Where the Tension Lies
by Katharine Kress
credit: Daniel Oines via flickr
1.
It was the two years during which I read the New York Times everyday but could never remember what it said. I wanted to memorize it all. But instead I could remember only Matthew Arnold and his "Dover Beach" and the mechanistic sadness that weighted his chest: You hear the grating roar/Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling…Begin, and cease, and then again begin,/With tremulous cadence slow, and bring/The eternal note of sadness in.
I felt a strong desire, too, to run everyday on the elevated university indoor track. I ran around in ovals and could not keep the time or look down past the guard rail into the empty space and would, sometimes, after moving as fast as I could for as long as I could, begin to cry. And maybe because of all of that or maybe because of something else, my heart began to hurt.
2.
It was autumn and I was a sophomore in college. It was 2009 and 2010 and I lived in Iowa City. I was running laps on the track of the field house that fall of 2009 and my heart seized. It felt squeezed between wide palms with thick, dry fingers and sharp, metallic fingernails that pierced thin pericardium. I inhaled sharply. Over the next six months I felt a squeeze, like blood draining, flowing out of my valves and spurting out of holes in my ventricles, collecting in a bowl hidden somewhere beneath my stomach or maybe in the calluses under my toes, my heels. I ignored it for the first few weeks but soon told my best friend, and then, my father. In January of 2010, I saw the first doctor. This doctor hypothesized that maybe I was drinking too much caffeine, not getting enough sleep, that maybe I was mentally unstable and feeling the pains of a phantom heart. It was soon after that electrodes attached to my bare chest and recorded the electrical impulses of my heart, mountains without bottoms.
3.
Matthew Arnold lamented the certainty of his faith and feared the tensions between soot, oil, cogs, and prayer. He wrote that it was upon the straits that the moon shone and the tide pushed. But it evokes, too, the instruments by which we restrain others, ourselves. Arnold attempted to bridge the schism between industry and religion, between popular Victorian desires of mass production and the inner life of the individual, which happen, still, to be at odds. He wanted to find the middle ground. It was the center he was looking for. And, it was the fragments and phrases of Arnold’s pebbles and tide and tension that teased the edges of my tongue as I voted yes for same-sex marriage equality. I heard Arnold’s lament of things that could not hold, and it was my lament too. I clung to time as it passed away much like Arnold and I, too, felt a melancholy that I could not quite name. I desired social, but not personal, change and that is where the tension lay. It lay, too, in the gap between my biological and emotional realities. It had occurred to me, that the vote in 2009—which still struggles to come to a vote in many states—was really all about belief and fear and a tension that tugs us away from what we once thought was balance.
After it became clear that the vote had been successful and that same-sex marriage was now legal—in spite of an outdated state law that decreed marital union between only men and women—the mood seemed celebratory and light, but tentative, too, as if the vote could be overturned at any moment. It was known, though, that a love had rightly been recognized, an exclusion had begun to inch toward the opposite. And almost at the same time as the vote came in, it became obvious to me, too, that below the divot of my collarbone emanated a pain that, although recognized, remained unknown and unwanted. Many things and people, I understand now, exist in a similar way. It all felt emotionally quite metaphysical but it seemed to me physically, very real.
4.
The next doctor I visited instructed that I lay down on the table, still, as a nurse took an ultrasound of my heart. I couldn’t see my heart or hear its pulses or echoes. I wanted to, though. I wanted to turn my head and see my insides. I wanted to see it pulse in black and white. I wanted to know its exact shape so I could imagine its curves and the width of its valves, the thickness of the muscle and the smoothness of the skin. I wanted to imagine a size and form more specific than skin stretched tight over the bones of knuckles and fingers curled into a fist. And so I imagined my heart felt like velvet, smooth and slick, the color of raw and fatty ground beef.
After the ultrasound there was a stress test, too. I walked, then ran, on a treadmill while the incline increased. The doctors looked for spasms, for an irregular beat, for a skip or a pause. I ran until I tired but my heart still didn’t hurt. I wanted it to, though. I wanted an answer, something I could treat and research and know about and fight against. The doctors concluded—after those tests and my family medical history and my straw allergy and immunity to penicillin failed to provide an answer—that my heart was physically healthy. They concluded the pain must be caused by stress and told me to take up yoga practice, to breathe my way towards the center.
That wasn’t the answer that I wanted and as it happened, I felt more pain, a deeper squeeze, a sense of urgency. I continued wondering why the pain began when it did. Why not earlier? Why begin at all? It had occurred to me that I didn’t know my own body. I knew what was supposed to reside beneath my skin, but did it? I wanted to see it, to peel away the skin and slough through the fat and paw beneath muscle fiber and striation to get at the core, the center of things.
5.
In the autumn of 2010, three of the Iowa Supreme Court Justices who voted for same-sex equality were subsequently voted off the bench. Members of the American Family Association and the National Organization for Marriage, who supported the “reshaping” of the Iowa Supreme Court, explained that those former judges “had sided in freedom over virtue.” The emotional and pseudo-moral beliefs of these special interests groups collided with state constitutional law, butted against all of those who tried to tip the social balance, to push it inside out.
6.
What lies at the center? I crave the interior, to know the things that cannot be seen. Sometimes, when I forget to eat or don’t have time to sleep or my sister drives drunk, or I read the New York Times, or my brother’s eyes look like he’s been using heroin again, my heart hurts. It takes my breath away. I try to breathe, but the sharpness of the pain prevents me. I exhale, slowly and squeeze my right fist, tight. I don’t need to listen to the grating roar because I can feel it and the pebbles and the tide nudging, too. The waters that push against Dover beach are familiar and I can do nothing but wait and try to breathe. I imagine my sister bleeding from her head, her neck limp, the wheels of her Taurus straddling an oak tree. I imagine my brother laying on a wooden floor, the crook of his left arm bent at a gentle angle, stiff. I imagine these things because I want to know, to figure out why. I want to know how and what and why my brother, sister, and those propelled by religious fervor think. I can imagine, but I can’t know. I have no control of the center. And so my heart spasms and the doctors can’t see it and even though I feel it, I can’t see it either.
It was the two years during which I read the New York Times everyday but could never remember what it said. I wanted to memorize it all. But instead I could remember only Matthew Arnold and his "Dover Beach" and the mechanistic sadness that weighted his chest: You hear the grating roar/Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling…Begin, and cease, and then again begin,/With tremulous cadence slow, and bring/The eternal note of sadness in.
I felt a strong desire, too, to run everyday on the elevated university indoor track. I ran around in ovals and could not keep the time or look down past the guard rail into the empty space and would, sometimes, after moving as fast as I could for as long as I could, begin to cry. And maybe because of all of that or maybe because of something else, my heart began to hurt.
2.
It was autumn and I was a sophomore in college. It was 2009 and 2010 and I lived in Iowa City. I was running laps on the track of the field house that fall of 2009 and my heart seized. It felt squeezed between wide palms with thick, dry fingers and sharp, metallic fingernails that pierced thin pericardium. I inhaled sharply. Over the next six months I felt a squeeze, like blood draining, flowing out of my valves and spurting out of holes in my ventricles, collecting in a bowl hidden somewhere beneath my stomach or maybe in the calluses under my toes, my heels. I ignored it for the first few weeks but soon told my best friend, and then, my father. In January of 2010, I saw the first doctor. This doctor hypothesized that maybe I was drinking too much caffeine, not getting enough sleep, that maybe I was mentally unstable and feeling the pains of a phantom heart. It was soon after that electrodes attached to my bare chest and recorded the electrical impulses of my heart, mountains without bottoms.
3.
Matthew Arnold lamented the certainty of his faith and feared the tensions between soot, oil, cogs, and prayer. He wrote that it was upon the straits that the moon shone and the tide pushed. But it evokes, too, the instruments by which we restrain others, ourselves. Arnold attempted to bridge the schism between industry and religion, between popular Victorian desires of mass production and the inner life of the individual, which happen, still, to be at odds. He wanted to find the middle ground. It was the center he was looking for. And, it was the fragments and phrases of Arnold’s pebbles and tide and tension that teased the edges of my tongue as I voted yes for same-sex marriage equality. I heard Arnold’s lament of things that could not hold, and it was my lament too. I clung to time as it passed away much like Arnold and I, too, felt a melancholy that I could not quite name. I desired social, but not personal, change and that is where the tension lay. It lay, too, in the gap between my biological and emotional realities. It had occurred to me, that the vote in 2009—which still struggles to come to a vote in many states—was really all about belief and fear and a tension that tugs us away from what we once thought was balance.
After it became clear that the vote had been successful and that same-sex marriage was now legal—in spite of an outdated state law that decreed marital union between only men and women—the mood seemed celebratory and light, but tentative, too, as if the vote could be overturned at any moment. It was known, though, that a love had rightly been recognized, an exclusion had begun to inch toward the opposite. And almost at the same time as the vote came in, it became obvious to me, too, that below the divot of my collarbone emanated a pain that, although recognized, remained unknown and unwanted. Many things and people, I understand now, exist in a similar way. It all felt emotionally quite metaphysical but it seemed to me physically, very real.
4.
The next doctor I visited instructed that I lay down on the table, still, as a nurse took an ultrasound of my heart. I couldn’t see my heart or hear its pulses or echoes. I wanted to, though. I wanted to turn my head and see my insides. I wanted to see it pulse in black and white. I wanted to know its exact shape so I could imagine its curves and the width of its valves, the thickness of the muscle and the smoothness of the skin. I wanted to imagine a size and form more specific than skin stretched tight over the bones of knuckles and fingers curled into a fist. And so I imagined my heart felt like velvet, smooth and slick, the color of raw and fatty ground beef.
After the ultrasound there was a stress test, too. I walked, then ran, on a treadmill while the incline increased. The doctors looked for spasms, for an irregular beat, for a skip or a pause. I ran until I tired but my heart still didn’t hurt. I wanted it to, though. I wanted an answer, something I could treat and research and know about and fight against. The doctors concluded—after those tests and my family medical history and my straw allergy and immunity to penicillin failed to provide an answer—that my heart was physically healthy. They concluded the pain must be caused by stress and told me to take up yoga practice, to breathe my way towards the center.
That wasn’t the answer that I wanted and as it happened, I felt more pain, a deeper squeeze, a sense of urgency. I continued wondering why the pain began when it did. Why not earlier? Why begin at all? It had occurred to me that I didn’t know my own body. I knew what was supposed to reside beneath my skin, but did it? I wanted to see it, to peel away the skin and slough through the fat and paw beneath muscle fiber and striation to get at the core, the center of things.
5.
In the autumn of 2010, three of the Iowa Supreme Court Justices who voted for same-sex equality were subsequently voted off the bench. Members of the American Family Association and the National Organization for Marriage, who supported the “reshaping” of the Iowa Supreme Court, explained that those former judges “had sided in freedom over virtue.” The emotional and pseudo-moral beliefs of these special interests groups collided with state constitutional law, butted against all of those who tried to tip the social balance, to push it inside out.
6.
What lies at the center? I crave the interior, to know the things that cannot be seen. Sometimes, when I forget to eat or don’t have time to sleep or my sister drives drunk, or I read the New York Times, or my brother’s eyes look like he’s been using heroin again, my heart hurts. It takes my breath away. I try to breathe, but the sharpness of the pain prevents me. I exhale, slowly and squeeze my right fist, tight. I don’t need to listen to the grating roar because I can feel it and the pebbles and the tide nudging, too. The waters that push against Dover beach are familiar and I can do nothing but wait and try to breathe. I imagine my sister bleeding from her head, her neck limp, the wheels of her Taurus straddling an oak tree. I imagine my brother laying on a wooden floor, the crook of his left arm bent at a gentle angle, stiff. I imagine these things because I want to know, to figure out why. I want to know how and what and why my brother, sister, and those propelled by religious fervor think. I can imagine, but I can’t know. I have no control of the center. And so my heart spasms and the doctors can’t see it and even though I feel it, I can’t see it either.
Katharine Kress grew up in Iowa among oak trees, tall grasses, and fields of hay, but now lives in Chicago where she is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing at Columbia College. She teaches and tutors writing and coordinates Columbia’s internationally accredited undergraduate mentoring program.
