Murmurations (II)

Editor's Note:
This is the second installment in a three-part essay. To read the first installment, visit this link: Part I.

The word arrhythmic, from the Greek arrhythmos or without rhythm, did not always have such a strong association with the human heart. Broadly, arrhythmic means loss of rhythm, like a lack of a structured repetition of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry, in notes, in music. When Plato wrote in Laws: “Order in movement is called rhythm,” he suggested rhythm is a kind of organizing principle of the soul. He also related musical rhythm to the stages of childhood development, the transition from “perpetually breaking into disorderly cries and jumps” to acquiring “a sense of order.” It’s that sense of order, according to Plato, that divides the Eurowestern Man (with a capital ‘M’) from animal. 

English-language prosody has historically drawn from Plato’s definition of rhythm and uses rhythmic value as a form of discipline. In this definition, rooted in anthropocentric, Western humanist values, rhythm is a carceral mode.

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After pianist Elaine Chew had surgery to regulate her heart rate, she used data from her recorded heartbeats to make a series of compositions called “The Arrhythmia Suite.” The music is not an abstraction of her pulse, but a deeply specific cardiological song and record of her transforming rhythm.

When my rhythm changed I took notes. But the notetaking was fraught. If there was a language for this, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. I wasn’t sure it was mine to use. 

When blood-bound cortisol spikes and adrenaline peaks brought me to the page, what did they want? 

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early memories of having a heart:
-kid at the park says, “You can actually scare someone to death”
-zebrafish can regrow damaged parts of their hearts / coral, jellyfish, and starfish are heartless
-polygraph test instructions read, “If the individual has engaged in such activities and denies it, there will be an autonomic response” 

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Plato goes on to write that “proper” rhythmic education can correct “grievous palpitations of the heart,” which he associates with behavioral misconduct. The heart, like other organs of the body, has long histories of narrative and lyric associations. In English, the heart loves, breaks, enlarges, shrinks, stops, flutters, is ripped out, transmutates into cold stone, is fragile as glass, leaves the body to appear on the sleeve, in one’s hands, in the hands of another. In Persian, the liver, too, is the beloved’s organ. In this context, the liver has a different kind of rhythm-–it filters the blood, clears away poisons in the stream, and communicates with sugars. جیگرم (you are) my liver, sweet—my rhythmos which comes from rhein, or “to flow,” روان, like unhindered blood.

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At a 2017 Barnard College event “Poetics of Justice: A Conversation Between Claudia Rankine and Dionne Brand,” Dionne Brand spoke of syntax as a mode of the state’s control: “Everything that offers a sentence velocity, causality, trajectory must be thrown up.” The state’s use of rhythm propels a sentence into law; sentence “flow” enables violence. What would it look like to disable this flow? To undo rhythm by centering disability? How to situate the state as a place of thrombosis?

I look to the forms we break and remake to engage in a re-ordering of rhythm. What is a poetics of the un-metaphorical heart? How is the cardiovascular system in conversation with poetry and vice versa? 

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early memories of having a heart:
-linear time does not hold space for a rogue flicker
-how to make memory flicker? 
-look up cortisol & catecholamines
-the Concealed Information [Guilty Knowledge] Test records prisoners’ heart’s reaction to new information. Deceleration or acceleration = guilty?
-they build a new wall around the 108 year old fig tree (w/ observation deck)

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Arrhythmias were first observed by listening for a peripheral pulse. Later, optical mapping was performed to detect the presence of an irregular pattern. Before the map, there was a sound. 

Performance artist and writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s poem “american-Palestinian incantation” begins with the line: “absence makes the heart.” Tbakhi’s truncation of the adage renders the heart as both shaped by colonial displacement and as changeable, remakeable. The incantation is written almost entirely in couplets that recreate rhythm over and over again. “i do not believe in object permanence,” reads one line, and later:

on days i feel too solid,
i wear the border around my neck: black and white, 

fishnet patterned, tassled. this way 
you do not have to wonder in which language my blood 

moans. my veins a cyst filled to the brim. 

The speaker labors against a body simplified by settler-colonial land and gender borders. The border itself is queered, worn as clothing. Blood flows in a language detached from settler nation. The poem continues with a list of beliefs: “i believe in missiles. i believe in tunneling / underneath walls. i believe that god, too, has kissable feet.” The list creates rhythm that rewires the text toward possibility.

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Early experiments in determining the nature of arrhythmias were also conducted on frog and tortoise hearts. In one experiment, a frog’s sciatic nerve was accidentally moved over the beating heart of another frog and the pulse in its surrounding muscles synchronized with this other heartbeat. Is an arrhythmia a failed attempt to synchronize to another’s body? Does forging two pulses into one sever the body from itself?

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early memories of having a heart:
-the heart can beat in the neck, repeatedly, like a memorized poem by Rudaki or Jean Valentine
-memory of reciting [by heart] an objectivist poem in an all-white room
-what is it to be incessant? 
-i count the number of times the news reads, in passive tense, “following torture, her heart gave out”

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In How To Wash A Heart, Bhanu Kapil archives the heart of a nondescript “visitor” as it is depleted of its resources in the “host’s” house. Under the supposed care of the host, the visitor’s heart is racialized, consumed, studied. Kapil writes:

In that moment, I understood that you were a wolf
Capable of devouring
My internal organs
If I exposed them to view.
Sure enough, the image of a heart
Carved from the body
Appeared
In the next poem you wrote.

Kapil’s collection is addressed to the host—to a colonial “you”—who is both a figure of carnal consumption and a poet. In fact, it is, in part, the host’s position as poet that allows for the extraction of the guest’s heart. Throughout the book, the guest recalls memories of survival despite the host’s violence. Kapil writes, “When you watch my plays, your heart / Will make a circuit with the dense shadow / In the upper part of the atmosphere.” And a few lines later, “Sometimes I lie on the earth face down / To connect / With its copper plate.” Protecting the heart involves making its rhythms opaque, unhearting it from human spaces that are co-opted by whiteness. Here, the land and atmosphere outside of the home become spaces where the guest’s heart is possible—where such a rhythm is possible.

While Kapil’s work is allegorical, the guest’s heart is not a metaphor. At times, the speaker takes on the host’s point of view: “Prick me. / And I will cut off the energy / To your life.” Here, the colonial nation becomes a kind of specter that grants only conditional nourishment to migrants as a visceral form of control.

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early memories of having a heart:
-today, tried to translate memory while also translating fear 
-zigzagged the perimeter of tree-lined houses
-in the forest, wrote into the soil: I always feel there is someone watching me.

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In his cross-genre work Undocuments, John-Michael Rivera writes of the Aztec Anales de Tlatelolco, which records the catastrophe of colonization. In a series of dissonant journal entries juxtaposing personal notes and news headlines, Rivera reminds us of the ongoing settler-colonial apocalypse. The state’s regulation of bodily organs such as the heart and kidney create an incessant anxiety, a rhythm fueled by human capital. Rivera reproduces the news headline: “‘Dying Immigrant Denied Kidney Transplant Because He Is Undocumented.’ Huffington Post”; another journal entry details the onset of Rivera’s heart palpitations, which haunt him for years to come. The palpitations become a counter-record of the state’s prescribed status, “undocumented”: 

I lie motionless in bed, my finger frozen on my neck taking my pulse. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I match my heart rate to my watch. I press my neck so often in 2012 that a rash forms where my carotid artery is buried under my skin. My neck smells of hydrocortisone for the remainder of the year.

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early memories of having a heart:
-the vagus nerve connects throat to heart, digestive tract to uterus in one long vaulted arrow
-deoxygenated blood/oxygenated blood = a kind of past/future?
-dreamt of a barbed purple brush fluttering 
-every word I know translates roughly to a heart rate