Practice Modalities

Translation. Making space. Integration. Alternation. Tuning in/out. Turning down/up. Working (in) the dark. Attendance. Nursing. Cultivating the void.

Impasse / Chronic / Asklepion II

The one who could not be healed
would go to sleep in the abaton
"not to be stepped into"
"impassable"
to dream of Asklepios
who would reveal the remedy
or the dream itself could cure

I side with opacity

because it's in the dark something changes

and we never see it

Etel Adnan from Beirut writes that she has never seen war

They say healing needs witnesses
a patient, reintegration into community

but mystery requires darkness
(No one young can see how / opacity lends protection not risk)

I don't think we see healing
as we don't see a child growing every day

our bodies do not tell stories but enlist them travel them become subject to

[It’s because I’m not a subject I light out for the territory]

our bodies prepare for future bodies
at every moment repairing aligning acting interpreting

for plants it is always night

"I passed cancer two years ago"

In Greek the idiom is chronologic rather than victorious

Healing takes place in the impasse / the sickness passes

Time is a living being
                        - Alma Kunanbaeva, Eurasian Shamanism as Healing,
                           Stanford 2005

Poetry as antibiotic, malpractice, and placebo effect

I came across this article by John Lundberg in the venerable HuffPo recently: Can Poetry Heal?

I found these lines particularly ironic and troubling (in that they seek to make poetry untroubled and untroubling):

"Longo also speaks to a third potential benefit of writing poetry: that writing a poem can help to clear up one's emotions on a complex issue."

"Experts are careful to stress that poetry is a tool, which, wrongfully employed, can hurt rather than heal a patient. But many feel that it has significant potential. In a Time Magazine article on poetry therapy, Yale Psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg offered that "poetry by itself does not cure," but noted the benefit of its unique focus on verbalization, which, he offered, is "the lifeblood of psychotherapy."

Calling Robert Kocik here - by subtlest and therefore most potent means - to treat the iatrogenic effects produced above...gathering myself for emergent measures...induce the chronic to remediate the acute..

Poets, still trying to make poetry anesthetic to remove the sting of aesthetics?

Psychiatrists, still trying to defang poetry into talking cure?

Self-reliance and Catharsis Part 2

Today I'm no longer interested in healing as some triumphal return, a rise to the surface to tell one’s story. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee... It may still be the book one makes out of the body’s passion—I haven’t let go of that yet. But to treat it as a triumph—or failure—of the individual, a journey of self-transformation or self-invention, is to remain captive to a peculiarly American enterprise.

To be the hero or victim of one’s story is to deny the lines of power that innervate and enervate our bodies, charge us with relation. One need only consider the opposition to universal coverage to be reminded of how self-reliance, that core neoliberal doctrine, so thoroughly informs beliefs about health and healing in this country—and informs much of contemporary literature associated with it.

What would an anti-cathartic poetics of healing look like? Am I ready to let go of catharsis? Or, ready to bring it back to the visceral rather than the sentimental, a counter to pernicious influence?

I dreamt we were susceptive to language

that care might be agency’s complement

and form never more than condition
passing as body

(from Armies of Compassion)