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81 a cardiovascular study in hope I. Blood Strawberries in a breakfast: the color of blood garnets, once used in arrows as indiscernible weaponry—hard to find & remove from the slippery of artery and its fluid. A tiny darted gem holding open its wound. Sliva is Russian for plum, like a dark round purple hematoma, pupil to a bruise. Like the coursing of oric veins, spidery gold on a red card. “My guru is within my heart, he is the viveka within my heart,” wrote Jnaneshwari. “This means to me that our hearts are our whole bodies and our wounds are visible,” says Fanny Howe. * * * Wounds are fed & cleansed by our supply of blood. As are injuries. One of the problems with injuries to tendons and ligaments is that their blood supply is much less than other connective tissue. The healing process can be lengthy. 82 “Since all dying is a kind of murder by this world, I would like to be able to declare, ‘I served another world,’” writes Howe later. So many descriptions of how tendons go awry (like rope over an edge, toothed up and snarled, or raspy sloe and swollen) & nerve tunnels. These elbows which just can’t hold the strain. Still blood courses through veins & arteries in circular, scrubbing and carrying. * * * The ancient Greek word for blood was haima, hence our prefix haemo- or hemo-. Hemophilia, hemoglobinuria, hemolysis. Things that go wrong with the blood. We refuse to understand why living should be such a challenge to the muscles of the heart. But there is also hemostasis, stopping the bleeding, turning it from a fluid to a solid. When a blood vessel ruptures or is cut, floating platelets in the blood come into contact with collagen in the layer of tissue around the vessel. They become sticky, begin to clump: a magnetism of bodies. You may think of these platelets as heroes but they look like small monsters. Little floating horrors with many spiking limbs, a grotesquery of function. Around the platelet clumps, a jumbled net of fibers form, like the tangle of northwestern forests. The platelets contract and pull the net tight. Our bleeding stops. The horrors have saved us. 83 Our bodies do much to preserve us. Flannery O’Connor notes: to recognize the grotesque you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque. Carson replies: The grotesque may take many forms. Is it grotesque to think of our bodies split open at the seams, of what is inside now out? There is a certain grotesquery to the ways we break. But I would take body rupture over mind any day. To speak of horrors. The ways a diagnosis can spell a life. Early-onset Alzheimer’s begins before the age of 65. At earliest, its beginnings were identified in a 17-year-old. It is genetic, and runs in families. No one outruns this disease, says a news station. No one survives it. To look at the world around you and know it is slowly being erased. Your relationships to things, to place, to the language of knowing. That words and people will erode, go away. The you you think of as self, will go away. The horrors. Yet with all these changes in the brain, the body keeps itself running . Though the appetite may be diminished, the patient still eats. Though perhaps fearful, the person still sleeps. Still walks around, perplexed, looking for something or someone they feel is missing. And the blood. Irony red bodywater, surging and pulsing with vitality, carrying, cleansing, feeding. The blood itself keeps flowing as if nothing else has even changed. Grotesqueries. 84 II. Arteries When my grandmother’s own mother passed away, the blood in her arteries was so thick with cholesterol they couldn’t embalm her. She was always such a lady, my grandmother used to say. Longing (soggy) dripping out of her voice. Medically speaking, the lumen is the inside space of a tubular structure, like an artery. But look at its Latin meanings, its origins. An opening or a light: the luminousness of a space, the way light in the distance beckons, as when you have been exploring a cave for very many hours and approach the light of the exit. The air grows fresher. The lumen of an artery expands and contracts easily as long as it is soft and unplaqued. All aflush, we haunt ourselves, seeking the distance between knowing and unknowing. Blood moves warmly through our vessels. Thin...

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