The Scar, a Breakthrough
- The DIY Scholar
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
I had been having so much fun that I almost forgot about the scar.
My interlocutor, Kim, threw her head back and laughed heartily when I joked about the fate of our project, like so many others before it, just as well-intended and every bit as poorly executed. It almost felt like we were having a normal conversation, just two activists concerned about the future of the movement and the efficacy of its strategies. It felt good to laugh at our shortcomings, to put a little distance between us and our work, like it might save us from the entrapments of dogma, like it might stop us for abandoning ourselves to faulty reasoning and rushing headlong into misguided conclusions, like so many of our fellow travellers.
Despite the weather outside, it was hot in the kitchen, where we were gathered, the panes of the windows fogged up, so I unbuttoned the top button of my shirt, the one I usually keep buttoned.
It wasn’t altogether obvious, but I spotted it nonetheless, there on Kim’s face. In the expanses of her forehead, where the lines diverge. In the downslope of her eyebrows, the point where they taper out. In the depth of her eyes, there where the freefall begins, the panic, behind everything else.
Yes, it insinuated itself there in her features. The Thought, it was written there.
It was my cue. The time to exit the conversation had arrived. “Kim, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m going to head over to the refrigerator for another beer,” I said, sententiously, rebuttoning the top button of my shirt. I grabbed my empty beer bottle from the counter and pivoted toward the refrigerator, convinced that I was off the hook.
“Great! Would you mind getting me another one as well,” Kim interjected, lifting the amber bottle in her hand to eye level. There was only a thin wash of foamy liquid swirling around at the bottom of the bottle. Apparently, my retreat to safety, back to the shadows, wasn’t going to be as simple as I thought.
Needing a second, I took a detour to the window on my way to the fridge. I opened it a crack, and cold air rushed inside. It felt good on the skin of my face, my cheeks, which were hotter than usual. I could see my breath as I exhaled, a tenuous funnel in front of my face. Closing my eyes tightly and inhaling deeply, I pretended that I was somewhere safer, Kansas after the third tap of my ruby slippers, perhaps.
To my surprise, the kitchen was still there when I opened my eyes, louder than before, steamier, more crowded with activists. A bike messenger walked past me with his shirt off, despite the weather outside. From what I could gather, he was displaying a full back tattoo of the face from the album cover of In the Court of King Crimson. A work in progress, not all the outlines had been filled in yet. The back of the throat, for example, was still uncolored, as if the anguished scream opened directly into the body of the bike messenger.
I was convinced that there wasn’t room for me in the kitchen or any of the other rooms of the squat. Heavy-limbed, weighed down by my thoughts, I set myself to the task at hand, the refrigerator and the beers.
Kim was waiting, entirely unaffected, when I returned with a bottle in each hand. “Hope you like your beer uncommonly smooth”, I said, as I handed her a beer with the words, “uncommonly smooth,” printed in big letters on the label.
“I usually prefer my beer rough around the edges, but I guess I can make an exception this one time.” Kim smiled. All traces of The Thought had vanished from her face. She lifted her beer and tilted the rim in my direction. “To failing better,” she said. “To failing better,” I echoed, tapping the neck of her beer bottle with the neck of mine. I hadn’t known that she, too, was a fan of Beckett.
Then the unexpected happened. Kim and I talked. About normal things. Beckett. Failed social movements. King Crimson. Bike Messengers. Punk. 21st century socialism. The Fourth International. The Great Academic Succession. Normal things, no scar talk. None of the usual awkwardness, the prying glances, the pity. None of the furrowed brows and forced smiles. No active-listening-nods and platitudes. None of the usual fascination with wound-gazing, with measuring scars, with mapping out the pain. None of the usual countercultural cartography, the insatiable urge to discover the uncharted continent of individual and collective disaster. No, Kim did not appear to be scrutinizing my hairline, the collar of my shirt, or the cuff of my sleeves, in search of a clue, an explanation, a verification. She did not try to follow the course of the scar across the surface of my skin and identify the parts where it turned inward and burrowed deep into the tissue, like a rich vein of ore in a mine, the motherload, waiting to be exploited for effect. It was almost as if there wasn’t a scar between us.
The kitchen felt larger. The appliances, far away. The party goers, static on the radio, turned down low. The overhead lights, dimmer somehow, soothing even. I ran my hand through my hair, what was left of it, entirely unconcerned about the scalp part of the scar, a snake hiding in the grass. Unburdened, I was even considering rolling up my sleeves to the elbow. It had been years since I allowed myself to do so.
Kim lowered her voice. She leaned in close, closer, until it was just the two of us, until the rest of the kitchen and its appliances and its activists had fallen away. There was something, she said, on her mind, something urgent, something that might, she said, interest me. She had a breakthrough. An idea for something entirely new, a project, not like any of the previous ones, less of a project really than a new direction, a different type of praxis. None of the same second-hand clothes, none of milkcrates atop bike racks, none of the cliches, none of the tired tropes, none of the activist anachronisms, the hopeless repetition of past revolutionary gestures in a historical present in which they are no longer viable or even intelligible. No, this was something different. She had found it, she said, a way out, the path forward, a more robust response, fully affirmative, potentiated by the present predicament and its specific needs. “It’s,” she said, at a whisper, “explosive,” making a mushroom-cloud gesture with her hands.
It was at that exact moment, the moment of the explosion, that I caught a glimpse of it, sticking its head out of her sweater, writhing. Its erratic movements, its moods, so volatile, were unmistakeable. It was as if my scar had taken up residence on another’s skin, something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Despite myself, I felt a hot flash pass across my face, The Thought. I caught myself, I pushed it out of my head, but it was too late. Kim had noticed.
She straightened up, eyes wide, and pursed her lips. “Hey, would you believe that I’m all out of beer?” She said the words slowly, pronouncing each one separately, as if she were reading a children’s book aloud. “Golly, it looks like I’ll have to go to the refrigerator for another.”
In a panic, I struggled to find the right words, something graceful, funny even, something about needing another beer myself. But I couldn’t organize a response in time. When I turned to face her, Kim was gone, reabsorbed into the pulsing mass of fellow activists in the kitchen, their second-hand clothes, their tired tropes, their anachronisms.
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