ask these questions with no desire for an answer. I ask them so that we may continue our journeys thinking of them, feeling them in our hearts, realizing the weight they may carry. Or they are not the “correct” questions, the questions that will facilitate us getting well. I ask these questions with an urgency. The post-pandemic, if we are to recognize it as such, is a form of residual effects. It is a term that does not signify an end, but the opening of possibility that might mean denial of covid-19 existing or the enduring assaults of the virus menacing psychological and embodied safety. The pessimist reveals the telos of Earth as a future planet deprived in darkness or rubble, for the Sun becoming supernova scattering its cosmic energies across the universe is a force of destruction in the birth of new matter. The universe, the galaxies, the erratic energies of the cosmos; these are the grounds of which we endure, in which I locate my anxieties. And beyond it, I feel in my body a world anxious of neither this spectacle nor the mundaneness of the everyday, ordinary living and dying. I feel an anxiety of knowing Freud’s death-drive to be closer to us than a whisper or esoteric claim on our collective psyche. The motion of dark energy, dark matter, the spirit of consciousness, is a motion zig-zagging out, in, up, down, around, over, beyond. Perhaps, even, in my assumption, motion is not the question. Earth is our phenomenon that we as an intelligent species with an ego have attempted in time and space and experience to name, map, and reckon with it. Speech, writing, practice—development. Relation, dialectic, motion—transformation. I have come to no conclusions in the study of our existence, but have only generated more questions, more curiosity without a desire for the mastery or domination of such knowledge—for this was the Western impulse. Perhaps the history of our present is a reckoning with a contradiction of heart. The pandemic has suspended the potentiality of a good life for a damaged existence. Its ubiquitous diffusion has meant the immediate disaster for disabled slow life and the certainty of provoking the prospect of disability in the bodies of survivors who will experience what is known as Long Covid. How does one or a people contend with this in the U.S. when we no longer take our precaution? I would gesture to think that our experience of melancholia has led to an explosion of joy—thus the death-drive to feel the length of society as the nature of who we are. Our re-exposure for this new normal has meant sustaining the proliferation of the virus looming among us. How are we to grieve in the devastation of our lives undone and concealed? I dream not of harmony, but of being well. white mountain rabbitThis avatar, or nom de plume, that emerges from the abyss, conjured by a mystical desire for a decolonial line of force. He emerges when play, creativity, and joy are flowing, overflowing, interrupting, attaching, and interacting with powerviolence, grindcore, or anarcho-punk as the textuality of noisy music, sometimes with jazz, indie, and crossover thrash metal. With radical imagination, insurgent dreams, Zapatista praxis, rasquache materialisms, or heretical nomadism, white mountain rabbit hops around building ideas knowing that they eventually break down: this is the life of a decolonizing writing machine. Comments are closed.
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November 2022
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