Never Less Than Whole

I

The body is canvas.

Body is blank page.

Body the computer screen.

A body in the Medieval period:

porous and permeable.

Inside – outside –

no boundaries to skin.

All pass the gates of flesh:

fluids, demons, God.

Desires of the politician

the pop idol, the TV,

the social media influencer,

the podcast host, the personalities,

the celebrity, the Mother, the stars,

the TikTok videos and hands of the clock.

Noiseless electric cars

breathe an angel chorus.

All the true prophets are dead.

Rise the astrologers, the transits,

angles and planets,

aspects and retrogrades,

eclipses and full moons.

II

News (September 17, 2024)

In France, a 71 year old man confesses to drugging his wife and repeatedly arranging her rape by strangers which he filmed. The woman, Gisèle, has made the decision to make her trial public as a message to other rape victims that they are not alone.

A 28 year old black woman named Amber Nicole Thurman dies after an Atlanta hospital delays her Dilation and Curettage procedure for 20 hours due to the state’s abortion laws. She had a severe infection but they needed to make sure she was dying first.

In Hong-Kong, a 27 year old man named Chu Kai-pong becomes the first person to be convicted under Article 23, the new national security law. His crime was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan: “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.”

Thousands are injured and many killed in Lebanon when pagers explode in an act of organized terrorism. Doctors, responsible for treating these victims, cannot use their own pagers from abject fear.

III

The course of war.

The course of hurt.

Genocide in Gaza

and the global shrug.

Ukraine war ongoing.

So many killed: men, women, children.

Journalists, protesters.

And my country Myanmar:

torture, sexual violence, ethnic cleansing

old news decades old.

How have we suffered

this lack of empathy?

What is our duty?

To witness?

Or:

can we turn away?

What are the burdens

we must bear.

Who can blame those

that stay away from news.

Afterall, the world is

an entirely heavy thing.

IV

I have paid artists to have them carve into me.

I have never written about the feeling of being tattooed.

An intensity of pain that digs deeper and deeper

dermis and epidermis, new layers

where you come out the other side.

A new dimension. A sort of peace there.

Coexistence of body, mind, pain.

A cohesive pleasure strange and welcome.

Dissolution of inside and outside.

A body under your command.

The pain: you take it in. Surrender.

Abandon your body to a complete stranger.

V

My job is strange.

I work as a nurse at a hospital.

People come at their most desperate

in the depths of profound suffering,

whatever exists after rock bottom.

I barely have to ask questions before

they open up, spilling their guts,

offering me their most painful moments.

Blood and guilt and self-loathing and a stickiness.

I become confessor and healer

though we both know

I have the skills of neither.

Their desire to disappear.

Their wish to no longer live.

Some are fresh from just

having tried to kill themselves.

Overdosing on medications.

Hanging with a rope or belt or electrical cord.

Cutting with razors. Stabbing with a kitchen knife.

Some want to fall. Bridge, building, balcony.

These stories are common.

I hear them every day, over and over.

The setting changes, the metaphorical

furniture of their emotional homes.

Some are heartbreakingly young,

with lives fully ahead of them.

I want to tell them this.

But they can’t hear it.

But they come to hospital or call 911 or call a friend for help.

Still a certain ambivalence to dying.

I try to speak to that part of them.

I want to force hope on them.

A hope that I don’t exactly myself feel.

Because sometimes I secretly agree

that there is not much of a world left

how the end will be some kind of mercy.

That most of us will never find someone

who loves us as who we truly are.

That no one can help, no one to rely on.

That living every moment of every day takes such effort.

That we will end up alone and in pain.

That things will not get better.

We will not be okay.

Inside us, an unspoken place

where we know we are dying.

VI

The Californian artist Robert Irwin in his early twenties spent eight months alone on a secluded island in Spain. He did not speak to anyone. Every day he went out in the sun and into the water and stared at the thin line where the sea met the sky. He thought for a while, but there came a point where thoughts stopped.

On October 25, 2023, I was in the Getty Centre in Los Angeles in Irwin’s Central Garden when I learned that he had died at the age of 95. It seemed to mean something that I happened to be right there in his garden at that specific time. It had been an uncharacteristically cloudy day for LA. I sat on a bench surrounded by bright flowers and lush green trees, before me round labyrinthine hedges and the view of the pristine and blindingly white museum above.

The following words are engraved on two stone slabs in the garden.

EVER                                    EVER

PRESENT                            CHANGING

NEVER                                 NEVER

TWICE                                  LESS

THE                                      THAN

SAME                                   WHOLE

DECEMBER                         ROBERT

1997                                      IRWIN

VII

Living is the push and pull of the beautiful and terrible.

Trying to keep one’s head above water, or resisting lava.

Burning with emotion or being frozen, not feeling at all.

The helplessness of the everyday.

The desire to help.

The impulse to retreat and withdraw.

What else matters besides the fact that you are safe.

How lucky we are not to live in an active war zone,

to live in a place where wars are psychological

and aggressions are so systematic they are

embedded in society and government and frameworks.

This is a space that a person may or may not exist.

Something electronic beeps once and goes away.

I used to be able to read hours at a time.

I get nostalgic for my old mind.

I try not to get nostalgic about being in love.

I try to keep my heart open

to follow the advice of

artist Laurie Anderson:

“to be really, really tender.”

VIII

It was on a mountain when I felt like I was dying.

Surrounded by a terrifying, sublime beauty,

cliffs around me, the immensity of stone.

My legs and lungs had long given out.

I could not breathe. I was embarrassed.

I kept on repeating, “I just need a moment.”

My friend calmly told me with no uncertainty,

“You have enough oxygen.”

A large grey boulder flecked with green and black

in front of me and I held on to it with desperation.

I tried to breathe and quiet my pounding heart.

In the sun, the stone was warm

and I laid my head and chest on it.

IX

Ever changing, never less than whole.

Ever present, never twice the same.

Ever present, never less than whole.

Never changing, never twice the same.

Never changing, ever less than whole.

Never present, ever twice the same.

Never whole, changing less than ever.

Ever the same, never present twice.

Less whole than never changing ever.

Twice present never, the same ever.

Never less whole changing than ever.

The same present twice never ever.

X

I am at the Vancouver Art Gallery

astounded by the sight of Robert Irwin’s

1965 Untitled disc made of translucent white acrylic.

Light shone, making its shadows flower.

The disc blooms petals of itself.

A sort of alchemy of perception.

I gaze at the disc, pale and delicate

as if standing in front of a horizon.

How light traces the edges.

Slowly, I feel some holes fill.

Is that all that is –

the answer

to suffering and grief

and the unbearable

prospect of a terrifying

future?

Beauty?

Beauty.

By beauty

of course

I mean

everything.