August 16, 2021 Corpus Oranges By Jordan Kisner In her column Corpus, Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell. Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit (detail), 1992–97, orange, banana, grapefruit, and lemon skins, thread, buttons, zippers, needles, wax, sinew, string, snaps, and hooks, 295 parts, dimensions variable. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with funds contributed by the Dietrich Foundation and with the partial gift of the artist and the Paula Cooper Gallery, 1998. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Graydon Wood. When I undertook this column, I had the notion that I would be writing about, I don’t know, heredity. Like: I went to a healing circle in south Brooklyn. After a few days of being asked to think about the particular ways we might need to be healed, as well as the particular ways we might offer healing to other people, we were taken into a small, dark room in groups of four or five and told to sit on stools and close our eyes. The two women leading the healing circle told us they would be drawing initiatory symbols in the air over our heads and invoking various energies on our behalf. They instructed us to keep our eyes closed and to anticipate that we might receive a vision of a spirit that would guide us in this healing journey. I was there because I was curious about the nature of the healing these women claimed to invoke, but I was resistant to the endeavor. I did not want my vibrational frequencies altered. I did not want a spirit guide. I was feeling fraudulent and confused and a little guilty for being an unbeliever in this room of aspiring healers, and so I was startled when—sitting there in the dark with my eyes closed, confused and fraudulent, dimly aware of these two women waving their hands in the air around me—I had a sense suddenly that my grandmother (my father’s mother, Mardell) was near my left shoulder and my great-grandmother (my mother’s paternal grandmother and namesake, Carmen) was at my right. They’ve both been dead for more than fifteen years, and I hadn’t thought about them for a while—nor had I ever really thought about them together. I’d never spent any time with them together, and they weren’t at all alike. Their arrival as a pair in my imagination was a surprise. In the moment, I half wondered whether this meant they needed some kind of healing or attention from me, posthumously—or, conversely, whether I needed some kind of healing that had to do with them. Read More
September 3, 2020 Corpus Vanitas By Jordan Kisner In her column, Corpus, Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell. Abraham Mignon, The Nature as a Symbol of Vanitas, c. 1665-79 I like flowers all right, I suppose. I like having them around, I like how they smell. I like their delicate skins, their manner of shedding yellow everywhere in a fine powder. I try to stop on the street, when I can, to bend down and look directly into their faces. I have mild flower preferences, in a bodega-selection way: ranunculus over chrysanthemums, peonies over roses, lilies over hydrangeas. Having lived in New York City my entire adult life, bodega-flower choice has been more or less the extent of the relationship. It’s possible that I no longer live in New York City, a fact that won’t be decided until next year sometime and which I only relay here because the place I currently inhabit has a lot of wildflowers and no bodegas. Inasmuch as flowers exist here, they exist because they come out of the ground randomly, with no rubric or intention or market. First there were lilacs (on bushes!) and then when the lilacs died the peonies bloomed, which began wilting just as the day lilies and trout lilies and tiger lilies sprang open like self-peeling bananas. That was right around when Dame’s Rocket, highlighter purple, was all over the fields and dominating the unmowed grasses along the side of the road. A gigantic mock orange bush exploded into blossoms and made everything smell like, naturally, orange blossoms. Then vervain, then Queen Anne’s Lace like weeds, wild lupines. Right now we are in red clover. Trying to articulate what’s so stunning about watching flowers just appear and disappear makes me sound like an idiot. I was on a long walk with an older gentleman who’s been watching the seasons cycle in this part of the world for something like ninety years, and trying my best. “They just arrive!” I said. “And then they go!” He seemed briefly at a loss for a response. “That’s true,” he said, encouragingly. Helplessly, moronically, I am amazed by them. Their brevity, for one. Lilacs bloom for … maybe two weeks? Most of the year they just look like bushes, and then for the briefest moment they burst into the lushest Day-Glo purple, a jammy, fragrant, fecund burgeoning. Everything within a quarter mile smells like sweetness. And then after a few days the purple begins to look slightly blurry, slightly less explosive in its presence. And then you wake up one morning and the bush is just a bush again: green, leafy, pretty but unremarkable. This repeats itself again and again in waves, as every flower’s death is met by the profusion of some new species whose moment in the season has arrived. This all happens, uninterrupted and untended, wholly separate from human timelines and activity, relentlessly. Read More
July 23, 2020 Corpus Cantilever By Jordan Kisner In her column, Corpus, Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell. For a while last year, back when such things were possible, I was clocking chins on the subway. Weak chin. Strong chin. Strong chin. In between. This started when an orthodontist explained to me how you can pull a person’s whole mouth back and rewrite their profile. She recommends the procedure for people who have a fulsome, protruding mouth, horse teeth if you want to be unkind about it, which is a consequence of large teeth in a small mouth. With nowhere for all your big, beautiful teeth to fit along your jaw, they fan out, reaching for daylight. The orthodontist fixes this by pulling four teeth, one each from the left and right side of both the upper and lower jaws, usually the first molar right behind the canines. Then, she uses braces and head gear to pull your remaining front eight teeth back into the holes. The whole mouth backs up, retracts, makes itself scarce. She showed me pictures. Mostly, the people looked better before, with their sweet excessive mouths, but one teenage girl was a stunner after. Her before picture shows a reasonably pretty girl with nice eyes and teeth so full that her lips are turning inside out a little, showing their slick undersides. Her after picture shows a teenager suddenly made exceptional. I was startled, looking at it. The first picture was of a girl who would not grow up to be remarkably ugly, and the second was of a girl who would grow up to be remarkably beautiful. I eyed this orthodontist with new respect and wariness. Read More
February 3, 2020 Corpus The Artifact By Jordan Kisner In her new column, Corpus, Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell. I saw a lot of dead bodies in 2018. I was researching a story about medical examiners, and in so doing inadvertently saw autopsies and death scenes and the inside and outside of a lot of corpses. It was an entirely different kind of encounter with the human form for me: so many opened rib cages, sculptural and bloody, and so many surprises. There is a delicate bone shaped like a horseshoe hidden in the cartilage at the throat. The uterus, fierce red, is startlingly pretty when lifted into the light. The dura mater, a membrane that sheaths our brain and spinal cord, clings so stubbornly to the inside of the skull that you need a tool like a chisel to scrape it out. The empty skull echoes. Skin eventually turns colors, swells, splits, peels back like curled paper. What does a person still living inside her body do with this knowledge? What does a body mean? Nearly all of the corpses, at the moment I saw them, were in a medical examiner’s office, where the bodies are kept naked, toe-tagged, and supine, arranged on metal gurneys. Any clothing or belongings they arrived with rests in brown bags beside them. There’s a standardization to bodies kept in the morgue—the body becomes an item that has entered a bureaucratic system in order to be organized, studied, catalogued, and released. Corpses in this context are something like people, but they are also like books in a library. Read More