Honey Mine

by Camille Roy

  Some of the most interesting material in Infidel Poetics relates lyric obscurity to a history of communities of dissidence. Tiffany describes, as a genealogy of modern nightlife, erotic and artistic undergrounds and their ‘infidel songs.’ He discovers roots of poetry in the canting songs of beggars as well as the broadsheets of radicals. There is also an amazing section on manic rewrites of Mother Goose developed as schoolroom exercises by Stéphane Mallarmé. It was an exciting book to encounter, especially as I spent much of my life in one underground community or another. The rich nexus of lyric obscurity and secret experience has baffled and compelled me for years.

  The Obscure Community

  Before I was an experimental writer, I was a lesbian. I still am, but as time has passed, my sort of lesbian—who came of age in an underground community—is passing away. I have the odd sense of being out of phase with any image of lesbian identity in part because my beginnings were (or felt like they were) outside the representational boundary.

  The community I entered in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the mid-1970s was undergoing a decade of extremity. That meant it was a convergence of collectives, prostitutes, union organizers, drag shows, radicals with history in violent parts of the Weather Movement, and bar life. These components combined and re-combined across all boundaries to produce an ongoing show with propulsive elements of both shock and hilarity. The larger feeling was of having slipped into an exhilarating social life that I could not describe. We had collective existence (and a political rhetoric) but our substance was invisible. This was partly a collective ruse for safety in a violently hostile society—but it was also structural and linguistic.

  The coming out narrative is supposed to make experience legible, but I have never been able to write about this period. I still cannot create sentences about the circumstances and time in which I came out. There are many conflicts and contradictions that stymie the project: much of what happened cannot be discussed openly despite the fact that decades have passed. Also, there were so many reversals of expectation in play that representation becomes confusing. Finally, there is the issue of how to navigate the extraordinary gap between private life—a secret community—and what is sloppily termed “the world.” Where was I living, if not “the world”?

  When I have tried to explore this period, I have ended up circling around the very issues that constrain my writing about it. This passage below is both a description and an enactment of this failure. It’s a narrative of a past love affair during this period of extremity. In the excerpt, an effort at representation has failed and, in response, I end up examining taboo as a distortionary field even as the writing shifts away from realism:

  One could say that my attempt at realistic narrative is a surrender to nostalgia, for the representational failure of realism is well-known. I will not disagree with that. However, nostalgia is the vehicle through which my past has survived.

  …and I want to touch the past lightly, so as not to disturb it. Especially its dewish Utopian qualities. Although it was instability which made it secret and fresh.

  If light waves can be bent by gravity, scattered by reflectors, sucked up by the bottomless gravity of a black hole. If light can stretch or shrink time.

  Language is bent. A taboo is a place where language deteriorates, becoming both supple and truncated.

  Camille’s fall for Dusty sent her hurtling through the doors: butch, whore, incest survivor.

  Into the sturdy, enigmatic presence of taboo.

  A taboo as presence is both everywhere and nowhere. Language bends around it. One experiences moments of hysteria as recognition seems to be slipping away. I can’t believe you’ve been a prostitute, Dusty’s mother wails into the phone.

  The powerful attraction of taboo is anti-linguistic; it stops meaning at the boundary. Privacy and insanity have this in common: shared meaning drops away. So, love thrust Camille inside an enigma. I write this, of course, out of nostalgia, to affirm whore as enigma and abstraction.

  She is the one who inhabits me and who familiarizes me with the universe.1

  Her hands probe the sheer tunnel of flesh.

  She sheds the weightless freedom of the abstract.

  To clarify this line:

  “The powerful attraction of taboo is anti-linguistic; it stops meaning at the boundary.”

  …the boundary I’m referring to is not individual but communal. The ability of a community to seal itself is mysterious and powerful (even if temporary). All revolutions (in values as well as governments) begin in these underground and secret spaces.

  This recalls a professional colleague of twenty years ago. Working on a yearlong software project, it eventually emerged that our parents had been Communists. Mine left the party after Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin at the 20th Congress in 1956. His parents never left the party and they also maintained their political involvement in a secret cell for decades, until their death. They never admitted this to their son. He found out by spying on them.

  Light and shadow: meaning and the secret cell. As a young man, my colleague protested fiercely against the Vietnam War but was never otherwise politically associated.

  I also grew up with the silences of former Communists, but it came with an enveloping community. Down the block from my home, there was a house built of pale brick and tall blades of light (windows). Every week, the fathers gathered there, to talk politics, drink whiskey, and play poker. They were all ex-Communists. Several of these men were engaged in civil rights lawsuits related to their period of Communist affiliation that ran for many years. To me, these were infinite lawsuits, stretching from before my birth until after my death. I experienced them as markers of the edge of value; beyond them was nothingness. I wandered around the house fingering the blown glass eggs collected by our host’s wife. They were heavy and glistened in my palm. I picked up one after another and peered into their depths: all floating veils and orbs of bright colors. I barely listened to the men, but it was enough.

  Intimate Disorder

  The terms that would describe us were lurid… so distance fell away. We were inside, touching, without perspective…

  …even as we were outside of society, ghostly, hidden.

  My confusion was not a mistake—it was intimate disorder, or self-in-relation. Confusion is a necessary property of entering a social space (including a text) without a system of defenses in place.

  As a young lesbian, the obscurity of my person became a comfortable condition. I didn’t think it would ever be disturbed. Now it has disappeared, and I have arrived at a world of objects (persons) presented as recognizable. It seems to me this transformation rests on some basic faults in understanding and perception. Here are a few alternative views:

  + Recognition is extractive. It removes what is recognized from its constitutive relations. Thus, an instant of recognition creates an alien deformity which is experienced as clarity.

  + Recognition imposes a coercive order, whereas obscurity is packed with relation: communal, sexual, political. Obscurity marks an interstice where social relations slip from public to private and understanding becomes tacit (and tactile). It is a space of social darkness which functions opposite to a black hole: it throws out slang, ideas, reconfigured relations, new possibilities for dissent and disorder. This is why in popular music the coolest slang is unfamiliar: underground slang signals authentic social relations.

  + Obscurity is a property of inwardness; language as a substance is imbued with it.

  + Consciousness is like a canoe on an ocean of raw unfiltered perception. We learn the skills of navigation, but moment to moment ‘know’ almost nothing of what constitutes our ‘experience.’ The billions of nerve signals that are filtered and processed every second before reaching the level of consciousness constitute a stream of raw data that is antithetical to being, meaning, personhood. But moment to moment, without awareness, we are created from it—from an obscurity which is by condition unknowable.

  + Not knowing my
ancestors does not remove their intimate grasp. Language, likewise, arrives from the past and expresses conditions through me and upon me of which I will never be aware.

  + Meaning is organized looting of the mind’s infrastructure.

  The Monad’s Tiny Pants

  I prefer to use language that carries relation in its texture. While a text may be difficult, relation does not fall away due to difficulty. Obscurity is a social substance. Recognition can ripple through the text as sequences of tiny transformations, one question into another, so that a poem riddles itself. Alternatively, the poem may unfold as a sort of suspense novel. Rigid understandings undermined from below.

  One aspect of Tiffany’s Infidel Poetics which I found especially rewarding is his development of an ontology of lyric obscurity. For this, he uses Leibniz’s model of the monad, first described in Monadology. This model “posits a mode of obscurity integral to the nature of Being itself, a foundational obscurity replicated in our understanding of the phenomenal world, in forms of sociability, and (of course) in language” (Tiffany 11).

  A monad is similar to early conceptions of the atom, a thing that is “simple, without parts” (Leibniz 213). Nothing exists other than simple monads and aggregates of monads. Unlike atoms, monads model metaphysical substance, not physical reality. They are characterized by perception (and correspondence), even though they do not communicate. A fundamental paradox is that this is perception without consciousness or sensory properties—the perceptions of a doorknob. This characterization of perception straddles the divide between the material world and consciousness. The perceptions of a doorknob are what precipitate its responses to all the forces of the universe.

  Rather than consciousness having sole possession of perception, according to Leibniz’s view, the perception associated with consciousness (which he calls apperception) is a small and transient variation: “It is good to distinguish between perception, which is the internal state of the monad representing external things, and apperception, which is consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of this internal state, something not given to all souls, nor at all times to a given soul” (Tiffany 114).

  According to Leibniz, each monad is a mirror which “represents the universe from its own point of view and which is ordered as the universe itself” (Leibniz 278). What the monad perceives in its mirror is the entire universe, but this perception is dappled with obscurity as its point of view is infinitesimal. Thus, its perception is both “clear” and “confused”: “Monads all go confusedly to infinity, to the whole, but they are limited and differentiated by the degrees of their distinct perceptions” (Leibniz 221). Because monadic perception combines “infinity and confusion, omniscience and obscurity” (Tiffany 114), opposites not only combine, they have constitutive relations. Obscurity is fundamental to each part and inseparable from the whole, at scales ranging from the infinitesimal to the infinite.

  Monadic perception is solipsistic. Monads have “no windows through which something else can enter or leave” (Leibniz 214). The monads know the world by what passes within them. This is similar to a reader who knows the world only through reading a text. Leibniz suggests that a monad may be compared to a crypt whose interior is engraved with inscriptions invoking an external world. Nonetheless, via correspondence, aggregation and harmony, monads produce phenomenological reality.

  In Tiffany’s use of this model, monadic correspondence can be found in undergrounds, criminal or radical communities, nightclubs. These are sealed but expressive communities which possess and create the secrecy of vernacular speech. They provide a negative sociability which defies the instant and shallow continuities of the internet era.

  Tiffany uses this model to ground poetry itself with the negative capability of monadic expression: “Lyric obscurity may trigger a variation of the sublime associated with the abject: a vernacular sublime” (Tiffany 8). Difficulty in poetry is thus connected to the “dangerous speech of various underworlds” (Tiffany 8). In elite culture, this connection is suppressed but a study of etymology reveals it. For example, “slang” and “slum” originate in canting speech, and the OED records that “slum” is a cant word which means “nonsensical talk or writing.”

  I find this thrilling because it connects my lived experience of subcultures and undergrounds to a model of lyricism that is faithful to darkness and confusion. The monadic expression of a poetic community has a secret harmony with the criminal and the suppressed. Lyric obscurity communicates these secrets without revealing them: “Lyrical knowledge of the sensory world, like monadic perception, is ‘miraculous’ because it is senseless, because it does not rely on a causal relation to the object” (Tiffany 115). The world is encrypted by language. This doesn’t cancel social relations but is expressed by them, as a form of monadic correspondence.

  One interesting aspect of the monad is that it is a model of perception generally. Thus, it is applicable to elite perception as well. Tiffany’s book led me to read Leibniz and, after this immersion, I had a new understanding of a minor incident that occurred decades earlier. After growing up on the South Side of Chicago in what was then Chicago’s only integrated neighborhood, I spent years in a state of cognitive dissonance. I was not able to process the sudden disappearance of Black people and Black culture from almost everywhere I went. A huge and vital complexity had vanished, and this was accompanied by the strange invisibility of the disappearance itself. Of course, this was normal for a white person, but I had grown up in a community stubbornly resistant to white flight and, thus, with different tools and understandings. Sometimes I would sink into a stunned (wordless) spectatorship—for example, when paging through the New Yorker. What felt wrong? What was reality? Where was I? I stared at the ads and the cartoons in a state of mystification. One day (in the proverbial flash) it hit me. I realized there were never any Black people in the cartoons. But there were Black people in the streets of New York! And so many cartoons showed the streets of New York! The cartoonists did not see the Black people. They were physically present, but unseen—by every single cartoonist, in hundreds or thousands of cartoons. The cartoonists were drawing the street but were unable to see the street, because their vision had been blocked. In that instant, I grasped the bodily nature and magnitude of the deformity constructed deep inside each cartoonist. I looked away, ashamed for them.

  This blindness of the cartoonists is monadic perception: solipsistic to the core. Recall that monads have no windows. They know the world indirectly, like readers of a text. Understandings created by such perception cannot be corrected by experience of the outside as there is no such experience. This is a useful corrective to dealing with ideological dominance, whether it be neoliberal economics, psychoanalysis, or prejudice of any kind.

  Obscuring Narrative

  In my reflections upon these issues, there is a line from an essay by Robert Glück which I have returned to many times. He is describing the questions he and Bruce Boone were exploring in the early days of New Narrative.

  “What kind of representation least deforms its subject? Can language be aware of itself (as object, as system, as commodity, as abstraction) yet take part in the forces that generate the present? Where in writing does engagement become authentic?”

  I love this quote for reasons which change as I contemplate it from different perspectives. Recently, I have been drawn to its acknowledgement of the deformed subject: deformed by representation, by language itself. This being a starting point of struggle which has both personal and social aspects (dialog). New Narrative has always been attractive to me because it placed this struggle at the center of the project. In fact, this acknowledgment is for me the beginning of authenticity as a possibility.

  I am also drawn to this problematizing of narrative precisely because it engages failure. Representation is a failed project. (Acknowledging the failure is not the same as authenticity but it overlaps.)

  Giving obscurity its place as a central aspect of social relations (including politic
al revolt) gives writing the freedom to manifest its own obscure condition. It allows a story to disappear—and to appear again.

  Once I tutored a student who, over the course of our work together, became psychotic. This happened before my eyes and yet presented itself as a deep mystery. It was, among other things, a mystery in language. After the break, the sentences in his essay paragraphs made no sense but they had great rhythm and were very interesting. They possessed a leaping energy which seemed to be liberated as if language were a demon which had been suffering under constraint.

  One day, he asked me if characters chose their author. I sat for a moment silently, transfixed by the prospect of characters floating through the ether as they searched for the right ‘host.’ What should I say? Where did characters come from?

  The silence lengthened and began to feel weird. I came up with something calm and rational, mostly because I didn’t want my peculiar behavior to impact a vulnerable student. But I’d like to leave that question open. Of course, there are many answers. But of all of them, it seems to me, the one we most overlook is silence. That is, we overlook the obscurity of the conditions of our invention. We speak into the silence and write likewise. What would it mean to listen to it?

  1. Nicole Brossard, Picture Theory.

  Camille & Angie, 1978

  It’s vexing to use words, particularly when their meaning has changed. It requires such a high level of care. But I am setting forth; why? Not long after my partner, Angie, died of cancer, a friend wondered out loud to me whether it was rough, that the butch-femme subculture which seeded our relationship “had become obsolete.” Angie and I had lived together for thirty-six years. The startling question caused a flush of pure grief for the rich intimacy we had shared; after some time, I realized that the grief was strong enough to spur a desire to represent that context.