Immortalizing the Mortal 2021
A Pathological Perspective on Social Isolation
In Collaboration with the Maude Abbott Medical Museum
Silence
Lucie Dubes, MDCM '24
Silence, je n’ai pas eu à te chercher;
Depuis longtemps tu t’es imposé.
Alors quand on s’est retrouvé
J’en étais sans peine apaisée.
Silence, mon vieil ami, ma connaissance,
Je croyais en notre chère alliance,
Tel un acquis, une évidence,
Une vieille blessure de mon enfance.
Silence, m’aurais-tu donc trompée?
Mais comment puis-je te briser,
Quand on m’a toujours enseigné
Que tu es mon plus cher allié.
Silence, si tu es fait de non-dits
De traumatismes que l’on oublie,
Tes secrets sont pourtant trahis
Par ses mécanismes reproduits.
Silence, serais-tu donc coupable?
Ou est-ce moi qui n’suis plus capable
De cet isolement qui m’accable
En m’aliénant de mes semblables.
Silence radio, mais quel malaise!
Qui s’arrange pour que l’on taise
Le poids des mots, les maux qui pèsent
Sans guère fermer la parenthèse.
Silence, ton règne est-il déchu?
Une de ces choses qu’on ne pourra plus
Se permettre sans retenue
Sans éviter les malentendus.
Silence, de plomb, d’or ou d’argent?
Est-ce que tu dors ou fais semblant?
Tais-toi donc, et ici entends
Comme le vide est assourdissant.
Silence, si longue fut ta sentence
Si lente que ta convalescence
Annoncera notre délivrance.
Et maintenant quoi, on danse?
Three dancers moving as one, when one falls out of step. The one lives a parallel life, unable to resynchronize as the other two continue without her. She learns to speak a new language of silence and must ultimately go her own way. This resembles the immediate loss of language abilities that may follow a stroke in Broca’s Area. Dance is a form of language without words, which speaks to the alternative ways a stroke patient must interact with their environment during recovery. The patient’s brain is plastic and open to new creative paths as they move forward. The small apartment setting and cast of close friends captures the essence of the pandemic from an artist’s perspective: restrictions giving rise to beauty.
Even if words are lost, meaning isn't.
The Man in the Next Room
Jakob Lafon, MDCM '24
Lately, I’ve begun to imagine each year to be the life of some man. As the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, a baby would be born in a room enumerated by the number of the New Year. As the months progressed, the boy would grow up, and eventually, grow old. January would see his first steps and words, February his first crush and kiss, March his first heartbreak. As spring moved on, he would either start a family with his wife, backpack across Europe with his boyfriend, or go to a library to be alone—cozy in his own company.
Summertime would arrive when he was becoming comfortable in his own shoes, realizing that resentment is more easily forgotten with age, to know that you can choose who your family is, that wellbeing is sometimes more important than doing everything all at once. Those last summer days at the cottage lake would be filled with fireworks, campfire stories, and the feeling of butterflies in his stomach humming, “this is where you belong”.
September would be the sunset of his youth: Falling asleep before 10pm, starting to need glasses to read, making coffee at the crack of dawn without a thought. Life would have periods of redundancy, but also of security. Slowly those around him would begin to pass away, leaving only the bittersweet memories that come with loss. Does he have regrets? Did he do everything he wanted to? Did he let his true love go (and return)? Who are his ghosts? What monstrous nightmares insidiously ruminate within his mind? And what sweet honeysuckle dreams remind him of the moments joyfully lived?
October would see his old age fully realized. As the leaves fell slowly to the ground like fairy wings fluttering in the wind, his vitality would begin to fade away. Would these years be spent with a partner, hand in aged hand? Or was he left to face his life’s denouement on his own, knowing that the end would inevitably be lonesome? Would he desperately cling to life, deny his own mortality? Or, no longer scared, would he look toward death as a friend, ready to go peacefully into that good night?
Under the grey blanket of November, he would reflect on his life. He wants nothing but tranquility, to regain the assurance he had as a child that everything would be okay, that there is something to wake up to, that it doesn’t end here. But it did. On the 31st of December, he returned to the hospital in which he was born, but this time on his deathbed. Would he be surrounded by loved ones or solitary in his passing? So much loss, why did he ever love? But, then again, was it not all undeniably worth it? And at the stroke of midnight, his last breath would be taken, his pulse would run flat, allowing him the silent solace he deserves. A return to where he came from—a womb, a void free of consciousness. In the room adjacent to his, a baby was born at the exact moment that his Herculean heart had stopped beating. Both would leave their rooms—one meant to give back through education and the other for a life anew. And the cycle would interminably go on.
"There's a gap in my mind and references where the year 2020 is supposed to be and I sometimes catch myself referring to events from“ last year ”that in fact took place in 2019. When I saw the infract that afflicted this year's specimen I thought of other nebulous concepts and experiences which I currently don't have the vocabulary to describe. Not unlike that scene in Hamlet where the prince baits Polonius by asking him what shapes he thinks the clouds resemble (“very like a whale,” agrees the baffled, toadying Polonius), or the beginning of Fellini's 8 1/2 where Guido Anselmi, afflicted with director's block, feels so untethered from his life he pictures himself floating above the beach with a rope on his ankle, as though he were a balloon. "
Puzzling
Pantoum for Lost Words
Jiameng Xu, MDCM '22
If I am born already, like my DNA,
With all the words I would ever say
Where are the ones birthed in my thoughts
That never leave the confines of my brain?
With all the words I would ever say
Will I sculpt them into another’s fate?
That never leave the confines of my brain
Silence converses with silence instead
Will I sculpt them into another’s fate?
Words my mother and father could not say
Silence converses with silence instead
I open my mouth, bid my lips to speak
Words my father and mother could not say
Passed to me decisions I must make
I open my mouth, bid my lips to speak
The should, could haves, would haves of the past
Passed to me decisions I must make
Syllables drop anchor in my throat
The should, could haves, would haves of the past
Anesthetize my vocal cords
Syllables drop anchor in my throat
My grandfathers and grandmothers knew silence, too
Anesthetizing my vocal cords
Time buries our unspoken words
My grandfathers and grandmothers knew silence, too
Their witnessing has become my station
Time buries our unspoken words
Lost syllables give me breath
Their witnessing has become my station
As I am born with all the words I will say
Lost syllables give me breath
Echoing in the confines of my brain.
The pantoum is a poetic form originating from the pantun of the Malay oral tradition. Conventionally composed of quatrains, the pantoum’s distinctive characteristic is its pattern of repeating lines: the second and fourth lines of each stanza (or quatrain) become the first and third lines of the next. It has been said that the pantoum’s repetition of sound and image allows for the evocation of an echoing idea, of resonating time.
Responding to the theme of social isolation, in connection with the pathological specimen showing an infarct in Broca’s area, I wished to take an intergenerational, and ethical, perspective on speaking and staying silent. What silences have I inherited from fore-generations? What happens to the words that I cannot say? Do they become someone else’s words, to be spoken when times and circumstances are different? If the responsibility for speaking and staying silent carries across generations, then my speaking has significance for the silences of people in the past, and my silences might become openings for people who will be able to speak in the future, as I could not.
