Katherine E. Standefer - Lightning Flowers

For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes:

(1) the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the chalice required is determined as to its form and matter; (4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith.

The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else.The three previously mentioned ways of being responsible owe thanks to the pondering of the silversmith for the that and the how of their coming into appearance and into play for the production of the sacrificial vessel.

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

Tucson, Arizona
2012

N othing can prepare you for what it feels like to be shocked by an implanted cardioverter defibrillator. Like a badly spliced film reel, my memory of the night is fractured: in one instant, a player on the other intramural soccer team had fallen and the game stopped; he was getting up, brushing his thighs. In the next, my hands became claws. A maul cracked open my chest with a sickening thump, a hot whip tearing through my back. Did somebody kick in my spine? And then I knew. And I was screaming.

Theres no way you wouldnt scream if you felt it, my sister had said.

By then, the defibrillator had been in my body for three silent years, resting loyally above my left breast, keeping watch for the arrhythmia that could send me to the ground unconscious, with a heart quivering rather than pumping blood.

Now, on a crisp November night in Tucson, Arizona, I dropped to my knees in time for the second shock. What if it doesnt stop? I knew something was wrong, either with my device or with my body, but probably my ICD. If it was an arrhythmia, I should have been collapsed, unconsciousnot sharp and alive like this, staring at the backs of houses at the edge of the field, their kitchen lights spilling dully out the windows as I screamed. Call 911!

A third shock. You can either scream or breathe, a voice inside me said, and I began to pull in air, cold heavy breaths, the way Id learned to breathe into pain in yoga. I am either alive or dead, and I choose which.

The device did not fire again.

Can I get someone behind me? I called out. I dont trust myself not to fall. Someone cupped my back immediately, supported me to the ground, and the sky came into view. A ring of faces. The sharp white field lights.

The smell of burning, which was me.

There is a kind of dream state that settles over the body in these moments, a clarity that rarely visits us when our lives are busy unfolding. For lying on my back, looking at the stars, a question lodged itself in my brain, a wild constellation of if-then statements.

If the defibrillator just saved my life. If a defibrillator is just metal. If metal is mined earth. If children sometimes work in mines, if tunnels collapse, if warlords profit, if women are raped, if mountains are dismantled and made toxic.

If mined earth just saved my life: Was it worth it?

The thin, branched burns that uncoil from the heads and necks of lightning-strike victims are sometimes called lightning flowers. Fernlike, following the patterns of rain or sweat, they are rose-colored lightning bolts frozen onto the body, as beautiful as they are terrible.

I will never know what my insides looked like after two thousand voltsif my tissue erupted into lightning flowers of the body cavity, a sudden bloom. What I do know is that the night I took three shocks to the heart I was marked, called into the world in a way I could not turn away from.

What can save us, I would learn, never comes without cost.

Some people say lightning strikes cure blindness; this is my version.