In terms of heterosexist oppression of gays, Gay Identity represents a strategy for tarring a whole lot of very different people with the same brush: Billy, Mike, my perpetual virgin—at least, that is, if the people with the tar believe in a transcendent difference between male and female. (For those are precisely the people who historically have contrived to keep male homosexuality not talked of and lesbianism trivial.) And if, on the other hand, they simply believe deviance is deviance, then it includes as well, you, me, Carla, and Hank. The tar is there in order to police a whole range of behaviors—not only in terms of the action that is language but also in terms of the language that human actions themselves must generate, including the language of these tales tonight.
In terms of gay rights, Gay Identity represents one strategy by which some of the people oppressed by heterosexism may come together, talk, and join forces to fight for the equality that certain egalitarian philosophies claim is due us all. In those terms, what we need these stories for is so that we don’t get too surprised when we look at—or start to listen to—the person sitting next to us. That person, after all, might be me, or Hank, or Mike—or anyone else I’ve spoken of this evening. In those terms, Gay Identity is a strategy I approve of wholly, even if, at a theoretical level, I question the existence of that identity as having anything beyond a provisional or strategic reality. Nor do I seek what Jane Gallup has written of so forcefully as some sort of liberation from identity itself that would lead only to another form of paralysis—“the oceanic passivity of undifferentiation” (The Daughter’s Seduction, Ithaca: Cornell, 1982, p.xii). For me, Gay Identity—like the joys of Gay Pride Day, weekends on Fire Island, and the delight of tickets to the opera—is an object of the context, not of the self—which means, like the rest of the context, it requires analysis, understanding, interrogation, even sympathy, but never an easy and uncritical acceptance.
That is to say, its place is precisely in the politically positivist comedy of liberation we began with—but probably nowhere else. But the reason why that partial congruence between the two strategies is finally happy, is because it alone allows one group to speak, however inexactly, with the other. It allows those who have joined together in solidarity to speak to those who have been excluded; and, to me even more important, it allows the excluded to speak back. That very partial congruence is the linguistic element of the conduit through which any change, as it manifests a response by a vigorous and meaningful activism, will transpire.
Again: in a field of heterosexist dominance and homophobic oppression, however much the policing of what is allowed into language has broadened since the late sixties, the bulk of the extraordinarily rich, frightening, and complex sexual landscape has been—and remains—outside of language. Most of it will remain there for quite some time. It is precisely because I have talked of it as much as I have that I am so hugely aware of how little of it I have actually spoken. But because that sexual landscape is not articulated in certain orders of language—written language, say, of a certain formality—does not mean it doesn’t exist. Nor does it mean that its effects as a pervasive context do not inform other articulations, that either do not reflect it directly or that reflect only a highly coded, heavily policed portion of it.
From time to time I have been accused—I have always taken it as praise—of trying to put the sex back in homosexuality. Here, not as a matter of nostalgia, but to facilitate an analytical and theoretical precision, I am trying to trouble the notion both of what we aver and what we are averse to, in its perversity and its diversity—or, if you will, through occasional appeals to the averse, I am trying to put a bit of the perversity back into perversion.
I hope many of you so inclined will welcome it. And to all of you tonight: Love, luxury, justice, and joy.
Thank you.
—Amherst
30 October 1991
Shadow and Ash
1. Rhetoric is the ash of discourse.
2. Probably in the winter of 1797–98, in what has become known as The Gutch Memorandum Notebook, Samuel Taylor Coleridge jotted down the sweepingly sonorous verses:
the prophetic soul
of the wide world dreaming on things to come—
In those 95 sheets that served him over some three years as commonplace book, journal, and project notebook, after a few more entries, including some odd lines from Shakespeare’s sonnets and a tercet that grew into the third verse paragraph of “Christobel,” Coleridge copied out a glorious description of alligators from a travel book by one William Bartram with the sesquipedalian title Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Production of these Regions, together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians. After about a page, the transcription is interrupted by a paragraph-long entry on an accident with Coleridge’s infant son:
—Hartley fell down & hurt himself—I caught him up crying & screaming—& ran out of doors with him.—The Moon caught his eye—he ceased crying immediately—& his eyes & the tears in them, how they glittered in the Moonlight!
Then, after the mention of a “wilderness plot, green & fountainous & unviolated by man” (an image that perhaps helped to hold the winter at bay), Coleridge goes back to transcribing Bartram on alligators; followed by Bartram on the flowering Gordonia Lasianthus; followed by Bartram on the snake-bird . . .
In his magisterial study The Road to Xanadu (1927), John Livingston Lowes suggests that these New World alligators are the Ur-versions of the archaic sea monsters that would wriggle and slither over the waters of “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts,” as it would be titled when, just after the famous “Preface,” it opens Lyrical Ballads (printed by Biggs and Cottle for T. N. Longman, Paternoster-Row, London) in 1798. Certainly Bartram’s and Coleridge’s water beasts share, as Lowes points out, both aspects and adjectives.
At the end of his cadenza (“Chaos”) on the riches of the Gutch (the notebook eventually passed into the hands of Coleridge’s schoolmate, John Matthew Gutch, from whom it was purchased by the British Museum in 1868: hence the name), Lowes mentions half a dozen Coleridge poems with germs lying among the fragments he has exegeted: “Christobel,” “The Wanderings of Cain,” “The Nightingale,” “Kubla Khan,” “Lewti,” “Love,” “Fears in Solitude,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (the revised title that would eventually head the poem, along with the addition of the marginal rubrics), and even Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”
But one poem, whose germ is clearly here and, to a modern ear, most obviously so, is absent from Lowes’s list. Lowes knew everything Coleridge wrote, phrase by phrase, and mentions the poem near half a dozen times in the course of his monumental exploration of the range of Coleridge’s reading. But nowhere along the road to Xanadu does he explicitly connect it to the first lines he quotes from the Gutch. Was the connection too obvious? Or too banal? I mean, of course, Coleridge’s meditation—written as little Hartley slept in his cradle, while the fire in the grate burned low that winter—“Frost at Midnight.”
The frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. . . .
the poem begins. In the second of its four verse paragraphs, Coleridge’s thought retreats from the dark night by the barely glimmering fire and his sleeping child’s cradle to his own school days. There he recalls the bells on a hot Fair Day that rang from morn till evening
So sweetly that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure falling on my ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come.
In the next verse paragraph Coleridge is back at the cradle, apostrophizing the sleeping Hartley. And in the last, his thoughts go out to all the year’s seasons, hot and cold. But surely in the lines cited, we have a strangely reduced version of what the prophetic soul of the wide world had been dreaming on, now
articulated in the bells.
What prompts me to all this speculation? Doubtless it is only because I am a science fiction writer. And in 1939, a dozen years after Lowes first published his wondrously thorough book, noting the Gutch line in Lowes, H. G. Wells was prompted to entitle his first and only film script—and certainly one of the finest science fiction films ever made—Things to Come.
3. The initial question in discussing the cascade of inventive and almost always beautiful sentences making up the corpus of Ron Silliman’s poems and prose poems is whether or not a discussion of work that so rigorously eschews argument is betrayed by an argumentatively coherent exposition.
Silliman’s poems side-step argument; but they do not—at least the early pieces that make up the major series, The Alphabet (ABC, its first volume, appeared in ’83)—avoid situation. “Albany” really is about impressions of the Bay Area as contemplated from that West Coast suburb of Berkeley. And “Blue,” announced by its feminization of the famous line by Valéry (“The Marchioness went out. . .”), meditates on literary effects.
In the later poems, however, each sentence becomes its own situation. A fine sense of this is perhaps the best thing to bring to a reading of Silliman’s texts.
While for most of us so much of the impulse to write grows from a desire to capture something of the subject, to stabilize passages of lived experience in the headlong career toward death, what strikes me most about Silliman and, by extension, those poets who work in the abstract, is that these poets’ almost complete abandonment of the subject as narrative topic seems so staggeringly brave!
4. The only thing untoward about my April visit to Swarthmore was that, during my afternoon reading, while I was sitting in the red wing chair in the richly paneled room of a Sunday noon, with the students in shorts and t-shirts, cross-legged on the rug, and the sportily dressed faculty in chairs behind them (while dragons careered Nevèrÿon’s night), a fly lacrosse ball smashed an oval hole through a hand-sized pane beside me, strewing glass bits on the blue carpet—to worry about a third of the youngsters, who’d come barefoot.
5. A thought on the day after my 49th birthday: We move through life’s second half with scrumbling joint and grinding gristle.
6. The high modernist prejudice against biography is, of course, an acknowledgement of the fact that, since most biographies are not good ones, to have no biography is better than having a bad one. But what would the ideal biography be? To me, Richard Aldington’s biography of Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius, But . . . is a more interesting book than any of Lawrence’s novels. (This marks me as a certain type of vulgarian, I realize. Still, what interests is what interests.) Sections of life are, I suspect, governed by tone. A good biography should catch that. (But those sections are not exhausted by tone; and Aldington manages to relate dissonant details to the broader tone—one reason his book works so well.) I wonder, however, if you had a subject who actually thought, rather than a subject such as Lawrence who simply acted forcefully on feelings (or prejudices—and when that action involved writing, mistook them for thinking), how the intellectual development of a man or woman ought to be attended to. The one thing I’m sure of is that the development of ideas does not proceed in the lucid order in which it is presented in, say, most biographies of Freud, be it Jones’s, Gay’s, Rozzen’s, or even Manonni’s.
Could anyone actually like both Lawrence and Nabokov? To me that seems an exercise in negative capability beyond human accomplishment—or, at any rate, beyond mine.
7. I never thought of myself when young as someone who, someday, would have “quite a collection of old moustache-wax brushes.” But I do . . . simply because I now have quite a moustache!
8. Thoughts on Joanna Russ’s achingly fine sf novel, We Who Are About to . . .:
In Tom Godwin’s science fiction short story, “The Cold Equations,” during the early days of space flight an eighteen-year-old girl stows away on a moon-bound spaceship. Because the fuel is portioned out in exact accord with the payload, her extra weight has not been taken into account. If she stays on board, the ship will not be able to make the return trip to earth, and all of the five-man crew will perish. Thus, there is no option but to jettison her to her death—which, tearfully, she acquiesces to.* The equations which govern Russ’s We Who Are About to. . .. are just as cold; but they are more complex.
At the height of the New Wave, an sf convention that particularly exercised editor Moorcock at New Worlds was what Kurt Vonnegut had already characterized as “the impossibly generous universe” of sf: When, in the real world, 95 percent of all commercial jet crashes are 100 percent fatal and we live in a solar system in which presumably only one planet can support any life at all, science fiction is nevertheless full of spaceship crashes (!) in which everyone gets up and walks away from the wreckage unscathed—and usually out onto a planet with breathable atmosphere, amenable weather, and a high-tech civilization in wait near-by to provide interesting twists in subsequent adventures.
This is the convention that Russ’s novel takes to task. She does it, however, by making it seem, in the first few entries of her tale, that this is precisely the convention she is bowing to. But at the start only a few phrases of a tell-tale harshness suggest how cold her equations are:
About to die. And so on . . . The light of our dying may not reach you for a thousand million years . . . We’re a handful of persons in a metal bungalow: five women, three men, bedding, chemical toilet, simple tools, an even simpler pocket laboratory, freeze-dried food for six months, and a water distiller with its own sealed powerpack, good for six months (and cast as a unit, unusable for anything else).
Good-bye everybody.
At dawn I held hands with the other passengers, we all huddled together under that brilliant flash, although I hate them.
O God, I miss my music.
For the flash of the exploding spaceship above them is the light of their dying—though the working out of the tortuous and protracted deaths lingers on another few months, in terms of the single natural death, five murders, and two suicides which comprise the actual plot.
With its cast of a child and seven socially functional adults—all but the narrator, in effect, in thrall to just that notion of an impossibly generous universe—We Who Are About to . . . functions as the bad conscience of Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
The revelation of the temperature at which these equations work is what sets Russ’s gelid vision: L.B. has only to be annoyed enough at the screech of the baby sparrows to kill them. The polite and well-bred Alan-Bobby has only to wake up to the fact that he is stronger than anyone else for civilization to slide back three thousand years.
Radically, Russ suggests that the quality of life is the purpose of living, and reproduction only a reparative process to extend that quality—and not the point of life at all. (Only feudal societies can really believe wholly that reproduction—i.e., the manufacture of cannon fodder—is life’s real point.)
The narrator herself—certainly the most “civilized” person among the passengers—both recalls and re-voices Walter Benjamin’s famous observation: “Every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism.”
We Who Are About to . . . is a dangerous book because it is readable as allegory, though not an allegory about death: rather, death in this novel is the allegorical stand-in for whatever degree of social-political un-freedom the reader’s society has reached. For a long time the book will remain a damningly fine analysis of the mechanics of political and social decay we have undergone to arrive at “this point,” however “this point” changes.
Can I think of half a dozen works written in this century of the same length that are as brilliantly structured? Camus’s La Chute, Davenport’s The Dawn in Erewhon . . . .
But these are Russ’s esthetic peers.
9. “What shall I do with this body I’ve been given?” asks Mandelstam. When, one wonders, was the last time he asked it? In his cramped Petersberg apartment? or in the death camp
where, near mad, the elements and ideology killed him . . .?
10. At 1:45, just before we were ready to go down to Port Authority to catch the 2:45 bus up to Amherst, Dennis stood at our New York kitchen window, looking out at the snow dropping toward Amsterdam Avenue, five stories below. “To think, I used to sleep outside in that shit.”
Me: “That must have been fun.”
Dennis: “Yeah, it was so much fun, I’m gonna get a snow-making machine for my room.”
How much context is needed to make sense of such ironies?
11. A poetic bestiary: Rilke’s swan and panther, Moore’s buffalo, moose, snail, fish, and jellyfish; Bishop’s fish, rooster, and moose; and Davenport’s medusa. To read them all one after another is to reinvest with energy and incision the range of sensual relations between the animal and the natural.
12. “Public life on television is more real than private life in the flesh,” explains a character from the sound track of Cronenberg’s unsettlingly astute Videodrome, shortly before he undergoes a negative industrial birth in which his belly swallows a gun. But the fact is, public life—the life known, understood, and finally constituted by society—has always felt more satisfying than private life. That’s what lies behind the conflict thrashing at the center of Romanticism to render private life public.
13. The decade of the eighteen-sixties gave us three extraordinary novels. All of them could be described as turning on a single theme—the republican revolutions that had wracked the century so far in France, Germany, and Italy:
Hugo’s Les Misérables.
Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale.
Verne’s 20,000 lieues sous la mer.
All read in the same month—what a dialogue they construct with one another!
14. I am the sweeping tapestry of my sensory and bodily perceptions. I am their linguistic reduction and abstraction, delayed and deferred till they form a wholly different order, called my thought. I am, at the behest and prompting of all these, my memory—which forms still another order. I am the emotions that hold them together. Webbing the four, and finally, I am the flux and filigree of desire around them all.
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