An electric new poem by Emma Aylor and Part 4 of Rob Bowman's essay "On Being and On Being the Right Size"
Dear Readers,
If you’re anything like us, you woke with strange thoughts burning in your head. Thoughts such as: “What is a driven nail cure?” and “What does it mean to be the right size?”
And if these were your exact questions, questions that had burrowed deep into the very fiber and folds of your brain, threatening to drive you mad, then you are now in luck — because today Air/Light is excited to present Emma Aylor’s electrifying poem “Driven Nail Cure” as well as the 4th part of Rob Bowman’s brilliant epic essay “On Being and On Being the Right Size.”
We know you’re going to love it all, and they just might give you the answers you’re looking for.
✌️
The Editors
Emma Aylor: “Mandy at the End of the World”
If you’ve seen a prayer spoken, you know something of what I mean. The purpose of the prayer list, read by the priest aloud, prior to a silence, is to hold names’ wetted wafers in the mouth. A person creaks like small gravel—you told me that. You told me trees make speech sounds, growing.
“On Being and On Being the Right Size,” Part 4 by Rob Bowman
We’re thrilled to present “On Being and On Being the Right Size” in five parts for the next five weeks. You can read all the sections of the essay here.
—The Editors
They pulled away the sheet.
I’ve looked up how chest ports are supposed to be inserted. There are two incisions, one to guide what happens in the other, but this doctor made only one and then felt it out or intuited it somehow, running a tube through an artery and into my heart. I lay there and thought about my family while willing my body not to move. Then they pulled away the sheet. A tube was sticking out of me, set into a plastic patch, taped down. I looked at the doctor and the nurses on either side of him. They were splashed with blood.
Mine.
*
The port meant more solutions could be poured into me, solutions as in liquids and as in hopefully eliminating problems. I could hear them talk about the different things they wanted to try, incantations of pharmaceutical ingenuity, names that merge Greek and Latin with corporate synergy, needles as wands, clear plastic pouches and syringes standing in for doeskin and divining rods.
*
In “On Magic in Medicine,” Lewis Thomas reminds us that in the early days of medicine, “hostile spirits needing exorcism were the principal pathogens, and the shaman’s duty was simply the development of improved incantation.” The manufacture of medications involves a long tradition of trying shit and seeing what works and what doesn’t. The successes come in shocking bursts. Felix Hoffmann, a chemist at Bayer, invented or found or synthesized or summoned or alchemized both heroin and aspirin. What’s more, the two discoveries took place around ten days apart.
Bayer loves to tell the story of the aspirin but is less keen to discuss the heroin.
Haldane’s essay “Pain-Killers” comes toward the back of the collection. Again, this is an indicator of bad things. Haldane is a fan of heroin, writing that it “is remarkably useful in dealing with the intractable tickle of a severe cough.” He acknowledges that some people enjoy the psychological effects but claims he isn’t one of them, even as he also admits to having “taken a large dose of heroin four times a day for ten days or so without getting any ‘kick’ out of it or losing an hour’s sleep when I stopped taking it.” He is convinced that the drug’s addictive properties are more troubling for Westerners and that no Communist would ever be addicted, as their systems are just too powerful.