Joseph Osmundson, a molecular biologist, considers the recent work of Anne Carson and Richard Siken, two poets “writing from the inside of neurodegeneration . . . considering the brain as it loses itself.” (Carson has Parkinson’s disease, and Siken survived a stroke.) His essay—an entrancing mix of criticism, memoir, and craft talk—reveres the body and the act of writing, despite the threshold that waits to quiet us. “Language,” he writes, “is worth staying alive for.”
Words are the first metaphor, the word standing in for the object. If words lose their primary meaning, then metaphor has left the room. How to get into the room of metaphor again? We write. “A doorknob is a rock for the hand. It opens a hole in the wall,” Siken writes, and I can feel the rock in my hand. There is no metaphor here, only a search for the meaning that comes before metaphor.
Picks about the body and its limits
How Losing My Limbs Turned Me Into a Different Kind of Cook
“Two years ago, our cooking columnist Yewande Komolafe woke from a coma and soon learned her body would be profoundly altered. She recounts her journey back to the kitchen, and to herself.”
St. John the Wondermaker
“Since April, on the past five fourth Wednesdays of the month I have driven to St. John the Wondermaker Orthodox Church, in Atlanta’s Grant Park neighborhood, to wash and trim and file the feet of a handful of the city’s 2,200 unhoused men.”
The Blind Leading the Gamers
“Ross Minor lost his eyesight at 8 years old. Today, he’s a hardcore gamer who runs YouTube and Twitch channels and consults for big studios. This is not—necessarily—an inspirational story.”
