FRAGMENTS / ON CORPOREAL BREVITY
LISA KORPOS
The tattered wings of a monarch butterfly decay on a bed of eucalyptus leaves. Two flashes of orange in a sea of beige. The faintest breeze makes the forms flutter, exactly as they did when they were still connected to a body—when they still had a vital force running through them—for however brief a blip in time.
Once, an unlikely constellation of firing neurons compelled a soft arthropod to emerge from its chrysalis, pump those wings, and take to the wind. The ability to defy gravity itself was coded into its proteins, its genetic material, its very being. Weightlessness was sculpted into it, from the velvet patterns on its wings to the curl of its proboscis. This elegant monarch was once a fluttering evolutionary triumph. Now, there is only stillness. Only torn remnants linger—the paltry material index of a being’s former splendor.
I fail to follow his logic but delight in his enthusiasm. He is exuberance embodied. All of his idiosyncratic movements—the uneven hops, the spontaneous bounding, the invisible flights across hardwood floors and plateaus of furniture—every action is unconstrained joy. There’s no catalyst for his furious spurts; Tizz moves for the sake of moving, as though there is primal joy in the contraction of muscles—in motion itself. Other times, it seems like he doesn’t sprint so much as simply manifest himself in a different time and place. He is just a flash of kinetic energy, briefly finding physical form as a snow-white blur.
I look into his ruby-red eyes and wonder: does he occupy a wholly different temporality than I do? And why wouldn’t he? I can’t imagine all species inhabit time in the same way or at the same rate. As a rat, his entire lifetime will play out in a fraction of my own, so perhaps my lightning flash is his leisurely stroll. Perhaps my second is his eternity. At least, this is what I have come to hope.
I look into his ruby-red eyes and wonder: does he occupy a wholly different temporality than I do? And why wouldn’t he? I can’t imagine all species inhabit time in the same way or at the same rate. As a rat, his entire lifetime will play out in a fraction of my own, so perhaps my lightning flash is his leisurely stroll. Perhaps my second is his eternity. At least, this is what I have come to hope.
I’m in the waiting room at my veterinarian’s office. Another visitor with a dappled chicken in tow gazes at my carrier cage and asks how long fancy rats usually live. Before I can muster an answer, Shelly, a veterinary technician at the front desk, plaintively says, “a thousand days, give or take—” and her voice trails off, and she stares out the window. The skies outside are grey.
A thousand is such a comprehensible number. It is such a finite, palpable span of time.
A thousand is such a comprehensible number. It is such a finite, palpable span of time.
Towards the end, it's always a blur of pills, syringes, towels, delirium, and overnight observation shifts. Truthfully, I’ve never had the psychological or physical wherewithal to withstand the burden of being a palliative care nurse, but I plod forward through that hellish torrent of end-of-life care anyway, because I know that I am the only one that will be there for her. I owe this to Olympia, as soul-crushing as it is.
Summer: a gnawing listlessness, punctuated only by coffee, a nightly beer haze, and fitful sleep.
They go fast sometimes. You come home to find them frighteningly cold to the touch, halfway between this world and the grave. Other times, they linger for months on end, clinging for dear life, combating the cruel decay that time has wrought upon their tiny bodies. This is the case with Olympia.
Mammary adenocarcinomas and emphysema, secondary to chronic pulmonary infections: the official diagnosis from Dr. Jenkins. She has breast cancer and her lungs are shot. Having names for these horrors has been a comfort for me. Medical terminology situates the incomprehensibility of terminal disease and death firmly within something more rational—within a systematic way of thinking that I can comprehend. In happier days, it even provided tools—tangible ways to remedy the vulnerability of our bodies. I still cling to the hope offered by the language of the biomedical. In Olympia’s case, at least I have a vocabulary to try and make sense of her suffering with.
I oscillate back and forth between wishing her a final respite from the labored breathing and the heavy tumors weighing down what's left of her skeletal frame—and also wanting her to linger, because, in spite of what the cancer has wrought upon her body, she still takes apparent pleasure in avocado slices and ripe figs and gentle strokes on her cheeks.
If she were human, what would she say to me?
Would she grumble about her aching joints, and then—like any other old lady—reminisce about yesteryear, about others who she has known and loved? I can't choose to extinguish her life until I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that she wouldn't want to go on any longer. For now, it does not seem like she’s reached that point yet. Euthanasia remains out of the question. So, she lingers, and I wait with her. Patiently. The summer has been an interminable blur, heavy with thoughts about mortality. But it doesn't have to be the same lonely, dismal limbo for Olympia. I try to be a constant, conscious reminder that she is not alone.
Every morning: coffee and cuddles with Olympia.
Every night: a strong ale and more cuddles with Olympia.
I am a witness of the slow crawl toward death.
I wait.
I wait.
I wait.
I wait.
I will wait with her, until her time is up.
They go fast sometimes. You come home to find them frighteningly cold to the touch, halfway between this world and the grave. Other times, they linger for months on end, clinging for dear life, combating the cruel decay that time has wrought upon their tiny bodies. This is the case with Olympia.
Mammary adenocarcinomas and emphysema, secondary to chronic pulmonary infections: the official diagnosis from Dr. Jenkins. She has breast cancer and her lungs are shot. Having names for these horrors has been a comfort for me. Medical terminology situates the incomprehensibility of terminal disease and death firmly within something more rational—within a systematic way of thinking that I can comprehend. In happier days, it even provided tools—tangible ways to remedy the vulnerability of our bodies. I still cling to the hope offered by the language of the biomedical. In Olympia’s case, at least I have a vocabulary to try and make sense of her suffering with.
I oscillate back and forth between wishing her a final respite from the labored breathing and the heavy tumors weighing down what's left of her skeletal frame—and also wanting her to linger, because, in spite of what the cancer has wrought upon her body, she still takes apparent pleasure in avocado slices and ripe figs and gentle strokes on her cheeks.
If she were human, what would she say to me?
Would she grumble about her aching joints, and then—like any other old lady—reminisce about yesteryear, about others who she has known and loved? I can't choose to extinguish her life until I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that she wouldn't want to go on any longer. For now, it does not seem like she’s reached that point yet. Euthanasia remains out of the question. So, she lingers, and I wait with her. Patiently. The summer has been an interminable blur, heavy with thoughts about mortality. But it doesn't have to be the same lonely, dismal limbo for Olympia. I try to be a constant, conscious reminder that she is not alone.
Every morning: coffee and cuddles with Olympia.
Every night: a strong ale and more cuddles with Olympia.
I am a witness of the slow crawl toward death.
I wait.
I wait.
I wait.
I wait.
I will wait with her, until her time is up.
A gentle ocean breeze wafts in through the patio doors, and I can't help but think about how she will never feel it across her whiskers again.
I kept on telling her that I wouldn't let her die alone. That I would be there with her until the very end. That she was loved. I loved her so much.
On the day that Olympia died, I stayed with her, from the break of dawn until late into the night, assuring her, with the presence of my own warmth, that she was not alone. I only left her side to grab a glass of water or use the bathroom, and each time she desperately searched for me at the edge of the bed, anticipating my return, waiting to curl up in my lap again. In her last hours, all she wanted was to not be alone. Although the gulf of eighty million years of evolution kept us from ever speaking to one another in our lifetimes, communication comes in many forms, and I am so profoundly humbled and touched to know that she trusted me so implicitly, so wholly.
I kept my word, even if she couldn’t understand what it meant. I was there at the end.
I kept on telling her that I wouldn't let her die alone. That I would be there with her until the very end. That she was loved. I loved her so much.
On the day that Olympia died, I stayed with her, from the break of dawn until late into the night, assuring her, with the presence of my own warmth, that she was not alone. I only left her side to grab a glass of water or use the bathroom, and each time she desperately searched for me at the edge of the bed, anticipating my return, waiting to curl up in my lap again. In her last hours, all she wanted was to not be alone. Although the gulf of eighty million years of evolution kept us from ever speaking to one another in our lifetimes, communication comes in many forms, and I am so profoundly humbled and touched to know that she trusted me so implicitly, so wholly.
I kept my word, even if she couldn’t understand what it meant. I was there at the end.
Mochi never really registered as a rat in my mind. She transcended the limitations of her species, like a mute nymph that lived in my apartment and enchanted everyone and everything she touched, just through mere contact. She was more pixie than she was a rodent: so dainty, precocious, and magical that her demise never even seemed a thinkable possibility, because she never seemed to be of this mundane, physical world to begin with. She lived with such joie de vivre that I still can't comprehend that it was even possible for her to die at all. She was too special to die.
Since infancy, she was always eager to be alongside me—perched on my shoulder or curled up on my chest, like a whiskered extension of my own body. That willful, stubborn insistence on having her life spatially and temporally bound up with my own was what made her loss all the more excruciating.
Since infancy, she was always eager to be alongside me—perched on my shoulder or curled up on my chest, like a whiskered extension of my own body. That willful, stubborn insistence on having her life spatially and temporally bound up with my own was what made her loss all the more excruciating.
It was a memory that I had all but forgotten until the day that we put her in the ground.
Memory can be so intimately tied to place, and going back to Los Angeles again conjured up a poignant recollection of a day, many years ago—a memory of a cinematic videogame that my little brother was deeply engrossed in, sometime in the early aughts. The action-adventure unfolding on the living room television piqued my curiosity; the narrative was about a man who had lived for more than a thousand years, an immortal protagonist who had had the dismal misfortune of outliving everyone he’d ever known and loved throughout the centuries. He had vivid nightmares about his long-lost families—about the generations of ephemeral lovers and children that had marched past him into oblivion, leaving him to grieve, perpetually, in his own solitary, timeless limbo. Something about his haunting existential curse moved me, so I plopped myself down on the couch next to my brother to watch the story of this cursed creature unfold.
Years later, I would come back home to Los Angeles to bury Mochi, and I would remember the tragedy of the immortal videogame character—the psychological price of having to endure the repeated loss of loved ones as his own body persisted, impervious to the effects of time. I’ve come to identify with this character. During my twenties, I had ushered more than a dozen precious lives from birth to death. I am grateful for having been part of each one, honored to help each tiny body meet its eventual end with all the patience, gentleness, and care that I could possibly bare to give. But the human psyche is not meant to process so much recurring loss. Some days I felt like I began to embody grief itself.
Memory can be so intimately tied to place, and going back to Los Angeles again conjured up a poignant recollection of a day, many years ago—a memory of a cinematic videogame that my little brother was deeply engrossed in, sometime in the early aughts. The action-adventure unfolding on the living room television piqued my curiosity; the narrative was about a man who had lived for more than a thousand years, an immortal protagonist who had had the dismal misfortune of outliving everyone he’d ever known and loved throughout the centuries. He had vivid nightmares about his long-lost families—about the generations of ephemeral lovers and children that had marched past him into oblivion, leaving him to grieve, perpetually, in his own solitary, timeless limbo. Something about his haunting existential curse moved me, so I plopped myself down on the couch next to my brother to watch the story of this cursed creature unfold.
Years later, I would come back home to Los Angeles to bury Mochi, and I would remember the tragedy of the immortal videogame character—the psychological price of having to endure the repeated loss of loved ones as his own body persisted, impervious to the effects of time. I’ve come to identify with this character. During my twenties, I had ushered more than a dozen precious lives from birth to death. I am grateful for having been part of each one, honored to help each tiny body meet its eventual end with all the patience, gentleness, and care that I could possibly bare to give. But the human psyche is not meant to process so much recurring loss. Some days I felt like I began to embody grief itself.
We spend an hour talking about empathy, loss, and absurdity.
My graduate advisor asks me if my work is a coping mechanism. I laugh out loud.
The answer is an unflinching and emphatic, “yes.”
My graduate advisor asks me if my work is a coping mechanism. I laugh out loud.
The answer is an unflinching and emphatic, “yes.”
The irresistible heaviness of sleep lulls us toward a brief respite, as it has for eons, with every droopy eyelid, every Circadian rhythm that has ever been. Tonight, each limb intertwines with its counterpart: twenty fingers laced together at impossible angles, frigid toes pressed up against calves—as though the circulation of his blood might encourage my appendages to warm up, too. On nights like this, the pretensions of humanity dissolve. All that is left, all that is longed for, is essentially mammalian: the heat of bodies pressed up against one another, the safety of the ancestral burrow that we all still remember deep in our bones—a trace of genetic memory from an era when we were more vulnerable. A trace of an era when we were so much more aware of our visceral need for one another.
My last rodent companion died at the end of April during my second year of graduate school. His name was Tizz, and he was an albino laboratory rat whose life began as a developmental psychology experiment. Five days prior to his death, my veterinarian pressed her stethoscope to his chest and told me that his heart sounded “funny.” I asked if it was congestive heart failure. She nodded.
“Is there anything we can do for him?”
“No. Make his last days good ones. Spoil him. Keep him comfortable. I know that you’re good at that.”
I sighed. Here I was again. One last time, I'd inevitably fallen into the role of animal death midwife, chaperoning another frail body to the end of his stay in the earthly realm. I stole myself away to the task at hand, ready to become a reclusive hospice nurse for whatever indeterminate period of time his passing would demand. It turned out to be five days.
A vibrance characterized Tizz during the days when his body’s timeline was closer to zero than one thousand. In his youth, he was possessed by spurts of spontaneous bounding, leaping, and zigzagging. He embodied exuberance, brimming with vital energy right up until his heart began to fail him.
The night that Tizz died, I bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time in seven years and sat on the beach, shivering and smoking until three in the morning. The night after that, I slept in the room of a boy I barely knew, desperate to avoid the oppressive emptiness that reverberated through my apartment. A handsome friend’s bed seemed the best escape from the thunderous void of my now-empty nest.
Two nights after the death of my last pet rat, I drove the hundred miles back to my hometown and buried him in my parents’ backyard. Tizz was laid to rest alongside his brother and his former friends—all the dear souls that constituted my non-human family in my twenties. It was an idiosyncratic and unexpected family—lots of whiskers and fur and trouble—but they were my family, nonetheless. Here they all rested, in a neat, orderly row of graves. One subterranean cigar box coffin for every creature I have ever loved. Thirteen in total.
“Is there anything we can do for him?”
“No. Make his last days good ones. Spoil him. Keep him comfortable. I know that you’re good at that.”
I sighed. Here I was again. One last time, I'd inevitably fallen into the role of animal death midwife, chaperoning another frail body to the end of his stay in the earthly realm. I stole myself away to the task at hand, ready to become a reclusive hospice nurse for whatever indeterminate period of time his passing would demand. It turned out to be five days.
A vibrance characterized Tizz during the days when his body’s timeline was closer to zero than one thousand. In his youth, he was possessed by spurts of spontaneous bounding, leaping, and zigzagging. He embodied exuberance, brimming with vital energy right up until his heart began to fail him.
The night that Tizz died, I bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time in seven years and sat on the beach, shivering and smoking until three in the morning. The night after that, I slept in the room of a boy I barely knew, desperate to avoid the oppressive emptiness that reverberated through my apartment. A handsome friend’s bed seemed the best escape from the thunderous void of my now-empty nest.
Two nights after the death of my last pet rat, I drove the hundred miles back to my hometown and buried him in my parents’ backyard. Tizz was laid to rest alongside his brother and his former friends—all the dear souls that constituted my non-human family in my twenties. It was an idiosyncratic and unexpected family—lots of whiskers and fur and trouble—but they were my family, nonetheless. Here they all rested, in a neat, orderly row of graves. One subterranean cigar box coffin for every creature I have ever loved. Thirteen in total.
Two months after Tizz died, the rats’ vacant cage still stood erect in my living room, a six-foot tall monument to all of yesteryear’s ephemeral companions. I couldn’t bring myself to disassemble it.
I cannot bare to be here anymore. Sometimes, I come home to my apartment and still hear the soft pitter-patter of footsteps across hardwood floor—the shuffle of tiny, mischievous feet on the move. I can hear the metallic tap-tap-tap-tap-tap of the ball bearing of their water bottle. I still startle if my ankle brushes against something soft—the fear of accidentally stepping on somebody is ingrained in me after so many years of cohabitating with beings that were a tenth of my size.
But nobody’s lapping up water droplets. Nobody’s underfoot. The taps, the rustling—these are spectral sounds, auditory hallucinations born only of memory and grief.
This place is full of tiny ghosts.
But nobody’s lapping up water droplets. Nobody’s underfoot. The taps, the rustling—these are spectral sounds, auditory hallucinations born only of memory and grief.
This place is full of tiny ghosts.
What does it mean to live and die alongside other beings? In practice, it is gut-wrenching to see a whole life—or a succession of complex, vivid lives—play out, rapid fire, in front of you, in a temporality that you cannot really grasp or grapple with. All of these fleeting, interwoven threads of consciousness mingle together, blinking into existence with a flurry of mischief and joyous ebullience—and then they wilt away just as quickly, leaving only corpses, and you, wondering what the point of any of this was, if it was all fated to end as quickly as it began.
What kind of universe do we live in, where something as deep, and rich, and varied as sentient experience can arise billions of times, independently, just to be snuffed out by our very own bodies' in-built and inevitable decay? What is the point of all this emergence and disappearance? What is the point of sublime beauty coming into being, if only to transpire?
What kind of universe do we live in, where something as deep, and rich, and varied as sentient experience can arise billions of times, independently, just to be snuffed out by our very own bodies' in-built and inevitable decay? What is the point of all this emergence and disappearance? What is the point of sublime beauty coming into being, if only to transpire?
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To kaleidoscope is to undergo metamorphosis; to continuously transform from one ephemeral state into another, shifting fluidly between compositions, conditions, or structures.
/// Lisa Korpos (she/her) is a San Diego-based interdisciplinary artist who investigates non-human perception, embodiment, and the aesthetics of vulnerability. Her research-based art practice is rooted in the cognitive and ecological sciences, but her projects materialize as visual or tactile experiences, taking form as interactive installation, sculpture, digital media, creative nonfiction writing, and drawing. Collaborating with human and non-human bodies is an integral part of her process, with birds, honeybees, laboratory rats, and bottlenose dolphins acting as the subjects, co-creators, and participants within her work. Korpos holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego, along with baccalaureate degrees in Studio Art and Cognitive Science from the same institution. Her works have been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Other Places Art Fair, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) Gallery, and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, among others. Her interspecies collaboration projects can be viewed at: www.lisakorpos.com. |