The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

  Afraid of assertion. Always trying to get out of “totalizing” language, i.e., language that rides roughshod over specificity; realizing this is another form of paranoia. Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that “it is language which is assertive, not he.” It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language’s assertive nature by “add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.”

  My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.

  At times I grow tired of this approach, and all its gendered baggage. Over the years I’ve had to train myself to wipe the sorry off almost every work e-mail I write; otherwise, each might begin, Sorry for the delay, Sorry for the confusion, Sorry for whatever. One only has to read interviews with outstanding women to hear them apologizing. But I don’t intend to denigrate the power of apology: I keep in my sorry when I really mean it. And certainly there are many speakers whom I’d like to see do more trembling, more unknowing, more apologizing.

  While beholding Steiner’s Puppies and Babies, I couldn’t help but think of Nan Goldin’s 1986 “visual diary,” The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—another series of photographs that bears witness to the friends, lovers, and exes that make up the photographer’s tribe. As the titles of the two works suggest, however, their moods differ sharply. One of the most Goldinesque photos in Puppies and Babies is an interior shot, just out of focus, of dancer Layla Childs (Steiner’s ex), half-dressed and staring blankly at the camera, bathed in a dim red light. But instead of sporting a tear-stained face or bruises from a recent battering, à la Ballad, Childs is pumping milk from her breasts via a “hands free” pumping bra and double electric pump.

  Pumping milk is, for many women, a sharply private activity. It can also be physically and emotionally challenging, as it reminds the nursing mother of her animal status: just another mammal, milk being siphoned from its glands. Beyond photographs in breast pump manuals (and lactation porn), however, images of milk expression are really nowhere to be found. Phrases such as colostrum, letdown, and hindmilk arrive in one’s life like hieroglyphs from the land of the lost. So the presence of Steiner’s camera here—and the steadfast stare of her subject—feels jarring and exciting. This is especially so when you consider how photographers such as Goldin (or Ryan McGinley, or Richard Billingham, or Larry Clark, or Peter Hujar, or Zoe Strauss) often make us feel as though we have glimpsed something radically intimate by evoking danger, suffering, illness, nihilism, or abjection. In Steiner’s intimate portrait of Childs, the proposed transmission of fluids is about nourishment. I almost can’t imagine.

  And yet—while pumping milk may be about nourishment, it isn’t really about communion. A human mother expresses milk because sometimes she can’t be there to nurse her baby, either by choice or by necessity. Pumping is thus an admission of distance, of maternal finitude. But it is a separation, a finitude, suffused with best intentions. Milk or no milk, this is often the best we’ve got to give.

  Once I suggested that I had written half a book drunk, the other half sober. Here I estimate that about nine-tenths of the words in this book were written “free,” the other one-tenth, hooked up to a hospital-grade breast pump: words piled into one machine, milk siphoned out by another.

  The phrase “toxic maternal” refers to a mother whose milk delivers poison along with nourishment. If you turn away from the poison, you also turn away from the nourishment. Given that human breast milk now contains literal poisons, from paint thinners to dry-cleaning fluid to toilet deodorizers to rocket fuel to DDT to flame retardants, there is literally no escape. Toxicity is now a question of degree, of acceptable parts per unit. Infants don’t get to choose—they take what they can get, in their scramble to stay alive.

  I had never thought much about this dilemma until after I had been working for many years in a bar that was regularly voted “a smoker’s paradise” in a New York City guidebook. I had quit smoking a few months before taking the job, primarily because cigarettes made me feel so completely awful, and now I was spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on an acupuncturist to help me with swollen glands and difficulty breathing as a result of inhaling smoke that wasn’t even mine. (I ended up quitting the job about a month before Mayor Bloomberg’s ban took effect; in my final hours, I secretly allowed myself to be interviewed by the antismoking crusaders, to advance their cause.) Anyone to whom I complained at the time said—wisely!—Why don’t you just get a different job? There are hundreds upon hundreds of restaurants and bars in New York City. My therapist—I had taken on yet another choking shift in order to keep seeing her—suggested I help rich kids study for the SAT instead, which made me want to sock her. How could I explain? I had already had a hundred restaurant jobs in New York City, and finally I had found one at which I made more in a week than I would have in an entire semester as an adjunct instructor (the other discernible option). I also thought—a larval Karen Silkwood—if “they”—whoever they are—let me work here, it couldn’t be that bad, could it?

  But it was that bad. The bills I stashed under my mattress were almost wet with smoke, and stayed that way until rent time. And it’s only now that I see that the job ensured me something else I needed: the constant company of alcoholics apparently worse off than I was. I can still see them all: the silent owner who had to be carried into the back of a taxi at dawn after he’d blacked out from Rolling Rocks and shots of Stoli that we’d served him, raking in his Wall Street–derived tips; the punk Swedes who drank shot after shot of jalapeno-pickled vodka dissolved in iced coffee (the Swedeball, we called it); the rotted teeth of a successful foley editor; the man who inexplicably took off his belt after a few Hurricanes and started whipping a fellow diner with it; the woman who left her baby in a car seat under the bar one night and forgot about it … their example, and the ease with which I deemed myself together by comparison, purchased me a few more years of believing alcohol more precious than toxic to me.

  The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic…. [Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.

  I learned this scorn from my own mother; perhaps it laced my milk. I therefore have to be on the alert for a tendency to treat other people’s needs as repulsive. Corollary habit: deriving the bulk of my self-worth from a feeling of hypercompetence, an irrational but fervent belief in my near total self-reliance.

  You’re a great student because you don’t have any baggage, a teacher once told me, at which moment the subterfuge of my life felt complete.

  One of the gifts of recognizing oneself in thrall to a substance is the perforation of such subterfuge. In place of an exhausting autonomy, there is the blunt admittance of dependence, and its subsequent relief. I will always aspire to contain my shit as best I can, but I am no longer interested in hiding my dependencies in an effort to appear superior to those who are more visibly undone or aching. Most people decide at some point that it is better … to be enthralled with what is impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so to lose the condition of one’s being and becoming. I’m glad not to be there right now, but I’m also glad to have been there, to know how it is.

  Sedgwick was a famous pluralizer, an instinctive maximalist who named and celebrated her predilection for profusion as “fat art.” I celebrate this fat art, even if in practice I am more of a serial minimalist—an employee, however productive, of the condensery. Rather than a philosopher or a pluralizer, I may be more of an empiricist, insofar as my aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).

  I have never really t
hought of myself as a “creative person”—writing is my only talent, and writing has always felt more clarifying than creative to me. But in contemplating this definition, I wonder if one might be creative (or queer, or happy, or held) in spite of oneself.

  That’s enough. You can stop now: the phrase Sedgwick said she longed to hear whenever she was suffering. (Enough hurting, enough showing off, enough achieving, enough talking, enough trying, enough writing, enough living.)

  The capaciousness of growing a baby. The way a baby literally makes space where there wasn’t space before. The cartilage nub where my ribs used to fit together at the sternum. The little slide in my lower rib cage when I twist right or left that didn’t used to slide. The rearrangement of internal organs, the upward squeezing of the lungs. The dirt that collects on your belly button when it finally pops inside out, revealing its bottom—finite, after all. The husky feeling in my postpartum perineum, the way my breasts filling all at once with milk is like an orgasm but more painful, powerful as a hard rain. While one nipple is getting sucked, the other sometimes sprays forth, unstoppable.

  When I was writing on the poet James Schuyler in graduate school, my adviser noted in passing that I seemed oddly compelled by the idea of Schuyler’s flaccidity. His comments on this account made me feel guilty, as if he thought I were trying to neuter or castrate Schuyler, a closet Solanas. I wasn’t, at least not consciously. I just liked the way that Schuyler seemed to be performing, especially in his long poems, a drive to speech or creation not synonymous with desire in any typical sublimated-lust kind of a way. He had a cruising eye, to be sure (here he is in a grocery store: “I grabbed / a cart, went wheeling / up and down the aisles trying to get a front view of / him and see how he was / Hung and what his face was like”). But his poetics struck me as refreshingly without a will to power, or even a will to perversity. They feel triumphantly wilted, like so many of the flowers Schuyler paid tribute to.

  This wiltedness may have had, in part, a chemical root. As Schuyler writes in “The Morning of the Poem”: “Remember what / The doctor said: I am: remembering and staying / off [the sauce]: mostly it’s not / So hard (indeed): did you know a side effect of / Antabuse can be to make / You impotent? Not that I need much help in that / department these days.” The climactic expulsion at the poem’s end is not come, but urine. Recalling a night long ago, drunk on Pernod in Paris, Schuyler writes: “I made it: there I was, confronting a urinal: I / inched down my zipper and put my right hand into / The opening: hideous trauma, there was just no way I could / transfer my swollen tool from hand to hand without a great / Gushing forth (inside my pants), like when Moses hit the rock: so / I did it: there was piss all over Paris, not to mention my shirt and pants, light sun tans.”

  “The Morning of the Poem” takes place, as do many of Schuyler’s poems, against the backdrop of his mother’s home in East Aurora, New York. As he moves in and out of memory and anecdote, his mother shuffles around the house, plays the radio all night, leaves out the dishes just so, watches her TV programs, jokes about the size of a skunk in the trash, and bickers with Schuyler about his desire to leave the windows open to the rain (“‘I’m the one who will have to clean it up,’” she snarls, the maternal refrain). Schuyler’s other great epic poem, “A Few Days,” finishes his mother’s story, ending with the lines: “Margaret Daisy Connor Schuyler Ridenour, / rest well, / the weary journey done.”

  It feels important to pause and pay homage to the fact that many of the many gendered-mothers of my heart—Schuyler, Ginsberg, Clifton, Sedgwick—are or were or have been corpulent beings. (“Whom do I mean when I say ‘there’s nothing wrong with us’?,” asks poet Fred Moten. “The fat ones. The ones who are out of all compass however precisely they are located … My cousins. All my friends.”) Or, as poet CAConrad writes: “Coming from white trash has advantages people with money don’t seem to understand. For years, I’ve watched friends whose parents are doctors and bankers live in FEAR (even while rebelling) that they don’t achieve enough, aren’t good enough, clean enough, and especially NOT thin enough…. Now, if you don’t mind I have a date with a delicious smartass with a trick jaw who’s on his way over to my place with freshly made chocolate pudding and a can of whipped cream!”

  And yet, at the same time, it feels disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that on a literal level, having a small body, a slender body, has long been related to my sense of self, even my sense of freedom.

  This comes as no real surprise—my mother and her entire family line are obsessed with skinniness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness. My mother’s skinny body, and her lifelong obsession with having zero fat, almost makes me disbelieve that she ever housed my sister or me inside of her. (I gained fifty-four pounds to grow an Iggy—a number that appalled my mother, and gave me the pleasure of a late-breaking disobedience.) One time my mother saw her shadow on a wall at a restaurant, and before she recognized it as hers, she said it looked like a skeleton. Look how fat everyone is, my mother says, her mouth agape, whenever we visit her ancestral Michigan. Her skinniness is proof that she moved up, got out.

  A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother. I am a writer; I must play with the body of my mother. Schuyler does it; Barthes does it; Conrad does it; Ginsberg does it. Why is it so hard for me to do it? For while I’ve come to know my own body as a mother, and while I can imagine the bodies of a multitude of strangers as my mother (basic Buddhist meditation), I still have a hard time imagining my mother’s body as my mother.

  I can easily conjure my father’s body, though he has been dead thirty years. I can see him in the shower—tan, red, steaming, singing. I can conjure the slight oiliness of the curls on the back of his head, curls now present on Iggy. I can remember how certain clothes looked on him: a gray cable-knit sweater, his old Levi’s, his daily suit. He was a density of heat and energy and joy and sexuality and song. I recognized him.

  I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it. I’ve long known the drill: Boobs, too small. Butt, too big. Face, bird-like. Upper arms, old. But it’s not just age—she even disparages the way she looks in baby pictures.

  I don’t know why she has never seen herself as beautiful. I think I’ve been waiting all these years for her to do so, as if that kind of self-love would somehow offer her body to me. But now I realize—she already gave it to me.

  At times I imagine her in death, and I know that her body, in all its details, will flood me. I do not know how I will survive it.

  I have always hated Hamlet—the character—for his misogynistic moping around after his mother’s remarriage. And yet I know I carry a kernel of Hamlet within me. In fact, I have proof: a childhood diary, in which I swore to one day exact revenge on my mother and stepfather for their affair, which broke up my parents’ marriage. (My father’s untimely death unfortunately occurred shortly thereafter.) I swore in my diary that my sister and I would stand forever with the ghost of our dead father, who now looked down upon us, betrayed and heartbroken, from heaven.

  Also like Hamlet, I was angrier at my mother than at my stepfather, who was essentially a stranger. He had been the young housepainter in white pants who would sometimes stay late into the evening when my father was out of town on a business trip. On such nights, my sister and I would put on skits or dances for him and my mother: jesters for the queen and ersatz king. Not long after, he and my mother were walking down the aisle. When the reverend asked us to bend our heads in prayer, I kept my chin up, a sentinel.

  For the duration of her marriage to my stepfather, my mother’s maternal body seemed to me supplanted by her desiring body. For I knew that my stepfather wasn’t just the object of her desire. I knew she believed him to be her desire, incarnate. Such thinking set her up for a bitter fall when he left her, twenty-odd years later, confessing all kinds of infidelities on his way out the door.

  I hated him for crush
ing her. I hated her for being crushed.

  When I was a teenager, my mother tried to explain her reasons for leaving my father in more adult terms. But even at thirteen I didn’t know what to do with the notion that she needed to leave him “to have a chance at joy.” My father seemed to me the vessel of all earthly joy; his death had but deepened this impression.

  Why wasn’t he good enough? He told me that I could work outside the home if I wanted to, so long as his shirts still got ironed and were ready for work the next day, my mother told me. The feminist in me was unmoved. Couldn’t you have told him you didn’t want to iron his shirts, and taken it from there?

  When my stepfather finally left, my sister and I felt as much relief as grief. The intruder had finally been expelled. The sodomitical mother would melt away, and the maternal body would be ours, at last.

  No wonder, then, that our mother’s announcement that she was getting married again caught us off guard, just a few years later. As she and her husband-to-be told us the news at a dinner party orchestrated, to our surprise, for just that purpose, I watched my sister turn a furious red, then lunge around for a vine that could hold her. Well, if the wedding is in June, I’m not going, she sputtered. It’s way too hot in June for anyone to get married. If it’s in June I’m not going. She was ruining the moment, and I loved her for it.