It's a cliche that we (scholars, academics) are seeking to understand ourselves in the objects that we study, and I think that's true. Our subjects become mirrors, in a way. It's also true that we historians see in our documents just what we're able or predisposed to see, given the experiences we bring to the position from which we look. The same document changes over time, because we change. We make texts into themselves by reading them, and what it is to read - what we're doing, seeing, understanding when we read - changes as we change.

When I was writing my first book, I came across the story of "honey mummies" as related in the early modern Chinese medical text I was studying. Briefly put, the story told of people in some far-off elsewhere who would decide that they had had enough of life, and proceeded to mummify themselves in honey as a way to transform their bodies into medicine for those who remained. At the time when I was writing that book - and this was 15 or so years ago - the story of the honey mummies was a curiosity to me. I had only lived so much life, at that point. The story, for me, was about honey, ingestion, body-medicine, the power of elsewhere. It was not, at that point, a story of dying and decisions related to it. It was not a story about bodies, or about aging.

I returned to the story recently, as part of a project I had been working on with brilliant friend and artist Dianna Frid. Much more on that to come, but, briefly: my charge as part of that project is to work with Dianna's beautiful photographs of wormholed books (some from the Burgoa Library, where we visited on a trip to Oaxaca a few years ago, pre-pandemic), to read the images, and to make stories with them. With this particular image, included below, I was thinking about enoughness, about the things we do to our bodies as a result of how we relate to the idea of enoughness, about the things that women in particular do to their bodies - and about the things done to them - in this context. I was thinking about people who are or have been close to me, and about how to understand how a person comes to the decision that they have lived enough, that they are done, that they want or need no more life. (And if not to understand, at least to bear witness to the fact of the phenomenon.) This is the story that came of that consideration. It's just a draft - as ever, a work in progress! - and it will change as it reaches its final form in whatever home it ultimately lives. In that spirit, I bring to you: The Corset Bee. The text is meant to grow from the image, and to allow you to return to it, after reading, with changed eyes. xo

The Corset Bee

Sometimes we find ourselves at a point in life where we turn around and look behind us and realize that we are not where we thought we would be, by this point. And sometimes we imagine that we might still get there, to that imagined place, ahead, or to that place of potential, behind. And perhaps we take things into ourselves (pills, people) that we hope might help us to leap over what feels like it should not be, to get to what should be, to go back to go forward to travel in time. And we know, don't we, that what will happen instead is that they will take us somewhere else, they will consume us from the inside out, even as we imagine ourselves to be the ones doing the consuming. Imagination can be cruel. Traveling in time is not kind to the traveler.

I had read books - old books, 16th century Chinese books - where doctors told stories of elders who had looked back, and looked forward, and concluded that the best thing was to stay just where they were, decided that they had lived enough life. (I do not know how they understood what "enough" was, what that meant and how it felt. I don't know how to know what enough feels like.) And so they turned themselves into the future by staying put, and transformed their own bodies into medicine for those that would come after them, easing into their deaths by consuming only (and eventually excreting only, and eventually becoming only) honey. Honey men, they were called. Their descendants ate them like candy, with spoons and ladles. Perhaps it was more comforting, knowing that you would be eaten by your children's children instead of vultures or beetles or worms. Perhaps we become what we are according to what, and who, consumes us.

I decided to become a honey woman. I wanted to feel what enough feels like. I wanted it, I wanted everything, to have been enough. Granted, I was not sure who I was donating myself to. (I was not sure who might want to receive me, to take me into themselves.) In any case, I thought, perhaps at the very least, this way, there's more of me. Perhaps this way I become a multitude, my guts a hive, my insides an activity. Come with me, I would tell them, stay with me, inside this cage of my ribs. We'll look out between the bars together. 

They lived in the libraries, is what I heard. Waiting, under chairs and in the spines of old books. They will find you if you sit still enough. There are ways to extend the invitation, to offer yourself to them, to invite them to home themselves in your body. They will make their way inside of you - you will barely feel this is happening - and sculpt your flesh to build a nest, a hive, in your bones. It's better than a corset, is what I heard - it will tighten you up and shape you into loveliness. You will become lovely, is what I heard. You'll see. 

And so because, perhaps, becoming just enough was a way of becoming enough - of everything becoming enough - It seemed like a reasonable thing to do. My bones were bubbled through with holes. I had extra flesh to spare. Why not. It felt time for a remaking.

And so I made my preparations and my promises. I will gorge myself on pollen, so that you may make honey from my fat. I will sit and watch it run down my leg as my cat laps it up. I will drink sugar water to make rivers for you. Come honeycomb me, divide me up, live in my flesh. I will fill the holes with gifts for you. I want to feel you dance a story, inside of me, of where to find me, of where I am. Help me be somewhere. Help me be here. Help me be enough.

Of course, "enough" is a fiction. They burst through my skin, eventually. They rent holes in my flesh. (The holes don't bleed, anymore: I simply try to catch what oozes out. It's part of a cycle, I imagine. I menstruate sweetness through my pores. I turn candy with the moon.) The bees leave. Others take their place.

When I'm gone, lay my body in the library, and listen to the music of my bones, and smell the feast that I have become, and taste me, if you like. If the bees will let you. But mind your tongue: the honey comes with the sting.