15 09 20

Boyer, The Undying

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.