My blood is just slightly tainted. I’ve never tried to hide my HIV-positive status, and I am, if anything, a little embarrassed by how useful I’ve found it. In my defense, one works with what is at hand—it’s not as if I sero-converted simply to get some good material. But then what? What can I say about blood that makes me more interesting than anybody else? Emily Carter on blood. Better than Emily Carter on drugs, I say.
But I have another alibi, or an excuse, or at least an inspiration. It all started with Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. In that movie, blood was beautiful, and so was death, and so, in fact, was everything else, including the title, The Blood of a Poet.
“The blood of a poet.” I want it—the phrase, not the blood—for myself. The glamorous and distant idea is, of course, that someone would actually allow her blood to be spilled for poetry, for beauty, for freedom from cruelty. I sit in my warm little office, my computer playing a radio station from Cape Verde, and I contemplate blood. Meanwhile, it’s being spilled on the floor.
That’s what the news reports said about the video of the terrorists terrorizing all those Russian schoolchildren and their parents and their teachers. Blood is clearly visible on the floor. You can see blood on the floor. For something that’s supposed to be kept on the inside, blood is certainly beautiful. It is scarlet, perhaps to call attention to itself. In nature, bright color is reserved for mating or warning. The little frog that looks like a jewel is often poisonous. Even, and especially, the birds know this. Bright colors tell you to stay away unless you want a painful death. There is no such warning on the human label. Terrorists, for example, look exactly like human beings. Their blood is no more a warning (or an invitation) than anyone else’s.
I watched the video of the schoolchildren and the blood on the floor because curiosity is stronger than choice. I’m no more of a ghoul than anyone else, and the desire to see what shouldn’t be seen is only human. Blood on the floor, hair on the walls, that’s the promise used to get my attention. You can see blood on the floor. The blood seeps into the tiny moats between the tiles, and threads its merry way along a maze-like path of cracks, just like it did that lunchtime twenty-five years ago, the trickle escaping from the gashed head of a boy who’d just thrown himself off the third-floor balcony and into the stairwell. Bright red blood running through the black and white marble.
I remember the face on Brenda, the school psychologist—frozen half-smile, whispered curse—before she bolted to the emergency phone. It was a small school for disturbed but talented adolescents and it didn’t take long to get the word that Brenda and the fallen boy—a Zappa-worshiping, Tuinal-gulping kid from an outlying suburb—had been having an affair. The whole school was crazy; I have no idea whether or not it was true. I just remember marveling at the fact that the boy was still, somehow, alive. The human body, that eggshell full of guts, amazed me with its strength. Even when the inside got outside, the way it was never supposed to do, that thing can take a licking and keep on ticking. It’s true, or we’d all know even more people who had driven themselves to death at an early age.
Anyway, that certainly was not the blood of a poet. It was the blood of a messed-up adolescent boy who, the story went, had just been dismissed by the beautiful older woman who no longer found his services necessary.
There’s actually not much that’s poetic about blood, a liquid medium in which basic processes occur. Respiration, mitosis, meiosis, whatever. It’s just not that exciting a substance, in the end. It fades, for one thing. All those handkerchiefs dipped in Dillinger’s blood were splashy red to start with and ten minutes later were nothing but faded brown, instantly sepia-tinged and historical. Blood fades as fast as the shock of seeing it. The first decapitation video, I was transfixed. I was about to see a human head removed from its body, to look at death. Naturally, the tawdry mess of it is what stays in the mind, the inept sawing, the face with no particular expression, as if surprised mid-thought. In the pornographic light of poor production, the blood looked almost black. That was only the first video. The others appeared, one after the other, in a toxic flurry. It has been a year of death presented like two fat hookers faking sex with each other for rent money. No elegant vampire would want that blackish, sticky, clotted substance.
The blood of a poet, in other words, oozes prose-like out of the body. It carries no potent charm; in the societal power structure, the poet is less significant than the plumber, who, at least, is a hero when he last-minute fixes the pipes everybody thought were going to be frozen all weekend. The blood of a poet is worth less than the blood of a plumber.
So, oh well. So be it. I am no poet, but I am poetic, and my blood carries a little something extra. Gugu Dlamini’s blood carried the same virus as mine. She, however, lived in South Africa in a place where your HIV status didn’t get you any grants like the one for HIV-positive writers I just applied for. What her HIV status got her, when she disclosed it, was stoned to death. Her blood was the same color as mine, but she herself made a brighter splash. She knew that in her town, disclosure meant death, but she disclosed. She was sicker of the denial than she was from the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus, the kind of sickness that makes one ready, almost eager, to have her own blood spilled. Which is what I call transgressive, which is what I call “edge.” I don’t know if I have it, and, God willing, I’ll never need to know. I can picture the red brushstroke painted by the first stone, however, a gash splitting her eyebrow like a signature. There was nothing to protect her. “Can’t you see,” the poet Akmatova exclaimed, “I am naked, vulnerable, while the rest of you have armor?” There was someone who was not afraid to let it spill. I like to think of her and Gugu in heaven, laughing, happy and drunk upon the blood of so-called saints.