[APPLAUSE]
So, you know, I wrote this book on cruelty and it was--
it really began as a, kind of, catalog
of different kinds of cruelty.
Like the cruelty of brutal honesty, like saying,
no you smell bad.
No, you just do.
I'm just saying.
You know, like that kind of thing.
It had like brutal honesty.
It had the cruelty of, kind of, re-enactments--
the, kind of, faux catharsis principle.
It had cruelty of defacement, forms of effacement and in art.
It had a lot of different--
the cruelty of the resurrection and crucifixion.
Not what you think [CHUCKLES] on that account
but anyway I won't go into all that.
But it was-- but as I was describing
in one of the classes I visited, I think
it was today's class actually, while I was writing
about all these very claustrophobic forms of cruelty
this idea of this space or this-- enough room
to move but not fall.
Kind of, kept getting summoned beside this claustrophobia
and that's why that book ends with Winnicott and John
Cage talking about that, kind of, space.
So the book that I'm working on now is--
kind of, takes up--
it, kind of, takes up with Winnicott where it left off
and with this idea of the holding container.
And it is--
I won't say too much about it but it's, kind of,
a double love story for my partner and for a baby
that we had about 20 months ago.
And it, kind of, weaves in between-- there's
also a love, kind of, a love letter
to Eve Sedgwick who was a teacher of mine
and a great hero of queer theory who died of breast cancer
while I was writing.
And some other heroes along the way.
So it's, kind of, a--
it's a weave of--
it braids different threads than some of the ones
I've been touching on so far tonight.
So maybe it's another head and I'm
going to read you guys about, I don't know, eight pages
from this manuscript so--
This is near the beginning.
October 2007.
The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark
off the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes.
A friend suggests I tattoo the words,
hard to get, across my knuckles as a reminder of this
poses possible fruits.
Instead the words, I love you, come tumbling out
of my mouth in an incantation, the first time you fucked me
in the ass, my face smashed against the cement
floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad.
You had Molloy by your bedside, and a pile
of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall.
Does it get any better?
What's your pleasure? you asked.
And then you stuck around for an answer.
A friend came over the other day and pulled down
a mug for coffee.
A mug that was a gift from my mother.
It's one of those mugs you can purchase
online from Snapfish with the photo of your choice emblazoned
on it.
I was horrified when I received it
but it's the biggest mug we own.
So sometimes it fits the bill like
if you're in the mood for a trough of warm milk
or something.
Wow, my friend said filling up the mug.
I've never seen anything so heteronormative in all my life.
[LAUGHTER]
The photo on the mug depicts Harry, Harry's first son Lenny,
and me all dressed up to go to the Nutcracker
at Christmas time.
A ritual that was important to my mother when I was little
and which we have revived now that I
have children in my life.
In the photo I'm seven months pregnant
and wearing a high ponytail in a leopard print dress.
Harry and Lenny are wearing matching
dark suits and look dashing.
We're standing in front of the mantel
at my mother's house, which has monogrammed
stockings hanging from it.
We look happy.
The struggles it has taken to make
this happiness, this family, are not pictured on the mug.
But what about it is the essence of heteronormativity?
That my mother made the mug on a bougie service like Snapfish?
That we're clearly participating or acquiescing for the moment
into participating into a long tradition of families
being photographed at holiday time in their holiday best.
That my mother made me the mug in part to indicate
she recognizes my tribe as family.
What about my pregnancy?
Is that, inherently, heteronormative,
or is the presumed opposition of queerness and procreation,
or to put a finer edge on it, maternity,
more of a reactionary embrace of how things have shaken down
for queers rather than the bearer
of some ontological truth.
As more queers have kids will the presumed opposition
wither away?
Will you miss it?
Is there something, inherently, queer about pregnancy itself?
Insofar as it radically alters one's normal state
and occasions an intimacy with and radical alienation
from one's body.
How can the experience so profoundly strange and wild
and transformative also symbolize or enact
the ultimate conformity?
Or is this simply another instance of disqualifying
anything tied too closely to the female animal
from the privileged term, in this case,
non-conformity, radicality.
What about the fact that Harry's neither male nor female.
I'm a special, a two for one, his character
explains in his butch buddy classic By Hook or by Crook.
What qualifies as a mining of older nuclear family kinship
arrangements?
That's a Judith Butler line.
And what is a radical rethinking of kinship?
How can you tell?
Who's to tell?
Tell your girlfriend to find a different kid to play house
with, your ex said over and over again after we moved him.
To assert oneself aligned or suffused
with the real at the expense of others
is an attempt to bar them, to shrivel them,
but any fixed conviction of identity or realness
also has a finger in psychosis.
The madman is not only a beggar who
thinks he is a king, wrote Lacan,
but also a king who thinks he is a king.
Perhaps this is why Winnicott's notion of feeling real
is so moving to me.
One can aspire to feel real.
One can help others to feel real.
And one can oneself feel real but no one has to be it.
Alice Notley called money zinnias.
Gertrude Stein called orgasms or bowel movements,
depending on which scholar you're reading, cows.
Our kids call Harry, Poppy, and know him
as to be an in-betweener.
A day or two after my pronouncement,
now wild 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, quote, "the Argonaut
renewing its ship during its voyage
without changing its name."
Just as the Argo's parts may get changed out 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, Barthes says, quote,
"the task of love and of language is to give to one
and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new."
End quote.
I thought the passage was romantic.
You thought it was a retraction.
In retrospect, I guess, it was both.
My friend later suggests I order a mug for my mother in response
to her mug that features a photo of Iggy's head crowning
in all its bloody glory.
[LAUGHTER]
This is a funny friend.
I had told her earlier that day I
was vaguely hurt that my mother hadn't wanted
to look at my birth photos.
Harry reminded me, then, that few people ever
want to look at anyone's birth photos.
And I was forced to admit my past feelings
about other people's birth photos bore out
the truth of this statement.
But in my postpartum haze I felt as though giving birth to Iggy
was such an achievement and doesn't my mother
like to be proud of my achievements?
She laminated the page in the New York Times
that listed me as a Guggenheim recipient, for god's sake.
Unable to throw the Guggenheim placemat away,
which would signify ingratitude, but not knowing what else
to do with it, I've since placed it below Iggy's high chair
to catch the food that flows downward.
Given that the fellowship, essentially,
paid for his conception, each time I sponge
tidbits of shredded wheat or block broccoli florets off it
I feel a loose sense of justice.
[LAUGHTER]
About two months after our first date
we spent Christmas together in a seedy hotel
in downtown San Francisco.
I had booked the room for us online
hoping my booking the room and our time in the room
would make you love me forever.
It turned out to be one of those hotels
that book for cheap because it was undergoing
an astonishingly rude renovation and because it was smack
in the middle of the cracked out Tenderloin.
No matter.
We had other business to attend to.
As we attended to it the sun filtered
in through the skanky Venetian blinds
which barely obscured the construction workers hammering
away just steps outside.
Just don't kill me, I said as you took off your leather belt.
You cracked a big smile, charmed.
In his book Bubbles, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk
elaborates something he calls quote, "The basic rule
of a negative gynecology."
This rule holds quote, "that one must reject the temptation
to extricate oneself from the affair with outside views
of a mother-child relationship.
Where the concern is insight into intimate connections,
outside observation is already the fundamental mistake."
I cheer this appeal to immersive experience.
This resistance to interpretation.
This a priori rejection of external mastery.
At the same time I am annoyed with myself
for consulting a 700 page treatise by a male heavyweight
to tell me something revelatory about the bubble of mother
and child in which I am currently ensconced.
I have no desire to extricate myself from this bubble.
But, literally, physically, I cannot hold my baby at the same
time as I write.
Winnicott wrote, "Sometimes mothers
find it alarming to think that what they are doing
is so important and in that case it is better not to tell them.
It makes them self-conscious and then
they do everything less well.
When a mother has a capacity quite simply to be a mother
we must never interfere.
She will not be able to fight for her rights
because she will not understand."
As if mothers thought they were performing
their ordinary devotions in the wild,
and then are stunned to look up, and see a peanut crunching
crowd across the moat.
After I sent you the Barthes passage I tried again.
This time I sent you a little poem
by Michael Ondaatje titled "Skin Boat."
This is the poem "Skin Boat."
"Kissing the stomach.
Kissing your scarred skin boat.
History is what you've traveled on and take with you.
We've each had our stomachs kissed by strangers
to the other.
As for me, I bless everyone who kissed you here."
I didn't send this poem to you because I had in any way
achieved its serenity.
I sent it with the aspiration that one day I might.
Because by the time you're falling in love
anew if with both parties have had
two or three or more decades of relations prior,
what other sentiment could there be in contending
with each other's pasts.
Repression?
Alas, we tried that too, even more than we tried skin boat.
All your goddamn tattoos.
Early on we made a romantic visit to Dr. Tattoff
on Wilshire Boulevard, both of us
giddy at the prospect of clearing your slate.
We left crestfallen at the price,
the improbability of ever, completely,
eradicating the ink.
The jacket of the book Bubbles proclaims
it to be a bookend to Heidegger's Being and Time.
This, despite its ridiculous name
which it shares with Michael Jackson's pet chimpanzee,
Bubbles.
Michael Jackson doted on Bubbles but Michael Jackson
would also rotate the chimp out of service
as it aged and replaced it with a new younger monkey who
he also always named, Bubbles.
[LAUGHTER]
So we met in October and by February we'd moved in.
It was one of those moments in a life when we both knew.
We've had some hard times since and it's possible some of them
had to do with our moving fast at the start
but we weren't wrong about what we knew.
And we still know what we knew and we know it differently
but we still know it.
And it's the same thing that we know.
And so we found the house on a hill
with gleaming dark wood floors and a view of a mountain.
The day we got the keys we slept together
on the wood floor of what would become our first bedroom.
I will never forget that green hill.
It may have been a pile of rough scrub
with a stagnant pond at its top, but for two years
it was our mountain.
And then just like that I was folding your son's laundry.
He had just turned three.
Such little socks, such little underwear, I marveled at them.
Made him lukewarm cocoa every morning with as much powder as
could fit in the rim of my fingernail.
Played fallen soldier with him for hours on end.
And fallen soldier he would collapse with all his gear on.
Sequined chain mail, hat, sword, sheath,
a limb wounded in battle tied up in a scarf.
I was the good blue witch who had
to sprinkle healing dust all over him
to bring him back to life.
I had a twin who was evil.
The evil twin had felled him with her poisonous blue powder
but now I was here to heal him.
He lay there motionless.
His eyes closed.
The faintest smile on his face while I recited my monologue
but where could the soldier have come from?
How did he get so far from home?
Is he badly wounded?
Will he be kind or fierce when he awakens?
Will he know I'm good or will he mistake me for my evil twin?
What can I say that will bring him back to life?
You've punctured my solitude, I kept telling you.
This was mostly a relief.
My solitude had grown ripe for puncturing.
As painful and strange as it was I
had learned immeasurably from it.
So much so that, early on, I told you
I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away.
And if one does one's solitude right, this will be the prize.
Throughout the fall of 2008 those yellow prop--
Yes on Prop 8 signs were all over the place.
Most notably jabbed into an otherwise bald and beautiful
mountain I passed every day on my way to work.
I hated seeing signs on that hillside.
In part because I don't like the look of any gorgeous hillside
desecrated with chintzy human signs,
but also because this sign's hieroglyphics were so stupid.
Four stick figures raise their hand
to the sky in a paroxysm of joy.
The joy, I suppose, of heteronormativity.
Here indicated by the fact that one stick figure sports
a triangle skirt.
What is that triangle anyway, Eileen Myles asked, my pussy?
[LAUGHTER]
Protect California children, the stick figures cheered.
Each time I passed the sign I thought about Cathy Opie's
self-portrait from 1993.
Self-Portrait/Cutting, it's called.
In which Opie carved a drawing of a house and two stick figure
women holding hands, two triangle
skirts along with a sun, the cloud, and two birds.
Opie had photographed her back while the drawing was still
dripping with blood.
Art in America wrote, Opie, who had recently broken up
with her partner was longing at the time to start a family
and the image radiates all the painful contradictions
inherent in that wish.
Ugh, I say to Harry, I don't get it.
Who wants a rehash of the Prop 8 poster
but only with two triangle skirts?
Maybe Cathy does, said Harry.
This gave me pause.
Once I wrote a book about domesticity
in the poetry of certain gay men, Ashbery, Schuyler.
And some women, Mayer, Notley.
I wrote this book when I was living
in New York City in a teeny, too hot attic apartment
on a Brooklyn thoroughfare.
I had not a single comfortable chair
to sit in, an unusable stove full of petrified mouse
droppings, an empty fridge, save a couple of beers
and yogurt peanut honey flavored Balance bars,
a dirty futon on a piece of plywood unevenly balanced
on milk crates for a bed, and an F train station
so close below I could hear, stand
clear the closing doors, underneath me
morning, noon, and night.
I spent, approximately, seven hours a day
lying in bed in this apartment, if that.
Mostly, I slept elsewhere.
I wrote most everything I wrote and I
read most everything I read in public just as I
am writing this in public now.
I realize, now, I was so happy renting
in New York City for so long because renting,
or at least the way I rented, which
involved never lifting a finger to better my surroundings,
allows you to let things literally
fall apart around you.
And then when it gets to be too much, you just move on.
Many feminists have argued for, quote,
this is a woman named Susan Freeman,
"the decline of the domestic as a separate inherently female
sphere and the vindication of domesticity
as an ethic, an affect, an aesthetic, and a public"
end quote.
I'm not sure what this vindication would
mean, exactly, though I think in my book
I had been angling for something of the same.
But even then I suspected that I was angling
for it because I didn't have a domestic
and I liked it that way.
Like much of Opie's work, Self-Portrait/Cutting
gains a meaning in series, in context.
The bloody stick figures are in conversation
with the finely carved script of the word, pervert,
which Opie had carved into her chest a year later.
It's also in conversation with the portraits
of all the leather people who have long been Opie's community
and inspiration as well as the heterogeneous lesbian couples
of her domestics series.
And it is in conversation with her Self-Portrait/Nursing from
2004.
Taken about a decade after Self-Portrait/Cutting,
in which Opie holds and beholds her son Oliver while he nurses
with her, pervert, scar still visible albeit ghosted across
her chest.
The 2004 portrait, Nursing, offers a rebus
of sodomitical maternity.
The pervert need not die or even go into hiding per se,
but nor is adult sexuality foisted
upon the child made its burden.
This balance is admirable.
It is also not always easy to maintain.
In a recent interview Opie said, "Between being
a full-time professor, and an artist,
and a mom, and a partner it's not
like I have that much time to go and explore and play S & M style.
Also, all of a sudden you're taking care of a child all day,
your brain doesn't easily switch to, oh great,
now I'm going to hurt somebody."
[LAUGHTER]
End quote.
There is something profound here,
which I will draw but a circle around for you to ponder.
As you ponder, however, know that a difficulty
in shifting gears or a struggle to find the time
is not the same thing as an ontological either/or.
I liked the game Fallen Soldier because it gave me time
to gaze upon Lenny's face in mute repose.
His big almond eyes, his skin just starting to freckle,
and he clearly found some novel relaxing pleasure
in just lying there, protected by his imaginary armor,
while a near stranger, who was quickly becoming family,
picked up each limb and turned it
over trying to find the wound.
I think I'll stop there.
So, thanks you guys for listening.
[APPLAUSE]