The boils seem to be different after the acupuncture They’ve moved over to my back, but perhaps in a good way. As if there is a final battle being prepared, a showdown on the main drag.
Its funny how I became aware that the human back always has bumps and warfare going on, for most people, I’d say. Warts and zits and itchiness of its own peculiar sort. But I gradually became aware of that a couple days ago after the acupuncture sesh with Meg, who had seemed to take special interest in me once I said I was coming in for boils, and showed her the ones on my left wrist. When she put the needles in, she capped it off with one in the top of my head that had a pricking feeling, that I can still feel even now up there on the top of my egg, (almost a desire for the needle) as if a balloon were popping, or a volcano opening up. I whispered, in the dark and fragrant room, with 4 or 5 others leaning back somberly in some kind of day of the dead trance, blankets shrouding them, I whispered “Wow, that was something!” And Meg immediately responded as she was fading back into the room, “Yea, that one is always a clincher.”
When I awoke and left the room, she was at the front desk and she looked at me expectantly and seemed eager to discuss my situation. I was still a bit dazed and too floaty from the elevated nap experience to trust my intentions, so all I could manage was a humble thank you as I walked by, but later I wished I had stopped to ask questions. Such as when are you on duty again, so I can schedule for that? I’m not really used to people actually wanting to heal me, -that healing focus is a balm in itself. Its almost as if she wanted to continue the spell upon me by lassoing it onto me as I left the space, and how grateful I am for that! The boils themselves have a distinct flavor for me of being an entity in the world that wants to erase me, spot by spot, or eat me away. I am the meal, don’t you see? Who can see that?
Its very disconcerting to be unable to distinguish wether they are coming from outside or from inside. The new ones are itchy in a new way, the old ones are sore and the itch is deeper within or so it seems. The embodiment itself changes and pushes and heaves against my consciousness and of course, the itching feeling grabs at my intentions and yells at me, “Scratch me!!” or rather “Scraaaaaaaaaaatch meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee….” The feeling is one long vowel with only the richness and inescapable quality one could get from putting every vowel in there: aaaaaeeeeeiiieeoooooouououououeaoueoueouaaaa… Not the kind of pain for aspirin or ibuprofen or any opiate but insistent on some kind of interaction with my finger nails as if piercing the location with sharpness would actually help and not indeed, spread the ill feeling and the I’m-being-eaten-away sensation to ever more square inches of my externality itself. So, in essence I’m surrounded at the most closest quarters, somewhere between the cool air of outsideness and the internal world of boiling emotional desire and misunderstanding, with the feeling of wanting to eviscerate myself point by point. Am I the painful need, or is it someone else? Out out, damn spot!
Interesting that it doesn’t show to the rest of the world and no one can tell by looking. It is such a skin thing. Its as connected to a disease called racism as any embodiment of illness could be. I feel certain that the plague of boils is a direct manifestation 2 years later of my incident at ___ College, which indeed focused my attention, and everyone at the school’s (I felt) on how the color of our skin sets us apart, or does it? This seemed to be the knife edge’s question hanging like a guillotine over me, that I had never looked upon before in that exact way (some inexact way), after three incidents involving H.W. (incidentally, my own exact same initials!) and some other faculty of ____ College.
“White fragility” seemed to be the point and the fact that it is so producible so nearby at any moment, that it could be created, pulled out of me, fear of the other, being speechless, being frozen and unable to speak, unable to love, to feel, just SEEING black skin creating a frozen person, an uptight white Anglo-Saxon older male, caught up in his unchangeableness old-dog Pavlovian ways. (Was I really like this before? Yes sometimes, sometimes… sometimes…) There’s something deeply existential about racism as if the me that lives is actually standing next to the me that sees, and not only is frozen but cannot, will not say the right thing, but probably will say the wrong thing, the insincere thing, the hurtful thing, the othering thing, the way too late thing.
And the distance between us, the gap, the break, yawns wider into a chasm down which I am falling, always falling. When you look at me, don’t you see that I am falling down a hole, a break in time itself that ironically is also black and depthless? My own empty interior world. The entire culture of Western Christian “civilization” is empty and blank and cannot save me, my ancestors are not there with me, no one is here with me, wherever I am falling. -though perhaps Jesus waits, my mind tells me as my father reads his morning scripture. I am not human anymore, I am a cliched scream to which no one is listening.
And then, now, very colorless black itself fades as I fall, and the light filters slowly to into a burning white of light that does not help at all but instead fries me like a vampire in the morning, I’m a white slug under a rotting log, I am rot itself in my guts, I complete the cycle of regeneration for this old oak tree on the earth, and again, I am in the depths of skinness, more than just a container or covering, I am the decaying covering itself. Once it becomes false, the skin is infinitely deep and never ending in time. I’ll never escape this plague of boils, after 9 months now and a regime of antibiotics lasting nearly 3 weeks, I still have them.
Though, seemingly, they are smaller now, I am using 2 or 3 times a day, the ointment and the salve. And now that the boils have taken to my back - I can’t see them so I’m not sure, but the familiar itch is there - will anything be different? Check back in, in a couple or three, and find out!
Last little itchy note: how terrible and plain that it only feels good when I itch them… or I suppose when I really turn my attention elsewhere, tho how fleeting that is. My dad told me he had boils as a kid and they cured it by tying his hands to the bedposts while he slept.
No comments:
Post a Comment