Tag: F. Gonzalez-Crussi
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Love as illness: Symptomatology
Frank Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Is love a disease? I mean erotic, obsessive, knees-a-trembling, passionate love. This is a question on which philosophers have descanted interminably. So have anthropologists, physicians, poets, and, in short, all those who suffer what Juvenal called insanabile cacoethes scribendi1 (“the incurable mania of writing”). All these have set forth their…
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The dream of the uterus
F. Gonzalez-Crussi Chicago, Illinois, United States More than one-half century ago, it was my duty to examine and describe, day in and day out, the bodily parts that surgeons removed at the hospital where I worked. Surely this peculiar daily routine must have incited the flights of fancy that I took then, and which I recount…
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A birth remembered
F. Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Memory is to old age as presbyopia (far-sightedness) is to eyesight. Presbyopia makes you lose the ability to see clearly at a normal near working distance while maintaining a sharp distant vision. Just so the elderly recollect in painstaking detail what happened to them fifty or sixty years ago, yet…
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Of luxuriant manes and in praise of baldness
Frank Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States The feverish imagination of poets has ever eulogized the beauty of feminine hair. The beloved’s hair has been represented as golden threads, sunrays, fragrant flowers, or astrakhan fleece (wool famous for its tight, shiny loops). Richard Lovelace spoke of it as “sunlight wound up in ribbands.”1 To Charles Baudelaire, his…
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We are all hospitalized (metaphorically speaking)
F. Gonzalez-Crussi Chicago, Illinois, United States Figure 1. Right section of an etching titled Infirmus eram et visitastis me: (“I was sick and you visited me,” quoted from Matthew 25:36), sometimes attributed to Cornelius Galle. The left section (not shown) has Jesus Christ overseeing the hospital visit. Among the many species of adversity that unavoidably…
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Cranium: the symbolic powers of the skull
F. Gonzalez-Crussi Chicago, Illinois, USA It Was a Man and a Pot. Georgia O’Keeffe. 1942. Crocker Art Museum Of all bodily parts, the head has traditionally enjoyed the greatest prestige. The Platonic Timaeus tells us that secondary gods (themselves created by the Demiurge) copied the round form of the universe to make the head,…
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Fire eaters
F. Gonzalez-Crussi Chicago, Illinois, USA “La Trinchera” (The Trench). Mural by the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) in the former San Ildefonso College of Mexico City, now a Museum and cultural center. Author’s collection. I have often wondered what obscure forces impel Mexicans to relish the unbearably acrid hot peppers used as condiment…
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An “enematic” saga
F. Gonzalez-Crussi Chicago, Illinois, USA Primitive method of administering an enema, by blowing directly without the use of an injector1 Apothecary holding an enema syringe2 “The Enema”3 Those of us who have managed to survive sixty, seventy, or more years remember that the enema or clyster was, by far, the commonest home remedy in…