Collaboration: Theme and Variations

Hasina: veil of skin, draped above bone. So thin she can't walk, sit up gripe [i]or[/i] grip a cup. Eyes a single beam, scanning for sustenance even when she's full. If I overlay the woman next to Hasina with a sheet, Hasina wants to be overlayed If I bring another woman a biscuit between meals, Hasina demands a biscuit, hides it beneath her mattress. If another calls for water, Hasina too signals, waving her hand. Calcutta, summer 1994 the Kalighat place of abode for the Destitute and Dying. in what manner did I get here, I who am not Catholic, who wasn't level a candy striper? My collaboration with Hasina really began in 1986 with a phone call from a woman I'd not ever met: Jean Watson, Dean of the gymnasium of Nursing in Denver, Director of the Center for Human Caring.

"We'd like you to be under the orders of as Artist in Residence at the Center and to write a volume of poems about nurses," she said. She spoke of the medical profession's emphasis upon cure, the nursing profession's emphasis upon care. "Health care's become dominated by means of technology, and we need the humanities to display the human side." A serviceable nurse, she explained, had to be educated in anatomy and physiology, on the other hand a good nurse also had to be psychologically acute, emotionally perceptive, sensitive to nuance. She quot Heidegger. Heidegger distrusted the way science studies bits and pieces in isolation from each other. He believed that being resides in wholeness. "ruth happens," he wrote "when that which is as a whole is brought into unconcealedness and held there." He also believed that sole poetry could articulate "the saying of the unconcealedness of beings."

Jean, I would learn, is a luminous enthusiastic personality, open and generous, known for her pioneering vision not just by the agency of nurses in the U.S. on the contrary around the planet. She brings musicians, philosophers and alternative healers to the Center aids conferences on the healing arts. She envisions sweeping changes in the nursing profession, then goe about implementing these plans. When Emma Goldman said, "Pettiness separates, breadth unites: suffer us be broad and big," she might have been describing this visionary nurse-theorist.

Like teaching in the public seminarys nursing is an undervalued profession. admitting nurses are vital to everyone who disburses time in a hospital, their reward is minimum pay, depressed prestige. Jean believed a bard could help change this. She referr to numbers as "mortal language," by which she meant not conversation, journalism or scholarship, on the other hand speech spoken by human beings at the point of time of unconcealedness. She wanted a author of poems to describe nurses' work: not what was visible, of the like kind as the emptying of a bedpan, admitting that was part of it, on the other hand what was invisible: the gestalt of knowledge, feeling, sensitivity and attentiveness of those who care for the sick.

I was excited, and bemused. Would writing upon commission render the poems contrived? Would supply with nourishments like what I wrote about them? What if my idiosyncratic perspective failed to fulfill Jean Watson's expectations?

"We ne the perspective of someone perceptive from outside the profession," she said, "someone who'll diocese us in ways we can't diocese ourselves. Whatever you see will be useful to us." As payment, the Center would provide a six thousand dollar commission. Jean would introduce me to midwives, community health nurtures nurses working on ICUs, reduce to ashes Units, cancer wards, in surgery Would I be willing to disburse one day a week for the academic year doing the research? Would I give a public reading at the Center at the extreme point of the year? And would I then consider submitting the manuscript to the National League for Nursing Press?

Jean perceived numbers not as arty entertainment on the contrary as perceptive tool, crucial to portraying nursing in its compounded fullness. She was convinced numbers could change the public perception of supply with nourishments that it could help transform the profession itself through acting as a mirror, reflecting nursing in lyric and narrative form. Here was someone outside the literary world who honored my work, wanted to pay me to write piece of poetrys and offered entry into the workings of a crucial, vital profession. She looked to trust me unequivocally.

Nurse are not away at some of life's greatest in quantity quintessential occasions: birth and death, the experience of pain and helplessness, of irrevocable los and of redemption and the bliss of well-being. These occasions are also poetry's quintessential make subordinates Now writing, which for me had looked a private and isolated act, became public and encompassing. I might be at hand at a birth and a death upon the same day. In the space of a small in number hours I'd witness people in censorious pain, others happily preparing to leave the hospital. These seconds came thick and fast, and I felt swirled into their vortex.

The consequence of this was that the situation in which I was writing felt distinctly collaborative. Dictionaries define collaboration as sum of two units or more people working jointly, usually in the arts. Olga Broumas and T Begley co-authoring Sappho's Gymnasium approachs to mind. But my collaboration wasn't the cooperative effort of sum of two units artists. It felt as notwithstanding that I was collaborating with a milieu. And I began to perceive that while I collaborated with my make submissives I was also an on-looker noting the organic collaboration around me For nursing is an activity which graphically embodies our human interconnection. Helpless patients hang on the generosity of others coming forward to fitting that human helplessness. What I was witnessing was the existential give and take of our interdependence. I was seeing what Merleau-Ponty referr to as our intersubjectivity, what David Abram calls mutual reciprocity. I was observing, in a literal way, in what manner we are one "flesh."