Quelques minutes plus tard, elle faisait son entrée en scène : au sortir de sa penderie, la lumière du jour la fait reculer, elle secoue sa robe qui traîne par terre comme un perroquet faisant gonfler ses plumes.
Citations
There are people who feel bad in their bodies and do nothing about it, and there are people who feel bad in their bodies and submit their symptoms to search engines and stop there. Then there are people who can afford to circulate what hurts between professionals who will offer them competing diagnostic bids. This group of people follow a set of symptoms toward a promise, ask for tests, question answers, travel long distances to visit specialists who might be able to recognize what’s wrong.
If symptoms are circulated long enough, a set of discomforts might be allowed the mercy of a name : a disease, a syndrome, a sensitivity, a search term. Sometimes that is cure enough—as if to appellate is to make okay. Sometimes to give a person a word to call their suffering is the only treatment for it.
In a world where so many people feel so bad, there’s a common unmarked and indefinite state of feeling ill that provides, at least, membership in a community of the unspecified. Discomfort in need of diagnosis forms a feeling-scape of curious pains and corporeal eruptions, all untamed by the category disease. The kind of illness that has no name is the kind that is held in suspense or held in common or shuffled into the adjacency of psychiatry.
A body in mysterious discomfort exposes itself to medicine hoping to meet a vocabulary with which to speak of suffering in return. If that suffering does not meet sufficient language, those who endure that suffering must come together to invent it. The sick but undiagnosed have developed a literature of unnamed illness, a poetry of it, too, and a narrative of their search for answers. They finesse diets in response to what medicine fails, assay lifestyle restrictions, and in the mix of refined ingestion and corrective protections and rotating professional inspections, health or ill health wanders from the bounds of medicine, resists both disease and cure.
Cancer’s custom, on the other hand, is to rarely show up unannounced. Cancer comes in a wave of experts and expert technologies. It arrives via surveillance and professional declaration. Our senses tell us almost nothing about our illness, but the doctors ask us to believe that what we cannot see or feel might kill us, and so we do.
“They tell me,” said an old man to me in the chemotherapy infusion room, “I have cancer, but,” he whispered, “I have my doubts.”
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.
I am sick and a woman. I write my own name. I am handed at each appointment a printout from the general database that I am told to amend or approve. The databases would be empty without us.
Receptionists distribute forms, print the bracelets to be read later by scanners held in the hands of other women. The nursing assistants stand in a doorway from which they never quite emerge. They hold these doors open with their bodies and call out patients’ names. These women are the paraprofessionals in the thresholds, weighing the bodies of patients on digital scales, taking measurements of vital signs in the staging area of a clinic’s open crannies. Then they lead the patient (me) to an examining room and log into the system. They enter the numbers my body generates when offered to machines : how hot or cold I am, the rate at which my heart is beating. Then they ask the question : Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten ? I try to answer, but the correct answer is always anumerical. Sensation is the enemy of quantification. There is no machine, yet, to which a nervous system can submit sensation to be transformed into a sufficiently descriptive measurement.
Contemporary medicine hyper-responds to the body’s unruly event of illness by transmuting it into data. Patients become information not merely via the quantities of whatever emerges from or passes through their discrete bodies, the bodies and sensations of entire populations become the math of likelihood (of falling ill or staying well, of living or dying, of healing or suffering) upon which treatment is based. The bodies of all people are subject to these calculations, but it is women, most often, who do the preliminary work of relocating the nebulousness and uncountablity of illness into medicine’s technologized math.
There is no more tragic piece of furniture than a bed, how it falls so quickly from the place we make love to the place we might die in. It is tragic, too, for how it falls so quickly from the place where we sleep to the place where we think ourselves mad. The bed where anyone makes love is also—and too clearly for anyone stuck there because of illness—the grave, as John Donne described it, from which they might never rise.
In vertical life, when you are well or mostly and walking around, pretending to be, the top of your head is the space that the heavens touch. The total area of the top of you is pretty small. You are only moderately airy, then, and your eyes, rather than gazing up, gaze outward at the active world, and it is to this you are mostly reacting. And it is mostly during the night, during dreams, that imagining becomes temporarily expansive and the ceiling air spreads over you, or at least this was, in those days, one magic theory I conjured in bed to explain the relationship of posture to thought.
When you are sick and horizontal, the sky or skyish air of what is above you spreads all over your body, the increased area of airy intersection leads to a crisis of excessive imagining. All that horizontality invites a massive projecting of cognitive forms. When you are so often lying down, you are also so often looking up.
I think of the medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna’s floating man, who, denied all sensation, still knows, as proof of the soul, that he exists.1 I am not sure I believe him. A better answer is found in the Roman poet Lucretius’s argument in his epic poem, De rerum natura, that we can die inch by inch. Every cell is a kingdom of both substance and spirit, and any kingdom can be overthrown. Our life force, like our flesh, never seems to issue away from us all at once. Anyone who has been half dead can attest to this. What we call our soul can die in small quantities, just as our bodies can be worn, amputated, and poisoned away, bit by bit.2 The lost parts of our souls are no more replaceable than the lost parts of our bodies, life incrementally lifting from life, just like that. And there we are, mostly dead, but still required to go to work.
I come across a headline : “Attitude Is Everything for Breast Cancer Survivor.” I look for the headline “Attitude Is Everything for Ebola Patient” or “Attitude Is Everything for Guy with Diabetes” or “Attitude Is Everything for Those with Congenital Syphilis” or “Attitude Is Everything with Lead Poisoning” or “Attitude Is Everything When a Dog Bites Your Hand” or “Attitude Is Everything for Gunshot Victim” or “Attitude Is Everything for a Tween with a Hangover” or “Attitude Is Everything for a Coyote Struck by a Ford F150” or “Attitude Is Everything for Gravity” or “Attitude Is Everything for the Water Cycle” or “Attitude Is Everything for Survivor of Varicose Veins” or “Attitude Is Everything for Dying Coral Reef.”
I wanted to write about exhaustion the way I used to write about love. Like love, exhaustion both requires language and baffles it, and like love, it is not as if exhaustion will kill you, no matter how many times you might declare that you are dying of it.
Exhaustion is not like death, either, which has a plot and a readership. Exhaustion is boring, requires no genius, is democratic in practice, lacks fans. In this, it’s like experimental literature.
I was once not exhausted, and then I was. I got sick, and then the late effects of treatment made me exhausted. I was taken to the moment of depletion and then taken past that, and after my recovery kept there in the probably forever of never-all-better, sinking further and further into exhaustion’s ground. What happens if you can no longer self-repair ? To be depleted is not to die : it is to barely do something else.
Exhaustion is a culmination of history presented in one body, then another, then another. If exhaustion as a subject has become newly popular it is because a once-proletarian feeling has now become a feeling of the proletarianized all.
*
The exhausted are always trying, even when they don’t want to, even when they are too exhausted to name trying as trying or to think about it like that. The trying of the exhausted is fuel for the machine that keeps running them over in the first place. Life doesn’t have to be happy to be long.
Trying is the method of traveling with a body through efforts to find the limit of those efforts’ ends. You just can’t, but have to. Now you will. First a breath, next an achievement, then another combination of attempts, a failure or a nap or a bad decision, all in an attempt at attempting, eating a high-protein afternoon snack and playing out with one’s existence existing’s limit-end.
The exhausted are plastic and adaptable. They bend better and more to what is necessary for their having been worn down. They live as fluidly as the water into which a corpse tied with rocks has been plunged or into which a ship sank or from which a dolphin surfaced.
The exhausted have a desire : to no longer be exhausted. The exhausted can have this one desire, to no longer be exhausted, as the prerequisite for the possibility of again having many desires, to no longer be exhausted so that they can want something other, to want what they really want, which is to no longer be exhausted, so that their bodies can offer the possibility again of love or art or pleasure, of thinking without regretting, of achievement, too, or something beyond failed and sorrowful trying at the barely.
Our wanting is not our wanting, exactly, when it is exposed like this through being too tired to want anything. What the exhausted once believed was a desire from inside them showed itself to be a desire from what was outside, what had been there before them and what was ordered by whatever wasn’t them.
But it’s not that abstract, energy and lack of it ; and not that abstract, being too worn out to want anything but to not be worn out anymore ; and not that abstract, the hyperfocused forever of not having enough of any life to do with it what one could. The exhausted are exhausted because they sell the hours of their lives to survive their lives, then they use the hours they haven’t sold to get their lives ready for selling, and the hours after that to do the same for the other lives they love.
*
A person can be anything, she is told, if she puts her mind to it in the economic zone of unfettered personal possibility. It’s the free trade of souls across the open borders of indefatigability. It’s a series of horizon-wide choices unlimited by limitations except for how all possibilities will be circumscribed by the capacity to exhaust oneself to discover a possibility’s end.
Fate was shipwrecked, so in its place, they sent us agency. Free to love, free to work, free to get, free to enter multiple and contractual and subcontractual realms in which each element of a person’s existence is negotiated to the effect of determining her position only by how it wears her out.
In this version of freedom, the invisibility of all fences is the point of every invisible fence. The apparent lack of limits among the limits mystifies both limits and limitlessness. There are horizons that sink, roads and highways that seem to go on for as long as one has the capacity to travel them, and then, at the place at which it wears you out, you find a real fence.
Freedom ends exactly there, hung up on your own system’s failure, a former dynamo that is now an evaporated animal, all free energy having been expended freely in a quest toward freedom’s end.
*
The exhausted rise each day, or at least most of them do. That they rise most days is testament to the distance between how a person feels and what they do.
A person can and often does rise in a will-optional attempt at getting out of bed, and when they can’t rise, it’s almost never from lack of wanting to. No matter how much they just can’t, the exhausted, if they are living, continue to. They continue to, like everyone who does until they don’t anymore, but they continue to more miserably than those who are not exhausted yet. To live and so to eat, drink water, to find a method—work or love—by which to afford to eat, to pay their bills and pay their taxes, to use the bathroom, to put on clothes, to care for their loved ones, requires that they rise, at least sometimes. The exhausted might almost do what they are supposed to do, but as a consequence of their depletion, they almost never do what they want. The exhausted don’t die. Or if they do die, it is only once, like everyone else, and from anything. An exhausted body almost always provides the wrong information. The wrong information is also the right information : things can’t go on like this, and so they do, and what gets proved is the blurred edge between being alive and being dead.
Living takes the shape of the effort to exist. In the long night of this effort to exist’s case file, each hour recedes into a lack of energy to achieve a measure of that hour’s length. Everything is tried—that’s how it gets exhausted—and a person trying to take notes on this writes, “I’m exhausted,” because they are too tired to put down their pen.
*
That you will run out of yourself trying to make yourself is the yogic prelude to the entrepreneurial rules of existing. It’s the epoch of yes ; the age of unlimited can, a mass existence in the soma-pathetic fallacy of the body and earth together registering the alarming texture of our mutual expiration.
Here’s an asana of auto-exploitation :
First, a breath. Then sweating. Now sweating with breathing. Then achievement. Then email and sweating. Now breathing and achieving and emailing. Now working while breathing. Now failure and sleeping and breathing. Now refusing to sleep while breathing or attempting to refuse to breathe while still sweating and failing and achieving.
Exhaustion as a method of existing combines all actions until it finds the edges of the shape of existing’s end. Like everything aleatory, as a method it has one outcome : possibility. This possibility is mostly the possibility that all things will end in exhaustion.
The exhausted find their energy wasted again. Sleep, which is often the remedy for tiredness, disappoints the exhausted. Sleep is full of the work of dreams, full of the way that sleep begets more sleep, full of the way that more sleep can beget more exhaustion, and that more exhaustion begets more exhaustion for which the remedy is almost never just sleep.
The exhausted are the saints of the wasted life, if a saint is a person who is better than others at suffering. What the exhausted suffer better is the way bodies and time are so often at odds with each other in our time of overwhelming and confused chronicity, when each hour is amplified past circadianism, quadrupled in the quarter-hour’s agenda, Pomodoro-ed, hacked, FOMO-ed, and productivized. The exhausted are the human evidence of each minute misunderstood to be an empire for finance, of each human body misunderstood to be an instrument that should play a thousand compliant songs at once.
*
We can’t measure spirit. This because it isn’t real, or at least because it is not material, but it feels real when we become acutely aware of our own aridity. But no matter how potentially unalive or indistinct an exhausted person feels inside of herself, her body will look like a body, discreet, alive and animate, and capable of trying more, of trying harder, of improving or remedying or aspiring or producing.
We are never our spirits’ containers. No person’s body is marked with a measuring line. No one knows how boundless we once were or could be, and by looking, no one knows what it used to feel like to exist, and how different it feels to exist now, or how we were once full and are now depleted. The water is gone because the empty glass tells us so. In order to appear used up, a body has to look like a particular life’s packaging, providing rough measure of its interior’s resources, then its lack of them.
The exhausted person is “used up,” but can’t ever be seen as that, only as what is potentially (like everyone else and probably everything else in the instrumentalized world) used. The “used up” mostly belongs to substances or objects that can be or commonly are contained, and it is mostly in relationship to their container that what can be used up becomes legible as use-up-able. Probably a thing that can be “used up” can’t be considered actually used until it is gone entirely, and maybe this is because a thing that can be “used up” is often a thing with a use that is recognizably metabolic, like food or soap or gasoline. The interior of the compost barrel stays dark.
The exhausted look exhausted because they aren’t trying, even if what they are exhausted from is all that trying. “You look exhausted,” we might say to the exhausted only when we remember them as once vital, noticing the alteration only through comparison, meaning you once looked okay but now you look gaunt, you have circles under your eyes, your face is puffy or your features deformed, you drag and do not spring, you seem to hold your head above your shoulders with the greatest effort, what you say is not too lucid, you fly off the handle in rage, you cry too easily, your words come out jumbled, you cry and say “I’m tired” and say “I’m exhausted” and you cry because you are so tired.
An exhausted person, trying to look less so, will try, as trying is what she is good at. She will put concealer under her eyes, add blush to her cheeks, do all the tricks the magazines and websites tell her will make her look less exhausted : curl her eyelashes up so that her eyelids might droop less, drink coffee, take Adderall, exercise, realize it is Tuesday, then that it is Friday, then that it is the end of the month, then that it is the beginning, then that time has rushed forward without her, carrying with it her to-do list but leaving her behind.
De Porphyre à Avicenne, donc, les nuances sont importances, mais on a affaire, quant au thème qui nous intéresse, à une notion relativement homogène, transmise d’un mouvement continu, à travers les commentaires néoplatoniciens de l’Organon d’Aristote surtout. Le discours intérieur apparaît comme étant composé de concepts, pour l’essentiel, c’est-à-dire de portraits intellectuels et prélinguistiques, naturellement formés dans l’esprit pour y représenter les choses extérieures et signifiés, le cas échéant, par les paroles orales. Certes, l’idée émerge chez Avicenne que les mots, esquissés dans l’imagination, fournissent en pratique aux humains une assistance indispensable pour la combinaison mentale des concepts et que les langues parlées, par conséquent, constituent pour le raisonnement une sorte de béquilles sans lesquelles l’âme incarnée resterait maladroite à se mouvoir parmi les intelligibles. Mais le jeu des mots, même chez Avicenne, n’en est pas moins dérivé. Il serait dénué de sens et de valeur sans cette activité intellectuelle sous-jacente et non conventionnelle qui est l’objet propre de la logique et qui correspond au logos endiathetos de Porphyre et d’Ammonius ou à l’oratio intellectus de Boèce.
Cette filière néoplatonicienne, continuée à partir du IXe siècle par les Arabes, nous sommes maintenant en mesure, au terme de cette première partie de notre enquête, de la replacer dans le contexte d’une histoire beaucoup plus longue où peuvent être distinguées deux grandes traditions : l’une, proprement philosophique, d’origine grecque, et l’autre à caractère théologique et d’allégeance chrétienne. La première – à laquelle appartient de plein droit la série de textes parcourue dans ce chapitre – remonte, en dernière instance, jusqu’à Platon et Aristote. Elle associe – ou identifie même –, à l’instar de Platon, le discours mental à la dianoia, c’est-à-dire à la pensée délibérante, dont l’aboutissement normal est la prise de position, la formation de la doxa ; et elle en fait, dans la foulée d’Aristote, le lieu privilégié des opérations logiques et, en particulier, d’une raisonnement syllogistique. Le « discours disposé à l’intérieur » est alors le mouvement psychique séquentiel par lequel un agent moralement et intellectuellement responsable se détermine lui-même, d’une manière rationnelle, quant à ce qu’il lui fait dire ou faire dans une situation donnée. C’est cette notion de délibération discursive privée, logiquement articulée et moralement responsable – qu’elle pratique ou théorique –, qui fut véhiculée dans les diverses écoles de philosophie grecques à partir, vraisemblablement, du IIe siècle avant Jésus-Christ sous l’étiquette de logos endiathetos. Utilisée d’abord à des fins de clarification dans le cadre du débat sur la rationalité des animaux, elle paraît avoir connu un regain de popularité dans la psychologie cognitive du IIe siècle de notre ère, du côté d’Alexandrie, en particulier, et de Smyrne en Asie Mineure. C’est elle encore que l’on retrouve dans les commentaires néoplatoniciens de la logique aristotélicienne et dans les traités grecs de rhétorique, comme dans les écrits de Némésius d’Émèse, d’Ammonius, de Boèce, de Jean Damascène, d’al-Fârâbi ou d’Avicenne, par l’intermédiaire desquels elle sera transmise au Moyen Age latin.
Quant à la seconde tradition, plus exclusivement théologique, elle trouve aussi sa source dans la notion grecque de logos endiathetos, qui commença dès le Ier siècle après Jésus-Christ – au moins – d’être régulièrement employée pour l’interprétation allégorique des récits religieux, ceux notamment qui concernaient Hermès. Mais elle ne prend véritablement forme que dans la tentative du courant johannique chrétien du IIe et du IIIe siècle pour rendre minimalement intelligible l’assimilation du Logos divin au Christ incarné. Apparue timidement chez Justin – pour autant que nous sachions –, la comparaison du Verbe immanent de Dieu à la parole intérieure de l’homme déboucha chez Augustin, au Ve siècle, sur une psychologie hautement articulée de l’homme intérieur, qui fit une très forte impression sur la pensée médiévale. Le verbe mental, ici, ne se caractérise plus essentiellement par la discursivité rationnelle et structurée, mais comme une force expressive, une intention motrice porteuse de sens, qui serait elle-même le fruit d’un engendrement intérieur.
Chacune des deux lignées exploite ainsi l’un ou l’autre aspect de l’idée grecque du logos : la rationalité discursive d’un côté et, de l’autre, l’énergie intentionnelle et créatrice. Elles se recoupent ou se rejoignent ici et là, mais à partir du IVe siècle, et jusqu’au XIIe, elles se transmettront, pour l’essentiel, de manière indépendante l’une de l’autre. Il arrive que la notion philosophique réapparaisse chez des théologiens comme Maxime le Confesseur au VIIe siècle ou Jean Damascène au VIIIe, mais elle n’yest pas alors directement utilisée pour la spéculation théologique. Quant à l’idée augustinienne du verbe mental, elle n’aura, pendant cette période, aucun impact hors de la chrétienté latine, ni chez les néoplatoniciens grecs – qu’ils furent chrétiens ou non – ni a fortiori chez les auteurs de langue arabe. Ce n’est que dans l’Europe du XIIe et surtout du XIIIe et du XIVe siècle que la rencontre se produira de nouveau et qu’elle donnera lieu à des problématiques théoriques originales et fécondes.
L’interprétation, alors, sera grandement facilitée par ceci que, quelles que fussent leurs divergences et leur indépendance, les deux traditions avaient en commun de poser l’une et l’autre le discours de la pensée (ou le verbe mental) comme étant préalable – en principe, sinon toujours en pratique – à l’usage des langues de communication et signifié ou révélé de l’extérieur parles mots oraux aux syllabes et aux sonorités variables entre les peuples. Il est possible que les auteurs les plus anciens n’aient pas toujours été très au clair quant à la distinction à établir (ou à ne pas établir) entre le discours intérieur proprement dit et le fait de se parler tout bas dans une langue donnée. Mais la grande majorité des indices disponibles dans la philosophie grecque à partir d’Aristote vont dans le sens d’une dissociation des deux phénomènes, que ce soit, par exemple, chez Philon d’Alexandrie, chez Claude Ptolémée, chez Plotin, chez Ammonius ou chez Boèce. Augustin, quant à lui, est on ne peut plus net à ce sujet. Pour l’une et l’autre approche, finalement, la représentation silencieuse des paroles orales relève de l’imagination et non de l’intellect : Augustin parle de rouler en soi-même les images des sons [De Trinitate, XV, 19], tandis que les commentateurs d’Aristote, à la suite de Porphyre, évoquent à ce propos une sorte d’imaginaire verbal : lektikê phantasia pour Ammonius ou imaginatio proferendi pour Boèce. Le véritable discours mentale, lui, dans ce qu’il a de plus pur, appartenait, pour les philosophes comme pour les chrétiens, à l’intellect proprement dit ou à l’âme spirituelle. Une réflexion plus attentive sur l’interaction des deux ordres, comme celle qu’esquissait Avicenne dans son Isagogê sur le rôleauxiliaire des paroles imaginées dans la composition logique, pouvait bien ouvrir pour la postérité la perspective d’une position encore plus précise de la question des rapports entre la pensée et le langage – celle de leur isomorphisme notamment –, c’était toujours, chez les uns comme chez les autres, sur le fond d’une conception foncièrement non linguistique du discours intérieur. Les catégories grammaticales, celles du nom et du verbe en particulier, restaient associées depuis Platon aux contingences de la communication plutôt qu’aux structures intimes de la délibération.
La dianoia, écrit Philon, est un « lieu invisible » où sont conservées les pensées jusqu’à ce que la voix s’en empare avec ardeur « dans son désir de les faire connaître ». Elle est comme un « métal vierge » sur lequel le langage, aux fins de la communication humaine, « imprime le dessin des verbes et des noms ».