A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

most men were a kind of noise pollution, something akin to TV static,

felt

Any word or sound bursts the second it hits the air and then it shatters in our faces. We’re exposed. Our honesty renders us ugly and irredeemable.

He wept until he was no longer human. Like an animal, he wanted his mourning to be an enormous display.

The thesis behind my project was that people turned into musical instruments when encouraged to testify about the conditions of their lives.

Do we make ourselves into tragedians trying to accrue proof of our aliveness in retrospect?

Somewhere between love and loss we pitch a tent from which we only look backward.

became easier for Michael to clock in and out of his body than to confront the heaviness of his desires. He was unsure what devastation they might unleash.

Michael’s story reminded me of Judith Butler’s observation that we sometimes choose to stay attached to what injures us rather than gamble with what it might feel like to be in the world without the attachment. The psychological investment is so large it seems counterintuitive to relinquish it, regardless of its consequences. We don’t want to lose too much, to be left with so little.

Don’t we all suspect our most volatile yearnings, when freed from the pits of our stomachs, could upend a world? What if desire were one of the few forces that troubles the idea of continuums, meaning we’re either entirely absorbed or wrecked by it? We all have it in us to destroy ourselves.

GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Who wouldn’t burn themselves in the drama of self-documentation?

How could anyone hold such a jagged memory up to the light and not wince?

Suppose a body were trapped between two parentheses, I thought, made out to be an aside, a distraction, a trace of another narrative possibility. Would you set it free, set it loose on the world?

What we were: two bodies pulsating inside a co-constituted indeterminacy. What we weren’t: real, realized, finished. What he said: here are some words, swallow them. No, he didn’t say that, but his dick did swell against mine;

I crawled over him, upside down, such that our mouths were at opposite ends of each other, an image that always made me think of a tree gnarled around another simply because it is there, proximal. We were there, proximal. Once upon a time we were trees for an entire night.

but I wanted his memories of me to be sonic as much as they would be fleshy;

Our asymmetry was a gesture toward beauty.

I was reading Água Viva, and in it Clarice Lispector wrote: “Writing is the method of using the word as bait.”

YEEEEESSSSSSS Clarice

I reached for my phone perched dangerously on the toilet and wrote: Inside my body it was loud like a body, or a city street. To which they responded: O, desire!

So what if the present was an empty bathroom inside which I shivered, at least I had something to write about.

Let’s say I have to be unendingly invented and reinvented.

Let’s say I’m part of a breathtaking view.

Let’s say I made love and art as if I hadn’t already lost the war.

I needed to learn how to live and love without placing an embargo on creativity.

“A mother is a library seconds before the tornado strikes,” I wrote.

Some nights my pseudo-motherlessness seemed to me a more animal form of freedom; other nights I felt corroded by it, like a sculpture long severed from the fingers of its maker.

This was the power parents held over us, that of shaping the kinds of debt we carried into our own adulthoods. That we all haul little five- and ten-pound dumbbells of the past around and say nothing of it is a kind of poetry.

Mothering is about being with others in a context in which mutual flourishing is a shared goal.

Take my friendship with River as an example; I became the person I am in their company. Who I am is tied to who they are. In this way, we have a kind of collective self, and we tend to it as one does a garden. That, to me, is the mark of the maternal function.

Power of platonic love!!!

Rachel Cusk wrote: “That’s writing for you: when you make room for passion, it doesn’t turn up.”

To read

What I’m saying is, that’s writing for you: when you make room for your mother, she doesn’t turn up. What does: a brief scene, a little pathos, the ringing earth.

I wanted to take a photo and call it The Unwritability of Grief. I felt that I too could be photographed and labeled this way.

The landscape was something I felt hurled at even as I was standing still.

Today, language was the sky falling onto me.

River: what’s fieldwork called when it’s for a novel? Me: group therapy? River: LOL

All language is raw and improvised, I thought, shot out of an unrehearsed mouth.

I decided that I didn’t want to conceal my fluttering body anymore. My future sentences would ache.

picked up my notebook and wrote: Can one write like a community? Where the narrative voice isn’t individual but plural...

These men demanded a certain formlessness from women, demanded that they exist as containers for their anguish. In other words, they wanted to reign over meaning, to force the genre of women to engender the same thing without end: the end of women.

needed to insist on a form of gender that wasn’t a natural disaster but rather a sprawling field where nothing was a coffin someone could fall into.

A matter of receptivity, I thought. The fact of being vulnerable to another’s language, regardless of if we respond or not.

My theory of aesthetics is that if you’re queer you’re predisposed to the condition of overwriting because when you come into your identity after a time of closetedness excess becomes a way of plotting yourself in a different story than the one you inherited. It’s literally gay to be a bad writer!

I will think about this for years

There’s so much language inside me. I feel like I’m going to explode with it, like light.

As an adult, I had to dig myself out of myself, had to make myself into a ruin from which something new could grow.

It seemed to me that their dogma could be summarized like this: If we’re all subject to planetary catastrophe, if we experience the same intensity of existential fragility as the downtrodden, let us descend into madness and disaster, but we will govern the pace! What a brutal legacy to be a recipient of by virtue of geographic fate, I thought. It’s a miracle anyone escapes it.

What would my Grindr brethren make of this sort of line of thinking? Did the app make them feel part of a country, allegiant to the same values of lust and self-fabrication, singers of the same anthem of risk and longing?

Humans are pitiable because we are unfree from the scripts inside another’s head; but we rebel.

I’ve made all this racket about ideas and literature and art, but really what I’ve wanted most was to be loved.

Into the stale apartment air, I said, Mom, I forgive you.

Ouchie!

Perhaps making room for my mother’s love, I thought, was a politics in and of itself.

!!!!!!!!!!!!

There were many kinds of arenas for punishment and surveillance, and we lived inside them our whole lives. The prison was where all of these tactics and arenas existed in their most monstrous forms.