Caren Beilin

Daniel Tiffany asked me to be part of this some time ago, sometime earlier than October, and I agreed it would be good, and nice. Now I find myself a bit blocked, a bit out of words, out of order and we’d agreed anyway—I was cashed out of excerpts anyway, before all this—that I’d offer an old excerpt from my book Blackfishing the IUD, from 2019. It’s out of print but I could mail you one. I think it’s the book Daniel first read of mine and why he thought of me for this, as a curator of this issue, so maybe it could be re-spat into internet glass. Dark glass. Dark and sequenced. Toxic sequins.

I wrote Blackfishing the IUD because I’d gotten the copper IUD implanted in my uterus, earlier, and it had caused a chain of symptoms and I believe initiated a perhaps latent autoimmune disease that I now have.

It’s not a perfect device. In fact in 2019, I went to an FDA meeting about metal devices, and spoke to a panel with some other bad patients, largely women who had flown into DC and gotten Ubers deep then into the suburbs of Maryland to tell about 23 men and 3 women that when metal got put suddenly into their bodies—used as pins, as stitching, in minor surgeries, as IUDs, as other birth control implants, and metal on metal hip replacements—that their life fell apart. The sudden metal caused extreme mental disturbance, autoimmunity, and just, deep and bad, harrowing disabilities. I told the panel I’d stopped being able to run, that I lived in the drifts of prednisone cycles, and that there was actually a set of burgeoning research that supports a connection between copper IUD use and the early onset of Rheumatoid Arthritis. I gave them copies of Blackfishing, which begins with a long anecdote about Walter Benjamin. Great.

I say sudden metal because there is metal. It’s in us, we are partly very metal, LIFE METAL, and in the ground and in the cosmos. It’s making everything move and click. But we should control the ways it is sudden. There is the flow of arms. That’s politics. That is a metal river, a toxic, flying river, an acrobatic unwater of weapons. That’s metal. I think the death drive might be metallic.

It's the suddenness, the glib introduction of a metal, in a body, to a form, that caused all those people to testify about their pain at the FDA meeting, why I wrote Blackfishing, because there’s a howling blowing through the sequins, patients online all the time, who say this device, and others, the sudden introduction to more metal, wasn’t good for their life. Though there was no warning. The meeting in Maryland was a lot about if the FDA would ever offer a warning.

A bomb is so much more than a warning. It over-warns. It’s sudden. There is too much of the sudden psychotic spring of metal on a people. You can’t clean people, or the earth of people, with metal. Do not.

from BLACKFISHING THE IUD

The moon is hollow. The moon is hollow says a certain contingent of people, because of aliens (and, also, the moon has experienced bangs on its surface that have apparently made it ring just like a bell).

These people are conspiracy theorists. Paranoid, conclusive, certain. Too certain. They connect the dots with their eager, enormous chalk. They want something to be true. They want, I think, something new to be true, and they are taken (as I am) with the moon being like a bell, two phonemes, moon, bell, beautiful and struck across each other’s false armor, mutable and beautiful.

The moon is a bell, as the theorist Georges Bataille, in 1931, said, “The sun is an anus.” He was arguing about the beauty— the absolute energy—of the copula.

“The verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy,” he wrote, the year that Benjamin unpacked his library, alone.

The moon is a bell, and I believe this absolutely, sure. The IUD is the RA. The sexual force of the verb, is, to be, of my verbacious being, will knock any noun into the moon and beyond. Everything is a parody, can be anything. The moon is hollow and made of muleskin.

The moon is hollow, insofar as it is coated with the agglutinate, the shining coat, of a limit. I cannot go into the moon with my eyesight.

I can’t enter my womb from that time (in November 2015) and sit crosslegged by the device, at the base of its suspending embedding, in the oaty red fist of my uterus, and watch the metal loam off its rigid cross-branch—and leech into tissues and activate, or reanimate, flare or push over my problem. I can’t spy the center of the inception or the core of my being. I only know the timing. My health deteriorated rapidly after it was in, and I know how horrible it is, to cease planning for trips, outings, applications, or children, waiting and watching for how bad and how soon, and that the moon is hollow.