Ataxia: Fragments

1. Ataxia, from the greek for disorder, lack of discipline, confusion. In current medical parlance it points to a neurological disorder characterized by disruption or failure of motor control: symptoms include tendency to lose balance, difficulty swallowing, slurred speech.

In 2016, I took a test. I am not sure if I failed or passed, whether failure is possible when prodding one’s genetics. But I haven’t passed either — since the real test is ongoing — we all have our trials, and this belongs to me: spino-cerebellar ataxia 3.

2. The time is out of joint is Hamlet’s phrase. He has just seen his father’s ghost. The footnotes to many renderings of Hamlet parse “out of joint” as meaning “completely disordered,” one note calling it “a metaphor from a bone which has slipped from its proper juncture with another bone, the same metaphor being apparently mixed up with that of setting a clock.” But what, after all, is the proper joint of time? From what has it been disarticulated?

The time is out of joint: the speeds at which my body and my awareness grow old are fundamentally disconnected. My body speeds ahead, happy to show off its dysfunction, cheerfully making routine tasks — coming down stairs, for example — tests of my core training. It seems bent on literalizing my Dasein — being (thrown) there, splayed out, some awkward angel barely surviving a crash landing. My awareness still incessantly works at 5- and 10- year plans: workouts, trips, meals, cakes, sourdough, work, etc. ETC: Et cetera, the locution of those with ample time.

3. Nachtraglichkeit. Freud coined the term to explain how memories, dreams, scenes of trauma, could lay dormant in the psyche, only to give rise to symptoms, pain, bodily effects much later. One translation is deferred action. Another is afterwardsness. Or, in French, apres-coup. Actually, Freud went farther and said that the symptom in the present precedes the event in the past — that the past only really appears to experience or memory because of the present. 

But what if the original event never happened? Or what if it was silence itself? The fact is, my father and I never spoke about it. I thought my father just drank too much, that this explained him stumbling down the hall, his inability to handle stairs, his occasional bad judgement when driving me home from swim practice. 

It would be convenient if the antidote to silence were just speech, just writing, the talking/scribbling cure. But I know better. I knew there was something going on back in the day — I knew that it implicated me, though I desperately wanted my father’s self-medication to explain all of it. It didn’t. And then I recognized my own clumsiness in his.

4. Disability (1). We are all able-bodied, until we are not. If we live long enough, we will all know what it is like to be dis-abled. In that sense, none of what I face is new — it might even be a sign of privilege. Is it best called loss?