identifiable

This is still on the subject of personal photography and self-portraiture, but it's not the image that - if I could have managed it - I would have chosen to post today.   Yesterday in class we talked about a strange photograph by Chema Madoz of an X-Ray of a skull - his skull? - and a not-quite-in-alignment spinal column: it's superimposed on a couple of clouds - his head in the clouds? wondered one student.   For me, the cloud looks more sinister, like an atomic bomb exploding around him, the white heat of the explosion located somewhere near the pineal gland.   Certainly, a glimpse into one's own body offers a more literal form of personal insight than one usually bargains for.   I would loved to have taken a photograph of my heart as imaged by an echocardiogram machine, which not only showed what I know to be a more or less oval, semi-palpable lump of muscle going about its business on the one hand, but on the other,was illuminated with an imaging device that showed my blood pace and direction, turning the images on the screen into strange flows of color: bright blue rivers, the color of my ID bracelet, going one way, and jagged burst of red and yellow and startling bright white in the other, looking like a Weather Underground radar image showing a peculiarly violent storm system.

But it didn't seem practicable to raise a hand and say Stop! I want to get my camera! when one's all wired up like a circuit board, and lying down wearing a gown designed with no apparent relation to the fact that a human being might some day have to inhabit it.   Thinking about my heart is enough to make me go wide-eyed and scary at the best of times, so looking at it working away (oddly? how oddly? if very oddly at all? I guess I get to find out soon) is an experience that hovers between a usefully objectifying experience (oh look! an image! I can write about this!) and something that touches on metaphysical terror.   To be sure, I can't write about the latter aspect of this without tears of panic starting to well up, so I'll stick to trying to remember the aesthetic possibilities of it all.   But I do understand very well why people undergoing medical procedures might document them photographically: sometimes regarding oneself as an object, not as an experiencing subject can be a way of holding at bay one's fears about the tenuous physical fragility of that very self.