Susanna's Howling Liver (delivered unto the organ of healing)
This site-specific installation was the beginning of the Intimacies, of the internal landscapes, shared secrets, whispered truths and warped and woven lies that form the typography of spoken work.
The Crypt under St. Pancras Church has two mouths: deep red metal double doors, pierced with patterned holes, allowing it to draw and expel breath. While the church stands, silent and full of aspiration, the secret life of the below breathes like a bellows.
A body, then, built, like mine, of essentially interconnected parts. It has organs of function like mine does. Organs of storage, of transformation, of process, of restoration, of production and of dormancy. I try not to connect my own dysfunctional pancreas, struggling to heal itself to the church above - it is impossible.
In the deep recesses of the Crypt lies a room with stairs to the “other” mouth, this space, I decide, is a vital organ, one that we all possess, but are unsure how to activate. It is an appendix, an extra-long coccyx, it may not be vestigial after all.
I think of the recent scans of my own enigmatic organs - technicolor, stained, uniquely visible. One set of doctors tells me finally there is no cancer. Another tells me “Worry is the disease of the pancreas.” The liver, I learn, is the only organ capable of truly healing to the point of actual regeneration. Also, the Liver is associated with anger. Anger and Regeneration.
A white-hot flame erupts in me. Lokadhi says white-hot anger is the anger of obliteration, its reach remorseless in its totality. I recognize it. The pillar of my spine is built of this same insistent substance.
The sound of the roofers using a blow torch above my head in my studio reinforces this: a furnace of purpose, producing energy, obliterating, transforming, destroying, and from that chaos: something new? A space left cleansed, cauterized, no longer white hot and howling, but able to breathe once more? Kali? Are you in there with Eiko? Are you bringing all of us Susannas together, plotting a path to and through the Rupture, healing us all? Dare I hope? Maybe only in this space, I do. In a paralleled fiction willed into truth.
An organ then. A dormant organ, an organ we all possess: an organ of healing, with its mouth sucking in the air of the corporeal world and bathing the loss below with possibility.
I think of Tampaksiring in Bali, of emergency trips to the Tirta Empul temple for rites of purification, to shake off the night terrors of my child, of offerings made and left, of reaching, reaching, so close to love and falling, again, so humanly short of it.
A bath, then, a cleansing of worry my pancreas needs: injected straight into the vein, bypassing the trouble, dunked under the water, hands passing over the head, flowers and cigarettes and candy wrapped in plastic offered up in woven grass boats laden with incense. A bath where it is safe to bathe.
Eiko will hold the polarities of possibility and despair. Leave them with your shoes at the temple stairs.
