Steinbeck: East of Eden

“The wound had not worried Charles, but the scar did. It looked like a long fingermark laid on his forehead. He inspected it often in the little mirror by the stove. He combed his hair down over his forehead to conceal as much of it as he could. He conceived a shame for his scar; he hated his scar. He became restless when anyone looked at it, and fury rose in him if any question was asked about it. In a letter to his brother her put down his feeling about it.
‘It looks,’ he wrote, ‘like somebody marked me like a cow. The damn thing gets darker. By the time you get home it will maybe be black. All I need is one going the other way and I would look like a Papist on Ash Wednesday. I don’t know why it bothers me. I got plenty other scars. It just seems like I was marked. And when I go into town, like to the inn, why, people are always looking at it. I can hear them talking about it when they don’t know I can hear. I don’t know why they’re so damn curious about it. It gets so I don’t feel like going into town at all.'”

-- pp. 53-54, Toronto: Macmillan, 1952.

Dana Jennings: Our Scars Tell The Stories of Our Lives

Our scars tell stories. Sometimes they’re stark tales of life-threatening catastrophes, but more often they’re just footnotes to the ordinary but bloody detours that befall us on the roadways of life.

When I parse my body’s motley parade of scars, I see them as personal runes and conversation starters. When I wear shorts, the footlong surgical scar on my right knee rarely fails to draw a comment.

And in their railroad-track-like appearance, my scars remind me of the startling journeys that my body has taken — often enough to the hospital or the emergency room.

The ones that intrigue me most are those from childhood that I can’t account for. The one on my right eyebrow, for example, and a couple of ancient pockmarks and starbursts on my knees. I’m not shocked by them. To be honest, I wonder why there aren’t more.

I had a full and active boyhood, one that raged with scabs and scrapes, mashed and bloody knees, bumps and lumps, gashes and slashes, cats’ claws and dogs’ teeth, jagged glass, ragged steel, knots, knobs and shiners. Which raises this question: How do any of us get out of childhood alive?

My stubborn chin has sustained a fair bit of damage over the years. On close examination, there’s a faint delta of scars that brings back memories of my teenage war on acne. Those frustrating days of tetracycline and gritty soaps left my face not clean and glowing but red and raw. The acne also ravaged my back, scoring the skin there so that it still looks scorched and lunar.

I further cratered my chin as an adult. First, I sprinted into a cast-iron lamppost while chasing a fly ball in a park in Washington; I actually saw a chorus line of stars dance before my eyes as I crumpled to the ground. Second, I hooked one of those old acne potholes with my razor and created an instant dueling scar.

Scanning down from the jut of my chin to the tips of my toes, I’ve even managed to brand my feet. In high school and college I worked at Kingston Steel Drum, a factory in my New Hampshire hometown that scoured some of the 55-gallon steel drums it cleaned with acid and scalding water. The factory was eventually shut down by the federal government and became a Superfund hazardous waste site, but not before a spigot malfunctioned one day and soaked my feet in acid.

Then there are the heavy hitters, the stitched whips and serpents that make my other scars seem like dimples on a golf ball.

There’s that mighty scar on my right knee from when I was 12 years old and had a benign tumor cut out. Then there are the scars on my abdomen from when my colon (devoured by ulcerative colities) was removed in 1984, and from my radical open prostatectomy last summer to take out my cancerous prostate. (If I ever front a heavy metal band, I think I’ll call it Radical Open Prostatectomy.)

But for all the potential tales of woe that they suggest, scars are also signposts of optimism. If your body is game enough to knit itself back together after a hard physical lesson, to make scar tissue, that means you’re still alive, means you’re on the path toward healing.

Scars, perhaps, were the primal tattoos, marks of distinction that showed you had been tried and had survived the test. And like tattoos, they also fade, though the one from my surgery last summer is still a fierce and deep purple.

There’s also something talismanic about them. I rub my scars the way other people fret a rabbit’s foot or burnish a lucky penny. Scars feel smooth and dry, the same way the scales of a snake feel smooth and dry.

I find my abdominal scars to be the most profound. They vividly remind me that skilled surgeons unlocked me with their scalpels, took out what had to be taken, sewed me back up and saved my life. It’s almost as if they left their life-giving signatures on my flawed flesh.

The scars remind me, too, that in this vain culture our vanity sometimes needs to be punctured and deflated — and that’s not such a bad thing. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, better to be a scarred and living dog than to be a dead lion.

It’s not that I’m proud of my scars — they are what they are, born of accident and necessity — but I’m not embarrassed by them, either. More than anything, I relish the stories they tell. Then again, I’ve always believed in the power of stories, and I certainly believe in the power of scars.

(New York Times Online, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/health/21case.html?_r=1&emc=eta1) A version of this article appeared in print on July 21, 2009, on page D5 of the New York edition. Thanks to Marilyn Casselman (http://www.freebornproject.com/) for sending me this article.

Jeannette Walls: The Glass Castle

“I’d never met a man I would rather spend time with. I loved him for all sorts of reasons: He [sic] cooked without recipes; he wrote nonsense poems for his nieces; his large, warm family had accepted me as one of their own. And when I first showed him my scar, he said it was interesting. He used the word “textured.” He said “smooth” was boring but “textured” was interesting, and the scar meant that I was stronger than whatever it was that had tried to hurt me.”
(p.286, The Glass Castle. New York: Scribner, 2005)

Eli Claire: The Marrow's Telling

I pour a bath, dissolve a handful of mineral
salts, catching each crystal in the stream of hot
water, crack a window, try to light the candles. They
float in a bowl of water, and as I touch match to wick,
my hand jumps, tremor climbing the ladder of my
arm. I swamp one candle, then the other, give up.
Strip my clothes—t–shirt, high tops, jeans, boxers.
Pull off my binder, breasts coming free. I think about
the not–so–long–ago laws against cross–dressing,
about old–time butches and the price they paid. Their
stories of bar raids, strip searches, jail cells scare me.
Heat stings. Right arm loosens, body buoyant.
Tremors rock water, no longer locked in shoulder and
back. I finger the appendectomy scar stretched from
navel to pubic hair, a thick, ropy trail cut down my
center. Cup the knobby glob of tissue on my right
knee, remnants of one fall among thousands. Trace
the ridged line across my left palm, mark of a chisel
slipping from wood to flesh.
Except for that thick ropy braid, my scars don’t
come from a surgeon’s scalpel, an unusual circumstance
for anyone physically disabled since birth. My
quad muscles were never cut, sewn back together.
Achilles tendons, never severed. Pins, never inserted
into hips and knees. The bodies of disabled people so
often end up criss–crossed with scars, childhoods
punctuated by surgery. But not mine: my skin didn’t
become a map. For that, I need to go subterranean.
Muscles knotted, tendons inflamed, vertebrae too
sore to touch.

-- 'Scars' from The Marrow's Telling (p. 77)

Various/Ted Meyer

The following are quotations cited in an exhibition essay about the work of Ted Meyer. He does imprints of people's scars and collects their narratives, too. Thought-provoking work, it can be seen at http://www.tedmeyer.com/ .

“Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to
reveal. A scar is what happens when the world is made flesh.”
Leonard Cohen

“Scar tissue is stronger than regular
tissue. Realize the strength, move on.”
Henry Rollins

“We are spinning our own fates, good
or evil, and never to be undone.
Every smallest stroke of virtue or of
vice leaves its never-so-little scar.”
William James

Bukowski: Documentary

Bukowski: I was on some fucking bus, with a girlfriend, and here came a guy walking toward us, looking for a back seat. His [facial] scars were deeper than mine. And you wanna know something? I was jealous.

Interviewer: Jealous?

Bukowski: Yeah! I said, “Jesus.” I said, “Did you see him?” And she said, “Yes I did.” I said, “Aw shit.” What a beautiful man he was.


(from the 2004 documentary 'Born Into This', directed by John Dullagen)

Coelho: The Art of Trying

“It’s…natural that unexpected conflicts should arise, and it’s natural that wounds may be inflicted during those conflicts. The wounds pass, and only the scars remain.
This is a blessing. These scars stay wit us throughout our life and are very helpful. If…the desire to return to the past becomes very great, we need only look at those scars. They are the marks left by the handcuffs, and will reminds us of the horrors of prison, and we will keep walking straight ahead.”

- Paulo Coehlo, ‘The Art of Trying’ in Like the Flowing River, Trans. Margaret Jull. Thomson Press: India, 2000.