Carrion, p.11
Carrion, page 11
Attaching the secondaries with wax could have been a measure to prevent Icarus from flying too high to begin with: reach a certain altitude, and the secondaries would have slid off, preventing him from gaining excess height. This could be a demonstration of the most profound intimacy and knowledge with and of his son, a recognition that his word would not be heeded. Wax, then, could be proof that Daedalus did not want Icarus to soar too high. Destruction, a measure of protection.
But it could also have been sabotage. Again, knowing that Icarus would climb to extreme heights, the melting (meltable) wax would, again, prevent him from proceeding higher still; but so too would it have prevented him from recovering from the fall. Falling, unable to right himself, unable to gain height once fallen. Fallen, indefinitely grounded; fallen, flightless. Also (necessarily) dead.
Although this can’t be quite right either: not all of the feathers were lost, so Icarus could have, if not gained height enough to continue flight at a reasonable altitude, then glided, floated, slowly descended in a controlled enough manner to land without crash. I imagine that his immaturity led to significant panic and an inadequate ability to problem-solve: he may simply have not realized that this was a possibility.
Or perhaps he did, and the best he could do was land in the middle of the sea, tied up by his father in his father’s heavy wooden flying apparatus, making swimming an impossibility. And slowly succumbing to torrents.
This is so often how it happens, isn’t it: we commit to something so adamantly, with so much zeal that we make ourselves see it through, even to the destructive end. Because the alternative is or else. We say we will see how far we can go, how long we can sustain it, and then we don’t—don’t go, don’t sustain. And the fall takes only a fraction of the time it took to ascend.
It is the proverbial crash and burn, only without the crash, and probably without the burn. Instead, just the flames, the phlogiston, the four pounds of ashes (if there were even one). This is the emotional fall from that height.
And it is not just seen in father-son relationships: this obviously trespasses upon many kinds. Once we learn to fly—once we are given the opportunity and tools to fly, we do, because we have never felt so weightless, and we have never felt so free. We test the relationship: how much may I pull back; how close may I get. But there is a definite beauty—a light, a fire—to which we fly, continuously, if circuitously. The warmth of the sun rejuvenates us from a lonely solitude, suddenly, as if we have been trapped outside of it for a very long time. And perhaps we do not yet know how to take things in moderation. And we only have two choices, anyway: get closer to the object that makes us feel as if we are flying (we are, we do), or let ourselves drop unnoticed into the ocean. So the choice is made, because none of us are self-destructive—not admittedly—and we get closer and closer until the pleasant, encompassing heat of that object is the same that engulfs our wings, burns our backs, and we fall without notice. Regardless.
As we swallow our salts and return the water’s slaps to stave off the inevitable drowning, we understand that our proximity to the object which guided our flight was destructive. The object—the sun, the romantic other—was not destructive, not innately; our fathers’ wax was not inadequate; we possessed both the strength and the endurance; and we each were able to fight gravity well enough to see it through. But we ascend, and the relationship intensifies exponentially—till it elevates to a place we can’t breathe. As our face (collective, here) returns to a regular pallor and our carotid arteries deliver oxygen again and our swollen supratrochlear artery inters itself under our blackened, flaked skin—there is nothing left to grieve, because we have that for which we (perhaps) flew: the damage that proves we did—we flew higher, and we survived.
My skin continues to peel, only now in small holes near my wrists, like blisters, like open pustules, like cavities that I open wider and carve deeper. I know that this is new damaged skin being exposed and sloughed as quickly; I know that this could also be bits of flesh that were not damaged as severely and are thus rejected less quickly (as if they have been still remotely recognizable and usable). I associate this, though, with the knowledge that our skin continues to burn even once we remove it from ultraviolet exposure. We cook from the inside out. And these flaky eruptions, almost insignificant when compared to my scabbed and desiccated shoulders, seem that way to me: my bones provide the heat, and my skin is now at a rolling boil. And my therapist asks what would happen if I did not intellectualize these experiences: if not, then my skin is boiling from a heat that must exist somewhere inside me. And Icarus did fly and flew high and crashed and died. And there is nothing to explain the ribbons of flesh falling from my shoulders. And the pictures are as, if not more, accurate: his wings were his own, and they grew from his back, and when they burnt, it was terrible; the bones became exposed, charred there too, crumbled to just the frame—just ulna, metacarpus, phalanx. If I did not intellectualize the burn or the time between us, then that time would not exist, and the burn would be much more frightening, because it would be unexplained. Memory would contract everything, and he would be very close, still, and our fingers would overlap over my own shoulders, pulling some of the same flesh off of me—never having grown or shed or changed or burnt again. My skin would tell me that something has changed, but nothing hurts. And that would be it. If, then it is all conflated and impossible.
The physics of all this is a way to manage the site of trauma, keep it as clean as possible so that it may heal without scarring, to tidy it up to prepare for something else: the definite answers to the definite, serious problems, the math involved, the narrative itself, the fantastic images that I can’t not see now—they give me something to say, words to speak into what is otherwise an absence, a reason for or cause of the damage I (again) find (on (in) me).
The fall could not have surprised him. (I wonder if falls ever do.) To climb to such ecstatic heights, we may only plummet. And he would have exhausted himself, buffeting his wings so vigorously and adamantly to, perhaps, make up for such flimsy feathers. How often do we find ourselves tired from attempting that which we know we should not be able to do—continue the ascent when all we want is to glide, for things to be easy. That is part of the (romantic) commitment: try as we may, we get as far as we can, and when we cannot proceed further, we cannot proceed further. So end.
For Icarus, there would be that moment of stillness at the full height when his momentum waned as gravity dominated again (as if it ever doesn’t). Just a singular moment of weightlessness—between (merging) ascent and descent—before falling for mere seconds before what I imagine as an eruption into the flames he and his wings would become. And I wonder how long that singular moment feels: to look up and see, unimpeded by atmosphere, all the stars and see below the aurora and past that to the earth that has become unrecognizable and, suddenly, spherical.
Does that stretch the moment. And if so, how long does it seem. Do we stretch a singular moment into years—or three. And when it is over, do we remember the years, or does it contract back into negligence—our backs a clayey landscape of mud cracks.
Eve
Teach me to bury this. Teach me to rub lemons over all this. How do I nip a thing in the bud, kill at the root. How do I cross a puddle that lay so cadaverous and awful or enter a room when so many are watching.
A dead raven. Surprising to see how limp: I know we loosen when we vacate our bodies, but we bloat, and we stiffen. I know this, but birds seem different: no part of them seems soft even in life, nothing comforting, nothing to stroke, nothing to eat except too-hard muscle. They are so many feathers and not much else. I want to touch it, because I have held a dead animal before, and there is something about the rolling head that is both pleasing and terrible.
This is spectacle. And thousands of ravens come to see it, though not all at once. Some better fight the urge than others, slowly materializing. They arrive in threes or twos or sometimes fewer. As the faces slowly appear, it becomes more obvious that they are all dumb faces, without thought or expression. Dumb faces all pointing in the same direction, encompassing. There is a visual threshold, so they are only so far away, but very far away: a match at a mile. They keep appearing, though, so they encroach on our space. To see you. And there is a limit, and it creates a border just out of my reach, just beyond my outstretched knuckled finger and oval nail. I dream of nothing but boundaries and dreams between my breasts.
One of these visiting ravens comes closer. It scratches at the dry yellow ground, now collecting under its nails, and isn’t it amazing how something yellow seems so brown under keratin and hair. And it scratches for a very long time. Change is always so slow. I am mourning you, weeping. My forehead is dustily transparent, rasp, and my cheeks are dirty the way lips get dirty and then peel, the way we peel back plastic wrap, and the way we only clean that which we can reach.
I pause and wonder momentarily at who has sent this raven, why this raven acted differently than the rest. I trust it was god, though I have been foolish about snakes before.
The yellow ground is so dry, and it flakes, coming up in plaster chunks, but the residue only falls into the newfound absences, the air pockets, and leave a layer of something porous, covered and pressed, stamped, with something fine. Scratch, but it is like wax on unfinished wood, like something thin on something flat, and no nails can get under it. It breaks and chips and smashes and dusts finer and finer, until all that the raven can do is take its tiny head, point his beak into its chest, and push it all away, leaving its forehead and cere matted with ground or ash. And then all it can do is somehow begin again. Another thin layer.
The raven looks frantic, rushing. This must be done by May, but this is so difficult. There is grease and dust covering everything, and each hour of work only changes so little.
How can you be at this for so long. Are you really digging for five or six or ten hours at a time. I can’t imagine anything to be this difficult. I can’t imagine.
He can’t imagine. But it is this difficult.
Until finally it is not, and enough layers have been scratched away, built up like a crater, piled about like stones, like ravens viewing carrion. Until finally the only remaining task is to push the thing, the dead raven, into this shallow hole. The raven pushes the dead raven, the thing, into this shallow hole and then turns around and faces me in some horrible way with exhausted eyes with sagging skin and brow and bloodshot and so fucking dark, so beautifully dark. I watch as it uses its wings to flap back all that yellowed dust.
Only now, with the thing covered, do I understand: the raven has shown me what to do with this burst appendix, you, this body—this first lifeless body. The raven is frantic and rushing, yes, because the raven is insistent: it would be awful to not do this; it would be awful to leave this incomplete; it would be a bad thing to do anything but this, even though there are so many other things to do. You have to bury, but I am so tired.
I protest. I don’t want your hard lines covered this way. I don’t understand this, this death, this lifelessness or this just-body. But I know that this raven is telling me what must be done for my kin who has fallen the way I have felled so many of his creatures. Unfit for food. And loved. But I don’t want him to tell me what to do with a dead body; I want him to make the lifeless body not a dead body.
If you can send a message, you can revive the dead. So then why not.
I don’t want you covered, because I am not ashamed of you, I should not be ashamed of you, the way I am of my own body. But yours is a body too, so of course I am ashamed, that is why I am here, on the ground, covered in dust, weeping; and that is why he came and told me what to do with you. But I knew once that there is nothing shameful in a body to hide. If shame exists in your flesh, I implanted it in you, the way he placed the seed of it in mine. I projected it. So the question is not whether you need to be hidden. The question is, Am I ashamed of you.
Yes.
But this shame is mine, not yours, never because of you, but because I am ashamed of my narrow back and wide hips, of my inability to distinguish between emotions and sex, of my ears and teeth, and of my inability to rightly exist in my body the way you once did yours. I am ashamed that there is nothing thrashing in me, that I am making no attempts at anything other than at attempts. I try to try, but you do. And I am ashamed of you, yes, in part. So he came, the raven did, and he said, Bury it. Cover it.
And I could end it that easily. But the problem is not how to measure difficulty. The problem is a question: Do I want it ended.
No.
I will never be done with you, I think. I can’t say I am just beginning with you, because everyone says that, and I want to be first, best, more than enough. Good enough. I want to be able to say that I could put you away at any moment.
Abel keeps secrets, hidden with him under this yellow ground. Cain is the storyteller, so once I told him, the world knew. Now we know to bury a raven. Now we know how we know to bury the dead, if we do bury the dead. And I am always before the story.
Through phone-cans and aging voices, the same story becomes the suggestion that it is bad luck to kill a raven. As if burial demonstrates attrition. As if a corpse alone is proof of violence. And I admit, this is violent. But it isn’t bad luck to kill anything.
You can drown anything. But the corpse is yours to do something with. So we bury to hide our shame with it.
I’ve wept at not knowing what to do with you. Nothing exists as an appendix, grown useless and fit only to burst. Nothing is a placeholder, but rather is singly, wholly loved. And when I am sad, I am vacant. Just this body. My eyes still see, so I look straight ahead because all my muscles are stiff cement. Nothing but barren landscape, just a path, just your body, lying in the road. The entire world becomes just my body and your body. Without lodgment. We could be anywhere: Eden, Egypt, Chicago. Against the lake, in the mountains, on the rocks.
How do I still have all my fingernails. And how do you. I break one off and throw it to the ocean, and I consider the waves of blood. This throbbing digit is for you. The uncracking knuckles and blistered shoulders, this burnt hair around my right wrist, this scar, here—all for you.
I am frustrated. I weep, like this. I throw myself amongst shredded papers on the floor, and I forget that you are somewhere, watching me. And you are embarrassed at my inability, calling away those who might see; attracting everyone, giving priority to your ability so that none is given to the possibility that I might fuck up.
In a frenzy, I shove the snow aside so that I can do this for you, so that I can give you this one message. I lift and carry something too heavy for my frame, and I launch it to the ground in the hope of making a crater to end Russia and you with it.
But I feel immobilized, any of my attempts at attempting, futile: for as much shit and ejecta and debris there may be, the compression wave has only compacted that which I must till. I create for myself an impossible density that cannot be pushed aside.
So how much of this will linger, decay here in the air. How many times have I given myself something to bury without the strength to dig. I have gone through sixteen, now seventeen ways now of telling you one thing only to find that there is no way of telling you at all. I can only hope you come to find me in a dark, damp, wide-mouthed cave a thousand ages from now and I have the strength to lift my limp wrists to present you with my broken nails and rough hands, to point and show you that that, there, is what I tried to make for you.
Notes
The title “I thought it would happen as in a myth.” comes from Deborah Tall’s A Family of Strangers, and the title “No-One Suspects Your Shoulder Blades of Wings” comes from Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body.
“Mother” (82) was the first of these essays begun as well as one of the last to be finished—the most difficult because the content was the most frightening: not only literary forebears, not only illness and the body, but also creativity and writing and writing illness and writing the body. Woolf inspires just as she intimidates, so the only way I could get myself to utter it completely, if imperfectly, was by using a soliloquy from one of her last novels, The Waves. The words, spoken by the character Rhoda, were appended with quotes from Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” and supplemented by my own rumination and speculation.
March 2016
Chicago, IL
Biographical Note
Wes Jamison is the author of the chapbook and Melancholia (Essay Press, 2016) and is a noted author in Best American Essays. They earned an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago and a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. They currently teach at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Wes Jamison, Carrion
