“a-side”/ “b-side”
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
kristen tapson/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
“a-side”: lake swamps fields
I know what this table looks like. I mean, I know what this table looks like when there is no difference in its relative speed and mine. The things in this room – books, coffee mugs, empty plates, wrappers, pens, photos of people I love – occupy most of the space. I’m here too, mainly sitting but standing up from time to time to move around, while Theory, A Sunday is still on the table, and I know what it looks like. Right now, it is after sunset. France Théoret writes, “I am time.”1 The shadow of the book on the wall is a thin rectangle. I have been thinking about something my son shouted while riding a bicycle down a wooded path as he looked back and forth between the road ahead and his shadow moving alongside him: “Mom, I’m not really cutting down the trees!” I feel uneasy telling you this, but I need a place to start.
Théoret’s story of adolescent transformation in “This is not a Lake” appears to chart a mournful course from resistance to capitulation with regard to conventional gender roles. Through the surface of a calm, deliberate, and confessional performance, however, Théoret quietly uncouples the particulars of her story from the expected timescale of human life and recouples them to the longer, nonhuman timescale of natural lake eutrophication. The amplified details that emerge through a frame of collapsing critical distance – from self-consciousness that she has “gotten a little fatter and become shy” to a declaration of increasing laziness to her acknowledgment of a “temperament that makes me perfectly suited to femininity” – form a rumpled fabric of juxtaposed past versions of herself that lie either inside or outside of the boundaries of a feminine ideal.2 Théoret’s turnabout to a would-be identification with the “stillborn” artificial Lac Capri does signal a lack of resistance, but she has already stacked the deck on its sources, let them loose to fill in an “ideal” shape, and bloomed into a mass of toxic algae rather than a woman.3 Floating is not escaping, but it does offer another set of terms for what it means to thrive in connection.
For Théoret, the self-critic’s restriction of movement at a given time gains a temporary degree of freedom through affective energy that scaffolds and sorts past objects, but that movement is not available to the critic herself. Instead, her speaker is a partition that inadvertently builds a concentration gradient between two interpenetrating kinds of data, emotional and sensory, that are not reliable on their own but might be situated orthogonally in order to stabilize an empirical apparatus for bringing about and measuring “the things I don’t know yet but whose existence I strongly suspect.”4 The structural integrity of the distancing apparatus – that is, the storyteller – faces increasing damage from the sources that feed her, as her existence depends on, and is limited by, the material of the story she tells. Lakes are geologically transient; they begin to dry up as soon as they form. Théoret’s lake rapidly stagnates, but its sources, held in the suspended nonconfrontational slow time advocated by her mother (with different meaning) turns nonconfrontation into a useable force that paradoxically writes her mother into her feminist lineage as an obligatory ally.
What constitutes a living movement? Where do feminisms live that we do not easily recognize? Can a social movement create space for itself by strategically “playing dead” – that is, inhabiting the blind spots created by our presumptions about what cooperation, coordination, and lively movements should look like? Theory, A Sunday glimpses a possible form for a regular intra/intergenerational conversation, one that might give shape, direction, and momentum to the secondary effects that arise from periodic collisions of present feminisms.
The sun is almost up. I know you know better, but I’m exhausted.
1. France Théoret, “This is not a Lake,” in Theory, A Sunday (New York: Belladonna, 2013), 147.↩
2. Ibid., 147-148.↩
3. Ibid., 148-149.↩
4. Ibid., 149.↩
“b-side”: amateur pulmonology
Growing up as a doctor’s daughter, I picked up habits that are hard to break. I tend to worry about getting enough air. But I don’t really mind taking medicine. I guess you get accustomed to making certain divisions.
Sometimes I would go to the hospital with my dad to visit lung transplant patients. I practiced asking to see their staples, and I practiced my composure. Many of the patients smoked and had to stop in order to get a transplant. There were plenty of aids to help a person quit smoking back then (patches, hypnosis, gum), but now there are other things you can do to stay closer to your routine, such as swapping real cigarettes for electronic ones. Naturally, I liked the idea of a medical occupation. There’s a video of me around preschool age, wearing a nurse’s cap from my dress-up box and carefully dissecting Thanksgiving giblets. Studying the parts of dead bodies is supposed to be a preliminary step for taking care of live bodies, but I never made the transition.
I’m prone to panic attacks, but that’s probably unrelated to my upbringing. Usually they happen in the middle of the night and I wake up hyperventilating. The main thing, they say, is to get everything to slow down. You’re not supposed to beat yourself up about having all this fight-or-flight over nothing. I keep a stethoscope around so I can sit quietly and listen to my heartbeat. It helps if I imagine I’m switching on a current from eartip to chestpiece that pushes my heart to top speed.
Doctors don’t really have to use percussion to diagnose lung problems anymore. Now they can use imaging, but the idea is basically the same. When one thing covers another thing, strike the top thing and listen. You can employ a “listener,” and it doesn’t even have to know the question you’re asking. Good histories are key, though. Physician assistants know that. I had my lung pulse taken once, just for a demonstration. You have to hold your breath and be patient while the ultrasound runs. Lung-slide rule.
When I was ten years old, a cardboard box appeared on my dresser. Inside was a pair of lungs, one from a smoker and one from a non-smoker, each one snug in its own formaldehyde-filled bag. I didn’t really wonder how they got there, or how they ended up together. Now that I think about it, though, there aren’t very many situations that require a person to handle human organs, especially when the rest of the body isn’t around. I kept the box in my room for a week or so, and then I left it on the kitchen counter. The rules about borrowing teaching tools from the hospital have changed, so I don’t think many organs end up participating in those kinds of demonstrations anymore. Even so, I wouldn’t mind letting one of my lungs travel that way – I mean, how could you? – but if I had a choice, I would want to know something about the partner it would be joining. I guess that might not matter much, since they wouldn’t know where they were going, but I imagine it would be exhausting to have to be so good all the time.
Anyway, everyone knows it’s good to be a doctor’s daughter. Other professions, though, they’re not in my blood.