The following is an excerpt from the late Chicago writer Jon-Henri Damski's 1997 anthology dead/ queer/proud ( Firetap Press ).
To be healthy you must have the courage to be insane. On Friday, my doctors are going to put me to sleep. For an hour or two, my life will be in their hands. With this interruption, I am not quite in the spirit of Christmas. How can I sort all this out?
I have given my body over to strangers before. Why should I make a fuss over giving it to a surgeon? I really don't. Something inside me says there is a no-fault principal at play here. First, my body isn't exactly mine! It takes an ego even larger than mine to pretend that I run things and that I am in charge of all my body parts and functions.
Also, when I give my body over to the hands of others—lovers, strangers, doctors, police ( ? )—they don't run the whole works either. Living is a chance, not a fault. They may put me to sleep, like I put King Kitty to sleep after he lived with me intimately for 16 years. He never woke up. Did he know what I knew when I put—or had the doctors put—him to sleep? Was that his fault, their fault, my fault?
Cancer is a pretext for this operation which will put me to sleep for a few hours. My doctor and I both agree on that. But I am not going to get specific here, with the whys and wherefores. I am just going to reiterate that no one is at fault. This sleep will be a virtual sleep, a virtual reality and I am only virtually in their hands, as I have lived up until now virtually in my hands.
Living is a chance thing. On the bubble of chaos, it has no deeper substance that its surface; no more profound meaning than its probabilities.
After they put me to sleep, they are going to cut into my tissue. I like that word tissue. First it makes me think of Kleenex. Kleenex is such a warm fuzzy item to have around the house, that I always think of pleasant things when I hear the word tissue.
My child-brain, however, always wondered: How can tissues be on or in my body? Am I a Kleenex box? No. In biology, tissue refers to a collection of skin layers and cells. "An aggregate of similar cells and cell products forming a definite kind of structural material."
The more general definition of tissue charms me even more. "A woven fabric, especially one of light or gauzy texture." Texture and tissue are related words, for they both come from the Latin texere, "to weave." From which we get our common words now used in fancy criticisms about writers, readers: text, subtext, context. Life and writing biology and matter are each a "fabric," a "fabrication." Scary. I can come apart or be put back together like a sentence by the grammar of our surgeons with their skin grafts.
Our egos like the idea that we are "whole subjects," a singularly well-put-together item that will last forever. But in truth, we are just part of a woven fabric, a soul on a string held together by nursery fabrication. We are not the whole matter; we are just an isolated patch of the whole matter. A little stitch in the Big Quilt.
I also like the notion that my writing is just like a bunch of tissues coming out of a box. Handy things to blow your nose or mind on and then throw away. All my work is a piece of gauze. Gauze is a "transparent fabric made of plain weave." Also, surgical dressing ( something I will be writing ) made of "loose woven cotton."
More coincidentally, gauze is a word we derive from Gaza, Palestine, where the fabric came from originally. A place of murky tissue. That's why we have about as much chance of fabricating universal truth as achieving peace in Palestine.
All this play of words gives me pause. I don't blame anyone, including myself, for having to be put to sleep. When the French anatomist and physiologist Marie Francois- Xavier Bichal invented the medical term tissue, he put his life and biology into proper context as a "woven fabric." Out little string balls do unwind. Pity, pity.
Out glorious lesbian and gay community is only a big string ball of tissue, too. We seem to come unraveled all the time by infighting and queen wars. We are a drag show, a veiled disguise held together by a show tune. No wonder we like Auntie Mame and Gypsy, story lines of odd ducks who succeed. That's our dearly-wished -for-story, our communal fabrication.
Tissue is the issue. Which makes a proper mockery of all our deadly serious talk about the issues; it's just a ball of fuzz. What really matters is not who wins the next Alongi Award, gets into the Hall of Fame, or becomes the next executive director of ( fill in the blank ). It is so easy for us self-fabricated leaders, royals, subjects and queens, to think we are made of stone. To ask the world to kiss our toe. To want statues made of us in our image. To carry the traces of the worst patriarchal ego in our dim minds.
As though any of our issues cuts into the tissue.
Damski ( March 31, 1937-Nov. 1, 1997 ) wrote books and also penned columns for publications such as Windy City Times.
