| Description |
The compositions in <italic>The Healing Machine</italic> are assemblages of archival and invented documents, narratives, meditations, and language. Formally, they are assembled from fragments, capitalizing on the human impulse to connect unlike things, to see patterns and invent coherent narratives where they may not exist. Section I contains lyric essays that connect personal with public history. Documents are channeled through and distorted by my particular vision. In "Endnotes to a Seizure," I extend dictionary definitions (e.g., of "seizure" or "Scintillating Scotoma") into associative or metaphorical definitions. "As a Bitch Paces Round Her Tender Whelps..." consists of love letters that collage "high" and "low" diction, juxtapose Homer with contemporary slang, and meditate on the way metaphors--like love-- embody the impossible fusion of unlike things. The stories in Section II blur fiction and nonfiction, often employing the form or text of documents as scaffolding. "Real Silk" features invented characters, but includes snippets from professional development pamphlets written for 1930s silk stocking salesmen. Conversely, some stories in Section II invert this relationship between document and character, featuring historical characters but invented documents. "This Precarious Hive" purports to be a biopic of an artist duo, but neither artists nor document have veracity. In such works, I both rely on and undermine the authority of recorded historical narratives. The stories in Section III, about a dentist and his wife in the early twentieth century, also use documents as scaffolding, but in this section, I create a multifaceted, polyphonic history that emphasizes the story over fact. In the title story of this collection, a man builds a "healing machine" in his shed using found materials. He believed this haphazard wunderkammer healed disease by conducting electricity through the body. While this seems unlikely, I find that even photographs of the "machine" provoke wonder and perhaps--through language, observation, and communication--heal less tangible malaise. The compositions in this collection resemble his arrangements of salt vials and Popsicle sticks, and I hope the formal, aesthetic, and thematic relationships that emerge between them invite consideration of how and why unlike things cohere as narrative within a text or texts. |
