Listen to Olivia Muenz read this excerpt.
for John Deyle
Nothing is my favorite thing to do. It often disguises itself as something because true nothing is hard. Think deep space. Think the Void. Think no think. I like a lazier nothing. Nothing with texture. Think distraction. Think white noise.
—
I started watching a lot of movies because I was too sick to do anything. Too sick to move. Too sick to think. In the sickbed there is no void to swallow time. Time becomes plump. It fills me up. It drags on forever.
After a while that kind of nothing feels like dying. But chronic illness is a different kind of dying than terminal illness. Death is more symbol. The threat is not in the literal act of dying but in the dying of what constitutes a life. The threat of nothing stretched on for eighty years. An empty life in a long deathbed.
But through movies I could immerse myself in other lives. And being adjacent to living is almost like living. I could trick myself into believing I was being productive, which in America is what constitutes a life. Movies became research. I was learning narrative. I was absorbing other lives.
—
In Taoism, wei-wu-wei is the action of nonaction. That definition gives me nothing. I don’t know if contradicting parts cancel each other out or make something new. I read theorist David Loy, who describes wei-wu-wei as doing nothing, or as little as possible. Everything seems to hinge on that or. Is it nothing or something very little? Is there a difference?
—
Potatoes is my Wi-Fi password. Potatoes are my favorite food because they are a lot like nothing. You can turn them into something. Dress them up. Mash them together with butter. Cut them into pieces and throw herbs on them.
But potatoes are best boiled. Plain starch. Their most fundamental. Their nothingness makes them earnest and adaptable, which I find admirable. Some people accuse me of having boring food taste. Too much chicken and potatoes. Too plain. No flavor. But I call myself exciting. Full of possibility. A radical opening. Potatoes are so nothing they can be anything you want them to be.
—
To glean is to gather after the harvest. European gleaners used to sweep fields after the harvest season in groups looking for good produce missed by harvesters. Considered a right of the poor, laws around the right to glean exist in France to this day.
Agnès Varda follows modern-day gleaners in her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I—rural gleaners raking through fields to salvage produce too ugly to be sold commercially, urban gleaners picking through trash cans for restaurant food waste or furniture left on the curb. In all cases, the gleaners of today are much more solitary, many picking alone rather than in groups like their nineteenth-century counterparts.
In a post-harvest field, a gleaner explains the different kinds of leftover potatoes. Those that are too big. Those that are too small. Those that are heart shaped. The gleaners take them to eat. Varda loves the potato hearts. She takes a bagful home and films them up close in a dumped pile. She has gleaned something else, interested in another kind of eating.
—
For years I collected small diagnoses for the symptoms most visible, most unignorable, most understandable, most confirmable by hard data. Nutcracker syndrome. Chronic migraine. Insomnia. But there was nothing to piece them all together. No larger narrative. No umbrella name.
As time dragged on, I grew more desperate. More serious. I joined every group I could find on Facebook for conditions I could have. I raked through their archives. I asked questions. I crowdsourced data. I found lists of vetted doctors to see. With their help, I gleaned a list of possibilities. With their help, I finally found a name I could circle. I was diagnosed.
—
The term couch potato was first used in 1976 by Tom Lacino offhandedly on a phone call. Tom was in a group called the Boob Tubers, a group devoted to sitting on the couch, watching TV, and eating snacks. Although it wasn’t intentional, some linguists assume somewhere in Lacino’s brain he conflated potatoes—a tuber—with the television tube.
I like to watch movies about nothing. I like to see myself back. In technical terms, Diner is about something. A group of high school friends returning home for a wedding. But it’s comprised of scenes that would usually be filler in other movies. A group of friends in a diner eating fries arguing about who’s better, Johnny Mathis or Frank Sinatra. A group of friends in a diner watching two friends argue over who should eat a sandwich. The plot is almost arbitrary. It shows life as it is. A lot of waiting around. A lot of talking about nothing. A lot of doing nothing. A lot of nothing textured by companionship.
—
Nothing is defined as not anything. No single thing. Not at all. I’m not sure how that helps. It seems hard to define a negation. What are you doing? someone asks while I’m in bed. I’m negating, I answer.
—
My best friend has breast cancer. When she told me, it felt like nothing. I got her email as I was taking my daily pandemic walk, a nothing break to break up my nothing days. She sent me an email because voices are too real. An email renders illness into nothing.
On the phone we talk about tiredness while feeling sorry for each other. Me, sorry for her future tiredness. Her, sorry for my permanent tiredness. Me, sorry for her threat of literal death. Her, sorry for my threat of metaphorical death. Together in sickness we become yin yang. One of us terminal, one of us chronic. A complete spread of sickness given texture by companionship.
—
When you accuse someone of being a couch potato, you accuse them of being a nothing. Being sick I am mostly a nothing. I am a proud couch potato. It is not my most interesting or my most productive. But it is myself boiled down, all starch.
—
Is it a shelter as well? Varda asks an urban gleaner who collects trash from the streets of Paris. His house looks like a slightly more sophisticated home from Hoarders. Floor to ceiling there are empty glass bottles. Old TV sets. Bits of copper wiring. From what? he asks. From emptiness. It’s full in here, overflowing. The gleaner tells the camera he’s moving toward emptiness, but Varda’s cut to his endless piles of stuff suggests otherwise.
Others might call it a heap of junk. For me it’s a wondrous heap of possibilities, another urban gleaner explains.
—
Diagnosis has mostly given me nothing. Without a cure or treatment for Ehlers Danlos syndrome, I’m left with nothing but a framework of understanding. I used to wait for an answer. Now, I’m not sure what I’m waiting for.
I think about gleaning from my sickbed. Ordinary objects are made critical. A small packet of crackers. A half-empty water bottle. A neck pillow. A few strewn, open pill bottles. My body surrounded by the trash it needs to survive the day.
What kind of eating am I after? My sickbody says it wants a cracker, which comes from a place of desire, but not the kind I’m looking for. What is my body gleaning from its own mess? We can’t shake the feeling of being a dumpster.
—
One of Varda’s most famous films is Cléo from 5 to 7. We wait with Cléo for nearly two hours for the results of her test for cancer. We walk with her, eat with her, shop with her. The specter of diagnosis hangs in every mouthful, in every benign conversation. At the end of the film, Cléo’s doctor tells her she has cancer and she smiles. Sometimes the waiting is the worst part.
—
A sickbed is a grave, John Donne says. Here I am mine own ghost . . . Miserable, and (though common to all) inhuman posture, where I must practise lying in the grave by lying still, and not practice my resurrection by rising any more.
I write a poem from my sickbed in the shape of a bed. My gleaning feels like a lie. If I were more interested in the truth, I would invite readers to stand over me and tuck me in. I’m not sure what exactly I’m trying to resurrect. I’m not sure if I’m coming or going. Mostly I’m stuck.
—
Say a word over and over and over until it’s rendered meaningless. Its sound no longer correlated to a linguistic symbol, instead a plump, foreign, sound shape. Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing . . .
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