The Argonauts Read online

  I realize now that such moments in Ginsberg have a different shine when held in the bowl alongside his go-for-broke encounter with the naked body of his mother, the mad Naomi, in his great “Kaddish”:

  One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb— Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover.

  Yisborach, v’yistabach, v’yispoar, v’yisroman, v’yisnaseh, v’yishador, v’yishalleh, v’yishallol, sh’meh d’kudsho, b’rich hu.

  When I read this passage now, I feel only moved and inspired. “What, even, smell of asshole?”—this is the sound of Ginsberg cajoling himself as far out onto the ledge as he can go, even if it means pressing into the speculative, the fictive. Beyond the “Monster of the Beginning Womb” to the mother’s anus, which he leans into and sniffs. Not in service of abjection, but in pursuit of the limits of generosity. She needs a lover—am I that name?

  The result of all this pushing? “Later revolted a little, not much.” O glorious deflation without dismissal!

  I remember, around age ten, beholding the scene in The Shining in which the hot young woman whom Jack Nicholson is lewdly embracing in the haunted hotel bathroom ages rapidly in his arms, screeching from nubile chick to putrefying corpse within seconds. I understood that the scene was supposed to represent some kind of primal horror. This was The Shining, after all. But the image of that decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away, has stayed with me for three decades, as a type of friend. She’s part baths-ghost, part mad-Naomi. She didn’t get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted. Or perhaps she just means to scare the shit out of him, which she does.

  At one point in her book The Buddhist, Dodie Bellamy takes Jonathan Franzen to task for the following description of a middle-aged woman found in his novel Freedom: “Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence—the drama of being her—was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position now of feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy’s doughty little ego, its flotation on a sea of aging-female insecurity.” Bellamy responds: “Due to all the stagy point of view switches the novel apparently employs, I’d thought of assigning it to students, but after reading the above passage I was like, not in 100 fucking years…. Middle aged women are such easy prey, like they’re supposed to walk around with eyes averted, hanging their heads in shame at their wreckage.” She then offers “a sappy image of a crone to wipe out the evil Franzen-view.”

  I won’t reproduce the image here, but I encourage you to find The Buddhist and consult it. What I will do is tell you about the stable of people I have come to think of as my sappy crones (except that they aren’t really sappy, and they’re not really crones). You’ve already met some of them. For a while I was calling them my good witches, but that wasn’t quite right. If it weren’t such a lengthy moniker I might call them “the many gendered-mothers of my heart,” which is what poet Dana Ward calls everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Barry Manilow to his father to his grandmother to his childhood neighbor to Winona Ryder’s character in Heathers to Ella Fitzgerald to Jacob von Gunten to his bio mom in his amazing long poem “A Kentucky of Mothers,” which accomplishes the nearly impossible feat of constructing an ecstatic matriarchal cosmology while also de-fetishizing the maternal, even emptying the category out, eventually wondering: “But is ‘mother of’ precise? / Should I say ‘singers of’ instead? … Is it good to call these others as my moms the way I have? Is it care, & if it is have I gave honor in my song?”

  My college professor of feminist theory was named Christina Crosby. I tried my very hardest in her class and she gave me an A-. I didn’t get it then but now I do. I was cruising for intellectual mothers, unconsciously gravitating toward the stern and nonmaternal type. Christina would show up for class on her motorcycle or sleek road bike, blow into the room with her helmet under her arm, the whip of autumnal New England in her hair and cheeks, and everyone would quake with intimidation and desire. I always think of her entrances when I start a class now, as she always showed up just a smidgen late—never actually late, but never the first one to the party. She was radiant and elegant and butch, not stone and not soft, just her own blond, professorial, athletic, windswept kind of butch.

  Christina, too, had a habit of blushing deep red while she spoke for the first few minutes of class. It didn’t make her any less cool. In fact it made us think she ran hot on the inside, that something about her passion for Gayatri Spivak or the Combahee River Collective was uncontainable. And it was. Because of her blushing, I don’t feel any substantive shame when this happens to me now, in the classroom. (It happens to me all the time.)

  Eventually Christina and I became friends. A few years ago, she told me the story of a subsequent feminist theory class that threw a kind of coup. They wanted—in keeping with a long feminist tradition—a different kind of pedagogy than that of sitting around a table with an instructor. They were frustrated by the poststructuralist ethos of her teaching, they were tired of dismantling identities, tired of hearing that the most resistance one could muster in a Foucauldian universe was to work the trap one is inevitably in. So they staged a walkout and held class in a private setting, to which they invited Christina as a guest. When people arrived, Christina told me, a student handed everyone an index card and asked them to write “how they identified” on it, then pin it to their lapel.

  Christina was mortified. Like Butler, she’d spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same, and now, as if in a tier of hell, she was being handed an index card and a Sharpie and being told to squeeze a Homeric epithet onto it. Defeated, she wrote “Lover of Babe.” (Babe was her dog, a mischievous white lab.)

  As she told me this story, I cringed all over—for the students, mostly, but also because I was remembering how, when I was Christina’s student, we had all wanted her to come out in a more public and coherent fashion, and how frustrated we were that she wouldn’t. (Actually, I wasn’t all that frustrated; I’ve always sympathized with those who refuse to engage with terms or forums that feel like more of a compromise or distortion than an unbidden expression. But I understood why others were frustrated, and I sympathized with them, too.) Her students’ frustration with her reticence about her personal life did not diminish their desire for her, however—sentiments such as “Christina Crosby’s leather pants make me wet” appeared regularly on the cement paths all over campus. Likely her reticence but fed the fire. (Christina admitted to me later that she knew about the chalkings, and that they had pleased her very much.)

  But as the times changed, Christina changed. She got together with a younger, more activist scholar who is more vocal about queer issues, about being queer. Like most academic feminists, Christina now teaches “gender and sexuality studies” rather than women’s studies. Perhaps most moving to me, she is now writing autobiography—something she never would have dreamed of doing back when she was my mentor.

  Back then, she said she was willing to be my thesis adviser because I struck her as serious, but she made it very clear that she felt no kinship—indeed, she felt a measure of repulsion—at my interest in the personal made public. I was ashamed, but undaunted (my epithet?). The thesis I produced under her tutelage was titled The Performance of Intimacy. I didn’t mean the word performance in opposition to “the real”; I’ve never
been interested in any sort of con. Of course there exist people who perform intimacy in ways that are fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous or steamrolling or creepy, but that’s not the kind of performance that I meant, or the kind I mean. I mean writing that dramatizes the ways in which we are for another or by virtue of another, not in a single instance, but from the start and always.

  When it comes to my own writing, if I insist that there is a persona or a performativity at work, I don’t mean to say that I’m not myself in my writing, or that my writing somehow isn’t me. I’m with Eileen Myles—“My dirty secret has always been that it’s of course about me.” Lately, however, I have felt myself awash in a fresh irony. After a lifetime of experimenting with the personal made public, each day that passes I watch myself grow more alienated from social media, the most rampant arena for such activity. Instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital self-revelation is one of my greatest nightmares. I feel quite certain that my character is too weak to withstand the temptations and pressures that would come with hoisting it onto the stage of Facebook, and truly amazed by the fact that so many others—or all others, so it sometimes seems—bear it so easily.

  More than bear it—celebrate it, intrepidly push at its limits, just as they should. In The Buddhist—which was created from blog posts—Dodie Bellamy hails the blog of poet Jackie Wang, who once posted her thoughts as they decomposed under the influence of Ambien: “6am. hello. fading fast because i took an ambien and am becoming incoherent. but the nice thing about ambien is that you can write and write and write because you don’t give a fuck, it;s good for the loosening that needs to happen in order to speak…. i was going to wrier sometrgiubf important but i snasccan6y cant read nmyg own handwriting and i hallucinate when i look at things.” Intellectually, I’m right there with Dodie, cheering Jackie on. But in my heart I’m saying a prayer of gratitude: it was an act of grace that I got sober before I got wireless.

  I haven’t really thought this through (in homage to Wang?), but when I think about my more “personal” writing, I keep seeing that old Atari game, Breakout. I see the game’s plain, flat cursor sliding around on the bottom of the screen, popping the little black dot back onto the thick bank of rainbow above. Each time the dot hits the bank, it eats away a chunk of color, until eventually it has eaten away enough of the bank to “break out.” The breakout is a thrill because of all the triangulation, all the monotony, all the effort, all the obstruction, all the shapes and sounds that were its predecessor. I need those colored bricks to chip away at, because the eating into them makes form. And then I need the occasional jailbreak, my hypomanic dot riding the sky.

  In Christina’s feminist theory class we also read Irigaray’s famous essay “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in which Irigaray critiques both unitary and binary ways of thinking by focusing on the morphology of the labial lips. They are the “sex which is not one.” They are not one, but also not two. They make a circle that is always self-touching, an autoerotic mandorla.

  This image immediately struck me as weird but exciting. And a little embarrassing. It reminded me of the fact that a lot of women can jerk off just by pressing their legs together on a bus or in a chair or whatever (I came this way once while waiting in line to see The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant at Film Forum on Houston). While we were discussing Irigaray in class, I tried to feel the circle of my labial lips. I imagined every woman in the class trying to feel it too. But the thing is, you can’t really feel your labial lips.

  It’s easy to get juiced up about a concept like plurality or multiplicity and start complimenting everything as such. Sedgwick was impatient with that kind of sloppy praise. Instead, she spent a lot of time talking and writing about that which is more than one, and more than two, but less than infinity.

  This finitude is important. It makes possible the great mantra, the great invitation, of Sedgwick’s work, which is to “pluralize and specify.” (Barthes: “one must pluralize, refine, continuously”) This is an activity that demands an attentiveness—a relentlessness, even—whose very rigor tips it into ardor.

  A few months before Iggy was conceived, we went to see an art porn movie made by some friends, A. K. Burns and A. L. Steiner. You were feeling lonely, longing for a sense of community, identification. Unlike the close-knit, DIY queer scene you were once at the center of in San Francisco, the queer scene in LA can feel like everything else in LA: partitioned by traffic and freeways, oppressively cliquish and bewilderingly diffuse at the same time, hard to fathom, to see.

  The movie, Community Action Center, is pretty great. You liked its frenzied variety and absurdity, though you felt perplexed by its banishment of cock, as you think the category of women should be capacious enough to include it—“like the blob that ate Detroit,” you say. I agreed, but wondered how to make space for the nonphallic if the phallic is always pushing its way back into the room. In whose world are these terms mutually exclusive? you said, justly agitated. In whose world is the morphological imaginary defined as that which is not real?

  In one of my favorites of your drawings, two Popsicles are talking to each other. One accuses, “You’re more interested in fantasy than reality.” The other responds, “I’m interested in the reality of my fantasy.” Both of the Popsicles are melting off their sticks.

  After the movie had finished, the screen flashed a parting dedication: “to the queerest of the queer.” The audience applauded, and I applauded too. But inside the dedication felt like a needle zigzagging off the record after a great song. Whatever happened to horizontality? Whatever happened to the difference is spreading? I tried to hold on to what I liked most about the movie, which was watching people hit each other during sex without it seeming violent, the scene of someone jerking off with a chunk of purple quartz down by the water, and the slow sewing of feathers onto a girl’s butt. Really that’s all I remember now. And that the girl having the feathers sewn onto her butt was pretty in an unusual way, and that her sexuality reminded me of mine in ways I couldn’t name but that moved me. Those parts made that little portal swing open for me: I think we have—and can have—a right to be free.

  I collect these moments. I know they hold a key. It doesn’t matter to me if the key must remain perched in a lock, incipient. The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window … the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window.

  Out in the lobby, a friend complains that the subtitle of the movie should have been “flip the butch” (presumably an insult), and is seriously grossed out by the sex. Ugh, why did we have to stare at so many hairy pussies? I drift off to the water fountain.

  Like much of Catherine Opie’s work, Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), which features the bloody stick figures cut into her back, gains meaning in series, in context. Its crude drawing is in conversation with the ornate script of the word Pervert, which Opie had carved into the front of her chest and photographed a year later. And both are in conversation with the heterogeneous lesbian households of Opie’s Domestic series (1995–98)—in which Harry appears, baby-faced—as well as with Opie’s Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), taken a decade after Self-Portrait/Pervert. In Opie’s nursing self-portrait, she holds and beholds her son Oliver while he nurses, her Pervert scar still visible, albeit ghosted, across her chest. The ghosted scar offers a rebus of sodomitical maternity: the pervert need not die or even go into hiding per se, but nor is adult sexuality foisted upon the child, made its burden.

  This balance is admirable. It is also not always easy to maintain. In a recent interview, Opie says: “Between being a full-time professor and an artist and a mom and a partner, it’s not like I get to have that much time to go and explore and play [SM style]…. Also, all of a sudden when you’re taking care of a child, your brain doesn’t easily switch to ‘Oh, now I’m going to hurt somebody’”

  There is something profound here, which I will but draw a circle around for you to ponder. As you ponder, however, note that a difficulty in shifting gears, or a struggle to
find the time, is not the same thing as an ontological either/or.

  Of course, there are a multitude of good reasons for adults to keep their bodies to themselves, one of which is the simple aesthetic fact that adult bodies can be hideous to children. Listen, for example, to Hervé Guibert’s description of his father’s penis:

  I’m staring at his trousers as he opens his flies and that’s when I see something I’ve never seen again in all my life: a kind of threshing ringed beast, cork-screwed and blood-filled and raw, a pink sausage ending in a cone-shaped knob. At this moment I see my father’s prick as if it were skinless, as if my eyes had the power to see right through the flesh. I see something anatomically separate. It’s as if I see a superimposed and scaled-down version of the shiny cosh that he brought back from the slaughterhouse and puzzlingly places on his bedside table.

  This scene doesn’t forecast damage or violation per se, but most such literary scenes (the non-French ones?) do. Think of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, whose primal scene of violation I must have read a hundred times over as a young girl. Here is eight-year-old Maya, our narrator, reporting on the actions of her uncle: “Mr. Freeman pulled me to him, and put his hand between my legs…. He threw back the blankets and his ‘thing’ stood up like a brown ear of corn. He took my hand and said, ‘Feel it.’ It was mushy and squirmy like the inside of a freshly killed chicken. Then he dragged me on top of his chest.” This is but the opening salvo of the recurring sexual abuse of Maya at the hands of Mr. Freeman.