In addition to reading her
newest volume, Frissure, which is a
collaborative set of mediations on healing and attention, I have been re-reading Kathleen
Jamie’s 2005 gathering of essays, Findings,
to prepare for a set of first-year lectures on prose non-fiction I am set to
deliver over the next few months. The
earlier volume appears to lay some of the groundwork for her more recent prose
poems. In the pages of Findings, Jamie consistently demonstrates a palpable gift for
perceptive clarity, an attunement to visual and auditory detail: the eleven
mediations on the “natural and unnatural world” – “world” meaning contemporary
Scotland – that make up the book reflect on her own all-too-human need to
accrete what she sees and hears, to hold and remember it, to catch something of
her sensory drift and document it on paper before it skitters beyond her field
of view. She listens and watches, she notes and collects. And what she often ends
up attending to, in each piece, are the gaps and uncertainties in the apparatus
of her own consciousness. She comes to observe herself wanting to observe,
trying to see and hear her way toward a sublimity, a sense of the near-absolute alterity of nature, that
keeps refusing her any absolute access. She often directs her creative energies
toward collection and preservation, picking up souvenirs and compiling wrack
and flotsam from shoreline scrapheaps, a tactic that recalls the poetic salvage
of “Mr
and Mrs Scotland Are Dead.” (“Do we save this toolbox . . .?”)
Salvage
is also self-directed, when she visits, for example, the Royal College of
Surgeons in Edinburgh and peruses the formaldehyde-filled anatomical specimen
jars: the human form, a late version frittered from Da Vinci’s homo mensura, becomes a collation or an
assemblage of posthumous, scattered parts, bottled samples and amputations. “At
certain shelves,” she writes, “you have to bend and look closely, without
knowing what you might see. It will be pale and strange, and possibly quite
beautiful. It will be someone’s catastrophe and death” (from “Surgeon’s Hall”).
Bodies are catalogued, labeled, textualized; she sees them as particular, uncanny
artefacts, almost art-objects that, with their vestigial humanity, still resist
the aesthetical gaze. Medical and representational objectivity is mitigated by
empathy, by the traces of human suffering and of feeling – not affect, but
feeling – that persist in these fissured bodies, at once remembered and
dismembered: “a stranger’s arm with his [not ‘its’] corroding carcinoma, a
diseased breast, a kidney taken from a man gassed on the Western Front, all
call forth the same plain tenderness, “ for Jamie.
“Pathologies,”
the first essay in her subsequent collection, Sightlines (2012), develops this empathetic scrutiny further, when
Jamie describes her visit to a pathology lab to observe clinicians performing
biopsies. What she thinks of, plainly, are the people with whose tissues she
has gained, as she scrutinizes samples through a microscope, a strange and
unbidden intimacy, an impossible closeness. This complex ethic in which she
finds herself implicated had already been hinted at in Findings, in
the essay I’ve been citing, where she offers a précis of one of the earliest
accounts, in “an Edinburgh book” from 1863, of a Victorian surgery: a certain
“Mrs Ailie Noble, suffering terrible pain from breast cancer[,] is taken into
theatre, and in full view of the young medical students undergoes a
mastectomy.” Jamie’s writing practice is often highly iterative – texts
embedded into texts, marking the retreat of an abyssal subjectivity – and she
quotes her source text to close her own essay; but her point is not to remark a
futility, so much as to emphasize the shared pathos of loss even in the seeming
detachment of patriarchal science:
He
says “Don’t think [the students] heartless . . . they get over their
professional horrors and into their proper work, and in them pity as an emotion
ending in itself, or at least in tears and in a long drawn breath, lessens —
while pity as a motive is quickened and gains power and purpose.
Pity converts from romanticized,
narcissistic amour-propre into viable
empathy for others, an intersubjectivity of care (to borrow a phrase from Julie
Livingston), a call to feeling that Jamie seems to discover somewhere
between the jars she observes and the archive she re-reads: reminder and remainder.
Frissure emerges
from Jamie’s collaboration with visual-tactile artist Birgid Collins. When she turned 49,
Jamie notes in her preface, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and underwent
a mastectomy. For her, she writes, “it seemed ironic: a case of life imitating
art.” She had written extensively, as I’ve just noted, on pathology labs and
breast cancer, and now her own body was subject to medical scrutiny and
intervention. Redirecting her own attention selfward, negotiating the now intimate
collision of observer and observed in her own physiology, seems to come to
mean, for her, finding some kind of balance point between the aesthetic and the
lived, a means of sensible transcription that would become part of her healing.
She ended up approaching Birgid Collins to draw her mastectomy scar, to try to
find a means of inhabiting this intersubjective tension; collaboration entails
both deferring to perspectives outside of your own, and simultaneously voicing
yourself against that deference: both seeing closely and being closely seen, in
this instance. The scar is an unruly line, not only in the literal sense of a
mark on her skin, but also in both the visual and the poetic senses: “Whatever
it was, it was a line, drawn on my body. A line, in poetry, opens up
possibilities within the language, and brings forth voice out of the silence.
What is the first thing an artist does, beginning a new work? He or she draws a
line.” She and Collins, in their various media, begin from a contingent, shared
understanding of line.
 |
| "With that, a line of Burns arrived in my head. 'You seize the flo'er, the bloom is shed.'" |
Jamie
composes a number of prose-poems during her recovery, which become part of
their collaboration; Collins pastes fragments of text into her constructions,
and incorporates found matter and textiles described in Jamie’s texts into her
compositions, which she comes to understand not as drawings but as dimensional
constructions she comes to call “Poem-Houses,” which she creates in
“conversation” or “exchange” with “K’s
fragments.” Line here becomes a trajectory of intersections, an empathetic
give-and-take (though not without difficulties and uncertainties). Collins
begins with drawings, then introduces “natural” matter onto her paper, then
builds dimensionality beyond the surface of page or sheet. The resulting
hand-sized sculptures, if that’s the right word, have a raw, stunning beauty,
an intricacy and a delicacy of texture that suggest an uneasy balance between
the found and the made, the fractal and the formal, the aleatory and the
intentional, the natural and the unnatural, that informs much of Jamie’s best
writing. (You'll have to buy the book to see photographs of these Poem-Houses; Collins's website also has plenty of images of similarly-realized constructions.)
The sense of line in these prose poems, for example, is more latent than manifest: the rhythmic shape of each sentence remains insistent but not
(yet) fully differentiated from the rhuthmos,
language’s unruly cadence, its natural flow: there are no clean lines, but,
like Collins’s art, an attention to the besmirched, the impure, the incipient.
“What is a line? “ Jamie asks in “Line”: “A border, a symbol of defence, of
defiance.” But a body, such as hers, isn’t healed by being defended, medically
or poetically, against its own enmeshment in the natural world, by the surgical
repair of its boundaries and limits. Rather, healing for Jamie involves a
return to the permeability, to the interpenetration, of body and world: “To be healed is not to be saved from
mortality but rather, released back into it: we are returned to the wild, into
possibilities for ageing and change” (“Healings 2”). The textures of Collins’s
work derive from this enmeshment, emblematized at a number of points in
economies of reciprocity, mutuality and interchange, as healing gifts mailed to Jamie from friends, and passed on to her, like letters written in natural scraps, from the landscape around her:
“Spilling from an envelope, a get-well gift of silverweed, bog-cotton and
thrift.” (The brief catalogues of found matter in these texts recall the
collected flotsam of “Findings.”) To heal, for Jamie, is not to protect or to
defend herself in art, but to open up her language to the textures of the
inhuman, of the given, and to listen carefully for a “music at the edge of
sense . . . the sound of the benign indifference of the world.” (“Healings 1”).
Tacitly, and amid its contingent stillnesses, Collins’s work performs this same
close attentiveness both for and with Jamie, and both for and with us.
