“IT DOESN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE that no one wants to read this pathemata,” writes Maggie Nelson in her new book, Pathemata. Nelson is not speaking of the book itself, but rather about a document that provides much of its source material: a record she has made of her jaw pain, for the benefit of doctors––its genesis, medical imaging, and history of unsuccessful treatment.
Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is a companion piece to Nelson’s Bluets (2009), which was formed, after Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, as a series of numbered propositions. Bluets inspected Nelson’s own heartache alongside the suffering of her friend Christina Crosby, who had been left paralyzed by an accident that broke her spine in two places and spared her “very little face.” Subverting the form of its philosophical precursor, Bluets refused to mount to any logical conclusions, mirroring Crosby’s own rejection of efforts to redeem or resolve the problem of physical pain. Bluets irradiated like few other texts pain’s frustrating illogic––the pointlessness of trying to diagnose it (merely a restatement of the problem), the need to go limp in the face of it while also making the effort to live livably in its midst. To the clinical eye, Nelson observed, even a pain reflex as innocent as crying could signal a dysfunction. “Well then,” she wrote, “it is as you please. This is the dysfunction talking.” {read}