Disarticulation

noun: the separation of parts or sections at the joints, especially bones.

I’m in the process of disarticulating.

(And yes, I’ve dumped the 5,000 words on blood in the bin—good riddance.)

I think I became addicted to making myself understood from an early age. I was born with a neurological condition that I now know to be dyspraxia, or developmental co-ordination disorder, but we didn’t have names for those sorts of things in 1980s and 90s Ireland. We had Converse, ice cream vans circulating housing estates, and robbing 20p from your mother’s purse to buy a 99, and me flailing after the van, falling, tripping, etc. I was simply labelled awkward, clumsy, or, one I later came to love through my love of languages like German and Yiddish—a klutz, meaning a block or a lump.

How does a block or a lump communicate? With great, great difficulty. But recently, I’ve been thinking: is being understood overrated? It just might be.

Total bloody legend, Édouard Glissant (read him, read him, read him), wrote that:

‘To move from the oral to the written is to immobilise the body, to take control (to possess it).’

Friends, when you are born into a body like mine, one I now affectionately call staccato-ed, you feel compelled to rush to the page to try to control your reality. When the body mistranslates you, you leap to your own defence in language.

I wrote last time that I was in a rage. It was because I find writing about myself deeply boring. If you know me even a little, you know that joy is my thing. I have a highly judgmental inner craicometer (and God help you in my company if you rank zero craic). Fiction feels like a party to me. Poetry feels like a slow dance. But non-fiction that only turns towards the self is, to borrow a phrase from my beautiful ten-and-a-half-year-old nephew, “total trash.”

This is why we need guides, not idols or influencers, but companions along the way. I started again (I can’t go on… I’ll go on), and my guide arrived in the form of Harpo Marx, who, if you know anything about the Marx Brothers, was the silent one—the one who said absolutely nothing, but let his body (and musicianship) speak for him.

So that’s who I’ve been listening to this past week. Harpo has returned me to a sort of sanity, lit a match in that cavernous mind of mine, and, through saying nothing at all, has set me free. (For now—impending writerly imprisonment is but an atichoo away.)

Lovely reader/writer, who has saved you this week? Let me know.