Nervous Amputation // Small Shortage :: In Corpore Sano Presents Bonnie Emerick

Five works and an explanatory statement from Bonnie Emerick’s text-image collage project Autoimmune Autobiography

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A cut-out of a labeled drawing of a human brain, slightly off-kilter, with typewritten text in red: “Self-destructive Defense of the Self]

Bonnie Emerick’s project Autoimmune Autobiography uses typewritten text and collages of MRI brain scans to “[explore] the nature of the autoimmune illness in which the body attacks itself,” as she tells us. Developed after Emerick’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis, the project incorporates a typewriter to “[reflect] the pressure that the autoimmune system puts on the nerve synapses as key elements of the immune system attack the myelin sheath that assists in nerve conduction.” This practice generates a text-image “palimpsest” of the nervous system that considers labor, process, and materials.

Expanded and additional work from Emerick appears in the forthcoming initial print volume of In Corpore Sano.

Selections from Autoimmune Autobiography

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: On a white page, red typewritten text: “‘I could not simplify / myself’ the math- / metician sd / on his deathbed. / Me? / Yes, I / cld.”]

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: On a white page, red typewritten text: “I woke to feet & / awareness of. / Wind / howled / like in movies / about wind. // I wasn’t going to fall / for that. / Fall. / I did, feet unsure of / unsure. / Down. Okay? / What happened? // Avoid obvious answer”]

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Above two cropped MRI images of an unknown part of the human body, red typewritten text displays: “Anti anti-realist: One / who must / attend to material / condition — // body in state of / disability.”]

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: On a white page, red typewritten text: “Picture of / my brain / I see eyes, / ears, abnormalities. // Charts explain the [bla] / black hole , / the one in the brain, // that is less about / life / more about // being there.]

Explanatory Statement

If the limits of my language are the limits of my world, I will extend the limits of my world by extending the limits of my language. I will strive to understand my body’s relationship to itself, as manifested in multiple sclerosis, by striving to understand its language.

Contrary to what the MS for Dummies book says, ‘sclerosis’ does not necessarily mean ‘scars.’ ‘Sclerosis’ might be considered a compound noun composed of the root ‘scler’ and the suffix ‘-osis.” The Oxford English Dictionary traces ‘sclerosis’ to the sixteenth-century Middle English ‘sclirosis,’ meaning “to harden.”

One of the first — and now obsolete — uses of the word is this:

“sclerosis, n.: “1. Pathol. †a. A hard external tumour. Obs.”

Pathologically obsolete. This is the derivative of the disease whose moment before the memory is the nervous amputation — the small shortage.

If I have a disease today that carries a 1700 derivative, am I part of the sixteenth century? The times harden together. The words fuse and create the type of connection that my nerves yearn for: myelin across the centuries — loaning, stealing, borrowing the conducting highway that my nerves would use to send impulses to tell my fingers, my hand, my legs, my feet, my toes, my hips, my arms, my lips when to sense, when to feel, what to feel, what the sensation is. Your connection, world, is my disconnection.

“Sclerosis” is itself a fused word. Its suffix, ‘-osis,’ is one of the earliest ancient Greek terms to be transferred into English use, the OED says. Next to the entry for ‘sclerosis’ is ‘metamorphosis’ — both are described as “loan” words by the OED, as if acknowledging that to harden or to change is not an original state. ‘Sclerosis’ and ‘metamorphosis’ have much in common. There was an original state, and it did not involve this particular type of loan. I am not speaking of anyone else’s original state except my own. This is my story — of hardening, changing — of plaques staking claim in my central nervous system, which had an original state that fell into disarray.

An autoimmune autobiography.

My suffix, ‘-osis,’ the OED says, is used to create “nouns of condition, esp. medical terms, usually denoting a condition of disease, disorder, excess, or infection.” Not only, then, does the seemingly neutral suffix indicate disease, but its definition provides alternatives: disorder, excess, infection. Of these, ‘excess’ bothers me the most.

I will write about what bothers me. I write because I am bothered. I write because inside my brain, inside the thoracic spine there is excess; there is multiple; there is the uncooperative body called mine.

Excerpts from this project have been previously published online in Masque & Spectacle.

Bonnie Emerick’s poetry has been published in print and online magazines, including Cannibal, the tiny, How2, So To Speak, Quarter After Eight, Little Red Leaves, and Fogged Clarity, among others. Her digital chapbook, Ventriloquy, is forthcoming from The Operating System. She teaches secondary English in Telluride, Colorado.

IN CORPORE SANO: Creative Practice and the Challenged* Body, is a transdisciplinary collection and conversation by, on, and for bodies-against-within-despite, in the form of an ongoing web series and a forthcoming print:document series (preorder a copy here!). If you’d like to be a part of ICS, rolling submissions for the project are once again open.

With thanks to managing editor and lead facilitator Elæ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson].