A Matter of Appearance by Emily Wells

Author:Emily Wells [Emily Wells]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sontag; chronic illness; Behcet's-disease; autoimmune; Behcet’s; memoir; language; Freud; hysteria; dancing; dance; ballet; pain; gender; disease; illness; biography; biographies; medical; medicine; health; doctor; health and wellness; autobiographies; creativity; genetics; health and fitness; medical books; nursing; wellness; nurse; ballet books; biographies of famous people; health books; ancestry; ancestry dna test kit; nurse gifts; emt; family tree; autobiography; ballet book; nurse books; genetics testing kit; ballet gifts
ISBN: 9781644212776
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2023-04-18T18:00:00+00:00

When I can’t get my thoughts down, I look at the photographs of Augustine. In one, she is mischievous, giving Charcot a sidelong glance, skeptical, and I wonder if she so obediently offered herself up for medical policing not only to create a beautiful final photograph or contribute knowledge about the nature of her illness, but also to experience the time spent posing, the moment of self-loss, respite, oblivion. Are the images a quickened path to the climaxes of her life? Does she have a clear image of herself outside Charcot’s creation?

Augustine continues to come to me; I continue to transcribe her; we are united in having been rendered in a language that cannot account for us. It is too easy to speculate about her motivations. It is entirely possible that she found the life available to her before the Salpêtrière banal, that the possibilities of a life in the confines and language of the hospital were simply more exciting. The retreat of bodyminds from an unacceptable world, the scream of symptoms against chemicals and contagion—both create the conditions of refusal: I am constantly discovering new things I cannot or will not do.

Or maybe it was about the taking of the picture, the process and the ritual, the feeling that the act of being photographed was what she was, if who we are is how we fill the vastness of our days. Or, maybe—and this is the explanation I favor most—maybe she followed Charcot into that studio for each private rehearsal enthusiastically, her eyes locked on him the whole time, and when she slipped into the passionate poses for the camera, she was triumphant. She was getting precisely what she wanted, and if I watch her closely enough, I might, too. But, of course, the most likely explanation is an ancient, thoughtless instinct toward survival.

I prefer Augustine’s photographs to accounts of her life and symptoms, written by doctors, labeling her poses and attacks. In the archive of her photos, her face is appropriated but also drawn down from clinical anonymity. Am I simply punctum hunting through her photos, limiting their significance to whatever they make me feel, whatever they present to me about myself? In graduate school, I wrote a contrived paper modeling such a hunt. In W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the title character recalls observing a woman he believes to be his mother, who was forced to appear in a Nazi propaganda film: “Around her neck, she is wearing a three-stringed and delicately draped necklace which scarcely stands out from her dark, high-necked dress, and there is, I think, a white flower in her hair . . . I gaze and gaze again at that face, which seems to me both strange and familiar, said Austerlitz, I run the tape back repeatedly.” I wrote that I was waiting for something, a rupture in Austerlitz’s examination of the film as a pure document, but all I was able to find is that he described the necklace incorrectly; in fact, it

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