The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

“the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”

You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you.

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.

You must learn to take cover in grammatical cul-de-sacs, relax into an orgy of specificity.

because the words are not good enough. How can the words not be good enough?

Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

One must also become alert to the multitude of possible uses, possible contexts, the wings with which each word can fly.

the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.

And then, just like that, I was folding your son’s laundry. He had just turned three. Such little socks! Such little underwear!

I was so happy renting in New York City for so long because renting—or at least the way I rented, which involved never lifting a finger to better my surroundings—allows you to let things literally fall apart all around you. Then, when it gets to be too much, you just move on.

Many feminists have argued for the decline of the domestic as a separate, inherently female sphere and the vindication of domesticity as an ethic, an affect, an aesthetic, and a public.

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?

But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis. If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

It’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered selfconsciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature.

apiece

Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify.

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

Fifty-seven years of baffling the paradigm, with ardor.

moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.

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 soon as we moved in together, we were faced with the urgent task of setting up a home for your son that would feel abundant and containing—good enough—rather than broken or falling.

When you are a stepparent, no matter how wonderful you are, no matter how much love you have to give, no matter how mature or wise or successful or smart or responsible you are, you are structurally vulnerable to being hated or resented, and there is precious little you can do about it, save endure, and commit to planting seeds of sanity and good spirit in the face of whatever shitstorms may come your way. And don’t expect to get any kudos from the culture, either: parents are Hallmark-sacrosanct, but stepparents are interlopers, self-servers, poachers, pollutants, and child molesters.

love is preferred, but not required),

inventiveness,

We were surprised at our shock, as it revealed a passive, naive trust that the arc of the moral universe, however long, tends toward justice.

you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority.

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.”

you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.

Whenever anyone asked me why I wanted to have a baby, I had no answer.

Falling for ever All kinds of disintegration Things that disunite the psyche and the body The fruits of privation going to pieces falling for ever dying and dying and dying losing all vestige of hope of the renewal of contacts

Being with Mary: it has been almost too wonderful it is hard to believe

I feel no urge to extricate myself from this bubble. But here’s the catch: I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write.

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 exper...

cathected

The room thickened with the sound of one keenly intelligent woman taking another down.

But the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop’s maternity had rotted her mind—besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.

pugilist,

I wanted to attend to Iggy, but I didn’t want to ambush him. Also, the culture’s worrying over pedophilia in all the wrong places at times made me feel unable to approach his genitals or anus with wonder and glee, until one day I realized, he’s my baby, I can—indeed I must!—

Until he grows too heavy, I carry him always and everywhere, even against the rules

I adore Winnicott. But the perversity is not lost on me that the most oft-cited, well-respected, best-selling books about the caretaking of babies—Winnicott, Spock, Sears, Weissbluth— have been and are mostly still by men.

I don’t ever want to make the mistake of needing him as much as or more than he needs me.

He is, after all, a very private person, who has told me more than once that being with me is like an epileptic with a pacemaker being married to a strobe light artist.

I guess I wasn’t ready to lose sight of my own me yet, as for so long, writing has been the only place I have felt it plausible to find it (whatever “it” is).

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.

Forcing myself to shut up, pouring language onto paper instead: this became a habit. But now I’ve returned to copious speaking as well, in the form of teaching.

We were standing in our kitchen when you said this, at the same countertop where I suddenly remembered scouring the teeny print of a Canadian testosterone information pamphlet (Canada is light-years ahead of the United States on this front). I had indeed been trying to figure out, in a sort of teary panic, what about you might change on T, and what would not.

You think I’m not worried too? Of course I’m worried. What I don’t need is your worry on top of mine. I need your support.

How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?