Lana Lin dissects the literary and bodily significance of the appendix.
GERTRUDE STEIN'S The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) tells the story of her genius through the voice of her longtime companion. Stein and Toklas had been together for 25 years when Stein's most famous book was written. My life partner, H. Lan Thao Lam, and I will have been together for 25 years this fall. Gertrude Stein was 59 when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published. I turned 59 this past summer. Stein was 33 and Toklas 30 when they met in 1907. I was 34 and Lan Thao was 32 when we met in 2000. Stein liked to wear vests; so does Lan Thao. Toklas had a bit of a mustache, and so do I, although Lan Thao now has one since they've started taking T. During the pandemic, I browsed the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas papers obsessively online, dreaming about the lives they led.
In No Archive Will Restore You (2018), Julietta Singh describes feeling desire for the archive; I have felt and worked within this same desire. What strikes me most in the archives are the physical objects. Freud's pocket watch and palm-sized notebooks I discovered when writing a monograph on the psychoanalyst's oral cancer. Audre Lorde's dreadlocks, sunglasses, and wallet with prescription startled me when I was filming a cinematic recitation of the poet's diaristic manifesto, The Cancer Journals (1980). Stein's luggage tag, locket, and Louis XVI children's armchairs with petit point Toklas sewed over Picasso's designs charmed me as I researched my autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam. I experienced that same sense of material wonder wading through my own archive of notebooks, datebooks, and random scraps of paper that I held on to over the years.
Singh connects the archive as a storehouse of documents and collection of ideas to the body's role as an archive of cells, memories, and pain. In the aftermath of a recent medical emergency, I have been drawn to this notion of the bodily archive as well. "I am a disquieted archive that fumbles in words," she writes. "A thing made up of infinite, intractable traces. [...] The archive is a stimulus between myself and myself."
"The appendix comes through the belly button," the resident said. Really? I thought. That's strange. Maybe it was drug-induced haze, but Lan Thao heard it too. When staring in the mirror the day or maybe two days after a laparoscopic appendectomy, the hot incisions still enflamed, I could see that it could not have strictly been the case that the appendix comes through the belly button the way a neonate comes through the cervix, which is how I had imagined it. The after-visit summary featured an illustration that also did not conform to this description. Why, then, would the doctor have put it that way? At the time, it gave me the impression I was being told a comforting myth, like how a child is assured that a stork will deliver their baby brother in the morning. I pictured myself giving birth to an appendix by C-section.
When leaving the safety zone of the hospital, I remembered from previous surgeries the unexpected feeling of having to protect myself, feeling bodily vulnerable, wishing some sort of circle of power surrounded me as I stepped into crowded subway cars, worried that someone would shove themselves against my wounded body, leaving me throbbing and breathless.
My body's interior is a surprising mystery to me. I was always taught to look outward for myself, and rarely thought about my own body. Athleticism and even physical care were not particularly encouraged. But studiousness was revered. The mind-body split was real.
Over the days following my appendectomy, I found adhesive on my forehead and chest, small cuts, a bruise on my groin whose cause I couldn't discern. Large indigo masses formed on both my thighs where I had been shot with anticoagulants. My left arm was dotted with red and purple spots from my wrist to just above my elbow where IVs were inserted, my right arm out of commission for such duties due to lymph node removal from my mastectomy. I have no conscious explanation for the bruise that sat below and to the side of the triangle of incisions on my abdomen. I speculate that some type of equipment was planted there. Painful procedures are sometimes made more painful, harmful even, because most medical instruments do not fit my diminutive size. Blood draws seemed treacherous until a Memorial Sloan Kettering chemotherapy nurse introduced me to pediatric needles. But most clinics and hospitals either are not readily supplied with them or will not go to the trouble.
I think of the things people have left in my body unbeknownst to me. Mere acquaintances have had greater intimacy with my interior than I have. Strangers have rummaged around my innards. A sponge was ejected from my body weeks after a surgery that was described to me as "scraping" the lining of my uterus. I had been bleeding for months. Polyps and endometrial buildup were the result of six years of taking tamoxifen to reduce my risk of a breast cancer recurrence. After the postsurgical visit in which I was deemed fit to proceed with everyday activities, I dismissed the bloating and discharge with an unpleasant odor because at least my bleeding had ceased. After a jog in Fort Tryon Park, I may have been stretching when I discovered the sponge in my underwear. Horrified and disgusted, I wrapped it in toilet paper and put it in the trash. Then I pondered if I should keep it as evidence of negligence. I poked my head into the kitchen and told Lan Thao what I had found. But neither of us has litigious inclinations.
Around 14 or 15 years after my mastectomies, an X-ray alerted me to the four to five surgical staples in my shoulder region. Should there be such ambiguity in the report? Are there four or five pieces of steel embedded in my flesh? What else has been housed inside me that I have no idea resided there?
Stein and Toklas were for each other the way that Lan Thao and I are for each other. When I was in the hospital, they stayed by my side for 72 hours straight, extraordinary but not unexpected. They and I have gone through long periods of inseparability since we met 25 years ago. On several occasions, they Velcroed the compression sleeves around my lower legs to prevent blood clots, adjusted my bed and pillows, tucked me into a cocoon of blankets. Even when they at last reclined on the chair next to me to sleep, they would bolt up and ask what was wrong if I made the slightest move. At some point, we would both drift off to the methodical lulling of the inflatable compression sleeves breathing in and out.
In The Autobiography, Toklas was "I" for Stein -- or was it the other way around? I am attracted to their partnership as a site of literary fantasy. I am interested in figures around whom a mythology has flourished, fostered, and been preserved in archives. Such figures become my sources of identification, projection, and self-analysis. What does speaking through another, as Stein did through Toklas, as I do in my "autobiography," say about my partnership with Lan Thao, about dependency, codependency, interdependency, and care? The ruse of the literary first-person singular cloaks our lived first-person plural.
Exactly three weeks after my surgery, when I was practically recovered, I tripped and fell while going for what I thought would be a quick walk. I sprained my right hand, my dominant hand; aside from the many menial tasks for which I rely on my right hand, writing has become nearly impossible, because I cannot capture the words in real time. To me, the act of putting words on a page is essentially the same thing as actively shaping thoughts into words.
A caregiver promotes healing, but they cannot heal for you. I might have asked Lan Thao to transcribe my thoughts, but typing is not one of their many strengths. I could have used a recorder or AI, but the steep slopes of writing, like recovery, must, to some degree, be ascended alone.
When you injure a part of yourself, what that part means to you is brought into new light. The edge of your palm helps to steady your electric toothbrush; the padding at the base of your index finger provides the tension needed to twist off lids and caps. These incidental unconscious movements suddenly leap into consciousness with sparks of pain, alerting you to previously ignored pockets of your body function.
Toklas cooked for Stein and typed all her manuscripts. Stein consumed with relish Toklas's gourmet cuisine and handwrote her oeuvre for Toklas to decipher. When Stein died, Toklas must have been bereft without her other half. The last chapter of What Is Remembered (1963), the autobiography that Toklas actually wrote, offers only five paragraphs on Stein's sudden illness and death. The book's and Stein's end are unnervingly abrupt. What Is Remembered would conclude, Toklas decided, with Stein's demise and not with Toklas's 17 years of "staying on alone," as her posthumously collected letters are titled. She chose to commemorate a life of togetherness and not of solitude.
Yet Toklas's uncorrected proofs of What Is Remembered document Stein's absence: a page and a half that do not appear in the published version -- just 13 brief paragraphs, several only a sentence or two long. The dining room where Toklas had enjoyed Stein's company was unbearable. She went to the kitchen to eat alone.
When I returned from the hospital, I adopted Lan Thao's hoodie, even though I have hoodies of my own. When I puttered around the house in the days after my surgery, while Lan Thao still hugged me gingerly for fear of hurting me, their hoodie held me close.
Lan Thao gleefully holds out a scrap of paper. A few months ago, they were removing rotted wood from a beam of a doorframe in the former sawmill to which we escaped at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. They reached into the post's interior and pulled out a wad of crumpled newspaper. Now they unwrinkle the remnant to show me a date: January 9, 1949. Mysterious, unknown, full of surprises, our homes, like our bodies, are archives, both wondrous and unsettling. Lan Thao muses, "I'm so glad I kept this."
Under the anatomical and biological definitions of appendix, the Oxford English Dictionary states, "Although the human appendix has often been regarded as a useless vestigial organ, it may play a role in processes such as the maintenance of beneficial intestinal microorganisms and the regulation of intestinal immune responses."
Stein and Toklas, Lana and Lan Thao, lifelong companions, dependent upon one another. We might be appendices to each other, archival vessels for each other. This role, though it may be obscure to onlookers, is vital to our mutual preservation.