Animals Strike Curious Poses
The stigmata, Tasmanian sex clubs, and other things that happen to bodies
Creatures, what up? I have various life updates which I will condense into the advice that if you are a Catholic in a relationship with another Catholic, and both of you are unwell, a funny thing you can do is for each of you to offer up her infirmity for the other one, like a pair of Escher hands erasing as they draw. Anyway we’re fine now, in two days I’ll have CDC approval to rampage about the landscape once more. Until then, two book notes.
First up, Stigmata: A Medieval Mystery in a Modern Age, by Ted Harrison. This is very “does what it says on the tin”: Harrison tells you a lot about the experiences of people who received the stigmata after the advent of modern medicine, and what those experiences might mean.
He accepts that many of these people’s wounds appeared on their bodies spontaneously, without any evident material cause—they weren’t faking or like, sleep-stigmatizing themselves, etc. He does not believe that the stigmata are the result of Divine intervention, so part of the book is a fascinating exploration of other instances in which psychological states can produce wounds and marks on the body. Mostly these are traumatized people whose psyches somehow recreate on their bodies the marks of old injuries. Only one person is recorded in the literature as producing the marks of somebody else’s trauma—if the mechanism of the stigmata is psychological, the identification with Christ’s suffering is extraordinarily intense.
Medieval observers, according to Harrison, were blithely unconcerned with the stigmata’s origins. They weren’t grubbing around for miracles (or for disproofs of miracles) the way we do. If you got marks like Christ’s because you did physical penances in imitation of His suffering, that was excellent, well done you. If you got marks like Christ’s without your physical intervention, that’s extraordinary of course, but the point was really to unite your experience with Christ’s in whatever way you and God could do together.
Harrison suggests that stigmata, which most often occurred to women with long histories of illness and uhhhh intense personalities, were a way for marginalized people to speak authoritatively in the Church. That’s fine as far as it goes (that is a thing God might decide to do with stigmata!), but for me, it was interesting to see that the rare men who received stigmata didn’t fit this pattern. You can argue that St Francis was always psychologically-unstable if you want to, I’m fine with Holiness As Abnormality discourse in general, but the other men profiled here seem very down-to-earth. For them, perhaps what God is doing with the stigmata is precisely putting them in the exposed, tabloidish position of the “hysteric”: perhaps God wanted this low-key, world-weary parish priest to be confronted with the hysterical nature of the Christian claim. Perhaps God wanted these calm, self-controlled men to experience the public, humiliating, bloody lack of physical self-control which is such a familiar experience for women.
Or perhaps I’m reading my own obsessions into experiences which don’t necessarily follow strong patterns!
In general Harrison is really attentive to his subjects. He doesn’t believe that they are specially-gifted by God, but he’s respectful and even admiring, not prosecutorial. Sure, there’s a bit toward the end where the theology gets a bit simplistic and explanations for miracles seem to accumulate like epicycles (maybe some people have telepathy… and uhhh maybe sometimes everybody in an area can have a little telepathy, as a treat… this is definitely more plausible than a God Who loves us and allows us to share in His reality) but mostly he’s just fascinated by the way people respond to a bizarre, emotionally-fraught, visceral experience they never chose.
Ella Baxter’s New Animal is one of those contemporary novels about a horrible womanchild. Amelia Aurelia (don’t worry, this name is as twee as the book gets) is an Australian who works in the family mortuary business by day; her nights are spent on hookup apps, basically DoorDashing fast food to cram into her existential maw except the food is a person. Her mom dies, she freaks out and skips the funeral and ends up in the kink scene of Tasmania.
I liked this! I wasn’t sure I’d like it at first. Amelia is the kind of narrator who describes bodily experience in clinical terms (on page one we get “prodded my vagina with his hangnailed finger”) and is covertly proud of her alienation and self-absorption. That’s fine, but Amelia justifies her awful behavior a little too insistently, as if Baxter isn’t sure that we’ll get how bad it is unless it’s underlined. Still… “Surely the lights will be dim enough to cover the outfit, and surely I can still go and be obliterated by someone else and forget this daughter ever ran away from her mother’s death. I’ll burn this body to the ground, and then bury myself deeper than her.”
This is a story of hard-won reconciliation with the body: the prodigal soul, crawling back spent and sick of feasting, ready to eat the husks the body can offer, only to be welcomed home by the body with unexpected and undeserved love. It’s also a pretty terrific satire of kink-community manners and morals. All that paperwork! All that strenuous consent, for people who first got into this stuff precisely because they didn’t want to act well, they didn’t want to respect others and/or themselves. Basically every paragraph Amelia spends in the kink club is hilarious: she’s arriving in an ill-fitting fishnet body stocking with a horse mask, she’s listening in absolute bewilderment to the up-is-down philosophy of kink (“It is a restorative practice”), she’s smearing her blood on the wall because by this point she is completely feral. (“...I recognize that this behavior is not acceptable, not even by my standards.”) She has multiple disastrous encounters, and also hears some home truths. It turns out that the kink club is kind of like a funeral home, in that our deepest longings, fears, and hopes also drag a lot of weird and humiliating physical baggage; the rituals of both places communicate mostly that here we are in a space where communication fails.
Amelia leaves the comedy of sex and returns to the comedy of death, and discovers that she’s able now to touch its real sorrow. It’s a gentle book in the end.
icymi
I wrote up Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, and also did a bunch of other short movie notes.
Wounds of Christ and St Francis via Wikimedia Commons.