Hard to say when my brain became cyborg. I noticed it during the pandemic. We were, around the globe, flipping out. I was in the middle of changing legs. My old leg, an Ottobock C-Leg, began to make whirring noises. I could hear my leg thinking, or whatever the word is for when our machine parts complete tasks.
I went to the prosthetist and he told me about a new device called Freedom Innovations Plié Knee. Of course they’d name the knee after a fucking ballet move.
The selling point? It had removable batteries. I could have an extra battery in my purse. I would no longer need to plug myself into a wall for a charge.
Why was the prosthetist enthusiastic? Money, probably. But he didn’t say that. They never say that. He told me I would love the new leg—they always say that—and that it would be lighter. Much lighter.
I weigh 100 pounds, so any excess weight from machine matters.
The salesperson from Freedom Innovations gave me swag—a T-shirt, a keychain.
In the next appointment, she had no idea why the Plié was fucking up. Why had I fallen on my concrete driveway while getting the mail? Why did the leg not understand inclines and declines?
I imagine she attributed the fall to “user malfunction.” That’s how prosthetic companies say “It must be your fault. The technology is fine.”
I left the house, in those early months of pandemic, for leg appointments. I did all the driving for errands—the grocery store, the gas station—but I did not get out of the car. My submissive went in. I sat in the car with a leg I did not like and my pill box for chronic pain. I was born disabled from Agent Orange. I’m an involuntary combatant in two wars: Vietnam and the War on Opioids. One war gave me the pain; the other war threatens to keep me in it.
I watched people walk in and out of the store. How easily they walked. This one in a hurry, fast, get in and get out. That one dawdling, stopping to put his mask on, looking back at his truck.
Would I get used to the new leg? Did it just take practice? Why did everything hurt more?
For the first time, changing legs, I had a cyborg companion. I hired the cyborg Amy Gaeta to be my assistant. She is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There’s so much we do not have to explain to each other because we both occupy the cyborg subject position. So we can skip the bullshit convos about access, access, always access, and get theoretical.
I always follow Yoshiko Dart’s lead: If you have the money, hire disabled people.
It is only because I was in conversation with another cyborg that I realized my brain is already cyborg. Amy is autistic. She studies drones, so our conversations often led to how war technology is an extension of the human brain, neurodivergent and neurotypical modes of thinking, and why it’s hard to hold a conversation when one is in pain.
So I already knew my body was cyborg. I had known since 2010, when I published “Going Cyborg” in The New York Times. It was even getting easier to explain my cyborg personhood to anyone.
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My elevator pitch goes something like this: “I know you think cyborgs are always imminent. But not here yet. However, I am a cyborg. And cyborgs are first and foremost disabled people. We’re the ones who have a fundamental interface with tech. We’re the ones who depend on tech to actually live. And we’re not new. We’ve been here since Hephaestus. If you want a concrete example, you call this my fake leg. And when you do that, you distance me from myself. I call this my leg. It is real to me. I experience it perhaps more than you experience your own leg.”
But I had never considered that my mind was cyborg. I had inadvertently adopted the Cartesian philosophy of body-mind dualism. In convo with Amy, I realized my body is cyborg and my mind is too.
I sent this email to her:
“So at some point I need a way to distinguish btw ‘old leg’ and ‘new leg’ and how does Aimee Mullins do it with 13 legs? Ahhh, they all look different. But these two legs look exactly identical and it is effing UNCANNY to me and I never thought I would say that b/c I do not find my own legs, even prosthetic, uncanny. But when there are two of me-legs [why not pirate voice, sure] then yes, I am uncannied. What should I call them? Am I going to need to become a we pronoun? Plz dear god no.”
Then I continue: “It's like this is the sign:
🕒🕒
[image is two identical clocks]
And someone says ‘what time is it?’ and I say ‘it is three o'clock’ and someone says ‘what about the other time?’ and I say ‘it is also three o'clock.’ There’s something here that’s not quite surfacing for me. Something about seeing double and time.
Omg Amy it’s because there’s another person—wait let me think this out—there’s another person. I’m wearing my leg and yet my leg is also over there in the closet. My mind is like ‘who’s over there?’ then ‘where?’ then ‘where the leg is wear the leg is’ thusly I’m sensing a body in the closet and it’s my body. Am I making sense?”
Amy wrote back, “YES YOU ARE MAKING SENSE. I TOTALLY GET THIS. ITS ALMOST LIKE YR LEG BELONGED TO SOMEONE ELSE—YR LEG HAD/HAS ANOTHER LIFE.”
I have presented on many panels about access. While I am talking about access, which anyone can Google, I am not talking about cyborg ontology. Cyborg ontology is the brain-meld between self and computerized leg. The augmentations I take daily: Norco, Lexapro, Klonopin. I hesitate here because I know what the tryborg might be thinking: “Your brain is not cyborg; the medications you take make your brain cyborg.” That’s not it. The medications are another hack for a brain that is already cyborg. The medications norm me.
Once, when I forgot to take Norco and was going through intense pain, my cyborg brain offered a memory I would not otherwise have had. I’ll tell you the memory at the end of this essay.
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Part of being a cyborg in my brain involves knowing what tryborgs purport to know. What tryborgs want. Tryborgs are nondisabled people with a lot of hubris. Tryborgs are granted the expertise on cyborgs, almost pro forma, for no apparent reason. Tryborgs lack experiential knowledge. Their brains do not jostle between pharma and non-pharma. Their bodies do not whir. They were not born into machines.
Yet tryborgs pretend to know more than disabled people—cyborgs—all the time.
Ray Kurzweil conceptualizes the Singularity, a tryborg salvation fantasy.
Elon Musk invents Neuralink, a tryborg plagiarism of the cyborg mind.
And worse: These tryborgs make technologies in their own image—white, nondisabled, heterosexual, cisgender, wealthy. We should retire them. We should unsubscribe from them. We should fire them. Yet tryborgs are in my mind. I don’t know what I want to know. But I know what they want to know.This has gone on long enough. This hall of mirrors where nondisabled people reflect themselves back to themselves, where we cyborgs are never present, we are always out of the room, we are only beckoned to inspire or teach the tryborgs something about themselves.
I have another life. It does not involve them.
I fell in love with a cyborg. “What do you want?” she said.
What a question.
“No, what do you want me to bring?” she clarified.
“An extension cord with at least four outlets,” I said.
I attended an artist talk with Suzannah Sinclair. She described painting with egg tempera like this: “There is a time element. It takes six months to cure. So even if you’re done with the painting. The painting is not done with you.”
I gasped on that line. I recognized something inside it.
The word cure in the painting line. “It takes six months to cure.” And inside the word cure the sound of the contraction you’re. As in “you’re cured.” As in what every tryborg wants for us. As in What a relief that must be: You’re less like you, more like me.
It took six months to abandon the Plié knee. I was in between selves for those six months. I wish this on no one: the split-body, split-mind; falling on the ground; staying close to walls with a palm out just in case; always ready to catch oneself; crying, loads of crying, and wondering, Why can’t I figure this out? Where this is my physicality—my walk, my stance—and also my psychology.
The newer, lighter leg did not cure me. I almost want to say it abused me. But that seems too strong a word. But what word captures what happened? My body made me fall a lot. It was dangerous. What if I fell while walking around in my neighborhood? What if a semi hit me? They kept telling me, “You’ll like it. Give it time. You’ll like it.”
“Even if you’re done with the painting. The painting is not done with you,” Sinclair said.
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This checks out with my cyborg ontology, my cyborg brain. Even if you’re done with a component— like the Freedom Innovation Plié Knee—the component is not done with you. I went back to my old leg. I learned how to walk on it again. But the experience, going forward to a new leg, then backward to my leg, isn’t done with me. When I think of the early pandemic, I think of immobility. Probably a lot of people had to stay in one place. But a lot of people got to do that in their bodies, their same bodies.I am still not sure what to make of the body in the closet. The dead body in the closet? My body in the closet. As a queer person, this word closet has other implications for me. As a cyborg, where should I keep my multiple parts? Who will make a display case for me, like the one in Return to Oz, so I can honor my components instead of hide myself from myself in the closet?
Everything is feet in my field. I’m a poet. Poetry is obsessed with feet. In particular, two feet. One foot, two foot makes a beat. Iambic pentameter. Shakespeare. Entire canons are measured in feet.
I’m thinking of this because I’m co-teaching a poetry class, based in London, with Ella Frears on Zoom. I forgot to tell the class why I like writing in hendecasyllabics, 11-syllable lines. The academic answer is that I write them after Catullus, who stole them from Sappho.
My cyborg brain is saying: That’s silly. I write in hendecasyllabics because I have so many variants of feet. Why would I write in a form I do not have? Why would I ask my mind to pass?
Thinking back, the power cord was enormously sweet. But like all things with this love, we did not let ourselves be too sweet about anything.
“How do you say your last name?” she asked early on. “Is it like bicycle?”
And I winced but did not let her notice. I cannot ride a bicycle. I have tried and tried to ride a bicycle. But yeah, my last name sounds a bit like bicycle. And driving down a country road tonight, I realize I’ve changed my name to Cy. And that word is inside bicycle.
And my name? She’s never called me by it. She hasn’t known me since I changed names. Even though I was already, back then, telling her, “We’re cyborgs. I really mean it. We are.”This is the memory that surfaced in my cyborg brain when I was deliriously in pain and had forgotten to take the dose of Norco. My love. She’s there on the bed in the hotel room. I have not spoken to her in over a year. But she’s right there.
The afternoon sun blazes through the hotel window and lights her up. I’m telling her, “We’re cyborgs. I really mean it.”
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She is facing me in bed. Her elbow on my pillow, her arm up, her hand supporting her face.
“I know, baby, but nobody else knows,” she says.
“Right, so we have to tell them,” I say.
She gets dressed. Pants, button-down shirt, belt, shoes. One foot, then the other. She’s going out to bring back coffee.
I used to think she didn’t believe me. She didn’t believe that we were cyborgs. Otherwise, why leave? In the middle of this conversation? But the sharp pain, sans Norco, brings me to a new angle on the memory. She did believe me. Maybe she just knew it was going to be hard to tell the world that we cyborgs exist. We’re real. We’re here.
And if I let myself be sweet, I think maybe she was protecting us. Maybe she was saying, with her eyes, “I don’t want the world to hurt us, to not believe us, to deride our cyborg identity. The world is not ready.”
The world may not be ready. But I’m ready. I’m telling the world.
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