The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

In this way you can have your empty church with a dirt floor swept clean of dirt and your spectacular stained glass gleaming by the cathedral rafters, both. Because nothing you say can fuck up the space for God.

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered.

I stopped smugly repeating Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly and wondered anew, can everything be thought.

Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”

I want the you no one else can see, the you so close the third person never need apply.

What if where I am is what I need? Before you, I had always thought of this mantra as a means of making peace with a bummer or even catastrophic situation. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too.

Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again. As with knowledge, so too, with presence.

To devote yourself to someone else’s pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own. But whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.

But I’ve never been able to answer to comrade, nor share in this fantasy of attack. In fact I have come to understand revolutionary language as a sort of fetish—in which case, one response to the above might be, Our diagnosis is similar, but our perversities are not compatible.

Perhaps it’s the word radical that needs rethinking. But what could we angle ourselves toward instead, or in addition? Openness? Is that good enough, strong enough?

“Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant” she wrote. “Keenly, it is relational, and strange.” She wanted the term to be a perpetual excitement, a kind of placeholder—a nominative, like Argo, willing to designate molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip.

You showed me an essay about butches and femmes that contained the line “to be femme is to give honor where there has been shame.”

I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?

Genitalia of all stripes are often slimy and pendulous and repulsive. That’s part of their charm.

“the many gendered-mothers of my heart,”

I was ashamed, but undaunted (my epithet?).

I’m with Eileen Myles—“My dirty secret has always been that it’s of course about me.”

(If you share Koestenbaum’s happily prurient sentiment, “If I attend a photo show that lacks nudes, I consider the visit a waste,” then you’ve come to the right place.)

“I still see homosexuality as a narrative of urban adventure, a chance to cross not only sex barriers but class and age barriers, while breaking a few laws in the process—and all for the sake of pleasure. If not, I might as well be straight,” Benderson says.

That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.

But when I think about it now I hear only the background buzz of our trying to explain something to each other, to ourselves, about our lived experiences thus far on this peeled, endangered planet.

Women aren’t like that. I don’t mean that women are all back-stabbers or have it in for each other or whatnot. But in public, we don’t nod nobly at each other. Nor do we really need to, as that nod also means I mean you no violence.

Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. This is a crucial point to remember, and also a difficult one. It reminds us that there is difference right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion.

Just let him wheel around in his sac for Christ’s sake, I thought, grimly folding the genital triptychs into my wallet, week after week. Let him stay oblivious—for the first and last time, perhaps—to the task of performing a self for others, to the fact that we develop, even in utero, in response to a flow of projections and reflections ricocheting off us. Eventually, we call that snowball a self (Argo).

My mother thinks that people don’t really know what they’re in for in this life—what the risks are. How could there be such a thing as an irrational peril, if anything unexpected or horrific that has ever happened could happen again?

And many-gendered mothers of the heart say: Just because you have enemies does not mean you have to be paranoid. They insist, no matter the evidence marshaled against their insistence: There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.

The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy. —Sara Ahmed

Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. —Sedgwick