Natalie Eilbert's “Imprecation”

On "Imprecation"

The word was first introduced to me in a workshop by the brilliant poet, Dawn Marie Knopf, and it means a spoken curse. It was irresistible as a conceit, but I didn't touch it for years. Imprecation. I grew up sealed shut, ashamed of my body, ashamed to speak. From imprecari, to invoke, call down upon. At a very young age, my body was taken from me, replaced with this wretched premature woman shape I never wanted to consider. I thought for long periods of my life I could rely on what I didn't say about my history, and then on what I might embellish about that history. I embellished or omitted details to hide, to survive. What did I want to consider mine in this world, I didn't know. When I moved to New York City for grad school, there was something that broke open in me—the city can give us the sense of control as it wrests certainty; it demands visibility through invisibility; it relies on urban development and planning but seems to prefer rupture. As someone who has always had crippling depression, the city's contradictions were a special comfort. Baudelaire said, "Everything becomes an allegory for me," and I think in how the city erased me and how I erased myself, I took in the city as my allegory.

I read Jane Jacobs and Walter Benjamin for years, and so I was digging into these two minds to get a greater scope of The City as an organism and allegory and IRL agony. My book, I knew, was going to be about the "Venus" of Willendorf, but the city—and my desires for an alternative reality—felt like something I could reclaim and repossess as an ancient cosmopolis. I could give the city the Calvino treatment, create a city with such a dictum: "the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places." The foreignness of what you no longer are, I wanted to build that.

In the heat of all this thinking, I experienced the Punchdrunk production of Sleep No More where literally the only way to interact with the world was behind a mask. I felt performance immersion and I left with glass teeth and a sweaty brow, exhausted, energized, fucked every way. I looked up the eponymous Macbeth passage and came upon this curse: "The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, / Chief nourisher in life's feast." I kept misreading "course" for "curse" and thought back to the word. "Balm" implied so much, a cure-all, an unguent, a secretion. I thought of my hurt mind, what more I could squeeze from it. The memory of watching a feather fall from a bald eagle and thinking it a small bird, smuggling it onto a boat, and brushing it across my cheek. The memory of finding gutted strung deer in the yard and regarding her slack wet tongue. The memory of accidentally unburying a desiccated corpse of a three-legged dog while digging in my backyard. The memory of seeing photos at the MoMA of women self-immolating and crying for weeks in my shoebox apartment for even thinking I deserved unburned skin. I synthesized it all into a spell for the "Venus" of Willendorf and our city, but it became a curse. Do not touch my hurt mind, the poem warns, I am from no city.