“Have you talked about it with MaryJo?” Timothy asks when I tell him I’m thinking about trying to write about migraine. “Hers went away.” Yes, we talked about it, so how can it be that all I remember is that she’d had them enough like me that in our eyes we understood we understood? Hers had gone away? Something vague flutters by. “It may have been hormonal,” Timothy says. “Yes,” I answer, “I think she timed out.” How is it possible I could not remember this successful grasping of the brass ring, a parallel quest completed? I think we got sidetracked when one of us mentioned Joan of Arc.
Why Joan? The patient-cum-defendant endlessly examined, poked at and prodded, revered and reviled, the center around which the whole unwelcome circus spins. The subject forced to speak in and of the untranslatable condition of herself. The subject sure and unsure. The choosing between evils. I don’t care about the church or Joan’s relationship to God or the Hundred Years’ War. I care about what she says. The expression of one’s inexpressible experience for an avid but not necessarily sympathetic audience of nonpeers: A bit too often like doctor/patient, no? A lot like pain.
Why Joan? Because required to voice the private publicly, she often refused. Because she uttered the unutterable while somehow staying true to it. That is to say, because of her relationship to language.
Because she was a woman surrounded by prying, know-it-all, highly trained, deeply biased men who pelted her with questions, forcing her to defend herself for what was no offense but which offended them—their sensibilities, their sense of power and decorum, of how things went.
Because she heard voices and saw light.
Because, bodily, she did not behave. Because by insisting on what her body felt or needed, she defended it from certain kinds of attack while opening it to others.
Because everywhere I turn, my life is crowded with too many questions and too many answers, often in mismatched pairs, and frequently this is how Joan’s testimony reads.
Because although she is so well known, so widely claimed, really, we know so little about her.
Because I wanted to start with nothing, or, in the sink and surge of migraine-mind, I found myself drawn to this crowded near nothingness: the intriguing cloud of potential and projection, the thrill of an almost unpredetermined chase combined with the shifty allure of a cliché’s intentionally low stakes.
Or because I wanted to start with something I knew nothing about, but could have, should have, maybe once did. What do we learn? What do we recall? What does it mean? I was born to college-educated parents in the Greater Boston area in 1972. I attended “good” schools. The first time I learned anything about the Ottoman Empire was in 2003 and it was only because I happened to be studying in Greece. I never learned anything at all about Joan of Arc, except ambiently, the three-syllable beat of her name.