240228 - The Hospital

The words are the clearest when I’m the least capable of getting them down. Yet I will try.

Reality is a peculiar thing. It’s taken for granted until it’s challenged. The outliers face a terrifying decision. To trust themselves, or everyone else? Who is more likely to be mad? In the end, if they are to survive, they must come to the same conclusion. It doesn’t matter if I’m mad. I must live my life.

The hospital is a uniquely Kafkaesque construct. Unique, not in its Kafkaesqueness, but in the fact that the average person is most likely to encounter it there. The subject is, by his very entrance, already conceding. He enters for help, helpless he is in need of the other. Most likely, by the fact of him being there, he is weakened, often substantially. The atmosphere certainly does nothing to help ease his worries. He is then completely objectified. He is granted permission to express only in so far as it is the reason for him being there: “What are your symptoms?”

He is then consulted in so much as he is the knower of his body: “When did you last eat? Does this hurt? What about that?”. These times of expression only serves to negate him further, to a passive source of body-knowledge. Patients are not treated, symptoms are. Shuttled from room to room; eat this, drink that, piss in this cup, give us some blood. All the while the environment is excessively sterile, bright and uncomfortable. Nothing is explained or done in account of a person being helped. Such a notion has nothing to do with the function of a hospital. The body sourcing a Subject is rather something quite cumbersome for this enterprise, and everything is carefully set up so that his interference is minimized as much as possible. He is, fundamentally, denied.