Feeling Into the Shape of Another

July 2020

The stuckness of the situation. How to describe it? Hung upside down? Upended? Yet still doing something. Still living. The continual interruption of my day, my desires, my work; my trajectories are as inevitable as the push and pull of the tides, pain dictates my shape. Each day a variation of the same routine. Days sculpted by the repetition of small acts create particular indentations upon the vertebrae of my neck, spine, shoulders, wrists – I am aware of my body and its gradual erosion as my child’s evolves next to mine. Sedimentary tension deposited in an unexpected place, a knotted mass forms in another, as I stoop the wrong way to collect her from harm.

Sitting on the toilet, is that me or the plumbing? Can’t be sure. The plumbing is old and complaining, its habitual rumination providing company in our solitude. A hiss of pain emanating from my sacrum, fizzing down my legs in unison with the shhhhhhh of the pipes. Earlier I soothed the baby, my nose to her hairline, emitting the same kind of sound. Late evening sun streams through an open skylight, summer breeze sibilating through the barley fields below. The baby asleep in the next room, finally. Adjust the angle of my spine incrementally, trousers around my ankles. Heavy sting. Farm machinery harvesting something in the distance. Pretty sure I’m finished. Maybe not. Trace a finger over the shape of the new acquisitions in the form of bruising upon my thighs, the points at which they have connected with stationary objects throughout the day. Some years before my daughter was born, I sustained an injury that severely impaired the nerves of my lower spine. The condition, I am told, is permanent. It seems an inaccurate descriptor to me, the word ‘permanent’, since my injury has signified in me a deeper comprehension of precarity and uncertainty. Amongst a catalogue of symptoms, I can’t feel whether I’m urinating or not. There was talk of mobility aids, catheters. The clinician delivered her prognosis, adding: ‘I know these are not the words you want to hear.’ At the time I was obliged to lay flat on my back for many weeks. Is anything ever permanent? The foot attached to the affected leg is often the temperature of refrigerated meat. When my young child steadies her body alongside my thigh, her touch is pixelated, her fingers pins and needles, sending faulty signals across my skin. I feel everything and nothing at once. Now the venerable faucets next to the loo emit successive plops and drips with impressive consistency, timed to the stinging pulse in my back. Before my daughter was born I did everything I could to pre-empt what was to come. Now I can’t hear my own thoughts. Pain and baby obscure them. Or baby and pain. We have had to leave our home with her father still in it – now it’s just us here, isolating: baby, pain and I. The isolating is not new, we had been practicing our own version for some time before the pandemic. Now everything leaks. We have forgotten where she ends and I begin. Edges blurred and boundaries compromised, we can’t feel the full expanse of our left leg. Outside a congregation of crows caw and swirl dramatically in the dusky sky. Pain carries us in all directions yet I cannot move quickly enough. The plumbing… or am I actually finished? Author Dodie Bellamy describes the sensation that ‘trauma is always in the present tense. The body marries the then with the now’¹. Our left side is numb. Something is missing, something from before. No, not missing. It can still be located, if we feel for it. We have to feel for it.

July 1952

Two men travel to the west of Ireland from the north of England as part of a potholing expedition. Whilst hiking, they stumble upon a thin stream disappearing under a rockface.

Working together to remove boulders from the entrance to an underground passage, they dig their way into the channel carved out by the water, descending into a shaft barely wide enough to house them. After scrambling upon their knees in the cramped orifice for so long, rather than facing the prospect of crawling backwards to make their way out, they elect to keep following the stream, in the hope that it will surface elsewhere. At some point, in the damp, trickling space, it dawns upon them that they have no idea how far this tunnel will reach, how long this is likely to take. The moisture soaks their clothing, its clammy hand upon their backs. Under dim lamps, to save the gas they have left they resolve to switch them off. Now in complete darkness, they feel their way through on hands and knees, grappling with the stones and the uncertainty of their vicissitudes. The light cannot travel here, but the water runs freely.  

July 2020

I imagine we are located inside a cave – inside a deep and solid darkness. We have not fallen into it, rather we have evolved here, into our current shape; we are a part of this place, we grow outwards from it, in and around its edges. Because I held myself in a certain way for too long today, I cannot turn my head to the side. The bathroom echoes, hisses, trickles in conversation with the taut escarpment of my neck.  Water drips and gathers, keeps moving. Even the water shows us that nothing is permanent. This place we find ourselves in is one of endurance, somehow older than I can fathom. Surely we are not the first to find ourselves here? I must shower before she wakes. Petition my leg and spine to stand upright. Shed clothing, hang it on a height so I won’t have to bend to retrieve it. The glaze on the inside of the washbasin is stained a greenish brown, residual trickle perpetually falling from the stiff faucet, carrying minerals with it.

July 2025

In Co. Clare, along the west coast of Ireland, there is an extensive underground cave system, a complex arrangement of deep voids hidden from sight, conversing with the perpetual motion, hiss and suck of the sea. The coastline is intricately cut; it’s boundaries – hostile to colonisation – have wrecked countless vessels over the centuries, often obscured by a skyline cloaked in objectionably heavy mist and cloud. When the horizon is visible, it discloses a glistening ocean, virgin blue sky, as though the light has been transported from another realm. The landscape is peculiar, expansive tracts of limestone and mineral, chemically dissolved by the rain into carved ridges, fissures and sinkholes. Rivulets and streams suddenly disappear from sight underground, consumed there by a featureless darkness. It is here I wish to be when my daughter, no longer an infant, goes this time to stay with her father. Her absence takes up all of the space in our home. I cannot breathe in its’ void.

July 1952

Their bodies are held deep within the cavity, pressed closely. The explorers are suspended, with no choice but to keep moving forward. Progress is glacial; there is no guarantee that their efforts will lead them anywhere. This space is unknowable apart from what they glean through their able senses in the palliative darkness. Incrementally, they excavate the rockface before them – minute, repetitive, tentative gestures. If their way caves inwards it will surely suffocate them both.  

July 2020

Warm water flows down my shoulders and spine, soothing and piercing scarred skin simultaneously, nerve endings misfiring, the sensation of aphids scurrying across a surface. The shower’s repetition reforms the body – the half-there leg, softening muscle and fascia. A sudden bolt through the lower back: body like a snail poked with a stick, is she crying? Listen with intent beyond the rush of the shower. No. No. It’s ok. When my senses are not being flooded by pain or the rituals of raising a child, I am aware in some deeper part of myself that my life is not how I would wish for it to be. How to proceed? Another bolt, fist in the stomach. The sound of her cry comes again; it’s real this time, reverberating upwards into my throat. My vertebrae shifts audibly as I support her body to lay back in her cot – a combination lock moving down: three, two, one. Red hot pain splits and spills across my lower back, lava down the legs. This is how time is measured now. The room is dim, blackout blind to help her sleep. Hair still unwashed. Wrap the towel tighter around my chest. My tender chest. When breastfeeding, the tissue tingles inwardly, capillaries filling with the rush of milk upon hearing the baby’s cry. Sensation of stinging nettle. Soothed, she gestures for me to kiss her face. She is too young to understand that this movement will send another bullet of pain through me. I inhale and do it anyway. She has total access to me, to my body. The sentence: I know these are not the words you want to hear running through my mind. Such facts are hardly comforting.  On the toilet again. Is that me? No, it’s no longer me, just the plumbing. Hair remains unwashed. In the past week she has started to coast precariously along sills and the edges of countertops, one leg curled over the side of the cot, her face delighted, hands unsteady, head delicate and exposed. My daughter encapsulates the risk of injury that goes hand in hand with the very act of living. It is as though we are plunged into a new, previously unexplored cavern, one in which she might fall at any moment. How to proceed? Feeling through the darkness, night and day I keep vigil, floating upon an atavistic drive to keep her safe.

July 1956

After some time, they become aware of the sensation of their movements casting an echo along the far wall of what feels like a large chamber. With trepidation, they reignite their lamps to illuminate an imposing, cathedral-like cavern. An immense stalactite, almost thirty-foot long – hangs vertically from the very centre of its roof. They are fearful of making a sound; they are the first humans to enter this place since the beginning of time. Something as seemingly inconsequential as the vibration of their voices could fracture everything beyond recognition.

July 2020

Choosing not to dwell on the words that I do not want to hear, I seek out other images to meditate upon, alternative spaces to consider. Words replace words. Some might assume I read for enjoyment; they do not know that I read in order to survive. Upon hearing my infant attempting or substituting a word (‘hopsicle’ for hospital, ‘tippy shoes’ for high heels), endorphins flood, muscles drop, a dog-eared book is cast upon a mat on the living-room floor and perhaps I will find some space in which to open it. In the search for alternate words, I find poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir’s ‘Animal Joy’, in which she describes our tendency as humans to project onto others - and how others project onto us – as energy transferred between bodies. She states: ‘Empathy, which is articulated in German as feeling into the shape of another, also gets at this shape-shifting of emotion as it passes between people. We now understand, through neuroscience, what happens when a person feels into the shape of another – say, if they see someone trip. Mirror neurons fire within the brain of the observer, causing the tripping sensation to be mirrored within, as though it had originated there, the way the mother feels the infant’s emotion within her body as her own.’² Under the surface of daily life there is an ever present noise, a leaky valve which cannot be shut off, cannot be silenced any more than my pain. When the baby tries something potentially perilous, when I have not slept in a long time – nervous system on overdrive – I see impaled eye sockets, her cracked skull under a swollen blue scalp; I see the disfigurement. I see bones fractured, pointing in unnatural directions under contused skin. I could buckle under the weight of this responsibility. I hear the dull yet distinctly heart-stopping thud upon tiles. I really hear it. I imagine the steady hurtle of a small body falling from a height, my stomach falling too, as though I am standing in an elevator bound for the earth’s core. I feel the sickening crunch in my bones. My heart sits in the back of my throat. My own body, nerves already jangling like taut metallic strings, responds to my daughter’s whether or not I feel it is able to. The sensation is the most predictable one, chemically bound towards her, always to tend to her. I spring to action – and the child is protected. I am aware that this is not necessarily how caregiving should feel.

In the bedroom now, on the floor I manoeuvre my back across a stack of cushions so as to hang my shoulders upside down. I let gravity do its work upon my vertebrae, loosening the gnaw suppurating there. How to remain vertical when you are so bound to being horizontal? I am to be found upended in a pitch-black chamber, I am pendulant cartilage. The house, upside down, murmurs around us, it’s drip drip and hiss, ssshhhh, wooden floorboards shifting occasionally like old bones. My own bones respond with the sound of dried twigs snapping. I was bent by the time we made it here to isolate. That first night, I lay sleepless, holding her, bearing weight through my better side. Feeling as substantial as a length of apple peel, curled around her; when I moved away in the night I might have split at the thinnest point. Perhaps the situation can be explained through the suddenness with which I sustained my own injuries. My body carries an indelible knowing of this. An indelible smudge. The smudge is not a consistent mark, it’s messy, fading around the edges. But my body remembers: at approximately 4 am on an Autumn morning, without warning, I awoke and could not feel my left leg. Could not mobilise without eliciting the most vicious pain I had ever encountered. Nothing is ever really permanent, or is it? Something had happened internally, hidden from sight, which lead to the migration of matter in my spinal canal.

July 1956

Deep within the rockface, the two explorers are elated. Bathed in the light of their lamps, they gesture silently in communication to one another. Standing under the great bulk of the stalactite, they are fearful it will fall, gleaning through the dimness that it is fixed from what feels like an impossibly thin point at the very centre of the ceiling. All around them the sound of water echoes throughout the cave system. They must concede to the water, they must find a way out. They must share with the world what they have discovered in this place.

July 2025

I feel a kind of kinship with the stalactite. Think of it often, as though it is a friend. The urge to pay it a visit is overdue. Must shower before packing. Water spirals down into the dark of the choking drain. Drag a brush through wet hair, thistle pressed against my groin. The skin of my left leg carries the ceaseless outrage of the aftermath of a smack as I lean towards my rucksack. Include a change of clothes. On my kitchen table, I reach for the nearest book which I may or may not read - in negotiation with the pain induced by the drive west.

Descending haltingly down hundreds of metal steps, one by one, down and down and down and down; focus to steady the direction of the errant leg, both hands on the rail. There are tourists, let them go on ahead. There is an animalistic quality to it. The stalactite is, after all, still growing. No one knows how old it is, but scientists indicate that it gets longer by about the width of a fingernail every year. The mineral rich water that has shaped its form running constantly downwards, feeds a smaller mound which reaches upwards from underneath it, to meet its tip. Being both soft and hard, its body is composed of what looks like exquisitely detailed white marble, carved to mimic drapery, its mineral solution sweeping downwards towards the mound it grows underneath. It has the most peculiar character, something of an ancient object from the future: the quality of the folds of cloth on a figurative Greek sculpture, unfinished, something made by AI, gone awry. An older, shorter ‘curtain’ to one side is a different shade; it speaks to my leg, hanging indifferently from its hinge, somewhat superfluously. The flow of water which carried the minerals to form this part of its drapery was interrupted or cut off at some point. It protrudes, a greyish stain in contrast with the rest of the luminous, ivory-hued structure; a dead tooth, no longer viable. The stalactite’s sediment is deposited where the drip lands, the stalagmite exists because of this flow of materials, movement of matter from one place to another. Eventually, over millennia, the two structures, top and bottom, will meet – via this routine – creating a column, strengthening over time, growing in density about the width of a fingernail per year. We are encouraged not to touch the walls of the cave or the flesh and salt surface of the stalacmite. The shallow impression of a fingertip could alter its life. This is how I have come to understand access. One form shapes another. How I move through the world, my body, its very existence, impedes or accelerates another’s progress.

Later, in a coastal B&B, I open the book I packed earlier, reading the introduction to ‘Revolutionary Routines’, in which Rebecca Pedwell shows us that small, seemingly inconsequential acts can, over time, affect radical change – my child, my disability and the stalactite – also exposing the fact that ‘although habit can compel us to repeat previous modes of action again and again, it is nonetheless only through habituation that new tendencies may be created which are deeply rooted and robust enough to endure’.³

My injury dictates that I strengthen the muscles in my core, legs, arms and shoulders, so as to compensate for those parts which no longer function, and to displace the load from the weaker points. Either that or becoming more stuck, more isolated, more hung up-side-down. On my front, I hold myself in the shape of a plank. Pushing my hips into the floor, hands underneath shoulders, elbows in, legs relaxed, I breathe into the next posture, the upper body elevated, holding tension in the mid-back. Each gesture is reform, slow resistance, a shifting of shape, a movement of matter. Count backwards from thirty. Rehabilitation is habit, is non-recorded time. Reproductive labour is habit, also non-recorded time. Looking back on those days of endurance, I can run my hands over the texture of them still. The food is planned, prepared – the child eats. Nutrients and minerals digested – the infant body absorbs – releases the waste through urination, defecation, sweat – the caregiver cleans the child – keeps her environment safe – implements routine or ritual – reads her a story or sings a familiar song – signalling that it will soon be time to sleep. The infant expands in the night – cuts teeth – her hair grows – her thoughts reorganise – legs and spine extend perhaps a centimetre or two in length – her bones knit, grown denser through the day’s activities.

The caregiver exists between sleep and waking. The caregiver loses a concrete grasp on time as it existed for them before, before, before. Time is the smallest of gestures. Wipe of a nose. Sediment moved from one area to another.