A body is a machine for building with

I have spent some time in hospital recently visiting a relative. The patient journey is taxing: private experience is forcibly drawn out onto a public stage, risking the patient's dignity, and the NHS's size and functional specialisation - and medicine's complex domain - makes for differing and hard-to-understand information presented by different specialists across a long period of time. So the "patient" is well-named: the word goes back to enduring, staying in a place, waiting. (It has to be said though that the healthcare professionals we've encountered so far have been very good indeed.)

This notion of enduring/staying in a place brought to mind a dimly-remembered Heidegger essay on building and dwelling and then Le Corbusier's famous "a house is a machine for living in". Could architecture and medicine be happily combined in a short story? Could we start to graft the two together, turning the body into a machine for building with? Here's a first and tentative draft for a sub-Calvino story, on Masochuticon: Fracture. The first line is a quote, and the story's critical structural weakness is that there is no story there yet! Like the patient, I must now endure - and wait to see if this story gets better.

Heidegger in 'Building Dwelling Thinking' (1951):

What, then, does Bauen, building, mean? The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in a place. The real meaning of the verb bauen, namely, to dwell, has been lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbor.

Comments

[Russ]

Hi - Really liked the Masochuticon piece. What I find interesting is that the meditation on ephemera, and working notes seems like you working out concepts that you might use in another story. So the piece might be an offcut itself of something yet to be written ?

[rodcorp]

Hey Russ,

I suppose both the 'Fracture' piece described above and the later 'Several inches were cut' piece on Masochuticon are about the margins, edges, offcuts. An offcut in advance of a future body of work - a pre-supplement as it were - is a very nice idea... hmmm.

If I can clumsily attempt to suture together both stories, it's by citing Duchamp, who did a artwork called 'In advance of the broken arm'.

And I only just noticed your story, up at http://russcoff.typepad.com/russcoff/2007/04/chapter_one_par.html - it's on the list to read.