Between Agency and Fate: Towards a New Poetics of Illness and Healing

I called the hypnotherapist and left my voice.
The next day we spoke:
What did I want?

To clear blocks. To stop excavating.
That’s what one does with dead languages and civilizations.

Yes! When we have enough earth, we can build.
Then:
Is it all right if we go around instead of through?

Then he told me the story of the woman in pain
the woman who went to the clinic and slept there
woke to tell the dream see it recorded make her offering
go home

Together we began to compose a poem
I spoke, he translated
sending my words back to me
rebuilding them as a sanctuary
I could now enter to rest

*

I.

I was recovering from writing a book. A book made possible by illness, generative and poetic in the ways Susan Sontag had warned about in Illness as Metaphor, while famously writing, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Yet I had thrived on the spleen of criticism. I had been captivated by impersonations of suffering.

I did not want to turn healing into absolution or absolve healing from its entanglement with harm.

Writing poems gave me refuge, even though these poems had always been the companion to the anti-academic book I’d finished, shadowing it like lead on the underside of a page.

This book, too, ended with a surrogacy, one that was deliberate. I made a veil through which the next book would appear:

one can sleep in another’s place
one can dream for them

Can a book heal a book?

I wanted a different poetics now, made with many people in real time, woven from their words and struggles in the great experiment of San Francisco, drawing on the city’s energy and legacy of work in consciousness studies, holistic healing, medical humanities, disability rights, its long grief and care for people with AIDS.

To write with Eric Greenleaf’s words in mind: Love is a better model than illness.

To write healing not as self-recovery but infinite extension to others, to write under the morbid symptoms of hyper-capitalism, with increasing numbers of people starving for the lie of scarcity, increasing evidence of what we know in our guts: that inequality sickens, it kills, anthropogenic disaster drives millions from home into the violent impasse of borders. Into the widening gap, the growing chasm, as Greeks say.

Whether to change or restore
Getting the body back
or accepting it lost to all sides
Recovering the dead to heal the polis
lost given

I did not want to be consoled. I did not want to disavow complicity or reject ambiguity in the service of pronoia. I did not want to turn healing into absolution or absolve healing from its entanglement with harm.

I wanted to be clear-eyed about the violent ideologies embedded in discourses of healing, which I had experienced firsthand with those who called themselves healers. I was suspicious of charisma as a mystification of power. I knew that some of my audience would be just as suspicious and dismissive of the very term healing, given its frequent deployment by self-help personalities, wellness hucksters, and politicians to mystify the very conditions from which they profited and did not actually seek to change.

I came of age in a poetry world suspicious of art’s utility. As a young person, I felt scornful of poets who announced that personal tragedy or struggle had made them poets. I couldn’t stand the idea that art might be equivalent to therapy. Art should be art for art’s sake! Useless, difficult, not about something but the thing itself. Language. Did I assume instrumentality made art an uncomplicated balm? Did I assume uselessness made poetry free? At the same time I often reminded myself of W. E. B. DuBois’s dictum: “all Art is propaganda and ever must be.”

Back in the days when I went from doctor to doctor, I came across the products of medical intuitive and energy healer Caroline Myss, author of the not-so-subtly titled Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can. But it is in her book Anatomy of the Spirit that Myss reveals her full cosmology. Badly camouflaged in all that syncretic wisdom, all those esoteric networks—the chakras, the sacraments, the dazzling Sefirotic tree that Myss and her ilk graft onto a body transcendent of difference—the New Age message has always carried clear instruction in the American myth: You are responsible for what happens to you. You didn’t manifest hard enough. Your thoughts became your reality. You didn’t get rid of the ghosts.

The medical-industrial complex is more blunt: you smoked; therefore, you got cancer. You got mononucleosis; therefore, you damaged your immune system. You didn’t manage stress adequately; therefore, you had a heart attack. You didn’t take care of yourself. The individual is responsible for both malady and redress, mocked as a little god. The classicist and poet Ruth Padel writes that Homeric and fifth-century tragic imagery “embodies the idea that gods, or godlike feelings, strike and enter the innards.” Emotions were visceral events launched from the outside. Some agency, the agency of gods made in humans’ image, becomes assigned to illness. An anthropomorphic god becomes the cause. But then we progressed to interiority. The gods were turned into self. And how can you be forgiven when the gods lie inside you? The cause becomes you.

We are not gods. We know the powers who contort our organs, who stir up bile and choler and melancholy so that we feel what they cannot.

If “healing” seemed to collude with capitalism, then I would dig into that collusion. I would dig into my fascination with healing and its relationship to a potential praxis.

I would approach it as an apophatic exercise.
Healing is not
an accomplishment. victory. the antithesis of illness.
Healing cannot
undo the disaster. reverse time.
These were some forms of the apophatic.
What is healing when it is said not to occur?
These were some forms of the impasse:
incapacity. failure. obstruction.
refusal. choice.

Did I mean healing or cure?

Beset by pain his entire adult life, self-medicating with opium, Antonin Artaud sought healing while ferociously refusing cure.

And the disability culture activists I came to know also refused the premise of cure.

Cure seemed easy, a lure of capitalism. Of course, the perception of ease is central to the lure. But we prefer our disease to be acute and limited.

In contrast, healing was complicated and often violent: experimental, rhetorical, magical, an effect or spectacle of time.

Healing had an unknown destination or had no destination; it came and went “in the land of pain.”

To be the hero or victim of one’s story is to deny the lines of power that cross and enervate our bodies, charge us with relation. Who does not know anymore that the opposition to universal coverage in the United States is fueled by the punishing myth of self-reliance?

To return to the surface. To start again. To become whomever you like.

This is frontier logic: Frederick Jackson Turner’s “perennial rebirth.”

I no longer see healing as an ultimate return to the surface to tell the tale. Ishmael, via the Book of Job: “AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE.” To understand healing as a triumph—or failure—of the individual, a journey of self-transformation, is to remain entranced by a peculiarly American enterprise. To comply with neoliberalism. To fall for the lie of imperial time.

So I would give up the heroic setting-out-and-return. I would be disloyal to the nostos.

*

Were the chronically ill those whom cure eluded?

Or did they elude cure?

Were they excluded from healing?

Or were they traffickers who came to know its precincts better than anyone else, expert in its weights, values, price?

For over a millennium in the ancient Mediterranean, those who could not be treated successfully by conventional means could seek healing at an Asklepieion or Aesculapium, a clinic dedicated to Apollo and his son, Asklepios, the divine physician. While practices differed across these sanctuaries and the eras in which they operated, all of them shared the common element of incubation, or enkoimesis, ritual sleep to produce a dream in which the suppliant would receive a remedy or prophecy.

To understand healing as a triumph—or failure—of the individual, a journey of self-transformation, is to remain entranced by a peculiarly American enterprise.

Those who traveled to the Asklepieion were generally people with longstanding ailments whom physicians had turned away, or those who intended to incubate on behalf of people too ill to make the pilgrimage. All were welcomed no matter their age, status, or origin—except for those in labor or at the point of death.

At Epidauros, both a cult center and an organized therapeutic center, suppliants took part in a ritual sequence of modalities that included attendance at a drama, listening to hymns, undergoing a regimen of purification involving hydrotherapy and drinking water from a sacred spring, and burning sacrificial cakes. This culminated in sleep in the inner sanctum or abaton, the closed or sunken part of the dormitory. The healing dream could include instructions from Asklepios or function as the treatment itself. It was auspicious to be licked by a snake or dog, the god’s helpers. The actors in a pageant about Asklepios and his family may also have been the therapeuts, priests who attended the patients in the abaton, who may have induced the suppliant’s sleep and laid their hands on them and whispered to them as they slept. On waking, the healed patient would report the dream to the therapeut, the dream would be recorded, and the patient would make their offering to thank Asklepios. The testimonies were then transferred to votive tablets known as iamata, which newly arrived suppliants could see and read before undertaking their own enkoimesis. In later eras, these miracle cures were sometimes the result of surgery under anesthesia, evident in the abundance of bronze instruments found at Epidauros.

Epidauros was not the oldest Asklepieion but it became the legendary origin for the others. The cult spread to Kos, Pergamum, Corinth, and beyond; more than two hundred sanctuaries claimed to have been founded by Epidauros. A suppliant who made the pilgrimage successfully might found a sanctuary of Asklepios when they returned home. The god of medicine was himself a traveler. His cult traveled by serpent: introducing the god and building an Asklepieion required snakes to be brought from Epidauros to the new locale.

Around 420–419 BCE, a few years after the Plague of Athens, a citizen invited the god to the city and built a shrine for him. Before the Asklepieion was built on the southern slope of the Acropolis, long before the state officially adopted the cult in the 4th century, the playwright Sophocles hosted the god in his home. Asklepios arrived in the city during the festival of the Greater Eleusinian Mysteries and was incorporated into the rites through a new festival, the Epidauria. In 292 BCE, during another epidemic, Roman ambassadors traveled to Epidauros to bring back the statue of Asklepios. Instead, they brought back a serpent that, upon reaching Rome, swam to the shore of Isola Tiberina, a good omen for building a temple there. In Ovid’s telling, the Romans travel to Epidauros to beseech the god, who rises up before them as a giant serpent, crosses the sea, and—still in theriomorphic form—comes onto shore.

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From Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing by Eleni Stecopoulos. Copyright © 2024. Available from Nightboat Books.