The Argonauts Read online

  Being with Mary: it has

  been almost too wonderful

  it is hard to believe

  And so, shamefully, I looked. I looked for evidence of their unhappiness, all the while repressing the fact that my search reminded me of a particularly dysfunctional moment in Leonard Michaels’s account of his tortured, explosive, and eventually disastrous relationship to his first wife, Sylvia. Upon learning that a friend had an equally horrible relationship with equally horrible fights, Michaels writes: “I was grateful to him, relieved, giddy with pleasure. So others lived this way, too…. Every couple, every marriage, was sick. Such thinking, like bloodletting, purged me. I was miserably normal; I was normally miserable.” He and Sylvia marry; a short, miserable time later, she’s dead from forty-seven Seconals.

  Of course the Oppens fought and hurt each other sometimes, you said when I told you about my search. They probably just kept it to themselves, out of respect and love for one another.

  Whatever I was looking for between George and Mary Oppen, I never found it. I did, however, find something I wasn’t expecting. I found it in Mary’s autobiography, Meaning a Life, which she published at the start of George’s mental decline. I found Mary.

  When I looked up Meaning a Life on Amazon, there was only one review. It was by a guy who gave the book a single star, complaining: “Purchased this book hoping to gain insight into the life of one of my favorite poets. Very little about George and a lot about Mary.” It’s her autobiography, you fucking moron, I thought, before realizing my trajectory had followed something of the same course.

  Before the birth of her daughter, Linda, it turns out Mary suffered several stillbirths—too many, apparently, for her to give a number—as well as the crib death of a six-week-old. About all this, Mary writes:

  Birth … I think I am afraid to try to write of it. In childbirth I was isolated; I never talked about it even to George. He was surprised to learn that giving birth was a peak emotional experience and so entirely my own that I never tried to express it…. I would wish it to remain whole, and I have preserved the wholeness of my own experience of birth by not telling it; it is too precious to me. Even now, writing of the experiences of age twenty-four to thirty, I wish to encompass my isolation and the wracking devastation of loss, the sense of being a nothing on the delivery table, knocked out by anesthetic, only to regain consciousness and be told once more, “The fetus is dead.”

  George and Mary are famous for living a life in conversation, in poetry. We talked as I had never talked before, an outpouring. But here, Mary is unsure that words are good enough. I never talked about it even to George. Her experience may be one of devastation, but she still worries that words might chip away at it (intolerable).

  Nonetheless, years later, as her husband begins to peel away from language, Mary tries to tell.

  In his epic treatise Bubbles, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk puts forth something he calls the “rule of a negative gynecology.” To truly understand the fetal and perinatal world, Sloterdijk writes, “one must reject the temptation to extricate oneself from the affair with outside views of the mother-child relationship; where the concern is insight into intimate connections, outside observation is already the fundamental mistake.” I applaud this involution, this “cave research,” this turn away from mastery and toward the immersive bubble of “blood, amniotic fluid, voice, sonic bubble and breath.” I feel no urge to extricate myself from this bubble. But here’s the catch: I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write.

  Winnicott acknowledges that the demands of ordinary devotion can be frightening for some mothers, who worry that giving themselves over to it will “turn them into a vegetable.” Poet Alice Notley raises the stakes: “he is born and I am undone—feel as if I will / never be, was never born. // Two years later I obliterate myself again / having another child … for two years, there’s no me here.”

  I have never felt that way, but I’m an old mom. I had nearly four decades to become myself before experimenting with my obliteration.

  Sometimes mothers find it alarming to think that what they are doing is so important and in that case it is better not to tell them. It makes them self-conscious and then they do everything less well…. When a mother has a capacity quite simply to be a mother we must never interfere. She will not be able to fight for her rights because she will not understand.

  As if mothers thought they were performing their ordinary devotions in the wild, then are stunned to look up, and see a peanut-crunching crowd across a moat.

  Shortly after returning to work after having Iggy, I ran into a superior in the cafeteria. He gallantly purchased me my “vegan comfort meal” and a Naked juice. He asked when my next book would be out; I told him it might take a minute, as I had just had a baby. This sparked a story for him about a colleague he’d once had, a Renaissance studies professor, who allegedly found her newborn so fascinating that for two whole years, her Renaissance research struck her as esoteric and boring. But then, after two years, her interest came back, he said. It came back, he repeated, with a wink.

  Over time, I have come to suspect that my affection for Bubbles may have less to do with its endorsement of the rule of negative gynecology, and more to do with its ridiculous title, which it shares with Michael Jackson’s pet chimpanzee.

  Michael doted on Bubbles. But Michael would also rotate the chimp out of service as it aged, and replace it with a new, younger Bubbles. (Cruelty of the Argo?)

  When I was growing up, my mother would sometimes tell me to switch the TV channel to a station with a male weatherman. They usually have the more accurate forecast, she’d say.

  The weather people are reading a script, I would say, rolling my eyes. It’s all the same forecast.

  It’s just a feeling, she would shrug.

  Alas, it isn’t just a feeling. Even if women are consulting the same satellites, or reading from the same script: their reports are suspect; the jig is up. In other words, the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, and for a structural, eidetic reason. My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discursive coherence.

  Irigaray’s answer to this conundrum?: to destroy … [but] with nuptial tools…. The option left to me, she writes, was to have a fling with the philosophers.

  In October of 1998, just a few weeks into my graduate school career, I was invited to attend a seminar with Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. Gallop would be presenting new work, to which Krauss would respond. I was excited—back in college I had liked Gallop’s heady, disobedient books on Lacan (such as The Daughter’s Seduction); they evidenced a deep investment in Lacanian thought without seeming to have drunk the Kool-Aid. She was having a fling with the philosophers all right, but she seemed to be learning everything there was to know about the boiler room so that she could blow it up. Krauss’s work I knew less well, but I gathered that everyone was invested in her theories about the modernist grid, and I liked the plain matte cover of October magazine. Didn’t she write on Claude Cahun? I liked Claude Cahun. And busting the avant-garde’s mythos of itself was, even then, my idea of a good time.

  The professors gathered solemnly around a long wooden table in one of the more handsome rooms at the Grace Building, where CUNY was then situated. I felt as though I had truly arrived—somehow I had been plucked from the corner booth of Max Fish and deposited in the center of an intellectual mecca, complete with dark wood and academic superstars.

  Gallop gave a slide show: her recent work was about being photographed by her husband, appropriately named Dick. I remember a photo of her with their baby boy in the bathtub, and one of her and her son lounging around together naked, Carole King—style. I remember being surprised and pleased that she was showing us naked photos of her and her son, and talking unabashedly about her partner Dick (heterosexuality always embarrasses me). She was trying to talk about photography from the standpoint of the photographed subject, which,
as she said, “may be the position from which it is most difficult to claim valid general insights.” And she was coupling this subjective position with that of being a mother, in an attempt to get at the experience of being photographed as a mother (another position generally assumed to be, as Gallop put it, “troublingly personal, anecdotal, self-concerned”). She was taking on Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and the way in which even in Barthes—delectable Barthes!—the mother remains the (photographed) object; the son, the (writing) subject. “The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body,” Barthes wrote. But sometimes the writer is also the mother (Möbius strip).

  I liked that Gallop was onto something and letting us in on it before she fully understood it. She was hanging her shit out to dry: a start. She was droopy-eyed and louche in a way that I liked, and had that bad but endearing style that so many academics have—kind of stuck in the ’80s, feather earrings, and so on. She even talked about how much she liked a shirt she was wearing in one of the slides—a black button-down with white bubbly scribbles all over it. I find it irresistibly interesting when people are cathected onto their bad style rather than simply oblivious to it (a description that may apply to us all; I sense the risk increases with age).

  The slides were over, the talk was over, it was Krauss’s turn. She scooted her chair up to the table and shuffled her papers. She was Gallop’s inverse—sharp face, classy in a silk scarf, Ivy League, Upper East Side way. Feline, groomed, her thin dark hair in a bob. Kind of like the Janet Malcolm of art history. She started by saying how important Gallop’s daring and thorough work on Lacan had been. This praise went on for some time. Then, theatrically, she swerved. The importance of this early work is why it is so deeply disturbing to behold the mediocrity, naïveté, and soft-mindedness of the work Gallop has presented to us today. The color drained out of Gallop’s face. Krauss ignored her, and went in for the kill.

  The room thickened with the sound of one keenly intelligent woman taking another down. Dismembering her, really. Krauss excoriated Gallop for taking her own personal situation as subject matter, accused her of having an almost willful blindness to photography’s long history. She alleged—or so I recall her alleging—that Gallop had misused Barthes, had failed to place her investigation in relation to any lineage of family photography, had punted on the most basic aesthetic concepts in art history, and so on. But the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop’s maternity had rotted her mind—besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.

  It’s true that Gallop is no art historian, certainly not in the way that Krauss is. (Nor was Barthes, for that matter, but artistry trumps mastery.) And Krauss has always been something of a pugilist, just as Gallop has always been something of a narcissist—two perversities that proved, on this occasion, to be incompatible. But the lashing Gallop received that day stood for some time in my mind as an object lesson. Krauss acted as though Gallop should be ashamed for trotting out naked pictures of herself and her son in the bathtub, contaminating serious academic space with her pudgy body and unresolved, self-involved thinking (even though Gallop had been perfecting such contamination for years). But staging a fling with a philosopher was one thing; a pudgy mother in love with her son and her ugly scribble shirt was another.

  I didn’t have a baby then, nor did I have any designs on having one. Nor have I ever been what you might call a baby person (nor an animal person, nor a garden person, not even a house-plant person; even urgings toward “self-care” often irritate or mystify me). But I was enough of a feminist to refuse any knee-jerk quarantining of the feminine or the maternal from the realm of intellectual profundity. And, as I remember it, Krauss was not simply quarantining; she was shaming. In the face of such shaming, I felt no choice. I stood with Gallop.

  In Arabic, the word for fetus derives from jinn, which means “hidden from sight.” No matter how many ultrasounds you’ve had, no matter how well you feel you’ve gotten to know your baby’s rhythms in utero, the baby’s body is still a revelation. A body! An actual body! I was so in awe of Iggy’s fantastic little body that it took a few weeks for me to feel that I had the right to touch him all over. Before Iggy, it always startled me to see a parent stuffing a Kleenex in the face of an unsuspecting toddler, as if a kid were just an object whose physical autonomy could be violated any time some stray mucus appeared. I wanted to attend to Iggy, but I didn’t want to ambush him. Also, the culture’s worrying over pedophilia in all the wrong places at times made me feel unable to approach his genitals or anus with wonder and glee, until one day I realized, he’s my baby, I can—indeed I must!—handle him freely and ably. My baby! My little butt! Now I delight in his little butt. I delight in pouring water over his head with a toy boat full of holes, wetting his blond curls, matted with butter from a plate he recently made into a hat.

  Luckily, Iggy couldn’t care less. He is stalwart, has a high tolerance for physical intrusions. Within his first year of life, he withstood a spinal tap, several catheterizations, a contrast enema, electric shocks, nuclear scans, countless IVs, and an infusion of rare antibodies harvested from other people’s bodies (an infusion that, had we not had health insurance, would have cost $47,000 for the vial, an amount that puts the price of frozen sperm to shame). All that said, his native joy and robustness have continued, unabated. Until he grows too heavy, I carry him always and everywhere, even against the rules (making pancakes at the stove, walking down steep trails, etc.). When we go on the road together, I let him drag around my enormous roily-bag at the airport, even though he’s been ambulatory for only a few weeks. He insists. I recognize his insistence. I ignore the books that sternly advise against rocking or nursing your baby to sleep, so that she learns to go to sleep by herself; I am blessed with the time and the desire to hold Iggy until he slips off, and so I do. I wait and wait and wait until I hear a sleep rattle enter his breath, I watch his eyes flutter open and closed, open and closed, a hundred times, until finally they stay shut. I know from raising my stepson that this ritual won’t last forever—Iggy’s babyhood is already speeding away. By the time this book is published, it will be gone. Sturdy pilot, he flips over the coffee table and rides.

  I adore Winnicott. But the perversity is not lost on me that the most oft-cited, well-respected, best-selling books about the caretaking of babies—Winnicott, Spock, Sears, Weissbluth— have been and are mostly still by men. On the front cover of The Baby Book—arguably one of the more progressive contemporary options (albeit oppressively heteronormative)—the byline reads “by William Sears (MD) and Martha Sears (RN).” This seems promising(ish), but nurse/wife/mother Martha’s voice appears only in anecdotes, italics, and sidebars, never as conarrator. Was she too busy taking care of their eight children to join in the first-person? I look down at my well-loved copy of Winnicott on the Child and note that it comes laden with not one, not two, but three introductions by male pediatricians (Brazelton, Greenspan, Spock). What kind of bubble would burst if a lady shrink were presumed to add value to his legacy? Why don’t I myself seek out child-care books by women? Am I unconsciously channel-surfing for the male weatherman? How could Gallop, or any mother, however whip-smart, present the rule of negative gynecology and be taken as seriously as Sloterdijk? I’m boring myself with these reversals (feminist hazard).

  In Dr. Sears’s The Baby Book there’s a little sidebar (written by Martha?) called “Sexual Feelings While Breastfeeding,” which attempts to reassure you that such feelings don’t mean you’re a pedophile freak. It says that you’re basically hormonal soup, and because the hormones unleashed by breast-feeding are the same as those unleashed by sex, you could be forgiven for the mix-up.

  But how can it be a mix-up, if it’s the same hormones? How does one go about partitioning one sexual feeling off from another, presumably more “real” sexual feeling? Or, more to the point, why the partition? It isn’t like
a love affair. It is a love affair.

  Or, rather, it is romantic, erotic, and consuming—but without tentacles. I have my baby, and my baby has me. It is a buoyant eros, an eros without teleology. Even if I do feel turned on while I’m breast-feeding or rocking him to sleep, I don’t feel the need to do anything about it (and if I did, it wouldn’t be with him).

  In the years to come, this affair will likely become unrequited, or so I’ve heard. All the more reason to hail the moment’s autotelia.

  It’s so dark, this underspace, dark and sweaty. His thin hair is damp, smells like candy and earth, I burrow my mouth into it and breathe. I don’t ever want to make the mistake of needing him as much as or more than he needs me. But there’s no denying that sometimes, when we sleep together in the dark cavern of the bottom bunk, his big brother thrashing around on top, the white noise machine grinding out its fake rain, the green digital clock announcing every hour, Iggy’s small body holds mine.

  One of the most lovable aspects of Winnicott’s writing on children (and on those who attempt to hold them) is his deployment of an “ordinary language” seemingly incapable of histrionics even as it discusses issues of maximum complexity and gravity. In his book Queer Optimism, Michael Snediker offers Winnicott’s “nonironic denomination of adolescent depression as ‘doldrums’” as an example of Winnicott’s signature deflation-without-dismissal. “Easy enough … to wax lyrical on melancholy,” Snediker writes, in reference to queer theory’s long-standing preoccupation with melancholia. “Less easy to wax lyrical about ‘doldrums.’”