Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

Write a criticism of a mark you’ve made today. Write a note of praise for a mark you’ve made today.

  Which dead people do you feel are present—or should be present—on East Ninth Street with us now?

  Moisten the page—do you have a water bottle you can dribble on the pad?—and then drag a watercolor pencil through the puddle.

  Write or draw something impermissible with a watercolor pencil. Efface the marks with water. Retrace the effaced marks, or write something new on top of the smudge.

  Cross Avenue A and enter Tompkins Square Park. Find a partner. Sit together on a bench and take turns being the speaker. While the first speaker engages in a monologue (about any subject whatsoever), the partner should make marks of response, transcription, or counterpoint. Then, trade roles: the formerly silent partner engages in a monologue, while the formerly vocal partner silently transcribes or makes marks in oblique response.

  Write a three-minute novel about what took place on this cubit of earth, one hundred years ago.

  Make a mark on someone else’s pad.

  Hunt for omens that will catalyze or predict the directions your creative endeavors will take in the coming year. We turn an espied detail into an omen by overinvesting in it, overinterpreting it. Surplus cathexis ennobles the detail and makes it an omen. That’s why we’re walking tonight: to ennoble. Are there omens in the flower bed?

  We gather now at a fence in the park. Using a bit of available glue, we affix one or more of our pages to a significant position on this fence, a position that has meaning for you, however slight and phantasmal. This arrangement of pages constitutes our pop-up exhibition in honor of Frank O’Hara’s “Second Avenue,” a dense litany that ends “‘You’ve reached the enormous summit of passion / which is immobility forging an entrail from the pure obstruction of the air.’” You may never reach that summit; enjoy, meanwhile, the obstructions, pure or impure.

  (2015)

  “MY” MASCULINITY REMIX

  1.

  In 1994, I wrote a short essay called “‘My’ Masculinity.” Twenty-two years later, I revoke my earlier version and start the composition all over again. (Consider the two essays mismatched nipples.) Did anyone own masculinity in 1994? Aren’t we finished with possessiveness—its sodden betrayals, its puerilities, its cuts?

  2.

  I only half-mean what I say; identity remains in the half-meaning, the ruse I fall into when I begin this odd dance called thinking. I don’t have an identity, only

  a vast fatigue—

  did I once call it

  a vast summational

  fatigue (but what

  am I summoning

  when I say “summational”)?

  3.

  Summing up is the enemy of staggered discovery, and yet I feel nostalgia for thinkers, like Siegfried Kracauer, who confidently strike final poses: “Like emigrants gathering up their personal belongings, bourgeois literature gathers the effects of a household that will soon have to vacate its current site.” Vacated up the wazoo, I seek new justifications for piecemeal introspection—methods for germinating a thought and then splitting the thought in half, as if the idea-morsel were to greet or devour itself. Vulnerability to self-division is a sufficiently stable platform for speech.

  4.

  A house on a

  horizon line has no

  interest in adjudicating

  debates. But we

  are not a house,

  we are a petty

  adjudicator.

  5.

  “can I do this spiritual drag, collective agony wishful thinking,” wrote kari edwards. I, too, wonder if I can do this drag of speaking or thinking collectively, drag of not being singular, drag of shedding the rags of self. Adrienne Rich once excoriated these rags as “personal weather.” She opposed personal weather to “the great dark birds of history.” Syllables shamed by birds of history can intoxicate the ear. Remix, please, a consciousness, nominally mine, governed by its enthrallments, and hell-bent on squeezing cadence out of thrall.

  6.

  Few poets today can rival the unstoppered perversity and brilliant heedlessness of Ronaldo V. Wilson. Seeking shelter from the brutal weather of the normative, I turn to his book Farther Traveler (2015) for the comfort that only extreme language about extreme situations can give. From his poem “Multiply”: “Banged by 29 men, and you wanted some of them, / the red-ape, monstrous heaving, then sleep, / to wake, to be that cum bucket, filled.” I repeat, as an under-the-breath mantra, the words “cum bucket.” How can I express strongly enough to you the quietude that arrives by repeating “cum bucket” and delving into its sonic riches, the “u” and the “u,” twinned vowels, an effect I was taught to call assonance?

  7.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley’s masochistic stances are a sweetly Christological template for cum-bucket consciousness—as when he writes (in the 1819 Prometheus Unbound, that proof-text of thralldom’s occasional potential to become exalted flight), “Insufferable might! / God! spare me! I sustain not the quick flames, / The penetrating presence . . .” Maybe Percy is impersonating a water goddess. An imploration arises from one person’s voice, but then the words acquire naughty, independent life, apart from their originator. I sustain not the quick flames is a phrase that fits any circumstance, any occasion in which you wish to assert ambivalence. I sustain not—nearly oxymoronic—asserts the possibility of sustaining antitheses, of preserving antiphonal cacophonies.

  8.

  Saw Nicola Tyson monoprint portraits today in New York at Petzel Gallery uptown. She painted them more than a decade ago. A decade ago I didn’t know what a monoprint was. How could I claim to know what genders were, if I didn’t understand monoprints? Tyson’s procedure: paint a glass plate, and then press a piece of paper onto the wet original, which feeds its colorful essence to the recipient. The result is smashed identity. Try to figure out who someone is, from a Tyson monoprint, and you’ll discover a lump instead of an identity. When I say “I,” when I say “my,” I am behaving like a fruitfully messy lump. A monoprinter passes identity through baptismal mediation. Dunk a self into the acrylic fount, and then drag out the remnants, unrecognizable, from the gunky morass.

  9.

  In some of Tyson’s large graphite and ink drawings (of tall skinny women?), I perhaps delusionally note the motif—near the pubic area—of a bone or codpiece, a tiny curiosity protruding or hanging down. Its nonbinary oddity amuses and educates. I might be imagining this flash-drive bone chip, a glad specter near the groin. Graphite and ink, in Tyson’s expert hands, aren’t just servants of her subject; these materials become agents of change—of rippling, unsettling motion.

  10.

  I like to exaggerate the elements of feverishness that exist within motionless artworks. Adam McEwen’s spartan graphite sculptures (of, say, mainframe computers) contain a secretly febrile enchantment, as if ideas rippled, bubbled, and wept inside the graphite mass. This strategy I advise you to learn: figure out how to find the latently febrile tendencies lurking within reticent quiescences. A toilet bowl plunger qualifies as a quiescence.

  11.

  Anne Collier’s photo series Women Crying (2016), at Anton Kern Gallery, set me thinking about crying. Women Crying. W. C. Water closet? In Collier’s provocative acts of conceptual, emotional, and optical destabilization, copying intrudes. We welcome intrusions. Intrusions complicate our otherwise claustral existence. To wit: in one photograph, a pair of hands (a woman’s?) holds a movie soundtrack album, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Its cover is a close-up image of Ingrid Bergman’s tearful face. Another Collier C-print depicts a record cover with a more extreme close-up of Bergman; this LP, however, is an album called Men, by the “noise/grind/metal/what-the-fuck” band Burmese. Were Burmese’s members Burmese? Questions—needling, digressive—are not a tic; they are a tactic.

  12.

  Boys Don’t Cry (1999) is a movie about the murder of trans man Brandon Teena. I don’t cry. My boycott against crying is comp
licated. “My” masculinity can be found somewhere between Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Collier’s Women Crying. (The metaphoric chain connecting these two photographic series includes tear gas.) In rigorous and in fanciful aesthetic procedures begins the replenishment—through critique, through reenactment, through ritual, through kicky if sober-seeming détournements—of depleted resources.

  13.

  If a secret agent wanted to find the historical residues of rigorously fey critique, this private eye might investigate the paintings of Hernan Bas (in a 2016 exhibition called Bright Young Things at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York); these paintings could teach the ferreting spy that “my” masculinity got lost—or materialized—or struck bottom—in the fin de siècle. Acrylic, the medium Bas reclaimed for these works, came of age in the 1950s. Bas’s acrylic marks look like oil (and indeed he sometimes incorporates colored pencil, chalk, and oil pastel); his colors are more cheerful, more superficial, than exclusive use of oil would allow. Secret superficiality camouflaged as oily depth permits the merriment of identity’s dissolution to surface, like bubbles above a sludge ellipse. See shredded pieces of “mine” and “my” disappear down the flushed toilet.

  14.

  Went this morning to the Bowery’s New Museum to absorb Cheryl Donegan’s alert interpretation of how gender gets confused when it collides with middlebrow design. I stole the phrase “middlebrow design” from the exhibit’s succinct wall-text. Middlebrow design is where masculinity (mine, yours, ours, hers, theirs) forgets what to do with itself and considers this memory lapse or misrecognition (Am I masculine? Was I masculine? Will I be masculine tomorrow?) to be a new form of tepid exaltation—the tepidity itself the source of the excitement. Femininity, too, gets screwy, mine and his and yours, when it hits middlebrow design’s sober practicalities. I don’t know what middlebrow design is, but I wear it, create it, cruise it; it creams all over me. Three gas-mask fashion helmets (re-creations of chic headgear that appeared in Donegan’s The Janice Tapes [2000]) are not for sale, but I wanted to buy them in the exhibit’s smart and seductive Concept Store installation. Hanging out at the shop’s computer-monitor screen, I clicked on a pill-shaped ellipse because it said click me, even though nothing happened when I clicked. Nonetheless, I kept doing it, and enjoyed the experience of the repeated, futile click.

  15.

  Confronting two of Donegan’s videos, Channeling in 5 Versions (2001) and File (2003), projected simultaneously one above the other, I stood mesmerized by the card-shuffled bricolage of middlebrow fabrics, maybe low- and highbrow ones, too. (Who can tell them apart?) The quick-splice rhythm prepared me, on my walk home afterward, to ford the city’s phantasmagorical battalion of rectangles and curves and in-betweens, squares and lines and triangles and parallelograms and unclassifiable other shapes—none of the tesserae precious because someone authorized them to be precious, but precious because an eye (Donegan’s, and now, mine) had found a way to thrive within the nonce category of fabric that has no longer any purpose, fabric that now signifies dizziness itself. Fabrics become paintings; three-dimensional scenes get compressed and reborn through virtual technologies, and we learn to live and love inside these compressed spaces—learn to treat compression as elixir, just as lyric poetry, not to mention sublimation, long ago taught certain souls to do. In the last twenty years, I’ve learned that becoming dizzy, and learning how to become educated by dizziness, are worthwhile callings.

  16.

  And then, this evening, wanting to change my mind about most claims I’ve made, I wrote:

  try to say

  something lucid

  and small about

  the papery

  quality of daffodils—

  If that clause isn’t lucid enough, or doesn’t sharply retract the regime of false certitude, please substitute, for the word daffodils, another noun, any noun that will help you get through the night.

  (2016)

  THE PORN PUNCTUM

  In a porn photo, the punctum is the detail that does not arouse. It neutralizes desire, and by that act of clemency, of numbing surcease, surreptitiously reinstates and intensifies passion. As devotees of porn, we request the real, not the fictive; we want to verify the depicted scene. The narcotic bath in which we steep, while savoring a porn photo, consists of nonsexual details that are concupiscence’s underpainting, the unsuspected colors (ultramarine, burnt umber, alizarin crimson) that secretly give the figure its conspicuous liveliness.

  A paradox: the porn punctum catalyzes and reprieves desire. Reprieve takes the form of anesthesia. Eroticism needs the punctum that undermines physical self-surety and thereby keeps sex the variegated, error-strewn landscape that we restlessly crave.

  A shower curtain with blue and black polka dots. A plastic hanger. A yellow ochre terry-cloth bath towel. A wooden chair. The dick not very big. A black rectangular butt-plug and a rolled-up pair of blue Levi’s. A bright orange teddy bear, next to a cactus in a plastic brown planter. An unduly thick penis. A square face with black horn-rims. Behind an endowed man, a wastepaper basket. A CD rack. A bottle of Sprite. A shaved pubis. A floral-patterned throw pillow. Auto-fellatio on an orange suede rug. Pinned to the wall, a photograph of marine coral. A washing machine. Dirt flecks (or moles?) on a model’s legs. A necklace-suspended silver cross, lodged between a large man’s breasts. Puckers of a ruched curtain. A leafy circlet around a lampshade.

  The porn punctum distracts me from desiring the nude body. I can’t get turned on if I’m focusing on the polka-dotted shower curtain. False. I’m more aroused by the shower curtain than by the fornicating guys. I desire the counterpoint between eroticism and decor. The clash of discourses—cock, shower curtain—creates a psychological and somatic friction, a dissonance that offers density, strangeness, and sorrow. Melancholy may be sexuality’s unwanted supplement, or its beseeched-for authorization stamp.

  The porn punctum provides a glaze of reality, like a cleaning fluid sprayed on wooden furniture to assist the polisher and make sure the surfaces shine. In my youth, a popular product was Lemon Pledge. What did it pledge? Lemon Pledge arouses me more keenly than the sexual scenes it varnishes.

  The liminal balustrade I lean on, when gazing at an arousing photograph, is the porn punctum: the inert zone, the never-brutal carpet, the pacifist drapes. Drapes and carpet save me from tumbling into a libidinal abyss. I beg the punctum to keep me separate from an engulfing, chthonic eroticism.

  A buff-white shag carpet, its nubs not elegant. Gray-checked bedsheets, and a matching pillowcase. Behind his erect penis, a ficus plant. Feet resting on a rattan laundry hamper. Jockstrap with a pewter-gray band. Three white trucks parked in a dark lot. A spoon resting on a park bench. The yellow lid of a garbage can. In a shower stall, a naked man posed beside a sign: MASTURBATION IN THE SHOWERS IS A VIOLATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS HOUSING CODE. THE SHOWER DRAINS ARE NOT DESIGNED TO HANDLE SEMEN! THE EXCESSIVE AMOUNTS OF SEMEN IN THE DRAINS CAUSE THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS IN MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR. Five seagulls perched behind a sunbathing man on a sandy beach. A cock ring and an ironing board. Torn undershorts. An unfastened seat belt. A map of Washington, D.C. A naked man reading his cell phone’s screen. A wall-mounted wine rack containing only one bottle.

  (2017)

  THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR

  Daisy was a poet; Gavin, a translator; Wayne, a teacher.

  Gavin translated Daisy’s poems, poorly, into English.

  Wayne taught the inaccurate translations’ deeply creased interstices.

  Sometimes Gavin added meanings of his own.

  Wayne taught these supplemental innuendos.

  Daisy and Gavin were too young to remember the previous war.

  Wayne invited Daisy and Gavin to visit his seminar and discuss translation’s perils.

  Daisy had an accident in the seminar. She broke down crying. Gavin tried to comfort her. Wayne vowed never again to teach Daisy’s cloudy originals.

  Gavin and D
aisy began having an affair.

  Wayne changed his mind. He invited Daisy back to the seminar, despite her breakdown.

  The seminar took place in a dungeon. Troublemaker Daisy read her originals into a distorting, crackly amplification system, which made the words more desirable.

  Gavin made great money by translating Daisy, a star of underground cinema.

  Wayne made a decent living by teaching Gavin’s translations. Secretly Wayne wanted a direct erotic friendship with Daisy, but he settled for Gavin.

  Wayne and Gavin always met for beers before class, so they could talk about Daisy’s opacities.

  Daisy was the genius, Gavin the conversationalist.

  Gavin tried to translate breakdown. He grew exaggerated sideburns and wore tinted glasses. Daisy wore hippie skirts. Wayne taught the skirts and the translations, the originals and the sideburns.

  Despite his relative affluence, Gavin lived at the Y. Daisy lived at the Waldorf.

  Daisy thought her originals were flameproof, so she set fire to them in her ice bucket. A bellboy put out the flame. Daisy faxed the charred fragments to Gavin, who translated them. Wayne taught the remains. Daisy’s finger felt the wound.

  Wayne took Daisy out for a drink. Gavin came along, to translate. Only Gavin could master Daisy’s demanding multiplicity of dialects. The three friends ordered a plate of clattering mussels.

  “Teach my originals,” said Daisy, to Wayne, who shot Gavin a complicit look.

  “You’re a genius but I value my life,” Wayne told Daisy.