Blood
It began with what looked like two large shoehorns inserted into a shaved, withered vagina. The shoe horns were stainless steel and sparkled underneath the operation-room lighting. The manner of their insertion made it clear that their purpose was to pry the vagina open, to expose an extraordinary area. The labia minor were of a tannish hue. I adjusted the color.
The University of Sapienza had hired me, for the next two days, to transmit video of several operations-seven hysterectomies and one prostatectomy. I sat in a white Benz truck with a satellite dish on top, at Policlinico di Sapienza in Rome, transmitting the images. A crazed Australian sat in a truck, two blocks away, receiving the images off the satellite. My boss sat in the auditorium, controlling the phone line to the operating room so the students could ask the surgeons questions.
The vagina obviously belonged to an older woman. Extruding from the labia minor and steel shoehorns was a distended, pinkish, smooth mass. From what I understood it was a fallen uterus. The internal musculature was unable to support it. They switched to the lipstick camera.
The vagina was opened to a 10 centimeter diameter. The uteral mass was placed back into the pale pink interior and manipulated so to expose the almost labial-appearing cervix. The surgeon took a bright steel scalpel and began to cleave the cervix from the vaginal cavity, exposing the interior limit of the uterine wall. Bright red blood flowed over the image. The blood was rinsed with saline and drained with a steel tube.
The red color was too intense for transmission; the students on the other end of the signal were getting distorted images. I pulled all of the color I could out of the video, but it was still a horrible, deep red. I sat on a reel of cables and clung to sanity.
Boredom becomes an issue. Sitting there you begin to experience an ebb and flow to your sense of horror.
When the knife cuts through a seemingly healthy fiber, the view of discoloration and disease, the lower stomach fully incised, the extraction of an uterus as a whole piece (as if it were a squid's head) bloated with fibroids, cutting through the endodermic fat layer (colored a pus-like hue with a red highlights), the crotch obviously spread open; all of these brought horror. The sound of intensified suction of fluids.
The last image was particularly disturbing-this woman resembled a slaughtered duck being prepared for the kitchen.
I was gripped by notions of humanity and carnality, when I wasn't complaining about how stiff my neck was getting.
No tricks: a body on a table surrounded, incised, partitioned. Gloved hands with sterile knives, the open iris of the lens, cables to the car, my eyes, transmission? I could not distance myself from a carved-up living corpse.
Red fiber hanging, clear strip of muscle, murky strip of fat, the hanging of a tendon: meat. A human does not resemble meat, it is meat. No matter what distance we put between us and our prey, we are the same as what we eat.
My boss called me, laughing:
I've ordered a real American hamburger for you! Al sangue! Rare!
He promised the others meat sauce. Sugo Bolognese!
No escape.
Food is cruel but so is medicine:
"This distention of the uterus is common among enormously fat women like the one before us?"
Politically correct is not an Italian concept. While the quality of work was undeniable, the surgeons marked time with a torrent of obscenities I picked up over the video line, mocking the patients, yelling at each other and just keeping rhythm:
Porco, porco Cane, porca Puttana, porca Troia, porco Giudo, porca Eva, porco Dio, porca Madonna, tu fai sempre i porci comodi tuoi! Sono Porchi Questi Romani?
I sat before two small monitors in the parking lot, as people wandered up to me, wondering what a sattelite truck was doing there. Doctors, nurses, cleaning staff, students and bored strangers would come up and ask what was happening, and then watch the operation. Crowds of cigarette-smoking groups watched, discussing the operation. At one point, an entire family of eight, all dressed in jogging suits, all smoking cigarettes, gathered around my truck. They were sure that the woman currently having her uterus removed was their relative.
There is where I stop being Italian; nothing is more horrifying to me than the concept of watching my sister's hysterectomy with my family. To them, the view allows them to restore their community. Privacy is an American concept.
Driven to participate, the people in the parking lot were yelling and critiquing, the doctors yelling at other doctors while students yelled questions and critiques over phone lines. I made sure the video and audio were good.
I think I understand J.G. Ballard now. Lawrence attempted to constitute the body from its libidinal drives and Joyce from the chain of sensory impressions, but both were still writing about the mind. Now, with my mind fixed on that point were scalpel meets flesh, I imagine Ballard cleaving the body, dragging it piecemeal into literature, at times returning to the medical literature from which he came. We have yet to imagine our characters as bones grating at joints, blue veins clogged, red rope-like arteries contracting and mucus glands excreting.
We are still trapped at a point were our characters are voices and faces, if that. Our cinema, with its Platonic idealized forms, is even worse. We suffer a eunuch cinema, and our pornography is the price we pay for our lies about the body. There's no falsehood, though, to the strip-mining of the woman on the table.
The male is treated far more gently. A 5 milimeter tube with a camera attached is inserted into the penis and pushed all the way in until it arrives at the prostate. When it arrives, a small electric saw is deployed through the tube. The saw dismembers the prostate, piece by inflamed piece. The saw is uncomfortably audible. Still, there is something safe about the images, nothing is identifiable; it could be Jacques Cousteau if you didn't know better. It is only when the camera cuts to the exterior and the surgeon's arm going back and forth, obviously pushing the tube deeply into and out of the penis, that one reaches a point of shuddering discomfort.
What is arranged in the picture is not there to be more or less beautiful, but to give the highest level of sensibility so that the students can comprehend the operation. It is a perfect model for a work of art.
There, in the quadra, is the body before me? a piece at least. A bleeding piece being cauterized, blackened, sending electric noise through the image. I suppose it could have all been a lie, generated by CGI. Manufactured in coding sweatshops in India, Malaysia, Chinatown? but it would change nothing. It is in the image we place our sympathies; we have lost the person from the start. I can only escape by acknowledging it as an image. By making sure the colors are okay.
The image that returns to my mind is one from a military friend. It is Houston James, a survivor of Pearl Harbor, embracing Staff Sergeant Mark Graunke Jr., who had lost a hand, a leg and an eye while defusing a bomb in Iraq. Mr. James seems to hang gently on Sergeant Graunke, who stands tall and returns the embrace with one hand and one hook. The only eye that is not glistening is the sergeant's missing socket, X-stitched.
This image-which somehow calls me to respond, calls me to account, (but to what?)-was also framed, adjusted and controlled by someone for color, contrast, clarity? no escape.