the rhy thmic units of, say, Bruce Andrews or Steve McCaffery, Raworth’s
starts and stops connote a curious breathlessness, as in
blur blur blur blur
what’s what’s that that!! Oh oh
crew crew (17)And even Raworth’s prose sentences are unusually short, as if they need to
catch their breath. Here is the open-heart surgery passage:
He is dressed in a white gown and lies on a trolley being wheeled along
a corridor. He is drowsy. Outside the operating theatre the trolley stops,
and a doctor in green overalls with a green face-mask leans over and
looks at him. He feels hands on his right arm, the chill of alcohol, the
prick of a needle. A voice tells him to count backwards from 10. At
once he feels wide awake, though his eyes are shut, and thinks “this is
taking a long time to work.” As he thinks “work” he opens his eyes.
There is an enormous weight on his chest; he is inside an oxygen tent.
Eight hours have passed and the operation is over. He runs the thought
through again: “this is taking a long time to work.” He can see no break
in it. He screams for them to take him out of the oxygen tent—the clear
plastic only a few inches from his face seems to be suffocating him. Two
days later, when the nurse is out of the room, he forces himself out of
bed and over to the table where, in a drawer, is his ¤le. He reads how
his heart was stopped, his blood pumped through a machine: how his
breastbone was sawn in half, his heart stitched, his chest sewn up. He
reads of the pints of blood poured into him, and how, at the end of the
operation, after his heart had been re-started, it had stopped again, and
how he’d been given massive shots of adrenalin to bring him back to
life. Nowhere can he ¤nd the key. (34)These are the perceptions of a seventeen-year-old patient, as retold by the
survivor of the operation, now twice that age. But the retrospective account,
searing as it is, cannot really convey what it was that happened. Here is the
text’s concluding paragraph:
I still run that thought through sometimes. Somewhere there must be
a ®aw in it. Somehow, I must ¤nd the weak point and snap it. It’s too
perfect to be human. It tastes of technology. When I wrote “I feel like
an android” I knew what I was writing. (34)Raworth’s “Letters from Yaddo” 229