Necropolitics in the margins.

1

J.-A. Mbembé's "Necropolitcs" in the margins of images and repetitions. Mbembe quotes Fanon extensively when describing how necropower operates:

The town belonging to the colonized people . . . is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees.

2

Sovereignty began with the divine right of kings, in the relationship invoked by the elite to emphasize their privilege of access.

[“I am the one appointed to do God’s will. I am the recipient of the revelation. My body deciphers this will.”]

Loyalty to the sovereign demonstrates loyalty to God.

An imaginary with a Jade Emperor.

Mbembé' on the European legal imaginary:

Under the wikipedia section on names and forms of address for the Emperor of China, there is a subheading which reads: “To see naming conventions in detail, please refer to Chinese sovereign”

Beneath this subheading, one finds:

As the emperor had, by law, an absolute position not to be challenged by anyone else, his or her subjects were to show the utmost respect in his or her presence, whether in direct conversation or otherwise. When approaching the Imperial throne, one was expected to kowtow before the emperor. In a conversation with the emperor, it was considered a crime to compare oneself to the emperor in any way. It was taboo to refer to the emperor by his or her given name, even for the emperor's own mother, who instead was to use Huángdì (皇帝), or simply Ér (儿; 兒, "son", for male emperor). The given names of all the emperor's deceased male ancestors were forbidden from being written, and could be avoided (避諱) by using synonymous characters, homophonous characters, or simply leaving out the final stroke of the tabboo word. This linguistic feature can sometimes be used to date historical texts, by noting which words in parallel texts are altered.

 

Jacob Bryant, “Orphic Egg” (1774)

3

Any serious imaginary grounds itself in a physical claim that is tied to a cosmos. The territorial sanctifies the urge for conquest and ownership esoterically. Here is how wikipedia does cosmology:

Religious or mythological cosmology is a body of beliefs based on mythological, religious, and esoteric literature and traditions of creation and eschatology. Creation myths are found in most religions, and are typically split into five different classifications, based on a system created by Mircea Eliade and his colleague Charles Long.

Types of Creation Myths based on similar motifs:

  • Creation ex nihilo in which the creation is through the thought, word, dream or bodily secretions of a divine being.

  • Earth diver creation in which a diver, usually a bird or amphibian sent by a creator, plunges to the seabed through a primordial ocean to bring up sand or mud which develops into a terrestrial world.

  • Emergence myths in which progenitors pass through a series of worlds and metamorphoses until reaching the present world.

  • Creation by the dismemberment of a primordial being.

  • Creation by the splitting or ordering of a primordial unity such as the cracking of a cosmic egg or a bringing order from chaos.

The preferred cosmology of modern empires is the promise to bring order from chaos—- to tame and civilize; to make productive; to modernize and develop; to de-barbarize.

The preferred costume of 21st century empire is neoliberal democracy.

I mourn the decline of the orphic egg and the sexy, cave-dwelling oracle that refused to do the bidding of kings, empires, and state governments. My imaginary works this out in my own imagi-nation.

4

"In this case, sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not," Mbembe adds. 

Late-modern colonial occupation differs in many ways from early-modern occupation, particularly in its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical, and the necropolitical. The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine. Here, the colonial state derives its fundamental claim of sovereignty and legitimacy from the authority of its own particular narrative of history and identity. This narrative is itself underpinned by the idea that the state has a divine right to exist; the narrative competes with another for the same sacred space. Because the two narratives are incompatible and the two populations are inextricably intertwined, any demarcation of the territory on the basis of pure identity is quasi-impossible. Violence and sovereignty, in this case, claim a divine foundation: peoplehood itself is forged by the worship of one deity, and national identity is imagined as an identity against the Other, other deities. 

History, geography, cartography, and archaeology are supposed to back these claims, thereby closely binding identity and topography. As a consequence, colonial violence and occupation are profoundly underwritten by the sacred terror of truth and exclusivity (mass expulsions, resettlement of “stateless” people in refugee camps, settlement of new colonies). Lying beneath the terror of the sacred is the constant excavation of missing bones; the permanent remembrance of a torn body hewn in a thousand pieces and never self-same; the limits, or better, the impossibility of representing for oneself an “original crime,” an unspeakable death: the terror of the Holocaust.


5

Mbembe appends the following foot-note to the paragraph quoted above:

See Lydia Flem, L’Art et la mémoire des camps: Représenter exterminer, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

Thus does Jean-Luc Nancy enter the room through the sidereal. "I don't want to venture into the silence of the outside that surrounds the thing itself as soon as it emerges," Nancy wrote in The Fragile Skin of the World.

The book opens with an “Overture,” a formal gesture that draws on the symphonic mode to introduce his exploration of space-time's fragility, and how this fragility counterposes the possibility of an all-encompassing skin:

“We can no longer count on anything —- this is the situation.”

We can longer count our way through the exclusions of all the elsewheres.

As for the situation, it inscribes the I’s relationship to the site. The situational gaze is sited.


6

What gives the colonial government unlimited power over an occupied territory?

The state of siege is itself a military institution. It allows a modality of killing that does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy. Entire populations are the target of the sovereign. The besieged villages and towns are sealed off and cut off from the world. Daily life is militarized. Freedom is given to local military commanders to use their discretion as to when and whom to shoot. Movement between the territorial cells requires formal permits. Local civil institutions are systematically destroyed. The besieged population is deprived of their means of income. Invisible killing is added to outright executions.

Even when rendered visible, “invisible killing” remains unseeable at present.

To see is to have a body that may be attached to a hand: to see is to see one’s hand in it.

Small things.

1

The seasonal darkness—-like the narrowing shaft when one descends into a coal mine, and the way claustrophobia surprised me by tightening my shoulders and increasing my heart-rate before I recognized it. (“But I am not scared of small places?”) The way the “I” is modified by the particular. The way darkness surprises when it arrives.

2

A game I play in the dark with a treasure: The Compendium of Lost Words. Treating each word as character, re-inscribing their epitaph, mourning an intangible that has vanished from the world. Looking for its cousins in other languages. Fiddling with words.

Amarulence (n). Born in 1731 and died in 1755. Meaning "bitterness; spite." As in: The airgonaut could not avoid the particular amarulence that arrived when his feet touched the ground. Amarulence has a Romanian cousin in Amar, who is alive and thriving, and means "bitter."

3

Notebook, April.

My father phones from Korea to wish me a happy birthday because he is ahead of me in time. He calls from a future in which I am already 45 years old. In this future present, I am his morning as he is my afternoon. 

His voice bumps against the grass beneath my notebook. "You were the happiest baby," he says, "You brought so much joy." 

I can feel his mind reaching backward into time, fondling memories, and how strange that this baby is me in a memory I cannot share.

At the gas station, a lady is speaking to another lady while filling her tank. She mentions adoption, and how much she loves her children: how grateful she is to the woman who got pregnant and then "chose another family to raise this baby" for whom she has chosen life. I wonder what it means to choose life. Did that birthmother have what could be called "a choice"? If she lived in a state where abortion was illegal, no one can properly say that the birth mother "chooses" to birth a child for others to raise.

Coerced birth is such an unthinkably vicious punishment. How will we tell children that they were born as a punishment,* as a permanent scar against the mother, whose body was forced to carry them? What illustrated books will descend like gumdrops to cover the image of a woman imprisoned in her growing body?

Note to self: you are an idiot. The theocrats believe that birth is God's way of punishing Eve. It is a Divine Punishment. They are doing "God's work" in the post-Edenic plutocracy.

Chevengur: Waiting for the miracle with Platonov.

Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (NYRB Classics) Translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler.


1 — The son

In May 1938, Andrei Platonov’s 15 year-old-son, Platon, was arrested by the Soviet secret police (KGB) as a terrorist and a spy. Sentenced to ten years in the Siberian gulag, Platon contracted tuberculosis. Although released in October 1940, eight years earlier than his sentence, Platon died of tuberculosis in January 1943. His father, Andrei, died of tuberculosis (supposedly contracted from his son) in January 1951, eight years later. There are two eights, two ways of measuring the gape between life and death, and countless intersections between what must die and what living entails in relation to the god named Freedom.

Acronyms change but the carceral content remains the same. The Soviet secret police was called Cheka from 1917 to 1922, GPU from 1922 to 1924, and NKVD from 1934 to 1943. Until 1953 the designation was MGB and from then to the fairly-recent present, KGB.


2 — My obsession

This book has obsessed me for months. It has distracted me from projects and family. It has manhandled my attention like the first reckless months of new love. My lips are raw from reading it. My notebooks and digital space are covered in Chevengur crumbs.

To get Chevengur out of my system—to “move on,” so to speak—demands a certain discipline, a reckoning with what is given as well as how the given situates itself in time, in relation to temporality. Now is not Then; Here is not There. One commences by stripping off the residual neoliberal subjectification; one tries to read in the light of the room the author presents.

Of Here, or the present US, authors often complain that biography gets over-read into their fiction. This complaint befouls itself when applied to novels written from geographic spaces where the novel plays a double-role of saying what cannot be officially “said.” I began with a biographical detail from Platonov’s life because those details perfume the book; they scent the bones and cling to his strange shifts in tense. In a sense, they also explain the decade of labor involved in the Chandlers translation. The “archive” version of Chevengur wasn’t published in Russian until 2022; the translators worked from archives rather than a published text; the presence of Platonov’s manuscript notes reveals the painstaking effort to provide readers with the definitive translation.

If definitive translations exist, then the Chandlers’ Chevengur will be listed among them. There is no way for me to link all the symbols and evocations—the accordion; the mystical moment; the spiritualism; the barracks culture, etc.—-Platonov weaves into the novel. Proceeding with for what gets left out, I self-soothe with the hope that this book inaugurates a flurry of conversations and events, a virtual cavalcade celebrating 2024 as the Year Chevengur Obsessed Us.

"The prelude to organization is always catastrophe," a younger Platonov wrote an essay titled "The New Gospel." The suffering of the "drought" and famine would be rewarded by Communism's arrival. Early Platonov analogizes communism to the Second Coming of a Messiah. Let it be noted that the formal requirement in the genre of Second Comings is how it begins in fantastic, world-destroying apocalypse.

Like all Messiahs and apocalypses, Platonov’s revolutionary scene is hounded by the challenges posed by its unrecognizability. The characters struggle with discerning the arrival of Communism from its betrayal. How does revelation differ from recognition? Who is positioned to recognize? If ‘apocalypse’ existed—-if it took place in time as an event— would there be such a thing as recognition, retrospectively? The narrative of the illuminated moment is created in the backwards glance that acknowledges it. In this sense, the moment gets lit by being written. We illuminate sacred manuscripts differently, and theory’s delight is implicated in our consciousness of doing so. Critically, the Russian Orthodox sectarians and religious schismatics who believed heaven and the kingdom of God would be established on earth were central to the 19th century zeitgeist that fueled anarchism and apocalyptic thinking. Platanov plays the zeitgeist contrapuntally in Chevengur. He links the extraordinary salvation-hunger to the abject misery produced by famine and war in Russia. Reform is no resolution.



3 — The horse the dude is riding into the sunset

"What interested me now was the transformation of thoughts into an event," Platonov wrote in an autobiographical early passage concerning the death of his mother and siblings, a passage he later removed. These deaths are not peripheral to the novel. Platonov’s mother died between 1927 and 1929, as he was writing Chevengur. We know this due to the splendid and prodigIous end-notes assembled by translators Robert and Elizabeth Chandler.

One endnote tells us that Platonov's handwritten manuscript page for chapter 25, when "Chepurny lay down in the straw," includes an unpublished note by the author: "Help me, mother, to remember and to keep living." Invocations to his dead mother's spirit ripple through Platonov's notebooks; he struggles to justify or accept the death of loved ones by imputing their value as ersatz guardian angels who offer counsel to the living. For Platonov, to know one's dead is to remain in conversation with them. "They are important," he whispers to his notebook.

Like their author, Chevengur’s characters also regularly invoke the dead as both partners and lovers. Each of the revolutionists lives alone with the ghosts in his head. The jubilant, man-hunting veteran warrior, Stepan Kopionkin, rides about on the horse named Strength of the Proletariat like a statue looking for a plinth to mount. He is the Vanguard riding the animal labor. I wept at Platonov’s genius upon realizing the symbolism of that horse named after the virtue of the exploited class’, a horse the Vanguard is riding relentlessly, riding and extolling in monologues at sunset, toasting and celebrating, theorizing ad infinitum with such profound and committed thoughtlessness that they are unable to recognize the Other they are riding when encountering it in the flesh, rather than they symbol.

Vanguard machismo aside, most of Kopionkin’s interpersonal conversations are dialogues and monologues directed to his dead love, Rosa— "He loved the dead, since Rosa Luxembourg was among them” — or his dead mother. I will be forced to return to this thread. (And I wish I had time to defend Rosa from Kopionkin’s patriarchal maw.)

4 — Aside on alter egos

According to Robert Chandler’s afterword (which deserves an its own essay), the adoptee, Sasha Dvanov, represents the idealistic Platonov of the past-revolutionary period while Scribinov represents the "somewhat disillusioned Platonov of the 1920’s.”

5 —- Digression involving another obsession whose name is Vera Figner

In 1825, the Decembrists stormed Tsar Alexander II’s winter palace, opening what some have called ‘the age of revolution’. It is indisputable that the Decembrists’ attempted insurrection altered what was considered possible. Revolutionists were born, raised, and complicated by the churn of these events. The revolutions that followed owed their gesture to the Decembrists.

In 1861, the Tsar (who had been ruling since 1818) was forced to finally liberate the serfs. This created a large class of peasantry who found themselves “property-owners” overnight. Serfs were given small plots of land that they worked for centuries. The landowning nobility and feudal class retreated to their salons and smothered themselves in luxury to quiet their alarm. Nevertheless, the salon, itself, drew reading into the spaces of power. Books containing radical ideas circulated among the children of the landowning nobility. One of these children, Vera Figner, became a revolutionist.

Figner’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Northwestern University Press, 1991) interposes itself against the archival imprint of revolutionary journals that foreground the labor and vision of men. Figner was 75 years old when the book was published in 1927. In the introduction, she says that one must write because "the dead do not rise but there is resurrection in books." Figner also recalls a warning from Eleanor Duse, when they met abroad: "Write: you must write; your experience must not be lost." 

What Figner brings to the revolutionary memoir is intentionally gendered. She frames her intellectual journey as a series of relational epiphanies: the knowledge of self in relation to others, the ecologies of affect and signification, etc, where feelings signify. Lived experience socializes us for the roles we’re expected to play. Figner’s resistance to these roles begins early. She was fussy, hot-tempered, and spirited. She fought with her siblings until the nurse pulled her away. Then, Vera would "mop the floor," which is how the nurse described her graphic, physical, floor-writhing rage.

Her first experience of shame as a child— something revolving around a broken lock— led her to adopt her first principle. The experience of shame taught her "to take the blame on yourself." Punishment is preferable to guilt. And guilt may have nothing to do with innocence. 

Class expectations loomed over her future. She loathed her time at the Smolny Institute, an exclusive boarding school for the daughters of the nobility (which would become the Bolshevik headquarters in 1917). At Smolny, she was taught to believe that she had no duty or responsibility for peasants or Russians or the masses: her sole responsibility was to those of her class.a lack of duty or sense of responsibility towards others.

Where school gave her despair, novels gave her the world. Figner insists that she learned more about life and humanity from the idealistic heroes in the literature given to her by her mother. At the same time, her early bildungsromanism included an "an abundance of joy," which Figner believed needed to be shared and rendered in common. Joy connected her to others; it created brothers, sisters, a family. And joy was not indistinct from the revolutionary character Figner acquired from literature.

N. A. Nekrasov's poem, "Saša," taught her "how to live" as a revolutionist: "To make my words coincide with my actions; to demand this consistency from myself and others. And this became the watchword of my life." (It still gives me goosebumps.) The logic of her character, in her own words: "It was incomprehensible for me not to act upon that which I had acknowledged as true.” Her soul “crystallized”, or came into itself in that Byronic key, on the day when she asked her father for advice with a difficult decision and realized he had no fucking clue. "One must make his great decisions for himself," Figner resolved. So she moved to Zurich and pursued a medical degree that would permit her to heal others. While in Zurich, she got married. But her views on healing shifted from individual cases of healthcare to the structural lack of economic conditions. For Vera, the problems of healthcare and social suffering she witnessed were inseparable. Poverty and healthcare went together.  The decision to leave her medical degree behind was, to her, a choice towards life and against status. "I decided to go, in order that my deeds might not disprove my words," she wrote. And so deciding, she acted without looking back. 

Around this time, Alexander Ulyanov, Vladimir Lenin's brother, was executed for being involved in a failed conspiracy to assassinate Alexander III. Theory was being negotiated in the field, on the ground, between barricades where nihilism met communism. Questions about direct action played out in prison sentences. Prison formed new solidarities between revolutionists.

Figner’s arrest introduced her to Vladimir Nabokov's father and Lev Tolstoy, both of whom occupied positions of power in the tsarist prison system. Tolstoy didn't reproach the struggle she fought for the peasants; he only asked why she had to kill the tsar, since a new one would pop up behind him. "The desire to be silent" descended upon Vera. Imprisoned for decades in a tsarist prison, Vera wore a gray prison coat with a yellow diamond patch on the back. Her co-prisoners called her "queen." 

The carceral society has been called kazarmnyy kommunizm ("barracks communism") or Nechaevshchina ("Nechayevism") after Segrey Nechayaev, the Russian revolutionary whose 1869 book, The Catechism of a Revolutionary, is best known for its slogan: "the ends justify the means." Nechayev’s first article of faith is critical reading:

- The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, affairs, feelings, attachments, property, or even a name. Everything in him is consumed by a unique, exclusive interest, a single idea, a single passion: revolution.

- In the depths of his being, not only in his words, but also in his deeds, he has severed every link with the civil order, with the whole of the civilized world, with all the laws, propriety, conventions and morals of this world. He is its implacable enemy, and if he continues to live in it, it is only in order that he might destroy it. 

[Nechayev inspired the nihilist revolutionist's character in Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Dostoevsky also based the brutal murder of Shatov, a member of the clandestine cell, on the November 1869 assassination of Ivanov, an apostate from Nechayev's revolutionary band of brothers.]

What Figner brings to history is a first-person account foregrounding women. It is indisputable that the abysmal, relentless suffering of Russian mothers created many women revolutionists, as Figner reveals. Her anarchist chafes against the imposition of teleology, a mode she associates with authoritarian Russian Orthodox leaders. No, things did not have to be this way, Figner insists. Russians did not have to suffer miserably for a god or a tsar or a notion of national greatness. Dissent didn’t have to culminate in purges and the assertion of omnipotent dictatorial power. Figner posits a sort of counterfactual hope, a relentless optimism in progress and social change. Those evil novels can be indicted for wild hopefulness as well as revolutionary character.

I mention Figner because a lot rode on the "one-spark theory" and the activist belief that Russian peasants were ready for revolution: all they needed was an intellectual spark. (Platonov circles this point in Chevyngur)….  Like American Baptist missionaries bumbling through Romania in the early 1990’s, the revolutionists brought books and lessons to their target audience. Unlike Baptist missionaries in Iron Bloc countries, Figner’s comrades actually relocated to the villages, providing medical assistance and education, and made their lives among the peasants.

Refusing the given world, building from the radical re-visioning such refusal permits, missionaries and revolutionists proselytized and sought teachable moments between the poverty, grief, flood, loss. The promised deliverance. They outlined the actions which led to salvation. They guaranteed a world greater than suffering alone, and being abandoned to reckon with it.

6 —- Foundations

While typing just now, my thoughts bumped into Zura’s, who was reading Platonov’s Foundation Pit at 12:29 am today in Turkey. (The Platonovmania is global, as it should be.) Zura’s quote it touches on the exhaustion of the mothers—-and the way Platonov dragged this obsession across various novels.

Where Vera Figner dialogued with her absent mother in the prison cell, Platonov dialogued with his dead mother ("and the “Others”) in Chevengur. One could even venture to say he builds conflict between fathers and mothers into theory, through literature. In Platonov's telling, it is the fatherlessness of "the others" (the mysterious group of displaced refugees wandering through Russia) that makes them malleable and hungry for leadership. The search for a father may lead mankind to god, nation, or political ideal. Their accomplishment consisted in surviving and living despite their orphanhood. 

The mother is missing, friends. The mother is always dead or bent over in the pieta posture. Hers is the body invoked for apology and penance.



7 — Language tasked to order

Platonov plays with the way official language (see also academic lingo, specialized lingos, lexicons rendered salient by their capacity to estrange peasants and workers) intrudes on the mysterious and attempts to establish order, to provide a language in which things can be known: "Red as the circulars!"  "A man’s skin and nails are Soviet power. How come you can’t formulate that for yourself?" "None of this can be formulated in a resolution."

The verbs "expend" and "extract" impinge upon the present moment. I hear climate change as the unimagined horizon that empires, including the US, the Soviet, and the Chinese, would normalize for maximum resource extraction during that industrialist’s wet-dream commonly called the Cold War.

The men attempt to theorize a future ("The sun gets by without any Bolsheviks–and a correct attitude to the sun is part of our consciousness"),  but theory, like god, transcends the plane of life. The men on the field wrangle with their ghosts —-ghosts, by the way, are radically heretical for the Russian revolutionists; one could even take Platonov’s ghosts to be the ‘real’ sabotage indulged by the Vanguard who was waiting for Communism to appear. Forget the dead, for it is the dead who distract us from building the future. In Chevengur, however, the men wait and wait with guns in their arms and death surrounding them. The ornamental nature of their cliff-notes-Marxism lends it a supra-natural feel that remains external to the famines and basic needs of the peasants. It is as if Platonov’s vanguardists read the catechism, take their first Communion, and wait for the unrecognizable miracle.


8 —- The others & their others

Inspired by Don Quixote, Platonov’s novel plays into the epic form. This is immediately visible in the character of the horse named Strength of the Proletariat. But the attempt to spoof chivalric romances is prismatic and multi-faceted. Sure, Platonov wryly and cheekedly condemns the lover to continue romancing his dead revolutionary idol, Rosa, into the corpse and maggots phase of tenderness. But he also condemns himself. He condemns the vanguard, the village, the Russian people, civilization, modernity, religion; only the landscape escapes condemnation.

How to describe the Platonovian mix of playfulness, absurdity, affection, disorientation, and despair? Epically, everything (and it’s mother) is at stake in Chevengur. One might read it as a love letter to the first love, the one whose failure implicates all the “others”. And “others” are tremendous in this book. The unidentified mass of impoverished refugees who may or may not constitute the Proletariat remain a mystery. Characters discuss them and try to find a place for them in Marx’s theory. Platonov’s brilliance extends to the use of capitalization, showing how the masses flip flop between the others and the Others and even “comrade other,” as seen in the dialogue excerpted below.

End-notes attend to idioms. The "Bolshevik foxtrot”, for example, is an oxymoron based on statements by 19s0’s Bolsheviks of the foxtrot as a bourgeois decadence likely to corrupt and rot the proletarian soul.

It seems fair to drag my mother’s ghost into space where the ghosts of the mothers are never quite buried.

“Men who can’t dance are dangerous,” my mom used to say. “Men who can’t dance seek their ecstasy from guns.”

[May she never Rest in Peace. May the mothers continue to rail from beyond the grave at the stupidity involved in our hunger for exemplarity and our desire to be the latest exceptional gumdrop in the pageant of personal branding.']

Once, when I was a boy, I shaved a kitten and buried it in the snow. I didn’t understand whether or not it was human. And then the kitten caught a fever and died. —- Impossible to resist astonishment at what is happening here, inside these conversations, in these words so meticulously and lovingly translated by the Chandlers.

Platonov brings theory to literature; every theme that would preoccupy the Soviets is given to the reader. One finds the tension between urban and rural, the trope of technocracy’s failure to provide for those whom it objectifies, the stereotype of the technocrat as a frivolous, lazy armchair-dweller who commands serfs on paper while pretending to liberate them, the mistrust of ‘outsiders’ that will turn into the mistrust of ‘foreigners’ that will evolve into the fear of free-thinking intellectuals.

9 — The lice in the heart of the heart of the village

The village lacks phones or means to communicate with the outer world.

In lieu of books, the men exchange incoherent interjections among themselves: "We are comrades! Comrades to the oppressed countries of the world!" When alone, they repeat these things to the sky, as if sending missives to the missing proletariat.

History meets us in events on the ground, where the lice make their appearance. After the first world war (and during the Russian civil war), a typhus epidemic carried by lice killed between two and three million people. Vladimir Lenin held a meeting in 1919 to strategize around the epidemic. "All attention to this problem, comrades," Lenin announced. "Either lice will conquer socialism or socialism will conquer lice." (The significance of lice carrying a disease that travels on foreign bodies and is brought into the heart of the nation or village is an image that xenophobes and propagandists will not relinquish.)

When a refugee-cum-proletariat child gets sick with typhus, the vanguardists employ every measure in their power to care for and save this child. But the child dies of typhus anyway. The mother calmly accepts this death, and mourns. The vanguardists, however, cannot process their grief, given what death of an innocent, possibly proletariat child signifies for Communism. Stunned, the men discuss the dead child as an "alienated body" that had been failed by both Tsarism and communism.

Irreality pervades Cepurny’s musings as he lays in tall grass and wonders how suffering can continue under communism. Is this extraordinary present suffering (which seems to resemble the extraordinary prior suffering) evidence that Communism isn’t here?

"And what are we to do about the horses, and the cows, and the sparrows?" he wonders before soothing himself with theory. The Proletariat will be here soon to solve it. The Petty Bourgeoisie is finished, buried, dispossessed—and yet, they must still exist somewhere. The refugees take residence in the village, replacing the small-land owning farmers.

But “somewhere on the outskirts of . . . an accordion began to play.” Kopionkin is “unsettled” by the mystery of this instrument. He is perturbed by its failure to declare its interest, and rankled by the invitation it extends, an invitation that is not resolved when man goes to meet the accordion.

Chepurny remains tormented by "conscience" because "the smallest child Chevengur had died from communism and he was unable to formulate any justification to himself." One could read this as a self-interrogating critique of Marxism’s reliance on structure to explain everything. One could read it as hole in the machinery of Proletkult. One could speculate that Platonov the older is addressing Platonov the younger, who has not yet watched his son be sentenced to prison. One might even worry that over-focus on the abstract enables us to erase the living.

Theory’s power comes from its ideological rigor. The vanguardists left grasping for explanation opens into that mystical space Platonov courts, or makes visible. Perhaps this is where explanation is rejected for mythology and propaganda, for telling a story that will defend the theory and conquer other minds with its narration.

The death of one child from typhus is a blight on the village–it "snatched the whole town from the road of revolution." 



10 — Avowals and disavowals

And so the Vanguard wait for the Proletariat to save them.

The famished, alienated Proletariat is tasked with accomplishing this critical step in the coming of Communism.

The Peasants float in a sort of limbo between the communal ideal of village life and the Petty Bourgeois landowners who have come from the city.

The Proletariat must be imported, since they aren’t indigenous to the village. Or maybe they are being treated like the horse beneath the statue of the self-mythologizing warrior in the plaza. Or maybe the men haven’t read enough literature to distinguish the humans from the legend. Or else a theory must be written that makes for what exists in that There, in that particular Russia . . .

As for the Peasants, no one knows what on earth to do with them. Their theoretical role is missing from the script.

What is significant when everything is a sign and justification?

Beckett’s Godot came to mind as the vanguard waited for the proletariat to emerge from peasants who were waiting for God.

And we wait, too. As American statesmen issue balmy statements that cosplay “red lines,” the Neo-Nice (liberal) intellectuals build a case for ethnic cleansing from their gargantuan silences. The fear of being mis-read continues to define our cowardice. As armchair warriors shift their investment portfolios to reflect an increased demand for weapons and drones, President Biden reassures himself that the US economy will be saved by the war on Palestinians. The Christian Evangelical Zionists titillate themselves publicly with promises of second comings on the horizon and Jesus-rule in our lifetime. Forms, shapes, and intellectual prevarications assemble themselves in the pageant of optics with the expectation of saving something in a war that cannot be justified on the basis of security. It is a dream-war, a scene from a mythological dream being scripted for the eschatological social imaginary. It stains every surface with its bombs. It marks no justice and no peace: simply death of tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Intoxicated by novels, Figner imagined a different world. She lived her life as if this world were possible. Any world is possible. What is impossible is the perversity of accepting a world as loud, deadly, dedicated to economic inequality, vicious (and exultant in its viciousness), and meaningless as the one that has been given to us.

Perhaps Morbid Swither said it best—- the nothing else matters book changes everything. May the curse of its beauty damn your plans, radicalize your tended silences, and vacate the slumber of your nights.





A lover's discourse and the subject.

1

Where to begin with Richard Howard’s translation of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse?

Before the mirror, with cold coffee and a willingness to reconsider fidelity. One must meet Barthes there, with uncombed hair and a certain intellectual piety, a willingness.

His arguments undress themselves continuously before the mind’s mirror. Open the book anywhere and you will catch a flash of something falling off, a shoe being abandoned, a necklace being admired and laid aside.

Stripteases are linear: no performance has a clearer narrative arc. The narrative shape associated with the Iowa workshop is the striptease par exemplar. Rising action, climax, falling action— everything lands in that resolution, that happy ending. I take happy ending, here, to indicate closure—- it doesn’t have to be happy so much as it needs to give the illusion of ending. Thus is the reader satisfied by the experience of the book.

There is no single striptease in Barthes’ Discourse. There are countless undressings and stripteases occurring simultaneously. Even the visual layout does its own dance for the head of the John the Baptist. Given this multiplicity, the book lacks a crescendo. It situates its dimensional dynamics on the page rather than the entirety.

2

No discursive regime can exist without its lexicon.

The table of contents is its own poem, a visual painting dressed up as a lexicon of loved-over words. The loose links and connections between these words serve to order and disorder what is to come.

3

Conversationally:

BARTHES: What is proposed, then, is a portrait but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.

ME: So, the lover is not a subject so much as the object—the loved object, the material altered by idealization? And the lover whose entire discourse is “woven of languorous desire, of the image-repertoire, of declarations” speaks in a way that will be challenged by epistemology, or by what he cannot know about the love in relation to meaning, which is the narrative that will emerge as a story later.

BARTHES: But he who utters this discourse and shapes its episodes does not know that a book is to be made of them…

ME: Two things are happening. One is the claim that situates the beloved and the lover in the text-to-come. The text-to-come occupies the eternity of possibility. Once the book is made, the beloved and the lover occupy a material terrain, and there is a compensatory aspect to this. He says he will love you forever. He meant he would write a book about it.

The other thing happening is that hallowing of the utterance as action. The role accorded to utterance creates an interesting dialogue with J.L. Austin’s ‘speech acts’ in the margins. Although this is not what you are doing, it is what I do when reading you. This is why the margins of my Lover’s Discourse is filled with speech bubbles. Perhaps no striptease declares itself as explicitly as the comic strip.

4

To be engulfed feels presumptive; it courts a certain notion of solidity and separate selfhood that exists in relation to not-feeling surrounded. a certain destructive relationship with desire—and to be failed by love if the pitch doesn’t reach a level that requires succumbing.

I hear suck my thumb, numbing, and dumbing in this succumbing. I visualize the mysterious succubus.

And all this —- “this” being a digression from the things I owe the world, the words I am supposed to be writing—began, really, with the moment I realized what you had done to futility.

[The work Barthes demands of "sometimes" here ... not to mention the way he makes the parentheses work against themselves. Would the futility be as poignant without those visual hands cupping the word? He *arrests* us with it.]

5

What was it that you said in The Preparation of the Novel?

The part where you asked the question you have always avoided, and then distracted yourself from answering it:

“What do I believe in?”

Wanting to write is to be suddenly and violently confronted with that question from the outset, and that sudden violence is a trial you have to overcome.

Slap me with your ought, Barthes.

Look: I cannot.

Polyphony and counterpoint in Edward Said's legacy.

1

A leukemia diagnosis (and a lifelong fascination with Proust) motivated Edward Said to begin writing his memoir, Out of Place. The book embodies the self-spectating gaze of exile to articulate the critical division between the Edward he performs and the Edward who studies the performance.

In childhood, Said studied his father’s refusal to express emotion alongside his mother’s disdain for physical touch as a means of comforting her children. From these two inhibitions, he became aware of his own “sensitivity”, a hyperawareness that he monitored like a vulture preying on its carcass. Mired by shame, the young Edward feared the public disgrace of being legible in his feelings. It was the possibility of being recognized by others as an Edward that felt foreign to him, a possibility that materialized in the power of teachers and peers to write the foreign, the weird, the unusual, the less comprehensible:

2

"Princeton in the fifties was unpolitical, self-satisfied, and oblivious.” It prepared Said to be a manager of elite machines—- and he knew this. He resented the facility of the superficial gestures that kept American appearances intact. He loathed and feared the aura of complacency, which might explain why he found it difficult to make friends at Princeton. “I felt that there was no depth, no ease, to the Americans, only the surface jokiness and anecdotal high spirits of teammates, which never satisfied me,” Said wrote. Uneasiness inflected his bilingual existence:

There was always the feeling that what I missed with my American contemporaries was other languages, Arabic mainly, in which I lived and thought and felt along with English. They seemed less emotional, with little interest in articulating their attitudes and reactions. This was the extraordinary homogenizing power of American life, in which the same TV, clothes, ideological uniformity, in films, newspapers, comics, etc., seemed to limit the complex intercourse of daily life to an unreflective minimum in which memory has no role.

“Immersion in reading and writing was the only antidote to Princeton's poisonous social atmosphere,” he wrote of Princeton’s fraternity-boy feel:

Like Walker Percy’s alien anthropologist, Said conducted a close reading of the environment in which he had been placed, and found only two professors who inspired him to think critically, the first of which was literary critic R. P. Blackmur. What Said loved about Blackmur is what he would come to celebrate in his formulations of the “amateur” critic. Lacking a doctorate or “even a high school diploma,” Blackmur had become an English professor, at Princeton. “A lonely, difficult-to-follow writer and lecturer, whose sheer genius in uncovering layer after layer of meaning in modern poetry and fiction (despite his gnarled and frequently incomprehensible language),” Blackmur, to Said, was “utterly challenging.” And the challenge is precisely what Said craved:

[Blackmur’s] example for me opened the secret delight of interpretation as something more than paraphrase or explanation. I never took a course with him or met him, but apart from reading him avidly I intermittently used to go to his lectures on poetics and modern fiction. He was one of the two readers of my senior thesis on André Gide and Graham Greene, a tortured affair …

The “other figure of distinction” was Professor of Philosophy Arthur Szathmary: “a spritely, energetic little figure who was everyone's gadfly, whether student, colleague, or great writer.” To the jaded students and “disaffected outsiders,” Said says that “Szathmary came to represent, and even embody, the intellectual life”:

He was intensely skeptical, asked irreverent questions, and generally made one feel that the accurate articulation of objections and flaws were activities of the highest order. There was nothing of the Princeton "tweedy" ethos about him or anything that suggested careerism and worldly success.


3

"Manipulated seriality is the heart of fascist politics", Jairus Banaji wrote in "Trajectories of Fascism: Extreme-Right Movements in India and Elsewhere" (2013). Banaji predicted Modi could function as a figurehead around which to build a cult of national greatness, a cult complicated by the polyvocality of Hinduism that doesn't automatically privilege a male god. [Note also a lack of "political culture" willing to do battle against burgeoning national greatness mythos on the left.]

“At the heart of fascist politics lies a manipulated seriality”: a refrain that continues touching the world, a leitmotif that exile admonishes against and often, unintentionally, prevents. By virtue of never belonging, one is given to know that belonging is illusory, a temporal construction that cannot persist across time in a globalized world. But one one mourns it nonetheless. One mourns this beautiful monster named Belonging; one samples its unrealizable iconographies. This is the marrow of Svetlana Boym's theories on nostalgia, and her call for off-modern nostalgia that settles no place, that requires no drawing of boundaries or war to map it. A nostalgia that subverts the sacralized nation for the daydream: this appears in Said’s writings as well.

The gradual evolution towards religious extremism among friends and family disoriented Said. Listening to political discussions in Washington, Said found his own unsettledness:

… the inherent irreconcilability between intellectual belief and passionate loyalty to tribe, sect, and country first opened up in me, and have remained open. I have never felt the need to close the gap but have kept them apart as opposites, and have always felt the priority of intellectual, rather than national or tribal, consciousness, no matter how solitary that made one.


4

The final paragraph of Said’s memoir also locates his life and mind in this contrapuntal motion:

Although Said never really goes after the therapy industry or takes the pedagogies of self-esteem to task, his criticism continuously challenged the “solid self” reaches toward certainty. Like the nation-state or the Virgin Mary, the solid self is a fragile construction that lives on the defensive. The solid self (again, like the ethno-state) invents new rules and boundaries that prevent it from being violated by reality.

Edward Said knew that the price of purity was an immaculate, fossilized stupidity, an ignorance so solid that not even millions of tons of bombs dropped on innocent children could move it.

"The Music Itself: Glenn Gould's Contrapuntal Vision" by Edward Said (PDF)

"Glenn Gould, the Virtuous as Intellectual" by Edward Said (PDF)

Mark Sandman and his "Super Sex" tritar.

“Super Sex” comes from Morphine’s 1995 album, Yes. Alongside his usual baritone vocals, Sandman played 2-string slide bass, piano, Chamberlin, tritar, and electric guitar on Yes—-and “Super Sex” is the song where Sandman happens to play the Chamberlin as well as the tritar.

There’s a brief flash to Dana Colley playing the alto and tenor saxophone simultaneously in the video.

Dana Colley playing double sax.

Morphine’s album, The Night, was posthumously released by Sandman's bandmates after his passing. On that note, Jean-Luc Nancy wrote something that holds my attention in The Fragile Skin of the World. I leave it here for future reckoning: “The idea of an authentic man or an authentic life can only be spoken of from a point of view that is neither human nor living, which is precisely what we lack. It is impossible for us to decide in favor of an authenticity whose content is not indicated to us.”

"I made him promise he'd piss on my grave," said Edmund White.

 

“I made him promise he'd piss on my grave,” Edmund White wrote of the lover who broke his heart.

The week bumped over the hump that was Tom Waits’ birthday, and certainly the lyric “Who are you this time?” came to mind as I let Edmund White’s memoir, My Lives, devour me.

The conceit of White’s “lives” is that he inventories them.

If the table of contents enumerates the ten lives that Edmund White lived, the text refuses any assumption that these lives are separate from the one he is living as he writes about the Others, as he welcomes his Others into the fold of selfhood.

Oddly, like the writers associated with New Narrative, White wants to reclaim “realism” rather than abandon it.

He wants a shift in how we describe “reality”.

Ideally, maybe really, such a shift shift would enable us to acknowledge the way reality differs from our discursive approaches to representation.

I made him promise he’d piss on my grave seems like the perfect vow to exchange with a human one has loved when leaving. It is an alternative eternity, an intimate and forbidden homage, a vow closer to standing outside time than trying to tame it.

“This is realism, I thought with grim satisfaction.”

Identifying as a “mystical atheist,” White recounts the spiritual seeking of his adolescence (encouraged by vaguely Christian Scientist mother). Already, he holds realism in high regard as the measure of value.

I'd gone every afternoon for weeks to the neo-Gothic library at Northwestern to read Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East. I'd dipped into the Torah, the Koran and the Upanishads. But Id been gripped by the Buddhist sutras. No matter how pessimistic I might become, I could never begin to approach the extent of Gotama's nihilism. He saw the self as an illusion, desire as the root of all evil, rebirth as the worst of fates and extinction as the only goal. In this world the most and the least one could expect was sickness, old age and death. Whereas the Hindus posited an irreducible soul, the atman, the Buddha preached the doctrine of 'no soul,' anatta. In an unpeopled universe full of nothing but illusion and suffering, not a single entity existed, certainly no deity.

This is realism, I thought with grim satisfaction. No interceding ranks of angels, no accountancy of sins and good deeds, no heaven nor hell, no nosy-parkering into other people's bedroom hijinks. The opposite of hateful, intolerant Christianity.

And all is divine until White and his mother get to the Chicago Buddhist Church in a rundown South Side neighborhood nearly thirty miles away. There, in that Church, they “encountered a group of smiling, waving Japanese men, women and children worshiping Amida, the Lord of the Western Paradise, a personage very much like a Catholic saint.”

He was a bodhisattva in the (to my eyes at least) 'degraded' form of Mahayana Buddhism, someone pledged to stave off the horrors of rebirth and the bleak solitude of nirvana by spiriting his followers away to a paradise where they could struggle toward enlightenment in comfort and in the busy, bustling society of likeminded souls.

“I was bitterly disappointed - by the organ and hymns that sounded suspiciously Methodist, by the flutter of arriving parishioners in big hats exchanging kisses, by the depressingly secular announcements of upcoming bingo games and covered dish suppers,” White says. Bitterly disappointed, he fled the scene.

Disappointment being the gap between what one expects and what is delivered, White inventories his losses:

Where I'd expected a bald abbot stony with meditation, a trickle of sandalwood smoke and a superb indifference to all forms of striving, I'd found a congregation of ordinary folks besotted in the ordinary way with the little pains and little rewards of everyday life.

'I thought it was nice, Mother said, puzzled by my contempt.

You liked it because it was just like some dismal Christian service,' I said nastily.

Contempt, nastiness, spiritual disappointment, aesthetic disaster: the affective expressions clamber over the material disenchantment in White’s telling.

“Even these humiliating occasions when I was robbed could be used as material. Life was a field trip. My writing would turn all this evil into flowers.”

White writes his hustlers gorgeously, engorgedly, edging close to the realism of New Narrative. 

“I was always reading novels, and I knowingly chuckled when a character was described as 'foolish' or 'naïve' but here I was: I was naive, I was foolish, which until this moment I'd never suspected,” he acknowledges, before pivoting to muse on craft:

The reader considers himself to be all-knowing, superior, but now I had to push this conventional flattery aside and recognize that cleverness is not a question of perspective but of accumulated experience in the world. I was slowly putting together my own fund of lived worldliness, more modest but more real than the reader's omniscience.

I was duped again in Cincinnati that summer when I was eighteen. I gave a hustler forty dollars to buy us both one-way Greyhound bus tickets to New York. Our plan was to meet on the corner near my father's new house in Watch Hill, an area of big estates and no sidewalks where any pedestrian, especially a teenage boy with a suitcase, would have attracted attention if anyone had been awake and driving past. I spent a sleepless night imagining how I'd become a blond with the bottle of peroxide I'd put in my bag; I'd be so transformed that my father would never be able to find me, neither he nor his private detectives. Kay, my stepmother, would go to awaken me and find my room empty. No note. A missing suitcase. A drained tub and a wisp of winking foam from my dawn bubble bath.

The guy never came. The hot, steamy Cincinnati sun rose and became more intense, like an alcohol lab burner concentrating and flaming whiter and whiter. I felt so foolish. I was grateful I hadn't already dyed my hair. Then for a second I'd become hopeful again and imagine he'd been held up and would appear in another minute or two if I would just be patient. Then I would remember how uninterested he'd been in the directions to this exact corner - at the time I'd thought it was proof of his quickness that he'd been able to grasp the baffling directions so easily. At last it came to me with pitiless clarity that he was a con man. He'd conned me. He'd tolen wow money and run. How he must have laughed at my naivety. When I saw him on the Square, a few nights later, he waved merrily.

One could learn about life from literature - one could learn to spot a confidence man - but only if one woke up from the smug, dreamlike superiority of the reader, which blinded one to the actual slippery manifestations of vice and dishonesty in the shadowy world of reality. In the novel, at least the reassuring nineteenth-century novel, one was always privy to everyone's well-lit motives and alerted to even the first sign of corruption. But in life - how could one navigate in an unnarrated world? Of course I was always narrating my life to myself but unfortunately I had no access to the private thoughts of the other characters around me. Even my own mind was too prolific to be comprehensible. It was certainly true that I was fashioning the book of my life at all times, trying out sentences, sketching out plot lines, hoarding impressions, restaging the scenes I'd just lived through. I'd already written and typed two novels in boarding school, one about me and the other (my senior thesis) about my mother or some more driven version of my mother to whom I attributed my own sexual obsessions. At every moment convinced myself that I was gathering material for the novel of my life - all experienced from the philosophical distance of the author.

Yes, White confirms: “Even these humiliating occasions when I was robbed could be used as material.”

For: “Life was a field trip. My writing would turn all this evil into flowers.”

And his “sexual obsessions” were not merely obsessive; they also partook of curiosity. “All these encounters with hustlers were as much an expression of fear as of desire, and above all they were animated by curiosity,” he writes. It is a feast, a communion, a religion to replace the failed spiritualities:

I was swallowing the sperm of strangers and this feast convinced me I was possessing all these men. I was like one of those nearly insane saints who must take communion several times a day, who are driven by a desire to eat the body and drink the blood of a long-dead historical human being. That man may also have been a god, but the saint longs for the pulse and crunch of a thirty-three-year-old Jew nailed to crossed boards. In the same way I had this permanent, gnawing hunger for all these street-corner Hanks or Orvilles, for their penises fat or thin, crooked or straight, eager or reluctant.

Impossible not to think of Robert Gluck’s descriptions of cruising the bath-houses here. Hopefully that Gluck review will get published soon, but who knows?

“My Roberto (my hustler and my character) was quiveringly and richly fleshed, his smile soft and unfocused, his body instinct with laughter.”

His first muse was a hustler who went by the name Roberto:

The room was big and clean and the wide window looked out on the square below, and afforded enough illumination so that we didn't need to turn on the overhead light. In the half-darkness his white shirt glowed. He let me unbutton it as we kissed. As soon as we began to touch, Roberto had the sort of gleeful, complicitous smile that says, "Look how wicked we're being." Never before had associated irony with sex between men. For a moment I even suspected that Roberto might be gay or bisexual and surprisingly! still found him attractive. He held my naked body against his and quaked with silent laughter, then moved without transition into long, languorous kisses, letting his eyes rise and wander along the line between the ceiling and the wall.

Roberto's white shirt and tanned skin, his compact body with the sensual ass, his sense of irony and romantic air - all these properties came together to inspire me. That fall I wrote a novel about him while I was in my junior year at the University of Michigan. Like many novels by young people it was derived more from my reading than from my experience, but the character of the younger brother 'Roberto' was based on my very own Lafcadio, my own Tancredi, my own Felix Krull, my own Fabrizio. I had in mind a synthesis of all these gallant young men from Continental literature, plucky characters who had as strong a sense of personal style as my hustler, who were as romantic and long-lashed as a silent movie star and as streetwise as a Neapolitan shoeshine boy.

My Roberto (my hustler and my character) was quiveringly and richly fleshed, his smile soft and unfocused, his body instinct with laughter. I knew almost nothing about him but I could keep returning to my memory of having held him in my arms for a moment, and having rented an hour of his time and leased on short term the use of his torso and hips and lightly downed legs and tan arms flung back to reveal his soft, creased, axial paleness. I liked the notion behind the English term rent boy more than our hustler, since the American word suggested something dishonest and on the make.

Roberto was my first male muse, a mental snapshot I worked up into a full-dress portrait in oil. I wanted to recapture that moment I bought and present him with a portrait in words. I wanted to convey to the reader as well my fascination with the boy. I was like Caravaggio, who paints in a saint's halo behind the curly head of a street urchin with a farmer's tan and a cynical smile. In my novel an older, richer, blonder brother hires a darker, smaller kid - and discovers they are half-brothers, the offspring of the same father but of different mothers, one fair and legitimate, the other an Italian mistress.

That the book, itself, did not rise to the level of Roberto’s mystique doesn’t matter. In the novel White calls his “failed fantasy,” the fact that the narrator’s first encounter with Roberto was commerical didn’t prevent it from being rapidly “elevated to brotherhood and, finally, impossibly, to an almost marital love.”

“The title of the book was The Amorous History of Our Youth, a pedantic fusion of Lermontov's Byronic parody, A Hero of Our Times, and of The Amorous History of the Gauls, a seventeenth-century satire of the court by Roger de Rabutin, Count de Bussy, which caused this sharp-tongued cousin of Madame de Sévigné to be banished to his comely little château in Burgundy,” White confesses in that wry (and very precise) whisper that gives away the snob.

“The most poignant moment in Lady Chatterley's Lover occurs when, unannounced, her ladyship visits the gamekeeper's cottage and sees him, all unawares, washing himself in an outdoor shower.”

Like a lover worthy of his novel, White looked for Roberto on the streets the following summer—-and every other time he wound up in Chicago—but he never found him again. All that remains of Roberto is the whiff of a hot ghost in White’s convoluted, breathless, Brodkey-tuned sentence structure: “Pedantry, satire, literary ostentation, an irritating lack of sincerity - none of these faults could conceal from my eye, at least, that I was quite humbly and gratefully in love with an Italian boy I had met once who had a strangely low and almost strangled way of whispering his words into the big ear of a bespectacled American geek, his awestruck client.”

Roberto’s “awestruck client” quickly pivots into one of the self-lacerating statements that characterize his essays when White adds, “If in my novel inappropriate emotions kept firing off, all these missteps just revealed how inadequate I was to the occasion.”

True to life, true to literature, White admits the men he picked up on Times Square weren’t quite sublime. Nor were the tricks erotic. The reality lacked the heat of his fantasies because “some of these boys were too perfect”:

I liked a flaw, a wound, which acted as an opening to the communion of shared humanity. For instance, a guy named Hal lived upstairs from me and sometimes he'd drop by for sex. He had a badly mended harelip which made his taut, muscled torso and hairy chest and pale, narrow loins seem vulnerable, touching.

The most poignant moment in Lady Chatterley's Lover occurs when, unannounced, her ladyship visits the gamekeeper's cottage and sees him, all unawares, washing himself in an outdoor shower. She glances at his white, narrow hips and his thin back and he never realizes she is there. His back, so pale and thin, is wholly male and vulnerable. If, instead, a big blond showboat, perfect with a blinding smile, an ever-ready penis, came bounding up my steps, his very perfection made me feel somehow . .. orphaned.

“Young and attractive," in his thirties, White frequented the gym thrice a week, hoping to make a good impression on the johns. But the johns had other affinities, which the author analogizes to figures in a passion play or religious iconography:

That “suitable vague” St. Theresa: abject.


“Now, I'd say to myself, I'm going to write a good page.”

While employed by NYU’s New York Institute for the Humanities, White sat in a windowless cubicle and attempted to write his “novel, A Boy's Own Story, fighting the anxiety I usually felt when I wrote.” He details the writing process, the craft, if you will:

The heat and my hangover tempted me to put my head down on my desk and fall asleep. I was so sleepy I would write portmanteau words, which collapsed the syllables of two or three words I'd already sounded in my head. I even started to spell phonetically. My clothes would stick to me. I'd sigh and shift in my chair from one side to the other. One more trip to the water cooler. I'd come back and read through my latest pages and make microscopic changes. I'd sprawl on my desk. Then I'd get fed up with myself, sit up straight, as tall as possible in the chair, and I'd hold my pen as if it were a scalpel. Now, I'd say to myself, I'm going to write a good page. Usually my head was so fuzzy with the morning-after effects of wine and marijuana that I was pleased if I could form real sentences, nothing more.

"I would be horny, if that meant lonely, and anxious to such a degree that only sex could lift me out of this mire with enough immediacy and absoluteness," White says of the intervals between thinking, imagining, and writing.


“ . . . I had no notion that some people were more popular than others, much less that there were acquirable techniques to insure popularity.”

Adolescence introduced him to social scripts and revealed the strange theatre of American dating and gender performance to White. “In that paradise before I bit into the apple of social awareness, I had no idea that one could be ingratiating, seductive or even more or less likable,” he writes. He lacks the MBA techniques that teach humans how to fashion life.

I hadn't yet learned to ask flattering questions, to lead people out, to express sympathy for their pain and encouragement for their pleasures, to exonerate their failings as 'normal and declare their modest successes to be triumphs.? I am sure I was a nice enough guy and even projected a low wattage charm, but whatever glow I gave off was just the crumbling half-life of my sluggish existence. In the same way that I had no idea what I looked like and managed to stumble around ill-shod, badly dressed, unkempt and often dirty, I had no notion that some people were more popular than others, much less that there were acquirable techniques to insure popularity. Boys and girls alike were for me something like human furniture filling up rooms and corridors, as featureless as the real furniture we lived among. Just as we didn't notice the faded flowered slipcovers on sagging couches or the armchairs on which the green plush was worn down in browning patches, so we didn't see this kid or that as magnetic or repulsive. To be sure, I did fall under the physical spell of a Buster or Howie or Cam, but it seemed like a miracle if one of them liked me back.

“It never occurred to me that friendship was biddable,” White concludes.


“We revered Brecht, not Marx; Mayakovsky, not Lenin; Lotte Lenya, not La Pasionaria; both Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman; Elizabeth Taylor the actress and Elizabeth Taylor the reserved English novelist.”

He recollects the tanginess of his early New York friendships. “We arty types, especially the theater queens, were in the middle room, as if we were the intermediate sex,” White writes:

We were neither scrubbed and perky like the Greeks, nor alienated and uncombed like the Beats. We drank but didn't smoke pot, we had nothing resembling a credo beyond a faith in the permanent avant-garde. We revered Brecht, not Marx; Mayakovsky, not Lenin; Lotte Lenya, not La Pasionaria; both Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman; Elizabeth Taylor the actress and Elizabeth Taylor the reserved English novelist. Ten years later and the idea of High Culture would begin to crumble, battered by the American cult of success and the distinction-dissolving ironies of Pop Art. But in the late fifties we still believed in honorable poverty. We still thought that beauty should be difficult, that incomprehension was a first necessary step toward initiation and that time would determine irrefutably which of our current artistic developments had been the one, the only, the inevitable next one.


“I wanted to immerse myself in him, just him, his ideal essence, just as a tomb sculpture in Renaissance France always shows its subject at an ideal age, thirty-three…”

Recollecting his adoration of Stan during his senior year in college, White describes his singular project as "Stanley, seeing Stan, courting him.” For love keeps us riveted, busy, anticipatory.  “Love gives us something to do,” he writes. “It ties our days together, as if a composer had linked all the elements of the score with lightly curving legato marks, swooping from note to note like telephone wires.”

The image of Stan dressed in white on that stage never leaves White's imagination. Stan remains in that "slow-paced, deeply internal performance," animated by his own mesmerization, "as if he were slowly fermenting his own essence and getting drunk on it."

I, too, felt a bit drunk upon reading White’s tomb-analogy, burying my brain in this possibility of memory as a formal gesture that entombs while also provides the image for the iconography. “I didn't want him to be someone else, to impersonate a character,” White says of his Stan on the stage, “I wanted to immerse myself in him, just him, his ideal essence, just as a tomb sculpture in Renaissance France always shows its subject at an ideal age, thirty-three, and whether the subject died much older or younger, he must be presented as he will appear in his perfect form at the Resurrection.”


“You should hold my hand and go through this with me.”

One of his masters was also the man who broke his heart. Like the BDSM wired into their relationship, the breakup leaves White in the masochistic position. He has never felt so powerless. He weeps in his university office. He tells other professors that he doesn’t know if he can get over this. Eventually, he meets up with T, the lover, again:

It was April 12, 2004. He had on my favorite cerulean blue T-shirt. We sat knee to knee and ate beside the bar. The waiter was so solicitous, I could almost say tender, that I felt he knew this was a reconciliation. I told T Pat sarted seeing a middle-class shrink who was 'sure" T must have fet degraded and objectified' by being paid.

T: I didn't mind being paid for something I wanted to do, that was hot, earning money like a hustler, but then when I stopped wanting to do it, I resented the money."

T: I knew I wanted you to fall in love with me because I wanted to be part of your life. And, admit it, if I hadn't slept with you, you never would have thought about me twice.'

T said: 'I didn't want to feel I had to go to bed with you just to please you. That's too much like when I was a kid with my mother. I felt that if I didn't please her my whole life would fall apart and I'd lose everything. I don't want to have sex or do anything just to please someone else.'

In dialogue with T, White gives offers himself as abject, feminized self —- apologetic (I said I was sorry I was being so neurotic, crying all the time and plaguing him with my neediness.); cautious and ego-affirming (Well, the good thing is how we're talking.); critical; wounded (I noticed that my love for him had gone from being "flattering to 'a pain in the ass.'); wistful and unrealistic (I wondered if people still fell in love this way, my way. ); comparative; prone to self-diagnosis (Was it a period piece, my love for I, something akin to Sarah Bernhardt's wooden leg?); redemptive (We never talked about this honestly before, not when we were having sex); looking for a route back into a relationship ('It's like you're so strong, such a bully, you can just say matter-of-factly, "No, we won't ever have sex again" - you can say that and I nod, then I go home and suffer and why should I suffer all alone?); indignant; pathetic; (You should hold my hand and go through this with me.); bossy; controlling; pathetic; crumbly; on the edge of a stool that keeps tipping towards tears.

White envies his students who “bumped shoulders, wore each other's clothes, slept in the same bed for weeks without having sex until one drunken night it half-happened, then the next morning it took place fully.” Their casual fatalism had its own momentum: “they drifted away, cried a bit, hooked up one more time and it was over.” A brisk genre. A formal figuration vastly superior to his own “art nouveau passion.”


"Yes," he said, "that's what I believe."

“I had a small but faithful readership, and I had always placed the overall longevity of my talent, such as it was, above the success of any one book,” White says, locating himself among the minor writers.

Reflecting on the value of his own books and the question of whether he will be read, his compares his belief in the “readers in the future” to an “act of blind faith.” [“Of course people would always read things (captions, e-mails), but would they want to read long imaginative or confessional works written by writers in the past, even the recent past?”]

Following this question further, White inadvertently speaks to what it means to "be read", or how the writer approaches the imagined interlocutor by recollecting an interview with “a trendy English critic.” This critic loathed Jean Genet's novels. White’s love for Genet finally wrenched him out politeness.

"Let me get this straight,” White said to the critic, “Do you think works of art wear out? That one generation can't read the books of an earlier one? That Shakespeare has nothing to tell us now?" 

The dialogue continued:

"Yes," he said, "that's what I believe."

Suddenly all the pretensions of 'universal and 'eternal' art were called into question. I, who'd long since doubted that a 'canon' of white European male books should be read and studied by everyone, was now being asked to frame a more radical question about the relevance of a work by one generation to the next. We still hailed writers for being as original and profound and lasting as Hemingway or Flaubert, but maybe it was an empty rhetorical gesture. Maybe even libraries had a short shelf life.

No matter. I thought you, the reader of the future, the solitary twenty-year-old in Kansas, might be able to hear my voice, scratchy and bleating as it may be, as we can still hear Caruso's. Like Walt Whitman I want to excite at least one young man not yet born; the kid in Singapore or Salt Lake City who gets an erection at the thought of humiliating his teacher.

Is fiction necessary, etc . . .

The first page of Epstein’s “Is Fiction Necessary?”

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"Is Fiction Necessary?" asked critic Joseph Epstein in an essay devoted to lamenting "the strains of literary puerilism" infecting American literature. Epstein hated the fragments, the roman-a-clef is "just an autobiography trying to escape libel laws." He hated how Iowa "ruined" Vance Bourjoily. He detested the absence of point of view, novels that run on stories without "the weight of destiny" and all the modernisms written for the "permanently ageless… who will go to their graves in denim and sideburns, eternally youthful in mind if desiccated in body." 

Epstein wanted solubility— a novel with a strong arc and resolution, arousing foreplay that resulted in climax. Like many, Epstein wanted the experience of heteronormative sex from a novel.

Certainly, sexual frustration isn’t the critic’s whole story. Part of Epstein's “unnecessary fiction” fury can be traced to the blurring of genre distinctions. It is easier to critique a novel on the merits you were taught, and the merits you are teaching seem floppy when presented with literature that isn’t interested in them.

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Eugenio Montale compared the practice of literature to carving a secret amulet in order to placate the world and the gods of darkness. John Gardner (who died in a motorcycle accident) lamented the US literary scene's immaturity, and added that it was useless to keep on pretending the game wasn't a "killer's baseball." Harold Brodkey said anyone who "spent his life working to become eligible for literary immortality is a fool." — And yet, that's precisely what Brodkey did.

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"You never know if you will survive a piece of fiction," Harold Brodkey said, of the danger of writing and touching unbearable, sordid things. Perhaps we read poetry openly, defenses down, because poets are baring themselves on the page, in line with cultural expectations that the poet is one who over-feels things. Perhaps we enter their over-feeling in order to feel relief from our own. On this view, fiction’s difference is related to the reader’s expectations; we come to it with a suspiciousness, a need to be convinced. The fiction writer has to overcome this reticence on the part of the reader (less so in popular, mass-market fiction).

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Across the board, whether in fiction, poetry, or talk-shows, we demand miracles from “empathy.” The buy-in is tempting. Certainly, I wanted to believe friends would relinquish their commitment to judging mothers when they, too, became mothers. But more than half those friends greeted new motherhood with an upgraded, uber-muscular judgment. The mommy wars raged through recipes, extracurriculars, and wine clubs. The mommy wars chased outrage through the hi-drama of their own stupidity.

Yes, I used the word stupidity (utter stupidity, I should have hissed).

Yes, I’m talking about your ‘women.’

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Verisimilitude is touted as the secret ingredient to the magical power of literature to “create empathy” in the reader. But US crime shows have not made Americans more spiritually or emotionally generous—we are more paranoid, more exhausted, more afraid, more conversant with violence and weapons, more invested in intellectual crime solving as salvation and for our protection. To believe one could predict and therefore avoid one’s rape is a statement of control, not a fact about the world. In this case, a delusion is a belief that grabs the past by its balls and pretends it was otherwise.  

[Lo and behold, there I am on a screen: telling audiences, students, friends, strangers, that literature teaches us how to feel for others by imagining them. There I am, lying like my dog Radu in late capitalism.]

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How many times has the functional definition of empathy applied to what I believe my writing should be doing? At what point did I begin to believe I had the power to do this? In which instant did I anoint myself with this ‘mission’? How did doing good come to be conflated with the creation of products intended to stimulate empathy in others, as buttressed by the expectation that others would apply what they had learned from art-products in order to make the world a better place?

Elvia Wilk has written about how neoliberal philanthropy instrumentalizes compassion as "a lever to pull for spare change.” When individuals are emotionally taxed for systemic change, capitalist realism laughs.

"The system of empathy-incentivized giving perpetuates itself by creating the world in which it is necessary,” Wilks writes. And she is not lying.

Neoliberal discourse continuously invokes the power of "empathy transplant" as a solution to social problems. Those who labor as writers, artists, or designers are expected to “trigger” empathy. If we have done a good job of "triggering empathy," consumers will say the book changed their lives.

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Like other Gen X’ers, I watched Sally Jesse Raphael's “Save the Children” ad featuring the famished bodies of Ethiopian children alongside her sad, Hollywood-tweaked countenance. I remember top pop musicians linking arms to sing "we are the world” across the screens of my teens. My generation was raised on the images of distant suffering experienced by “others.” These images did not prevent the rise of committed xenophobia and racist political platforms eager to keep “others” out.

One might even argue that Americans cannot stand seeing suffering—they feel it as a personal violation of their Thanksgiving turkey-massacres. One might argue, for example, that we pay therapists to help us create “boundaries” against the suffering of others, and these boundaries are instrumental in fashioning new markets for exclusion, new weapons for protection, new lists of ‘trauma-prevention’ strategies that double as superstitions.

Every image of suffering is deployed doubly, and thrown back against those depicted as a form of “weakness” or failure. Antiabortion activists assail communities with the images of terminated fetuses. They call it ‘murde’r and then put the photo of murder on a T-shirt in order to demonstrate their sensitivity, or their heart for, unborn life. But it is gruesome really, this “heart for unborn life.” It is as gruesome as the countless boundaries we’ve erected in order to protect the lies from which we fashion our own victimhood.

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“Suspicion” is the belief that one is being lied to or secretly manipulated. The suspicious demand physical evidence and photographs of the gang rape. The demand to see in order to believe is generated, nourished, and developed daily by media.

"The empathy machine…works insofar as it is a trauma machine," Wilk writes. Virtual reality aims to cure trauma through exposure and desensitization. Rather than integrating trauma into life, virtual reality sets it apart and focuses on its eradication. 

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My friend told me the hardest part of the Iraq war was the video games he had to play back in the US, as part of his training, prior to being sent abroad. The desensitization to shooting, and the continuous game of it. "Something in me broke,” he said. "I can't talk about killing or what it means—all of that feels so surreal to me."

The words surreal comes up again and I am thinking about tripping.

“It’s comforting for me to play those games,” my friend adds. “It’s the closet I can come to feeling innocent again, or remembering a self before any of it was real.”

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Not everyone who drinks will become an alcoholic. Not everyone who plays intense first person shooter games will lose the connection between reality and fantasy and become desensitized to human lives. But some will. Some will become alcoholics. Some will become addicted to violence and endorphins. Some will become mass shooters. Some will become better soldiers. Perhaps we waffle on acknowledging this because we want to protect our own access to pleasurable diversion. One suspects we already know the blatantly obvious, namely, the alcoholic abuse and video game abuse are stories of relationships, stories about time, frequency, duration, and investment. Someone who drinks on Saturdays (like someone who games on Saturdays) doesn't have the time to develop an unhealthy relationship with their entertainment. Even if Saturdays are desensitized, six other days of the week draw them back into life among feeling persons, among the suffering and reality.

Yes, I suggested that playing video games is not comparable to the difficult banality of caring for living, breathing humans with complicated needs in a culture that monetizes demands. No, I did not make an argument capable of proving this.

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I’m drawn to how Elvia Wilk outlines the grotesque "relationship between individual suffering and the systems that create it – between the personal story and the statistic." Empathy isn't a crowd behavior, it is an internal feeling that varies across minds, cultures, genders and languages. The “identifiable victim effect” demonstrates that people are more likely to help others when they have a face and a name, but the face and the name also matter. People are more likely to donate money to someone who looks like them or meets their aesthetic standards of attractiveness.

When people use the phrase “Pain Olympics”, I think of the word pageant, that noun for the competition of peacockery in which the most charismatic and beautiful human “wins”. Neoliberalism assumes people will do good if they see the light, get wild, or have a transformational event. There are multiple industries, workshops, retreats, consultants, modules which can lead to those transformational events if one has enough money to afford the transaction. But how much pixelated suffering does it take to create a feeling that leads to action?

Once again, we return to the trauma machine, the goal of causing hurt in order to make others feel ethically. Susan Sontag wrote about this, her writings on pain flatten talk about how pain flattens and ruins humans. I'll abstracted pain create a sort of attic aesthetic of misery in which the view were takes all the experiences of child abuse to be mirrored in that one iconic celebrity image. "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle," Sontag writes, "universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, when use has been converted into entertainment."

Granted, she wrote this before it major news venues like Fox and CNN officially became infotainment.

"There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television,” Sontag snaps, “They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.”


On Nigerian English.

This beautiful poem by Hussain Ahmed.

1

“I speak Nigerian English,” Romeo said nonchalantly, on the first cold day of this year.

We were on a college campus in Kansas. The door to our left had a sign reading no guns or smoking on campus. We stood next to it and smoked cigarettes in the rain.

Although I heard Romeo’s comment, I’m not sure I understood it until several months later, when Romeo, Hussain, and I stood on a college campus in Mississippi and prepared to enter a building for a panel. The reading series was titled “Othered”, and I wasn’t sure how my own experiences as a white, Eastern European immigrant fit into the conversation.

At one point, Romeo and Hussain switched from American into Nigerian English, their voices softening. The language passed like a jazz brush warmly between them.

I didn’t understand a single word of it. But it sounded like home.


2

Inside the building, we read poems — Saddiq introduced a conversation with Nietzsche that remains in my head; Hussain invoked the sacred and the poetics of speaking into ancestry; both provoked interiority and thoughtfulness— I don’t remember what I read. Then we sat on the stage for a conversation led by the brilliant Olufunke Ogundimu, and I struggled to balance the self who writes with the self who would rather disappear. Public conversations always involve this tension, this struggle between the ebullient Alina and the Alina who feels most herself in a notebook, thinking about what others are saying while disappearing into text.

At one point, Saddiq spoke about Islam and his own relationship to Arabic, which he acknowledged as a “colonial language.” He spoke about the Nigerian self that exists between histories of colonization and erasures of distinction. He gestured towards hybridity as it means of remaining whole, or fashioning a livable self that can link the experience of being a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American professor.

Smiling, shaking his head, Saddiq recounted having been in Walmart when he learned that a niece had been born back home in Nigeria. He was walking between aisles and congratulating his family on the new baby. “Allahu Akbar!”, he exclaimed. “God is the greatest.” “What a blessing.” “God is good.” These are the phrases that people of faith often use when something tremendous is granted. And a baby is something tremendous anywhere in the world.

Suddenly, the space in Wal-Mart grew quieter. Saddiq noticed a white man staring at him, a gun strapped to his hip.

This moment—the moment when one looks up from the world of one’s first language and family to perceives the self as written by American scripts, as read by their limited stereotypes, as displaced by their wary eyes—is resonant. I mean: the world rumbles a bit around you.

The poet steps back to survey the self and make it friendly to the man with a gun.

The writer straddles the space between selves.

The immigrant begins the long process of translation that marks the apology for the homeland self, the “other” one is to beloveds.

The fear of being misunderstood exists in relation to the knowledge of violence; the quickness with which misunderstanding escalates into a threat for the American who loves to order his favorite Mexican food in Spanish but cannot stand a language that does not exist to him.

I don’t have words for how the shape of a room collapses when you realize that you are the danger. And how frightening it is— how terrifying— to discover that you are most threatening when you exist as yourself, in that mouth between languages, in the faith and culture that formed you.


3

That night, we went out to dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant. The writers moved between American and Nigerian English, or Nigerian Pidgin. Saddiq’s young daughter moved between laps and doodled on paper as the adults spoke. She smiled to herself and named her drawings. I was enchanted by her sweetness. Again, there was this strange sensation of feeling at home in a foreign language, or feeling safe in this space where the voices rose and fell in Pidgin, and the faces loosened as their bodies took on the intonation and gestures.

Were they recognizing themselves in it?

It felt as if I was being permitted to recognize them more completely, more fully, aware of what belonged to them—-what existed that remained unknowable—but grateful to see them in this fullness.

There was also a sense in which a homeland was being negotiated and created over pasta, salad, wine, and water. A communion. An encounter in being present as diasporas meet one another within the syntax of their native language.

In my experience, when I (rarely) begin to speak Romanian in the same room as an American, the American immediately takes offense. Perhaps we of the US are predisposed to expect our neocolonial colonial language gets over every border, into every room, and grants us access to any conversation on the planet. Perhaps there is something of the ugly American in this expectation . . .


4

At the restaurant table, the Nigerians took up controversial issues about publication and patronage in their diaspora. They did not chit-chat. They did not practice “active listening” or engage therapeutic modalities in order to communicate. They simply argued, debated, threw up their hands, laughed, and returned to underline earlier points relentlessly. I adored them. The restaurant felt passionately intellectual and Nigerian, and the intensity less fake or performative than the plastic version of American conversational intimacy where nothing is said and everything is expected.

In 1994, Edward Said told a British audience that “the intellectual is beset and remorselessly challenged by the problem of loyalty.” Loyalty provides access to status in diasporas. “An insider” must promote national interests in public, Said continued, but the intellectuals “should be the ones to question patriotic nationalism” and challenge “corporate thinking.” By corporate thinking, Said was referring to the political We, the rhetorical We that presumes to speak for others by nature of its status and expertise.

The diasporic We is complicated. (At present, I am obsessed with Momtaza Mehri’s Bad Diaspora, a poetry collection that pushes against what we owe the We, and how loyalty is constructed across borders.) But the facility of the “me” is also complicated by the expectations of meritocracy and respectability.

I mean: Shame tiptoes into rooms wearing respectable slippers. My diaspora is very conscious of not offending Americanism. Even in Romanian groups and meetings, I’ve been admonished for leaping into Romanian to express something intimate in the language it wants to speak.

"Let’s not do that,” the woman from my diaspora said. “Speaking Romanian is rude to our guests.” Even when the room is limited to Romanians, we are performing for the absent West.

Romanian is rude. Or Romanians are ashamed to be seen wearing it out in public. Romanian stays in the closet between shoes like our dirty little secret.

Romeo Oriogun, Hussain Ahmed, and Saddiq Dzukogi.

5

To return for a moment to the intellectual part, the shameless, Said-inflected part: the commitment at the dinner table was to thinking aloud and to questioning the terms of existence as they have been given. The Nigerian writers were not attempting to prove their loyalty or fidelity to a flag. Nor were they rationalizing a government policy to soothe the ruffled feathers of American exceptionalism. No one used dinner as a staging ground for proving one’s worth to the US meritocracy.

Unlike the worry in diasporic silence, the sagacity of investigation set the tone for the table talk. The discussion occurred as if thinking through ideas came first, as if thinking, itself, was the endeavor worthy of loyalty.

These days, the US is hardly exceptional to anyone except the refugees and immigrants. We are the constituents of earning one’s place, whether visa or citizenship. Our sense of self is implicated in the “land of opportunity.” Our notions of success and value are indebted to it.

To quote Said again:

The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, ar­ticulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose rai­ son d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.

Let me put this in personal terms: as an intellectual I present my concerns before an audience or constituency, but this is not just a matter of how I articulate them, but also of what I myself, as someone who is trying to advance the cause of freedom and justice, also represent. I say or write these things because after much reflection they are what I believe; and I also want to persuade others of this view. There is therefore this quite complicated mix be­tween the private and the public worlds, my own history, values, writings and positions as they derive from my ex­periences, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how these enter into the social world where people debate and make decisions about war and freedom and justice. There is no such thing as a private intellectual, since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world. Nor is there only a public intellectual, someone who exists just as a figurehead or spokesperson or symbol of a cause, movement, or position. There is always the personal inflection and the private sensibility, and those give meaning to what is being said or written. Least of all should an intellectual be there to make his/her audiences feel good: the whole point is to be embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant.

[…] the intellectual, in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made cliches, or the smooth, ever-so-accommo­dating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public.


6

“God bless you,” the grocery store clerk said while ringing up my groceries at Piggly Wiggly today.

In Alabama, “God bless you” is like the quarter one drops in a parking meter to follow the rules of appropriate behavior. No one reaches for a gun when God comes up. Presumably, American Jesus, himself, armed the South with guns in order to prepare for his second coming.

“God bless you” is part of a language that crosses races, including Black persons as well as white ones, and makes itself known in public spaces. But to say “God bless you” in another language is to risk being seen or made visible. To be visible as a person of color speaking a foreign language is to risk being determined unintelligible.

To say God is the greatest in Arabic is to be deemed a security threat by the richest, most powerful country in the world.


7

Representations of the Intellectual by Edward Said (PDF)

“There is always the personal inflection and the private sensibility, and those give meaning to what is being said or written. Least of all should an intellectual be there to make his/her audiences feel good: the whole point is to be embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant.”

Edward Said stayed with me on the drive home from Mississippi, and I am sharing copy of his book that celebrates the “amateur” over the expert at a time when foreign policy “experts” continue to sell us violence and war rather than visions for the future. I share it out of gratitude for the minds that met in Mississippi, as well as a relentless hope for a future that includes thinking.

And I keep the joy of that restaurant table at hand. I cherish it as a souvenir, a testament to being alive and at-home in the opening world of othered languages and the resistance to a simple, assimilated self.

“The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional, but to the audacity of daring, and representing change, to moving on, not standing still,” Said wrote. In different ways, each of the Nigerian writers embodied this dedication to the audacity of daring as writers and humans. I leave the scene in my mind with one final toast, a toast to the Nigerian voices, and to not selling one’s complicated self for that feeble, “exemplary” standing.


One Jesus sign, among the 7 encountered, on the drive towards Mississippi State University.

The radically-other language is the imagined one.

The child in an imaginary language.

An imaginary language critiques the adult world by refusing its grammar, lexicon, and syntax. In borrowing from the language of children, an invented mother-tongue supplies a fantastic rejection of the insolubility posed by “mature” framing and discourse.

I’ve been thinking about  Janice Eidus' short story, "Robin's Nest," and the percussive intonations of "innocence" in the language of a childhood narrator attempting to deal with the legacy borne by words. When her father's language and explanations fail to describe the mystery of her mother, she formulates new words to explain her mother's silence. The invented language of Ooola offers hope against the authoritarian father, whose authority is maintained by manipulating language. 

Oola, the alternative language, presents inventing and imagining as a form of resistance. During the day, the father makes money as a plastic surgeon. The daughter fears being "sculpted" by him. He makes no secret of his will. 

"Instead of a nose job, I would give your mother a mind job," he tells her. The  man's purpose is to fix the female, the ailing anti war hippie he thinks he saved. 

"A mind job hurts," the narrator thinks. "It pushes words down into your brain." She seeks a text she can read, a language in which she can find herself outside her father's violence. Male violence is the story of creation that the narrator needs to refuse in order to create herself, another story. She envisions her mother's silence as a vessel holding back magic. Envisioning this carves a space within her lineage, within her inheritance, where the daughter can speak outside the words owned by men. Feminism as a means of giving voice, passing mike. 

The harm done by language is both social and personal. The valence is an echolocation, as one sees in the consideration of pretty words, as the narrator wonders if they should add "amnesty" to their private language? Will they keep its meaning or use it to describe something else?

How do we define relational responsibility to our children when we represent their narratives and identities in poems? 

Who narrates the story of the “foreign” orphan?

How is power demonstrated, communicated, and solidified in the narrative choices made by magazines, journals, and academic publishers?

What do "autonomy and consent mean in the context of lived relationships and memorial tributes?

Who, historically, has been more impacted by the privatization and erasure of parenting labor and experience?

*

In For Your Own Good, Alice Miller examines the pedagogical assumptions of corporal punishment (a.k.a. spanking). The final paragraph reads:

Turning away from the truth will never help us preserve love, and the love we have for our parents is no exception. The act of forgiveness will not help as long as it serves to disguise the facts. For love and self-delusion are mutually exclusive. The disavowal of truth, the denial of the sufferings we have been through, is the breeding ground for the kind of hatred that gets deflected onto innocent victims. It is an act of self-deception and an impasse from which there is no way out. Genuine love can face up to the truth.

Implicit in this, the claim that “genuine love” does not face the truth from the safe, protected (arguably cowardly) space of defensiveness.

If Miller has spent a lifetime moving into, around, and through Womanism, the child has been central to her concerns. Paths of Life, for example, explores how confronting our experiences of childhood enable to us to live more richly into the future. How the home environment and emotional relationships we experience prime us for the way we live out our own lives. The neural pathways are thickened with us, programming us to experience the same lives as our parents unless we engage in self-reflection.

Anika tries to talk to her mother about the way in which she felt forced to keep her feelings a secret as a child. She says it is difficult to love yourself when a mother “finds your longing for contact, truth, understanding to be annoying, personally offensive, or even actively dangerous”. I think of the televisions blaring in all the rooms of the American home, offering pretexts to discuss things further from our hearts, further from the thick of things.

For Anika, this disdain for emotions is not something easily shaken off. She explains: “...gradually you arrive at the unconscious conviction that you have to suppress these cravings for any kind of connection if you want to get along with people”. When others suffered, Anika tried to find ways in which it might be her fault. This gave her a means of alleviating the lack of control without giving in to the taboo empathy.

Still proper in her older years, Anika’s mother is disturbed by this encounter. Her response is mainly one of fear- “fear of genuinely understanding the connections Anika was trying to show existed between their two lives”. Anika’s mother can’t break free from the lies she has lived by in order to draw close to her daughter. For her, the price is too high.

Margo and Lilka fear recognizing one another because, to do so, they will need to recognize the part of themselves back when they were friends in prewar Warsaw. The sounds of names breaks down the barrier to memory. Margo admits she married her first husband without loving him because her father told her “love and real life were two different things”. After he died in the Shoah, she took his mantra of love being an illusion without question. Later, while active in the Polish resistance movement, Margo met a man named Janek and fell in love. She felt this “as a return to my own self, to my first love, a love that I had been unfaithful to”. 

The chapter “Gurus and Cult Leaders” points to the importance of finding suppressed memories opening a void of interpretation. Gurus and cult leaders open these doors and insinuate themselves as the answer. Children who have been raised in families where obedience was “enforced” and the father’s authority was never predicated on whether he deserved to wield it or not are prey to cultish religious groups. Miller rejects the Freudian concept of infantile sexuality, which she thinks masks the consequences of sexual abuse in children. Rather than acknowledge their victimhood as children, Freudians and Reichians insist it is natural, a part of growing up- what every child needs to become an adult. 

The open, unquestioning psyche of the child enables them to accept sexual abuse as a kind of “surrogate emotional nourishment”. Miller says “that first, unquestioning love of our parents is so deeply rooted that hardly anything can destroy it, and certainly not insight into the truth.” Since kids can’t understand why someone they love would injure them, they reinterpret that behavior as right. In this way, “cruelty is given a positive valuation in the child’s cognitive system, and that valuation will be retained for life.”

One way in which adults deny the violence done to them as children and continuing the cycle of abuse burned so deep in their brains is through “sophisticated ideological justifications” which “allow them to pass it off as a good thing”. Miller notes that “the less inclination they show to recognize and revise this ingenious self-delusion, the more likely it is that others will be made to suffer the consequences.”

Miller came to this view after studying the childhoods of mass murderers and dictators, in her words:

All of them without exception were exposed to the horrors born of hypocrisy, and all of them ignored or denied the fact in later life. […] The atmosphere of hypocrisy they grew up in taught them to see cruelty as something good and useful.

…

A child battered and humiliated in the name of parental ‘care’ will quickly internalize the language of violence and canting insincerity and come to see it as the only effective medium of communication.

The “knowing witness” is defined as a person who actively helps them to recognize the wrong done to them for what it is and to articulate their sorrow for what has happened. Miller’s view resorts to the Freudian subconscious in order to explain why cycles of violence continue, namely, parents abuse their own kids in ways that repeat their own childhood abuse because feelings are stored in the “form of unconscious memories”. In turn, the unconscious memories “drive them to reproduce those repressed scenes over and over in the vain attempt to liberate themselves from the fears that cruelty and abuse have left with them.”

This is a ‘false’ liberation because “the effects of the past don’t change as long as they remain unnoticed”. The perpetrator goes in search of new victims, projects fear and hatred onto new scapegoats, and thus keeps himself from coming to term with the memories and feelings.

Notably, “liberation” is still at stake in Miller’s metaphysics. Although “liberation” feels limpid to me, Miller’s insights on avowing one’s anger are salient:

As long as the anger directed at a parent or other first caregiver remains unconscious or disavowed, it cannot be dissipated. It can be taken out only on oneself or stand-ins, on scapegoats such as one’s own children or alleged enemies. The variety of hatred that masquerades as religious ideological zeal is particularly dangerous because it’s imperviousness to moral categories makes it unassailable.

When personal hatred is attributed to a divinity, it cannot be discussed except as a means of refusing to be accountable for the feeling itself. The scapegoating of a god occurs in tandem with scapegoating of minorities and vulnerable persons.

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How can poets address issues of social justice like ableism and economic privilege without speaking to the evidence garnered from their lived experience as parents? 

Henri Lefebvre thought habit memory was a key to how children assumed the identity of a social group. "Dressage" includes the combat boots of the 1990's as well as other historically-specific socializations in fashion and self-presentation. There is the sense that we knew who we were then—or that knowing the self was easier.

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What does it mean to designate an entire portion of one's life (i.e. parenting) as unacceptable in writing? Or to designate, for example, the neurodivergence of one's child, as an "unacceptable" topic in literature?

Dr. Harlow’s experiments in the 1950’s showed that animals raised by artificial "robot" mothers later turned aggressive and showed no interest in their own offspring. They were primed for limited interaction.

Studies suggest that obedience training established in early infancy "stunts the development of such human capacities as compassion and pity for the sufferings of others". The learned behavior involves ignoring suffering and assessing the self in relation to rule-following ability. It has been suggested that children raised to perform obedience develop into adults that find it difficult to express, inhabit, or permit emotion when confronted with misfortune or tragedy.

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A few questions for writers thinking through the currency of violence, the sheer cash of it, the money money money and power and glory violence promises . . . and the notebooks in which we can permit ourselves to ask difficult questions about our own roles in the transactions of liberation:

  1. List the lies you remember living in order to make a childhood “safe.” Or list the lies you saw friends living. Note how the lie was understood differently by the child and the adult. Which verbs made things actionable? Which verbs were deemed “appropriate”?

  2. How did “Freudian” notions of sexuality impact the childhood in question? What is relationship between trust and sexual self in your mind, in the self-narrations that sustain your concept of selfhood?

  3. Are there any correlations between having been physically abused or spanked and believing war to be a just and reasonable means of resolving difficult problems? Are there any anecdotes that challenge this association?

  4. Which ideas and/or systems of belief were involved in your socialization? For example, "might makes right"; pledge of Allegiance; flag worship; anti-Muslim xenophobia; highly gendered household roles; Christian misogynies, neoliberal meritocracy; bootstrap exceptionalism, etc.

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Finally, loosely, to puncture the balloon a bit more, how do neoliberal notions of property, privacy, and ownership inflect our notions of "propriety" in writing?

What happens if one tries to write about the vapidity that is contemporary mothering?

Rachel Cusk on writing A Life’s Work about the strange silences of motherhood


How (if at all) do these questions implicate the failures of feminism and intersectionality in American poetics historically and at present? And to whom does it matter?