Habitus

Settled in to the hard edge of a chair--it cuts and makes its shape known against my body, and this awareness of sitting skitters at the edge of thought--I'm listening to songs that are substituting for prayer. I'm fairly sure Fiske is misreading the social action of fandom, and I'm fairly sure Burke says it all better in a single phrase: Literature is equipment for living. And I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with what I'm supposed to be reading for--oh, I'm poaching, baby--but the lines of the chair and the shining tabs of fanfic lining the task bar and the sounds of hope and peace and love penetrate the film of pain just enough to shatter my discipline.

This dissertation is being written amid burning and stabbing and weakness and twitching, words in the spaces between pain, theses extracted painstakingly, chaff from wheat, diamond from rock, tumor from breast. And even when I laser focus, pull my mind and soul from the body long enough for clarity of thought, it's there, in the meat; back down in the physical my legs move without consent, my brain registers startling scents, my ears baulk against the pressure of some deep throb of sound: A passing car. It's solid, inside me, a force that my soul shrinks from until I'm nothing but a singularity. How can it not appear in the writing, this pain? It manifests itself in every sentence, tainting my masterpiece with that which I abhor; the thing I hate infiltrating my love, I cannot escape it; we are forever entwined. When I speak of hope, it's never about my own.

"Final" draft of disability poems

When I took The Rhetoric of Access Class in the Summer of 2006, Dr Salvo kept asking me why I could theorize all sorts of things, but couldn't theorize my own disability. Or even seem to conceptualize it in any meaningful way. While I had come to terms with the necessity of the label "disabled" for university purposes, I didn't like to use it except as shorthand for my situation--which, as a Burkeian, I should have realized the implications of this naming, but, then again, I wasn't theorizing it. I struggled to define for myself whether the disability was part of me, or if there was some other core identity outside the illness. As though the illness were a deviation from my True Self.

"You don't let it define you," Lou said today, as I struggled to finish the prose poem. And this is and was and probably always will be the problem. It does define me, but not in totality; it is me, I am it. It colors my language, my bodily movements, my lived experience. It gives me, in Burke's words, an orientation or perspective that prescribes strategies for living. But people, particularly normals, don't want to think about this, because admitting the sickness is (in) you is to admit your proximity to death. We run far, far away from death, if only to return to it in the death drive. Being disabled means being mortal. And that makes people uncomfortable.

Well too damn bad, people. As Mrs Curie told me when I struggled with Weber's Clarinet Concerto, "Make beautiful mistakes"--or, in another orientation, make the mistakes beautiful. Here's me trying to make the mistake of my body beautiful. (Oh, and Jeff, if you're reading this? Thanks, and sorry about the Muppet comparison. And to AHS band members: Yes, I'm aware I was never "cricked." But there was that one time with Kamp's pants, and you know we came close then...)

Twelve Steps Away From Disabled

He wants me to walk like a penguin; I want him to speak to me like an adult. My feet turn ninety degrees without my permission and I waddle triumphantly across the office. No, he says, not looking at my mother. I meant, turn them the other way. My toes face each other and twitch hello.

In the middle of a step, time stops with a high whine, bright and still like a frozen sunbeam. My boot slides in the snow banks; the New Hampshire sludge has a contract out on me. The rest of the class keeps on walking. Thanks, teacher, for leaving me be--I‘ll catch up eventually.

If I don't run now, I might be able to walk later: this is energy conservation in its finest. The gym teacher is unimpressed by my planning skills. He thinks I mean later in the day. I mean later, when I'm middle-aged and sporting a wheelchair. I've got a lot of contingencies to consider. I'm already eight.

My fingers fly up and down the keys, faster than anyone, and my mother looks relieved. Somehow my body knows this, easier than walking, than using a knife and fork, and I wonder if this is what it's like to walk without thinking left, right, lift, push. The concentration of a step is harder than Mozart's clarinet concerto in A.

And hit. Three feet behind again, panting and red faced; my foot is nowhere near the white line--it’s betrayed me again. The bass drum pounds on, and they threaten to throw me in the creek. The doctor’s note stays in my back pocket. I’ll take the plunge instead.

Trudging uphill. The cold feel of frozen meat that is my thigh trips me, breaking the article already written in my head. I can't ask the question I want to (Do you agree with the Senate's decision?) with the noise of pain coating the scene. I go for the easy schmooze instead, and Mom recommends I rethink journalism school. We call the new round of college applications "Plan B."

The word is washing machine, but I'm going with "the thing that gets things clean," which earns me laughter and friends. I smooth over the gaps by speeding in circles around missing words, so it's okay, and no one notices until I try to order pizza and ask for balloons instead. Much giggling ensues. Instant friends for life.

I didn't mean to hit her, but she was sitting too close, and the arm decided it needed to inhabit some other space, so I'm telling myself it's not my fault. When the leg kicks me back from my desk and into the wall three days later, Jeff’s mentoring skills kick in, and he eases my blush with jokes about the spontaneous overflow of emotions. I tell him I hate the Romantics, anyway. I score points for intertextuality.

Jeff’s a mad Muppet-like man, bobbing in his seat, Mennonite compassion oozing from the books on his shelf. You’ve got more options, he tells me. You’d like grad school, because it’s clear Plan B is a bust, and I don’t want to travel too far into the alphabet. I refuse to ask What if I run out of words? What if I get lost? because Jeff has too much faith in me, and I’d hate to ruin his day.

They put me on the top floor, of course, high above the city that breathes for me most days. Fire drills aside, the minuscule elevator carries me faithfully down to the pavement I can pound, inhaling Boston, infusing it in my skin. The stairs stare me down, and I glare right back; I am not lost, for once, in the streets that wind dizzyingly in marshes and fens.

To the prim professor, I say, “The creation of audience identification is necessarily voluntary: But what if they don’t want to feel disabled with me?” The words haven’t gone anywhere, as long as the buildings twinkle at night, and standing in the doorway between here and there seems to suit me.

I'm sitting in the driveway, trying to remember which one is the brake pedal again, and how to get home. Twenty years of failing to be the right kind of penguin has been like the slide of twilight into night. Or like a frog being boiled slowly in water. “Becoming,” I say to the unfamiliar street signs, “is different from being,” tasting Heidegger on my lips. As long as I’m still driving, I haven’t yet arrived.

Sirloin Or why you shouldn't hug me

Please unloose my flesh
To let fly free that which
Aches against my borders.
Like frost on a window
Binds sticky and prickles,
So do your fingers scratch
Against the edge of my skin.

It begins in the spine,
Tracks down and settles
Matching gut for gut,
Meeting stab with stab,
Etching rutted lines
Through pulsing muscle,
Clean Ginsu marks,
But not to stretch,
Not to butterfly open:
It’s not your intent to butcher
Me with embracing arms.

And a bonus poem that I didn't have the balls to read at something called "Disability Awareness Month." "Raising Awareness" is an idea I often rant against, and this poem is to be read sarcastically: Imagine a whiny 13 year old girl's voice, and you've got it just about right. (Yes, this and Sirloin are reposts, but with revisions)

Raising Awareness
Are you there, passion?
Are you yet asleep?
Has hope awoken you on cue
at the end of the end,
where you can sip the most fuel
thrust forward at the tip of the fuse?
Or have you slipped beyond now
infusing the realm of dreams
where you are more easily grasped
where you are not denied a chance
to light the plot to enlighten the world
And make them all impassioned for the cause?

They’ve waited, passion,
those banner-makers and slogan-writers
They who walk for cures with posters held high
They’ve waited on you and upon you
waited for your arrival at the darkest night
triumphant in trumpet blares at blastissimo,
For you to burn the untouched souls
And inflame them with compassion.
But you snuck in quiet to the back room
and tied them up in our own pink ribbons
till they are furiously still at the keyboard
passionately aware, the standard of awareness raised.

Are you still here, passion,
Now that the worst has floated downriver?
It seems they can't remember
how this is supposed to end--
is it a tragedy or comedy?
A romantic gesture?
A single rose on the fifteenth of February?

Understanding Learning Disabilities: How Difficult Can This Be?

Frustration
Anxiety
Tension

The prepositions blend and idioms unwind. Do you turn a light “up” or “on”? Are my legs over the table or on it? Was that water passing under the bridge or the bridge going over water?

It is the lack that tracks our eyes to the skull in the center.

Let loose scraps of the alphabet into questions as weapons: nuclear phrases imploding over orations.

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Trauma of the Real

If, as Baudrillard claims, the postmodern era is that which is marked by the hyperreal, the substitution of the Real with signs for the Real, an inability to access the Real because our images and symbolic structures (systems of substitution) have superseded the Real, then what can we say about those artifacts of pop culture that wish to examine the Real via substitutions, by animation or performance—that is, how do our representations which have displaced the Real now attempt to explain that which we cannot know?

Fullmetal Alchemist is a rich text for its questioning of science, religion, and militarization. It also, however, begins to make an argument about the nature of the Real in its final episodes (48-51). When Hoenheim of Light appears to explain to Edward and Alphonse about the Philosopher’s Stone (a dense manifestation of the Real), he also hints at, but does not fully explain what exactly happened to Ed and Al when they attempted human transmutation. Edward is haunted still by the images of “The Gate” (or Door, depending on your translation) where some omnipotent Gatekeeper controls the flow between dimensions.

Edward is isolated by his connection to the Real, his memory of the Gate which controls material and temporal existence for two worlds. Alchemy, which on Earth never yielded any fruits and was replaced by the more scientific Chemistry, flourishes in Ed and Al’s world, Amestris, and is the legitimated form of science and power. Alchemy is how the people understand their world: through Equivalent Exchange (or Trade), where “humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return,” the people (for the most part) organize their philosophies and values. Alchemy, not the hard science we know on Earth, orders language and government. Alchemists transmute everything from water to radios (never gold, however—like the Middle Ages here on earth, transmuting gold is a crime), and are the privileged class for their knowledge about the universe.

But Ed and Al soon discover that there is more to Alchemy than drawing Transmutation Circles around the matter they wish to re-order when Ed attempts to transmute his mother’s remains into a living, souled person again. Despite drawing an intricate circle with all of the elements of fire, life, water, etc, despite using his own blood as catalyst, despite his knowledge and research, Ed fails at his attempt at human transmutation: it is not possible, he learns later, because there is no equivalent trade for a soul.

The attempt, however, is the closest anyone has gotten in years. Ed and Al managed to create a being, a mass of flesh and bone that groaned in pain before Ed destroyed it. And that being was created because Ed’s Circle managed to open and make manifest the Gate in his barn.

The Gate is left unexplained for most of the series. It appears as hands grabbing, little black homunculi babies with white eyes reaching for flesh—for the material of human bodies. These homunculi steal Al’s body as part of the Equivalent Exchange for his mother’s body, and use it to create the human-like homunculus named Sloth. Al’s mind is left at the Gate (this is never explained), but Edward, also at the Gate, manages to capture Al’s soul and tie it to a piece of armor by drawing a transmutation circle on the armor with his own blood.

Ed does not escape from his encounter with the Gate unscathed. His right arm and left leg are taken by the homunculi (later given to the homunculus named Wrath) and the images of the homunculi tearing his flesh flash throughout the series in short scenes. Mostly this encounter is left as a nightmare; despite the fact that it begins the series, Ed and Al’s foray into human transmutation and the resulting encounter with the Real are left unexplored until the end of the anime, when their father, Hoenheim returns.

When the nature of the Gate is explained as a conduit between worlds, as a transformation station of souls and matter, Edward begins to understand why human transmutation cannot work without a Philosopher’s Stone, which is itself made up of thousands of human bodies and souls, compressed into a small (blood)red gem. Edward is only 15, however, and since the series is conducted through his point of view, much is left unexplained and unsaid.

What is explained, however, is why Edward, unlike other Alchemists, does not need a transmutation circle to do alchemy. By simply clapping his hands and thinking of what he wants to happen, Edward is able to perform alchemic changes in an instant. Transmutation circles can take minutes or hours to draw (or longer, depending on the complexity of the transformation), but Edward no longer needs to draw out the relationships between the elements he plans to use. Transmutation circles can be seen as what Baudrillard calls “the visible machinery of icons [which] substituted for the pure and intelligible idea of God” (4). In fact, Edward refuses to believe in God after his encounter with the Gate: all is material presence to him. Icons, as representation of the real which supersede the real, like Transmutation circles, are simulacra; they get in between us and the Real and in doing so erase the Real completely. For the most part, humans are happy with this.

If Transmutation circles are simulacra that the humans of Amestris replace the Real with, it only makes sense that after his encounter with the Real at the Gate Edward no longer needs the circles to perform Alchemy. Whereas the circles mediate the Real so that Alchemists do not have to touch it (the Real, the Gate) directly, Edward’s “small inner Gate” (as Hoenheim explains) has been opened and thus Edward has immediate access to the Real. In exchange for this access, however, he loses his limbs and his ability to identify with the outside world. He becomes isolated and withdrawn, and it is only as his quest for the Philosopher’s Stone draws to an end--when he believes he may be able to stop using Alchemy someday—that he begins to reenter into the symbolic order by forgiving his father (or at least speaking to him) and hinting at his love for his childhood friend Winry.

Iconography marked Alchemy’s period here on Earth and the images of that time are still with us. The snake and pole which were symbols for renewal and rebirth became the caduceus of medicine, the five pointed star (representing the unity of the five elements) became a satanic symbol of inversion. These symbols are now simulations and parodies of their original meanings, back when we believed we could control the material world, the Real, by recombining its elements. When we codified matter into zodiac symbols and created a sign or representation for everything. Alchemy attempted to change the material world by working with the signs that simulate it. These signs, icons, at times sacred symbols, have stayed with us and have accumulated meanings—but not materiality. Symbolicity has not led us to the Real, but has led us to erase it.

Fullmetal Alchemist as a series resonates with us not only for its action/adventure treasure hunt for the Philosopher’s Stone or its detective story unveiling of Ed and Al’s father’s past actions, but for its attempt to explain Earth’s interaction with the Real, for our failure to conquer Alchemy. When Hoenheim explains to Ed that Earthling’s souls are the medium of transmutation, Ed is horrified: that is what he is touching when he claps his hands and imagines a transmutation, that is the purpose of the Gate—to regulate the flow of soul, body, and mind between dimensions of Being. The Gate that haunts Ed is the “desert of the real,” the unmapped, uncharted desert, the desert before we could represent it, pure materiality without symbols. The space of the Gate is white, sound echoes to an infinity, and the Gatekeeper’s being-ness is questionable. It is both nowhere and everywhere, nothing and everything, and the Truth that Ed claims to have seen there is so overwhelming it makes him sick. His father has passed through this Truth so many times that his physical body has begun to rot into its constituent molecules. Al’s mind resides somewhere there, in the inaccessable real.

If Baudrillard is correct in his assertion that postmodernity has led us to a kind of simulacra of simulacra, a disconnect with history and space, then how do we account for paranormal TV shows that attempt to explain the Real, to recover a division between reality and fantasy, to explore textuality and symbolicity in all their complicated glory? Fullmetal Alchemist is, of course, an uncanny text: the world of Amestris is so similar to Earth, yet the presence of Alchemy makes it strange. There is a historical resonance with the Middle Ages that cannot be ignored; FMA doubles the past and places it in the present. The story of the Philosopher’s Stone is fairly well known, and this retelling is an adaptation of an original tale. And the level of representation is further complicated by the medium: FMA is an animation created from a manga text. As a member of that genre called anime, FMA simulates the ur-anime text (whatever that may be) in its stylization. And, since Alchemy is a Western tradition, and anime is an Eastern one, there is some cultural translation (itself a reproduction/simulation) that causes a strange resulting representation. All of these factors of simulation, reproduction, and translation come together in a text attempting to discover/uncover/recover the Real by breaking down symbol systems (transmutation circles, bodies, cities), yet remaining within a readable language. How then, can any text explore the Real?

Much has been left unsaid in the series; startling images at the Gate are not verbally explained, but left only as iconography. While the FMA movie, The Gate of Shambala, attempted to delve further into this realm, it has served only to increase fan speculation about what the Gate “really” is and how it “really” works; the explanations were unsatisfactory even though the visuals were stunningly beautiful. It is unlikely that the “Truth” that Ed claims to have seen will ever be revealed to the viewers: it is something only Ed could see, as he was one of only a few to actually experience the Real of the Gate. As Baudrillard says, “It is always the goal of the ideological analysis [read: the fan interpretations] to restore the objective process, it is always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum” (27).
Poot--tee--weet.

Disability paper--I have no map

Clumps of thought to explore, or The Amylea Clemons Method of Paper Writing

“There seems to be a chasm between the medical knowledge of a condition, and how it impinges on academic progress.” (Report from Queensland University of Technology on ME/CFS in post-secondary ed)
Primary texts: Compliance documents from two universities. Purdue and Florida vs Queensland
Method: Close reading of the translation of ADA required material into web information on university sites.
Goal: to discuss the attitudes, values, and assumptions that underlie the construction of official statements (read: “legally mandated statements”) of disability services at the university level. What ideologies and definitions of “disability” are embedded in the language of the document? (Here I’m thinking of J Blake Scott’s article on Confide home testing for HIV, where “normalcy” and WASP ideology are constructed despite attempts at empathy and political correctness.)

Contextualization: ADA requirements, recommendations from ed.gov
Frameworks:
Use Mezzy’s terministic screens of interpretation of legal documents for own interpretations. Grammarian problems.
Edward Schiappa’s Defining Reality asks us to consider definition not as finding an “essence” but as contextualized:

It is not that X is Y, but that X should count as Y in context C. When we do this, however, we should ask “What are our shared purposes in defining X? What interests and values are advanced by competing definitions? Whose interests are being served by a particular definition and do we want to identify with those interests? What are the consequences of the ‘essential’ characteristics promoted by a definition, given that every category ‘valorizes some point of view and silences another’ (177-178).

To what extent do the definitions in university “judicial” documents (documents that serve a legal function) serve one interest or another? What definitions are used, and what are the attitudes toward that definition? What are the attitudes toward the ADA in general, and how is the ADA definition presented (where, to what extent is it quoted, how is it explained, links?) What version of “disability” emerges from the university’s use of the ADA’s legal language? Who benefits from these definitions, and what attitudes emerge from those definitions? What consequences might there be?

How is normalcy constructed in the documents? (Davis) What is “normal” for the university? How is “university” itself constructed in the documents? More importantly, how are these arguments made, and what authorities do they draw from?

Support for close reading: AHEAD website’s comments and recommendations. Overview of judicial rhetoric research in disability studies. Criticism of university regulations for chronic illness in Australia. (three studies)

Addictive personality

Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.
I'm obsessed by the bean. By the smell. By the way it enters my throat, trickles down into my veins and infiltrates my brain with life, hope, chi. When I'm awake, I'm thinking about it, about the frozen beans in my fridge. I eat three per day, and savor the flavor of chocolate and the earthy espresso.
How long till August 22?
Dana says she doesn't understand my addictive personality. I tell her she must have a thyroid disorder.
Addictive personality: as though people could become addicted to my personality. Or I could be addicted to personality. What is "personality"?
Last night I wrote a mental letter to Rick, my teaching mentor, in my head. I argued against his idea of excellence, based on disability studies. That "excellence" is contingent upon an established norm, that we don't blame ordinary people for not being able to hit a baseball like Big Papi or sing like an opera diva. And yet Rick would have us believe that all who are not daily striving for such excellence are somehow slackers, lacking initiative.
I used to believe that wholeheartedly. I believed it straight through freshmen year, through most of that summer. I was high strung, emotional, nervous, anxious, continually tensing my shoulders in fear of relaxation. Stay alert or you'll miss something.
Maybe it was Dragonball Z. Maybe it was the yoga or t'ai chi. But I learned to shut down that drive sometime during sophomore year. A switch in my head that still wants to be in the on position. I can feel when it flips on; my breathing changes, my cheeks flush, my shoulders hunch, a guilty knot appears in my stomach, and something goes down my spine--adrenaline, probably. Cortisol. Fight or flight.
And it hurts like hell.
I know I have it in me to be like Dana: to be addicted to action, motion, hard work, responsibility. I also know what it does to me. And instead of becoming anxious, sick, tired, and tense, I choose to find peace by subordinating excellence to my own sanity. To my personality.
Which may not make me the best, most organized teacher in the world, but it does make me a good person. I wish I didn't have to choose between those, but those are the set of terms I've been given, and until someone comes up with a cure, I'll have to keep making that decision.
Of course, I'll never write that letter. It won't do anyone any good; if you haven't lived with it, you can't understand it.
That being said, I've decided that it's time to try last ditch measures for getting back to a baseline pain level. Walking, yoga, and a massive cut down on sugar. Full doses of Ultram. Whatever it takes. I have an addictive personality, and it's time I use that to my advantage.
Frak you, FMS.

Frustrated? Why, yes!

(teaching week....oh whatever it was 10/12-10/15)

Frustrations are, of course, to be expected if one wants to treat the Act of teaching as a dialogue or dialectic. There will be misrepresentations, false starts, and questions of authority. And, as goes the quantum theory that at any one moment there is a slight but significant possibility that you could end up putting your hand through a door when attempting to knock on it--given a random ordering of atoms and their constituent parts all deciding to be somewhere else simultaneously--there is a signficant and not so slight possibility that student entropy will occur all at once as well. Particularly when certain environmental factors push the student-atoms to one side in a convincing manor (Motion, says Papa KB, not Action!).
So when only twelve students appeared in class on Thursday, and only a slight majority of those appearing had done the rough draft for peer reviewing, another rare, but significant event spurred by environmental factors ocurred. I stopped playing the "believing game" (Elbow) and started doubting the hell out of just about everything. And I got just about as pissed off as I ever do at students; as a pacifist and social justice promoter, I rarely find myself doubting humanity's ability to create together, but this must have been a final straw. Nice, forgiving, patient Teacher Amy (who is, some how, much more patient with students than with family or friends) removed the students sans essays from the room and proceded to reward those who remained.
Hence, the stratified due dates. Those appearing in class on Thursday will have an extra three days to write the verbal portrait. After all, they have feedback to work from.
Oh, the complaints! Amy has logical fallicies, they say! Those who have done work need less time than those of us who haven't started yet! And, in the standard Western philosophy, the premise of this argument is sound. But because my purposes are more abstract than simply producing essays, the two arguments talk over/under one another.
At least, I think I'm feeling better. My sleep habits don't make sense to anyone but me anymore, but I guess to a certain extent that doesn't matter. If my body wants to sleep from 6 pm to 3 am, I guess that's what it needs. My reading makes more sense to me at 3 am. My energy is peaking around 8 am...which is problematic for that 3:30 Romanticism class, but disability is about negotiation. Give and take.
Humans are not immortal; we are all "disabled" in the sense that our bodies are fallible. What the masses can do, however, is what is considered "normal human ability" despite the internal variations of that ability. We recognize this, and the relatively healthy do not have to negotiate consciously; it is built into our society.
Those of us with differing abilities must actively negotiate, however, and because we are less in certain areas, we must make choices that sacrifice one aspect or another. Those of us not stuck in bed--The doctors can't believe I'm actually succeeding; their surprise is offensive and flattering--are the ones who negotiate successfully because our particular abilites and disabilities can be managed within certain categories. I can go to grad school because I have the flexibility to sleep when I need it; I have a fairly good brain that has been adapting to physical pressures since 1986; my work can be done sitting or standing, and more and more from home via the internet.
If I chose a different occupation, I would seem more disabled. What would you do if you were cured tomorrow? The answer hasn't changed in 10 years. I'd quit grad school and be a journalist in Boston.
This negotiation, the give and take of energies and abilities, has become so engrained (what a weird metaphorical word) in my habits and speech that when students fail to meet my expectations--and, particularly, when it happens all at once--a part of me does not understand. How can healthy beings not manage the tasks I've set? If I did it, they should be able to, too.
It's in those moments that I hate myself. My friends joke that I have no compassion, and it is in this sense they mean it; I have plenty of compassion for the oppressed, the dispossessed, those suffering from ailments of body, mind, or nation, but when I see people wasting their abilities on things I deem frivolous, that I've had to deem frivolous to maintain my sense of self worth I become some Other Amy.
Not that these negative feelings are all bad. The students are there to learn, and it is, apparently, my job to make sure they do learn something. Anything. And it's hard to do that when they seem to have given up on the class, and, by extension, me.
It's enough to make one descend into anime so deeply that one never emerges. Too bad I've got three papers due this week.
Enough "woe is me." I slept from 9pm to 1 am, and am now working on three projects at once. It's invigorating, a reminder of what I am capable of when healthy. And who knows why I'm sicker now than I ever was in undergrad. It's the random arrangement of electrons. Entropy and all that.
Burke never talked about ability. Addiction as Symbolic, yes (it's not that "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is about Coleridge's drug addiction that he didn't have yet; it's that both are symbolic expressions of something else. Why didn't Burke think about Coleridge's vaguely defined "rheumatic pains" and pain's ability to incite symoblic reActions?). He can't help me here. Be quiet, Burke! In due time!