Jessica Gaitán Johannesson - The Nerves and Their Endings: essays on crisis and response

THE NERVES AND
THEIR ENDINGS

Jessica Gaitn Johannesson grew up between Sweden, Colombia, and Ecuador. Shes a bookseller and an activist working for climate justice, and lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, How We Are Translated , was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize.

Scribe Publications
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Published by Scribe 2022

Copyright Jessica Gaitn Johannesson 2022

Epigraph from La ventolera by Eduardo Galeano, from El libro de los abrazos appears with kind permission of the publisher, SIGLO XXI DE ESPAA EDITORES, S.A.
Excerpt from Vitsvit by Athena Farrokhzad on p.21 (Albert Bonniers frlag, 2013) appears with kind permission of the author. The English translation by Jennifer Hayashida (published in White Blight , Argos Books, 2013) is reprinted with kind permission of the translator.
Excerpt from The First Water is the Body by Natalie Diaz on p.35 from Postcolonial Love Poem . Copyright 2020 by Natalie Diaz. Reprinted with kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd., and of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org.
Excerpt from Pass, Passport, Passaporto, etc. by Pia Tafdrup on p.76 appears with kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.

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Scribe acknowledges Australias First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this country, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present.

978 1 922310 60 6 (Australian edition)
978 1 913348 65 6 (UK edition)
978 1 950354 59 7 (US edition)
978 1 922586 58 2 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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For Adam,
vars nervios hum alongside mine

CONTENTS

When it happens

and Other Illusions of Control

When it happens / there

My mother said that when her favourite aunt died

When it happened: when my mothers nerves ended

Why / so nervous?

: Five Moments of Un-Belonging

Signal / a transatlantic response

One way of classifying nerve endings

Its only a matter of time

: A Story in Arguments

When do we give each other a signal

: A Personal Encyclopaedia of Hope

Do certain questions have it in them

: Notes and Works Cited

Silba el viento dentro de m.

Estoy desnudo. Dueo de nada, dueo de nadie, ni siquiera dueo de mis certezas, soy mi cara en el viento, a contraviento, y soy el viento que me golpea la cara.

Eduardo Galeano

When it happens / (as if it hasnt already),

we want to make sure were together. Own enlaced with own: in the right place at this right time. As a time, it has been good to us: to those who count as us.

When this thing hits, we say, we want to make sure we stay we , until the end of our tethers

the borders encapsulating sense. We must hold our nerve,

keep our wits about us. What else is there, but this system of the nerves, and what if its not about us?

what does it mean to save us, those of us who count

as us / every crackling end of us?

WHAT HAVE I DONE?
AND OTHER ILLUSIONS
OF CONTROL

One or two photographs from the winter of 2006 are caged in my external hard drive, carried around between homes, countries, and boxes of life-debris. They are safely stored, always out of the way. One of them is a selfie, from before pictures of oneself were ever referred to as selfies, taken inside a hospital-ward loo. I look stressed in it I was most likely expecting a carer to knock on the door any minute and ask what I was up to in there. My eyes are large and liquid. I look like an elderly deer (anorexia makes you look both older and younger than you really are, I found but time is only one of its dislocations). The arm holding the camera is a piece of scaffolding without anything to soften it. At a certain point, I was able to encircle that arm between the tip of my middle finger and my thumb. This was a great achievement a mastering (not even a squeezing) of the flesh. A few years ago, I showed this picture to Adam, my Person, and realised, once we were both looking at it on the couch of the present, why I wanted him to see it. Hes never known me like this, thats why.

Was I? Actually proud. Once, Id been so very much on top of things.

*

In January that year, aged twenty and thinking birdlike was sexy, but not the least bit interested in sex, Id been admitted to a closed eating-disorder ward. I spent most of the spring there, re-routed into a strict schedule of meals, and the pooled hours between meals. This was followed by a couple of months as a day patient in the adjacent ward, until I was discharged in the summer of the same year. Throughout this time, I exchanged regular emails with a close friend. Elix was in Malm, the southern Swedish city I had left in a hurry, no longer able to study, or handle the size of a regular morning. With them in the real world, and me in a place where time was organised by the recurrence of card games and illicit sit-ups, our emails, along with Elixs mix CDs, offered me a line out a snorkel bringing in sips of air. The messages were a reminder of where I belonged, and an assurance that a space was being held for me there.

My reports to Elix were mostly about the new order of things: the way breakfasts worked (and most often didnt); the staff rotas we used to keep an eagle eye on, anxious to know (for no reason other than simply knowing ) whod be working the night shift; the crocodile-shaped key rings Id learned to make out of tiny beads; how making crocodile-shaped key rings out of tiny beads hadnt been on my list of things to accomplish the year I turned twenty-one. I told Elix about a recent excursion to a farm, where a group of us were taken to visit some heavily pregnant goats, for therapeutic purposes. The patients found it funny six tiny, anorexic people walking six pregnant goats through at least two feet of snow, with the carers pushing from the back; whose idea was it that this would help with weight gain?

In response to one of those emails, Elix wrote: Im so sorry that you, and everyone in there, have to go through this. It looked to me as a very odd thing to say.

I admire my friend so very much, especially the wisdom with which theyve always, for as long as Ive known them, recognised the harm that happens all around us, in spite of us how difficult it is to inhabit yourself fully and to accept your reach in space. I dont remember addressing their comment then (the emails are long gone now lost to a defunct email address, something involving a species of aquarium fish); I let it slip and, most likely, continued to regale Elix with tales of the nurse with the torch, with whom I was fighting a nightly battle to keep the door to my hospital room closed. There was something in their message that didnt sit well, though: Im so sorry that you, and everyone in there, have to go through this. The have to didnt seem at all appropriate; it suggested a coercion, pointed a finger to an outside force which, within the gentle, disastrous little universe of the ward, was nowhere to be seen.

Throughout this illness every small decision dictated by that illness and leading further into it I would have told anyone that nothing and no one was influencing my not-eating, nor the rabid walking past perplexed acquaintances in Malm parks (that classmate and his family, saying hi and getting nothing back). I would have told them that I was in charge. Isnt that the most basic definition of self-destructive behaviour? Clearly, its something you must necessarily do to yourself.