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System Instructions for Spolia & the Prologues 

 

I began this book with a shadowbook—with notes, maps, and images written, drawn, or glued onto a notebook of graph paper. I went to campus programs and fairs in physics and biology departments looking for structure. I can't imagine what the manuscript would look like without these tools, but in the end, my simultaneous immersion in disability theory in preparation for doctoral exams and fortunate timing for a pandemic determined its course. Spolia is a hybrid of memoir, speculative fiction, mythology, critifiction, and codex. It’s a play in narrative genre and intercultural, mixed-temporal tropes, a play that raises questions about the way we record and erase histories, the way people conceptualize reality and, to borrow from Michel Foucault, unreality, and the way neurodiverse people build self-awareness and represent themselves in different contexts. It also deals with disfiguration and restoration and the possibilities of an imagined feminine sexuality and social structure shaped by but impervious to violence. Borrowing from Christine de Pizan’s self-naming and reconstructive women’s histories in The Book of the City of Ladies, as well as possible-worlds theory and its connection to emerging concepts in theoretical physics and a number of modern and ancient medical, scientific, and other fictional texts, I  play with deployments of disability and related intersectional issues by presenting real-world situations in the first part and structuring the fictional world to explore them differently in the second part, while the third part is more reflective.

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More reading:

Possible Prologue: She Can't Be Shaved

Actual Prologue: Contain Me

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My Attempt to Encapsulate the Why This, Why That, of Spolia, in Lieu of a Detailed Syntagmatic Synopsis.

 

THE NAME: Spolia refers to repurposed building stone for new construction, or decorative sculpture reused in new monuments. Whenever a natural or manmade disaster or conquest happened, rubble or ideologies would lead to a rebuilding, a new orientation. In Ephesus I saw my own rubble—a woman fragmented by trauma and health issues, trying to rebuild her life into something livable. Amid the rubble were the narratives I studied as if they were islands of refuge, and encoded in them were the possibility for change.

 

INTERTEXTUALITY: But they weren’t islands. The spoke to each other. In them I noticed they wrestled with some of the same demons I couldn’t seem to tame: erasure, internalized stigmatization, dysarticulation, physical and emotional pain. They had a few strategies in common: their texts were full of intertextual references, mixed tropes, and word play that managed to spin beauty out of despair while casting a new light—both on the “tyranny of significations” (Robbe-Grillet), which is to say the paradigms of meaning enforced by those who oppress, marginalize, and even criminalize people whose differences were considered obstruction to their grip on power, and the nature of meaning and power itself.

 

GENRE: It seemed to me that early attempts by women to reclaim their stories (de Pizan and Cavendish, for example) required them to stretch conventional boundaries of genre—to try new modes of speaking to get around paradigms that offered them little access to express their ideas and frustrations. Pizan repurposed fragments of history—appropriating even herself as a kind of artifact with self-naming—to reconfigure and broaden the ways women were viewed. I initially struggled with this self-naming enterprise, wondering how she had the audacity to make herself her own protagonist. Since The Arc and the Sediment was published, I’d been holding a grudge against what had to be narcissism—how dare I think that what I said was worthy of another person’s time and consideration? I'd won a few contests but that didn't mean the book was being read. Cavendish is among a small handful of writers who planted the seeds of science fiction. How could a writer be so bold as to appropriate emerging ideas in science and cast them in something as outrageous as talking bear-men who were experimental philosophers and bird-men who were expert astronomers? I’ve always had one foot in scientific writing—both to find answers through neurology for my very idiosyncratic consciousness (between temporal-lobe epilepsy, PTSD, and the like) and another foot in theoretical physics that increasingly questions the way we’ve constructed “reality” itself. But why should a nonscientist—just some technical writer who worked with scientists—raise questions that were too big for her britches?

 

BOOK FORMS: This stirred my fascination with the Codex Cumanicus. This was the same fascination Cervantes took on with Don Quixote: how is it that some people were able to imagine written expression in a way that transformed the structure of narrative so completely that even their readers’ self-narratives—the ways they constructed their own identities, priorities, and potentialities, changed? The Codex Cumanicus was not a forerunner in the genre, but its breadth of interests was. Typically the form, which emerged in about the 2nd and 3rd centuries, addressed singular themes: reflections on Christianity, medicine, or magical spells. The Codex Cumanicus juxtaposed translation, parables, riddles, and more between two covers, speaking to the more varied dynamics and needs of everyday lives and cultural transactions. I wanted to place such different variables in one book, because books of a single theme and mode seemed unlike my life, which consisted of mundane means of survival and profound resonances with other people who felt similarly broken in a world of physical, institutional, and ideological violence.

 

SELF-REFLEXIVITY: While the book was in early stages in 2019, I met for a manuscript consultation with Robert Lopez. Writing has always been a centrifugal and not a centripetal process for me, and when I begin in the peripheries of ideas that haven’t yet been sublimated, my work is scattered, incoherent. He encouraged me for my style and asked questions about what was holding me back. I’d expressed my fears of what I’d learned in my first book that writing could mean: there would be pushback and interrogations—a nightmare for an agroraphobe like me; a fear of narcissism; fears of rejection. He said whenever I felt those anxieties creep up on me, I should “lean into them”—allow them to become matters for the work itself to tangle with and let them work themselves out through writing, as opposed to in writing.

 

THE CRIP TEXT: Through Sami Schalk I learned the power of speculative fiction to short-circuit internalized binary paradigms, in which I had always identified as inferior—physically and mentally broken and complicit in my own victimization. In Kafer I identified some of the cultural barriers that had fenced me in, and in Schalk, Kafer, and Audre Lorde I looked to intersectional feminism for answers. I wanted a book that first reflected on the particulars of my life—a memoir that drew on the strategies of fiction but remained true to the events that had shaped me. Then I wanted to take on the challenge of Michael Berube to create deployments of disability in part two. Berube notes that such deployments could only cast fictional disabilities that were more or less referential to the lived experiences of the disabled, because writers were operating in a purely representational world. So, for example, I invoked figurative sculpture for their ever-eroding trajectories, whose fragmentation and loss were always overly interpreted through their audience’s expectations for an unattainably ideal figure.

 

Throughout this process, I’d update my daughter: “Damn, Kate--now I have cephalopod gorgons. How am I going to deal with this?" Though she’s a teenager, she’s brilliant when it comes to understanding human nature and institutionalized violence (we are an interracial family who went through boom and bust together). We would talk about the repercussions of revising ancient scrolls or surviving a repetitive life even in the best of possible worlds, a utopia, of sorts. Recently she said to me, “It’s like you’ve invented a therapy for yourself that works for you. It’s like two years of therapy…and look how you’ve changed.”

 

I want more than anything to tap into the transformational power of juxtapositioning, of exploring alterity and neurodiversity as sources of strength and wonder. This book is a gathering of spolia, an attempt to build something new, to add to it whatever I’ve learned in the process. Therapists often urge their dissociative patients to integrate into a singular identity. Politicians and eugenicists want us to integrate into an average, an ideal, a mythologized purity and consistency. In Spolia, I’m saying Robert Lopez had it right: lean into what you perceive to be sources of failure or weakness. Allow the dynamic self or selves to be at play with one another and, at the same time, to sublimate unacknowledged personal and cultural raw material from the chora, as Kristeva would have it. That’s how you bust out of what was and into what could come into being.