The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

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 feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.

Sedgwick once proposed that “what it takes—all it takes—to make the description ‘queer’ a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person,” and that “anyone’s use of ‘queer’ about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else.”

As if I did not know that, in the field of gender, there is no charting where the external and the internal begin and end—

How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?

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.

You like the changes, but also feel them as a sort of compromise, a wager for visibility, as in your drawing of a ghost who proclaims, Without this sheet, I would be invisible. (Visibility makes possible, but it also disciplines: disciplines gender, disciplines genre.) Via

As my body made the male body, I felt the difference between male and female body melt even further away.

Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining. That’s what you kept telling me when we first met—that in a real, material sense, what is made from where. I didn’t have a clue what you were talking about, but I could see you burned for it. I wanted to be near that burning. I still don’t understand, but at least now my fingers ride the lip.

Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way. You will have realized that death will do you too, without fail and without mercy. It will do you even if you don’t believe it will do you, and it will do you in its own way. There’s never been a human that it didn’t. I guess I’m just waiting to die, your mother said, bemused and incredulous, the last time we saw her, her skin so thin in her borrowed bed.

The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time.