To be declared with certainty ill while feeling with certainty fine is to fall on the hardness of language without being given even an hour of soft uncertainty in which to steady oneself with preemptive worry, aka now you don’t have a solution to a problem, now you have a specific name for a life breaking in two. Illness that never bothered to announce itself to the senses radiates in screen life, as light is sound and is information encrypted, unencrypted, circulated, analyzed, rated, studied, and sold. In the servers, our health degrades or improves. Once we were sick in our bodies. Now we are sick in a body of light.
Welcome to the detectors with names made of letters : MRI, CT, PET. Earmuffs on, gown on, gown removed, arms up, arms down, breathe in, breathe out, blood drawn, dye injected, wand in, wand on, moving or being moved—radiology turns a person made of feelings and flesh into a patient made of light and shadows. There are quiet technicians, loud clatters, warmed blankets, cinematic beeps.
An image in a clinic isn’t : it is imaging. We who become patients through the waves and stopped waves of sonograms, of light tricks and exposures, of brilliant injectable dyes, are by the power vested in me by having-a-body’s universal law now to be called the imagelings. “Come in with a full bladder,” the technicians say on the phone to the imagelings, wanting to look into our interesting interiors. The sonogram that can find a new life in a person’s womb can also find an embryonic death there.
We fall ill, and our illness falls under the hard hand of science, falls onto slides under confident microscopes, falls into pretty lies, falls into pity and public relations, falls into new pages open on the browser and new books on the shelf. Then there is this body (my body) that has no feel for uncertainty, a life that breaks open under the alien terminology of oncology, then into the rift of that language, falls.