Blueberries

by Ellena Savage

  Acker:

  …I’m this: part of a culture that doesn’t want me… We’re rats walking on tightropes we never thought existed. No medical insurance; no steady job; etc. This isn’t me, Ken, or rather it is me (personal) and it isn’t: it’s social and political. All my friends are the same…Let me tell you about the America I live in. It’s a war-zone. No wonder I’m fascinated with…by?…your relationships…we have the relationships of too many rats in a cage.

  Wark replies: ‘There aren’t enough vampires in this town. I mean hey, you’ve seen it. Here even the *artists* come to dinner and talk about real estate!’

  Never mind that Acker, too, became free from work when her grandmother died, leaving her with close to a million dollars. Never mind that she had grown up in, and would always return to, the security of family money. Never mind that McKenzie Wark was able to professionalise her artistic work, because it was never far from being useful to an institution (the Australian government, universities). Never mind that most get to have neither.

  The way I understand art in the arc of a life is similar to how I think about gender. In order to make art, really make it, the artist has to sacrifice the niceties. In order to comprehend that gender is hegemonic, we have to forgo the protections of patriarchy. One cannot kill all men and marry them for the status too. Or perhaps ‘one’ as a general subject can, but this particular one cannot, not in good faith. There is no getting around that. And yet. You want to be an artist because you want a little something of everything, but the having everything all at once prevents you from stepping back, from seeing the composition in high relief. The cliché—the artist outsider looking in—has to be true.

  Acker was an outsider and she made a legend of herself. You could do that in San Francisco in the nineties, where there was ‘a sign over the door…that [read] “straights not wanted here”’. She writes, ‘I don’t like prison gates in any form: they make me want to bust out. And I do. I want it all, you know?’ I am guessing Acker wouldn’t live in SF anymore—too expensive, all those plaid-clad tech bros—she’d live in Austin, or maybe Detroit, or, who knows, Minneapolis? Berlin. Athens. Is London possible still?

  And Hemingway’s hunger, albeit one that sustains itself from the axis of power: ‘Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, “I don’t know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger…Memory is hunger.”’

  The niceties are culturally located. What is nice for me is not nice for you. Still, I like my luxury perfumes. Still, cheap produce makes me want to die. The hunger I have is bigger than any object. It is difficult to thoroughly imagine contentedness with some money or the love of a good man. Or with the soft drool of a dachshund. Or with even the reddest most mammalian orgasm. It is difficult to imagine being content for more than ten minutes with even the sharpest, creamiest parmesan crumbled over taut spaghetti, though this comes a little closer to it.

  I have to employ my imagination to stabilise this idea. Content. Enough. Satis. An abstract condition. In place of the real thing or its semblance, my mind immediately makes the connection: to Satis House, the house where Miss Havisham and her ice-queen-in-training, her weapon against mankind, Estella, live. The association of that house and the thwarted lives trapped inside it sort of sums it up. Oh, irony. Oh, my days.

  What would that feel like, satis? To put in a final day’s work and dust yourself off. No. Acker, again: ‘it’s all boring and I want to work in this world and I want to matter.’

  Friendship between Women

  After a while you won’t be able to turn on the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas just because it is streaming on demand and it is Friday evening and you are living alone because he who has bale-coloured hair and sensitive skin is interstate working for the man. You won’t be able to simply watch movies that too heavily idealise male loneliness or men’s charming loserdom because you will be familiar with the concept by now, not that it wasn’t once charming to you, you can still get around Five Easy Pieces starring Jack Nicholson, who was a star on the precipice, screaming for more of it, more of life, which some women found sexually attractive, not you, but you could relate to Jack Nicholson in the way that stars inspire false likeness by dramatising the fantasies ordinary people have of themselves, primarily the fantasy that one is proximate to the edge at all times. Susan Sontag said real celebrities don’t play other characters they play themselves and they are coated with a sheen like velvet, forgive the misquote, who doesn’t want to be coated in short tufted silk, warm somehow and dewy, like waking up when it’s dark out still, turning on the bedside table lamp whose light traces on all skin and body types flatteringly; outside bed the morning is prickly and you reach across and envelop the hot form of him there there there velvet and there it is Jack Nicholson screaming.

  Where are all the female Homer Simpsons a great woman once said. Look around baby you think to yourself look around there are female losers everywhere that’s the point the point is you are drowning in female losers. Who wants to be Homer Simpson anyway when you could be Patty Bouvier anyway when did feminism get so up itself the point is that women too are stars of auteur films but auteur films are now plain life like women floundering with a sheen of volatility and velvet which some may find sexually attractive but with any luck it’s plain life with a better functioning welfare state such that the Patty Bouviers of this world can mind themselves without having to go all I’m clawing my way out of this dump forthwith! Lisa Simpson’s dogged righteousness was nonetheless another source of personal fantasy, the fantasy of discipline and conviction.

  Many women you know are afraid of becoming old women who walk around glaring at the leaves on trees with one tit hanging out, if you add to this a natural predisposition for hard drinking or shadows or hard brows folding onto themselves, a distaste for the cult of excellence, there goes your chance of female prime ministership, whoosh. There was that woman you knew who said ‘frankly’ without adjusting her voice to indicate that she was aware that in this world ‘frankly’ is used only in ironic contexts, and no one despised her for it, frankly, she was steely nerved and got what she wanted thank you but did she also fear that animal inside her? The fantasy of the beast within that glint of it feral women share me too baby me too you were laughing just yesterday about that, you were always looking for females to not become but perhaps acquire females with a wolfish charisma like tangled hair and other such clichés and that’s where you went wrong. When they did the beastly thing you dropped them like kittens in a dam lapping tiny tongues the slosh of it too cold at your ankles squatting over, you shoved them under and held tight come baby come sit on my lap you with your moral candour or so you would have them believe oh what big teeth you have clawing away from those girls forthwith.

  I am writing about the time I broke up with a friend for her actions, a wolfish girl covered in sheen and volatility she behaved as nature had intended. I dropped her via email and she never emailed back.

  The Literature of Sadness

  Look. I know you don’t want to read about this, so I’ll keep it brief. I’m sorry. But I met someone. Well, we had met before, but we re-met.

  I re-met someone. Between meeting him years ago, in our home town, and then re-meeting him in Berlin years later, in the back of my mind I had entertained the thought that maybe this person was kind of a poser? Or that, possibly, the only towel he owned might smell like mould? Or I had pictured his subconscious, the other side of his face, and it was just a Meredith Music Festival tableau.

  But I also thought: he’s kind. I read his work and thought: he’s talented. And then I saw him again, the first time we were both single, and I thought: oh. He’s beautiful.

  Now my only opinion of this man is that he is a fairy floss star cloud I want to float inside forever. I miss him when he’s in the next room. I feel a buzz from his skin, radiant next to me when we lie down to read. I wake some nights in a hot love panic, squeezing his f
lesh like crazy. Lah lah lah. Like, flay me, lord. I’ve got it bad.

  I told you. It’s horrible. For two months, maybe three, I did nothing but cook elaborate meals and perform advanced sex moves and hide my cruel interpretations of other people’s flawed personalities so that he would think I was the best. Best looking best read best fuck. I was supposed to be writing my thesis. Not googling ‘love psychosis’. There’s no suspend time button for when this happens. Friends expressed concern. Strangers in public gave unsolicited encouragement. Other things resolved themselves, as if by magic: things that had been asphyxiating me—the city I left, its lovelessness, my broke-ness and my overwork; family pains, my possessions, my fear of self-possession—all fell away. Calm took their place.

  Kathy Acker hints at this transformative love power in Blood and Guts in High School:

  One of the most destructive forces in the world is love. For the following reason: The world is a conglomeration of objects, no, of events and the approachings of events towards objects, therefore of becoming stases static stagnant, of all that is unreal. You get in the world, you get your daily life your routine doesn’t matter if you’re rich poor legal illegal, you begin to believe what doesn’t change is real, and love comes along and shows all these unchangeable forever fixtures to be flimsy paper bits. Love can tear anything to shreds.

  Love shows us that the certainties we accept are arbitrary, flimsy paper bits. An entanglement of love-struck, horny auras interrupts the sense of urgency otherwise governing a person’s existence in the world. But, while love is tearing everything to shreds, the ‘unchangeable forever fixtures’—deadlines, rent, the obligation to call Mum and Dad—keep demanding some degree of participation. Love might reveal the true flakiness of ideology, but adhering to it—participating in reality—is what keeps the heating bill paid. In those first few months, in love with him, I couldn’t work—not in the way I had been in the habit of working. The fruitlessness and masochism of that kind of toil was too hard to bear. So, during this love binge I performed only the bare minimum of labour: a column, an essay that was overdue, a book review I had agreed to months before, revisions on a paper. No new objects passed through my hands. I couldn’t bring myself to start any writing that might expand my little world.

  This could happen to you. And when it does, you’ll find yourself gravitating towards the grimmest specimens of culture for entertainment. Why? Self-punishment for your rapture. Or, an inverted sense of cruelty. Or, a twisted sense of social duty: my private joy does not erase history’s endless inhumanity.

  Or is it simpler than that? Aside from the initial shock of familiarity you find in love, a new relationship is small. It is time slowing down so you can learn the precise tininess of your lover’s world—the other’s world—while matter and moments forge onwards. When things are going well in your puny, daily island life, the macro-drama, the real action, is happening offstage, elsewhere. So you read (or watch films or listen to music) to keep a foot in it; high drama, crushing injustice. Absolute misery. Trump.

  Why is it that the closer we get to sadness the realer we feel?

  Sadness is the glue between the days as we live in them.

  Sadness is the other face of those object-events, the face of the world that stagnates and abnegates and doesn’t much change. By ‘sadness’ I don’t mean depression; I don’t mean the feeling of poor, pathetic me. I mean the bodily response when humour, and life, have been extinguished. The opposite of love. The closing down of possibility—and the reluctance to see and name and claim possibility when it appears. Self-hatred. Emotional ineptitude. Complicity. Complacency. Overwhelming meh-ness.

  Not long into our rapture I got an email advertising a Verso Books online sale, fifty per cent off. We scrolled through the catalogue of intellectual ambition and purchased what ended up being two blue plastic sacks’ worth of radical books, all for fifty or sixty Australian dollars. This is something you do when you are suddenly in love: you purchase the aspiration to understand the true horror that hegemony entails (theoretically, at least). You think: Adorno never let his heart turn to mush, and nor will I! You think: now that I am in love I am ready to face it all, with strength and with courage. I am ready now! You think: is love a terribly bourgeois conceit? You think: will our necks be first on the butcher’s block?

  When the books arrived a few weeks later, the days were already winter-dark. I took a photo of my lover in his tracksuit, holding the Verso sacks at his sides like a radical Santa, and posted it on Instagram. Waited for the meagre stream of likes to arrive, from the few of my social media ‘friends’ who remained tolerant of my reports on the State of My Love for Him (Critical).

  Did I read all those books on the powers of mourning and radical sexual futures and anti-colonial pedagogies? No. Though I skim-read a few chapters. Thank heavens that one of the books we bought was a graphic narrative. Basically a comic. Readable in one short sitting and with some pleasure. After finishing Red Rosa, Kate Evans’s graphic biography of Rosa Luxemburg, I sat on the edge of my bed and wept. Rosa Luxemburg was murdered! How could anyone be expected to bear the sadness of that? Of course, I had known she was murdered—the day I read the book was the ninety-eighth anniversary of her death, and a commemorative march, held two kilometres from my apartment, passed by the spot where the paramilitaries threw her corpse into the canal. She was murdered, and Red Rosa addresses this fact with the fullness of its tragedy. She was murdered, and if she hadn’t been murdered, things might have gone differently. Germany as the (possible, imagined) socialist republic might not have become Nazi Germany.

  Then again, if Luxemburg hadn’t been murdered in 1919, she’d have been murdered in 1920.

  Luxemburg’s death was no secret—not at all—though there was some mystery shrouding her remains, which were only recovered in 2009. Assassinations like Luxemburg’s were cease- and-desist warnings to—in this case—revolutionary socialists; they were done with the express intention of inciting terror. Of shutting people up. Normalising the sadness, the despair, of forced complicity.

  For the first time in my reading life, there are radical, political, even (at a stretch) revolutionary books on recommended reading lists in mainstream magazines and on bestseller and prize lists—what’s beautiful and cool can now be politically ‘worthy’, too. But the term ‘political literature’ still leads to eye-rolls. It conjures up images of working-class white families, or refugees not from vast metropolises, or sad queers, suffering as they ought to: in ugly clothes. These people don’t laugh, don’t joke around, don’t secretly believe they are the devastating stars of the melodrama of their lives—they stoically plod through their misery and mud. ‘Political writing’, as opposed to political reading—which sees every book as a site of potential political meaning and imagining—is still laden by association with a gritty kind of Marxist realism. This idea, that the normative domain of ‘politics’ is just suffering without style (or humour), comes, I suspect, from the notion that exposing ‘the truth’ of injustice will go some way to correcting it. And that the truth will be immediately discernible: it will be the ugliest thing; the thing we most want to turn away from. As though the individuals who make up a society are only complicit in any given injustice because ‘the truth’ has been hidden from them. As though people eat meat only because they don’t know about factory farming; they use iPhones only because they don’t know about the suicides at Foxconn; they accept a government’s forced internment of migrants at the near-end of perilous journeys only because they don’t know what the inside of a prison looks like. This might be what critic Paul Stephens names ‘the information dialectic’, the idea that ‘greater access to information does not necessarily lead to increasing enlightenment’.

  This era is one of endlessly proliferating images. If you haven’t seen an image of the terrible thing, it’s because you don’t want to. As Roland Barthes writes, ‘no photograph has ever convinced or refuted anyone’. He says that the signified, the denoted (
the real-life analogue that an image, a text, ostensibly portrays), the—for example—fact that Rosa Luxemburg was murdered, is not itself sufficiently meaningful. It’s in the signifier, the connotation (what ‘society’ thinks about something), the—for example—fact that Luxemburg was powerless against Nazi thugs and died for it, that a more potent truth is uncovered.

  But the denoted—the real-life flesh facts—are never neutral, entirely, not insofar as they are always understood through the culturally mediated field of language. The ‘culture’ changes over time due to the changing nature of which truths—which images and texts; which narratives—best serve and preserve a given society’s peace of mind. What happens when those images, the true, ugly ones, are exposed? Maggie Nelson writes:

  …‘knowing the truth’ does not come with redemption as a guarantee, nor does a feeling of redemption guarantee an end to a cycle of wrongdoing. Some would even say it is key to maintaining it, insofar as it can work as a reset button—a purge that cleans the slate, without any guarantee of change at the root.

  The gruesome images that are now part of our visual vocabulary, of Abu Ghraib victims, or of Eric Garner’s murder, work simultaneously to expose certain violent realities to the hard-to-convince (those with a stake in ‘not knowing’); to abrade old wounds; to allow some to shirk their complicity (a dangerous cop, a gang of cruel soldiers; not my kind, not me); and also, crucially, to advance the legal standing of victims. A tool of justice, a weapon of torture, an evasion. A graphic reminder of something you know too well, or something you’d rather not know.