plague letters and the animal body
I was scrolling back through some blog entries from last summer and noted the difference in not only everyone else's attitude toward the pandemic (which is still happening) but also my own. I am perhaps not as careful as I should be...but I understand now how easy it is to become complacent. Well, maybe not initially when there was still hope we could stem it. But maybe less now. The fall and winter was rough one, and I emerged on the other side not necessarily ambivalent about covid, but feeling loose around the edges about it when I had been so vigilant before. Of course, the price was what may have been the virus after New Year's outings, and then maybe again more recently (this time ferried to me at home by J.) We've reached the stage where unless you mask all the time, you are likely going to come across it. Even me, who barely interacts with anyone. Since I was isolating whatever it was, and no one is taking stats anymore, I just assumed maybe it was and did not venture out to get tested (which would actually possibly expose more people than me just waiting it out at home.) I wasn't particularly sick either time in a scary way, just an annoying one--both sinus and then some coughing later, the usual pattern of my illnesses that befall me 1-2 times per year. The second one may have bought a low-grade fever, but I didn't have a thermometer at home to check for sure. Whatever it was, it moved out on over the water fairly swiftly.
I've been thinking of complacency as I edited the plague letter poems last month, written in the thick of things, later than bloom, but still when Delta and Omicron were running rampant. The idea of the body as it moved through the world or did not move through the world. As someone who often has felt at various points like all head/no real body, it was strange to be beholden to things like contagion and biology. Surely, I was not a creature that, like an animal, faced extinction merely by the sort of virus in past years I would have just worked through and brushed aside as sniffles or maybe the flu, but never so bad as all that. Only a few things tripped me up. When I had mono in the mid-aughts, or a very persistent cough that afflicted me in January of 2019 (so much so, I later wondered if covid had been with us longer than determined because that was brutal). Even that I was lucky to come down with the feverish part over a weekend and was back at work on Monday hacking at my desk.
The letters are, in this case, epistolaries written to the self as abody, as corporal creature. But also to others--investors, senators, petty thieves. The bodies our bodies interact with in real space and virtual ones. As poets, I suspect I am not the only one who feels like she lives in her head more than her actual body. I dress the body sure, and love clothes but they feel separate somehow. I feed the body and sometimes the body wants things--tacos, ice cream, sweet red cherries. Coffee or chocolate. Sometimes it wants sex or touch or just to throw itself into water and swim to an opposite shore. I am aware of the body sometimes more than others. Like how different my muscles feel, good or bad, after workouts or movement. How it feels when I've gone too long without either. The animal body, which seems like some stranger to the creative and mental body we inhabit that barely notices the animal until, say, you've been busy writing and forgotten to eat lunch and your stomach lets you know.
Having been at a tattoo studio twice in the past month, I've thought of this while lying there emblazing the body with magnolias and butterflies, which I suppose, puts you in the body for the duration of the session, much in the way I imagine massage or reiki or acupuncture does. Strange and somewhat a stranger still this body, even still after nearly 50 years of living in it and moving it around in the world.
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