The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (13 page)

Here’s where
you
can help. By itself, the phlegm will become a shapeless mound bristling with little points. But by touching and folding the phlegm, you can give it a beautiful form and an
even texture. It may seem bossy and mean to restrict the exuberance of the phlegm, but we have seen how this exuberance ends up. Messy! The disciplined phlegm is harmonious and radiates well-being. It does not shout, “Look at me!” It is simple and modest, like good boys and girls. This work can be done alone, but when two people love each other very much, shaping the phlegm together becomes a wonderful way of expressing their cordial feelings.

We do not go to these lengths for a simple greeting, of course. A standardized series of kneading gestures in a one-two-three count will suffice. The “We’d better lance that,” the “From where I was sitting it looked out to me” and the “I’m trying to find my way in dense fog” series are the most widely accepted today, but others will come into vogue and these will come to look a little quaint, just as the most common gestures of yesteryear (the “Goosey goosey gander” and “What’s this in my pocket?”) seem to us today.

“Commercial Phlegm: Bane or Boon?”

Llewellyn Turk, American Pastimes no. 133, May 1961

Don’t be deceived by the packaging. Commercial brands of phlegm differ only in the dyes and fragrances they add. There is really only one way to make phlegm. (I exclude of course that cheap novelty also sometimes called phlegm—though it is hardly worthy of the name—made of cornstarch, food coloring, and water, and often adulterated with sequins and canned sentiments on slips of colored paper. You’ve seen it at checkout
stands in supermarkets and gas stations; it reaches its nadir in those garishly colored or, worse, glow-in-the-dark souvenirs peddled at holiday resorts, ball games, beaches, and amusement parks, with their thematic enclosures: mini soccer balls, international flags, and the like.)

Phlegm is milked from naturally high-yield individuals, often illegally, in huge third-world “spit shops” much like factories, where an unnatural and unhealthy level of production is induced by the all-dairy diet, fondling (performed by crack teams of fondlers, often underage), short films, etc. This phlegm is whisked out of the area to ensure that as little imprinting as possible takes place between the parent and the phlegm.

In a holding shed it is spread out in huge shallow tanks and slowly decocted under moonlight, a process that takes some weeks; daytimes it is covered with heavy black tarpaulins to retard evaporation, since the decoction must be slow to allow the phlegm to become completely alienated from the parent psyche. This is a solemn period of separation, introversion, the putting aside of the easy attractions of a world of a thousand and one desires.

Next, the phlegm, thickened but not quickened, is rolled up in big, soft pancakes and shunted down the belt to a forcing chamber, where it is sieved through a series of ever finer screens, the last one of pure silk, after which it has lost whatever accidental form the decoction tanks bestowed on it. Now it is a pure inchoate jelly.

Next comes the “rapport,” the phase for which skeptics reserve their strongest criticisms: how can the phlegm come to maturity through the offices of a machine? Be that as it may, the fact remains that after yielding to a vigorous kneading under the paddles, then a delicate spindling and fluting around
the fingerlike spools in the agitator, the phlegm is almost indistinguishable from natural phlegm, with the following differences (good or bad, depending on your viewpoint): that it is sanitary, and that it is free of those neurotic formations that often castle spontaneously in the phlegm of even quite normal individuals.

This concludes my summary of the industry. That working conditions must be stringently reviewed and, where necessary, regulated, is obvious. May concerned parties take note! These issues aside, I confidently recommend the use of machined phlegm in all situations where hygiene is of concern, as well as those numerous social situations where the individual is concerned to make a good impression, and his or her own phlegm is not “up to snuff.”

Together in Phlegm: A Couple’s Manual

Dr. B. Marcus, Barnum and Brewster, 1989

Phlegm energy, or P, flows along tiny natural capillaries or canals, which form a latent structure within the apparently formless corpus or hunk. By working the phlegm and pressing images through the tiny canals in much the way one works a fugitive elastic through a waistband, the canals become opinionated, and the P energy flows freely toward and through the construction sites. Deformations are caused by P energy balking at tight spots and clogging the canals, making the pinched opinion spritz. Its scattered bits and pieces knit together into a degraded form of imago, or “booger.” By applying a little focused
nostalgia to kinks and pressure points on the canals, you can release the opinion and set the engine back in motion. Put your whole family behind your movements. Allow your father to rock gently: pushing, pulling. Your mother should be close to, but not touching, the surface; this is called feathering. The imago is never an undifferentiated lump, but is criss-crossed by nostalgic forces. Only you can bring these in harmony.

When a person is in full flood, and the phlegm is cresting and rising high, and her hands are plunged in it to the elbow, possibly alongside those of her “bedroom apprentice” (other terms:
lady
or
gentleman-in-helping, scapemeet, pillow sharecropper),
then it is best not to interfere. The tricky geometries of the castling phlegm, bricking over the imaginary objects held in mind by the parent/custodian, can take a wrong turn, and though the custodian toils on, the edifice is, to use a technical term, cursed. Suffice it to say that an object that is almost necessary is more unnecessary than an object that was never intended to be necessary in the first place, which can acquire a kind of necessity of grace. That this has taken place sometimes escapes the attention of the custodian, who is involved in settling intricate rhythmic tantrums, and can install many images in the phlegm before she realizes, too late, that the whole enterprise has already received the big kayo.

There are many recurring motifs in the myriad forms of couples’ phlegm. Notable among these are
approach
(which includes the teasing display of the phlegm vents, “paradise flaunting,” and playful splattering and dabbing gestures) and
avoidance
(most famously, cold-cocking: the sudden unsticking of a ball of hardened phlegm, which will take off the small hairs, but also the “kick in the seat of the pants,” etc.). Many regional and personal variations are possible and include mixing
rice with the phlegm (“extra pulp”) for friction, “cuddling,” “brooding,” etc. But I will ask you to abandon these or any other tricks you feel you have mastered. It is exactly this feeling of “mastery” that gets in the way of direct experience.

Touch the phlegm. Feel yourself one with the phlegm. What do you, the phlegm, want to express? As you open yourself to the phlegm’s desire, your fingers may wish to make certain movements. Yield to these impulses, but if you find yourself falling into a familiar pattern, slow down. Do not name the pattern to yourself. Stay with the phlegm. Let it teach you what it wants to become. Perhaps it does want you to perform the Chrysanthemum or the beautiful old steps of the Invitation. If so, it will show you. You will discover them all over again, and they will be yours, and not a rote recital of a classic. Avoid influence as well. Your friends may call you chic, but are you sure you will be happy tomorrow with the giant peonies of today?

Except to those bowed by the winds of fashion, it does not really matter what form you attempt to impose on the phlegm. The particular form is a sort of pretext, though a necessary one, for it is only through our attention and toil that the phlegm can mature. This is not to say that the particular form does not matter, that it is just an envelope, because phlegm never
is
until it
is something,
so however arbitrary the process of composition, the phlegm endows the result with its own dignity, and makes even a hackneyed idea into a special case.

I should like to close this chapter with a quote from an anonymous nineteenth-century author. I hope you, too, will take inspiration from its freshness, its naïveté, its freedom from the proscriptions and prescriptions of the larger world.

“And then was born in me the desire to try my hand upon the phlegm, and see what I might shape, and its substance
seemed very comely and lustrous to me, and its touch was as a liniment to my hands, and it seemed pleased to feel my touch, like an affectionate cat, thrusting its back strongly against the caress. And it was given to me then to make many beautiful forms, some of which arose and melted away as quickly as the clouds that gather and disperse without distress to the sky or the earth, but only delight to the eyes, and other forms were more lasting, and as I manipulated them, and returned to them again and again in my delight to fondle them, and at times threw my whole weight against them in proud trial of their strength, they became ever more brazen and hard, and among these forms were several sheep, a complicated tower or turret, and a fascinating hole.”

Coming to Phlegm: Women Talk About Their First Flow
Eds. Wilson and Wilson, Spindrift Press, 1992

“Jane”

As a kid, I had the usual romantic notions about phlegm, I played pat-a-cake and practiced molding on mud and clay. One by one the other kids around me got theirs. One memorable day, seven kids got their first phlegm in the same recess period (it often happens, I found out later, that friends trigger one another—but at the time it seemed like a sign, as did my own omission). I stayed dry.

The happiness of phlegm eluded me despite my most earnest efforts. No man would touch me. I had zero self-esteem. I was in the depths of despair. One day, I caught sight of myself in the
mirror. I hardly recognized myself! My ceaseless straining to produce phlegm had made my eyes cold and my lips thin and pursed. I groaned: “I give up! I will try to live a decent life, though I am that saddest of creatures—a dry woman!”

And then my phlegm broke. It was so simple, I laughed out loud. I was still here, the world still there, but somehow I was able to extend this in-me-ness into that out-there-ness. I began to mold my phlegm. I cannot describe the joy I felt. The molding, I saw, was a kind of clarifying and articulating of what was already there, but it was at the same time an act of pure invention and discovery, in which I became myself in an impossibly prolonged moment of transformation, while not ceasing to be what I already was and had always been, and this whole event was, as I understood, a demonstration (in which the phlegm was equally instructional aid, teacher, and student) of the beautiful truth that …

The Viscid Enigma: Phlegm

Leslie Stace, PhD, Cordolu University Press, 2001

That there has always been something eerie about phlegm, something that stirs man’s dark imaginings, can be seen by examining the concordance of myths. Wizards who create servants or concubines out of their own phlegm are sure to be driven to madness and death by their creations; fairies who steal mortal children often replace them with an identical creature made all of phlegm; a dead woman’s face will appear in her murderer’s phlegm during congress with his new lover.

Graves that flow with phlegm are a staple of folk storytelling around the world, but were long considered no more than fantasies by men of science. Imagine the stir it caused when in 1970 a Canadian researcher proved (in the rather sensationally titled
The Extraordinary Case of the Dead Mr. Fleming)
that some bodies do continue phlegm production—indeed, step it up—for some days after all other bodily functions have ceased. Bodies have been disinterred whose coffins are quite full of phlegm, such that the deceased is found embedded in a sort of sticky amber, like a prehistoric gnat. We may perhaps find in this phenomenon of extended postmortem phlegm production the factual basis for the accounts of those saints (technically known as Myroblites) whose relics exude “balm and aromatic ichors.” (“Aromatic” is devout embroidery, we may be sure.)

Even in modern times, an aura of mystery surrounds these bodies lapped in phlegm.
The Extraordinary Case
drily proposes that the semiautonomous phlegm engines are always primed, even in the dry old age of the driest specimen of humankind, and that when the body relaxes its guard—and death may be seen as a kind of absolute relaxation—the phlegm backlog will out. But even our laconic French-Canadian friend waxes lyrical in his concluding remarks. “What do these bodies teach us?” he queries. “Are they in some sense still alive? Are they striving, in their wordless, affecting way, to express their tenderness and forgiveness to the living?”

Her girlfriend left but she found she was not alone in the house. “Let me speak,” said the hair. She recognized it as one of her own. She had thought it was gone forever, but forever does not always last very long.

“I am amazed to see a hair stand alone, upright in the air,” she said. “So speak.”

The hair had a brassy light in its shaft. It stood and shone and swayed, and a wave ran up it and down and the frequency of the wave was such that a clear note was laid upon the air, and so the hair began to sing, and it sang these words: “Many a little makes a mickle, once bitten twice shy, time and tide wait for no man, a penny saved is a penny earned.”

She assented to everything the hair said, and felt in her heart that the hair was right, and furthermore he cut a gallant figure, did slim, insinuating Mr. Hair. Would she step out with him? Why, yes.