ink magick, my alchemical scroll, and representing spinal cord injury through drawing
part one: ink medicine
It has been a month since my last newsletter post. My family experienced a huge loss, and I have been in arthritic/EDS/post-surgical nerve injury pain and mostly pacing the house, or wandering from room to room, chair to chair, bed to bed, seeking relief. It’s been hard to access the computer for any period of time. I have slowly improved with some PT, shockwave treatments, and heated aqua therapy, so here I am now.
CN: I quote an essay that briefly references abuse/trauma.
After my diagnosis of syringomyelia, I created my Alchemical Scroll, a leather-bound paper scroll containing a series of spinal cord and backbone drawings. The images all start the same: a backbone, spinal cord, and brain, floating against a parchment background.
From there, each one becomes its own permutation.
Sometimes the drawings represent my spinal cord injury. Sometimes, my spine becomes a site to process intergenerational trauma, climate change, ableism, and my own changing limitations.
I brew inks specific to each permutation, using ingredients like my own extracted tooth, found animal bones, bee pollen, pills, and medication pamphlets I light on fire to collect the carbon. For me, the materials are the message.
The form is also the message. Scrolls are spineless, not in the (ableist) sense of “lacking courage,” but literally—they do not have a spine. I didn’t want to use a notebook because their bodies feel foreign with their strong, straight spines.
The next few newsletter posts will discuss some of the drawings & put them in context of studies I later discovered about how people with spinal cord injury represent their selves & their condition.
In 2017, I drew a sigil for a dental stem cell transplant, using ink made from my own extracted tooth.
These tiny bones we wiggle out of the socket with our tongues and hide under the pillow for a fairy are not just for chewing; they are reliquaries, secret storage boxes of our perfect DNA blueprint. SHEDs, they are called, for stem cells from human exfoliated deciduous teeth.
My extracted tooth had no pulp; it had long since been drilled out for a root canal, replaced by gutta-percha, thermoplastic latex derived from the palaquium gutta tree.
Still, I made an ink from it, compelled by a vision of a thought form I could roll up and eat, metabolizing it into my tissue. This is how the stem cell transplant would take place. A callback to Ezekiel eating scrolls, imagery I have used in essays before because it speaks to me. Ink medicine.
Not cure, mind you — implanted with my own stem cells, I will recreate the same connective tissue disorder, same birth defects. Again: the material is the message.
You might ask, “How is this medicine?”
In a world where my body is pathologized and medicalized, the Alchemical Scroll is my resistance and my resilience. My inks + imagery expose science as magick and magick as science — medicine as magick and magick as medicine. They do not require a prescription. They do not require a medical card. They do not require an insurance card or pre-authorization or blood test or traumatic procedure. When I am drawing in the scroll, I am cultivating my powers. I am transmuting pain, physical and otherwise. I am my own MRI technicians. My own neurosurgeon.
It wasn’t just any tooth. It was Tooth 19, my lockbox for trauma and grief. As I wrote in Partial Match:
"These are the kind of roots I expect to see with significant trauma," [The dentist] says. "Like an assault with a baseball bat. You ever have a trauma there?" He points at Tooth 19. "Ever get hit or fall down or anything like that?"
Something about the way he asks the question takes me back to when I was thirteen and the Department of Human Services sent an interviewer to my house to follow up on a black eye. I cannot put my finger on it, but a certain tone transmits just under the audible register for most people, but well within hearing range of someone who grew up tiptoeing over booby-trapped eggshells. Even when I let myself forget about the IBEW belt buckle about to slam down on my bones or my father lifting my skirt to comment on how much the boys must like it or my grown brother sticking his tongue through my teeth, I cannot let go of this sixth sense for when conversations turn forensic. I already know this dentist is a forensic dentist because I investigated his background. He is interviewing me like one of his pediatric patients with suspicious injuries or malnourished teeth.
I see the way he glances at my hands, clenched into fists and pressed hard together between my thighs like a lock, a reflex of mine. I see him glance at my forearm, the one with all the linear scars running horizontally across. The cuts there healed ghostly white just like root canals on an x-ray. These days, I do not always cover them. I see him notice, and I think he sees me noticing him. He asks again about potential trauma, and I mention my seizures one more time.
Of the past five dentists I have seen, at least four of them have immediately recognized my epilepsy without my disclosing it. They could tell by the patterns of damage.
He looks back to the radiographs. I glare at him as he stares at my tooth roots, exposed by his omniscient machines. These x-rays, however, refuse to tell the whole story. Are the seizures a proxy for something else? He comes round full circle to his original theory: someone bashed me upside the jaw with a blunt object.
Or a fist.
Or I fell.
He turns toward me, and I quickly look away and look back.
"No falls or anything like that?" He asks. "You sure?"
In the sigil, I imagine my tooth awash in cerebrospinal fluid, returned to its original home in the body, the neural tube, from which cells migrate to form the teeth, brain, and face.
At first I wanted to make bone black pigment from the tooth, but then an image appeared to me: a spine leaking CSF fluid out the back, washing my tooth in a wave back into itself. A rebirth. For this, I needed ultramarine.
Cennini’s ultramarine recipe Il Libro dell’arte, turn of the 15th century:
To begin with, get some lapis lazuli … Pound it in a bronze mortar, covered up, so that it may not go off in dust; then put it on your porphyry slab, and work it up without water. Then take a covered sieve such as the druggists use for sifting drugs; and sift it, and pound it over again as you find necessary … When you have this powder all ready, get six ounces of pine rosin from the druggists, three ounces of gum mastic, and three ounces of new wax, for each pound of lapis lazuli; put all these things into a new pipkin, and melt them up together. Then take a white linen cloth, and strain these things into a glazed washbasin. Then take a pound of the lapis lazuli powder, and mix it all up thoroughly, and make a plastic of it, all incorporated together.
This ball is kneaded in lye solution until all the blue is extracted out without the calcite and pyrite: pure violet blue.
My vertebrae are drawn in ultramarine mixed with my tooth: my bones are getting into my cerebrospinal fluid and my cerebrospinal fluid is getting into my bones. In a way, I symbolically returned the ultramarine to its original lapis lazuli, my tooth as the calcite.
In my ink treatise notebook, I wrote:
Ultramarine is not blue because it is cool. It is not blue because of water. It is blue because of fire. It is an aluminosilicate, which in nature has no color. But trapped inside the lattice structure: a seed of sulphur. The sulphur makes it paradoxically blue. This is alchemy: the seed of fire inside water. This is like my spinal cord, too: inside, the cerebrospinal fluid is like water, but the cord is on fire.
I drew my spinal cord in iron gall, an ink that has bite, meaning it eats paper. It burns just like my spinal cord burns.
I illuminated it in gold—not real gold, but a pigment of fine copper flakes.
Some ataxia (not mine) is caused by copper deficiency, and this copper comes from home, which is Utah—Bingham Canyon mine, largest open-pit copper mine in the world, so big you can see it from space. When a landslide halted production, gun forums blew up: oh man, the price of ammo. Green ammo,* they meant: copper bullets, invented to stop the lead poisoning of protected predators like bald eagles.
*The bullets are not green, not really: copper mining = lead pollution. In this way, Utah takes a bullet for you.
Like someone shot a bullet clean through it — that’s how I described it when I first saw the syrinxes in my spinal cord.
copper bullet
The same metal that cures it kills it.
All this time, I had been making my sigils alone, in isolation, and I wondered: Was anyone else out there drawing their spinal cord injury? What are they drawing? How do they imagine it? What does drawing it mean to them?
So I searched, and I found the study "Images of self and spinal cord injury: exploring drawing as a visual method in disability research.”
THE COMMUNITY LIFE AFTER SPINAL CORD INJURY PROJECT: AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE USE OF DRAWINGS IN RESEARCH
The ‘drawings project’ is a part of a larger ongoing federally funded study of the community lives of persons (n5160) with SCI in Detroit, Michigan, USA (Lysack and Luborsky 2004). Drawings were included to explore their potential to reveal unique data about the processes of community integration and social inclusion. Due to the traumatic permanent and stigmatizing nature of SCI, the investigators hypothesized that drawings made by study participants coupled with their explanations about them would offer a rich source of data about the meaning and social impact of SCI.
From the study:
Figure 1 was drawn with a blue ballpoint pen by a 41- year-old African American man with tetraplegia who had lived with SCI for 21 years. This drawing was characteristic of many in the study: participants represented themselves in their wheelchairs doing something that they enjoyed. Describing his picture, he said, This is something I do once in a while – sneak away to a local park and sit under a tree. When asked why there were no other people in the drawing he replied that was because he is almost never alone: ‘I’m … with someone or dependent on someone, so it’s a real treat for me to have that kind of solitude.’ Since he was a relatively introverted person, this lack of privacy bothered him a great deal. He knew though that ‘nothing could be done’ because the severity of his disability meant nearly all daily activities required at least one other person, paid or unpaid, to assist. Although these feelings were superficially evident earlier in the interview, the depth and intensity of his feelings went unrecognized until the drawing task.
I can relate to drawing as self-revelatory. Often, with my own drawings, I don’t know how I feel until I have started making the inks or touched dip pen nib to parchment. Language doesn’t capture it, even though I am a writer. My drawings are MRIs I give myself: they reveal my innermost secrets.
Some of the study participants included their wheelchairs, like above, and some did not, mostly because (as the study authors note) they didn’t see it as “part of them.”* My drawings do not include any of my mobility aids, even though I do see them as part of me. The study made me wonder why. Why do I always draw my backbone bare, disembodied, floating? Why no wheelchair or walker? This is something I need to explore in further drawings, perhaps by trying to include a mobility aid. How would that feel? Where would I place it? What kind of ink? Are mobility aids “medicine?”**
*But now I need to re-read the study, too — did the participants actually say their wheelchairs weren’t part of them, or was that an assumption by the authors?
**The Mormons have used canes made from the oak of Joseph Smith’s casket — Canes of the Martyrdom — for healing. Heber C. Kimball said the canes had the power to heal "through [their] instrumentality, by the power of God" by laying the cane on a person's head.
Later in the study, participants did draw their injuries, and they fell into a few distinct groups: literal representations and metaphorical ones.
I think my drawings come closest to this one, which represents the spinal cord as an electrical cord plugged into the brain and the injury shown as a kind of knot or break in the electrical cord:
It’s literal and metaphorical at the same time, which is true for many of the permutations in my Alchemical Scroll, too. I sometimes call them “literal metaphors.”
The chemistry of my inks are grounded in science and medicine, while the imagery is fantastical & magical (maybe even a little bit body horror?).
Together, they are alchemy.
In an upcoming post, I will share about this permutation & a little more on alchemy:
I see you have been writing!
I love to read about people’s artistic process. Your work is powerful.