Lizz Schumer

WIKI-POEM-EPEDIA: A DEFINITION OF SELF

I am learning a new definition of my body.

Dysautonomia describes any disease or malfunction of the autonomic nervous system.

If my fingers feel larger than my hands, am I out of proportion despite my personalized concept of reality or perfectly proportioned to the body my brain has reinvented? How do I find myelf in a world that rejects my attempts at connection? Do I reject it, or does it reject me?

The autonomic nervous system is the part of the peripheral nervous system that acts as a control system functioning largely below the level of consciousness and controls visceral functions. Whereas most of its actions are involuntary, some, such as breathing, work in tandem with the conscious mind.

To what degree am I a consciousness separate from a body? If I float within myself like a fetus within amniotic fluid, am I returned to an infantilism that is both restrictive and ultimately, freeing?

A control system is a device, com, or set or devices to manage, command, direct or regulate the behavior of other devices or system. There is also fuzzy logic, which attempts to combine some of the design simplicity of logic with the utility of linear control. Some devices or systems are inherently not controllable.

My body is an army without a sergeant. My boundaries fuzzy, fluid. I cannot control the degrees to which my body melds with the outside world, the degree to which it remain outside and thus, intake everything. Intake anything.

Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic or probabilistic logic; it deals with reasoning that is approximate rather than fixed or exact.

I move by probability that the surfaces I depend on will remain static while my perception of them shifts. Stone is water water I wood. All is labyrinthine.

Reason is a term that refers to the capacity human beings have to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, and to change or justify practices, institutions, and believes.

How do I verify what even my doctors cannot understand? When I come unglued from the world in the way I have known it since emersion, do I reject the institution I have always understood to be real? Does it reject me?

Humans have a highly developed brain and are capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, and problem solving. This mental capability, combined with an erect body carriage that frees the hands for manipulating objects, has allowed humans to make far greater ue of tools than any other living species on Earth. Other higher-level thought processes of humans, such as self-awareness, rationality, and sapience are considered to be defining features of what constitutes a "person."

Erect carriage. Mental capability. Self-awareness. Rationality. Sapience. Sapience. Sapience. I embrace my personhood in a world that prefers me objectified. In malfunction, I create myself a new function. Redefined. Re-proportioned.

* * *

KINESTHESIA

Medicine. the sense by which movement, weight, position, etc. are perceived. –
kinesthetic, adj.
See also: Perception

Bruises give my body new contours.
Hollows where before lived only smooth expanse
And I wonder why we call these blemishes
Which create for us a new landscape.

My left-hip blooms, six inches where before was boring flesh
Purple-black, it reminds me of a table edge
Leapt out before I caluculated its trajectory
And wedged itself into my skin, its imprint there
Looks to me like an underwear ad
All shadow and skin and suggestion of bone.

My claves are spotted, a new interpretation of pigmentation
The spell out
      Walk more carefully
And I place each foot deliberately into a swaying world
Like me, still long enough only for approximation
I look to my skin as a record of my fallacy.

A friend, in jest
     we should get you a wheelchair
As she carried me home and I wonder
If, then

Where will I read where I've been?

 

JLizz Schumer is a writer, reporter and photographer living and working in Buffalo, N.Y. She is an MFA in creative writing candidate at Goddard College, where she edits the Pitkin Review. Lizz teaches creative writing in continuing education. Her work has appeared in a variety of forums and can also be found at The Keystroke Inkwell.