The Empathy Exams (27 page)

She wrote a poem about that dog: “it was like he could smell the blood / in my mouth. Neither of us / could help it.” As if the violence was her destiny and also something ultimately shared, nothing that could be helped, the twisting of intimacy into scar. The dog was sensing a wound that was already there—a mouth full of blood—and was drawn to it; his harm released what was already latent. “He has been at my itching,” the poem goes, “and cleaned out the rot. Left me / mouthfull of love.”

Wound #2

A Google search for the phrase “I hate cutters” yields hundreds of results, most of them from informal chat boards:
I’m like wtf? why do they do it and they say they cant stop im like damm the balde isnt controlling u
… There’s even a facebook group called “I hate cutters”:
this is for people who hate those emo kids who show off there cuts and thinks it is fun to cut them selves.
Hating cutters crystallizes a broader disdain for pain that is understood as performed rather than legitimately felt. It’s usually cutters that are hated (wound dwellers!), rather than simply the act of cutting itself. People are dismissed, not just the verbs of what they’ve done. Apologists for cutting—
Look beyond the cuts and to the soul, then you can see whom we really are
—actually corroborate this sense of cutting as personality type rather than mere dysfunction. Cutting becomes part of identity, part of the self.

A Google search for the phrase “Stop hating on cutters” yields only one result, a posting on a message board called Things You Wish People Would Stop Hating On.
Seriously the least they need is some idiotic troll calling them emo for cutting/burning etc.
“Emo” being code for affect as performance: the sad show. People say cutters are just doing it for the attention, but why does “just” apply? A cry for attention is positioned as the ultimate crime, clutching or trivial—as if “attention” were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn’t wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human—and isn’t granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?

There’s an online quiz titled “Are you a real cutter or do you cut for fun?” full of statements to be agreed or disagreed with:
I don’t know what it really feels like inside when you have problems, I just love to be the center of attention.
Gradations grow finer inside the taboo: some cut from pain, others for show. Hating on cutters—or at least these cutter-performers—tries to draw a boundary between authentic and fabricated pain, as if we weren’t all some complicated mix of wounds we can’t let go of and wounds we can’t help; as if choice itself weren’t always some blend of character and agency. How much do we choose to feel anything? The answer, I think, is nothing satisfying—we do, and we don’t. But hating on cutters insists desperately upon our capacity for choice. People want to believe in self-improvement—it’s an American ethos, pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps—and here we have the equivalent of affective downward mobility: cutting as a failure to feel better, as deliberately going on a kind of sympathetic welfare—taking some shortcut to the street cred of pain without actually feeling it.

I used to cut. It embarrasses me to admit now because it feels less like a demonstration of some pain I’ve suffered and more like an admission that I’ve wanted to hurt. But I’m also irritated by my own embarrassment. There was nothing false about my cutting. It was what it was, neither horrifying nor productive. I felt like I wanted to cut my skin and my cutting was an expression of that desire. There is no lie in that, only a tautology and a question: what made me want to cut at all? Cutting was query and response at once. I cut because my unhappiness felt nebulous and elusive and I thought it could perhaps hold the shape of a line across my ankle. I cut because I was curious what it would feel like to cut. I cut because I needed very badly to ratify a shaky sense of self, and embodied unhappiness felt like an architectural plan.

I wish we lived in a world where no one wanted to cut. But I also wish that instead of disdaining cutting or the people who do it—or else shrugging it off,
just youthful angst
—we might direct our attention to the unmet needs beneath its appeal. Cutting is an attempt to speak and an attempt to learn. The ways we court bleeding or psychic pain—hurting ourselves with razors or hunger or sex—are also seductions of knowledge. Blood comes before the scar; hunger before the apple.
I hurt myself to feel
is the cutter’s cliché, but it’s also true. Bleeding is experiment and demonstration, excavation, interior turned out—and the scar remains as residue, pain turned to proof. I don’t think of cutting as romantic or articulate, but I do think it manifests yearning, a desire to testify, and it makes me wonder if we could come to a place where proof wasn’t necessary at all.

Wound #3

Recounting a low point in the course of her anorexia, Carolyn Knapp describes standing in a kitchen and taking off her shirt, on the pretext of changing outfits, so her mother could see her bones more clearly:

I wanted her to see how the bones in my chest and shoulders stuck out, and how skeletal my arms were, and I wanted the sight of this to tell her something I couldn’t have begun to communicate myself: something about pain … an amalgam of buried wishes and unspoken fears.

Whenever I read accounts of the anorexic body as a semiotic system (as Knapp says, “describing in flesh a pain I could not communicate in words”) or an aesthetic creation (“the inner life … as a sculpture in bone”), I feel a familiar wariness. Not just at the familiarity of these metaphors—bone as hieroglyph, clavicle as cry—but at the way they risk performing the same valorization they claim to refute: ascribing eloquence to the starving body, a kind of lyric grace. I feel like I’ve heard it before: the author is still nostalgic for the belief that starving could render angst articulate. I used to write lyrically about my own eating disorder in this way, taking recourse in bone-as-language, documenting the gradual dumb show of my emergent parts—knobs and spurs and ribs. A friend calls these “rituals of surveying”; she describes what it feels like to love “seeing veins and tendons becoming visible.”

But underneath this wariness—
must we stylize?
—I remember that starvation is pain, beyond and beneath any stylized expression: there is an ache at its root and an obsession attending every moment of its realization. The desire to speak about that obsession can be symptom as much as cure; everything ultimately points back to pain—even and especially these clutches at nostalgia or abstraction.

What I appreciate about Knapp’s kitchen bone-show, in the end, is that it doesn’t work. Her mom doesn’t remark on the skeleton in her camisole. The subject only comes up later, at the dinner table, when Knapp drinks too much wine and tells her parents she has a problem. The soulful silent cry of bones in kitchen sunlight—that elegiac, faintly mythic anorexia—is trumped by Merlot and messy confession.

If substituting body for speech betrays a fraught relationship to pain—hurting yourself but also keeping quiet about the hurt, implying it without saying it—then having it “work” (mother noticing the bones) would somehow corroborate the logic: let your body say it for you. But here it doesn’t. We want our wounds to speak for themselves, Knapp seems to be saying, but usually we end up having to speak for them:
Look here.
Each of us must live with a mouth full of request, and full of hurt. How did it go again?
Mouthfull of love.

Interlude: Outward

Different kinds of pain summon different terms of art: hurt, suffering, ache, trauma, angst, wounds, damage.
Pain
is general and holds the others under its wings;
hurt
connotes something mild and often emotional;
angst
is the most diffuse and the most conducive to dismissal as something nebulous, sourceless, self-indulgent, affected.
Suffering
is epic and serious;
trauma
implies a specific devastating event and often links to
damage
, its residue. While wounds open to the surface, damage happens to the infrastructure—often invisibly, often irreversibly—and damage also carries the implication of lowered value.
Wound
implies
en media res:
the cause of injury is past but the healing isn’t done; we are seeing this situation in the present tense of its immediate aftermath. Wounds suggest sex and aperture: a wound marks the threshold between interior and exterior; it marks where a body has been penetrated. Wounds suggest that the skin has been opened—that privacy has been violated in the making of the wound, a rift in the skin, and by the act of peering into it.

Wound #4

In a poem called “The Glass Essay,” about the end of a love affair, Anne Carson describes a series of visitations:

Each morning a vision came to me.

Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul.

I called them Nudes.

Nude #1. Woman alone on a hill.

She stands into the wind.

It is a hard wind slanting from the north.

Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift

And blow away on the wind, leaving

An exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle

Calling mutely through lipless mouth.

It pains me to record this,

I am not a melodramatic person.

This closing motion—
It pains me to record this, / I am not a melodramatic person
—performs a simultaneous announcement and disavowal of pain: this hurts; I hate saying that. The act of admitting one wound creates another:
It pains me to record this.
And yet, the poet must record, because the wounded self can’t express anything audible:
Calling mutely through lipless mouth.

If a wound is where interior becomes exterior, here is a woman who is almost entirely wound—
an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle.
Over the course of the poem, she is followed by twelve more wounded visions: a woman in a cage of thorns, a woman pierced by blades of grass, a deck of flesh cards pierced by a silver needle:
The living cards are days of a woman’s life.
A woman’s flesh can be played like a game of bridge, or drawn like pulled pork from her body in the aftermath of a broken heart. Each Nude is a strange, surprising, devastating tableau of pain. We aren’t allowed to rest on any single image; we move itinerant from one to the next.

Carson gives us a fourteenth nude in “Teresa of God.” “Teresa lived in a personal black cube. / I saw her hit the wall each way she moved.” Teresa dies when her heart is “rent,” and her death is a response to the constant rebellion and anguish of her living: “To her heart God sent answer.” The poem doesn’t close with her death, however, but with the impossibility of representing it: “Photographs of the event / had to be faked … when the lens kept melting.” The melting lens means Teresa can’t be immortalized into any single frame, any single Nude, any single wounded posture. Instead her suffering demands our imagination—our invention and necessary acknowledgment of “fakery” and fabrication—each time we try to picture how she hurt.

Wound #5

Here’s the CliffsNotes version: girl gets her period, girl gets scared, girl gets mocked. Girl’s mother never told her she was going to bleed. Girl gets elected prom queen and gets a bucket of pig’s blood dumped on her head just when things start looking up.
Girl gets; girl gets; girl gets.
Not that she is granted things but that things keep happening to her, until they don’t—until she starts doing unto others as they have done, hurting everyone who ever hurt her, moving the world with her mind, conducting its objects like an orchestra.

Stephen King’s
Carrie
frames menstruation itself as possible wound: a natural bleeding that Carrie misunderstands as trauma. Carrie crouches in a corner of the locker-room shower while the other girls pelt her with tampons, chanting
Plug it up! Plug it up!
Even the gym teacher reprimands Carrie for being so upset about the simple fact of her period:
Grow up
, she says,
stand up.
The implicit imperative: own this bleeding as inevitable blood. A real woman takes it for granted. Carrie’s mother, on the other hand, takes “the curse of blood” as direct evidence of original sin. She slaps Carrie in the head with a tract called
The Sins of Women
while making Carrie repeat: “Eve was weak, Eve was weak, Eve was weak.”

I think
Carrie
has something useful to teach us about anorexia. The disease never shows up in its plot, but we see the plausible roots of an anorexic logic—to take the shame of that bleeding and make it disappear, to deny the curse of Eve and the intrinsic vulnerability of wanting—of wanting knowledge, wanting men, wanting anything. Getting your period is one kind of wound; not getting it is another. A friend calls it “the absence of blood where blood should be.” Starvation is an act of self-wounding that preempts other wounds, that scrubs away the blood from the shower. But Carrie responds to the shame of fertility by turning it into a weapon. She doesn’t get rid of the bleeding; she gets baptized by it. She doesn’t wound herself. She wounds everyone else.

The premise of
Carrie
is like porn for female angst: what if you could take how hard it is to be a girl—the cattiness of frenemies, the betrayals of your own body, the terror of a public gaze—and turn all that hardship into a superpower? Carrie’s telekinesis reaches the apex of its power at the moment she is drenched in red, the moment she becomes a living wound—as if she’s just gotten her period all over herself, in front of everyone, as if she’s saying,
fuck you
, saying,
now I know how to handle the blood.