[Composed October 2013
for Eleni Stecopoulos' Poetics of Healing symposium, held at Unnameable
Books, Bkyln. Parts of this text have been published in "I scarcely
have the right use this ghostly verb”.]
Upon returning from Florence
Italy this past July, I found our dog Lucy well taken care of by our friend
Eric. Six months previously she was diagnosed with bladder cancer, but she was
still with us, hanging on. No doubt because of the many experimental treatments
Dottie had tried—a regimen of herbal medicines, alkaline water, and weekly
acupuncture treatments. The following day when I awoke, Lucy was
whimpering—something she never did in the five years I knew her, unless you
stepped on her paw—and could not stand on her hind legs. That day we took a car
service to the vet, where she was scheduled for acupuncture. As the driver
pulled up to the vet’s office, Lucy growled at me—something she also never did.
Cradling her in my arms, we passed through the doors of the office into a
lobby, when I felt a warm liquid dripping onto my legs and feet, pooling in my
flip-flops. I thought Lucy had peed on me but the liquid was very dark, so then
I thought it could be shit. But it didn’t smell like shit, it had a metallic
odor. My senses were confused but moments later the vet techs would take her
away and I would know she had started to bleed-out. The vet was very kind, and
patiently waited until we could get Dottie on the phone to have a conference
until making any decisions about Lucy. Dottie was in Florence still and the
reception wasn’t good, so it was hard to decide what to do. The vet was very
confidant that anything we did for Lucy would only cause her pain and not
prolong her life significantly. It was clear we would have to put her to sleep.
Preparations were made for cremation and I held one of Lucy’s front paws while
the vet administered the lethal injection. She was gone in ten seconds, as the
vet said she would be. “She had one bad day,” the vet kept repeating, in an
attempt to console me.
The following week, my mother
called to say that my 99 year-old grandmother, Helene, had contracted shingles
and that her health was declining fast. This was a person who despite her
extreme age had never had a single health problem—only very recently some
mascular degeneration. Within a week of that phone call my grandmother was also
dead. In hospice at my parents’ house, which had once been her house, for
nearly 30 years, I visited her nightly, keeping vigil and holding her hand. It
occurred to me that I should read her poems—the nurses said that she could
still hear us even though she was not conscious—but then I remembered that she
never really liked the poetry that interested me, including my own. She liked
poems to rhyme. The only poem I knew her to have memorized, other than some
lines from Shakespeare (“Oh death where I thy sting?,” she used to recite), was
a poem with rhyming couplets meant to help you remember the rules for bridge.
Instead I just sat with her, reading silently, meditating on her face, which no
longer looked like her own. Classical music played on a stereo. My parents
hoped the music would comfort her.
I haven’t drawn anything
since I was about twelve. And I stopped drawing in high school, which didn’t
have art classes, to pursue poetry and academics. When I was young I would copy
a lot. From National Geographic and other magazines. Since the death of Lucy
and my grandmother I have started drawing again, and tried to draw them
specifically. On the one hand it has been like paying tribute to them, a form
of ancestor worship. My grandmother, an Aries with a Libra moon, would have
appreciated this. But then there is something primal about drawing too, which
forms a “transitional space,” in the sense that Object Oriented psychologists
use this term. Drawing as a form of healing, of mourning; of therapy or
self-hypnosis. Susan Howe used to imagine the handwriting of Emily Dickinson
this way. As an aid to mourning. The sumptuousness of her handwriting that only
became more spacious, more concerned seemingly with absence, the creamy
expanses of the page. It reminds me of something from an interview with Jean
Genet, startling because of its aestheticism, the assertion of writing’s
material pleasure and autonomy over its content:
Madeline Gobeil: Did you start writing to escape
from solitude?
Jean Genet: No, because I wrote things that made
me even more solitary. No, I don’t know why I started writing. What the deeper
reasons are, I don’t know. Perhaps this: the first time I became conscious of
the power of writing was when I sent a postcard to a German friend who was in
America at the time. I didn’t really know what to say to her. The side I was
supposed to write on had a sort of white, grainy texture, a little like snow,
and it was this surface that led me to speak of a snow that was of course
absent from prison, to speak of Christmas, and instead of just writing
anything, I wrote to her about the quality of that thick paper. That was it,
the trigger that allowed me to write. This was no doubt not the real motive,
but it’s what gave me the first taste of freedom.
We, Left Melancholics, write
responding to the grain of the writing surface, the paper, the page. Textual
conditions are a provider of content. Dickinson, confined to her house and
obligated to perform reproductive labor, writing on all those little scraps
(recently on exhibition at The Drawing Center and recollected in Marta Werner’s
book, Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios).
Like a form of permission. A point of entry, entrance. Often I am permitted to return to a meadow. Arcadia. Idylls. We
write as though to access a muscle memory of previous moments of writing, of
thought and feeling. Writing back to an overwhelming maternal presence. Called back. Writing before we became
separated from the bodies of others—friends, lovers, comrades. Drawing, like
writing, brings me closer to you. I am so rusty at it that it surprises me when
I make a mark and it actually resembles the photos I am copying, which are of
me hugging Lucy’s face close to mine on a bed, and which were taken of my
grandmother before she was married, during WWII. There is her standing before
what seems like an ice skating park with a girlfriend. Another where she is
standing in front of a large piece of machinery in an ammunitions factory. Her
cheerful expression set in relief from the heavy machinery of late industrial
warfare. I want the drawings to resemble them, but I also know this isn’t the
most important thing. It is in someway to undergo their image—pencil in hand;
pencil to paper. In the 19th century, infant mortality was much more
prevalent than it is today, to say the least. Dickinson’s culture was a culture
of death. So many of her letters notes of condolence to family members. So many
of her poems—epitaphs. At one point I wanted to write about Dickinson’s poetry
in relation to 19th century mediumship—but this is maybe all I meant
to say: that the poet is a medium for those others who they have lost, who
through the hand try to capture the lost rhythms—prosodies—of having been among
them. Of me losing a part of me in you (to paraphrase Judith Butler). Of us
being carried across time, stamped by a space of community.
I have never told anyone
this, but I want to tell you now—my friends, my comrades, our little band. One
of my earliest memories of making something that I would now call “art,”
involved gathering all of my action figures—GI Joes, He-Man, Star Wars—and
affixing them to this Fischer Price space shuttle, one of my very favorite toys
at the time. From the room I shared with my sister, the master bedroom of a
two-bedroom apartment in Menlo Park, California—I dragged the ship down a
hallway into the living room. I remember it being a lot of work, because each
time the space shuttle moved, some of the figurines fell off and I had to prop
them back up. The whole procession/performance probably took about twenty
minutes, at which point ‘we’ had reached our destination and I abruptly lost
interest.
Right now I am completing the
proofreading of a book by Robert Kocik, the poet-designer.[1] It’s
an extraordinary collection, and I often marvel that Robert isn’t better known,
particularly in the realm of poets who tend to love eccentrics and underdogs.
But the problem with Robert is that he’s not just a poet, but so much more. He
is thinking about the whole world (and beyond; a consortium of beings) while
constantly relating it back to a discourse about poetry. And I think this is
the saddest thing—that this world doesn’t like someone who tries to relate
everything, who steps outside their little area and tries to connect things
that for no other reason than the tendency towards specialization in our
society have become removed from one another. In fact, they are often punished
for it, despite the many demands nowadays—no doubt spawned by the prevalence of
“immaterial” and “affective” labor practices—for workers to be
‘interdisciplinary’. Robert’s practice isn’t interdisciplinary, so much as he
believes in one continuous work, the work of “unworking” (Blanchot, Nancy), of
trying to use the things of the world without using them (to paraphrase Robert
quoting Augustine).
One of the many radical
propositions in Robert’s book, is that instead of orienting ourselves through
“natural selection” or “fitness” he would like us to produce a 100% “survival
rate.” What would this mean? Wouldn’t this cause overpopulation? As Charles
Reznikoff says, the reason people die is so that there will be enough phone
numbers to go around. The Left Melancholic can’t let a single one of us go.
Robert is a Capricorn with a Pisces moon. What if everyone in the world were
part of that procession? If every time they fell down, we had to stop the
procession to pick them up? At what point do we stop believing that we cannot
pick everyone up? That inevitably some have to fall by the wayside? It leads to
the heart of questions of disability and social justice, another problem that
Robert’s writing tackles head on, by proposing architectural and linguistic
solutions to the problem. What would it mean to design an entire society around
its ‘weakest’ members; or simply, the members who require the most care, or who
the built environment is least equipped to accommodate? One of the main
differences between the Left and the Right, as I see it, is that the Left is
minoritarian—it believes in the importance of caring for minorities, practicing
a politics from their position, over a presumed majority—whereas the Right
would essentialize “normalcy” and relegate social difference to the margins.
Often with my students I will give them a series of exercises to help them
think about disability through aesthetics. Here, I ask them to do one of two
things:
1.
Reflect
on something you take for granted about the ways that you occupy space, move,
perceive the world, with regards to the ‘built environment’ (architecture, the
way social space is designed). Design a series of constraints that will disable
you in relationship to these conditions of design. Write a poem based on your
experience of the constraints.
2.
Reflect
on a way that you are disabled: physically, mentally, or socially (by your
environment, by the way society functions). Use your identified disability to
make a work of art. Consider ways that your disability can produce a new form
of art? Conversely, invent a form of writing that may empower you by
capitalizing upon the unacknowledged powers of your identified disability.
In the past when my students
have done these exercises, they have revealed things about themselves that it
may not usually be appropriate to reveal in a classroom. Which is to say, the
exercises facilitate forms of intimacy and vulnerability that might not
otherwise be possible in an institutional setting. Many of them reflect on the
drugs they have been forced to take since childhood, to control behavioral and
emotional problems. Memorably, another student talked about how he was trained
not to stutter. Which prompted me to ask him if he ever missed his stutter? He
was confused by the question. Twice I have taught Jordan Scott’s book Blert, which the students love, because
it makes them go through what he goes through. Speech dysfluency, a gymnastics
for the mouth, the tongue. One student called his writing “mouth writing,” as
opposed to hand writing. I talk about the body as a “constraint.” That we are
all constrained. Following Robert, what if we also approached disability as a
universal condition; with the proven fact that if we grow old we will all at
one point require care? The brilliance of all of Robert’s writing rests on a
form of inversion, that constantly relates this world through a sense that
there is another equally viable one waiting in the wings—if we only started by
thinking of others first. And of the ‘me’ that is in everyone else. Here
anarchism, and communism, and Buddhism can inform one another productively
because for Robert they are all in the interest of disalienting subject and
object—rooting-out separation. Separation being the source of all oppression.
Ego being the principal obstacle to all forms of justice.
Robert practices what he
preaches, as it were, by acting as a caregiver to others. I often imagine him
sitting with Larry Eigner in the 80s, who on account of his cerebral palsy was
confined to a wheelchair for his entire adult life. Now Robert cares for his
dad, who is in his mid-90s and lives by himself in Austin, Minnesota, and this
forms a backdrop to many of the anecdotes that pepper Robert’s writings about
disability, and “epigenetic” architecture, and “subtle” prosody, and economic
justice.
Last year around election
season I had been asked to participate in an event at the New Museum, a tribute
to the dance and art writer Jill Johnston, who was also a pioneering advocate
of militant feminism through her book, Lesbian
Nation. I didn’t know what to present for the event—I was tired of reading
poems I had written for dance—and the event was supposed to be about
convergences between social and personal emergencies. Where writing might
embody exigencies normally excluded from the realm of criticism. I wanted to do
something that might take up the challenge of this event—to invent such a form
of criticism—but I found myself writing a poem instead.
Visiting the Bay Area the
previous summer, I had seen a show at the SF MoMA regarding theatricality and
performance in contemporary visual art. The piece that struck me most was a
dance film by Charles Atlas, perhaps his most famous: Hail the New Puritan. The following day I was scheduled to give a
reading at Small Press Traffic with Sara Larsen and Suzanne Stein, and it
occurred to me that this work—made over twenty years ago—could help me to
organize my reading. Most of all, I was struck by a particular scene, where a
young Michael Clark is followed by Atlas’ camera into a dance club. In this scene,
Clark’s milieu is choreographed, so that he becomes both dancer and a social
currency passing among his friends and community. What I mean by “social
currency,” is that he becomes the thing shared among the other members of his
community, an object that seems to bind them—affectively. I remember he kisses
a young woman and slaps another on the backside; he is taking sips from
people’s drinks and drags on their cigarettes; he suddenly reclines in
someone’s arms; he rises and start’s dancing with a circle of friends. A
feeling for milieu is perfectly formalized in this scene, so that we can feel
all of the urgencies—the way that we are propelled by desire and
attraction—within a scene of our comrades. It is about partying of course, but
also something else. It is about Clark’s desire and how he is desired by
others. It is about how desire and pleasure are distributed within the group—as
gift, munis. Possibly it is also about care. How all these little things Clark
and his friends do for one another affect the other, keeping the whole things
in motion.
Then
Micah stops by & I smoke while he nurses a nicotine lozenge & helps me
better understand Laurelle.
Then
Kathy moves her shoulder in just such a way so that I can sneak around her
through the door.
Then
Nancy is working my shift.
Then I
shit my pants & a friend of my mother’s comes to pick me up from school so
I can change.
Then
Blake sits beside me on the waterbed talking me down from some harrowing trip.
Then
Anne brings me ice in a washcloth to see to the finger I’ve busted in Overland
Park.
Then Jen
hangs out with Vivian while I track down my car.
Then
Charlie drives me back from the impoundment lot on Sunday.
Then
Randy is taking me home.
Then
Joey comes to take me to the openings, & dinner.
Then Joe
picks me up for the show.
Then
Maria gets me home before midnight.
Then
pastor finds some money in the budget.
The poem I wrote was a kind
of exorcism of Mitt Romney, the 2012 presidential nominee. It was also a
reflection on “an aborted North American socialism” embodied by PBS’
commissioning of the dance film, and of course upon Atlas’ and Clark’s very
queer, very British communism of the nightclub. Shortly after I wrote this
poem, I remember seeing Dana Ward read at the Zinc Bar, for the SEGUE series.
It was a winter day and Charity Coleman and Ariel Greenberg were hosting the
event. In Dana’s poem, “Some Other Deaths of Bas Jan Ader,” a tribute to the visual
artist who famously died at sea during his last performance work (a journey by
sea), he distills the thing that I feel is so interesting about the scene with
Clark. Here, Dana/the speaker, provides the names of friends, in tandem with
what they do together and how, most specifically, they take care of him,
bringing him food, or medicine, or lifting his spirits at critical moments. It
occurs to me that Dana is so much like Clark, in the ways that his writing
conveys a social current coextensive with his life. Writing and life collapse;
life practice and performance; labor and play; everyday life and revolutionary
desire. It is the dream of all writing since the 20th Century avant-garde—Russian Futurism, Fluxus,
Happenings, Conceptualism. It is a fulfillment, as well, of O’Hara and how
O’Hara’s ideas are extended and given political valence in New Narrative. I
often wonder, given the many things people have said about poetry and political
militancy recently, and particularly since the occupations of 2011, if proper
political militancy can exist without a radical sense of care. Care as first politics.
Care as the beginning of political and social responsibility. Considering the
affective qualities of a work of art then does not necessarily become an alibi
for works that do not have an immediately available political content or
purport to be useful (as much “socially engaged” art would purport to be), but
of foregrounding affect as a locus for certain political and ethical conditions
of possibility. Mutual aid, care, as the groundwork for political and social
action.
[1] Since this text was composed,
Kocik’s Supple Science: a Robert Kocik
Primer has been published by ON Contemporary Practice Monograph Series (https://on-contemporarypractice.squarespace.com).
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