The Paris Review's Blog, page 22

New Books By Emily Witt, Vigdis Hjorth, and Daisy Atterbury

Erin O’Keefe, Circle Circle, 2020, from New and Recent Photographs, a portfolio in issue no. 235 (Winter 2020) of The Paris Review.

I did not have a good time reading Vigdis Hjorth’s novel If Only. I felt, in fact, kind of abject—but something about the novel compelled me forward, in a way that sometimes actually confused me. I found myself reading fifty pages, putting it down, picking it up a week later and once again being unable to stop reading, then abandoning it for another week. It was a discomfiting instance where in returning to the bleak narrative world of the novel I felt almost like I was mirroring the behavior of its main character, Ida, who returns again and again to a love affair that seems to offer her nothing but pain. Why was I reading this book that made me so angry, uncomfortable, irritated? Because it was, maybe, the kind of discomfort that can reconfigure certain aspects of the way you see the world, whose insights or the shadows of them seem to recur long after you’ve closed the book—and so they have, as I thought last night of an image from it, Ida and her lover at a restaurant in Istanbul, gorging on champagne, telling the waiter they were just married even though they weren’t. 

If Only—published in Norwegian in 2001, but published in English translation by Charlotte Barslund for the first time this month—is a novel about obsessive love. It is one of a spate of recent novels that take all-consuming desire as a theme: Miranda July’s All Fours and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos both deal with a passion that veers into misery at times, the kind of passion that is transformative only because it shatters lives. But If Only is by far the bleakest of these; in fact, it is one of the bleakest depictions of a relationship I have ever encountered. The affair obliterates Ida; it cuts her off from the people around her, including her young children; it makes her act erratically and occasionally dangerously. The relationship has many of the same qualities as prolonged substance abuse—and it is no coincidence that Ida and her lover constantly binge on alcohol, too. The novel offers neither redemption nor transcendence as its resolution. And yet Hjorth makes this relationship and its aftermath legible to us as a part of the human experience—one that we can’t extract from the type of love we do consider desirable or healthy. At the end of the book, we might find ourselves wondering, as Ida does: “If only there was a cure, a cure for love.” And we might realize, even as we wish this, that we don’t actually mean it at all. 

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

I want to recommend the final, fourth volume of Michel Leiris’s autobiographical project, The Rules of the Game: Frail Riffs, recently published by Yale’s Margellos series. Lydia Davis—whose fiction, essays, and translations of Proust and Flaubert amaze me—rendered the first three volumes; volume four is excellently translated by Richard Sieburth. Alice Kaplan has written an incisive essay on Leiris, and Frail Riffs, for the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Alice K. is another international treasure whose books will be known by anyone who reads The Paris Review, I would guess. Especially, but not only, The Collaborator, which summons so much about the political winds of the twenties and thirties blowing through the Parisian literary world, and about the postwar epuration in France, which Céline eluded by fleeing to Denmark, and which Robert Brasillach didn’t. Elude, I mean. (Whether this “fine literary writer” should have been executed for treason or not is, for me, a question one could settle one way at breakfast and the other way at dinner. Sartre or Camus, take your pick.) Anyway: Leiris, who writes the most pellucid and persuasive sentences. Whose abjection I welcome more than anybody’s egotism. His writings a bonanza of formidable insights conveyed with the unrushed elegance of a Saint-Simon. Leiris is incomparable, a Vermeer in a world of Han van Meegerens. Frail Riffs is pure pleasure, in the way Proust is pure pleasure—you can open to any page and just surrender yourself to the music of time that saturates it. The early entry in Frail Riffs, describing the prologues of Goethe’s Faust and their effect upon him as a teenager, is enough to turn any reader into a Leiris devotee.

—Gary Indiana

Emily Witt’s Health and Safety begins in Gowanus in 2016, where the Future Sex author is set to give a lecture called “How I Think About Drugs.” She speaks from a Google slide about Wellbutrin, which she used to take, and the distinction between “sort-of drugs” (pharmaceutical) and “drugs” (illegal). After quitting Wellbutrin, at thirty-one, Witt broke a yearslong illicit-substance fast by smoking DMT at Christmastime. This was the beginning of a drug journey of sorts, one involving ayahuasca retreats in the Catskills with her then boyfriend, a sensory-deprivation-tank attendant, and a large dose of mushrooms taken in a Brooklyn apartment. After her speech she meets Andrew, a Bushwick DJ. He soon introduces her to another context for and type of drug-doing: raving. She falls in love. They soon move in together at Myrtle-Broadway.

“Being in love made me happy,” begins chapter five, “and I lost interest in channeling all of my knowledge about nutrition, disease, and medicine into a life of perpetual risk management.” Witt began to see her former orientation toward health and wellness as narrow and individualistic, whereas raverly values were collectivist, abolitionist, and harm reductionist. To be one of techno’s real appreciators meant thinking through its lineage in Black American Detroit and how it morphed in Berlin clubs; it meant learning about Afrofuturism, Deleuzian metaphysics, and Narcan administration. It could all feel overly theoretical, because the real point of doing ketamine at Nowadays is having fun, but even the most pretentious scene fixtures were interesting in their own ways. Witt is intrigued by techno’s embrace of pessimism as praxis: a deep-house artist named DJ Sprinkles uses part of their set to drive home why they use the term transgendered instead of transgender, then tells their audience they’re all a bunch of normie losers. Sprinkles is compelling because their unapologetic manner gets at realer issues than does the tone-deaf #Resistance-era small talk that was unavoidable at the time in New York.

Witt’s partying coincides with Trump’s election, the beginning of the #MeToo movement, Parkland, Kenosha, the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, January 6. The Trump administration disturbed many Americans’ sense that we shared a definite political reality; our widened Overton window, at least, began to reveal the racial and socioeconomic injustices that white, middle-class liberals had claimed ignorance of. During this period, Witt joined The New Yorker as a staff writer while attending Black Lives Matter protests on the side with Andrew. Health and Safety poses sharp questions about what it means to watch history unfold versus to participate in its making, and about what it means to write about brutality when your friends are in harm’s way. These questions don’t resolve, as if to remind that discourse has little impact on the machinations of capital and state violence.

Witt’s reflections on the loop of reporting assignments—like being sent to watch Lizzo play a Shake Shack–sponsored set at a D.C. March for Our Lives rally—and sleepless nights at Bossa Nova Civic Club that comprised her pre-pandemic life are spectacular. So are her extremely specific notes on tripping: “I just saw some patterns that faintly buzzed in the marker colors of my childhood—the ‘bold’ jewel-toned spectrum that Crayola started selling in the early 1990s.” While reading Health and Safety, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the defamiliarizing effects of psychedelics are not unlike those of a well-constructed sentence, the kind that catches you off guard with its accuracy.

—Signe Swanson

The Kármán line, in astronomy, is the definition of the edge of space: the line at which Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. It’s a geopolitical rather than physical definition—it’s about fifty miles above sea level, though it is not sharp or well defined, and below the line, space belongs to the country below it, while above it, space is free. Daisy Atterbury’s new collection of poetry, The Kármán Line, to be published by Rescue Press next month, describes the line’s psychological import, characterizing it as a clearly defined yet impossible-to-name boundary between the known and the unknown. From the poem “Sound Bodily Condition”: “I want to learn how to get at the thing I don’t yet know, the blank space in memory, the experiences I should have language for and don’t.” Atterbury’s book is at once a math-inflected lyric essay; a rollicking road trip; a field guide to Spaceport America, the world’s first site for commercial space travel, located near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; and a collection of intimate poems.

Atterbury spells out how you can, in a few steps, arrive at a relatively simple equation for calculating the latitude of the Kármán line for any planet, (2𝑚𝜌(𝑟)𝐴𝐶𝐿𝑟=1), but though the math might be legible in the abstract, things get more complicated in concrete terms: “To work out the Kármán line on an extraterrestrial planet I suspect you’d need to know the temperature.” The book’s energy comes from its application of the idea of the Kármán line to borders of all kinds. “We are thinking a lot about mindset,” says a man on the radio in the poem “Uranium Yellow”: the distinction between thought and the mind is a kind of Kármán line between reality and metareality. “I think he calls himself a neurobiologist,” recalls the speaker: the blood/brain barrier is the Kármán line of the body. The Kármán line might even be the signature line that the speaker deletes “when writing / personal emails,” tracing the edge between the public and private virtual versions of the self.

In the poem “What the Boundary,” I hear in the title an echo of William Blake’s “The Tyger” (“What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?”). The Kármán line divides space into a Blakean fearful symmetry that makes the known world seem safer—we can measure it, mark its delineations, perhaps even explore all of it—but also makes the unknown that much more vast and wild. As much as we crave the escape beyond the Kármán line into the infinite, Atterbury writes, we fear in exact parallel what lies beyond what we can measure. The formula for the Kármán line is simple—having the variables to plug into the equation to get an answer is the impossible part.

—Adrienne Raphel

An Opera on Little Island

Photograph by Helen Rouner.

The evening is balmy on Little Island. Already, I’ve forgotten that there’s a highway just on the other side of the slope, beyond which programmers are riding scooters home from the Google offices and tourists are taking selfies with a globally migrating installation of rattan elephants meant to symbolize “coexistence.” The carefully overgrown fauna, maximalist and faintly tropical, is still lush here in early September, and it’s been a long time since the Meatpacking District felt more like a neighborhood than a novelty.

It’s an impression, I’m learning anew, that gets stranger with repetition. I’m standing in the same place I was last night when the authorities canceled the performance of Anthony Roth Costanzo’s The Marriage of Figaro for a rainstorm that never quite materialized. The crowd then had exhibited all five stages of grief at the news: The Marriage of Figaro is sold out for the entirety of its nearly four-week run, and there is no rain date. Returning to the pier tonight, having been granted a reserved seat by the gracious staff, I have a vague sense of traumatic reenactment, that retracing my steps like this and expecting a different outcome might be a sign of my impending insanity.

Behind me in line for the show, a professor from the NYU Stern School of Business is holding forth on the strategies his digital marketing class will have to leverage this term so that their mock businesses might maximize fake shareholder value; in front of me, two women are debating whether the headshot on a CEO’s bio page does, in fact, match another photo one of them has open on her phone, of a man on vacation in a rainforest. The skyline glimmers before us here on Barry Diller’s $260 million pleasure park, on stilts in the Hudson River, and one man wears a fedora with an ace of spades tucked into the ribbon. The opera’s three-and-a-half-hour running time has been cut to an Ozempic-thin ninety minutes, and the exquisite Italian libretto is being projected in internet-speak English subtitles accented with the occasional emoji. The show promises to be art in line with that great contemporary ideal: frictionlessness.

Performances of Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro, the play on which the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte based the opera, were banned in Louis XVI’s France and its author imprisoned. Lore has it that Joseph II, the Holy Roman emperor and a self-styled liberal reformer, permitted the opera adaptation on the condition that it omit the protagonist’s iconic speech, about how working for a living ought to earn Figaro a greater right to power than his master, the Count, who has done nothing of value with his life but be born noble. Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro debuted in 1786; in 1793, a public that had imbibed Beaumarchais’s rhetoric decapitated Joseph’s younger sister Marie Antoinette.

But tonight, any radical politics have been safely contained—so contained as to find voice in a single person. The star countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo is singing all the major roles himself, cheerfully covering seven jobs, alongside a cast who mutely provide more bodies to fill out the stage. Thus, Costanzo is both the servant girl Susanna and the predatory Count Almaviva, who intends to exercise his medieval droit de seigneur and bed his employee on her wedding night. Susanna resists; antics ensue. Opera companies have taken to billing Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, which can play light or dark, as a #MeToo opera. No such luck with Figaro, indisputably a buffa—even when not performed à la Monty Python, as it is tonight. Conveniently, a solo production can sidestep the issue altogether: the complicated erotics of jealously and coercion are now essentially masturbatory, the audience’s complicity downgraded to invited voyeurism. The nobleman gets to have his cake, and we get to eat it.

When the lights dim on the amphitheater, an eight-piece ensemble begins an electronically amplified rendition of Mozart’s overture beneath a credit reel (all credits to Costanzo, of course) of JibJab-style chattering heads. The spotlight catches our star, who grins: we’re off. In the opening scenes, the production really is a one-man show: Costanzo acts out each role in a tightly choreographed swapping of signifying garments and spinning doors. It’s an astounding feat of vocal stamina and physical comedy, and it’s obviously unsustainable. Sure enough, by “Ah, son perduto!,” the first real ensemble number, Costanzo has retreated into a curtained chair and sings out of sight while other actors hammily lip-synch the libretto in his place. For the rest of the production—with the exception of a genuinely stellar, if unavoidably Ed Sheeran–adjacent, use of a loop pedal in the act 2 finale—our star essentially provides a backing track to deliberately bad acting, accentuated by innumerable stage slaps and shrieking and shooting confetti into the air and bouncing on a trampoline in a desperate bid to hold the attention of an audience who, despite seeming to enjoy the chaos, is already lighting up the theater by scrolling Instagram. It’s a strange mode of attention, in any case, to ask an audience to inhabit, to resist becoming immersed in the scene before them and instead remain aware of how it’s being produced.

An audience unfamiliar with Mozart’s opera has no idea what’s going on, and the tween down my row wants everyone to know she’s upset about that. This, too, the production tries awkwardly to fix: during what presumably would have been an intermission had the production been less afraid of losing its audience, an actor reads out a summary of the plot thus far, forcibly swapping out whatever magic has been made onstage for digestible bullet points. Playing for time so Costanzo can rest his voice, actors explain that Beaumarchais’s play started the French Revolution “because the servants had opinions or something,” and they riff on Figaro’s illicit speech, with a big punch line about his being so desperate to make a living that he resorts to stealing—“I became a banker!” The audience howls with laughter, not a guillotine in sight.

The big joke as we enter act 3 is that the overwork his feat requires nearly kills Costanzo. He collapses after “Voi signor, che giusto siete” and is rushed offstage on a gurney. (One review of the production celebrates Costanzo as “the hardest-working countertenor in the biz.”) He returns to sing the opera’s great seria lament, “Dove sono,” with a medical scope down his throat, his frantically vibrating vocal folds projected onto two large screens. The intubation echo may be inadvertent, but it’s fitting that here grief is literally being swallowed: Little Island was being built during the horrors of spring 2020, just down the Hudson from the USNS Comfort, the ship that became a widely detested symbol of the city’s belated and inadequate COVID-19 response. The association between the two did not help reassure vulnerable New Yorkers about the city budget’s relationship to private wealth.

These kinds of elaborate public parks funded by the aristocracy were popular in Europe in the eighteenth century, their heyday coinciding with Mozart’s. They often have been theaters for the politics of inequality. Families were taking Sunday strolls in the Place de la Concorde when skirmishes between the armed foreign instruments of the ancien régime and the citizens of Paris escalated to the storming of the Bastille. During Little Island’s construction, the Hudson River Park’s sunbathers and rollerbladers gave way to vast choruses of marchers protesting state violence. Three hundred were kettled, assaulted with batons and pepper spray, and arrested in the Bronx. The city promised greater police accountability. Before long, it could seem that American social forces had been placed behind the fourth wall once more, from where they could be applauded.

Amid the final act, fireworks start going off over New Jersey. Costanzo has to project even louder over the explosions, the actors mime even more manically as the crowd en masse turns to look elsewhere. The trampoline has moved behind the stage, to the edge of the railing; one bad bounce and the jumper will launch himself into the Hudson. But it’s all under control. They’ve done this before. As the final minutes of the show arrive, after over an hour and a half of Costanzo singing for them, the actors finally lend their voices to the opera’s ultimate number, grinning and playing directly to the audience from the lip of the stage: “Gente, gente, all’armi, all’armi!” (Gentlemen, to arms!)

 

Helen Rouner is an associate editor at Penguin Press and the fiction editor of the Cleveland Review of Books. She lives in Brooklyn.

Dreaming Within the Text: Notebooks on Herman Melville

From Six Drawings by Robert Horvitz, a portfolio published by The Paris Review in 1978.

The following entries came from notebooks the writer and psychoanalyst  Christopher Bollas kept between 1974 and 1977. These notebooks were not written or edited for publication–Bollas says they were more like “mental scratch pads where the author simply writes out what he is thinking in the moment without, ironically, thinking about it.” The entries touch on things Bollas was reading at the time, scenes he saw in London, what he was observing in patients–and, more often than not, the ways these all intersected in his thoughts. We selected these entries in part because they cover a period of time when he was reading and thinking on and off about the work of Herman Melville, alongside many other questions about character, the self, and others.

 

Undated entry, 1974

Let us imagine that all neuroses and psychoses are the self’s way of speaking the unspeakable. The task of analysis is to provide an ambience in which the neurotic or characterological speech can be spoken to the analyst and understood. It is not so much [a question of] what are the epistemologies of each disorder but what does psychoanalytical treatment tell us about them? We must conclude that it tells us that all conflict is flight from the object and that analysis restores the structure of a relation so that the patient can engage in a dialogue with the object.

The style of the obsessive-compulsive, for example, is in the nature of a closed cognitive and active world. If obsessive-compulsive behavior is memory, what is being recalled? It seems to me that obsessive-compulsive behavior is a mimetic caricature of rigid mothering. It is caricatured self-mothering which [may] recall [interpret] the mother’s handling of the child.

How else can we account for the shifts in disorders if we don’t take into account the paradigms which generate them? Insofar as we know that patterns of mothering vary historically, can’t we assume that each disorder remembers the primary object relation? Indeed, why else does psychoanalysis go back to childhood when presented with conflict? Because it is understood by most to be functionally derivative of infancy.

The only problem is that the philosophical assumptions of this hypothesis remain unappreciated, to wit, all disorders speak the individual’s past and they ultimately speak the subject’s interpretation of the past and therefore are a form of remembering. The advantage of this to the person is to value his disorder as a statement, not simply a dysfunction. This is the difference between the hermeneutic and functional traditions of psychoanalysis.

A symptom is a way of thinking. Remembering is a way of thinking. Symptoms are some form of the subject’s thinking about himself. Psychoanalysis is a way of two people thinking together about one person’s thinking.

A patient brings a mood, thought, confusion, a blank—collages of himself—and the analyst provides the space. The therapeutic alliance is simply: we are thinking and working together. The transference and countertransference: we are feeling for each other together.

 

Undated, 1974

“American literature”

American writers speak the true self, while the country doesn’t listen. Melville tries to identify with this American false self—the external explorer and conqueror—but fails and the true self breaks through.

 

Undated, 1974

“Ahab”

What is absolutely essential is to keep in mind that Moby Dick is an invention, a projected object. The horrid irony of Ahab’s effort to break through the “pasteboard mask” is that he is the object behind the mask! He is the originating subjectivity. Does Melville make this irony specific?

The five phantoms loosed in chapter 47 are the loosening of Ahab’s internal objects: or the objectivization of internal selves. Rage permits the dissociations to be loosed though never integrated. Rage—especially in the search for the whale—is a loosening of or an exorcism of internal objects. The whole point of the trip is to exorcise the phantoms and to put them into the whale.

 

Undated, 1975

It is one of the ironies of existence that you can love the other only after you have lost the other. With ego development the fusion with the other is lost, a necessary precondition for recognizing the other’s separateness, but nonetheless a losing of one’s [fused] self.

 

Undated, 1975

“Melville’s ethics”

At a time when the other is sought outside, as a deity, an idea, or history, Melville’s hero points toward the struggle to find other as the unconscious self. In a sense as man has destroyed culture (collective dream/play space) he then assumes the responsibility of it and comes to a point of wisdom: culture always reflected him; he created it, it came from him. The sacred, profane, shared, etc., all experienced as outside; Melville says we must experience an inside other.

Thus he has in Mardi and in Moby-Dick a transitional metaphysical and psychical moment between other as outside (the whale) while Melville gently proves it to be inside the self. It is important to see this as Melville’s ethic. Outside, there is neither solution nor absolution; nor is either ever possible. Insight, the seeing into the self, to witness and behold the other as inside is the shock of re-cognition that Melville asks of us. It is the venue of the psychoanalyst as well, but the psychoanalyst after Freud’s metapsychological works processed the other and ethically disowned it.

Free association, which was a way of access, against the resistance of man, became a means of disowning the other by processing it. A novelist like Melville searches inside himself, comes to the point of seeing and holds the fundamental fact of the internal other.

 

December 10, 1975

“On good interpretation as poetry”

It is the form of an interpretation that is most effective. We must know that our best interpretations are poetic in their structure and delivery, so that the form holds words in such a way as to deeply affect the patient. In the same way, poetry rather than prose gets to us in a deeper way.

 

January 22, 1976

Out of the debris of our dying culture (early twentieth century) comes a new mythology and a new language. We see this early in Baudelaire who finds the symbolic inside the city; we discover it in Barthes (Mythologies) who creates a new mythology. It is godless. It is ordinary. As Barrett points out in Irrational Man, cubism is the ontologizing of the banal object, because out of the debris only objects are left.

The psychoanalytical experience is, in free association, the use of the ordinary (i.e., trivial language) to remythologize the person, to find his myth, his culture, through the debris. From the debris of his own words, which up till now he has found barren, a wasteland, he discovers meaning and then his own myth.

The analyst is the person, par excellence, who carries the person through the wasteland of the self, and who holds.

Where has the debris come from?

From an explosion in the nineteenth century of human value and belief. We are commodities, objects-to-ourselves, defined by use or function.

The death of culture. Debris. Playing with debris (Dadaism). Creating a new language.

The analytic process: death of the old self; debris and the sense of dislocation; playing with the debris; searching in anger, despair; through reflection, finding one’s self.

Barrett says that before man is a being, he is a “being-in” (111): taking Heidegger’s point about Being in the World. In modern man this Being in, or the essence of our being, has been lost. It can be re-found in psychoanalysis.

In Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” and in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts we see man expressing his sense of loss of being-in the actual world. We have seen this earlier with Pascal, though in his situation it was as much the losing of a spiritual world: being in a world of spirit. Being-in spiritually (mythically) and Being-in actually (materially) have been severed. It is this loss which writes the “Wasteland” and founds existentialism.

Out of this comes man and world as debris, cut up in Dada and Joyce, and now a new myth of man emerges. What is the new man?

The silence of the patient comes after despair over the word. They have said, perhaps, a great deal, but begin to have a feeling of despair over the word. This despair sponsors a silence; it is silence in the face of the unthinkable; the absence in the core of a person over a truly spontaneous sense of being-in the world. Their speech has been a narrative account, a construction, often beautifully or bravely rendered.

The patient of today can speak only for so long. Speech is an effort. It is an attempt to hold off the void. (Pascal.) The silence denotes emptiness and the absence of the other. The analyst must be absence coming eventually into presence through holding.

We focus on the mother as the cause, but in fact, she is all that is left of one who gives meaning, breathes life into the other, and so we focus on her. She can never make up for the void in the culture. Our search into this relation, solely, is a misdirected one.

Character and creation. Our being does have voice through character. To hear it is a task, painful, awful. It is the voice of our emptiness yet through the transference—the analytic paradigm—our character changes.

In Moby-Dick the myth explodes (capitalism, Protestantism). We are left with Bartleby, mute among the debris—dead letters. The Confidence-Man remythologizes by manipulating the ordinary into the fantastic. He picks up debris and maps the fantastic.

After 1914 man learns, according to William Barrett, that the solitude of being a self is irreducible regardless of how completely we seem to be part of a social milieu. Man is no longer contained in a social fabric. But with our patients the tragedy is that each must fashion a life out of a wasteland.

In the sixties, politics, group movements, the therapies, communes, etc., were all attempts to fashion cultures. The Beatniks (Kerouac, etc.) were the first.

It is silly to say “counterculture” as there was no culture there in the first place.

Each of us carries within our own debris. It is our past: a past not held within a familial, social, and cultural container to be given recurrently back to us. We don’t know our past. We only have images, memories, pictures etc. We bring this flotsam to the analyst who gathers the pieces; he gives form to our content—if we can trust him to do this—we find our past. This is the analyst as the transformational object: the one who gives form to our content and thereby transforms the content itself, by giving it meaning.

Out of the debris of our past emerges our own mythology. Why have I been so moved when on one bright day I witnessed from a 10,000-ft. peak of the Sierra Madre a tiny train thousands of feet below crossing the California desert? Why should this experience be so close to me, seem to hold me? It was a question, in fact, that I had never asked at the time. Its essence evaporated into the diversions of my life, though now and then I recovered it.

In analysis I found two things about myself. One was that, as my father had gone off to war when I was three months I did not see him until I was nearly two. I was overly eager not to see my mother disappear as well. At nursery school, it was my fate to stand up high on the steps of the slide—not to go down—in order to watch in the distance for the first sight of my mother who would come to collect me.

So being up high and searching for something vital and joyful was part of my personal idiom: the creation of my myth of significance and order.

The other mythical object was the train, which has always filled me with sadness and, strangely, contentment at the same time. So it was in my analysis that I discovered that it was by train that I left my birthplace and my father and also it was to the train station that every day my grandfather took me to see the train go by. Perhaps he did it out of his own love of trains or perhaps it was because I indicated my desire to see trains and he, in kindness, facilitated this wish. What the myth of trains gave to me in analysis, with the understanding of the essence of the aesthetic experience on the mountaintop, was how an experience visualised for me a deep myth: searching for recovery from my mother, longing to be reunited with my father. The experience of looking on the mountaintop was me.

 

May 9, 1976

“Metaphysical psychology”

Is it the eventual affirmation of the negative? Is Moby-Dick an affirmation of brotherhood, through the destruction of isolated fanaticisms? Ishmael lives to share a narrative with others, unifying men through discourse, while Ahab uses men to fulfill the fantastic demands of his private culture.

 

November 4, 1976

“On a character serving in a restaurant”

I am watching a young woman who is the waitress (wife) in an artificially lit Italian café that serves sandwiches to the English. The surroundings are without character, rather like the set of a television film, suggesting its impermanence. There is little here, except the come and go. The first time I ate here, she paid me no attention—flung the food on the table. Yet, tonight, I have discovered her use of herself as a character. She dissociates from the surroundings, defying the anomie by being a character. She throws her hands through her hair, punches out the orders, laughs or teases the locals—yet she is totally self contained. I find this interesting as I am reminded of Marx’s theory of alienation. She deals with it all by laboring her character: it becomes the surrounding of the self, and she looks no further.

 

Undated, 1977

“The text dreaming”

The text would have to undergo an experience of its own dream. Like the dreamer, the text would have to be confused. It is not simply the author who has the dream as the dream elements are already in the text at hand. With Stubb’s dream I must see what holds up to the dream and then what occurs after the dream.

The point is to establish the composition of the dream space, in literature or in life. It is an area of

1. Wonder or terror
2. Actualization
3. Enigmatic meaning
4. The place where the thinker is the thought of himself, or, the thinker the participant in the thought

The dream in literature must be a region of wonder, separate from yet reflexive to the rest of the text. It must be the dream’s text, as it must use and pit itself against the text, in order for us to consider it as a dream. A space in relation to the context of events in the fiction. Is it an allegory within an allegory?

What is the difference between a vision and a dream?

I am concerned with a text which has a dream, a moment when the continuity of its presence of mind is interrupted by a dissociation in its consciousness, in a space that I have called the dream space. The text can have its own dream if at this moment the cumulative experience of imagery-making, of plot construction, of characterization, breaks down into a self-reflexive dream process. This is rather like a breakdown, but a breakdown of a very special kind. In such moments the author yields, under the demand of the text’s unconscious logic, to the text’s (and his) need to share a dream with each other. (So, the author shares a dream with his text!) We could say that this moment will be more available in the modern novel, where the author already has found an intimacy of rapport with the text, where he uses more the idioms of his own internal psychic structures than the conventions of literary creativity. Even so, few authors—as Poulet insists—achieve a level of sincerity toward their own text. I should say, an intimacy where the text is the container of unintegrated subjectivity, and where the author’s Other is not an alienated moi, but a subjective object.

To the person writing or dreaming, writing (or textualization) and dreaming are processes of thinking about being, not products. We must, as E. Said argues, reacquaint ourselves with writing as a process, not a finished product.

This can also happen because an author, like Melville, needs to dream within the text; though the experience of the dream will be in the textual space, will use the history of the text for the dream material, and, as such, will be the text’s dream. If an author, like Melville, yields himself to the text, then we can say that the text will dream him, or dream about him.

 

April 26, 1977

“Melville”

The core fantasy seems to be of a desire for an object to be plundered. In Moby-Dick this was the whale, but this leads to annihilation. In “Bartleby” there is a desire for the experience to be provided by the other (the employer), with a dead ending in the brick-wall prison. In “I and My Chimney” there is an attachment to the object as inanimate and under the fantasy control of the self.

What can we call this cluster? It is a private phantasy: an autistic phantasy that materializes within the fiction, but isn’t made explicit as such. In “Bartleby” it is addressed to the other. In Pierre what do we make of the episode when the character crawls under the rock, to be born again? Is that another cluster? Is the fictional space a place where Melville can have this phantasy? An autistic voice?

 

May 2, 1977

“Melville”

Literary perversion.

Idiot event.

Burlesque.

Are there certain fantasies of the text that are not thoughts per se but ritual enactments of ego structures? Deep memories, paradigms, of the subject’s experience of the other?

Is an allegorical personification a character? Insofar as this structure speaks structurally, it is.

The idiomatic arrangement of character structures is the voice of character: the interpretation of self.

Does character speak in fiction more uniquely as the other becomes a phantom (death of God) eliciting a mute yell from the subject—as the voice of character? All character is utterance to an absent other, and with the death of God, this absence provokes deep language cries.

In some characterizations—especially sagas—we must ask, What is left out? The character may be noble, set against a surrounding world that is very violent. This is the split-off voice of character, which in the nineteenth century is joined to the self. Character defends the self against the internal world.

How does character relate—i.e., to us, the objects around it? Such use, does it reveal idioms?

The absence of a specific character language, particularly the person who seems to be strong and induces our projective identifications, creates a dream space for us. Character is the container of the reading subject’s pure self. We are Other.

 

May 3, 1977

“Character in fiction”

Does character in fiction depend on what the hero deals with or transforms? Where are the events of being? Character has to do with the idiom of transformation: an interpretation of the self. Where is the locus of transformation in fiction: in the author, or, is it yielded over to character?

What is the relation of character to the author’s use of character?

Character in fiction is a type of speech which may or may not occur in fiction. It is an interpretation of the self. If it is only a rhetorical device, it will only be interpreting the self as a rhetorical act. However, if the self experiences an internal world and relating, then character speech may occur as a reading of that self.

Rhetorical versus psychological character.

How do we experience the character in fiction? Or, how do others [other characters in a novel] experience the character in fiction? He is set up in others and in the reader. Is the text, the Other for the character? Does it reply to him or hold him?

Does character reflect the mental process of the text? Is character an interpretation of being inside the text? Where text is the psychical process, does character interpret this?

 

Undated, 1977

“Character”

Character in a text expresses something. Invariably, it is the discourse of structure, of handling by a self, and is a different hermeneutic. A character may say “I love you” but the formality of his being may say “Only at a safe distance do I love you.” This speech is the discourse of character and is a subjective interpretation of the self rather than the professed themes uttered by the subject. Think of Heidegger’s notion of the existence-structure of the self. Ishmael and Ahab transform the subject “I will hunt the whale” in different ways. Their style of handling is an interpretation of the self. It will speak fundamental paradigms of transformation of need, desire, fear, etc., of instincts and relating to the object. When an author releases different characters into fiction he is releasing varying ego structures in himself, different selves, to personify aesthetics of being.

“The Aesthetics of Being: Character as Discourse on the Self.”

We cannot decenter character from the crucial reality that there is an interpretive presence in character. The structures of character are idiomatic internalisations of self-object (and self as instinctual presence as object) relations. These are matters of choice. Ishmael and Ahab make choices derived from their different ego structures.

By releasing character the author uses different styles of transformation of desire and relating to the other.

In fiction, each character embodies a character memory.

Does any of it have to do with the experience of the text? In the sense that an author may release his internal world into the text, characters are different modes (ego structures) of handling and interpreting these themes. This handling (transformation) is the aesthetic of character.

Ego structure. The infant experiences the mother. On the basis of the infant’s experience of the mother he makes choices about handling the mother.

In Moby-Dick Melville puts one ill and one healthy ego structure alongside one another, in the juxtaposition of Ahab and Ishmael.

The mother’s handling of her infant is an aesthetic and points the way to her notion of the baby’s body and self. Her handling complements the baby’s emergent ego (handling) functions. As the mother handles instinct and impulse, so the baby internalizes her paradigms. This is the internalization of an interpretation of the self.

 

Undated, 1977

“Metaphor as secret”

Metaphor takes a word which applies to one thing and transfers it to another because it seems a natural transfer. This occurs in Melville’s pyramid fantasies where clusters of metaphor sequester hidden meanings. The chimney has hidden spaces and is a metaphor of secret places. Such an act is at the root of fiction. Keeping the source a secret, yet communicating from it. Is it some deep ego structure that finds symbolic equations for itself?

 

Undated, 1977

“Character versus subjectivity”

Character is memory. It is an aesthetic of being that forms and transforms experience according to an unconscious hermeneutic. It is mute in the sense that the receiver is absent (except in analysis) and the subject who enacts his character is blind and deaf to his aesthetic.

In a sense, character reserves an interpretation of being that may be at variance with the person’s subjective notion of their essence. It is a clash between the discourse of character—which speaks through the aesthetic of being—and the voice of desire: the subject’s play of the imaginative possibilities of self.

This is, perhaps, best illustrated in a person who is (as existent-structure) a certain way. He handles himself and others in a certain style. A syntax of being and relating. Now, all this may be unknown by the subject and, indeed, at wild variance with his own “internal world” or, at least, his experience of the world.

It raises the question: What is subjectivity? Or, can there be a genuine subjectivity without hearing from the discourse of character? I think the discourse of character is a mute speech. It means “listening” to one’s silent speech, almost as if we bear with us a shadow self who prints in an aesthetics of being a dialogue with an absent object. In psychoanalysis, this absent object may reappear in the transference.

In fiction, at least the modern novel, character may exist alongside consciousness; in particular, the consciousness of the author … or the world of the novel. What is the discourse of the self? Does the consciousness of the author grapple with the violence of character; or, is it remedied by superficial placing in indexical tongues (sociological matrices) rather than as an idiomatic—unconscious—discourse of the ego: the impersonal self?

What novels do I know of where the subject grapples with character? Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment. It means a conscious confrontation with the mute determinacy of one’s idiomatic discourse. Character is autistic, in that the receiver of the discourse is absent (the object of all characterological defenses) and the language is, thereby, a dead language. It is the fact that character is a dead language—a language no longer spoken between the original speakers—that gives critics the sense that character is conservative, or inhibiting.

Most novelists understand only the effect of character—that is, linking it with mute determinacy—and this principle is then reprinted in a novel, in social terms (cf. Goffman), but that is not the truth of character, which is deeply enigmatic and aggravating.

Many novels are an attempt to escape the enigma of character by a manic-omnipotent staging of character, giving to themselves a control over character—“characterization”—that is a denial of the very experiences of one’s character.

Recent psychoanalytical studies of the self—in particular, the borderline and narcissistic—are concerned really with a patient whose primary speech is character, whose “subjective” life is blank or chaotic and who refuses to be informed as a subject, of themselves as a character.

Character is destiny if understood, and fate if not understood.

Few authors permit this determinacy to be with them. Their act of omnipotent creation defies destiny. Yet some writers do: Melville, Shakespeare.

 

December 15, 1977

“Denial and paranoia”

A patient denies memory and both severs and dissolves linking, so he has no internal, accrued sense of self. He has no tradition upon which he can rest. His unconscious motivation is to deny the absence of a transformational object and to reject what is, to use the semiology of the self as a reproach to the other, who must feel guilt.

But, the attack on linking leaves him without structured psychological means of living-in-the-world. To survive, he uses paranoid vigilance—to scan the environment—instead of psychic insight, to know the self. Hence, paranoid thinking is a defense against anxiety surrounding survival of the self, that occurs when there has been an unconscious subversion of psychological insight. That is why he is not concerned with knowing himself or with insight, but only with how I feel about him and whether he is in trouble or not.

 

Christopher Bollas is a psychoanalyst and writer whose books include The Shadow of the Object, Cracking Up, and Meaning and Melancholia, among others. This extract is adapted from Streams of Consciousness: Notebooks, 1974-1990, which will be published by Karnac Books in England in October.

Letters to James Schuyler

TK

The artist and writer Joe Brainard and the poet James Schuyler, both central figures in the New York School of poets and painters, met in 1964. The two soon became close friends and confidants.   Brainard’s letters to Schuyler included here span the summer of 1964 through 1969 and were written while Brainard was moving from apartment to apartment in New York City and spending summers in Southampton, Long Island, and Calais, Vermont.

You can read an interview between James Schuyler and the critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review, no. 249, here. Schuyler and Schjeldahl were nominally meeting to discuss the poet Frank O’Hara, but the interview became a wide-ranging conversation about poetry, New York in the fifties, and the cast of characters that surrounded them. 

 

August 1968
Southampton, Long Island

Dear Jimmy,

Wouldn’t you know it? My rose petals didn’t work out. Some of them were not dried enough when I put them into those small Welch’s grape juice bottles and so they mildewed and turned green. So I had to throw them all away. Now, however, I have begun sand bottles. (At night) I don’t waste my time with such stuff in the daytime. At any rate—I have many colors of sand now (food coloring) all in many dishes all waiting for tonight (everyone is leaving tonight) when I’m going to see if it works. I have seen beautiful ones with very intricate designs but for my first one I will only do stripes. A nice size, those Welch’s bottles. I don’t, however care for the juice. When Pat and Wayne [Padgett] were here they would drink it for me (and loved it) but now I’ve nobody. I had (just had) several days of bad painting (sloppy) but today was very good. Today was (is) the most beautiful day I can ever remember: very sunny and very cool. And very quiet: Sunday. Many Sundays seem somehow odd to me, but today was just perfect. I do love it here. It just doesn’t make sense to go back to the city. Except for people. That’s where so many of the best people are, to me. The phone is ringing but I am in the studio. Kenward  is out watching the annual tennis tournaments. John and Scott are at the beach. John and John Scott (I don’t mean John and Scott, I mean John and John) are driving back tonight to the city. John to visit his mother for her seventy-fifth anniversary. I am talking of John Ashbery and John Scott, John’s new colored boy friend. I was afraid that perhaps you would get confused with John Button and Scott Burton. John and Scott, you may not know, have broken up. As I understand it tho, it was a mutual split. I am drinking a rosé wine. It’s about five o’clock. Once everyone gets back together we are going to an opening around the corner of Leon … (can’t remember). He is a very old romantic-realist and slick with lots of birds and fish nets. You know his work I am sure. Very much like Bernard. Morris Golde says that Fairfield [Porter]’s paintings looked terrific at the Biennale. He was very impressed with the number of them: said there were “lots.” I did some yellow pansies this morning with Fairfield’s yellow-black for green. I think that I would have done it anyway (?) but I always think of it as Fairfield’s thing: yellow-black for green. Actually, I have seen it in very few paintings that I have seen it in: one being the one I have. I hate to see today go. Will write more tomorrow, or soon—

Well—they didn’t leave around six as planned but instead we all (except Kenward) went to a queer beach party with Safronis [Sephronus Mundy]  and Jack (know them?) Safronis is from Sodus, like John A[shbery]. At any rate, it got 40 degrees and so we didn’t go to the beach but instead to some terrible interior decorator’s place. His name is Jack. I have never (no exaggeration) met anyone so disgusting in my entire life. Also there was a beautiful Indian boy who has been after me for several years now. I must admit that he turns me on terrifically. There is something fishy tho as he is so beautiful he could do a lot better than me. He is the Gerard Malanga type but he really has what it takes to be that type. He may know him he is quite notorious: Tosh Carrillo. At any rate, I have come to regard him as somewhat of the devil. Anyway, it was upsetting seeing him last night. (Temptation) I think you know me well enough to know that I am rather liberal. I’ve had many affairs since I started going with Kenward and I don’t feel one ounce of guilt. But this Tosh guy, there is really something dangerous about him. I hope you don’t mind my telling you this. It shook me up so much to see him again as, of course, I’m very attracted to him too. I hope by telling you about it I can forget for a while. So—today is another beautiful day: cool and hot. There is (like yesterday) a bit of autumn in the air and yet the sun is shining very brightly. It’s really the best of both seasons and I love it. This morning I got up at seven and picked three pansies and put them into three small bottles. One yellow pansy, one red-purple and yellow, and one solid blue-purple. I did three paintings of them (all three in each) and I am sure that at least one of them will look good in the morning. They are not so loose as before. More like summer before last. When I finish writing you I am going to read “Le Petomane” (about a French farter) And tonight I planned to do my first sand bottle.

Oh—the opening yesterday was paintings by Leonid. They weren’t very good but I rather admired a very details [sic] : details painted with one or two strokes of the brush. Like birds. Gore Vidal was there he looked quite young (35–40). Today is the twelfth. That means we have about two more weeks.

Right? Some of your house plants don’t look too great. I think that at first I watered them too much. They are not dead tho. So far there hasn’t been any serious damage done. A chunk of black linoleum in the laundry room

came up. Too much water was left at various times on the wooden tops in the new kitchen part: a few black streaks in the wood. I am watching it carefully now. I’m going to get this in the mail now. Do write soon. Summer is almost over and winter will not write much. One thing I forgot to tell you is that

I use your bike. I love riding it and I knew that you would not mind. Did I tell you that we are going to give a cocktail party for Jane [Freilicher] for her opening? Not Sunday (the opening), but Saturday before.

Very much love,
Joe

P.S. Did you see our names in the Sunday Times?
About painter poet collaborations by Peter S.

 

June 1969
Calais, Vermont

Dear Jimmy__

Last night (how nice it is to be writing to you again) I made a real strawberry short cake. I found the recipe in a “Family Circle.” I must say it was awfully good. And very easy. Egg, butter, milk, flour, baking powder, salt, and bake for fifteen minutes. Today is my second day in Vermont and I love being here. I especially love being here because I know I will be here for ten weeks. What to do? That’s what I am thinking about now. Mainly I just want to paint but also I want to get my manuscript together and do an issue of “C” Comics. This is too much to do in ten weeks but I imagine that I will try. If I had any sense in my head I would just paint and forget everything else but I enjoy “everything else” so much that I find this hard to do. So—as usual—I am torn between this or that or both. And—also I will pick both. It is still a bit cool up here. I continually (so far) wear a sweater. This morning (actually, it is still morning) I wrote a bit on a new thing I am writing called “I Remember.” It is just a collection of things I remember. Example:

“I remember the first time I got a letter that said ‘after five days return to’ on the envelope, and I thought that I was supposed to return the letter to the sender after I had kept it for five days.”

Stuff like that. Some funny, some (I hope) interesting, and, some downright boring. These, however, I will probably cut out. Unfortunately, I don’t have a very good memory, so it’s a bit like pulling teeth. I’ve been eating lots. I weighed in at 140 lbs. and I plan to arrive in N.Y.C. weighing at least 150. I plan to do this by eating lots and:

– 2 glasses of milk with Ovaltine everyday
– 1 big spoon of honey everyday
– eat lots of nuts at night
– vitamin B-12 pill every morning

I might even cut down on my smoking, but I doubt it. I am afraid that I don’t really care that much. In Tulsa I picked up some old school photographs of me. Enclosed is one of me in 1951. I also got some old newspaper photos and clippings of me which are very funny and very embarrassing. I’ll send them to you soon but I would like to have them back. Do keep this photo tho, if you want it. I am tempted to draw a line and write more tomorrow but actually I would enjoy this being your first summer letter so I’m going to go ahead and mail it. Do write.

Love, Joe

 

July 4, 1969
Calais, Vermont

Dear Jimmy__

You can’t know how nice, really, it was to get your letter. You write such nice letters even when you have nothing in particular to say. I am outside sunbathing again, and so are Anne [Waldman] and Lewis [Warsh]. Kenward is at the cabin he is writing, but surely nobody writes that much. Yesterday I sorted out all my oils, lined them up according to colors and stretched two canvases: 18″ x 24″. I thought I would start painting today but the sky is so clear and the sun is so hot, and actually, I didn’t (don’t) especially feel like it: painting. So—perhaps tomorrow. But I refuse to rush myself. No reason to except nervous habit. And nervous habit only produces works like I’ve done before. Which doesn’t have much to do with “painting,” as I see it. Or as I think I see it. (I don’t know what I’m talking about) Anne and Lewis are terrific people to live with. Lewis (so far) remains just as mysterious,  but in a friendly sort of way. Anne is just as nervous as me, which makes me feel not so nervous. We smoke a lot of “you know what.” Talk a lot. Eat a lot. Play cards some. (Pounce and Concentration) Did you ever play that? Concentration. I like it. If you don’t know how to play it, let me know, and I will explain it in my next letter. It’s very simple really. We read a bit every night from a “Woman’s Circle” or a “Woman’s Household” which reminds me: I want to send you some issues. Will soon. I don’t know how much I weigh now as we discovered that the scales are irregular. So—I am just eating a lot, altho it is not as much fun without being able to see (read) my gains. Next time we go into town, however, we are going to get a new pair. This I have never understood. Why scales are called a “pair.” Today is the 4th of July. Happy 4th! We here aren’t going to celebrate much, as far as I know, except that for dinner we are having a Harrington’s ham. There is a 4th of July parade today in East Calais, but I said “no thanks” to that, which put a damper on going. Nothing is more frightening to me than “Elks and Masons” and their children, etc. Besides, I don’t enjoy being an outsider. Did I tell you of a funny dream I had several nights ago? I don’t think so. At any rate—John Ashbery and I were chatting on my parent’s front porch and John said to me, “I think your Mondrian period was even better than Mondrian.” Actually, I never had a “Mondrian period” but in my dream I remember recalling the paintings I had done. They were just like Mondrian except with off-beat colors. Like slip [sic] peach and plum purple. Olive green. Etc. At any rate, I was awfully flattered. Frank O’Hara and J. J. Mitchell were there too, but I won’t go into that. Other people’s dreams are never as interesting as it seems they ought to be: to other people. Your advice is good. I do eat lots of nuts and I have been trying to eat as much as possible. Actually, getting better looking will probably only get me into more trouble, and make life more complicated. If I was wise I wouldn’t even try—but—once again—pardon the oil on this letter. It does help tho. And a warm shower afterwards. I am enclosing for you some “Button Face” note cards I sent away for from the “Woman’s Circle.” They’re very funny I think. Kenward and I have both been sending away for lots of stuff in order to get mail. Kenward has got lots of seeds. I got a “forget-me-not” necklace (“like grandma used to make”) which is somewhat of a disappointment. Also I got some crocheted butterflies which I gave to Kenward in celebration of the 1st day of July. They will be sewn on to curtains. I also got some “music post cards.” (Post cards with music on them) And some stars you glue to the ceiling and they glow in the dark. Like decals. I put them up in Anne and Lewis’s room and they like them. Someday it would be nice to do a whole ceiling. Also available is a friendly moon. I just went in for a Pepsi. It is now one o’clock. This afternoon I think I will get out my Polaroid and see what happens. Maybe we can swap pictures. Like those clubs do. Of a less intimate nature of course.  In your next letter to me would you please sign your name (your autograph) on a piece of white paper. I am beginning to put together my poet’s scrapbook and your autograph would be a big boom [sic] (Or a drawing?) I have drawings already by Ron and Ted and Frank and Kenward. Also I have many photos and clippings and wedding announcements, etc. It will be a nice book that will never end. The sun is really very hot today. Now I am sunning my back. This will be my first all-round tan since I was a kid. Kenward is doing pretty well too, tho his skin doesn’t tan as fast as mine. Obviously I am running out of talk. Will stop now. Do write again when you feel like it.

Love, Joe

P.S. Anne and Lewis city news:

John Giorno and Jasper Johns are back together again.
Pat and Ron leave for Tulsa this Monday for one week. Then three weeks traveling around California.
John Wieners’ parents had him committed but a plan is being worked out to get him out.
Dial-A-Poem will be continued next year from the “St. Marks Church.”
Bill Berkson has moved. His new address is 107 E. 10th St.
D. D. Ryan has been promoted to assistant producer, and now, is actually in the movie.
That’s about it.

(again) Love, Joe

 

Mid-July 1969
Calais, Vermont

Dear Jimmy:

Flowers not going too well. All the different greens (which seem to change from moment to moment) are driving me up the wall. Also—there is a red-purple I just can’t get. Also my wild flowers are too curvy (Art-Nouveau) and I can’t seem to straighten them out. A line (stem) like this [draws a smooth upward curve] always seems to end up like this [draws an upward curve with kinks in it] and, when I try to straighten them out, they seem flat (life-less) not that I have anything against curves. But my flowers are practically flying out of their bottles, off the canvas, to god only knows where. I never have liked El Greco much. Except for one pope. So—I am not painting today. A break. I am sunning. Today is a beautiful clear day, very blue, with not a cloud in sight. The sun is hot. It is about one o’clock. Kenward is coming back from the city around seven tonight. The whole back of me is peeling, as one day it got too much sun. So—I will have to start all over, little by little, as for several years it has been totally neglected. (Sun-wise) Not much is new. Except that the day lilies are out. The orange ones. In full bloom. All over. There are many more of them this year. And the milkweeds. They are everywhere. Which is O.K. with me. I like them. I read somewhere the other day that during the war they were used for lining coats. (Their fibers, or something, make good insulation.) Army coats. For very cold weather. It also said that their very small top leaves (the top two or three), when cooked taste like asparagus. I would say they taste more like spinach. And not very good spinach at that. Perhaps we didn’t cook them right yesterday. After oil painting all morning (I got up at 5:30!) I picked some grass and did lots of green ink and brush drawings of it. I am now cutting the grass out (with an X-Acto knife) and then I am going to put it all together, in layers, to make a solid patch of grass. (11″ x 14″) So far I have cut out two layers. It is quite delicate cutting and I have a big blister to prove it. (Delicate, but hard) It will be very pretty I know. It can’t miss. And it’s a good thing to do (cutting out grass) around four or five o’clock when your head is tired but you are still sort of wound up. Just before a drink. I plan to do a fern one too. If we ever get to Burlington (to get some more X-Acto blades). As it is rather intricate cutting one blade will not cut very much so finely. I could always send to the city for some. (Mail!) Now I am not sure what to do about my two oil paintings of two wild flowers arrangements. The actual flowers are gone now so I have a choice of “faking it” (which I am very good at) or forgetting them and start some new ones. I think I will do this (start some new paintings) as, if I’m going to fake it, I may as well wait until I get back to the city. Meanwhile, perhaps I can do some direct, here. I must keep reminding myself that this is not my purpose, now, to “produce good paintings” (rather to learn) about oils. About how things look. About color. Etc. Color is a real problem. I don’t know the tube colors so well as I know tempera jar colors. So I have to think. And thinking isn’t much good when it comes to color. From tempera painting I remember the best “right” colors more or less just happen. Do you know anything about toe nails? My right foot is bigger than my left foot and cowboy boots are not very good for you, but I wore them a lot last year anyway. The result is that my big toe nail is so squeezed together and it is very thick and sort of yellow. My idea is to file the entire nail (the top half, actually) down to how thin it ought to be. Do you think this would hurt? (The nail) That is to say, is a nail the same all the way through? I would hate to file away the surface of the nail and find something different underneath it. There are several health books here, all with toe nail sections, but you know how health books are. (No real information) They are cutting down some trees off to the left. (If one was entering the front door) So for days there has been constant sawing. What we hear, I guess, is like an echo. Like a car trying to start. One does get used to it tho. Mrs. [Louise Andrews] Kent’s son owns that land. Aside from getting lots of wood, it is supposed to be good for the land. (Thinning it) So Kenward said. So Ralph [Weeks] told Kenward Mrs. Kent is in the hospital. I don’t know if you know her well enough that you would want to send a card or not. I don’t know exactly what is wrong with her except that, really, she is very old. It is the Montpelier Hospital. The one Ron was in. Pat and Ron are either in Tulsa, or on their way to California. Or perhaps in California. It’s hard to keep track of the date up here. And I don’t know their plans anyway. (Date-wise) Sometime in August they will come up here next to visit some. Unless, by next year we are not very close. Which is possible. Actually we weren’t terribly close this year. Old friends don’t want you to change. And, of course, it works both ways. Or, perhaps it is just harder, around old friends, to try to change. At any rate—sometimes, around Pat and Ron (and especially Ted) I don’t feel like myself. (1969-wise) Of course, there are compensations. Like—I always feel very comfortable around Pat and Ron. And that’s NICE. I’m going to sign off before I find myself with a whole new page to fill. There has been no mail for two days as Kenward has been away. So—if I have received a letter from you and not mentioned it, this is why I haven’t received it. Do write.

Love, Joe

P.S. Actually, Ron is trying. Two times last year I got a kiss. And after seeing the Royal Ballet he said that Nureyev has a rear end like mine. For some reason I was very touched by that. (Wish it were true).

 

From  Love, Joe: The Collected Letters of Joe Brainard , edited by Daniel Kane, to be published by Columbia University Press this November.

Joe Brainard (1942–1994) was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to New York City in 1960. He was a prolific writer and artist across many media, including paintings, collages, assemblages, and comic-strip collaborations with poets. His I Remember has been translated into fifteen languages, and his artworks are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and many others. He died of AIDS-related pneumonia.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Café Life in Freud’s Vienna

Kalamian Walton, Silver Teaspoon. Circa 1938. Donated to Wikimedia Commons by the National Gallery of Art. Licensed under CCO 1.0.

Is there a single silver teaspoon that has not stirred up the memory of seduction and rage? Is there a Fräulein in the house without vague, disabling despair? Ah, the fresh and full aroma of hysteria under a constellation of coffee cups!

May the waiter (calm, contemptuous, organized) please bring to the table the shivering Sacher torte with its dark, oily cacao.

Observe Herr K. in his great coat lined with fur, gazing at Frau K.’s petticoats, white as frothing alpine milk. Is he still in love with his mother? Does he wish to murder his father, who regularly engaged in bestial coitus with the governess?

Today Frau K. likes her coffee the Turkish way. As she lifts the small cup to her lips, her right arm freezes in midair. Oh no! Is this the same arm that pulled a handsome Herr closer to her breast when they embraced on the big wheel at the fair in the park?

Near-death trance, vertigo, and strudel under the new clean light of electricity!

Observe Frau O., who, revived by the libido of yeast in the Kaiser bread rolls, is in flirtation with the family doctor. This kindly gentleman administers vitamin injections to her sister on the last Tuesday of every month. Watch how he gallantly presses Frau O.’s fingers to his lips and then rises to play billiards in the next room. Tomorrow at noon, these white-haired industrialists will send their clever, unhappy daughters (parental conflicts, the laws of society, lecherous uncles) to the curer of souls at Berggasse 19. There, they will learn that desire must not always win the day, but it always does.

There will forever be a snake in the cake box.

 

Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. She is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative “living autobiography” trilogy. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

From The Position of Spoons, a collection of Levy’s nonfiction that will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October.

On Nate Lippens

Paul VanDerWerf from Brunswick, Maine, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been reading Nate Lippens for years. I think this is the third time I’ve read My Dead Book and I’m finally getting a grip on what kind of machine his writing is. I think it’s a poetic instrument and also some kind of natural phenomena. I went to Joshua Tree one night in the aughts with a gang of people to see the Perseids. I’ve been thinking about that. We had sleeping bags and some people had drinks and their drugs of choice and then we all laid down flat looking up the sky waiting for the show. There wasn’t much. Like almost nothing. There’s one. And then in maybe about seven minutes another. Then another one. And nothing for a while. Then wham and all of the sudden we were screaming, giddy as kids because we were getting inundated with meteors making the sky like this crazy vibing net and we were ancient people animals lying there looking up in naked awe. It was the best. Start to finish I think that’s what Nate Lippens has done. Let me lay it out here. My Dead Book starts off with a fairly sentimental recitation, a recollection of one of his dead friends from the past. And then another one. I mean of course I like the way he writes. It’s clean, it’s fairly direct, and conceptually I am reminded of how practical friendship is to a lost child which this narrator definitely is. If you don’t know who you are then you make yourself up with bits and pieces of your friends. And losing them means continually losing yourself who never existed except what you got from them and what’s constant in these evocations and recollections is the trashy elegance, swarming and specific bravado of a collection of souls who are lost and living antithetical to the values of the culture itself. Young rent boys and old rent boys and the people who collect them. We have books of course that are memoirs by particular people living in particular times but My Dead Book will have none of that. These are no ones mostly. Self-declared. It’s a midwestern book. Going to New York or LA to trick, even living there for a while but always coming back. Maybe there’s one kind of someone but he doesn’t value that. And it turns out he’s invented. He’s mostly me, Nate said. So we’re on the fringe, the fringe of the fringe. So what we have is loss and a compounding of loss, more and more. People age out, bodies get found in the river. People jump in the river. The cup spilleth over. So what’s the story. It’s a rhythmic trick. Like poetry. Like God is. And a queer one. His narrator tells about Gore Vidal saying that there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts. So wise in a late-night-talk-show way (and Nate is not from that generation (mine) who stayed up late to see Truman Capote and Oscar Levant and Gore Vidal preen and pontificate on swivel chairs, but he’s entirely of it and Oscar Wilde too, definitely the Oscar Wilde of De Profundis but funnier) but the joke I want is how our narrator finds that quote funny because Gore Vidal was such a faggot. Rich as he was and toney and all he nonetheless handed them that joke. He was one of the boys. So he knew he’d be laughed at when he left the room or when the teevee went off for the night. So imagine reality being that place then. So we retreat into language here. Some of the jokes are just quietly squeezing the repetition. Almost with your fingertips. If money weren’t a factor somebody, a friend with money, begins a speech. What follows is a very conversational sequence of if-money-weren’t-a-factors but thinky, inside oneself. Which is also one of the main soundstages here. The narrator can’t sleep so he’s prone to long conversations with himself. If money weren’t a factor he asks finally (alone in bed) would we even know each other? It’s a quiet laugh followed by further critique of the wealthier friend but he has displayed his sword, his wit so we roll along for the next skein of thoughts. Nate takes huge risks with our capacity to suffer with him. And I like being pushed to that edge which is like watching your single mom clean the house and never knowing (it might take forever) when she is going to say something disarmingly filthy or just informative—something you’d never known about her before.

Of his class of boys Nate Lippens tells us:

We remembered social workers, outreach volunteers, and youth counselors with their advice, programs, groups, condoms, free anonymous screenings, and clean syringes. They trained us to be vigilant. No exceptions. They saved our lives and taught us to trust no one.

It’s a revelation. These dark comedians were “built” in so many ways. By social programs that saw everything but them. These are the kids who had the shit kicked out of them in school, whose dads beat them up for being fags—Dear Officer Krupke fuck you—but gay. The inside strikes back with a ton of young and not-so-young death. Thud, then everyone returning for encores throughout the text while the bodies keep landing on the deck like fish. Thump. And that’s the story.

There’s no rules when you’re not telling a story but stories. For me that’s the most redemptive thing of all. And because the narrator always loved Shane, perhaps the most recurring burnished tragic figure here, he ends a passage explaining that he wanted to save him with a kind of Diamond Dogs flourish:

I pictured us like salamanders, emerging from the fire with bright iridescent scales. Always the “just before” creates the very swirl of this. I imagine such lines bursting forth from hours of listening to music high for hours, and beauty and excess stepping out to dance just like humor always puts a stop to things and gets us out of the room. As I read My Dead Book again I was increasingly in awe at Nate’s timing and intuition. He was a poet first before anything else and you can smell it here. Most machinically, his bits and pieces are generally just a third of a page, a procession of them. This is a book full of asterisks for sure. Just when we’ve hit bottom with a character’s absolute inability to have intimacy with anyone other than his listening friend (and including him) the story races off to consider a world where “all the people who called ‘us’ bitter in the ’90s are now”—guess!?—“at the Whitney’s David Wojnarowicz exhibit.” Point being they would eat our dead bodies if we were famous. Turned out like this, the despair that floods this book like an abandoned car feels more like everybody’s problem and it is.

Humor is a kind of disordering, like ten, nine, eight, seven, three! and three tears a hole in your expectation and you crawl out laughing from a trap. Sometimes it’s ta-dum, sometimes a line noodles in like the moment when he’s talking about a show of matchbooks from “now-defunct gay bars and sex clubs.” His tone slightly shifts maybe lowers before explaining that the show refers to “a time that is an intermittent blinking on some abandoned shore, maybe.” I love the maybe. A whole era could be vast as in a movie about it, or infinitesimal like a kind of distant unforgettable light. But honestly it’s almost more than the beauty of the line, its noodling, its refusal to be major as another way of honoring what’s past. We were and now we are not. That’s all it means to say. It’s antimonumental. I feel I’m in danger of saying things I’ve said before, swooping Nate’s work into a wave of praise for things I’ve categorized before. If he’s related to that he shines most as the most uncategorizable, a poet of adamantine failure who while he’s experiencing the heft of his own declaration teases himself and us with vows of love, pledges to specific beauties, rages against conformities of comfort in relation to wealth and ideas and who’s declared valuable by “the community” (a phrase which he sneers at, delightedly) that wants to embellish our gay or queer love with the cozy and warm fragrance of home (and—at last—acceptance).

The spiky poetic homelessness of My Dead Book is in relation to a devotion to not fitting in, not anywhere ever. I haven’t read this yet before, not anywhere at all, though he’s moved by a literature I know that is never fiction or nonfiction but poetic fact unraveled with unparalleled and sidestepping skill.

Whatever his truth is he’s willing to die for it, woulda, but didn’t. And there’s one final effect which I’ve got to mention which is that once I’ve gotten used to the erratic flicker of his prose, the effects that randomly lighten his dead load, as the book comes to its final curve and it feels a bit like the narrator is a survivor after all and is mourning his loves and his own life and his family in recollection, what I’ve experienced in this book is formal somehow, the lights begin to stay and the final passage is bright as hell like one star stayed, yup, and got us home as well. It says hello. And man, can you write.

 

Excerpt from Eileen Myles’s introduction to My Dead Book by Nate Lippens, to be published by Semiotext(e) this October.

Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their twenty-two books include For Now, evolution, Afterglow, I Must Be Living Twice, and Chelsea Girls. Myles is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. They live in New York and Marfa, Texas.

My Childhood Toy Poodles

Binky and Tabby (left to right).

Origin

In 1989, my brother wanted a dog. He was twelve. I was six. We lived in suburban Central Florida. We found Binky in a newspaper listing. 

At Binky’s house, I pet Binky’s mom and she ignored me, walking away with straight posture. Binky’s parents competed in dog shows. We chose Binky over his brother because his brother seemed out of control, sprinting through the house, pulling down a lamp. I don’t remember what Binky was like that day. 

Four years later, I wanted another dog so that Binky would have a companion. When we went to meet Tabby one afternoon, she and her family of six or seven poodles were all lying flat on sofas and the floor, sleeping.

Appearance

Tabby weighed almost twice as much as Binky, who averaged five pounds. They both looked white to us, but veterinarians labeled Tabby “apricot,” which we found amusing. Binky was elegantly proportioned, like his parents. Tabby was awkward, doe-like, with long legs, a rectangular body, and a small-looking head. 

Personality

Binky was tense, loyal, protective, and easily agitated. He had a loud, piercing bark that made it hard to talk on the phone or hear the TV. At night, he would hear noises and bark continuously for up to an hour or more. My mom described him as “very serious, like a policeman.” When my parents and my brother and I argued, Binky would bark at the person who was being loud. If we pretended to hit one another, Binky would bark in a rapid, urgent-seeming manner and then attack the attacker with his teeth.

Tabby didn’t care, or even seem to notice, what we did to one another. Cheerful, unconcerned, and easily satisfied, she rarely barked and seemed to care only about food. She was carefree to the point of seeming Zen/enlightened. If Binky was a grumpy, peace-wanting cop, Tabby was a contented stoner. While resting, she would look at us by moving only her eyeballs. She allowed us to drag her around the house by holding her two hind legs (one in each hand) and pulling her like a sled. 

Binky would never have let us drag him like a sled. To him, it would have seemed absurdly inconsiderate. He would have bitten us before we’d gotten hold of his legs. He often attacked us, causing bleeding wounds, but only when provoked. If we touched him wrong, or if we got too close to him while he was eating, or if he was curled on my bed and felt my legs shifting beneath a blanket, he would growl and then, if we kept troubling him, lunge at us, biting. I respected that Binky asserted himself. 

We each had our own semiprivate strategies for interacting with him without upsetting him, but I felt that I knew him best. I was the most proficient, for example, at picking him up from the ground—gently yet quickly, sliding my hands firmly down to his belly from both sides of him while he was standing and aware of my presence. 

Freedom

Tabby ran away at any opportunity. She’d run past our legs when we opened the front door. We lived at the back of an approximately sixty-house subdivision called Willow Run that was enclosed by a wall except at the front, where cars entered and left. 

Once, after sprinting out of the house, Tabby seemed to disappear. The next day, a family that had recently moved into our subdivision brought her home; she’d stayed the night at their house after jumping into their minivan when its sliding door opened to let in a human. Another time, Tabby ran away on a cold night in December. My mom, who was living alone with the dogs at the time, told me in an email:

I was worried, going out to look for her, but could not see her so I came back, closed the door, looking out from the door window for a long time, finally I saw her outside of our home, walking so slowly and leisurely, felt like she was enjoying the cold air and the quietness of the night. I called her name, upon hearing my voice, she ran away again, she did not want to come home. 

After being gone for hours, she would stand at the front door until someone noticed her, waiting there silently, patiently, unlike Binky, who would repeatedly scratch the door and then, if we didn’t notice him, go to the door in the garage or the screen doors in the back of the house.

Binky never ran away. We would let him out and he would return within ten minutes. On walks, we often didn’t leash Binky. Tabby always required a leash. Despite being heavy and seeming low energy (she was usually recumbent), she was so quick and agile that it was almost impossible to catch her once she escaped.

Love

In middle school, when no one was home, I would lay facing Binky as he lay flat on his side on the carpet. “I love you,” I would say, looking into his black eyes while carefully petting him in a limited, measured way. I never said this to anyone else during my childhood. It felt difficult and strange to say, even to Binky. 

When I played piano, Binky would lay Sphinx-style on the carpet behind me, listening. When I visited home during college, Binky would walk upstairs to the second floor—my room, at that time, post–Willow Run, was above the garage—and “knock” on my door by scratching it.

My brother says he was closer to Binky than Tabby because we got Binky first, “but in my memory he spent much more time with Tabby. My parents say they preferred Tabby because she didn’t bite. In a 2008 email, after both dogs had died, my mom called Tabby “the best, nicest and funniest dog we have ever had.”

I was much closer to Binky than to Tabby. Binky’s unpopularity made me like him more. I related to his grumpiness and alienation. I was defensive of him against Tabby, who in moments of uncharacteristic hyperactivity would sprint at Binky, bumping into him or biting his ear and then running away, angering him. 

Email

In 2004, when I was twenty-one, Binky was fifteen, and Tabby was eleven, I got a Gmail account and named it binky.tabby. While researching for this essay, I realized I couldn’t search “Binky” or “Tabby” in my account because it returned every email, so I searched “Binky was” (seventy-six results) and “Tabby was” (fifty-eight results). Other research I did for this essay: asked my parents/brother for their “most memorable memories” of the poodles; viewed photos and videos; searched “toy poodle” in my Gmail (331 results).

Fetch

Binky loved playing fetch, which we called diū diū (“throw throw” in Mandarin). He played it fervently, never getting tired or losing interest. Fetch allowed him to meditatively focus all of himself on one simple yet ever-changing task. I believe the activity served as much-needed stress relief for him, a reprieve from police work.

We played fetch with him while we watched TV. We’d throw a rubber ball or a stuffed animal toward the front door. He’d bring it back within ten seconds and begin barking within another five seconds; if we didn’t throw the object, he’d scratch us and/or move the object closer to us while continuing to bark.

I don’t remember Tabby ever bringing me anything to throw. She played fetch half-heartedly, often giving up after an instinctual burst of motion. Her disinterest in fetch, peacemaking, barking at perceived threats, and other activities that occupied Binky supported our suspicion/joke that she cared only about food.

 

Tabby.

Intelligence

We fondly thought of Tabby as “stupid.” We viewed Binky as remarkably intelligent. He sometimes watched TV. In a 2004 email, my mom said, “When Dad called this evening, Binky was watching Fox News for about two minutes standing very close to the TV.” 

According to my mom, Binky was “interested in politics, he always watched presidential debates, he was against Ross Perot, every time when it was Perot’s turn to speak, Binky would run to the TV and kept barking at him.”

When Binky and I chased each other around the loop that went through the kitchen, living room, and piano room, back to the kitchen, he would turn around and run in the opposite direction or stand motionless, waiting for me. 

When Tabby was carrying a grape or some other piece of food in her mouth, I’d chase her for fun and she’d run away and put her head beneath my parents’ bed; with her entire body exposed, she’d stop moving, apparently thinking she was hidden. If she couldn’t see us, we couldn’t see her, seemed to be her reasoning. 

But maybe she was being playful or was somehow testing me. Throughout my life, gradually sloughing off culture’s hubristic bias against nature, I’ve increasingly realized that I’ve underestimated the complexity of animals. If I met Tabby now, I think I would discern many signs of intelligence that I hadn’t noticed as a child.

Christmas

Before Christmas, Binky would home in on his and Tabby’s presents under the Christmas tree and open them, clawing and biting through the wrapping. We’d repackage them and hide them better, among the other presents. Tabby didn’t open presents. Binky would open hers for her. He seemed to enjoy opening the presents more than the presents themselves—dog snacks, rubber toys.

One Christmas morning, my dad entered the room with a large cardboard box. He said it was for me. This was unexpected because he never gave anyone presents for Christmas, not out of stinginess or animus but seemingly just because it wasn’t something that he felt a responsibility to do. I opened the box and saw Binky and Tabby. My dad laughed harder than I’d ever seen him laugh, falling down, gasping.

When I asked my dad if he remembered this, he said, in an email, “Not really.” I told him, “This happened one Christmas and you laughed harder than I’ve ever heard you laugh.” He responded, “animals specially poodles n cats. gave our family so much happiness so long. we are lucky.” My dad had a cat as a child and another one as an adult, before I was born, and I currently have two cats.

Cats

Unlike Binky and Tabby, my cats were born and weaned in the wild, have a natural diet (raw meat), are free to go anywhere whenever (indoors or outdoors), don’t wear toxic and limiting accoutrements like flea collars and leashes, and never get scolded. When the poodles stole our food or peed or pooped in the wrong place, and when Binky attacked us, we’d say, “No!” and sometimes add, “Jìnqù!” (“go in”) and they’d walk slowly to their room and we’d close the door. My cats are purer expressions of the natural world than Binky and Tabby, who were somewhat heavily contaminated by human culture in ways that impaired their mental and physical health.

Baths

Tabby didn’t seem to like baths, but she was easy to bathe since she didn’t get angry. Binky hated baths. When he heard the sink filling with water, he would hide or curl into a tight, tense form, growling when we approached. After we put him in the water and squirted shampoo on him, he would let us scrub only his back and the top parts of his sides. Sometimes he became so distraught and defensive that we left him in the sink to air-dry after his bath, afraid to try to move him. Other times, we used bath towels to protect ourselves as we lifted him onto the adjacent laundry machine to be blow-dried. 

Change

Binky wasn’t always violent and high-strung. He was docile and peaceful until he was one or two, when he stayed at a kennel for two or three months while we were in Taiwan. My parents and brother and I don’t clearly remember “pre-biting Binky,” as my brother called early Binky, but we know he existed. 

Diet

They ate highly processed, corn-based, dry dog food, which probably gave them nutritional deficiencies and swings in blood sugar that made them insatiably hungry all of the time, especially Tabby, who seemed unable to stop eating until no food remained. The only time when Tabby would growl was when she was eating and Binky approached. This was effective in keeping Binky away.

When we ate, they constantly tried to steal our food. Sometimes, Tabby brought home vehicle-flattened, sun-dried frogs and toads; we’d pull the dead animals out of her mouth; she likely would have benefited from eating the natural, nutritious food, but back then we all seemed to view the behavior as indicative of her low intelligence.

They ate their own vomit, as my mom described in a 2005 email: “This morning when I was typing, I heard Binky growl (the way he is guarding his food), I thought why he growls, there is no food around, and I turned around and saw he was guarding his vomit afraid Tabby might steal it. Then he ate it back, I was trying to pick it up, but Binky wouldn’t let me. When I turned around again, it was Tabby who was eating it.”

Binky regularly tried to eat his own poop. He did it somewhat reluctantly. We would stop him, and he would seem to lose interest. We viewed the behavior as pathological, but he was probably instinctually trying to improve his microbiome.

Blockage

When Binky had diarrhea and long fur, poop would stick to his butthole, rendering him unable to poop. He would continue trying to push out poop, standing with his front and back legs together, and a mass of poop and fur would build up. These despair-filled events took hours to resolve. I would use scissors to cut off the matted fur, making one cut at a time by sneaking up behind him, quickly making the cut, and retreating as he turned to bite me. We would put him in the sink to let his butt soak. 

Elmo

Once, we adopted a male gray nonpoodle who was Tabby’s size and had a large, wide head. I don’t remember where he came from. He may have just wandered into our yard one day. We named him Elmo. He became friends with Tabby but not Binky. Tabby seemed to like Elmo more than she liked Binky. I sympathized with Binky. I didn’t like Elmo. We had him for maybe a week. We gave him to one of my dad’s employees.

Hurricane

My mom spent four years living alone with “Bin-Ta,” as we called the dogs when calling them both at once. My dad was in prison for a white-collar crime, my brother was living in New York City, and I was at college. One year, my mom and the poodles endured three hurricanes. The first was Hurricane Charley. My mom wrote:

Power was off and the wind was so strong, our doors suddenly flung open, I had to use all my strength trying to close the double doors against the strong wind, then the windows in your room sounded like they were going to break so I had to rush upstairs to your room to hold the windows in case they broke, running up and down in the dark (Binky and Tabby just followed me all the time).

Hurricanes Jeanne and Frances were less powerful but also caused power outages, lasting up to two weeks. At night, my mom lit candles and was scared sometimes but, as she also recalled, she “felt comfort with Binky and Tabby being always beside” her, keeping her company.

Death

My mom gave Tabby twice-daily insulin injections during the last few months of Tabby’s life, testing her urine each morning to determine the dose. “When she ate, I injected the insulin, she just kept on eating without even noticing she was being injected,” wrote my mom. One day in December 2005, seven months after I graduated from college, Tabby’s pee was green. She died that day. She was twelve.

For around a month, my mom cried whenever she thought of Tabby’s absence. Then she had a dream where “Tabby was so happy running around in a green field full of beautiful flowers.” She viewed the dream as a message from Tabby that she, my mom, “did not have to be so sad.”

Binky lived for seventeen more months. He became blind and then also deaf during this time. He would walk along the walls to reach his room to pee and poop on newspapers. Once, while I was visiting home, he accidentally walked into the swimming pool, making a surprisingly loud splash. He seemed happier being deaf-blind. Unaware of the world’s frustrating tumult, he became placid and untroubled again.

In May 2007 we decided to euthanize Binky, who was seventeen. I said bye to him at night, massaging him in my room. In the morning, my dad and brother brought him to the vet. After his death injection, Binky bit the vet and died.

 

Tao and Binky.

 

Tao Lin is the author of ten books. He is active on his blog/newsletter.

to recover belongings from a wreck

Ficre Ghebreyesus, Solitary Boat in Red and Blue, ca. 2002–07. © The Estate of Ficre Ghebreyesus. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.

There is a painting by the Eritrean American artist Ficre Ghebreyesus named Solitary Boat in Red and Blue. It is a painting I find utterly compelling, utterly seductive—perhaps because I love the color blue, and who doesn’t? But I find the blue and this painting so luminous, so doubled. Ghebreyesus’s boat drifts on an opalescent bluish green sea along a smoke-bush green, emerald sky. The boat has an ethereal appearance, its reflection drifting below in the water; its destination is everywhere. It gestures to another reality of boats—boats that we know about, distressed in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. I want to be in Ghebreyesus’s boat and perhaps I am; it has such light in it, and is such an invitation to uncertainty and bounty. I once wrote, “even a wrecked and wretched boat still has all the possibilities of moving.” But Solitary Boat in Red and Blue is not a wrecked boat. It is the spirit of boats that I spoke of in those lines. It is a boat moving with all haste, languor, and possibility. It is two boats, three boats, in combination with one’s own illusive boat: solid, reflective, and imagined. The moths or fireflies that accompany the boat with their own gray-blue translucence almost seem to be floating on water themselves. And where is the boat going, I ask? And the answer, it seems, is to somewhere green. Its lightness and drift indicate its whereabouts and destination. I can’t get enough of the painting. One’s eyes are always rewarded and that is because of its movement. If you glance away, you find it at another place, at a new place. “Solitary” is paradox here.

There is another painting of a boat that I love, Remedios Varo’s Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River. A woman, Varo’s avatar, sits in a red, fishlike bucketed waistcoat of a boat. She arrives in this boat at the source of the Orinoco only to find, whimsically or ironically, a coffee table with a glass spilling wine that appears to be the beginning of the river. In the painting, metaphor becomes a critique of such explorations: they resulted only in superconsumption and exploitation.

Unlike Varo’s painting, Ghebreyesus’s Solitary Boat in Red and Blue has no destination so specific and no purpose so directive and acquisitive. Nor one so ironic. There is no one on board, yet it seems everyone we wish to be, or know, is on board; so perhaps someone is on board. Whatever the case, this boat’s intentions are not missionary, with all the attendant violent and coercive relations that go along with “discovery” and “exploration” for future uses; it does not seek information or commodifiable knowledge. It is not equipped with a compass. And the end of its journey is still open to wonder.

***

One hears of shipwrecks, many shipwrecks. Not massive container ships like the Ever Given which ran aground in the Suez Canal, nor the ten-deck, thousand-foot-long cruise ships that move tourists around the world. Not those centuries-old wrecks, popular in literature, that emanated from what was called the voyage and the adventure. Not the shipwrecks where gold and treasure are lost; not those wrecks from that violent age, whose treasures are still sought today by modern adventurers with “scientific methods.” In the shipwrecks I hear of, there is another loss at sea. Human. These wrecks are of small vessels that move people and their precarity across the Mediterranean, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico. These are the boats and the pirogues and the dinghies, full of people who are trying to land in safety, but who might be interdicted and pushed back in the other direction. Or drowned. Or: arrived, only to be held again on some ship—the Bibby Stockholm—much like the Convict Hulks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London.

There are many shipwrecks now. They are attended by border and security regimes; they end in loss of lives. The salvage there, in wrecked pirogues, is bodies, small possessions, wallets, cell phones, T-shirts, raincoats, jackets, keys to houses and rooms, sodden papers, only valuable to the ones who lost their lives. And to those who wait for word of their safe landing. A Tunisian fisherman, Oussama Dabbebi, says, “Instead of getting fish, I sometimes get dead bodies. The first time I was afraid, then step by step I got used to it. After a while getting a dead body out of my net is like getting a fish. Once I found a baby’s body. How is a baby responsible for anything?” These lives were/are animated by need and want, and not by adventure. These lives were/are destroyed by need and want and the adventures of totalizing forces, of multinational arrangements, oil concessions, cocoa concessions, lumber concessions, mineral concessions, toxic waste concessions, and electronic waste concessions.

Those earlier shipwrecks contained the precarious too—the enslaved. But most of the stories that arrive from those times, and propel modern adventurers, are ones of lost wealth/treasure, such as that of the Spanish fleet sunk by a hurricane in the eighteenth century: fifty million dollars’ worth of gold coins and gold chain recovered, and an estimated four hundred million more still hiding in the sea, they say. And along with the gold bullion were the enslaved, who were also treasure to be transformed into more gold.

J. M. W. Turner’s oceans, explosions of movement and color, perhaps hint at this catastrophe below. Slavers Throwing Over­board the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On (1840) is the most searing of these paintings, although any Turner ocean is tumultuous. Yet Slavers best evokes the indifference fueling the cataclysm that overtook millions of abducted, enslaved, and transported Africans—an indifference that drove Turner’s watercolors to their experiments, no doubt. And a haunting that lead John Ruskin to use the word blood twice, but never once human or slavery, in his high praise for Turner’s Slavers. Even though, that “blood” is “girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror,” as Ruskin writes.

As I write, it is four years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and throughout this time the boats kept/keep leaving and arriving even as the pandemic itself, its enormity, still may not have struck all of us, except in moments and on days when we cannot believe how much time has passed since something quite unknown—though, we suspect, inevitable and truly uncontrollable—entered our lives. And not only our lives—as so often when we say “our lives” we mean only our social worlds—but our very biological viability. Increasingly we suspect what has entered is something irreparable, something irreversible, undoable. Like wreckage. And those of us who see the wreckage feel like unwanted messengers about the crisis already, always in progress. We recognize the deterioration of the geological life of the planet itself to be irreparable; the coincidence of great human migration and deep geological crisis is not lost on some of us. The migrations from South to North have everything to do with exploitation of the South by the North. Nihilistic resource extraction creates physically, socially, and politically uninhabitable conditions. But those are broad terms: “North” and “South.” Interrelated interests abound in capital. Those of us who live in the South know this complexity well, and those of us who live in the North know it, too—though the blindfold of metropolitan superiority mostly obscures or ignores that knowledge. Whoever “we” are, the passage of this time, these past few years, has been like walking deeper and deeper into a space whose full contours we are still making out. We have run into something. What? And who is “we”?

Capital has slingshot back, and seems to have accelerated in its motion, making up and superseding what it calls its losses over the last years. The pandemic has left the headlines, and we are back to “normal.” Or, “normal” quadrupled, which is to say more extraction, more war—the most rapid means of growth of capital; and more designation/eradication of the human beings extraneous and dispensable to the project of “normal.” “Normal,” it must be concluded, is nihilism-capital, churning up disasters geological and human, since that is all “we” are getting back to. This “we” insists on an aggregate of some kind; but something is always happening to its signification. This “we” that we have all been drafted into has collected around a set of social behaviors that have been made into principles. It is a “we” that takes the historical trajectory of the present dominant economic configuration, with its conflicts, tensions, and contradictions, for granted. This dominant ideology sweeps the boats aside like so much anticipated death, like personal or cultural failures. It calls these migrations the fault of failed states, not the brutal expulsions necessary to the new global political economy. These are what Saskia Sassen names, in her book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, the “elementary brutalities” that attend the so-called complex economies.

This pronoun “we” that we invoke is, at base, a “we” of constant, detailed and expanding consumption, refracting in geopolitical and historical ways. All of us are recruited into this “we,” whether we have the means, or whether we are the means by which others extract and consume.

“We” and “us” are always in flux. The meanings disaggregate with self-consciousness. “We” is an aggregate already disaggregated. And even in that partiality there is disaggregation.

We were made still by the pandemic. We were made still, and we could observe the great movement, the articulation of who was “we” and who was “we.”

In the Global North we were forced to come to terms with the rest of world. Not as labor pool, waste dumping site, theater of war, arena of resource extraction; not as Globalization—meaning the complete annexing of the world’s resources and labor supply in the project of neoliberal capitalism. Rather, a broad “we” in the Global North briefly felt the way it is to live in the Global South—under siege, under lack, under restraint. The world folded like cloth or like paper into the uncomfortable recognition of the “we”—of its geological whole. We suddenly felt the earth as if our feet were on the same shaky surface. The earth compressed its air and time together—and briefly made all distinctions superfluous. We went from world to earth to planet, and we realized the planet is indifferent to us. It goes on in any incarnation—it will sweep us away, it has no stake in us, it has no compassion. The pandemic allowed us to see and think; or forced us to see and think; or forced others among us to refuse to see and refuse to think—and it occurred to some of us that this is what it must have felt like for decades somewhere else. This was not some accustomed tragedy happening elsewhere, but everywhere; and for a short while “we” were not someone else, but everyone. Or: we were all someone else; and those of us who were someone else wherever we were, anyway—well, we were everyone and someone else as we always had been. The world altered. The Global North could not distribute its usual knowing looks of pity and blame, divorced from its complicity in the conditions that emanate from our/its way in the world. We stopped. For a short time, that is, or for as long as most memory lasts in the Global North—until the stock markets corrected themselves; until commentators reclaimed the racist narratives of difference. For a short time, we, or many of us, were stilled—until the supply lines figured out their new and old trajectories.

But this world-stillness hovers anyway; it is pressing over everyone and someone, over the indifferent planet; this world-stillness overrides and catapults, despite our ongoing right-siding toward a killing, stratifying, death-dealing normal. It is a stillness we encounter between every moment of living now; a stillness that cannot be described by the markets and the supply lines and the dominant interpretation of the normal; a stillness from whose attentions we cannot be reclaimed fully or returned to that dominant interpretation. In this stillness, we surmise that we must attend to some urgency in the process of defining itself.

Early in this season of stillness, this season of observation, when commentators and reporters tried to collect us into the generalizable “we,” to breathe confidence into the faltering project of “we” in order to keep our spirits up, they asked, “How should we get through this time?”; and “What should we read to get us through?” They asked, “Has any writer provided us with a key, to understand, to transform; to escape this time; to cope?”; “Does the literary canon contain any balm, any advice?” The implied question was, Did a certain set of Euro- or Anglo- American texts provide a roadmap to the way through and the way out? This, of course, pointed directly to the aggregate “we,” the one that coalesces into whiteness, or the genre of the human whose precondition is whiteness. And right on time, someone wrote in the Guardian: “What We Can Learn from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Years in Lockdown.” The essay went on to read: “After being diagnosed with a severe respiratory illness, the poet was forced to live in isolation. Her response offers great insights into how to cope. Lockdown taught her actively to embrace the freedom to travel when it came.” (And isn’t this just where “we” are now, and why the planet will continue to heave? And just who can travel in this time?) The commentator continued, “Yet the same material was also offering me a fascinating insight into how to cope with what was going on in my own world. … Her grasp of self-invention through a kind of ‘second life’ reminded me of all the friendships we were suddenly reconfiguring on Zoom. I also realized how closely her practice prefigured today’s digital communicators: not just the teenagers and geeks, bloggers and TikTok stars, but citizen journalists, activists and those policed by authoritarian regimes too.” (I wryly note here “second life,” and its resonance with that eponymous online game in which one creates an avatar and interacts with others.) The writer is trying to make some connection, to draw a line from the past to the present, but that’s just it: this connection is through whiteness—the white “we,” metonym for every “we,” innocently, casually summoned.

In fact, we are summoned through the bourgeois life of nineteenth-century England: we are lathered in slaveholding and the fortunes made in enslavement. This summons arrived in the Global North, in the middle of the pandemic, whole and aspirational, and as exemplar—as juridical in its demand. Naturally, if the world was falling apart during the pandemic, then its constitutive elements were also under siege; and if one of those elements was whiteness, then its tropes, its narrative his-tory, needed shoring up. Its narrative proprietorship needed affirming. Or more innocently, the narrative apparatus that undergirded and attended its dominance rallied in its defense.

Harriet Jacobs never came to mind for the Guardian commentator, I observed. Nor did the enslaved woman who is the narrator of Browning’s 1848 poem “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose family fortune was made through slavery in Jamaica, lived at the same time as Harriet Jacobs, who spent seven years hiding in a crawlspace three feet high by nine feet wide by seven feet long, escaping Dr. Norcom, the white man who claimed ownership over her. She would publish, in 1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written By Herself. In this slave narrative she would recount her years in slavery, her seven years in confinement, and then her years in the north working to get her children free. Perhaps this is the text we should read for knowledge for surviving. Perhaps we should look for lessons at what Jacobs described as her “loop-hole of retreat” (taken up so brilliantly by the sculptor Simone Leigh); perhaps we should look to Jacobs for an understanding of how to survive the crushing enclosure, and the existential void, for how to imagine and make real something like freedom.

I immediately thought, too, of all the writers I had read through the long time of our enduring, through outlasting the racism that brackets our lives, and hovers over all endeavors, presaging all appearances and events. And I found myself perplexed by these references to a literary canon that had surely tried to excise, by enclosure and confinement, Black experience in the Atlantic world by continually reproducing only white bourgeois experience as “meaning.” But, more innocently, my immediate reaction was of astonishment—as one is always astonished in this long durée of slavery and colonialism. “Goodness,” I thought. “Read any writer in the Black Tradition and you will see how to get through. Or writers from the geopolitical South who also must find a way through and around the glutinous ‘we.’ ”

Read Beloved, by Toni Morrison, where Sethe and Paul D survive slavery and navigate, attentively, their lives in the still fulminating anti-Black rage of Reconstruction and its brutal end.

Read, in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, of Tambu, Nyasha, Babamukuru, Lucia, and others whose lives are under pressure as one cosmology forcibly eclipses another. Read Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, where thousands emigrated by boat to London from the Caribbean, understanding their changing position and navigating this with humor and seriousness and everything that must be brought to bear in order to survive empire in the heart of empire. Read Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, where Haitian people in the Dominican Republic, over the course of seven days in 1937, experienced a genocide under Trujillo. In that novel, Amabelle Désir survives with compassion, having lost her lover and those around her. Read John Keene’s sweeping diasporic Counternarratives, which moves from the seventeenth century into the present, from Juan Rodrigues in the story “Mannahatta” to the speakers in the unnamed postcolonial interrogation room in the story “The Lions.” Read these works to understand how sustained, intense pressure shuts a life down, curtails its movement, makes all plans indefinite, shapes all days, yet does not frame its purpose. Read there about waiting. Read there about patience and cunning and imagination and laughter.

So many novels in Black Traditions are novels of endurance and survival through times of material and existential dread and confinement. So many recount surviving and enduring with compassion, with resolve, with knowledge, with humor and a determination to live otherwise. These texts (novels, stories) come out of, metabolize, and work in, the world of nihilistic extraction. Their imaginative field is the great catastrophe that undergirds what we call the Americas. Over a reading life I have sought out and read these works as a salve, as a balm, as a map, as a trace, as an analysis, as a hypothesis, about the coming of freedom from within what is circumscribing and possibly fatal. A world is always ending in these books. A world is about to begin in these books, or about to be forestalled; about to, but not guaranteed to, “be” in these books. And this is the sensorium they chart. The novels’ outcomes are living—when dying, of course; but living as if living.

***

The wreck is the library itself, and the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck. Exceeds this library. Solitary Boat in Red and Blue exceeds the fragile boats, and renders the full desires they carry and hold.

So, I ask myself, what is a life alert in this sensorium and animated by books, as mine has been? What is a life making its way through this monopoly of interpretation (as Fredric Jameson calls it) that colonial narratives represent? Well, it might be a life animated but also destroyed by books—that is, animated but also destroyed by stories that override life, that overlay experience, that deny experience or quantify experience or adjust experience. What is that life? A life animated by books is something that everyone may understand, but a life destroyed by books is the more complex, contradictory, mysterious proposition. The wreck is, of course, possibly a life.

I observe, and live through, the monopoly of interpretation that relegates the art of those who live through catastrophe to spectacle or pathology, and into a symbol of the always not “we.” Not art. Not an assemblage of the materials of perception that appraise and know life and what is lived. Not a set of insights and gestures of transformation. So the risk of going forward here is the risk of being read by some in this way. When I use the autobiographical, it is as artifice. It is not an invitation to witness transparency. Where it appears, it will have been pored over, turned over, analyzed, refashioned as art, and made theoretical through those processes. The only place the autobiographical appears in my art with a small vestige of itself may be in the fictions that I write. And even then, alloyed.

This book is another kind of forensics. A forensics of how a reader is made. And, unmade. A forensics of the literary substance of which I am made—since it is possible that I am now mostly literary substance—and that I must recover from; and if not recover from, then piece together.

 

From Salvage, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this October.

Dionne Brand is the award-winning author of twenty-three books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her twelve books of poetry include Land to Light On; thirsty; Inventory; Ossuaries; The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos; and Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. Her six works of fiction include At the Full and Change of the Moon; What We All Long For; Love Enough; and Theory. Her nonfiction work includes Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging.

Of Unicorns: On My Little Pony

Photo by Claire JS, via Flickr, CC 2.0.

My earliest memories are of my own interest in perfection. The supreme object of my interest, of my deepest intellectual and sensual love, was a product designed and manufactured with the express aim of capturing the attention of very young girls.

I was hardly unusual. I was obedient, even; in some ways unimaginative. Still, I think we can learn something from my thrall:

My Little Pony was a figurine copyrighted by Hasbro and first produced in 1982. Based on My Pretty Pony, a larger and clunkier toy with unimpressive sales, My Little Pony was, despite the singularity baked into its name, always plural. There was no “pony,” never a one. Only ponies—many ponies, always proliferating, mutating, re-accessorized. Earth ponies and sea ponies and winged ponies and, of course, unicorn ponies. Each pony with its distinctive not-to-be-found-in-nature shade, its shimmering corn-silk plastic mane, its rump printed with an allegorical symbol, a.k.a. “cutie mark”: ice cream, clover, seahorse, stars, flowering plants, and on and on, emojis avant la lettre. The ponies’ bodies were plastic. For now, the ponies would not decay, although fire might melt them or a car wheel crush them. Their eyes were round and bedecked with long lashes. The irises were illustrated in such a way that each pony eye appeared perpetually brimming. Highlights, as on a meniscus of dew, were standard. The ponies might weep soon. They might cry for joy. They might look in your direction.

The ponies lived in Ponyland. It is not clear where they came from nor how they reproduced. They were of course inside the television, part of a twenty-two-minute weekday cartoon show called, fittingly enough, My Little Pony, and thus inhabited a visual realm, temporally constrained, yet constantly available if one had a VHS system and knowledge of how to record. They were material, as stated. They were moving images, as stated. They could be purchased and held. They could be watched. They were very smooth, seamless, without any roughness. One might run a hand down their necks, across their shoulders, along their backs. One might brush their plastic-scented, flower-colored hair.

The myth-world of My Little Ponies was of a part with other myth-worlds of the mid to late eighties: the land of the Care Bears; the stationery empire of Lisa Frank; the intergalactic realms of She-Ra, of Wildfire the magical horse, of the ThunderCats. These myth-worlds ebbed into one another and got confused; it did not matter that they originated with unaffiliated copyright holders. They had rainbows, lots of rainbows, and craggy cliffs and lush forests and desert planets with buried fortresses, and were elsewhere, always elsewhere, beyond the sky or the solar system. You did not attain these places by walking down the street. They were like heaven, although no god was present. Devils aplenty: deranged scientists and bitter witches and space dictators and reanimated corpses with surprisingly good social skills were available to frustrate bliss. But there was no singular author of the good, no logos. There was only a puffy, sparkling spirit that cheerfully resisted death, corruption, and gratuitous violence—the ponies were mild imps who lived in terror of a Christian Satan. They always won out but it was by no means certain they would survive. These were the terms of the contest: a shimmering tribe of hunter-gatherer horses versus a citadel-dwelling autocracy equipped with what I now take to be early sixteenth-century levels of technology and opposable thumbs.

You collected the ponies. You displayed the ponies. You made the ponies move and speak. You had them interact with She-Ra or perhaps Panthro, your favorite ThunderCat. You watched the cartoon series and the mediocre animated movie. You understood the personalities in question, the greater stakes. You sided with the good. You experimented with the struggle of the good and caused the plastic bodies to crash into one another. You brushed their tangled silky hair and sometimes cut it off with safety scissors.

My Little Pony’s bodily gestalt closely resembles that of characters in Disney’s Fantasia (1940)—specifically, a herd of infant pegasi and unicorns who make brief appearances in the Pastoral Symphony section of the film, a visual interpretation of Beethoven’s Sixth. Here a highly stylized version of Ancient Greece, rendered by artists who had obviously never set foot on the Peloponnesus, supports aggressively manicured flora. The rolling hills and pompom trees are reminiscent of Grant Wood’s precisionist landscapes and therefore oddly Iowan, none too Olympian. The little mythical horses gambol in leafy zones, exuding cuteness, youth, and the desire to please. They are impossible pastel shades and offer relief from hetero mating games enacted by Pastoral Symphony’s main characters, a group of nubile centaurs and “centaurettes.”

Ponyland, once it appears over four decades later, is not located anywhere near fake Ancient Greece. In the eighties, visuals associated with woodlands of the European Middle Ages were all the rage, and therefore the ponies do not live in a caricature of the grounds of Monticello, although they are magically connected to a well-to-do part of rural America where their human intercessor, Megan, makes her home. The My Little Ponies inhabit a Germanic forest of pleasure, just steps from the locations of such unicorn-centered films as The Last Unicorn (1982) and Legend (1985). Swords, cauldrons, drawbridges, and magic wands are available, even as roller skates, leg warmers, tutus, boomboxes, examples of anachronistic architecture (e.g., suburban tract homes), plus soft-serve ice cream, proliferate.

Why did unicorns become such a thing in eighties America? I watch a commercial for stationery products by Lisa Frank, a major proponent of unicorn imagery, and the child actor explains that the glut of stickers and paper goods, et cetera, is “impossible to keep up with.” This said, “It’s fun to try!” “Lisa Frank: You Gotta Have It!” was the slogan. She must have it. All the rainbows and unicorns and butterflies and penguins in sunglasses and gumball dispensers and glistening hearts. All the smoothness, cuteness, perfection, palm trees. All the lozenges of light beaming from these ideal forms. Grinning orcas, infant tigers, pandas in overalls.

As if summoned by this deluge of devotional imagery, unicorns seemed to come into actual embodied existence at this time, too. In or before 1980, Morning Glory and Oberon Zell, an enterprising neopagan couple, created a “Living Unicorn” by transplanting the horn buds of immature goats so that the animals’ horns grew together into a single “corn” at the center of their foreheads. The Zells toured Renaissance fairs, monoceros goats in tow, and signed a deal with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1984. The circus took four of the Zells’ specimens on a cross-country tour that kicked off in Houston, Texas. It was in this way that a unicorn “attends party at disco”—as a headline in the Park City Daily News of Bowling Green, Kentucky, reported on April 19, 1985. Among those also on display were “Eric Douglas, son of actor Kirk Douglas,” as well as “a man with white hair coiffed in a one-foot horn like the unicorn’s” and “baby sharks in a tank.”

In one reading, the Zells’ goats satisfied a collective longing for a fantastical nature religion, inflected by an uncomfortable nostalgia for pseudomedieval times. In another, the circus unicorns seem an example of the unkind lengths to which humans will go to shape that which is living into a desired image. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the United States Department of Agriculture certainly took note of the Zells’ innovations. In spring of 1985, as controversy swirled, the chief federal veterinarian in New York State, one Dr. Gerald Toms, announced, “There is nothing wrong with the goats, and that is a considerable relief to find.” A week later, the unicorn celebrated its sanity by joining Eric Douglas and the sharks at the club.

The unicorn breed or variant of My Little Pony was less real or realistic than the Zells’ goats and was, therefore, an even more potent site of fantasy. Wingless (apparently turf-bound), she possessed a talent: wiggling, wriggling, twinkling her flank, she was able to disappear from one location and reappear in another. She teletransported—a magic body. She therefore underlines a peculiar quality of the time inherent to the MLP myth-world: this myth-world is not historical, although significant events (crises) in the style of history occur. The My Little Ponies seem to lack the sorts of mnemonic affordances, e.g., writing or social institutions, that would allow them to retain intergenerational memories, and, in any case, although baby My Little Ponies exist, the My Little Ponies appear to be immortal, unaffected by death. They wink in and out of an eternal present. They disappear when the show ends and reappear when it begins again, and nothing has changed. They increase in number but not one of them ages. They have little reason to believe that any day will be at all unlike the last.

In Ponyland of the eighties, there is no god, death, or recorded history. And there is no erotic love. The ponies might have some hermaphroditic capacity, like the velociraptors of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, who are engineered from amphibian DNA, but their reproductive lives are never explained. It would be unsurprising to come across a “nest” of My Little Pony “eggs”—candy-colored and trembling and ready to hatch. Yet Ponyland, a garden of earthly delights, is ultimately chaste. In it, the unicorn’s traditional association with purity has been so amplified as to become sterility. Here nature is a backdrop and is dead, despite the verdancy of the realm. Is not the world of My Little Ponies an image of post-industrial reproduction, in which images beget other images by means invisible to human eyes? It is a social space at once sexless and intently feminized. This femininity is slavishly devoted to (1) vague expressions of care, and (2) adhering to the personality traits allegorically entailed by the symbols on any given pony’s rump.

Even more enticing to me than this soulless cartoon and its anodyne landscapes were My Little Pony’s mesmerizing commercials, featuring tropes strung together in more or less the same order: cartoon vignette displaying rainbow logo and frolicking characters; introduction of new plastic figurines corresponding to cartoon characters; elaboration of possibilities for play in time to jingle by live child actors. The little girls, always primped as for a pageant, animate their ponies using their hands. They cause them to walk into the Satin Slipper Sweet Shoppe or the Poof ’n Puff Perfume Palace, offer them nourishment or grooming, raise them to their lips and kiss them on their plastic muzzles.

“I’m a My Little Pony mommy,” the jingle goes, “and now I’m happy as can be, because the My Little Pony Perm Shoppe beautifies my family!” The jingle extols “a beautiful place to comb their pretty hair.” “My Little Pony, My Little Pony,” croon soft female voices. The jingle announces, “We’re My Little Pony girls!” Someone sings, “Little Pony, it’s all for you!” “I love you, My Little Pony,” a girl says, briefly able to speak above the music. She murmurs, “I love the way you feel, my So Soft My Little Pony.” She reverently whispers, “You dance wonderfully, my Baby Pony.”

The commercials’ live-action environments were shade-speckled playrooms and artificial gardens. Collectible enclosures—the Dream Castle or Lullaby Nursery or Baby Bonnet School of Dance—were displayed on tabletops. The heads of the child actors nodded close by, their eyes and mouths visible through the windows and doorways of various sanctuaries and salons. The girls manipulated the pastel equines. One could almost imagine that the Flutter Ponies and Secret Surprise Ponies and Fancy Mermaid Ponies and Sundae Best Ponies and Twice as Fancy Ponies and Sweetberry Ponies and Baby Drink ’n Wet Baby Ponies and Twinkle-Eyed Ponies and Brush ’n Grow Ponies and Sparkle Ponies and Princess Ponies and Newborn Twins Baby Ponies and Baby Ponies with First Tooth and Magic Message Ponies and Dance ’n Prance Ponies and Tropical Ponies and Rockin’ Beat Ponies were alive.

***

It was from My Little Ponies that I first learned of unicorns. Thus, I got the idea of an adorable outline, a particular prettiness. This unicorn had a swirled spike, a bit like a third eye. Far from terrifying me, her protuberance emphasized the soft bluntness of her muzzle. She led with her forehead, flirtily butting the air. She must hold her head up high, for the tip of her horn seems lighter than the atmosphere, attracted to rainbows and puffy clouds. The tip is tiny, dainty. Obesity is impossible for the unicorn pony. Roughness is impossible. She is sleek, infinitely sleek. She is sleeker than water, for only my eye touches her outline. She is a slip, luscious as a basking fetus, supple as a cupid.

I am ecstatic and have no idea why. I’m four years old, perhaps a year or two older.

It is not difficult to feel that the unnatural fetish of the plasticky, pastel My Little Pony is a way of celebrating the attenuation of the senses in American culture. Our nation has repeatedly shown itself to be obsessed with pain-killing substances and institutionally managed hypnosis. Yet, the attempt to numb can coexist with other aesthetic possibilities. Indeed, it is not clear to me that the My Little Pony I hold in my lap is an opiate. She may, in fact, be something else altogether, a translating device, a vestige of alchemy.

Yes, for with My Little Pony there is always the matter of tactility. Ultimately, we are beckoned into her world through the sense of touch, although to be sure the sense of touch is so intimately tied to the sense of sight here that the two may be inextricable. The film scholar and critic Laura U. Marks has written of the way in which touch and sight become intermeshed in the new media of postmodernity in Touch (2002):

The difference between haptic and optical visuality is a matter of degree. … In most processes of seeing both are involved, in a dialectical movement from far to near, from solely optical to multisensory. And obviously we need both kinds of visuality: it is hard to look closely at a lover’s skin with optical vision; it is hard to drive a car with haptic vision.

Although Marks has recourse to examples from IRL behavior, she is most interested in how the virtuality of cinema gives us room to feel differently—to inhabit sensory modes that are not reducible to a single sense and require that we navigate moving images in unexpected and highly specific, bodily ways.

I relate to this notion because I grew up watching television. When I write this, I do not mean that I grew up sometimes watching television. I mean that, from the earliest times I can remember, I sat in front of a television for any and all hours I was not in school or asleep. As I can remember a time before I attended preschool, this was often many hours per day. This period of constantly watching television, of begging its then-limited channels to teach me about the world, to interact with me in some pronounced fashion, seemed to go on forever.

What I am saying is that from an early age I had to get creative, had to do something with my mind. I sought a metaphor, one that would describe the exceptional image I wanted. For I knew I wanted an image.

I wrote that I was interested in perfection, but that is just a manner of speaking—what I was interested in was a peculiar visual liquidity, a smooth taste or malleable sound, an image I could shape and feel; an image that would be coextensive with my body and require the collaboration of multiple senses.

When I at last found this image, it was in a terrible movie. This movie was originally created in 1985 and must have been rerun on television sometime later. It is called The Hugga Bunch. It is about forty-eight minutes long. It is accessible on YouTube today.

A summary culled from IMDb, amusing in its curtness: “A girl travels through her mirror into HuggaLand to find a way to keep her grandmother, the only one who knows how to hug, young.”

I had no interest in the grandmother plot, having almost no relationship with my extended family. I had no interest in the dolls, residents of HuggaLand who surveil the girl through her mirror and emerge from it to assist her. All I cared about was the possibility of this portal.

In my memory, it is a miracle that seems possible. It would be a lucky thing for such an event to take place, a mark of one’s life story being a life story that defies all expectation, and it would be a form of rescue, an intervention at the last minute, the universe rousing itself to demonstrate that there is more than meets the eye.

It was my idea that I would walk through the mirror in my own room. The mirror would soften, and I would be in another land. The moment of the mirror’s softening would be perfection. It would be the coalescing of image and sensation into something more and other than either of these two. It would be analogous to learning to fly or practice telekinesis. Having passed through a buoyant vertical curtain, I would find everything to surprise me. All things would be unusual and beautiful while at the same time intended for me, an infinitely complex allegory I had to decipher and continue to decipher and play with and learn from and cultivate—all of which would simultaneously be a form of food and an expression of love, whose I do not know. There would be fruit and blue skies. There might be puppets from children’s television shows. There would be a purpose to my living. Animals would speak, their voices musical and profound.

This mirror-world is additionally an intermediary state, a three-dimensional decoder that helps to explain the way in which the flattish images to which I am continuously privy via the television relate to the real world of time and space, in which I interact with a limited number of other human beings. If one were to stand before the mirror and have a certain feeling, a feeling of confidence but also one of curiosity, then might the mirror not grow porous, bend, dimple, liquify—so that a finger to its surface generates a ripple? And if this is the case, then might one not cross through? Might not that virtual realm become true? Might I not be able to cross over and experience the condition of being human as something … else?

A My Little Pony was a mirror, too.

 

From An Image of My Name Enters America, to be published by Graywolf this October.

Lucy Ives is the author of three novels: Impossible Views of the World; Life Is Everywhere, and Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World. She is the 2023–25 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University.

Les Cinquante Glorieuses

A glass of crème de menthe. M. Lawrenson, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

From a lecture given to students at Duke University on January 21, 2021.

In the early years of the fifth century, a famous philosopher visited Athens. You could say that this philosopher, Parmenides, was the inventor of ontology, and thus, in a way, the first real philosopher. Athens was a small town, and everybody knew who he was. Being a celebrity, he met a lot of people, one of whom was the young Socrates, who might have been a teenager. They had a long conversation. That would have been around 450 B.C.E., and if you believe the reports of this, perhaps you could date the beginning of Athenian philosophy from that encounter. Socrates will then meet the young Plato in 407 B.C.E. Plato abandons playwriting and becomes part of Socrates’s circle, and after Socrates’s execution for blasphemy in 399, he starts to write the dialogues, a lot of which are fictional, perhaps including this meeting with Parmenides, which becomes one of Plato’s most complicated works. Did this actually happen? Who knows? In any case, Plato will turn his circle into a kind of school, the Academy. In about 367 B.C.E., a young man from the North—who is not an Athenian and therefore never really enters Plato’s intimate circle—will come to this school to join his group. This man, Aristotle, is from the general area of the Macedonian coast, and in 343 he is summoned by the king of Macedonia to tutor his son, who becomes the king when Philip II is assassinated, the figure whom we know as Alexander the Great. Aristotle then returns to Athens and founds his own school, the Lyceum, which practices a certain critique of Platonism. The Lyceum is founded in 335 B.C.E.

After that, there emerge two major streams of philosophy that shape medieval philosophy, and then Western philosophy in general. These two major branches of philosophy are, of course, Neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism, and we can abandon those to their own stories. But, if you follow these dates, if you really want to start this period in 450 B.C.E. and end it with the foundation of the Lyceum, you have about a century of interactions and of intellectual stimulus. Lots of other things are going on, of course. There are two world wars. The Persian War has just ended at the beginning of this period, and the great civil war of the Greek city-states, the Peloponnesian War, is just beginning. It is a hot war between Sparta and Athens, essentially, and it will end with the defeat of the Athenians. So there is an initial moment in which the Athenians defeat the Persians and start a civil war with Sparta, ending with the defeat of Athens. Almost immediately, there follows the world conquest of Alexander the Great and the beginning of a still Greek but principally Hellenistic period, which is, let’s say, a bilingual world of Greek and Persian, in which the intellectual center of the world will gradually shift from Athens to Alexandria. Anyway, this period seems to have a certain coherence, and it makes sense to think of it as a period in its own right.

Now, if you skip to another philosophical period, eighteenth-century Germany, you find not a period of city-states but of principalities. There is no real German capital. Berlin is to be sure the Prussian capital, but merely a larger city than some of the others. Suddenly, in 1781, from one of the outlying parts of the German-speaking world, which is later called East Prussia but has now completely disappeared, out of a city which was called Königsberg, comes the publication of The Critique of Pure Reason, which suddenly inaugurates a whole new philosophical school. Everything comes out of that. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but we note that the publication comes immediately after the American Revolution and before the French Revolution, so this is a period of tremendous historical convulsions.

So we could date this period of German philosophy from 1781 to the death of Hegel in 1831. Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin are roommates in Tübingen. Fichte moves back and forth through these areas; produces an enormously influential rewriting of Kant and then the first great defense of German nationalism during the Napoleonic invasion. The group called the Romantics are all living in Jena at the time, and Hegel, an unemployed graduate student, somewhat older, comes to Jena later. Weimar being quite close to Jena, it is Goethe who refounds the University of Jena, where Hegel finishes the Phenomenology just as Napoleon is winning the Battle of Jena. It is said that Hegel could hear the guns in the distance as he was writing the last pages of his book on absolute spirit, and even that he saw Napoleon himself, whom he pleasantly called “the world-spirit on horseback.” At any rate, this is a comparable period in which you have an even tighter relationship between these various players and a monumental external world history.

What is that relationship? The history of philosophy is not a history of ideas: it is a history of problems. The Critique of Pure Reason is a critique, and it is a critique of types of knowledge. It raises all kinds of problems, and suddenly all those problems lead to an efflorescence of philosophical thought. After Kant come the Hegelian schools, to one of which Marx belongs, and by the time you get to 1850, suddenly all of Hegelianism is eclipsed by a very old book, written at practically the same time as Hegel’s early works, which is by Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s work, along with Lange’s history of materialism, suddenly eclipse all that came before them and lead us into a new period of German thought dominated by Nietzsche.

All that is to tell you that I think there is such a thing as the periodization of philosophical problematics. Problématique is the word that Althusser uses for this, for a complex of problems that are intertwined and that touch on certain limits, because there comes a moment when you see that these kinds of thinking can’t go beyond a certain point, where the problem itself becomes a kind of straitjacket, where the creative force of philosophical inquiry is lost and you get a period the Germans call Epigonentum. You know what epigones are: people who are born a little too late to participate in the great era. The younger French writers—Musset is the most famous—who came to their maturity after Napoleon had a nostalgia for this moment under Napoleon when you could become a general at twenty-five. That comes to an end, and the next generation considers itself, rightly or wrongly, epigones of this great period.

I gave you to read Alain Badiou’s book called The Adventure of French Philosophy, which tries to theorize the notion of modern French philosophy as a period. It’s a rather scattered collection of his own stuff, but the preface tries to theorize this notion of the adventure of French philosophy, and I think it is very suggestive. It’s not exactly what I would have done, but it is a starting point. The other text I put on reserve, by the way, for your amusement, is an interview with Jane Gallop, who was a student in Paris in the sixties, and which gives you an idea of this period from her perspective. She was studying with Derrida at the time French feminism was just evolving, closely related to Derrida, and the interview gives you an idea of the excitement of that moment that we’re going to look at in French philosophy. So that is less immediately relevant for us here, but her testimony is interesting. Badiou writes that

within philosophy there exist powerful cultural and national particularities. There are what we might call moments of philosophy, in space and time. Philosophy is thus both a universal aim of reason and, simultaneously, one that manifests itself in completely specific moments. Let us take the example of two especially intense and well-known philosophical instances.

And then you have what I’ve just been describing. “First, that of classical Greek”—I would rather say Athenian—“philosophy between Parmenides and Aristotle, from the fifth to the third centuries BC: a highly inventive foundational moment, ultimately quite short-lived”—although this is a little longer than the other ones were talking about.

Second, that of German idealism between Kant and Hegel, via Fichte and Schelling: another exceptional philosophical moment, from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, intensely creative and condensed within an even shorter time span. I propose to defend a further national and historical thesis: there was—or there is, depending where I put myself [because Badiou is still alive, of course, and still writing and philosophizing]—a French philosophical moment of the second half of the twentieth century which, toute proportion gardée, bears comparison to the examples of classical Greece and enlightenment Germany.

I think that’s so. I think this is a very remarkable period, and I propose this as the subject of our seminar this semester.

How long does this period last? I think everyone agrees—and, of course, this is also Badiou’s opinion—that it starts all of a sudden, in 1943, with Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. This is a kind of a meteorite that falls in the middle of an era which is, in France at least, a strange pause in history: the German occupation of Paris. The occupation will end the following year, in August of 1944, with the liberation of Paris, and, of course, World War II ends after that, in 1945. Sartre calls this period of the occupation of Paris the “republic of silence,” and I’ll read you the first lines of his account of this period. This is from a collection of essays with the title We Have Only This Life to Live, which is the best English collection of Sartre’s collected essays from 1939 to 1975, which are otherwise scattered in different publications. So this is where Sartre starts:

Never were we freer than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to speak. We were insulted to our faces every day and had to remain silent. We were deported en masse, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners. Everywhere—on the walls, on the movie screens, in the newspapers—we came up against the vile, insipid picture of ourselves our oppressors wanted to present to us. Because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our very thoughts, every accurate thought was a triumph. Because an all-powerful police force tried to gag us, every word became precious as a declaration of principle. Because we were wanted men and women, every one of our acts was a solemn commitment.

And the word commitment, of course, is the famous Sartrean word engagement. Anyway, that is the way that Sartre and his friends thought of this strange period. Sartre’s first play, The Flies, was allowed to be produced. The Germans were very anxious—or at least at that point the cultural attaché of the Nazi occupying regime was anxious—that Paris be seen as a very lively cultural place under German protection, so they encouraged all kinds of publications which were not explicitly anti-German, anti-Nazi, including Sartre’s first play. Before that, Sartre had written Nausea, which is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. It isn’t on our list, but someday you must all, if you have any interest in philosophy, read that. In a sense, it’s the only successful philosophical novel. But to develop that would be a longer matter. Anyway, we begin with Being and Nothingness because it does set all this off. So my title, “postwar,” is just slightly imprecise.

In his essay, Badiou goes on to talk about four different operations in this period. Four procedures, which exemplify the way of doing philosophy specific to this moment: the first one is a German one, or a French move upon German philosophers; the second one concerns science, the French philosophers who sought to wrest science from the exclusive domain of the philosophy of knowledge; the third operation is a political one undertaken by those thinkers of the period who sought an in-depth engagement of philosophy with the question of politics; the fourth operation has to do with the modernization of philosophy, in a sense quite distinct from the cant of political and social journalism. Here, we find a desire for the transformation not only of philosophical thought but of philosophical language as such. And I think one can say that, in a sense, France is one of the last Western European countries to modernize, really in this now American sense, because a lot of them called all this américanisation. That begins in France with de Gaulle, the second de Gaulle regime, after he returns to power in 1958. So the Paris of this earlier period, allowing for the destruction of the war, is not terribly different from Balzac’s Paris. What happens to Paris after that, in the following decades, will move it much closer to a conventional world city.

At any rate, I mention that, just as I mentioned these political events in ancient Greece and in the period of Kant and Hegel, to explain why we’re also going to have to outline, however imperfectly, a kind of history of contemporary France. We’re going to need to see what kind of effect this extremely mobile period in French history has on philosophy, or rather the other way around: how the philosophers tried to react to these historical events. The France that came into being after the war was still a colonial power. It had its colonial war, which it passed on, as you well know, to us, after having been defeated. The French then faced something even more cataclysmic, which ended with the return of General de Gaulle to power, the beginning of the Fifth Republic, and the independence of Algeria. After that, what can one say? One can say that the opposition was reabsorbed into a kind of institutionalized space, and that France begins to be a part of something that emerges as the European Union, losing something of its national identity. And so the France of today is not at all the France of Gaullism and the autonomous France of that period, which has its effect on the philosophers themselves, because, after all—and I am not at all talking as a nationalist—the national fact, the framework of a nation that you’re in, is a collective part of your individual personality. Certainly, the primacy of Athens is all part of ancient Greek philosophy. Plato’s utopias, for example, are absolutely a response to this permanent crisis, which is the Athenian state and its imperialism. In Germany the tendency is, first of all, the assumption of a German nationality with Fichte and then the attempt, as in Italy, at a unification of these provinces, which will only happen with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. It will be hard to talk about these individual philosophers in much detail, but that is a general story I’m going to tell you about the whole movement of this period, a story which runs from the question of individual action, the kind that we just heard Sartre expressing in terms of the German occupation, to the effort to deal with larger institutional and even transnational structures, under which your own political positions, your own words, are acts that have a meaning inside of a very constrained situation.

Now I’m passing to the four divisions of our readings in terms of which I want to tell this story of modern French philosophy, or, if you would like, modern French theory. First is this immediate period of the postwar, beginning in the occupation and running up to the beginning of the Korean War and of the Cold War, I would say. I characterize that as the period of the Liberation; libération is the crucial French word for this historical period. It is a period of the possibility of individual action and individual identity, and it is shot through with the fundamental political movement of anticolonialism, which will come to an end in the Algerian War, since Algeria is then officially not a colony but a province of the French state. And, therefore, this is not only a war of national liberation, as they would call it in that period; this is also a civil war, and it is the most deeply festering wound of colonialism in France. As you know, the fifties are a great period of decolonization all over the world. Britain’s colonies become independent. But it doesn’t mean that colonialism is over. The word we use now is neo-imperialism. France still has what are effectively colonies. There is something called Françafrique, which is France’s unwritten partnership with all its former French speaking colonies. You will have seen in the newspapers that whenever some group of Islamic terrorists kidnap somebody in French Africa, French parachutists arrive the next day and track them down. So, economically, militarily, there is still some kind of French power in its former colonies.

The other thing that then begins, besides anticolonialism, which I think is the fundamental impulse of this period, is the Cold War. It’s very important that you understand how the Western Europeans see themselves, even in England, but in France and Italy above all, because Spain is still Francoist. They feel themselves caught between the two superpowers. It’s the Korean War that suddenly proves this. The official Cold War, so to speak, begins in France in the late forties. The first Gaullist government is a government of national union which includes the Communist Party for the first time in modern French history. When the communists leave the government in May 1947, that is the beginning of the Cold War in France.

Caught as they were between the two great powers, France and Italy, with very strong leftist parties, entertain the possibility that each country needs to affirm a national identity, which is distinct, either from Soviet Communism or from Americanization and the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan includes all kinds of economic conditions. You may think that the Marshall Plan is a wonderful, gratuitous, generous act with respect to the Europeans—and, in a sense, it was—but it also very much included, for example, conditions about the import of American films. French national governments in the film area like to include foreign films in quotas so that their own national film industries are not destroyed, as in other countries, by this overwhelming export of Hollywood. The Marshall Plan included clauses which restricted the national possibility of excluding those Hollywood products. So the Marshall Plan, in that sense, can be seen as a project to wipe out national film industries. It was overall quite successful, but, in France, much less, because of both the New Wave and the resistance of Gaullism to this kind of American imperialism.

At any rate, France is caught between these two super states. Its intellectuals have to ask themselves what side they’re on. And you will see that one of the reasons why Americans don’t like Sartre—and to a certain degree, Beauvoir—has to do with their positions here. In Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins, which people don’t read so much anymore but which is a wonderful evocation of this immediate postwar period, the intellectuals are constantly asking themselves: “If it’s a choice between the Americans and the Soviets, what do we do?” “Well, the Soviets of course,” they say. “Socialism.” They know about the gulags, but nonetheless they don’t want Americanization. So this is not exactly “fellow-traveling.” This is an attempt to affirm an autonomy of French culture, if you want that kind of word, in the face of the gradual absorption of the European countries. You see this with Brexit. Some of the European states still feel the oppressiveness of the European Union, as opposed to that of the superstates, though you could say that the European Union is already an attempt to create a European superstate in between these two things, even though, of course, the Soviet Union is now gone.

Anyway, that is a first period, which is dominated by Sartre, Sartrean existentialism, and phenomenology. Suddenly, in the late fifties, we’ll say, something else begins to happen, a turn toward communication and language that is called structuralism. I think that is the easiest way of conveying all this. Suddenly there’s a new philosophical current, not from a philosopher but from an anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss, a turn to structural linguistics and a meditation on language, on narrative analysis. All these things begin to colonize the various disciplines. So I would say structural linguistics has a profound effect on the disciplines not only in France but in other countries. So you get this structuralist period, which is dominated by a whole notion of language that we will look at. And, from the point of view of anthropology, suddenly you get a very interesting phenomenon, which is that of tribal utopias, of the attempt to analyze societies without power. Lévi-Strauss’s work is a fundamental contribution to that movement.

And then, in a dialectical fashion, the meditation on societies without power brings about a meditation on power. I would say that is the moment when French philosophy moves away from the emphasis on individual consciousness that you found in the first period toward a period dominated by the notion of transindividual forces. I would say it’s a little bit like pre-Socratic philosophy in that sense, or the Tao; it doesn’t want to focus anymore on individual consciousness, which would be called “the subject.” Focusing on the subject in this period means being confined, as Sartre was, to individual consciousness or the Cartesian subject. This older focus will then be called, with a certain contempt, la philosophie du sujet. The new period wants to get out of the individual subject and into great, supraindividual forces, even in psychoanalysis, the drives (pulsions). So, in my opinion, this period will be dominated by the two great figures of this period: Deleuze, with his notion of the philosophy of the concept, and Foucault, with his idea of power. With Derrida, it’s a little bit different. We would say that Derrida is committed to undermining both the philosophy of the subject and the linguistics of structuralism. Can we say that Derrida has any positive positions with respect to these forces? I think not, but, nonetheless, his is a related project. And this is not to say that these people all worked together. Foucault and Derrida hated each other. They had a great fight. Deleuze is a little bit distant from all these folks, although he had a friendship with Foucault.

We’ll see that this third period is characterized by greater forces under the impact of what I call the experience of defeat, because, indeed, I have omitted a crucial moment in contemporary French history, fundamental in any consideration of France even today: May ’68, the great uprising against … everything, really. Everybody used to joke that even people who were self-employed went on strike. Against whom? Against themselves. Everyone was out in the street; there was an immense fraternization. You can see this, if you like, as the culmination of the utopian strain that I mentioned. This was the great moment of utopia, and it failed. It did not lead to revolution. The Communists are blamed for that. Instead, it led to Gaullist oppression, although General de Gaulle left the government at that point, and finally it led to the corporatization of France. I see this emphasis on supraindividual forces as a reflection of that corporatization, that eventual coming into being of the great transnational monopolies. And the same is true here. That is to say, when the Vietnam War was over, Nixon had prolonged it to the point that the revolutionary power of the antiwar movement was lost. What appeared when the dust settled, when the fog of war cleared away, was not a transformed world, not even the world of decolonization, of independent nations, but the world of transnational corporations, nascent globalization, and the end of a period of this or that individualism, this or that revolt. So here we have, as it were, two overlapping periods: that of structuralism, the linguistic turn, and that of revolt, the Algerian War, May ’68, and so-called poststructuralism.

Then a fourth period could be this period of the epigones, if you like, but I don’t like to put it that way. We will look at some of the writers from this period. It is certainly a period of globalization. It is a period of a return to the disciplines in the sense that French philosophy had broken free of the disciplines in a way that I will describe in a moment. So it is a return to institutionalization and, of course, of postmodernism, because that is really the first global American cultural movement. You can still count, for example, Foucault’s aesthetics among the aesthetics of modernism. Deleuze is always a little more difficult to pin down on these things, but, in a sense, the conclusion of Deleuze’s film book is not a postmodernist conclusion but a modernist one. In this period, however, little by little, the modernist aesthetic falls away and you get the beginnings of something else. The beginnings of what? I also call this the end of theory.

Now let’s look at this from a different point of view. We have said that each of these philosophical periods—Greece, the Germans, and now the French—are characterized by a problematic, but a changing problematic, a production of new problems. This is, in effect, Deleuze’s whole philosophy, the production of problems. But, if you put it that way, if you say philosophy’s task is the production of problems, what problems could there be if philosophy has come to an end? These problematics always end up producing a certain limit beyond which they are no longer productive.

What I want to say is not that these people all knew each other, not that they exactly derive problems from each other the way Schelling, Hegel, and Fichte will derive their problems directly from The Critique of Pure Reason, but in a different way which turns on the matter of what is called influence. People think influence is the reproduction of something. When people say, for example, that Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Merleau-Ponty—even, to a certain degree, Camus—were influenced by Sartre, that is not the right way to put it, I think. I once interviewed an East German novelist who was quite interesting at the time, and we asked him the then-obvious question: “How much of an influence did Faulkner have on you?” As you know, after the war, all over the world, it is the example of Faulkner that sets everything going, from the Latin American boom to the newer Chinese novel. Faulkner is a seminal world influence at a certain moment. But what does that mean, “Faulkner’s influence”? So he said, “No, I never learned anything from Faulkner—except that you could write page after page of your novel in italics.”

What does that mean? It means that to be influenced by somebody is not to write like him or her; rather, someone’s work suddenly opens up new possibilities that you never thought of before. It never occurred to you that you could put page on page in italics. Suddenly, you’re free. You’re opened up to something new, which may go in a completely different direction. What Sartre did, as someone who was not just a philosopher but also a playwright and a novelist, was to suddenly open up the possibility of writing philosophy in a wholly new way. You could suddenly get rid of all the traditions of academic philosophy. You could turn philosophy into something which was like the novel, which was really part of the novel. There was a new freedom which all these people, in one way or another—maybe except Derrida, who says he was never interested in Sartre—but all these other people—Deleuze says Sartre was “my master,” mon maître—felt was liberating, until they reach a certain moment when that influence is no longer productive for them and they cast it away. But, even then, they keep certain freedoms that they have learned.

I think that the passage in this period from philosophy to what we call theory is part of that liberation. Suddenly, philosophy is freed of its systemic ambitions. Here’s an anecdote. One of Sartre’s closest friends in school was Raymond Aron, a conservative, pro-American political scientist. In those days, the French government had scholarships to various foreign countries. They started a whole French school in Brazil. Lévi-Strauss himself taught in that school and his early work is the result of that contact with Brazil. Roland Barthes taught on this scholarship in Egypt, because the French had a teaching fellowship in Cairo. There was one in Berlin, and when Aron had just gotten back he said, “There’s this thing called phenomenology. What does it mean?” He is sitting in a cafe with Sartre and Beauvoir, and Aron says, “What it means is: you can philosophize about that glass of beer.” Suddenly, the whole idea that phenomenology allowed one to think, write, and philosophize about elements of daily life transforms everything. As historically reconstructed by participants, the drink turns out to have been a crème de menthe, but that doesn’t matter too much. That’s the lesson that these people got from phenomenology, and that’s what seems to me to set off this immense period of liberation from philosophy, a liberation toward theory. But, in the fourth period, this kind of thinking is folding back down, and we are seeing once again that professional philosophy has reconquered these terrains that were opened up by theory.

Before we end, let me tell you why this is going to be so frustrating and unsatisfying for all of us in this class, including me. We’re trying to do everything. That means that we’re going to touch on each of these people only for one or two classes. How do we do that? I had a boss once—I hate sports metaphors, but this one I’ve always liked—who said that, to get to know a field, you can’t know everything in detail. But the first things you need to learn as a student, graduate student, or young scholar are the names and numbers of all the players. My references are not to American sports, but you know that Messi is a number 10; Ronaldo is a number 7. That’s what you know about the players: you know their names and you know what they do, but you haven’t seen all their games. That’s what we’re going to try to do in this course. Instead of numbers, what I’m going to give you are the slogans. For Sartre we would say “freedom,” “bad faith,” “reification,” a series of slogans like that. You will learn, at least from me, what those slogans are, even if we don’t have time to read Being and Nothingness cover to cover. And we will use these words in the language, because, in France, that’s what people did. Le pour-soi, the “for-itself,” short for l’être-pour-soi, means human beings, human reality, as opposed to the en-soi, the being of things. So, if we say the pour-soi in English, that is a meaningful expression.

So that is the kind of slogan we will be learning. The French get it from the Germans, of course, because, when we talk about Heidegger, we talk about Dasein, “being there.” The whole point is that these existentialists don’t want to talk about mind. They don’t want to talk about personal identity. They don’t want to talk about spirit. They certainly don’t want to talk about soul, because they don’t believe in any of those things. How are they going to talk about what’s in the head? They’re going to call it consciousness. Sartre’s little essay on Husserl, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” is the fundamental starting point for all this stuff; it is the connection between phenomenology and existentialism, and it addresses consciousness. Consciousness does not have a personality or an identity. It’s impersonal. But it’s very strange. What can you say about this thing, consciousness? We each have it, but does each have it the same way? We don’t know.

Anyway, pour-soi will be one of these slogans in terms of which we’ll have to read Sartre. I have already mentioned “desire” for Deleuze, but there are plenty of other Deleuzian slogans, “territorialization,” “de-” and “reterritorialization.” For Foucault, “power” is one word that you get, but you can also look at “genealogy.” In other words, we’re going to go fast, and we’re going to try to develop what was called, a while ago, cultural literacy. When you talk about one of these philosophers, these are the keywords that come to mind, and we have to start with those because we’re going too fast to do anything else.

There is a sentence of Walter Benjamin’s that I like to quote, and it reflects both the limits of this course and the limits of our own tolerance, our frustration, and all the rest of it. It’s from a collection of sayings of his. “The task is to make a stopover at every one of these many little thoughts. To spend the night in a thought. Once I have done that, I know something about it that its originator never dreamed of.” Now, if you were making a grand tour and you spent a night in Paris, one in Rome, then Naples, then Cairo, you spent one night in each of those places, and, afterward, someone asks you how you liked them, what would you know about them? You have been to each of these places and seen some buildings, but, in effect, you know nothing about them. That is what it’s going to be like for us with each of these thinkers. We will spend one night in Deleuze, one night in Foucault, one night in Derrida. What are we going to get out of that? Well, at least we will have a larger narrative. You may not like spending a night in some of those. You may not like some of them. Some of them you will like. And, for intellectuals, like means “interest.” You will be interested in some of them, and others you will not be interested in. The ones you’re interested in, I hope, will lead you on to further exploration, and, as for the ones you’re not interested in, at least you will know who they are, why their enemies are hostile to them, what’s the matter with them, and how they fit into this period of great rivalry—because the Paris of this period is tremendously rivalrous. Newer generations are coming out, wanting to write new stuff and become famous; people are divided into groups. You have Derridians, Foucauldians, Lacanians, and they are all hostile to each other in one way or another. You aren’t necessarily going to be able to participate fully in that sense of rivalry, but at least you can get a sense of the way it all works.

Years ago, when I was teaching a course on the sixties, I had two visitors named Chantal Mouffe, whose work you may have read, and Ernesto Laclau, who unfortunately died recently. I asked Chantal to tell us about her experience of the sixties. At the time she was having a love affair with a guerrilla, freedom fighter, whatever you want to call them, in Colombia at the time, so she only got back to Paris in the summertime. “Oh,” she says, “it’s like a slideshow. Each summer I’d say, ‘What are you doing?’ and they would respond, ‘Well, now we’re studying Lacan’s attack on the signified.’ Then I’d go away, and when I came back the following summer I’d say, ‘What’s up with the signified?’ ‘Oh, we’re through with that now. We’re doing the passé.’ ” And so on. So the French sixties, the high point of all this, is a constant fight over new problems, new solutions. It is a very lively intellectual era.

 

From The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, to be published by Verso Books this October.

Fredric Jameson is the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University and the author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; The Cultural Turn; A Singular Modernity; and many other books.