Part Of My Body Research Articles

On My Seventieth Birthday I Try to Skinny-dip in Boston Harbor, and: Place, and: Gray Storm

On My Seventieth Birthday I Try to Skinny-dip in Boston Harbor, and: Place, and: Gray Storm Sandra Kohler (bio) On My Seventieth Birthday I Try to Skinny-dip in Boston Harbor I cover my nakedness this morningwith an outsize purple tee, “Outrageousolder woman” scrawled in pink acrossthe chest. A gift from my son, daughter-in-law. Beneath it, the only part ofmy body where my skin fits me still,unmarred by time—my shoulders. Sunrise, ebb tide, half an inch of watercovering Tennean Beach’s pebbles, mudI sink into as soon as I step out towarddawning sun. Planning this baptism Iforgot to check tide charts: I’d have towade through seventy feet of muck to getmy feet wet: no quick strip and dip here. Turning seventy: I never imagined this.Years ago, when I’m visiting my eighty-something mother-in-law, she’s gossipingabout a neighbor, calls her “an old lady”—stops herself, says, “I know I’m oldtoo, but not inside.” Inside, what ageam I? Thirty, eighty, fourteen? Will sinking into this muck renew me?On the drive home, passing a shallow [End Page 67] wetland between abandoned factories,I see a flash of white: two egrets gingerlywading, stepping, spreading their wingsin the risen light over a brood of hatchedfledglings, as new as aging is to me. Place This second day of the new year, a Wednesday, feelslike a Monday, the year’s first “real” day. Dawning,it showed Tonawanda Street as quiet, white-glazed, leftover snow almost unrecognizable as snow whereit mounds in banks, shoals along the curb. A thin sunyellows houses against gray skies. A gray imagination suits the day. Curled next to each other on the couchthe dogs sleep after their walk’s excitement: squirrelsand snow in Mother’s Rest Park. Last night a skunk shuffling into the hedges along our front sidewalkset them baying. I’m amazed by this urban landscape,its improbable wildlife, its orts and sludge of refuse, its flowerings, its watery wavering skies, their coldnorthern light, shifting opalescence. There must beVenetian glass this color—a wild blue I can’t name. Across the street in the gingko’s sprawl of gnarlylimbs, three fat black crows perch, inked blotson the skinny branches: a coven, a clutch of them. A red truck pulls out of a driveway opposite ours.There are walkers on the sidewalks now. Where Iused to live I’d walk along the Susquehanna on [End Page 68] mornings like this, taking pleasure in the minimal.In this new life, new dispensation, the minimal thatpleases me is snow, dogs, skies, crows. Yesterday on the T, I stare at a pale woman burying her facein her white shawl, pulling her black hat down overher hair. I wonder what she’s hiding from, or what she is hiding. Then wonder whether thought is alwaysgrounded in place: a thought I had walking alongthe Susquehanna necessarily different from one which surfaces while I’m on the T, watching faces—CapeVerdean, Vietnamese, Irish—an array I can’t beginto name, take in, lacking the new eyes it demands. Gray Storm for Sis, Dolores Zweier, in loving memory A gray storm of a day: weather I’d usuallywelcome, but this morning, after yesterday’s tripto say goodbye to a dying woman, its bleakness echoes, weighs. Overnight, email from a friendwho wonders if he needs a shrink, meds: tells meduring the days he’s full of joy, nights, dread. This seems natural to me, in touch with reality.Earlier this week the Times ran a front-page pieceabout how people all over, except in parts of Europe and the United States, die in pain,the excruciating pain of burns, aids, cancerbecause morphine’s not available. It would take [End Page 69] a Dante to imagine this reality. At my dyingfriend’s bed, what we speak of, like the soulsin hell, is former joy: our walks last summer mornings through neglected gardens, fields,old graveyards, abandoned...

Can I Consider the Pong Racket as a Part of My Body?

Up to which point can people consider as part of their body the Pong racket, or an avatar on the screen, on which do people exert direct motor control as well? When individuals move in a virtual environment, do the proprioceptors convey information about the location of which body? In which environment? How will the information contaminate each other? How does the temperature felt on the real environment influence the interaction in the virtual environment? This paper is not intended to answer these questions, it is rather intended to raise fundamental questions of perception and phenomenology in a digital context in which bodies “are not born; they are made” (Haraway, 1991). The work should act as a positio quaestionis, with the aim of affirming the urgent need for a necessarily interdisciplinary reflection on the overall design of the body - perception - cognition - technology perimeter; it also identifies in the Berthoz simplexity and Ginzburg evidential paradigms, and in the Hansen concept of mixed reality, the building blocks of a theoretical framework aimed to the solution of these questions.

A Professional Patient No More

A Professional Patient No More Anonymous Two* I was 22 when I had my first inpatient admittance to a psychiatric hospitalization. I am now 36 and have not been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in over six years, since I was 30. During the eight year period (from ages 22—30) I was hospitalized a total of 14 times. “This (the hospital) is where I belong,” is the statement that sums up my feelings about psychiatric hospitals after my first hospitalization. “I am sick and I can’t manage the world like other people can,” was the view I had about myself at the time. I was just out of college, in therapy for about one year and on psychotropic medications for about two years. My life, which I had managed somehow to hold together for 22 years, was disintegrating. I believe what finally led me to my first hospitalization was that, for the first time I was dealing, or trying to deal with my problems/issues/illness—whatever you want to call them. The things that woke me up at night, that led me to cry and beg to “something” at night to please not let me wake up the next day. The things that made me think it was a good solution [End Page 12] to pour containers of hot water over parts of my body so I could just be in my body and in the world. My first admittance to a psychiatric hospital saved me from taking my life. It gave me a chance to breathe, to stop having to protect myself from my problems/issues/illnesses. No longer was I the one responsible for giving myself protection. I needed protection from me, and the hospital gave me that. All I had to do was to wake up, take meds, talk to a few doctors, a few counselors, eat, and then go back to bed. At times, that was barely doable. My hospital stays always seemed to make things better. I was treated well, especially by the counseling staff and the nurses. They always listened to me when I was able to open up and talk. The psychiatrists I was assigned to while in the hospital always were willing and wanting to work with my therapist and psychiatrist on the outside. I always felt that my care in and out of the hospital was seamless. Along with getting a respite from life and having to deal with it, I also always left the hospital with a plan. The counselors, social workers, nurses and doctors worked closely with me so I would have a plan of action for when I left the hospital. The brilliant part of this was it was actually meant for me to be able to carry it out, to help me have a more successful transition when I left the hospital. I believe I was very fortunate to be able to be admitted to the same hospital 13 out of the 14 times I was admitted. The system not only knew me, but so did the people, and that made a difference. I didn’t have to start off telling my whole story over and over again. The counselors, social workers, nurses and doctors remembered me and I was able to talk to them without having to rehash everything. They were able to help me see how I had changed for the better since the last time I had been admitted—something that I couldn’t see because all I was focusing on was the fact that I had been admitted to the hospital, again. That I had failed, again. People knew about my strengths and focused on them. They also knew the areas I had problems in and would help me learn new skills that I could add to my toolbox. As the number of hospital stays increased, my length of stay decreased. “This, the hospital, is not where I belong,” is the statement that sums up my feelings about psychiatric hospitals after my last hospitalization, to date. My view of myself during that time, “I may have some problems/issues/illnesses, but that doesn’t mean I can’t manage the...

No Sex Please in Sexuality Research

When I open my legs to the invading hands and instruments of the medical profession, I do so with a comforting fiction in mind: that one part of my body is the same as another to the doctor examini...

Bridging the gap: how traditional healers interact with their patients. A comparative study in Cameroon

To compare traditional healers (TH) and Cameroonian representatives of Western medicine (Western providers (WP)) in terms of patient characteristics and communication patterns during the consultation in rural Cameroon. A facility-based comparative study was conducted. Seven TH were compared to eight WP in the same district. Patients (five per provider) provided detailed socio-demographic data. Recorded consultations were analysed with the Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS). Patients were similar in socio-demographic characteristics except for age, where TH patients were on average 9 years younger (P < 0.05). Patients of TH travelled 2.5 times as far to their provider as did patients in the WP group (79 vs. 31 km; P < 0.05) and paid 12 times more for their treatment (123 vs. 10 Euros; P < 0.05). Consultations of TH were shorter (5.6 vs. 10.3 min, P < 0.01), had fewer utterances (100 vs. 166, P < 0.05) and the patient's share in the communication was smaller (P < 0.01). TH had a higher percentage of lifestyle and psychosocial information at the expense of medical information (P < 0.05) and communicated more emotionally (P < 0.001). They asked more frequently for their patients' opinion (P < 0.01) and explicitly discussed their patients' concept of illness (P < 0.001). Patients of TH responded with a higher percentage of active communication (P < 0.05) i.e. question asking (P < 0.01). Our data contradict the idea that the lack of money or geographical access to Western health care in rural Africa is the main reason for people to consult traditional healers. Compared to WP, TH interacted very differently with their clients, using a more patient-centred communication style, to seek common ground with patients. This different type of interaction could be a relevant factor contributing to the popularity of traditional healers in Cameroon.

MY PROSTHETIC AND I: Identity Representation in Bodily Extension

My prosthetic is a secret of my self. It hides, tucked beneath clothing, allowing me to pass as something that I am not, that I can never be. It is precious to me, it enables me, gives me mobility and an aesthetic that would cease if it was removed from me. Within my body schema, my prosthetic is as much a part of my body as my skin, blood, and organs. It is also an object of technology, a topological replacement of a missing body part. However, a large, un-chartered misunderstanding of experience separates both of these experiences. For many years, academics, artists, and theorists have tried to merge the two, in the process bringing forth ideas on the prosthetic that have seemingly removed it from the realm of disabled experience and into the fantastical world of the uncanny. Therefore, the question for myself, as an artist, is how to explore this large chasm of differing experience and draw out the uncanny into a world of subtle, lived understanding and visual acceptance.

The spatiality of pain

How far can one ascribe a spatial meaning to pain? When I have a pain, for instance, in my leg, how should one understand the “in” in the “pain in my leg”? I argue (contrary to Noordhof) that pain does have a spatial meaning, but (contrary to Tye) that the spatiality of pain is not to be understood in the standard sense of spatial enclosure. Instead, spatiality has a special meaning with regard to pain. By defining pain in phenomenological terms as a disturbed form of bodily perception, I contend that the “in” in “pain in my body” has a dual spatial meaning: firstly, it signifies my internal perceptual relation to a disturbing part of my body; secondly, it denotes the external perceptual relation to my environment that the disturbance forces me to take. Once the spatiality of pain is understood in terms of such a perceptual relation, it is not restricted to localisable hurts, but pertains to all forms of pain, such as affliction and agony.South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25 (4) 2006: pp. 336-349

Steel Is Made Flesh

Steel Is Made Flesh Matt Samet A Gesture Through Time Elizabeth Block Spuyten Duyvil Press http://www.spuytenduyvil.net 280 pages; paper, $14.00 Ronald Sukenick once told a group of writing students that the written word and the page it's printed on comprise a physical medium. You must start here if you are truly to appreciate writing. What a delight, then, to read Elizabeth Block's deft A Gesture Through Time, a novel of love—and love lost—that not only exerts its own physicality through the use of two "flip books" punctuating the prose, but also through various treatises on earthly media like steel, light, film, x-ray, porcelain, the Bay Bridge, Bolex cameras, the body, etc. These lift the words out of the two-dimensional page-trap and into the fertile, three-dimensional sculpture garden of the reader-mind. As a narrative framework, we have a starry-eyed youngster, Elizabeth, seduced as a teenager by Magnitude Hortense Zappa, a worker in a Detroit steel mill owned by Elizabeth's father. Imprinted by this experience, she obsesses over recapturing her first love/sexual blooming. Zappa, meanwhile, has become a successful filmmaker in San Francisco, where the narrator lives, and has taken the name Sarah Ona Broome. Only the cryptic Dr. Ratio, therapist to each woman individually, knows that they now share the same city, a place of magical, near-Mediterranean light (and shadow), as imagined in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), that may or may not be the world they inhabit. Thus, when the role of narrator flip-flops from Elizabeth to Magnitude midway through the novel, we, too, reel with vertigo as we struggle to reconcile our notion of story with the disjunctive, but ultimately cohesive, gesture of Gesture. But plot is ancillary to Block's first novel. Block, an accomplished filmmaker and poet who has done graduate work in cultural anthropology, presents a verbal pastiche: traditional narrative; the stark, black-and-white flip books consisting of 16mm film scans; "found footage frames ofearly film technology (zoetropes)"; MRI and x-ray scans and drawings by the artist Evri Kwong; interviews between the narrator and the author; dramaturgical dialogues between such characters as HUMILIATION and PLEASURE or FILMMAKER and WOMAN; and scientific asides on substances, gizmos, and properties. So wherein lies the unity? In a post-millennial novel like Gesture, it finds a home in the marriage of man and machine, much as the director David Cronenberg proposed in such prescient films as Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983). (James Cameron's work comes to mind here, too.) In 2005, we stroll about with bluetooth technology, loudly, sometimes toxically , broadcasting ourpersonalities through headsets as we receive remote messages through near-invisible earpieces—or, at the other end of the spectrum, jamming one thousand songs onto iPod nanos so we can enter the agora and shirk human contact. However, whereas Cronenberg hypothesized mortification —and only mortification—as a result of the union of metal and flesh, Block, who might harbor some Cronenbergian sympathies, keeps her observations circumspect. Take, for example, Block's description of the x-ray: Paradoxical technology or thanotography, the x-ray represents "death on the body it penetrates." We imagine literal death and other traumatic associations and denials of trauma. The x-ray cannot record the human feeling that precedes the need for the x-ray. No, it certainly cannot. Analogously, can the written word truly convey the human feeling it strives to represent? In the enduring materiality ofits presence and its playful formal invention, Gesture sets itselfapart as an enduring piece ofmetafiction. Contrast that with Block's evocative description of an earthly delight: You move down my body, and I try to keep my hands in the air so the shampoo does not wash away—all this with my eyes closed because I am so mad at you I can not possibly look at you while you are turning me on—and you startto move your mouth right there on the most precious part of my body.... Flesh, here, is revered, even in the face ofanger, but it remains covered by shampoo—a manmade product. Meanwhile, spanning the interstice, we have: "How about technology as an...

The New Old World

Steel Is Made Flesh Matt Samet A Gesture Through Time Elizabeth Block Spuyten Duyvil Press http://www.spuytenduyvil.net 280 pages; paper, $14.00 Ronald Sukenick once told a group of writing students that the written word and the page it's printed on comprise a physical medium. You must start here if you are truly to appreciate writing. What a delight, then, to read Elizabeth Block's deft A Gesture Through Time, a novel of love—and love lost—that not only exerts its own physicality through the use of two "flip books" punctuating the prose, but also through various treatises on earthly media like steel, light, film, x-ray, porcelain, the Bay Bridge, Bolex cameras, the body, etc. These lift the words out of the two-dimensional page-trap and into the fertile, three-dimensional sculpture garden of the reader-mind. As a narrative framework, we have a starry-eyed youngster, Elizabeth, seduced as a teenager by Magnitude Hortense Zappa, a worker in a Detroit steel mill owned by Elizabeth's father. Imprinted by this experience, she obsesses over recapturing her first love/sexual blooming. Zappa, meanwhile, has become a successful filmmaker in San Francisco, where the narrator lives, and has taken the name Sarah Ona Broome. Only the cryptic Dr. Ratio, therapist to each woman individually, knows that they now share the same city, a place of magical, near-Mediterranean light (and shadow), as imagined in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), that may or may not be the world they inhabit. Thus, when the role of narrator flip-flops from Elizabeth to Magnitude midway through the novel, we, too, reel with vertigo as we struggle to reconcile our notion of story with the disjunctive, but ultimately cohesive, gesture of Gesture. But plot is ancillary to Block's first novel. Block, an accomplished filmmaker and poet who has done graduate work in cultural anthropology, presents a verbal pastiche: traditional narrative; the stark, black-and-white flip books consisting of 16mm film scans; "found footage frames ofearly film technology (zoetropes)"; MRI and x-ray scans and drawings by the artist Evri Kwong; interviews between the narrator and the author; dramaturgical dialogues between such characters as HUMILIATION and PLEASURE or FILMMAKER and WOMAN; and scientific asides on substances, gizmos, and properties. So wherein lies the unity? In a post-millennial novel like Gesture, it finds a home in the marriage of man and machine, much as the director David Cronenberg proposed in such prescient films as Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983). (James Cameron's work comes to mind here, too.) In 2005, we stroll about with bluetooth technology, loudly, sometimes toxically , broadcasting ourpersonalities through headsets as we receive remote messages through near-invisible earpieces—or, at the other end of the spectrum, jamming one thousand songs onto iPod nanos so we can enter the agora and shirk human contact. However, whereas Cronenberg hypothesized mortification —and only mortification—as a result of the union of metal and flesh, Block, who might harbor some Cronenbergian sympathies, keeps her observations circumspect. Take, for example, Block's description of the x-ray: Paradoxical technology or thanotography, the x-ray represents "death on the body it penetrates." We imagine literal death and other traumatic associations and denials of trauma. The x-ray cannot record the human feeling that precedes the need for the x-ray. No, it certainly cannot. Analogously, can the written word truly convey the human feeling it strives to represent? In the enduring materiality ofits presence and its playful formal invention, Gesture sets itselfapart as an enduring piece ofmetafiction. Contrast that with Block's evocative description of an earthly delight: You move down my body, and I try to keep my hands in the air so the shampoo does not wash away—all this with my eyes closed because I am so mad at you I can not possibly look at you while you are turning me on—and you startto move your mouth right there on the most precious part of my body.... Flesh, here, is revered, even in the face ofanger, but it remains covered by shampoo—a manmade product. Meanwhile, spanning the interstice, we have: "How about technology as an...

The Spatiality of Pain

How far can one ascribe a spatial meaning to pain? When I have a pain, for instance, in my leg, how should one understand the “in” in the “pain in my leg”? I argue (contrary to Noordhof) that pain does have a spatial meaning, but (contrary to Tye) that the spatiality of pain is not to be understood in the standard sense of spatial enclosure. Instead, spatiality has a special meaning with regard to pain. By defining pain in phenomenological terms as a disturbed form of bodily perception, I contend that the “in” in “pain in my body” has a dual spatial meaning: firstly, it signifies my internal perceptual relation to a disturbing part of my body; secondly, it denotes the external perceptual relation to my environment that the disturbance forces me to take. Once the spatiality of pain is understood in terms of such a perceptual relation, it is not restricted to localisable hurts, but pertains to all forms of pain, such as affliction and agony.

A teenager's experience of cancer

A teenager's experience of cancer

August, and: The First Manifesto, and: Seeing my mother seeing herself

August Within the screened porch we shared raspberry lemonade. Your adams apple rose towards your jaw when you swallowed. You mistook me [End Page 177] for interested and pretended you could read palms. Told me I had an extra line. I said it was from my previous life as a soldier in Cambodia. You asked if that was in Europe. We made up our own song, once. Back when you told me voices like ours are meant for steamboats and making wake. I believed you and you pulled from me another verse. Those nights we counted the angles of lightning. Summer storms were gentle. I let you kiss me until thunder reminded me of August. Maybe you were offended when I asked you to leave. Lemonade unfinished, the heavy breath of rain joined ice cubes in the glass like bells. Falling asleep alone, I dreamt of stacking sandbags. [End Page 178] The First Manifesto Red skin is meant to be bitten. That's why, when you whispered Don't touch and curled your index finger around the bone of my wrist, I couldn't help but think of handcuffs. So I ate. Because ribs are not logical birthplaces, and what other legends were you going to claim? Besides, naming eagles and sea-turtles was a one-man job. Eventually you would have become tired, scrutinizing parts of my body, spitting jumbled syllables. You would have assigned a title to every freckle. Soon, you would have had nothing else to own. I laugh that you believed, then, that neither towers nor forty rains were capable of falling. I ate so you'd know destruction and his many tongues. And you, you thought you died a master. [End Page 179] Seeing my mother seeing herself She lost her hair watched clumps spin then choke down the drain stepped out of the shower looked at her flat chest two diagonal lines facing inward like angry cartoon eyebrows steam on the mirror stared into her blurry reflection her sister's her mother's swearing to be the lucky survivor of the three hair or no hair began wearing berets then a wig fake curls like spiders' legs now taking the folded towel from the shelf the towel she folded from the pile of stacked towels she refused to let anyone else remove from the dryer even when nauseous from chemo this was hers matching corners to corners greens and blues into rectangles stacking them neatly cherishing right-angles weekly she'd fold take breaks every few minutes regain her balance then continue one of these towels rubbed against her scalp clumps falling into soft terry cloth onto tiles beneath she looked up saw herself hair hanging weakly in spotted patches round hazel eyes caught my reflection in the doorway as if she had known I had been there all along

Personal Accounts: Scrambled Eggs for Brains

Personal Accounts: Scrambled Eggs for Brains

Allergic to the sun

Allergic to the sun

Flow, Centering, and the Classroom: Wisdom from an Ancient Friend

O one-two-three. I am cantering. No, we are cantering. We are moving rhythmically forward in this three-beat gait with a suspended fourth beat, and I am so relaxed that it feels as if my own legs are doing the cantering, not my horse’s. I feel centered with my horse as she carries me willingly; I am sitting tall, square, supple, yet strong enough to balance with 1,000 pounds of momentum underneath me. I live for such spiritual moments; we are in flow. To be centered in the physical sense is to be balanced, relaxed, strong, aware. A rider must keep her center on a horse both physically and spiritually if she hopes to achieve quality in dressage requirements such as shoulder-in or halfpass, movements where the horse moves laterally and forward with much force. Dressage is the ultimate form of classical riding where the rider and horse “dance” together as one with very little obvious communication. It only takes seeing the Lippizaner stallions perform or watching the dressage events in the Olympics to understand the seamless, precise, gentle, but extravagant energy that characterizes the dressage pair. If a horse is naturally balanced, achieving this ideal is somewhat easier, which is why certain breeds are preferred. My horse, however, was very unbalanced, stiff in some ways, supple in others. Until I learned to find my own balance, my own center, I could not help her find hers. And so began my quest. Through the years, I have learned first the physical balance required to find my center and then the spiritual balance that allows me to keep my center while using different parts of my body independently. This process required learning first cognitively, and eventually somatically, the physical and mental strategies that would allow me to be centered, relaxed, and confident. My experience as a teacher

Race, ethnicity, and pain treatment: striving to understand the causes and solutions to the disparities in pain treatment.

would like for them to know that I am in pain or this part of my body hurts or the other part hurts — that I am not lying about it. To examine me and to cut down on the pain….And help me out.Patient with Sickle Cell Disease, Focus Group ParticipantPain in the United States is widely recognized to be undertreated; however, the capacity to treat pain has never been greater. The causes of this undertreatment are varied. As we focus on pain and why it is too often ineffectively treated, we also discover that this undertreatment afflicts some more than others. What divides the some from the others isn't limited to one factor, but one particularly disturbing factor is race and ethnicity. Racial and ethnic minority populations are at higher risk for oligoanalgesia, or the ineffective treatment of pain. Only through further study of the differences in pain treatment based on race and ethnicity can we develop strategies to reduce the disparities in care.

St. Augustine's Novelistic Conversion

ST. AUGUSTINE'S NOVELISTIC CONVERSION Tyler Graham Syracuse University In his famous biography of St. Augustine, Peter Brown attempts to explainwhat set the Confessions "apart from the intellectual tradition to which Augustine belonged" (Augustine ofHippo 169). While he concedes that "the Confessions are a masterpiece ofstrictly intellectual autobiography" (167), he concludes that it is more important to realize that they "are, quite succinctly, the story of Augustine's 'heart,' or of his 'feelings'—his affectus"(169). He continues to explain that "in the Confessions, however, the evocation of Augustine's feelings forms part of the wider study of the evolution ofhis will" (172). Thus, Brown suggests that Augustine's central anthropological concern is to determine the origin and/or causes ofhuman desire (i.e. the "evolution of will"). Augustine's "exhaustive analysis ofhis motives" (as Brown describes it) is linked to his lifetime struggle to explain the complex interaction between his free will and a divine will (grace) to transform his "sinful" desires and create a "new heart" within him. In Brown's view, the Confessions reflect Augustine's struggle to discover whether desire originates in God or man. We can agree with Brown that this theological agenda is important to Augustine, for it will resurface in all of his theological struggles stretching from his pre-Christian engagement with the Manichees to his final battle with Pelagius. Nevertheless, I will argue in this paper that the Confessions reflect another important dimension to Augustine's morphology ofdesire. Regardless 136Tyler Graham of its divine or human source, Augustine's desires often begin with the imitation of another person. In portraying examples of his life up to and including his famous conversion in the year 386 (Book VIII), Augustine consistently shows that his desires have been copies or imitations ofvarious models whom he has chosen to follow. Writers such as Brown have considered the importance ofdesire (or the will) in the Confessions, and critics like Geoffrey Harpham (whom we will address later) have examined Augustine's interest in mimesis during various scenes in the book. Yet, with the exception ofAvitol Wohlman, no one (to my knowledge) has adequately considered the combination of the two: mimetic desire. In the first book ofthe Confessions, Augustine recounts his childhood, and, by the eighth chapter, he has already introduced a theme which will haunt the entire work: the link between desire and language. My desires were internal; adults were external to me and had no means ofentering into my soul. So I threw my limbs about and uttered sounds, signs resembling my wishes. (1:8) Language is born as a result ofthe need to express desire. For Augustine, words, gestures, and all utterances connect the "internal" wants to the "external" object ofcommunication (in this case, adults). In fact, ifAugustine links desire with the soul (external adults could not "enter his soul"), then language becomes the bridge between souls: it communicates desire from soul to soul. When Augustine reaches boyhood, and he begins to learn the accepted modes of articulation, the link between language and desire remains: "By groans and various sounds and various movements of parts of my body I would endeavor to express the intentions ofmy heart to persuade people to bow to my will" (1:13). Language communicates desire, but it also seeks to transform and generate desire. Beyond simply explaining his wishes, Augustine's language is persuasive, seeking to get others to "bow to my will." Whereas some people would like to remember their childhood as a time of innocence, joy, and peace, Augustine depicts his early life as "sinful," unhappy, and fraught with tears and conflicting interests. For an infant ofthat age, could itbe reckoned good to use tears in trying to obtain what it would have been harmful to get? . . The feebleness of infant limbs is innocent, not the infant's mind. (1:11) St. Augustine 's Novelistic Conversion137 Although he does notrememberbis own infancy, Augustine extrapolates from his analysis ofother children. I have personally watched and studied a jealous baby. He could not yet speak and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother's milk. Who is unaware ofthis fact ofexperience? Envy among infants is universal...

Around the Festivals / 3: Bread and Butter: Productive Contradictions

Let’s open with a warm-up exercise. What words come to mind when you think about theatre festivals? Sitting on the floor with my legs crossed after joining parts of my body with those of people I have never met before (yearning for a chair somewhere in a corner where I don’t have to introduce myself yet again), I might suggest “stimulating,” “overwhelming,” “hectic,” and most importantly, “choices.”

Introspection, Schizophrenia, and the Fragmentation of Self

When I am melting I have no hands, I go into a doorway in order not to be trampled on. Everything is flying away from me. In the doorway I can gather together the pieces of my body. It is as if something is thrown in me, bursts me asunder. Why do I divide myself in different pieces? I feel that I am without poise, that my personality is melting and that my ego disappears and that I do not exist anymore. Everything pulls me apart.... The skin is the only possible means of keeping the different pieces together. There is no connection between the different parts of my body.2

Vladimir Nabokov’s Solus Rex and the “Ultima Thule” Theme

Nabokov’s unfinished novel, Solus Rex, composed in Paris during the winter of 1939-40, was the final flowering of the author’s “last season of Russian prose writing.” The novel was ultimately abandoned following Nabokov’s emigration to America in May 1940. Nabokov apparently intended to resume work on it, for in a letter of April 29, 1941, to his new friend Edmund Wilson, he remarked that he had “left Europe in the middle of avast Russian novel which will soon start to ooze from some part of my body if I go on keeping it inside.”There was no resumption, however.