There Is Nothing Clean or Spare About Being a Human

Thoughts on Bloodletting by Maria Robinson

1.

The first time I saw a leech, it was attached to the shin of a shrieking artist. It was not a lone hanger-on: she was dappled in bloodsuckers from her ankle to her inguinal groove. I have never birthed an artist (/anyone), but after nearly a decade of working with them in adult form, I imagined each of them must have been the kind of kid you couldn’t turn your back on for a second without chaos ensuing. I knew a painter who made her own brushes from roadkill she bare-handed off filthy road shoulders into the back of her hatchback, unfazed by the rotten guts gushing onto her upholstery, her grocery bags, her light fall jacket. I knew a sculptor who made towering objects out of pink fiberglass insulation she hand-shaped and -sanded without any protective gear. Artists: prancing barefoot in places I wouldn’t traverse in boots. Artists: wading naked into murky, stagnant freshwater and emerging—surprise, surprise!—covered in leeches. Their heedlessness astounded me; it seemed boundless and propulsive. I would say they were committed to it, but commitment implies a level of conscious intention beyond innate constitutional bent. If the world were truly an oyster, the artists I know seemed compelled to slurp it down at every turn, with no regard for provenance or proper handling nor concern for the wracking shits that might follow. Whereas I won’t eat a cherry tomato plucked straight from my own vine without first giving it a clean-water rinse. 

2.

My lifelong avoidance of unnecessary peril doesn’t extend to avoidance of pain. By the time I reached puberty, I actively practiced stoic endurance of minor and more advanced agonies. I would still my face and then wrap my hand around the branch of a picker bush and squeeze, gripping for longer, then harder, then both; thrust my tongue against the terminals of 9-volt batteries for an escalating count; stick my fingers into the blue edges of candle flames and whizzing fan blades until my skin went from screaming to numb; slowly press the lit ends of cigarettes against the soft flesh of my inner forearm until it sizzled enough to scar. My ultimate dream was to be able to calmly extinguish one on my tongue.

I didn’t then—and don’t now—think of these behaviors as self-harm: I did not want to injure myself nor did I find relief in the pain. I only wanted to master my reaction to pain so I could remain impassive when it arrived. It never crossed my mind to wish for a future in which taking ever greater afflictions in stride might be an unnecessary skill; my imagination hit its limit at wanting to bear ever more of it without flinching. 

3.

Phlebotomy, today, might conjure images of white rooms, gloved technicians, single-use tourniquets, and ruby-filled test tubes, but long before the days of collecting small amounts of blood for laboratory analysis, the word—born of the Greek phleb– ‘vein’ + –tomia ‘cutting’—referred to the longstanding historical practice of therapeutic bloodletting. This was during the thousands of years many cultures believed the health of the body was governed by four “humours”—blood, phlegm, and black and yellow biles—and that illness was the result of those humours falling out of balance. Bloodletting was prescribed for an impossibly wide range of maladies and was performed either by slicing a vein or artery and draining the necessary amount of “bad blood” into a purpose-made receptacle, or by the generous application of leeches. It was considered good practice to take blood enough to make the subject faint, a sort of hard reset via aggressive emptying of the bloated rivers inside us. 

4.

Not long after I started squeezing thorns and fingering flames, I began seeking out art that aimed a blade at an artery. I didn’t want funny or sweet or fumbling; I eschewed epiphanies and hope. I wanted work that started at broken and ended at shattered. Here, too, endurance was key: films with thematic and/or formal aims to excruciate; music that rejected melody and refused crescendo; literature that fomented distress and scorned resolution. Art that asked too much of me. Art that bullied my ears and my eyes. Art that harrowed my heart and mind for hours, weeks, years. If it didn’t leave me spent and shivering, it was too twee for me.  

5.

My therapist talks about “regulation strategies.” About how, for most people, the drive to alleviate psychic discomfort is swift and strong—an often-irresistible urge to replace uncomfortable feelings with (at least momentarily) more pleasurable ones. A sort of “act first, think later” approach to making it through the existential pains of any given day, or life. “You,” she says, “have almost the opposite strategy.” I am not a person who’s at risk of impulsivity or its associated regrets; my peril is in abiding much more pain than strictly necessary for much longer than I should.

6.

When my marriage ended, I finally located the limits of my endurance. It took eight years for the ripples to reach my outer rim.

7.

That first year, while physically separated but still legally bound, I had a space in a shared studio building. My neighbors were also my friends. We would head to the studio together and then shut our separate doors. The walls were onion skin-thin and there were frequent disputes over noise. Someone bounced a ball over and over; someone laughed too loudly for too long; someone’s “open music” shredded someone else’s concentration to ribbons. None of it mattered to me. I was too well-practiced at keeping numb. I had a makeshift desk, an old laptop, good headphones. As I stared at the blank screen, I would float my fingers above the surface of the keyboard, flexing them over the keys without striking—without “making a mark,” a visual artist might say, if a keystroke displayed on a glowing screen could be considered the expressive equivalent of a smudge of charcoal, a pencil flick. 

8.

In college, I read a book about a pianist who eschewed his instrument for one full year, instead practicing for hours every day on a soundless wooden board notched with 88 keys. It was a sort of penance, a kind of prayer, a form of mourning. The pianist’s brother had gone missing and the silence was a tribute—and tether—to his absence. 

9.

The silence of my keyboard was not a choice, it was a necessity: whatever depths I needed to plumb to marshal language sat too close to my water table. If I concatenated more than a phrase or two, my body would wrack with sobs. This weeping was independent of my will. My neighbors would rush to my door to make sure I was ok. Often I didn’t realize I was crying until they arrived. 

10.

In those early days of separation, it wasn’t only the act of writing that made me sob. Listening to music, watching a film, reading a book—any of the sorts of aesthetic experiences I once enjoyed had the potential to reduce me to a pile of damp rubble. Likewise those I once scorned: corny rom-coms, girl-power pop anthems.

Even a bee collecting pollen or a bright smile from a stranger might unexpectedly wrench open the spigot of grief. I called it “flash flooding,” as it was both unpredictable and uncontrollable. I walked the world like a peeled grape. Membranous, exposed. Juice spilling from my eyes at the slightest touch. But while my inner reservoir overflowed and poured down my face, the inciting emotions remained at a distance, shadowy forms lurking on a far shore, obscured by a thick fog, only glimpsable in contour. 

11.

In a 2023 interview with The Paris Review, the poet Rita Dove says: “Bad confessional poetry has always raised my hackles, because it goes skewering in deep, exclaiming Ooh, look at this blood! But I’m like, No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.” I ponder the locus of the “bad” within that formulation. Is the act of confession “bad” in itself? Is “good” inversely proportional to evidence of blood? 

12.

I can’t help but hear an echo of my younger self in Dove’s disdain for unconcealed injury, her hunger for the sharp end of the blade. But younger still, before I began to train myself to endure injury without flinching, I was an open font of rage. I collided, constantly, with everyone—parents, siblings, teachers, friends. I listened to furious punk and riot grrrl albums and screamed along. I scribbled spoken-word screeds in gold glitter pen and imagined performing before an audience of similarly seething peers. When did I begin to privilege the appearance of being impervious to pain over the defiant display of my wounds?

13.

An apocryphal Hemingway quote floats around the online writersphere: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” I wonder how the people who pass it around could square such a sanguineous belief with Hemingway’s tourniquetted prose. My own literary education was certainly a bloodless one, a virtuous inculcation into Lishian constraint, dedicated to the meticulous stripping away of every hint of excess or sentiment. The list of don’ts was endless: weak verbs, adverbs, fancy words, dialogue tags other than “said,” first-person point-of-view, similes and metaphors, dreams, cancer, the word “then”(!). If those workshops had an altar, it would have been consecrated to clean, dry bones. 

14.

I think about the artist Catherine Opie and her photographic Self-Portraits, /Cutting and /Pervert, the messages carved into the artist’s skin captured blooming with fresh blood. I think of Marc Quinn’s Self 1991, a frozen cast of the artist’s head made from 10 pints of his own blood. I think of Piero Manzoni’s 90 numbered cans of Artist’s Shit. Beuy’s Fettstuhl. Andy Warhol’s oxidized piss and cum paintings. Judy Chicago’s Red Flag. Ana Mendieta. Andres Serrano. Blood, urine, semen, feces, fat, entrails—a sizeable contingent of modern and contemporary artists materialize their (/our) innards in their work. They shock and scandalize, fascinate and unsettle. I have heard these artists criticized, even demonized! But never for the “bad confessional” act of putting literal blood on the page (/substrate). 

I think about the difference between expressing too much blood linguistically (derisible, “bad,”) and expressing too much blood haematically (medicinal, brave). I can’t help but wonder whether gender is a factor in the difference of perception—the feminized association with expelling blood, the masculinized association with extracting it. 

15.

At the end of The Paris Review’s 1993 interview with Toni Morrison, her interviewer asks “Do you ever write out of anger or any other emotion?”, to which she replies, in part: “I don’t trust that stuff…if it’s not your brain thinking cold, cold thoughts, which you can dress in any kind of mood, then it’s nothing. It has to be a cold, cold thought. I mean cold, or cool at least. Your brain. That’s all there is.” For years—decades—I subscribed to this belief, which mapped so neatly onto my indoctrination into the literature of dry bones. Until the shipwreck of my divorce and the upheaval it uncorked uncovered a conundrum: how to approach the page when emotion roils like magma for an epoch instead of a moment? Without an answer, unable to reconcile my ingrained aesthetic principles with my ongoingly tectonic state, I chose not to approach it at all. While I worked to find my footing and rebuild my life, I wrote hundreds of “notes” in my phone—loose, emotive fragments related to the changes I was going through:

i go for a brisk hike with my grateful dog/get a vigorous massage from a spirit-healer/talk to some voyeuristic lady about people she’ll never know from an armchair too squishy for proper company/sizzle up every vegetable in the fridge/drink water/breathe deep. none of it matters/nothing will budge.

I never tried to develop them further. What would be the point? They were too visceral to be “good.” My cool brain was nowhere to be found. 

16.

Whatever I might have endured before, it had never been enough to splinter my aesthetic from my emotions and my emotions from my intellect, and so I waited—too long—for the reversal of a rupture that in fact would never heal. My therapist encouraged me to “feel my feelings,” but I did not see the use of this. I wanted not just to write from but to live my whole life from the crow’s nest of my cold thoughts.

Even worse than impeding my ability to intellectually distance myself from my pain, “feeling my feelings” impinged on my ability to endure it at all. My instinct was to prevent myself from succumbing to softness. I did not want my appetite for aesthetic brutality diminished, my unflappability in the face of discomfort decreased. I wanted to dispassionately observe my emotions, to autopsy them cleanly (no excess, no mess) in my work. I did not want to surrender to their muck. 

17.

It took eight years for the pain of not writing to surpass my capacity for fortitudinous endurance. Only then did I begin to question the predicate of the matter: Who was my wordless austerity serving? What if my work was still worth making, even without cold thoughts or dry bones? What if there’s room in serious, “good” writing for moments of unconcealed emotion, for semantic intemperance, for imperfection and vulnerability?

18.

I’d grown up with the idea that artists stood solitary and clear-eyed apart from the crowd. Is bleeding on the page at odds with “good” writing because it shatters the illusion of singular genius? Blood connects us. It animates our original umbilical bond. We all emerge slicked in blood. We all bleed red.  

19.

In an interview with Elle magazine, the memoirist Melissa Febos discusses her frustration with the dismissal of the value of telling our own stories: “This logical fallacy was rampant in creative writing circles, and still is: that if it has therapeutic value, it can’t be good art.” 

I can’t help but notice that I read this in Elle and not The Paris Review.

20.

I might never be a tomato-straight-from-the-vine-eater or an uninhibited-plunger-into-murky-pools, but as my relationship to the expressive impulse changed, it was artists—their collective embrace of abandon, their commitment to material exploration, their unapologetic aesthetic obsessions both highbrow and low—who offered me new frames of reference and expanded my sense of possibility for my work. Slowly I reassessed my attachment to stoic dispassion. Piece by piece, I embraced a gradual relinquishing of restraint. Instead of working from a space of detachment, scrupulously keeping my guts to myself in order to “make [the reader] bleed,” I began to allow blood to flow (/show) in my work. To seek connection over control, despite the risk of impugnable prose. This is not an easier path for me. But at least for now, it’s the way my blood beats.

21.

Recently, an artist friend who knows about my shifting relationship to my writing practice sent me Fanny Howe’s essay “Bewilderment.” In it, Howe writes that “[b]ewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability. It breaks open the lock of dualism (it’s this or that) and peers out into space (not this, not that).” I return to this sentiment again and again as I consider the (once unquestionable to me, now unquestionably false) dichotomy between confessionality and creative merit, between emotional distance and aesthetic discernment. 

Howe’s essay loops and wanders, referencing spirals, circling, mazes, whirling, dizziness, oscillation, doubling, unraveling, repetition, and return in both content and form, and I find its disorientation clarifying as I write about bloody/bloodless prose and contemplate the value of confusion, contradiction, vulnerability, and disclosure in (my) art and in life. There is nothing clean or spare about being a human–everything about us and all that surrounds us is messy and complicated and perpetually in-between. Why should “good” writing be any different? 

I take a line from “Bewilderment” and make it my own; I hang it above my desk: 

Decorating and perfecting any subject [every sentence] can be a way of removing all stench of the real until it becomes an astral corpse.

22.

Leeches are still used in medicine today for a very specific form of bloodletting. Their bite contains anesthetic and anti-coagulant properties that, after certain surgeries, help promote the free flow of blood until healing occurs. Without the leeches’ assistance, these blood vessels might become congested, which can lead to tissue death and amputation. In this way, bloodletting after a trauma can be the difference between successful restoration and irreversible damage. 

23.

The brain is not a mortuary chamber. The heart is not a metronome. A tourniquet is an essential tool when arresting a hemorrhage, but if you leave it in place too long, you’ll lose the limb.