#sarah covington

[goreprofonde]

A wound is open, unresolved, a coming apart, a shock, its meaning indeterminate; a scar or disfigurement, on the other hand, stands at a greater temporal distance from the original inflic- tion. Wounds suffered in battle left the soldier in an abject, unresolved position in relation to the world, his body literally opened, his life and death dependent on the course of healing or decline his wounds would take; scars, on the other hand, were corporal evidence of healing as well as damage—a memorializing faultline on the body that reminded the veteran of the “before” and “after” that his life had taken upon the injury he suffered. Like settled or closed narratives, scars healed over ruptures and reintegrated the body back to its state of wholeness—but not entirely; despite traces of healing, and the myths that accrued around scars, the vestiges of an originary violence itself remained.

- Sarah Covington, Wounds Flesh And Metaphor In Seventeenth-Century England.

[rakonteur]

As a result, fate itself rested on the membrane of the skin, a luminescent tissue that enclosed the body even if it constituted a fragile and permeable protection, and one as ephemeral, as Isaiah put it, as grass.

Sarah Covington

[goreprofonde]

Since wounds were openings that ruptured the boundaries or, in anthropological terms, the limen or “threshold” between exterior and interior, medieval people, for example, guarded them in the same manner that entranceways (or eyes, or mouths) had to be guarded, since they opened the body to the outside world, and the outside world to the inner recesses. More importantly, through those openings could enter or exit any number of elements—contagion, grace, demons, angels, filth, purity, blood, pus, sweet smells, holy oil, shame, salvation The site where wounds occurred thus became infused with the most bodily theater (or theatrical bodiliness), for it existed at the crossroads—a place of possibility as well as fear, in an unclearly defined zone where the devil especially lurked. Nevertheless, what Michael Camille once wrote about the margins of medieval art might well apply to the scrawlings that took place on the skin. “If these edges were dangerous,” he wrote, “they were also powerful places,” with “betwixt and between” constituting “[an] important zone of transformation.”

- Sarah Covington, Wounds Flesh And Metaphor In Seventeenth-Century England.

[goreprofonde]

by haunting old battlefields, they created what the anthropologist Allen Feldman has elsewhere called a “cartography of death events,” or “spaces of death.” By creating such spaces, or at least reinforcing them as sites of woundedness and mortality, ghost soldiers grounded the larger meanings of war in a particular space of memory But so many deaths also rendered that space a defiled one, with ghosts representing the overflow of such debasement.

- Sarah Covington, Wounds Flesh And Metaphor In Seventeenth-Century England.

[goreprofonde]

- Sarah Covington, Wounds Flesh And Metaphor In Seventeenth-Century England.

[goreprofonde]

The Greeks were particularly aware of the potential of wounds in “savagely rupturing the fabric of being,” not only among their warriors but their lovers The Iliad is a tale of (primarily) masculine wounds depicted in graphic extremis; wounds can either be heroic or abject, but in both cases they mark the man as a warrior, even in death (later one sees this when Dante encounters Manfred, the grandson of the Empress Constance, in purgatory, his “beautiful and ... noble” presence only marred by a cloven eyebrow and a “wound high on his breast”—signs of the two mortal strokes that felled a good soldier and prince) In ancient literature, heroes as well as the defeated suffer from mortal and incurable (or in Prometheus’ case, continuous) wounds, which could be self-inflicted, in the case of Oedipus, or meted out by the gods.

- Sarah Covington, Wounds Flesh And Metaphor In Seventeenth-Century England.

[goreprofonde]

War’s transcendent heroism and its crude horrors, its affirming as well as negating qualities, had long provoked ambivalence, as not even Homer fully embraced the bloody costs of war. As Rachel Bespaloff once wrote, Homer had both a “virile love of war and a virile horror of it,” and, one might add, used wounds as the corporal repository to contain that horror (and love).

- Sarah Covington, Wounds Flesh And Metaphor In Seventeenth-Century England.

[goreprofonde]

But mutilating the living and the dead could also be providentially construed as an act of iconoclasm, in which the body of the victim— often opposing soldiers, many times innocent civilians—was literally cut into as one would slash at an impious object. In this, bodily mutilation was an extension of belief, and intended for specific targets. In the aftermath of Naseby, roundheads thus slashed the faces of women, marking them in a kind of perverse act of ownership, leaving their disfigurements forever visible.

- Sarah Covington, Wounds Flesh And Metaphor In Seventeenth-Century England.