“It is by the middle that things push.”
– Gilles Deleuze.1 As a practicing acupuncturist, I am privy to intimate spaces: spaces in bodies and the stories that emerge from the safe confines of the treatment room. Even after three decades of practice, I continue to marvel at the way gen-tly twirled acupuncture needles do their quiet work. And how the heat from smoldering moxa seeps into pain, leaving its lingering scent as the pain becomes a trace of itself. I marvel at the moment when the soft chatter of our voices in the treatment room starts to hum with the vibrating needles: how spoken words and objects and our bodies coalesce, in situ. These ineffable spaces and micro-movements (composed of gazillions of thresholds, transitions, qualities, and intensities) create a desire to explore language as a way to re-think, and re-present, no-tions of body.
1 Gilles Deleuze, The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantine V. Boundas (Co-lumbia University Press, 1993), 208.
Meanwhile, clinical and professional boundaries need to be water-tight. Trust in a therapeutic relationship is par-amount. What happens in the treatment room stays in the treatment room, which is where the “factual” stories remain permanently sealed.
To ensure privacy and confidentiality – and to be able to think and write, ethically fret-free – all “clients” and their narratives are imagined. They are fabulated. I make things up. Any perceived likeness to any of the clients in the clinic scenarios contained within many of these es-says is purely coincidental, and so imagined by the reader.
The ineffables are free to roam across the page. The text-word-bodyings give them a voice.
As such, more-than human agency is authoring this book.
The boundless qualities and textures that quiver within the text’s interstices are its driving agent.
It is the middle zone that twitches with eagerness and holds the potential to push the written words into their lines of flight, into their becomings.
In ancient China, at public hangings, families would rush to the dirt below the dangling feet of their freshly hanged relative and scoop up the dirt. It was believed that at the moment of death the dense hun – which most closely re-sembles the soul in Western culture and resides in the liver while living – drops to the ground. At the same time the po – akin to spirit and residing in the lighter and more ethereal lung tissue – ascends towards the heavens.
The collected ancestral hun was then mixed into the soil of the family’s garden plot, where the ginseng roots twist it into their cellulose fibers.
The more-than qualities of the dead relative’s hun live on as the ginseng is steeped into longevity tea.
“The writer can only imitate a gesture,” says Barthes in his essay, “Death of the Author,” “that is always anterior, never original.”2 Barthes insists that an author – the sub-ject doing the writing – does not exist prior to or outside of language, that is, it is the writing that is anterior to the author. The identifiable body of the author is only along for the ride.
For Barthes, there is no subject to throw under, nor is there an authority to do the throwing (although, the irony of Barthes’s own death – he succumbed to injuries after he was struck by a laundry van – does not go unno-ticed as a subject). Instead, “[The author’s] only power is to mix writings […] in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.”3
This is a challenging reorientation. Without the thor author-ing, how to orient to the text? With no
au-2 Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 68.
3 Ibid., 146.
thor at the wheel, where will we wind up? And what will it all mean?
The epistemological Houdini, having escaped the bi-nary straightjacket, materializes as a shapeless semiotic force and is present within the swirling mix of text. For Barthes, it is no longer the author with the agency. In-stead, agency lies within the indeterminate movement of the mixing of text. And in the movement, new demands are made on the reader: to bring the text to life and into meaning, there must be engagement. Passivity is no longer an option.
Lyric is the more-than dark matter of literary arts: like junk genes in our genetic material, there is plenty of it, and we know it is there, but it eludes capture. Dark mat-ter in the universe is only theoretically quantifiable. Try to find it, and it vanishes. Its presence is everywhere, de-spite the impossibility of its real-time measurement. Due to dark matter’s pervasive presence, many cosmologists are in agreement: the old theories no longer work.
For poet-essayist Lyn Hejinian, it is necessary to enter the vast uncharted internal territory that has opened up since the death of the singular subject: “The ‘personal’ is already a plural condition,”4 Hejinian says, and goes on to try and locate the more-than condition: “Perhaps one feels that it is located somewhere within, somewhere in-side the body – in the stomach? the chest? the genitals?
the throat? the head? One can look for it and already one
4 Lyn Hejinian, “The Person and the Description,” Poetics Journal 9 (1991): 68.
is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.”5
Like Barthes, Hejinian orients to the form of language itself and to language’s pursuit of knowing a subject, not a person.
Hejinian’s description – of the impossibility of sin-gling out the singular personal – conjures, for me, the ex-perience of being within Whitehead’s body functionings-world: to be amidst the ever-varying manyness of all that comes as one.
5 Ibid., 70.
Amid the unfathomable complexities, the needle’s tip makes distinct twirls
as we cleave our way into the anterior beyond.