River of Shadows is a meditation on the technologies that built the American empire, in myth and reality. But it is, more broadly, about technology itself—neither indictment nor appreciation, but a sort of reverent warning. “Literally,” Solnit writes, “a technology is a systemic practice or knowledge of an art.” While generally applied to “the scientific and mechanical” realms of human experience—the clang of the engine or the flash of the bulb—“there is no reason not to apply it to other human-made techniques for producing desired results.”
A technology, as Solnit redefines it, “is a practice, a technique, or a device for altering the world or the experience of the world.” As human beings, we’ve always surrounded ourselves, enmeshed ourselves, with technology; we have always been Haraway’s cyborgs. Metaphor itself is a technology. In fact, by allowing for imaginative production, metaphor may be the ur-technology from which all other technologies spring.
“One of the goals of a book,” Guibert writes, “is also to keep a language going, a certain threatened use of language.” In this book, metaphors react to their halves chemically. Fuel spent, we then dig these metaphors’ bones from the dirt. These chemical and archaeological metaphors are units I’ve chosen to explain and to ornament the importance of language in anti-fascist thought and action. Literature, to which this book aspires, is explanation and ornamentation, description and encryption, braided together in language—crucial and useless.
Metaphor makes possible the individual units of language—itself a technological apparatus that pierces, envelopes, surrounds, and connects us. Prior to the emergence of the Greek alphabet, the mnemonic Homeric epithet—“rosy-fingered dawn, “wine-dark sea,” “resourceful Odysseus,” “swift-footed Achilles”—helped sustain this oral epic’s massive vocabulary. It’s easier to memorize and recite over fifteen thousand lines of poetry when half of one line is dedicated to a multidactylic word pairing. Each presents an image for the listener—an image that, after hearing it repeatedly, one’s imagination no longer conjures. Helen becomes twinned to her epithets; we no longer see past her clichés.
Later, these same written legends would serve as the foundation for theater, whose own original compositions, thousands of years after that, would feed another art form’s earliest explorations: the cinema. The imagination often precedes the technological sophistication of its deployment.
Presumably, this technique is why the Iliad and the Odyssey—each a massive work of the imagination, even if they do have roots in history—both appear on papyrus shortly after the emergence of Greek writing itself. After centuries of recitation and memorization, and composed predominantly of images deployed as familiar, ready-made clichés, these stories were the perfect foundational texts for a new way of writing. Where writing itself is concerned, the Greeks borrowed largely from the fully phonetic (sound-based) alphabet of the Phoenicians. In their own alphabet, however, the Greeks were among the first to introduce vowels—the breath that brushes up against the edge of a consonant: the gap of sound between the teeth and the click of the tongue. Vowels—aspirated sound made possible by edges—exist in the poetic imagination of language as breath. “For the ancient Greeks,” writes Anne Carson, “breath is consciousness, breath is perception, breath is emotion.” Somewhat like the modern heart in our song lyrics, for these ancient speakers the chest was “a receptacle of sense impressions . . . Words, thoughts, and understanding are both received and produced by the phrenes [translated as lungs]. So words are ‘winged’ in Homer when they issue from the speaker, and ‘unwinged’ when they are kept in the phrenes unspoken.” Spoken language is a traveler. It crosses a distance between speaker and listener, and speech itself is set in motion. This shouldn’t be a surprise, Carson says: “Such a conception is natural among people in an oral environment . . . Breath is primary insofar as the spoken word is.” So too is it only natural for this breath to manifest itself in writing as vowels, the sounds channeled by the restrictions of the body and sent, winged, on their way.
In her journals, Sontag observes bodily breath as life’s visibility: “The ‘Art Nouveau’ appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. ‘I’m alive.’ ‘I’m decorative.’” Here, too, the inseparability of being alive from being seen, of imagining oneself as a thing to be seen.
The Greek alphabet was to have been a limitless, inexhaustible source of phonetic representation—a technology to convey, without literal breath, the breath of language from one to another, regardless of distance. But an actual listener, Carson says, “into whom sounds are being breathed in a continuous stream from the poet’s mouth,” has a sensual presence that a reader does not:
A reader must disconnect himself from the influx of sense impressions transmitted by nose, ear, tongue and skin if he is to concentrate upon his reading. A written text separates words from one another, separates words from the environment, separates words from the reader (or writer) and separates the reader (or writer) from his environment . . . As separable, controllable units of meaning, each with its own visible boundary, each with its own fixed and independent use, written words project their user into isolation.
Deprived of other senses, a reader is reduced to seeing. What they see—letters, petroglyphs, cuneiform script, abjad, Wingdings—is an ongoing pattern of enclosed images, each representing a sound (as in letters or syllabaries) or an idea (as in glyphs or words). This cleaving of the reader from space and time mirrors the cleaving of their personhood as Aristophanes imagines in Plato’s Symposium: a whole person of two halves split by a jealous Zeus into two half persons, each seeking to be whole again. It’s this edge we look for. It’s this frame we want to illuminate, to get a sense of our boundaries. It’s these years we count to see the dark chasm of time between moments.
Or, for the lucky ones, to feel it.
III
LITTLE SYMPHONY FOR THE BODY
At its etymological root, the glyph is something split, something cleaved: a carving. Yet every glyph chipped out of the rock is also an image, a small work of art. Art’s oldest root is a fitting together, a joining. As the earliest form of writing, glyphs reveal both the violence and the creativity in language. This tension, this irreconcilability, is a delight. “To catch beauty,” as Carson writes, “would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible.” Without this elusiveness, language would not move—nor art, nor knowledge: “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” This tension, where beauty is uncatchable—where so much more is possible because what we want has not yet been rejected—holds open an ancient and special space, and densely dark. To fall under a spell can never be photographed.
In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson outlines love’s relationship with language, and the impossibility of each without a tension that is both temporal and spatial: “In the interval between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive.” There is no desire without absence, without a boundary of flesh or of time: “In letters as in love, to imagine is to address oneself to what is not.”
Even before he began to die, Guibert observed how his life seemed to be a “foreclosed novel, with all of its characters, its eternal loves . . . its ghosts, and there is no further role to fill, the places are taken, walled up.” Years prior, he’d written of his hesitation to indulge his passion for photography: “This attraction frightens me . . . out of one day of one’s life one could cut out thousands of instants, thousands of little surfaces, and if one begins why stop?” If one’s narrative of resistance goes against the actual life one is living, indeed—when do you stop revising?
In what darkness does one preserve the living self?—or, for lack of a better word, the soul?
Photography, as Barthes writes, has its risks. Seeing has its risks. After he died, Sontag recalled how he “had beautiful eyes, which are always sad eyes.” When Sontag died, novelist Sigrid Nunez found
the shock of it—“to have been such a person, someone who struck others as too strong and tough, too alive to die”—almost an antidote to Sontag’s “insistence on her exceptionalism, her refusal to admit that her case was hopeless, that death was not only inevitable, not only near, but here.”
In The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer recalls a conversation he once had with John Berger, who some years before had visited the legendary Henri Cartier-Bresson, then in his eighties. “What struck Berger most about Cartier-Bresson,” Dyer remembers, “were his blue eyes which, he said, were ‘so tired of seeing.’” When Berger died, Dyer professed that “No one has ever matched [his] ability to help us look at paintings or photographs ‘more seeingly,’ as Rilke put it in a letter about Cézanne.”
When Guibert did begin to die, recording in journal entries and photographs the ongoing deterioration of his young body from AIDS, he observed how “the only things I want to photograph now are at the edge of the night.” In one of life’s strange echoes, Dyer recalls Diane Arbus’s fascination, late in her life, “with what could not be seen in photographs.” In one of her final lessons to her students, before she killed herself, she confessed to the pleasures of what is not seen in photographs, what is hidden in the dark—“An actual physical darkness and it’s very thrilling for me to see darkness again.”
The photographed moments of the past, it is imagined, are entombed. Their story is over. Images of the future are equally severed, stretching out into another narrative we curate and navigate. In this claustrophobic present, it’s only natural to claw and scratch at whatever we can to get by, to cope with the panic of an entire world suffocating. It’s natural to feel as if one’s soul is fading, and it may, in an increasingly surveilled and consumed world, become necessary to again savor transience, to again allow moments to step back into the dark.
Written down, as we’ve seen, what was once spoken becomes breathless, embalmed in boundaries of ink. Coined from metaphor like the flash of a collapsing star, a new word’s light dissipates outward until its darkness and death are writ in the standardized lexicon, until the metaphor is invisible. In these moments, the pursuit is over. Death has arrived. Like a metaphor, an oft-quoted photograph—a photograph that means something—has no future: it is clipped from the ongoing logos of life. What we scratch into the film, onto the paper, into the side of a cliff—these are and have been excisions of greed, stirred by excitement. More than ever, it’s with these victims we populate our lives, and through these dead we tell our stories.
Barthes’s image of the fastened butterfly resonates personally. Caught in the triangulation of male desire, one is likely, at some point, to hear the word “perfect”—usually leveled at your body or some part of it. This is a difficult complaint in a community that both seems to worship and resent stereotypical standards of male beauty. But “perfect,” to me, has never carried the pleasure of a compliment, only the sting of the entomologist’s pin. It’s a collector’s word, and I don’t wish to be collected. I don’t wish to be made dead.
At the Morgan Library in New York, I saw Peter Hujar’s portrait of David Wojnarowicz, gaunt and sharply shadowed, dark-eyed, a cigarette in mid drag; and I felt it, around my neck. Love there, and admiration. Grief. Seeing how Hujar saw his lover, friend, and fellow artist seized me entirely. I didn’t understand why I was trembling. It just happened as these things happen—and, for me, are happening more and more. In 2018, T magazine ran a special issue on the early eighties in New York. On one page, Edmund White remembered friends, writers, and artists who’d died young: “I was just thinking of Allen Barnett, who lived to publish one book of stories . . . He was so angry that he had to die.” On another page, the faces of over a hundred artists, choreographers, writers, performers, designers, and cinematographers “lost” to HIV-related illnesses. I sobbed when I saw it. The same thing happened with Tom Bianchi’s photographs of Fire Island from the early eighties, in which young men, naked or mostly naked, smile there on the sand with no idea what awaits them. “I could not have imagined,” Bianchi writes in Fire Island Pines, “that my Polaroids would so suddenly become a record of a lost world—my box of pictures a mausoleum, too painful to visit. When I reopened the box decades later, I found friends and lovers playing and smiling. Alive again.” Even this, reread so many times, is hard to transcribe.
I began having sex with men in 2006. HIV is not only a treatable illness but, thanks to PrEP, easier to avoid contracting than ever. I’ve lost no one to AIDS. I was a child when it decimated queer communities across the world. Because of this, it’s taken me a long time to understand that there is still trauma here, that for me to look back and see what has happened, and to see the people—the Reagan administration, state and local governments, charity organizations, and “normal Americans”—who stood by and let it happen, is for me a trauma I’m allowed to feel. It’s traumatic to know how many influential figures called it punishment, called it God, and how many millions nodded along with them. It’s traumatic that I believed, long after the documented success of antiretroviral therapy, that HIV was certain death. It’s traumatic to imagine myself and my friends in that other decade, losing all the men in my life, all while someone laughs on television, where they are paid to say, You had it coming.
Yes, they called me faggot, bullied me, threatened me; yes, I pushed myself so deeply into the closet that I thought I was someone else, hurting a lot of people in the process; and yes, I carry scars from those years when I craved physical pain instead of pain I couldn’t articulate. But no one I love died, not like that. Not long ago, people like me suffered unimaginably and died in isolation, cut off not only from civil and social apparatuses but often their families; and this happened because those people were like me. Through shunning, violence, intimidation, and legislation, a society had so othered LGBTQ+ individuals that their drawn out and brutal deaths seemed permissible, even desirable. And alongside those deaths, what were a few million drug users, homeless persons, and Black Americans living in abject poverty? Because of white supremacist and heteropatriarchal ideologies, a virus became a weapon of the state, allowed first to proliferate and then, once activists had pushed back hard enough, to be contained, managed, and controlled by federal subsidies and corporate pharmaceutical research.
Not that this “long ago” is necessarily isolated from the present. This “never again,” like all others, calls for constant vigilance. In February of 2018, the White House proposed a 20 percent cut in the nation’s global HIV/AIDS fund, which would lead, according to a report issued by ONE.org, to “nearly 300,000 deaths and more than 1.75 million new infections each year.” On June 1 of 2019, the president announced that the United States would “celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation,” despite everything his administration and party have done to strip trans persons of their safety and their rights, and to obstruct federal and state protections for queer families and workers. It’s especially tempting to ask this transphobic autocrat what he believes the T stands for when he reminds the nation to celebrate LGBT people, but that’s beside the point. It’s not ignorance that emanates from the White House. It is not a politics in conflict. No matter how many rainbow emoji Trump tweets, his queer politics is death, hate, and exclusion. It is a legacy of abuse, and perhaps it’s only natural to feel it across generations, to break down sobbing when I discover another artist or writer or human being who was, not that many years ago, “so angry that he had to die.”
Nor does “never again” mean that one should only watch out for the government’s deployment of a virus against highly specific communities, as the Trump administration’s overwhelming, widespread, and malicious negligence w/r/t COVID-19 has made clear.
For Wojnarowicz himself, the 2010s were something of a renaissance. In a retrospective at the Whitney Museum, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, we are reminded that Wojnarowicz “came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by crea
tive energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes.” We are to recognize that time period in our own and, with it, Wojnarowicz’s anger.
In truth, renaissance is a cruel word to give to someone who died at thirty-seven. But we do love him. We do, these days, need him, trapped as we are in a moment of political terror. And what else? We are dangerously close to cynicism, but angry enough to have hope. We are no longer interested in compromise. Men, we agree, have had their chance. White women can no longer be trusted to uphold feminism, not while they cling to white supremacy. We are anti-racist and anti-fascist and prison abolitionists; we rejoiced when Bill Cosby received his sentence. We canceled Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and Al Franken with equal fervor. We are uninterested in what they think. We could really use a kind of miracle or martyr, or at the very least a leader.
It seems inevitable that, in a time of such divisiveness, we would become a disingenuous pronoun that both paid and unpaid pundits brandish without consent. I’m often guilty, too: my points are more convincing if I ventriloquize your voice alongside mine. Are we really doing this? Is this what we want? When did we decide this was okay? As usual, Adorno said it best: “To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.” More often than not, we is an erasure, a linguistic illusion that you or I have endorsed some third person’s opinion, politics, or decisions. Deployed in politicized spaces, the subtext of we—i.e., I didn’t need to ask you—is a violation of political agency. CF. P6
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