Ben Lerner on Open Heart Surgery
| Long before I’d had any tests, I thought of both sentence and line as electrocardiograms, as measures of the writing body’s idiosyncratic pulses, which might quicken in the act of composition. I harbored the fantasy that once encoded in literary form the synchronic rhythms of my heartbeat and my breath might become available to you, and that your own rhythms might be altered by the encounter in the time of reading.
In the Review’s November 6 issue, Ben Lerner writes about his experience of open heart surgery—“they replaced the diseased portion of my aorta with a knitted Dacron polyester graft”—and the metaphors and language of the heart. Below, alongside Lerner’s essay, are six memoirs about illness from our archives. By strange alchemy, a treatment for allergies also cured my aversion to literature. It was those jabs that made me a writer. —June 23, 2021 “When I wake with my heart pounding in the middle of the night, my sheets are soaked with sweat that must be full of virus. The virus is my new partner, our third companion in the apartment, wetly draped across my body in the night. When I get up for water I have to sit on the floor, halfway to the sink, so I don’t faint.” —March 26, 2020 “The psychiatry department of Kings County Hospital in East Flatbush serves one of the poorest, most at-risk, and most diverse populations in a borough that has otherwise become a byword for gentrification.” —January 7, 2019 I have poetry to buy, as a matter of urgency. Should I kick the bucket in the next six months, I won’t have left my sons, aged twelve and fourteen, a code of conduct or moral legacy, and I am turning to poetry to step into the breach. —February 21, 2018 “On Monday, February 16, I could say I felt well, in my usual state of health—at least such health and energy as a fairly active eighty-one-year-old can hope to enjoy—and this despite learning, a month earlier, that much of my liver was occupied by metastatic cancer.” —April 23, 2015 “Morning brings some respite, though it says something about the lonely journey through the night that the prospect of being transferred to a wheelchair for the rest of the day should raise one’s spirits! Having something to do, in my case something purely cerebral and verbal, is a salutary diversion—if only in the almost literal sense of providing an occasion to communicate with the outside world and express in words, often angry words, the bottled-up irritations and frustrations of physical inanition.” —January 14, 2010 Image from Sunday Night Movies by Leanne Shapton, 2013 To find love for yourself, or to place a gift personals ad for a loved one, take advantage of our limited-time special offer. Special Offer
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