The Rose-Lung Damask
The lungs on the CT scan look like upholstery. This stream of images, cross-sections of my torso from the bottom of my lungs up to my throat, taken as I lay face-up on a table. A figured pattern that transforms like a time-lapse of flowers budding, blooming, and wilting away.
A flowered damask, an early-century floral pattern with full-blown roses and twining leaves. Somehow both elegant and commonplace. Showing up in photos of faded relatives in once-fashionable living rooms. A grandmother’s good sofa that one must be careful never to stain. A woman’s suit with pencil skirt, cropped jacket, and three-quarter-length sleeves. Fabric so familiar for the last hundred years, it takes some effort to care that it was once a rarity, a splendor reserved for the few.
My cancer drew things. A tone-on-tone design, a contrast of matte and luster. Irregular patterns of masses and voids, wet blooms and wilted petals. My cancer was maybe a better artist than I. My cancer, and cancer’s aftermath. I must credit the collaborators. The surgery, the radiation, the chemotherapy. Left upper lobe resection. Treatment-induced inflammation and fibrosity.
Or maybe everyone’s lungs look blowsy and humid in a stream of cross-sections. We aren’t shown the scans where everything is normal. The revelations of medical imaging are reserved for the diseased.
These blowsy roses that are and aren’t my lungs. Lungs that are and aren’t what they should be.
These images that penetrate the body. The intimate, the inmost. The body no one sees, save for this piercing beam spinning in its metal donut around the axis of me. These synthesized algorithmic reconstructions from the supravisible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. These images that translate the unseeable through this contingent artifice, always diminishing what can’t be seen.
These damask blooms, these inmost flowers, from my body figured and disfigured, jeopardized and saved, my body marked by industry, dependent on it, intertwined with it.
Damask uses different weave patterns, and sometimes the contrast of a lustrous warp and a matte weft, to create areas of varying sheen. Where the warp threads float above the weft the pattern shines like satin, where the weft threads float the pattern hushes like suede.
Handmade damask is woven on a drawloom, with an intricate set of harnesses that raise and lower the warp threads as the weft thread passes through. To work a drawloom the weaver needs a helper, a second set of hands to move the harnesses.
Chinese weavers made patterned silk of contrasting weaves more than 2,000 years ago.
Merchants carried the fabric along the Silk Road.
Textile makers in the Middle East mastered the artistry of figured pattern weaving
in the first millennium of our common era.
Damascus became a trading center for finely patterned cloth.
Crusaders carried the fabrics from Damascus back to Europe, and named them for the city where they’d plundered them.
The demands of hand weaving ensured that fine fabrics were a luxury through all of history, until industrial manufacturing convulsed the European textile trade. In the early 1800s, Joseph Jacquard built a programmable loom that used punch cards to create figured pattern weaves, and brought damask into mass production. Weavers in some towns attacked the textile mills and broke the power looms, raising hands against a new millennium.
Over the decades damask became common enough that its most popular patterns, scrolling floral motifs, came to stand in for the fabric itself. So today if someone says damask, they might just be describing a floral print.
Like roses. Blowsy, overblown.
My lung roses. Scoured and shredded and still composed. No warp, no weft, no loom.
Roses made of organs, muscle, blood, and bone. A singularity.
No one will covet or trade or plunder this, rose-lung damask
common as breath.
Composition for Knitting
Fire burns and burns in the foothills, unfurling ribbons of ash hundreds of miles downwind. Outdoors I wear the bulky respirator I got for spray painting and sanding in
the studio. I worry that I don’t put a mask on the dog. I trade nods and small waves with neighbors. Denied the exchange of smiles, we hold eye contact too long.
I bring out the drawings that I made half my life ago.
Suite for Lungs.
Drawings I made that one time after my lungs had been expertly carved and burned.
To obliterate the rogue cells. The misshapen insatiable colony that grew too fast and in all the wrong directions and wrecked things in its path.
Simple, loose geometric forms in ink with a soft broad brush.
A hollow black square filled with a splashed red square, on a white ground with a broad black border.
Two rectangular boxes in thick, clotted lines of gold, like two cages side by side, overflowing with splashes of dark pink and clouds of black, bound together by a broad pink band.
A brushy red background with a brushy hollow black square, surrounded by a brushy
black border.
Paper the size of an x-ray. A chest film, as they say. Though my pictures broke with the form. They were sideways, wider than tall. Landscapes, not portraits. Don’t you think the lungs need room that way, to breathe.
These two lungs like flour sacks filling with water smoke blood.
Still knitting themselves back together.
Mary Burger is a writer and artist working at the intersections of memory, identity, and narration. Her books include Sonny, a novella of a character's disintegration told through and against the Trinity atomic bomb test, and Then Go On, short narrative works about crisis and epiphany. She edited An Apparent Event: A Second Story Books Anthology, and co-edited Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, with Robert Glück, Camille Roy, and Gail Scott. She's working on a memoir about gender, class, religion, illness, entangled family roles, and the behavior of black holes. She lives in Oakland.