The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.

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. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page. I argued along the lines of Thomas Jefferson and the churches—for plethora, for kaleidoscopic shifting, for excess. I insisted that words did more than nominate.

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.”

a poem by Michael Ondaatje: Kissing the stomach kissing your scarred skin boat. History is what you’ve travelled on and take with you We’ve each had our stomachs kissed by strangers to the other and as for me I bless everyone who kissed you here

"your scarred skin boat" = 'your Argo' ?

Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. The answer isn’t just to introduce new words (boi, cisgendered, andro-fag) and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously there is power and pragmatism here). One must also become alert to the multitude of possible uses, possible contexts, the wings with which each word can fly.

Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from—one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)?

One can aspire to feel real, one can help others to feel real, and one can oneself feel real—a feeling Winnicott describes as the collected, primary sensation of aliveness, “the aliveness of the body tissues and working of body-functions, including the heart’s action and breathing,” which makes spontaneous gesture possible. For Winnicott, feeling real is not reactive to external stimuli, nor is it an identity. It is a sensation—a sensation that spreads. Among other things, it makes one want to live.

When my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen and that “performativity” is not radical choice and it’s not voluntarism…. Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.

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. If the baby could speak to the mother, says Winnicott, here is what it might say: I find you; You survive what I do to you as I come to recognize you as not-me; I use you; I forget you; But you remember me; I keep forgetting you; I lose you; I am sad.

You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring. In the face of this fact, Winnicott holds the relatively unsentimental position that we don’t owe these people (often women, but by no means always) anything. But we do owe ourselves “an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. Luckily we were met by ordinary devotion.” By ordinary devotion, Winnicott means ordinary devotion. “It is a trite remark when I say that by devoted I simply mean devoted.” Winnicott is a writer for whom ordinary words are good enough.

“I’m not the kind of faggot who wants to put a rainbow sticker on a machine gun,” declares poet CAConrad. If there’s one thing homonormativity reveals, it’s the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority.

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? You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows. And the thing is, even you don’t always know.

The more I thought about Biola’s doctrinal statement, the more I realized that I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please. If this particular cluster of adults doesn’t want to have sex outside of “biblical marriage,” then whatever. In the end, it was this sentence that kept me up at night: “Inadequate origin models [of the universe] hold that (a) God never directly intervened in creating nature and/or (b) humans share a common physical ancestry with earlier life forms.” Our shared ancestry with earlier life forms is sacred to me. I declined the invitation. They booked a “story guru” from Hollywood in my place.

It is sacred to me as well. What a futile faith if it is swayed by simple biology. I believe in God BECAUSE we share ancestry with earlier life forms!

In 1984, George Oppen died of pneumonia with complications from Alzheimer’s. Mary Oppen died a few years later, in 1990, of ovarian cancer. After George’s death, several fragments of writing were found pinned to the wall above his desk. One of these read: Being with Mary: it has been almost too wonderful it is hard to believe

it has been almost too wonderful it is hard to believe ! ! !

Before the birth of her daughter, Linda, it turns out Mary suffered several stillbirths—too many, apparently, for her to give a number—as well as the crib death of a six-week-old. About all this, Mary writes: Birth … I think I am afraid to try to write of it. In childbirth I was isolated; I never talked about it even to George. He was surprised to learn that giving birth was a peak emotional experience and so entirely my own that I never tried to express it…. I would wish it to remain whole, and I have preserved the wholeness of my own experience of birth by not telling it; it is too precious to me. Even now, writing of the experiences of age twenty-four to thirty, I wish to encompass my isolation and the wracking devastation of loss, the sense of being a nothing on the delivery table, knocked out by anesthetic, only to regain consciousness and be told once more, “The fetus is dead.” George and Mary are famous for living a life in conversation, in poetry. We talked as I had never talked before, an outpouring. But here, Mary is unsure that words are good enough. I never talked about it even to George. Her experience may be one of devastation, but she still worries that words might chip away at it (intolerable).

Winnicott acknowledges that the demands of ordinary devotion can be frightening for some mothers, who worry that giving themselves over to it will “turn them into a vegetable.” Poet Alice Notley raises the stakes: “he is born and I am undone—feel as if I will / never be, was never born. // Two years later I obliterate myself again / having another child … for two years, there’s no me here.” I have never felt that way, but I’m an old mom. I had nearly four decades to become myself before experimenting with my obliteration.

I was enough of a feminist to refuse any knee-jerk quarantining of the feminine or the maternal from the realm of intellectual profundity. And, as I remember it, Krauss was not simply quarantining; she was shaming. In the face of such shaming, I felt no choice. I stood with Gallop.

Wayne Koestenbaum tells an instructive story on this account: “Some psycho girlfriend of mine (decades ago!) answered a long rhapsodic letter I’d written her with this terse, humiliating rebuff: ‘Next time, write to me.’ That one command, on a tiny slip of paper, tucked into an envelope. I remember thinking, ‘Wasn’t I writing to her? How could I know, when writing to her, that I secretly wasn’t writing to her?’ At that point, Derrida hadn’t yet written The Post Card, so I didn’t know what to do with my befuddled, wounded sense of being a rhapsodic narcissist of a letter-writer weirdly instructed to ‘relate,’ to speak to someone instead of to the nothingness at the end of writing.”

Shame-spot: being someone who spoke freely, copiously, and passionately in high school, then arriving in college and realizing I was in danger of becoming one of those people who makes everyone else roll their eyes: there she goes again. It took some time and trouble, but eventually I learned to stop talking, to be (impersonate, really) an observer. This impersonation led me to write an enormous amount in the margins of my notebooks— marginalia I would later mine to make poems.

Sometimes, when I’m teaching, when I interject a comment without anyone calling on me, without caring that I just spoke a moment before, or when I interrupt someone to redirect the conversation away from an eddy I personally find fruitless, I feel high on the knowledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as quickly as I want to, in any direction that I want to, without anyone overtly rolling her eyes at me or suggesting I go to speech therapy. I’m not saying this is good pedagogy. I am saying that its pleasures are deep.

Many years ago, Carson gave a lecture at Teachers & Writers in New York City, at which she introduced (to me) the concept of leaving a space empty so that God could rush in. I knew a bit about this concept from my boyfriend at the time, who was big into bonsai. In bonsai you often plant the tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine. But that night Carson made the concept literary. (Act so that there is no use in a center: a piece of Steinian wisdom Carson says she tries to impart to her students.)

"leaving the center empty for God"

The presumptuousness of it all. On the one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories—predator, twilight, edible—on the other, the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live. Becoming, Deleuze and Guattari called this flight: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-molecular. A becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning, a certain turning inward, turning into my own / turning on in / to my own self / at last / turning out of the / white cage, turning out of the / lady cage / turning at last.

John Cage once said, “Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.” He knew his name was stuck to him, or he was stuck to it. Still, he urges out of it. The Argo’s parts may get replaced, but it’s still called the Argo.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. We ought to, but we don’t—or at least, we don’t quite as readily.

I expressed only offense at Allen Ginsberg’s descriptions of female genitalia in his poems, as in “the hang of pearplum / fat tissue / I had abhorred” and “the one hole that repelled me 1937 on.” I still don’t see the need to broadcast misogynistic repulsion, even in service of fagdom, but I do understand being repelled. Genitalia of all stripes are often slimy and pendulous and repulsive. That’s part of their charm.

Jacob von Gunten to his bio mom in his amazing long poem “A Kentucky of Mothers,” which accomplishes the nearly impossible feat of constructing an ecstatic matriarchal cosmology while also de-fetishizing the maternal, even emptying the category out, eventually wondering: “But is ‘mother of’ precise? / Should I say ‘singers of’ instead? … Is it good to call these others as my moms the way I have? Is it care, & if it is have I gave honor in my song?”

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

The thesis I produced under her tutelage was titled The Performance of Intimacy. I didn’t mean the word performance in opposition to “the real”; I’ve never been interested in any sort of con. Of course there exist people who perform intimacy in ways that are fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous or steamrolling or creepy, but that’s not the kind of performance that I meant, or the kind I mean. I mean writing that dramatizes the ways in which we are for another or by virtue of another, not in a single instance, but from the start and always.

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

lol me too queen

In a recent interview, Opie says: “Between being a full-time professor and an artist and a mom and a partner, it’s not like I get to have that much time to go and explore and play [SM style]…. Also, all of a sudden when you’re taking care of a child, your brain doesn’t easily switch to ‘Oh, now I’m going to hurt somebody’” There is something profound here, which I will but draw a circle around for you to ponder. As you ponder, however, note that a difficulty in shifting gears, or a struggle to find the time, is not the same thing as an ontological either/or.

Coming from the bouncer, I felt (paranoically? he was just doing his job) the specter of what Susan Fraiman has described as “a heroic gay male sexuality as a stand-in for queerness which remains ‘unpolluted by procreative femininity’”

But why bother fucking this Child when we could be fucking the specific forces that mobilize and crouch behind its image? Reproductive futurism needs no more disciples. But basking in the punk allure of “no future” won’t suffice, either, as if all that’s left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shred our economy and our climate and our planet, crowing all the while about how lucky the jealous roaches are to get the crumbs that fall from their banquet. Fuck them, I say.

I’ve never loved you more than I did then, with your Kool-Aid drains, your bravery in going under the knife to live a better life, a life of wind on skin, your nodding off while propped up on a throne of hotel pillows, so as not to disturb your stitches.

a life of wind on skin ! ! !

No one asked, How does one submit to falling forever, to going to pieces. A question from the inside.

falling through the bed with dizziness whenever I turned my head—falling forever—all touch starting to sicken, as if the cells of my skin were individually nauseated. That hormones can make the feel of wind, or the feel of fingers on one’s skin, change from arousing to nauseating is a mystery deeper than I can track or fathom. The mysteries of psychology pale in comparison, just as evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.

Despite agreeing with Sedgwick’s assertion that “women and men are more like each other than chalk is like cheese, than ratiocination is like raisins, than up is like down, or than 1 is like 0,” it took me by surprise that my body could make a male body. Many women I know have reported something of the same, even though they know this is the most ordinary of miracles. As my body made the male body, I felt the difference between male and female body melt even further away. I was making a body with a difference, but a girl body would have been a different body too. The principal difference was that the body I made would eventually slide out of me and be its own body. Radical intimacy, radical difference. Both in the body, both in the bowl. I kept thinking then about something poet Fanny Howe once said about bearing biracial children, something about how you become what grows inside you. But however “black” Howe might have felt herself becoming while gestating her children, she also remained keenly aware that the outside world was ready and waiting—and all too willing—to reinforce the color divide. She is of her children, and they are of her. But they know and she knows they do not share the same lot.

Powerlessness, finitude, endurance. You are making the baby but not directly. You are responsible for his welfare, but unable to control the core elements. You must allow him to unfurl, you must feed his unfurling, you must hold him. But he will unfurl as his cells are programmed to unfurl. You can’t reverse an unfolding structural or chromosomal disturbance by ingesting the right organic tea.

Never in my life have I felt more prochoice than when I was pregnant. And never in my life have I understood more thoroughly, and been more excited about, a life that began at conception. Feminists may never make a bumper sticker that says IT’S A CHOICE AND A CHILD, but of course that’s what it is, and we know it. We don’t need to wait for George Carlin to spill the beans. We’re not idiots; we understand the stakes. Sometimes we choose death. Harry and I sometimes joke that women should get way beyond twenty weeks—maybe even up to two days after birth—to decide if they want to keep the baby. (Joke, OK?)

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). I guess the cheery way of looking at this snowball would be to say, subjectivity is keenly relational, and it is strange. We are for another, or by virtue of another.

According to Kaja Silverman, the turn to a paternal God comes on the heels of the child’s recognition that the mother cannot protect against all harm, that her milk—be it literal or figurative—doesn’t solve all problems. As the human mother proves herself a separate, finite entity, she disappoints, and gravely. In its rage at maternal finitude, the child turns to an all-powerful patriarch—God—who, by definition, cannot let anyone down. “The extraordinarily difficult task imposed upon the child’s primary caretaker not only by the culture but also by Being itself is to induct it into relationality by saying over and over again, in a multitude of ways, what death will otherwise have to teach it: ‘This is where you end and others begin.’ Unfortunately, this lesson seldom ‘takes,’ and the mother usually delivers it at enormous cost to herself. Most children respond to the partial satisfaction of their demands with extreme rage, rage that is predicated on the belief that the mother is withholding something that is within her power to provide.”

Silverman also contends that a baby’s demands on the mother can be “very flattering to the mother’s narcissism, since it attributes to her the capacity to satisfy her infant’s lack, and so—by extension—her own. Since most women in our culture are egoically wounded, the temptation to bathe in the sun of this idealization often proves irresistible.” I have seen some mothers use their babies to fill a lack, or soothe an egoic wound, or bathe in the sun of idealization in ways that seemed pathological. But for the most part those people were pathological prior to having a baby. They would have had a pathological relation to carrot juice.

At the same time, every word that I write could be read as some kind of defense, or assertion of value, of whatever it is that I am, whatever viewpoint it is that I ostensibly have to offer, whatever I’ve lived. You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. That’s part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque.

What other reason is there for writing than to be traitor to one’s own reign, traitor to one’s own sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority? And to be traitor to writing.

Afraid of assertion. Always trying to get out of “totalizing” language, i.e., language that rides roughshod over specificity; realizing this is another form of paranoia. Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that “it is language which is assertive, not he.” It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language’s assertive nature by “add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.”

The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic…. [Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.

The capaciousness of growing a baby. The way a baby literally makes space where there wasn’t space before. The cartilage nub where my ribs used to fit together at the sternum. The little slide in my lower rib cage when I twist right or left that didn’t used to slide. The rearrangement of internal organs, the upward squeezing of the lungs.

A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother. I am a writer; I must play with the body of my mother. Schuyler does it; Barthes does it; Conrad does it; Ginsberg does it. Why is it so hard for me to do it? For while I’ve come to know my own body as a mother, and while I can imagine the bodies of a multitude of strangers as my mother (basic Buddhist meditation), I still have a hard time imagining my mother’s body as my mother.

I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it. I’ve long known the drill: Boobs, too small. Butt, too big. Face, bird-like. Upper arms, old. But it’s not just age—she even disparages the way she looks in baby pictures. I don’t know why she has never seen herself as beautiful. I think I’ve been waiting all these years for her to do so, as if that kind of self-love would somehow offer her body to me. But now I realize—she already gave it to me. At times I imagine her in death, and I know that her body, in all its details, will flood me. I do not know how I will survive it.

I do not know how I will survive it ! ! !

Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea, which makes it hard for me to know which ideas feel bad because they have merit, and which ones feel bad because they don’t.

Everything around me is normal and inside I am in the pain cavern.