Eula Biss - On Immunity: An Inoculation

Graywolf Press

Copyright 2014 by Eula Biss

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

This book is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. It is an inoculation only against maladies of a metaphorical nature.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-1-55597-689-7

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-327-8

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2014

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935701

Cover design: Kimberly Glyder Design

Cover art: Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish, 15771640

Achilles Dipped into the River Styx , ca. 163035 (detail)

Oil on panel, 43 35 inches, SN221

Collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art,

the State Art Museum of Florida, Florida State University

For other mothers,

with gratitude to mine

T HE FIRST STORY I EVER HEARD about immunity was told to me by my father, a doctor, when I was very young. It was the myth of Achilles, whose mother tried to make him immortal. She burned away his mortality with fire, in one telling of the story, and Achilles was left impervious to injury everywhere except his heel, where a poisoned arrow would eventually wound and kill him. In another telling, the infant Achilles was immersed in the River Styx, the river that divides the world from the underworld. His mother held her baby by his heel to dip him in the water, leaving, again, one fatal vulnerability.

When Rubens painted the life of Achilles, the River Styx is where he began. Bats fly across the sky of that painting and the dead ride a ferry in the distance. Achilles dangles from his mothers hand by one plump leg, with his head and shoulders entirely underwater. This is clearly no ordinary bath. The three-headed hound who guards the underworld lies curled at the base of the painting where the babys body meets the river, as if the baby is being plunged into the beast. Conferring immunity, the painting suggests, is a perilous task.

To prepare her children for the hazards of life, my own mother read Grimms fairy tales aloud to us every night before bed. I do not remember the brutality for which those tales are famous as vividly as I remember their magicthe golden pears growing in the castle garden, the boy no bigger than a thumb, the twelve brothers who became twelve swans. But it did not escape my notice, as a child, that the parents in those tales have a maddening habit of getting tricked into making bad gambles with their childrens lives.

In one story, a man agrees to trade with the devil whatever is standing beyond his mill. He thinks he is giving away his apple tree, but to his dismay he finds his daughter standing beyond the mill. In another story, a woman who has been longing for a child becomes pregnant and craves a plant called Rapunzel that grows in the garden of a wicked enchantress. The woman sends her husband to steal the plant and when he is caught, he promises their future child to the enchantress, who locks the girl away in a tall tower with no door. But maidens locked in towers will let down their hair.

And so it was in the Greek myths my mother read to me later. A king who had heard an ominous prophecy could not keep his daughter childless by locking her in a tower. Zeus visited her in the form of a shower of gold that left her pregnant with a child who later killed the king. When the infant Oedipus, left on a mountainside to die, was saved by a shepherd, he was not saved from the prophecy that foretold he would kill his father and marry his mother. And Thetis, Achilless mother, could neither burn nor drown his mortality.

A child cannot be kept from his fate, though this does not stop the gods themselves from trying. Achilless mother, a goddess who married a mortal, heard a prophecy that her son would die young. She made every effort to defy this prophecy, including dressing Achilles as a girl during the Trojan War. After he took up a sword and was discovered to be a boy, his mother asked the god of fire to make a shield for him. This shield was emblazoned with the sun and moon, the earth and ocean, cities at war and peace, fields plowed and reapedthe universe, with all its dualities, was Achilless shield.

The story my father told me when I was young was not the myth of Achilles, he reminds me now, but another ancient story. As my father relates the plot, I understand why I confused the two. The hero of this story is made immune to injury by bathing in the blood of a dragon. But a leaf clings to his body while he bathes, leaving a small spot on his back where he is unprotected. After having been victorious in many battles, he is killed by one blow to that spot.

Immunity is a myth, these stories suggest, and no mortal can ever be made invulnerable. The truth of this was much easier for me to grasp before I became a mother. My sons birth brought with it an exaggerated sense of both my own power and my own powerlessness. I found myself bargaining with fate so frequently that my husband and I made a game of it, asking each other what disease we would give our child for prevention against anothera parody of the impossible decisions of parenthood.

When my son was an infant, I would hear many variations of All that matters is that he is safe. I would wonder whether that was, indeed, all that mattered nearly as often as I would wonder if I could keep him safe. I was certain that I did not have the power to protect him from his fate, whatever it might be. But I was determined nonetheless to avoid the bad gambles of the Grimms tales. I would not let my child be cursed by my own carelessness or cupidity. I would not accidentally say to the devil, You may have what is beyond the mill , only to discover that what is standing beyond the mill is my child.

T HE DAY BEFORE MY SON WAS BORN was the first warm day of spring. In labor, I walked out to the end of the pier, where the morning sun was breaking up the ice floes on Lake Michigan. My husband held up a video camera and asked me to speak to the future, but the sound did not record, so whatever I said has been lost to the past. What remains evident on my face is that I was not afraid. During the long labor that followed that sunlit moment I imagined myself swimming in the lake, which became, against my will, a lake of darkness and then a lake of fire and then a lake without a horizon. By the time my son was born late the next day a cold rain was falling and I had crossed over into a new realm in which I was no longer fearless.