subway in march, 5:45 pm

by maggie nelson, from shiner

i take the long way home, knowing
i am free to choose happiness

or wander off into the tunnel
on the platform two teenagers french kiss, her lips

are enormous and soft and he seems at home with them
i feel crumpled like the pastel houses lining the canal

i am transporting an adorable succulent
the size of an infant's fist, holding it close as if

it were the one thing i had to keep alive
and thinking how much easier it would be

it all i had to love were this small plant
and then i wouldn't be so hard on you

and we could like the world before distrusting it
stop performing ourselves and let the pith of us

hang out. all these permutations of esteem and ridicule
when all i want is to stay focused on everyday life

what other kind of life is there?
all the world knows it, it's a miracle

the blue womb of evening
the nimble sparrow, the smug duck in the pond

the eruption of flowering quince
o shackle us to the rock of it

we will try to love each other
though there's wind on our heads

and we cannot read minds
the train jumps above ground

and stripes the car in gold light
it's the light of early spring

losing heart

by maggie nelson, from shiner

it feels good
like being
inside a car
in a car

wash, the froth
swopping
the roof, the
windows, a regular

murder of dirt.
but what if
it's the self
at stake, not

crimson with sin
just weary of
its own
contours, the run-on

sentence of its
thought. on
the inside looking
out, a window

streaked with black
effluvia, always
threatening to
become a hunk of

something that
won't budge. when
i was a younger man
it was all about

mozart. then later,
beethoven. then
later still -- mozart!
after that, beethoven!

ah, but mozart. ah,
but beethoven.
you don't really

have to believe in
yourself, only
in your circulation.

harbor

by maggie nelson, from shiner

not quite at home in the world
and turning toward the terminus

night-swimming with my sister
who stays back by the shore

the force that gets the body
out of the soul

what's person is what you hold
in your hand

a bottle of catsup
the pour of green water

if i were to escape beauty
into the season of giving

i would give to the birds,
the sad, and the leaning.

i would use simple language
to describe the forest. failing that,

i'd find a piano.
nickel body, nickel world

you are a figure illuminated
from behind by a light.

the underbelly of sunset
the rattling of blue logs.

the house is over. that is,
what you never went back for

has been loaded into a dumpster.
a bridge is an arc of green lights

over black water. this is memory
weather, and i remember

the roof in summer. how it stood.
how we stood upon it.

eighteen days until christmas

by maggie nelson, from shiner

i lost the romance of this place
and woke up old. one darling
fantasy shattered over the next,
folding over a fist drenched
in my hip. the christmas trees
are bound and stacked up
outside, the air can't decide
what to make of itself, and we
are about to throw a president
out. you are not your mother,
and each of your dead lives on
in you and smells like the moon.
large and mosquito-like,
my prose clatters off
my fingers. i woke up old
and into happy uncertainty,
the vitamins i feed to the streets,
the real relations within a bead.
oh pouring cylinder, stark
uncertainty, racket of leaves
helicoptering to their death--
my love is coming out
over and over again.
here it is, what
i always wanted. the air
spills ash; i suppose
it is light.

september 2

by maggie nelson, from shiner

dragging around some miserable wife
on a real hike, straight up a cliff
of corn, holding onto silk husks
for dear life -- it's a little odd
to vacation as your mistress, and as
the only one licensed to drive, but
no one seems to mind. a little
disturbed but making it through
swelling up before noon, i dreamt
my abalone ring came apart
live fish and shell peeled off
my finger, in a retail store
of which you were the owner.
this day smells like toast.

an ecstatic accident

excerpts from bluets by maggie nelson

4. i admit that i may have been lonely. i know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke - take your pick - an apprehension of the divine. (this ought to arouse our suspicions.)

8. do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. "we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it," wrote goethe, and perhaps he is right. but i am not interested in longing to live in a world in which i already live. i don't want to yearn for blue things, and god forbid for any "blueness." above all, i want to stop missing you.

28. it was around this time that i first had the thought: we fuck well because he is a passive top and i am an active bottom. i never said this out loud, but i thought it often. i had no idea how true it would prove, or how painful, outside of the fucking.

44. this particular conversation with the expert on guppy menopause takes place on a day when, later that afternoon, a therapist will say to me, if he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is. she is trying to get me to see that although i thought i love this man very completely for exactly who he was, i was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.

58. "love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing" (leonardo da vinci)

72. it is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. loneliness is solitude with a problem. can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it? -- no, not exactly. it cannot love me that way; it has no arms. but sometimes i do feel its presence to be a sort of wink - here you are again, it says, and so am i.

100. it often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. but really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. "there is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today," a different therapist said to me last year at this time. but though i have learned to act as if i feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.

104. i do not feel my friend's pain, but when i unintentionally cause her pain i wince as i hurt somewhere, and i do. often in exhaustion i lay my head down on her lap in her wheelchair and tell her how much i love her, that i'm sorry she is in so much pain, pain i can witness and imagine but that i do not know. she says, if anyone knows this pain besides me, it is you (and j, her lover). this is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers, and because she has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment.

125. of course, you could also just take off the blindfold and say, i think this game is stupid, and i'm not playing it anymore. and it must also be admitted that hitting the wall or wandering off in the wrong direction or tearing off the blindfold is as much a part of the game as is pinning the tail on the donkey.

157. the part i do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. as one optics journal puts it, "the color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue." in which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.

181. pharmakon means drug, but as jacques derrida and others have pointed out, the word in greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. it holds both in the bowl. in the dialogues plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. plato does not call fucking pharmakon, but then again, while he talks plenty about love, plato does not say much about fucking.

187. is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. more precise. one could leave it, too, as it is. -- yet how can i explain, that every time i put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as i turn away from it?

199. for to wish to forget how much you loved someone - and then, to actually forget - can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. i have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things." this acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. often i feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).

215. it often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional. of all the philosophers, schopenhauer is the most hilarious and direct spokesperson for this idea: "as a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected." you don't believe him? he offers this quick test: "compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten."

238. i want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when i would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; i would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

troublant

quotes from the argonauts by maggie nelson

"you, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring. in the face of this fact, winnicott holds the relatively unsentimental position that we don't owe these people (often women, but by no means always) anything. but we do owe ourselves 'an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. luckily we were met by ordinary devotion.'"

"when you are a stepparent, no matter how wonderful you are, no matter how much love you have to give, no matter how mature or wise or successful or smart or responsible you are, you are structurally vulnerable to being hated or resented, and there is precious little you can do about it, save endure, and commit to planting seeds of sanity and good spirit in the face of whatever shitstorms may come your way. and don't expect to get any kudos from the culture, either: parents are hallmark-sacrosanct, but stepparents are interlopers, self-servers, poachers, pollutants, and child molesters. . .

when i try to discover what i resent my stepfather for most, it is never 'he gave me too much love.' no - i resent him for not reliably giving the impression that he was glad he lived with my sister and me (he may not have been), for not telling me often that he loved me (again, he may not have - as one of the step-parenting self-help books i ordered during our early days put it, love is preferred, but not required), for not being my father, and for leaving after over twenty years of marriage to our mother without saying a proper good-bye.

i think you overestimate the maturity of adults, he wrote me in his final letter, a letter he sent only after i'd broken down and written him first, after a year of silence."

"one of the most annoying things about hearing the refrain 'same-sex marriage' over and over again is that i don't know many - if any - queers who think of their desire's main feature as being 'same-sex.' it's true that a lot of lesbian sex writing from the '70s was about being turned on, and even politically transformed, by an encounter with sameness. this encounter was, is, can be, important, as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled, with exchanging alienation or internalized revulsion for desire and care. to devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own. but whatever sameness i've noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy."

"if there's one thing homonormativity reveals it's the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority [leo bersani]."

"eve kosofsky sedgwick wanted to make way for 'queer' to hold all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation. 'queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive -- recurrent, eddying, troublant,' she wrote. 'keenly, it is relational, and strange.' she wanted the term to be a perpetual excitement, a kind of placeholder -- a nominative, like argo, willing to designate molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip. that is what reclaimed terms do -- they retain, they insist on retaining, a sense of the fugitive."

"i told you i wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty. you said i misunderstood what you meant by honor. we haven't yet stopped trying to explain to each other what these words mean to us"

"how to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? i do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. neither do i want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if i behave in the right way. i don't want any of it [beatriz preciado]. how to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is ok -- desirable, even (e.g., 'gender hackers') -- whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? how does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality -- or anything else, really -- is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?"

"i think [judith] butler is generous to name the diffuse 'commodification of identity' as the problem. less generously, i'd say that the simple fact that she's a lesbian is so blinding for some, that whatever words come out of her mouth -- whatever words come out of the lesbian's mouth, whatever ideas spout from her head -- certain listeners hear only one thing: lesbian, lesbian, lesbian. it's a quick step from there to discounting the lesbian -- or, for that matter, anyone who refuses to slip quietly into a 'postracial' future that resembles all too closely the racist past and present -- as identitarian, when it's actually the listener who cannot get beyond the identity that he has imputed to the speaker. calling the speaker identitarian then serves as an efficient excuse not to listen to her, in which case the listener can resume his role as speaker. and then we can scamper off to yet another conference with a keynote by jacques ranciere, alain badiou, slavoj zizek, at which we can meditate on self and other, grapple with radical difference, exalt the decisiveness of the two, and shame the unsophisticated identitarians, all at the feet of yet another great white man pontificating from the podium, just as we've done for centuries."

i feel i can give you everything without giving myself away

excerpt from the argonauts by maggie nelson

before we met, i had spent a lifetime devoted to wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained - inexpressibly! - in the expressed. this idea gets less air time than his more reverential whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, i think, the deeper idea. its paradox is, quite literally, why i write, or how i feel able to keep writing.

for it doesn't feed or exalt any angst one may feel about the incapacity to express, in words, that which eludes them. it doesn't punish what can be said for what, by definition, it cannot be. nor does it ham it up by miming a constricted throat: lo, what i would say, were words good enough. words are good enough.

it is idle to fault a net for having holes, my encyclopedia notes.

in this way you can have your empty church with a dirt floor swept clean of dirt and your spectacular stained glass gleaming by the cathedral rafters, both. because nothing you say can fuck up the space for god.

i've explained this elsewhere. but i'm trying to say something different now.

before long i learned that you had spent a lifetime equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough. not only not good enough, but corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow. we argued and argued on this account, full of fever, not malice. once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. all that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. you called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. you said that you knew this not from shunning language but from the immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page. i argued along the lines of thomas jefferson and the churches - for plethora, for kaleidoscopic shifting, for excess. i insisted that words did more than nominate. i read aloud to you the opening of philosophical investigations. slab, i shouted, slab!

for a time, i thought i had won. you conceded there might be an ok human, an ok human animal, even if that human animal used language, even if its use of language were somehow defining of its humanness - even if humanness itself meant trashing and torching the whole motley, precious planet, along with its, our, future.

but i changed too. i looked anew at unnameable things, or at least things whose essence is flicker, flow. i readmitted the sadness of our eventual extinction, and the injustice of our extinction of others. i stopped smugly repeating everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly [ludwig wittgenstein] and wondered anew, can everything be thought.

and you - whatever you argued, you never mimed a constricted throat. in fact you ran at least a lap ahead of me, words streaming in your wake. how could i ever catch up (by which i mean, how could you want me?)

a day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, i sent you the passage from roland barthes by roland barthes in which barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase "i love you" is like "the argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name." just as the argo's parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase "i love you," its meaning must be renewed by each use, as "the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new."

i thought the passage was romantic. you read it as a possible retraction. in retrospect, i guess it was both.

you've punctured my solitude, i told you. it had been a useful solitude, constructed, as it was, around a recent sobriety, long walks to and from the y through the sordid, bougainvillea-strewn back streets of hollywood, evening drives up and down mulholland to kill the long nights, and, of course, maniacal bouts of writing, learning to address no one. but the time for its puncturing had come. i feel i can give you everything without giving myself away. i whispered in your basement bed. if one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.

collective guilt

excerpt from the art of cruelty by maggie nelson:

when someone first told me, for example, about a 1992 piece by performance artist nao bustamente called indig/urrito, in which bustamante invites white men from the audience to join her on stage, get down on their knees in penance for 500 years of white-male oppression of indigenous peoples, and take an absolving bite of the burrito she is wielding as a strap-on, i think i spouted off some lazy dismissal of the venture, citing a disinterest in collective guilt, identity politics, audience humiliation, and dominatrix chic.

after watching a fifteen-minute performance of the piece (filmed at theater artaud in san francisco, and available for viewing on the artist's web site), i realized i couldn't have been more wrong. largely due to bustamante's quick-witted humor and benevolently sarcastic persona, the piece transforms political cliche into absurdist theater, opening up space for comedy, unpredictability, titillation, and an unlikely camaraderie. the indict made by the piece, if there is any, is multivalent: bustamante begins by poking fun at a (nameless) arts organization that has offered to fund artists of color whose work "addresses the past 500 years of oppression of indigenous peoples," and introduces this piece as her response. she then invites "any white man who would like to take the burden of the past 500 years of guilt" to report to the stage. after no one ascends, she moves on to invite "anyone with any inner white men," then "anyone who is hungry," then "anyone who knows a white man who is hungry," and so on. the concept of collective guilt - along with that of unswerving identity - receives all the complication it deserves, swiftly and hilariously.

eventually a hodgepodge of white men amble up to the stage and get down on their knees behind her, and bustamante revels in their pitifulness. (about one particularly scrawny, bald, and hunch-shouldered volunteer, she coos, "aw, i think he's going to take it for a lot of people, don't you?") at the same time, she lauds them as heroes and martyrs, as those willing to bear the guilt and shame that the more cowardly white men out there are unwilling to face. the unpredictability of the performance arrives when she asks each man to state his name into a microphone (fixed at knee height), and make a statement before taking an absolving bite of her burrito.

as everyone from ono to abramovic to lynn breedlove (lead singer of the queercore band tribe 8, who often invited male audience members to come onstage and suck her dick) knows, even men who have volunteered to take part in such ventures can behave volatilely. the feeling of suddenly being in the spotlight with a woman indisputably running the show is, for many, an intolerable reversal (albeit one that many men have a taste for, behind closed doors). for this reason, part of the deep pleasure of indig/urrito lies in watching bustamante's commanding grace, power, and wit as she banters with each man's self-introduction and apologia, as well as with the occasionally over-theatrical fellating of her burrito by the hammier of them. there's also plenty of edgy flirtation: after a handsome "justin" says, "i'm male, i'm white, and i'm sorry," with more coquettishness than penitence, bustamante responds, "i'm not sorry, justin, i'm not sorry at all," and rolls her eyes in ecstasy at his bite. as the bald gentleman - who introduces himself as "allan" - takes his bite, bustamante squeals, "he's so pitiful!" and holds his head against her rocking pelvis. by the time the last biter, a slim, short-haired figure in a suit, announces into the mic, "i'm a girl, i'm hispanic, and i'm prepared," and attempts to unroll a condom against the mess hanging from bustamante's harness, all facile premises have disintegrated (as has the burrito).

before the biting of indig/urrito begins, bustamante asks the members of the audience to yell a congratulatory "amen" at the moment that each man's teeth enter her burrito, and to think, at that moment, of any white man they know who needs absolving, so that "we can all just move on." the audience at theater artaud responds to this call with a loud cheer. obviously, bustamante and her audience know that "moving on" from 500 years of exploitation and racism isn't that easy. but neither her call nor the audience's spontaneous response comes off as a total joke. indig/urrito provides fifteen minutes of what a different kind of "moving on" might feel like - one not based in denial, abdication, derision, or preemptive dismissal, but in discomfiting role reversals, fraught but consensual confrontations, humor that rides the edge of contempt and anger without collapsing into their force, and a dedication to seeing what happens next, to seeing how individual humans might comport themselves in a politically and sexually charged situation they have been invited to address rather than repress. "anyone who is offended by this," bustamante warns before the ritual begins, "i really encourage you to leave your body."

distraction

quotes from the art of cruelty by maggie nelson

"trecartin's 2007 feature-length video, I-Be Area, while nominally based on the concept of 'virtual reality,' is a riotous exploration of what kinds of space, identity, physicality, language, sexuality, and consciousness might make possible once one leaves the dichotomy of the virtual and the real behind, along with a whole host of other need-not-apply binaries (the everyday and the apocalyptic, the public and the private, the utopic and the dystopic, male and female, gay and straight, among them)."

"'i love the idea of technology and culture moving faster than the understanding of those mediums by people,' trecartin has said, and his works aim to immerse viewers in this failed-to-upload state. the disorientation of this state is not that of grandpa befuddled by a fistful of printer cables, but rather the sort of psychological and physiological stupefaction more often associated with acid overdoses and schizoid breakdowns.

I-Be Area takes incapacity - to absorb, to make sense, to cohere, to sort, to concentrate - as its starting point. . . then it amplifies this incapacity by turning up the speed, the color, the hysteria, the flicker. image or speech overflow is no longer a problem, and certainly not one that art could or should aid in solving. . . it is our 'abstract plot of now,' as he calls it. trecartin's ability to sustain us here for some real time often feels like a miracle, in that such an ability seems as if it should be, by definition, also beyond the artist. that is to say, the art often feels as if it is moving faster than trecartin himself could be - which is likely why his films, when combined with his youth (I-Be Area was finished when he was twenty-six), have had something of an awe-inducing effect on the art world."

"koestenbaum notes that trecartin's work is about radical distraction. . . but recartin's brand of distraction doesn't rely on any simple use of the imitative fallacy - that is, 'contemporary life is mind-scrambling, fragmented, and distracted, so my art must be mind-scrambling, fragmented, and distracted, too.' it is too tightly orchestrated for that - too layered, too well performed, too purposefully edited, too intelligently perverse. however bawdy and hysterical, trecartin's videos draw tight rings of action: they are condensed, fast-moving world creations that make an intense demand on our attention. and the animating paradox of this world, as koestenbaum has put it, is that 'trecartin's characters concentrate on distraction.' however frenetic I-Be Area may be, its distraction is not of the same order as that of, say, the idiotic pop-up balloons and crawling tickers that have become staples of the television screen. to stay with I-Be Area all the way through - to listen to every word, to follow every decision and cut - requires a keen effort. you'll get the most out of it if you, too, can concentrate on distraction.

of course, you may not remember much of what happened; you may not remember any of the characters; you may not even be left with an image. if your experience resembles mine, you'll be left with something far more amorphous - a kind of vibrating memory of the unnerving psychic state the work induced, or captured, or invented (and, perhaps, a notebook full of scrawled lines that sounded great at the time, such as 'my personal really concise pussy is developing a very inner monologue which i will not reveal to you as i become dynamic')."

"both foreman and trecartin work from a conception of the human, or the 'real,' borne out of contradiction, fluctuation, incoherence, and perversity; both offer immersion in their vision without rehashing the avant-garde fetish of terrorizing the audience or the mainstream one of chaperoning it. 'we abide by cultural directives that urge us: clarify each thought, each experience, so you can cull from them their single, dominant meaning and, in the process, become a responsible adult who knows what he or she thinks,' foreman has said. 'but what i try to show is the opposite: how at every moment, the world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity.'"