Going Downhill from Here

NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE

The nude in Marcel Duchamp’s famed 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 does not appear to need a railing. She seems quite capable of walking down stairs, multiplied as she is into several incarnations, a body for each stair. Division of labor, rendering the task of each step far less daunting. As Duchamp parcels out her golden motion, the nude is anything but graceful, her body—or bodies—serviceable, put together more efficiently than we are, with the bulk of her in the calves, the feet: sturdy, working legs. Her head, translucent waves of motion, all flurry at higher elevations, weighs little on her arm-pumping shoulders. She doesn’t even need to think until she reaches the lowest step, where her head appears as she carefully looks down, leans back, holding all those previous stages of her movement steady, saying—if she had a mouth—“Don’t worry about this, ladies. I’ve got it all under control. I’ll stop your fall.”

This is how I see the painting today, when the scars in my brain and spine delay and suspend each downward step, confounding the entire process. I’m trying to work out how she does it. How she descends, machinelike, functional, on such a rickety staircase, without holding on to anything. I want to dissect it, which is a bit of what Duchamp was after—conveying motion in a static, painted image during cinema’s infancy—except I’m searching for instruction in weight distribution and balance. In where one arm goes when the opposite leg moves. In how to do it without bracing, without thought, without fear.

But then I get confused in the blur of her. At some point her upper torso becomes a golden, shining, eyeless horse head, leaning over the lowest figure’s shoulder, and I can’t unsee it. She is human and animal at once. And all of a sudden, the entire scenario is knocked off balance, too much horsey weight pressed upon her shoulder—the way I’ve known foals to do, not knowing their own strength. (How many horses’ jaws have pressed down upon my own shoulders, claiming, pushing?) The horse-head part of her could knock them all down.

When I revisited the painting on the Internet, my search also produced various homages to Duchamp—C-3PO from Star Wars, Bender from Futurama, and Superman, all descending in the same manner as the original—as well as a photograph of a silver-haired, smiling woman on a staircase. The woman looks down the stairs as her shadow rises behind her, stark against the wall. The shot reminded me of cinemascope films from the 1950s—Hitchcock came to mind, as did staircase sequences in two Nicholas Ray films, Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life. Of course I clicked on it. How could I not?

The woman is, as it turns out, seated. She is modeling the Picasso stair lift, manufactured by HandiCare Stairlifts in the United Kingdom. As she descends, I imagine her gliding, the machinery conveying her safely from floor to floor. Shadows of the banister rails rise like prison bars across her lower body. The metaphor was no doubt unintentional. The woman, like Duchamp’s figure, defies it; she needs no banister at all. Her body changes shape, molds into the chair on a track. I find myself between these two bodies—chairless, trackless, but unsturdily small-footed and weak-limbed. Not cut out for this sort of thing unless I change shape, redistribute myself into parts.

DECLINE

“We really don’t want to be on a downward path, do we,” my husband, Ian, said after I asked if I should call the neurologist about my latest relapse of multiple sclerosis. I’d already dusted off my canes, ready for that third leg—wooden, Lucite, or carbon fiber—to extend from my right hand and unstagger me. “Calling the neurologist” is our shorthand for getting put on IV steroids to nip the flare-up in the bud, before more damage occurs in the...