Murmurations (III)

Editor’s Note:
This is the third installment in a three-part essay. Read Part II here

Parts I and II of “Murmurations” focused on the colonial violence of metaphorizing the heart and the ways in which poets create their own versions of rhythm in the face of carceral Eurowestern notions of rhythm-keeping. What, those posts ask, is the language of the physical heart? This third part looks to the heart as a speculative space: How does the way we write and think about the heart change the heart? 

There is a range of writing on the ways breath transforms the line, and in turn, how reading a line of poetry can reroute the reader’s breath. I think of Whitman's privilege in claiming his own breath, his own heartbeat: “My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs.” Or Robert Hass’s idea that “if you read a poet’s line-breaks correctly, you’ll be breathing as the poet breathed.” But poets have also written on the interrupted, stolen, polluted, unfinished breath—respiration that is carefully cataloged and controlled by the empire—just as they have remarked on breath as transformation and agency. In Citizen, Claudia Rankine writes on sighing as both a product of and resistance to structural violence: “Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that.” I recall, also, Poupeh Missaghi’s reading of text as a body with collective respiration in trans(re)lating house one: “The text breathes. The text grows. The text decomposes.” Or, we might look to Renee Gladman’s rendering of breath in Event Factory: “My name is (then gave a puff of air). Will you come with me?” How are these forms of breath cared for within the line? How does breathing/beating shape the future of the line? 

In thinking about the speculative possibilities of breath and line, we must also consider the heart, which supplies blood to the lungs, making breath possible in the various ways it is possible (precarious and ever-changing) both on and off the page. 

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How can a textual practice of care for the nonmetaphorical heart inform future landscapes of care? 

For me, writing about the heart opens a space where forms of knowledge outside of Western science, philosophy, and feeling can be acknowledged, enacted, and shaped into a future. I was afraid to take on this topic (beyond the fear of cliché or lyric excess), because as I wrote, my rhythm changed. In writing about fear of a disrupted electrical signal—IVs pressed into my veins, the circulation of myself from elsewhere to the interior and back out—my heartbeat shifted and unknown rhythms flooded the text. They were translatable, alive in words, more alive than words themselves. 

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Once, after an argument with a white man who took up a lot of space in the room, I had a series of ectopic heartbeats. For two hours I thought about the exchange obsessively. Did I defend myself the way I had wanted to? 

The ectopics went away, but I wrote in my notebook: 

Speculative is defined as “based on conjecture rather than ‘knowledge/fact.’” 
Can my heart change the future by dealing with the past? 

I thought the extra beats were secret messages from another dimension. I was reading a lot of science fiction at the time. 

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In 2020, I was working on a poetry-sound project with media artist Eliseo Ortiz. We wanted to know how many times the word “heart” was used in national anthems across the world and to hear the various ways the body was enmeshed in performances of nationhood. Often violently, the heart, the ears, the eyes, the hands, appeared in anthems from different nations, beating, listening, watching, building. We layered sections of the songs that used the word “heart”—the sounds collided in a dissonant orchestra—and took notes while transposing them over figures of the circulatory system, then, later, over diagrams of the human heart. What did it look like for the physical heart to be called into action by these songs? 

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The image above consists of lyrics from different national anthems stacked on one another where the word “heart” from each lyric is aligned. The individual lyrics read: “Our heart and soul are dedicated to you,” “We’ll toil with heart and hands,” “Forever your skies, your air, set my heart in tune,” “Mountain meadow heart and spire,” and “That binds our hearts from coast to coast.” Through the words “heart” runs a vertical, solid-black line with curves. At the top end of this line is the word “throat,” in the middle is “digestive tract,” and at the bottom end is “uterus.” From the center of this image, six straight black lines branch into the words “superior vena cava,” brachial artery,” “vagus nerve,” “subclavian vein,” “pulmonary vein,” and “pulmonary artery"—all the body’s major nerves and arteries. 

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We draw the vagus nerve snaking—throat to uterus—across the word “heart” in lines from national anthems. The anthems begin to circulate through the body, enclosed in arteries and veins, arriving and departing.

In a dream, I am told: The body remembers the sound of its own ruin… via audiovisual pathways which can be recovered at any time. 

To consult these pathways, we write a memory into the nerve.

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As the maintenance of the empire manipulates the human heart’s rhythm via forms of enforced labor, dispossession, and sheer massacre, it also condenses the lyrical heart into a nationalist symbol of transformative love; love as exchange for the empire’s self-preservation. Still, the heart plays a part in imagining alternative futures, but only based on who assigns those futures. Perhaps it is the insecurity of the beating heart—its seemingly eternal yet finite language—that makes it such a divinatory figure. 

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Long ago, the half-snake half-human woman Shahmaran gave the mortal man Camasb access to her spring of water and botanical medicines. But soon after, Camasb betrayed her by sharing the location of Shahmaran’s cave with the ailing king and townspeople. Humankind extracted her resources and depleted her body’s water. In turn, Shahmaran interfered with the properties of her medicines so that they would impact humans in adverse or unusual ways. 

Like Shahmaran’s waters, the human heart is transformative yet finite, alive but exhaustible. The heart can alter our course in life, speed up our bodies with desire for another, slow our limbs in resistance to the day’s labor. But its course is also acted upon, and these tensions are always at play in the speculative space. Writings about the heart that center its varying languages (its musculatures) rather than the constructed connotations that have been imposed on it by the empire, recreate its speculative potential. 

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In Gladman’s Event Factory, which is the first book in the Ravickian series, the protagonist is a linguist traveling through a world whose communication practices are utterly unlike her own. She must ceaselessly navigate what her actions and sounds mean to the Ravickians and other travelers. Some characters use “air instead of hard sound for speech,” Gladman says, and others easily run out of breath when speaking certain phrases. The physicality of speech is felt at all times. During one greeting ritual, Gladman writes: “‘Hello Timothy,’ I said with my whole heart,” transforming the heart into an active vehicle for the expression of language. Later, when encountering Simon, the musician/hotel concierge: “I began to tiptoe because he seemed to be meditating. Also, with every step I took, he emitted a sound in perfect unison. I felt that I was walking on his chest.” Here, Gladman imagines new ways for bodies to communicate. Simon’s chest becomes a kind of speculative place, enabling movement without dictating direction. 

In fact, movement is a recurring motif throughout: 

In my room I recalled the salsa dancer. She had said something that I had forgotten until now: “You can’t do this without movement,”[...] now I wonder if she was referring to life in this city.

In Ravika, language makes and remakes place, always changing the land, cityscape, the bodies the protagonist encounters during her stay, and her own body, as she both faces and creates physically inaccessible geographies.

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In 1891, Mary Bird, an untrained physician for the Church Missionary Society, traveled from England to Iran as part of a medical missionary project. She used the administration of western medicine as a tool to convert Muslim women to Christianity. Bird entered family homes, offering scripture to mothers whose children were suffering or had died from diptheria, a bacterial disease that coats the lungs, making it difficult to breathe, releasing toxins into the bloodstream, and increasing the heart rate. 

CMS missionary physicians were initially sent to monitor the health of colonial officials. Doctors were sent from the British East India Company’s locations in Mumbai to Zahedan and Sistan, Baluchestan, because of the region’s proximity to waterways, which led more directly to India and were therefore “strategic” to British expansionist interests. Some took supplies and medication without staying for Bird’s missionary services. Many women resisted Bird’s medical occupation and continued to use remedies such as petroleum, quinine, bitter almond oil, indigo, pomegranate juice, and gunpowder. 

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In her travelog, photocopied slanted, one of Bird’s patients says to her, “My heart boils for you that you are in darkness.” 

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If curing the human heart was an early form of colonial land speculation, what might the heart’s speculative futures look like outside of these violent structures? 

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In a virtual performance this past April, She who has no master(s) read a collaborative poem over photographs of their performance in a field around dusk or dawn. The participants moved across the space in ways that resisted “the colonial desire for straight lines.” “The backbend opens the heart, they say,” Vi Khi Nao read aloud, as the group leaned backward into time, hearts skyward, angled toward pasts. Yet, I cannot shake how unstitched from time the collective’s heart felt in that field—as if pressing everything, regardless of any pre-ordained order or voice—into a future that was already all around them.