I wrote this in January of last year on this abandoned blog, and come back to it regularly, so –rather self-indulgently – I’m posting it again.
When I was growing up I would lie in bed at night and pray to God to make me normal. Young as I was, I was deeply aware that I wasn't like the other kids with whom I went to school or was slotted into playdates with: I couldn't quite grasp regular routes of socialization; I was smarter in some ways and stupider in others; there was a moroseness to my temperament that often led me to sulk alone in the darkness of my room. This, I know now, was a weirdness of the mind, a projected atmospheric presence that was perceived by others as a little "off." It all stayed in my brain, though: my mind glitched and sputtered, trapped itself in dangerous loops, certainly caused me agony, but the constant difficulties remained solely in the realm of my thoughts.
Ironic, then, what fate had in store for me: I lost half my lower legs, and my body, formerly rather healthy and robust, itself became something to be seen as odd, off-putting. So many pains taken over the years to give off some semblance of "normalcy," and now here I was, both soul and body stuck with a blatant lack thereof. The visibility of my amputations and eventual prosthetics brought this solidly into the physical realm: I could no longer hide it, couldn't fake it away. Everyone could see, and for a while peoples' reactions brought the childhood prayers back into my mind: please, God, I just want to be normal.
To lose a limb is to experience a sudden and permanent lack. No need to extrapolate much here; you had something, and now you don't, and you can't get it back. For six months after I lost my lower legs I used a wheelchair, the now-shortened ends of my legs constantly visible to passersby, some of whom would comment, many of whom would openly stare. A necessary, taken-for-granted body part was gone – how unusual, how grotesque. "What happened to you?" and so forth: the missing-ness of my legs left people wondering, caused them to view me and my situation as unnerving and strange.
Getting prosthetic legs did not lessen but rather re-routed this visible aura of strangeness: my legs do, technically, end where they ought to now, but they are not "real" legs (I don't feel like getting ontological here; they just aren't made of flesh); I walk a little funny, can't run or jump or swim or drive a car, can hide the legs with a pair of trousers but never their strange, hinge-like ankles. The lack of the old legs and the presence of the new, fake ones both beg the constant question, never-ending, asked as recently as last night: Why are your real legs gone?
And I have been thinking quite a lot lately of this contrast between lack versus presence, but a strange presence, one that is off-putting and uncanny. Uncanny – well, now it's time to segue into Mark Fisher and his concept of "the weird and the eerie," specifically from the essay Approaching the Eerie from his book named after the aforementioned concept. "...the weird is constituted by a presence – the presence of that which does not belong," he writes. "[...] The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence." In another section, Fisher elaborates on the weird as "the conjoining of two or more things that do not belong together." There you go: fake leg bumps up against flesh. Fisher's book is almost exclusively focussed on various forms of media that take on weird and eerie undertones, but I find it intriguing to apply the two concepts to my own physical body, as well as the extraneous objects that become a part of it every morning when I get out of bed. The form of grotesqueness simply mutates as I slide on one leg, then the other: no legs – where did they go? – and then fake legs – what are those doing there?
Right after I lost my legs, several people recommended I read Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto. Of course: by getting prosthetic legs I was going from full-flesh human to part-machine, was becoming bionic. I read the book. "Do you feel like you're technically a cyborg now?" a friend with some Haraway knowledge asked me one day. And, though much of Manifesto was admittedly very much over my head, I knew then that my understanding of what I'd read still answered my friend's question. "No," I told him, explaining to him that I did not feel the increase in power or strength that becoming-cyborg implied; my physical capabilities had in no way been extended; and, quite crucially, that I did not see myself as a hybrid of human and machine – to me, the putting-on and taking-off of my prosthetic legs delineated a blatant separation: flesh versus carbon fiber, presence versus lack.
To wit: I do not see my prosthetic limbs attached to my legs as a fusing-together, but as a dichotomy of two things pressed together but still ultimately separate. I come back to Fisher's concepts of the weird – carbon fiber does not belong pressed up against flesh – and the eerie – why does this carbon fiber need to be pressed up against this flesh in the first place? Physically speaking, it is an awkward combination, one that does hurt sometimes. Perhaps one could say that by putting my prosthetics on the ends of my shortened legs, I replace the lack-of-leg's eeriness with the weirdness of the fake leg. The two do not fuse together: the eerie's lack is replaced by the weird's presence; they do not blend.
My body, "cyborg" and "bionic" though it may be, is not often seen as powerful or possessing more abilities than a "regular" person's. Both the words cyborg and bionic have connotations of the fantastical, often showing up in science fiction as routes towards superhuman strength. Transhumanism (about which I am also sometimes asked) aspires towards this, considers voluntarily altering or adding mechanics to one's body to be a form of transcendence, a grand leap from humanity to superhumanity. I see none of this in the way I experience my prosthetics. Though they themselves are robust, made of metal and carbon fiber, I still can't do quite a few things most people can (drive, for instance), let alone perform feats of great strength; when people learn about them, their response is almost certainly one of pity or concern rather than amazement.
Frankly, I see my disability and the concept of cyborgian physical gain to be at odds with one another. (Are we zooming out now? Are we considering this particular phenomenon to be its own example of Fisher's contrasting version of the weird?) Beyond the dichotomy of dreams of bionic strength versus the reality of needing help getting up a flight of stairs, there is the necessary yet painful fact that, realistically speaking, I am not viewed by others as superhuman. No one pities the ever-powerful cyborg. I, however, could spend hours recounting the many times people have shown me excessive pity, made me feel shame. "Some days are better than others," I tell a friend who asks me, gently, if this messes with my self-perception. Of course it does. I like myself quite a lot, but to many people I'm just someone with weird-looking legs walking kind of funny down the street. What's up with him? Weird.
"What the weird and the eerie have in common," Fisher explains early on in his intro to The Weird and the Eerie, "is a preoccupation with the strange." And I want to make it clear: I realize that the book I've been repeatedly referencing throughout this post is about films and books and music, not physical objects, let alone prosthetic limbs. But there is, to me, something deeply, fundamentally strange in this way about not just the limbs themselves but the donning and wearing of them: mere objects when taken off, when worn they manage to invite ceaseless questions, stir up an unnerving feeling with their uncanniness, and offer a balance of the ability to do more things than I could without them, but not as much as before I needed them. Fisher's version of the weird: two things that don't belong together, carbon fiber and flesh, one pressed into the other.
And perhaps this is where the legs' cyborgian powers lie: not in physical movement, but in the ability to rouse emotion simply by being worn. Google's informal definition of bionic includes "having ordinary human powers increased by the aid of bionic devices"; certainly the ability to stir thought is a power in and of itself. The legs don't even need me, really – I'm just attached to them, am the one that questions and comments are directed to. They give and receive a curious, constantly-fluctuating energy that I cannot and never will be able to harness: their presence speaks for itself, lends itself to conversation, to projection, to wondering. A form of magnetism, perhaps; one that is not always wanted, but still rife with power.
Maybe this blog post is all bullshit. I can't quite tell at this point. But to be constantly aware of the fact that several of your own body parts – "body parts" – are more often than not seen as uncanny and grotesque requires some sorting-out of thoughts. I lost my real legs. I got prosthetic replacements. I am either wearing the legs or I am not. This last dichotomy invites the questions, again, of eeriness and weirdness respectively: why are your old legs gone? What are those new ones doing here? Lack versus presence, and so forth. The precedence of the former versus the latter changes with each person I interact with, discuss the legs with: some want to know more about the old ones, some about the new. No singular way to navigate things. There hasn't been yet and, I've begun to realize, there never will be.
And so I come back to the beginning of this post, my constant grappling with the concept of being "normal." That's gone, to be sure: my visible disability sets me far apart from everybody else I know, not just in looks but in actions, in ways of seeing and moving through the world. None of my friends has had someone shout down the sidewalk at them asking why they're using a cane if they're so young. Using a cane when you're only twenty-nine is, after all, just another form of the weird: what's the cane doing there? And so on and so on.
There is something thrilling, though, about coming into the understanding that if I want some form of "normal" I'm going to have to scope it out and build it myself, based on my own internalities versus comparison to other people. Difficult, to be sure: a prosthetic is an other-people magnet, and rarely do I want mine to be; I'll readily admit that there are often times I simply wish I still had feet. I don't, though, and far beyond getting used to it I've become aware of the fact that I need to incorporate it deeply into the life I insist on constructing for myself. Incorporate the lack versus presence, the weird glommed into the eerie, the bionic power of my two fake legs. At this point, it's the only thing I'm willing to do.