The Amazonian Healers - part of a story

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, ALIEN?


1. Philanthropy


Amazon – strong, masculine, missing one breast, the one that they removed to be able to use a bow and arrow.

My top lip was heavy today, pressing down onto my teeth, like pelt over bone. Yet it looked swollen, and puffed like a cold bird’s breast. The sweet green and soft peas that fell (accidentally) into my lap as they were shelled smelled of the foul, fouled ground they had dropped onto. We never seemed to bother picking them off the vine, to have fresh and unspoiled, but wait until they were heavy and dazed, and awaiting their imminent meeting with the chicken shit that is unartfully scattered on the ground. When I touched them, and held them between my fingers, I didn’t know how to touch them, as if touch is too solid an implement to be handling them with, too impermeable, and too trembley. But they will be eaten, and given the benefit of the doubt, until we suffer from late night nausea and flatulance and know that they were contaminated.

There are times when we don’t even bother shelling the peas, and instead make a giant pea soup, or stew, or casserole, or whatever word you think is the appropriate word. Did you know that peas give milk, like most living things in the world? Most things either give it willingly or have it grudgingly extracted from them, like oats and rice. Everything goes through a process to reach its full potential. The world is rich and creamy like that, and full of potential.

Christ, as I am sitting here with this laptop perched on my legs, I feel sick. I have nausea, as if writing this is causing me illness. I have taken some anti-nausea pills, but is suddenly comes on, and I want to vomit forth into the room. It is as if everything can make you sick, and this is like some kind of symbolic sickness. Perhaps that’s what nausea is? A symbolic sickness. My eyes water and I feel like clutching my poor gut, despite knowing that it will make no difference. And that is the sad thing about nausea. It is symbolic, untouchable and intangible. That’s it, it is like the best and the worst things/feelings, intangible but horrifically powerful. I feel hunched over, and as if my whole body is bloated by the presence of the nausea. I am bilious, swilling with bile bilge. I wish I could expel it. So vomit is an expulsion, and it is funny, because we are generally kind of fascinated by it as a concept. Tonight Anna told me about a drummer in a band who played so furiously and intensely that he threw up from exhaustion. Jesus that’s extreme. We see vomit as a sick reaction to something, but perhaps it isn’t. And we have such obsessions and fascinations with what stays inside and what doesn’t. If it wasn’t usual to shit every day, we’d probably find that even more horrifying than we already do.

And suddenly I noticed that she had her leg up on the bench, and waist height, cocked like a dog, as if about to piss on the food. “ya muthafuckas” she screamed.

There are inky nights of eyeless heat, where every human being hangs with a topical, tropical sweat so thick and viscous it is practically a caul of mucous. We sit, limpid in the heat, with a pallor of rough verdigris green, and feet and heads swollen. You keel over in this weather, and I am only saying this now because it is cold and I can’t feel the heat, only remember it in its most bloated and corporeal form. In this heat everyone is ugly. Upon meeting in the street or the shop, every person’s touch is lubricated with a sickly trickle down the spine and a stickiness in the handshake. There is no need for make up, because it slides off and pools in the ravines of the face. I have seen so many women in heat, looking mad and dirty, sick from floral synthetic dresses and hot nylon stockings. Sensible people stopped wearing white, because they knew that far from being innocently clear and crusty, their sweat was in fact yellow, and stainworthy. A great deal of bleach is purchased in the heat, and people talk quite openly about the effects of sweat on clothes, bed sheets, car seats, books, computers and shoes. Think of all the things you touch in a day, and imagine if you stained and salted them all.

Florid temper/tempering the heat.

Dense and personal ruminations.

There was a point where I had to stop asking what they would do, because they couldn’t know, so blinded and incensed they were by the gravity of their pain. But try vomiting for three days straight I say, and then you’ll understand pain in its most human incarnation.

Idea of physical being so overly physical, and revolting, and having such an impact on objects, that you just exist spiritually. Transcending physicality. Old metaphysical idea. Can you claim to exist only philosophically, and have no physical form? You can’t prove to me that it isn’t possible.

There was that time you thrust the garden hose down your throat because you wanted to cleanse yourself of the stinging bile. It was the ultimate act of self preservation, yet at the time I thought you were deranged.

Hospital illness. The sheets become hard with liquid before they are changed, and the odour of wounded human bodies is sweet and pungent. Malformed and damaged bodies lie side by side, and I feel castrated by the gravity of my own injuries. Injurious when my favourite little nurse Barbara comes to change the soaked dressings. Bless her, because she doesn’t gag, but smilingly and lovingly tends to these open parts with wet cotton wool held between tweezers. She is efficient, and spends no more time with me than necessary, but I think I am in love with her because she is the only woman I have see for weeks beside my mother. Young and single, Barbara sometimes smells faintly of apricot sweat. Older women’s sweat tends to be tomato or chicken scented. But Barbara is young enough to still smell like fruit. And then I wonder if the odour is in fact day old semen, and then I’m jealous and want to ask her, in the most proprietorial of manner’s if she is seeing anyone at the moment.
“So, jyahave a boyfriend?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Obviously I do or I wouldn’t have bothered asking.”
“Well Mr Grumpy, I’m not going to tell you until you give me one of those lovely smiles of yours.”
“No need to fucking patronize me, I’m sick, not invalid.”
“What’s that love?”
Suddenly, with both my hands I pull back my lips, pull them out and too the side to reveal teeth right up to their roots, and obscenely red gums. I want her to say that the colour my gums remind her of erect penis, and that she would love to see mine. But then, to her I am an impotent man; I can’t work, I can’t sleep, I can’t shit, I can’t work, and I certainly can’t fuck.
“Funny kind of smile that is!”
“A special one I invented for you.”

Like the suck of a drain/plug hole.

I don’t feel the heat any more, because it isn’t relevant to me, and although it seems like a somewhat abstract cliché, it is also true. If you spend so much time vomiting, you must at some point transcend the physical, and exist only spiritually.

You were considerably more violent than I had expected.

Lipids – fats, greasy feeling, soluble in alcohol but not water. Lipo – fat. Lipoid – fatty. Lipochrome – natural pigment containing a lipid, esp the pigments of butterfat.

Rural guttural roars and porcine whines. Always salty, always sultry. Whenever I had to suck your whimpering mouth, you were salted and puckered, as if you had spent your (I know) misspent youth crying and whinnying. What are the limitations of your self esteem young man?

I could always hear the faint puling from your tent, as you half slept, half wept with fright and melancholy. One day you will remember who I was, who came to you with a bowl of water for you to sip from and another for me to bathe your fevered brow.

Inky night, sunken eyes, verdigris pallor, eyeless heat. Topical, tropical sweat. Amazonian faith healers, women and nurses, who take on all the nausea in the world, who suck people’s pain and feel ill. Always vomiting.

A dozen chinks in the armour. Nausea, the world gives me nausea. Gutter, guttering.


Torrid times. They were torrid times, before the invention of Pramin. Anti-fouling – like a dose/drink of anti-fouling.

Degeneracy, degenerative illnesses. The world is full of nausea. Standing on an overpass, desperately wanting to throw rocks at the cars. A toothy monster.

I’m not upset or crying, I’m sick, I’m nauseus. I think you have always wanted me beside you when you vomited.

People vomit as an expression, and artistically. Doused in vomit. Vomit to put out a fire, to cure a skin condition, as a substitute for crying.

Acne lacunae – the lacunae left by acne’s greasy ravages.

Homage to my favourite museum. All that time spent in there, feeling like a wild colonial boy.

All the things that can cause nausea. Smell, blocked ears, horrible sights. Is nausea about an assault on the senses?


Tits as emblems, assets or totems.

Sometimes I am afraid of solid forms, as if committing to something solid would be like committing to the world and its strictures.



2. Boisse: the Hollow of the Hand

I have tried to give up smoking on five occasions with varying degrees of success or lack of. And yet I love those plump grey plumes of smoke now more than I did when I was a younger man of fat-thickened skin and healthy lungs. I love smoke now because I am slow and quiet, measured but not feeble. I am languid not indolent.

I often dream of gently swimming sturgeon, heavy and slow, weighted with roe. When Janice comes to wake me in the morning I am still floating just below the surface of the water, grasping at my own body, which is as flabby and translucent as a luminous jellyfish. The weight of the air and the smell of Janice’s unwashed hair draw me from the water into the room, and I’m still stertorous and warm as we kiss passionately, tongues interlocked and mouths leaking onto the sheets. You would not expect a passionate exchange between a man of 56 and a woman of 23, but there we are, five minutes after I awaken, thrusting deep inside her, wracking myself while she sits astride my opulent, taurine form. There is so much pleasure in taking the body of a young woman beneath yours, and feeling the sweet sponge of her insides mould to your outsides. This has been happening for six ecstatic years, and this fleshy well of honey is still overflowing, her rosy openings flowering profusely.

I was a lonely child, one bereft of childish charm and an upturned cherubic face with which to beguile those taller than me. Instead, I looked down, to locate my feet with my eyes, which were weak and one was lazy. The optometrist said; aha, he has a lazy eye, and I wondered if I had done something wrong, if I had made it lazy by being a lazy person. My mother said; what do we do about that then? The optometrist sternly said; well he’ll have to do exercises…..you will do them won’t you young man. I solemnly agreed that I would, and felt myself enter into an intractable contract with this man who guffawed before my mother with such jocularity…or should I say ocularity? I was dizzy with nerves, stygian with the effort of concentration and exhausted from holding my breath as the optometrist stared romantically into my eyes.

A lazier child than I would have said bugger the exercises, but diligently, my eyes darted around a page of random symbols, desperately seeking sense and patterns. I thought that finding the patterns would make me unlazy, would make me sensible, and that some secret would be unlocked for me. No such thing was ever conveyed to me by anyone else, but I felt my intuitive nature grasp onto this idea as if it were life itself. The search for patterns became a superstitious (and supercilious) search for meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. I became concerned with poverty, cruelty and destruction because they seemed so meaningless, and so in my 20s I became an avid campaigner for the rights of those I did not perceive as having rights. But this morally instilled l
‘laziness’ persisted until I was obsessed with activity, and felt guilty when I slept. Eventually I had to move back in with my parents, because I was exhausted and spent, and they asked me why I refused to sleep enough. I told them that I felt guilty, because it made me feel lazy, excessive and wasteful to sleep through time that could be spent Doing Good in the World. My parents looked at each other, and my mother’s mouth puckered disapprovingly, and I almost heard her say that young people are melodramatic and silly. My father asked me if I had ever considered that rather than sleeping through time, time actually stops when we are asleep and resumes when we are awake. That can’t be I told him, because we can see that time has elapsed while we have been asleep. But he said that it is possible that time stops, because time is intangible anyway, and the only ways we have to quantify it are linear, but we don’t really know anything about time. He said that thinking of time in that way is the only way he can cope with the idea of his own death. “When I cease to exist, the world ceases to exist with me”.

My feisty older sister refused braces when she was13, claiming that having a mouth full of metal would make her mouth taste bad, and boys would feel sick when they kissed her. Nevermin that her teeth stuck out in a manner more impressive than Sister Wendy’s. When she was 25 she took herself off to the orthodontist to have braces out on. A year later when she had them removed her top lip had that shortened look of people who have had braces, and her teeth looked too long.

Janice can’t wash her hair very often because her scalp aches when water hits it. So I rub warm almond oil into her head, and hold her small head between my large hands and imagine crushing it and immobilising her forever.




3. Don’t Hide Your Light Under a Bushel

The almost sexual heart massage pumping of a lifeless body, prostrate on a surgeon’s table, wrought with intractable agony. You know things are bad when the prefix you receive is ‘long term’. Do you even remember who I am, what I did for you? I knew you were an ungrateful little bastard, swinging from the ceiling beams like a savage.



Profligate, Propagate, Procreate.