WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.920 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.920 --> 00:00:02.720 align:middle line:84% I'm going to try really hard not to do 00:00:02.720 --> 00:00:07.240 align:middle line:84% too much bantering because it gets weird when I do that. 00:00:07.240 --> 00:00:10.760 align:middle line:84% But I will say that I have a PowerPoint. 00:00:10.760 --> 00:00:12.420 align:middle line:84% Because in addition to being a poet, 00:00:12.420 --> 00:00:14.220 align:middle line:84% I am also a gender studies professor. 00:00:14.220 --> 00:00:18.680 align:middle line:84% And so I have to have a PowerPoint. 00:00:18.680 --> 00:00:21.560 align:middle line:84% And I'm going to read three things to you. 00:00:21.560 --> 00:00:26.480 align:middle line:84% I'm going to read one long, two regular. 00:00:26.480 --> 00:00:31.480 align:middle line:84% And the long one is, as TC was talking about this, 00:00:31.480 --> 00:00:35.920 align:middle line:84% it's kind of a poem, kind of an essay directed 00:00:35.920 --> 00:00:39.860 align:middle line:84% to the 20th-century poet, priest, lawyer, 00:00:39.860 --> 00:00:42.400 align:middle line:84% co-founder of the National Organization of Women with Betty 00:00:42.400 --> 00:00:47.480 align:middle line:84% Friedan, He-She personality Pauli Murray, 00:00:47.480 --> 00:00:51.040 align:middle line:84% who sometime in 2020, I was like, 00:00:51.040 --> 00:00:55.920 align:middle line:84% I need an example of somebody who has lived the kind of life 00:00:55.920 --> 00:00:58.160 align:middle line:90% that I might live before. 00:00:58.160 --> 00:01:00.480 align:middle line:90% And I became obsessed with them. 00:01:00.480 --> 00:01:02.820 align:middle line:84% And then I wrote an academic essay about them. 00:01:02.820 --> 00:01:05.640 align:middle line:84% And then I became profoundly embarrassed and ashamed 00:01:05.640 --> 00:01:07.900 align:middle line:90% of that essay. 00:01:07.900 --> 00:01:09.400 align:middle line:84% And so then I wrote this thing which 00:01:09.400 --> 00:01:14.240 align:middle line:84% is a palinode, which is a poem which retracts something 00:01:14.240 --> 00:01:16.260 align:middle line:84% about a former thing that you have written. 00:01:16.260 --> 00:01:21.520 align:middle line:84% So this is a palinode about an essay I wrote about polyamory. 00:01:21.520 --> 00:01:23.200 align:middle line:90% Yeah OK. 00:01:23.200 --> 00:01:25.460 align:middle line:84% It's going to take me like 12 minutes to do this. 00:01:25.460 --> 00:01:27.760 align:middle line:90% So here I go. 00:01:27.760 --> 00:01:30.360 align:middle line:90% Palinode. 00:01:30.360 --> 00:01:32.420 align:middle line:90% It begins with two epigraphs. 00:01:32.420 --> 00:01:35.480 align:middle line:90% 00:01:35.480 --> 00:01:38.680 align:middle line:84% "The proximities of the archive disperse the feeling 00:01:38.680 --> 00:01:41.960 align:middle line:84% of otherwise being consumed by the present and its many 00:01:41.960 --> 00:01:47.000 align:middle line:84% emergences-" Jules Gill-Peterson. 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:50.120 align:middle line:84% "Reading only with and for transsexuals. 00:01:50.120 --> 00:01:55.280 align:middle line:84% I read for my life," Jay Prosser. 00:01:55.280 --> 00:01:56.000 align:middle line:90% Palinode. 00:01:56.000 --> 00:01:59.280 align:middle line:90% 00:01:59.280 --> 00:02:00.260 align:middle line:90% Dear Pauli. 00:02:00.260 --> 00:02:03.060 align:middle line:90% 00:02:03.060 --> 00:02:06.000 align:middle line:84% I've been trying to write about you for some years now 00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:10.280 align:middle line:90% and cannot, have not been able. 00:02:10.280 --> 00:02:14.720 align:middle line:84% Well, other people might say I have been. 00:02:14.720 --> 00:02:19.040 align:middle line:84% I've given talks, there is an essay under contract. 00:02:19.040 --> 00:02:24.080 align:middle line:84% But I haven't been able yet to say what I mean. 00:02:24.080 --> 00:02:26.480 align:middle line:84% Lately, each thing I do is a form 00:02:26.480 --> 00:02:32.960 align:middle line:84% of the epistolary, apostrophe, some particular impossible you. 00:02:32.960 --> 00:02:37.480 align:middle line:84% The problem is, of course, one of audience address. 00:02:37.480 --> 00:02:40.760 align:middle line:90% I cannot have a single thought. 00:02:40.760 --> 00:02:44.120 align:middle line:84% From what I can tell, you didn't have that problem. 00:02:44.120 --> 00:02:47.160 align:middle line:84% You were, I think, able to hold something like a nation 00:02:47.160 --> 00:02:48.880 align:middle line:90% in your head. 00:02:48.880 --> 00:02:51.200 align:middle line:84% Still, it must have eventually driven 00:02:51.200 --> 00:02:56.240 align:middle line:84% you mad from scene to scene, institution to institution, 00:02:56.240 --> 00:02:58.760 align:middle line:90% looking for felicitous language. 00:02:58.760 --> 00:03:00.680 align:middle line:90% The precise vocabulary. 00:03:00.680 --> 00:03:05.160 align:middle line:84% Syntax for making clear what to you was always clear. 00:03:05.160 --> 00:03:08.080 align:middle line:90% That you were alive. 00:03:08.080 --> 00:03:11.720 align:middle line:84% Anyway, I've been having trouble lately. 00:03:11.720 --> 00:03:15.120 align:middle line:84% The sentences either do not come or lie flat or say only 00:03:15.120 --> 00:03:17.520 align:middle line:90% what is obvious to say. 00:03:17.520 --> 00:03:19.820 align:middle line:90% Life hangs beneath the question. 00:03:19.820 --> 00:03:22.440 align:middle line:90% 00:03:22.440 --> 00:03:27.960 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, am I right to say that for you, the poet was 00:03:27.960 --> 00:03:30.560 align:middle line:90% at best a kind of prophet. 00:03:30.560 --> 00:03:35.280 align:middle line:84% Not a fortune teller, but in the biblical tradition, 00:03:35.280 --> 00:03:38.960 align:middle line:84% someone who could sense the future looming in the present. 00:03:38.960 --> 00:03:42.260 align:middle line:84% Who issues the warning, if we do not change our course, 00:03:42.260 --> 00:03:47.120 align:middle line:84% we will be, and thus are already doomed. 00:03:47.120 --> 00:03:51.040 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, in interviews, you say 00:03:51.040 --> 00:03:53.480 align:middle line:84% that writing was what enabled you to bare 00:03:53.480 --> 00:03:56.040 align:middle line:90% your life beneath the question. 00:03:56.040 --> 00:04:00.240 align:middle line:84% It was what you did that is when no other action was possible. 00:04:00.240 --> 00:04:04.070 align:middle line:84% A little valve for when the pressure built, anger 00:04:04.070 --> 00:04:06.750 align:middle line:90% otherwise would kill you. 00:04:06.750 --> 00:04:11.230 align:middle line:84% When asked at 67 at the edge of your fourth, fifth career, 00:04:11.230 --> 00:04:13.350 align:middle line:84% if you would ever let yourself rest, 00:04:13.350 --> 00:04:17.950 align:middle line:84% you said, in short, I'd be dead if I did. 00:04:17.950 --> 00:04:20.890 align:middle line:84% In the essay, the one under contract, 00:04:20.890 --> 00:04:26.270 align:middle line:84% the one I am already ashamed of, I make arguments or try to. 00:04:26.270 --> 00:04:28.710 align:middle line:84% First, I argue that you understood yourself 00:04:28.710 --> 00:04:31.110 align:middle line:90% as living somehow in the future. 00:04:31.110 --> 00:04:33.590 align:middle line:84% Ahead of myself, is how you put it once. 00:04:33.590 --> 00:04:36.070 align:middle line:90% 21 years ahead. 00:04:36.070 --> 00:04:40.030 align:middle line:84% Second, I argue that this is a trans way of occupying time, 00:04:40.030 --> 00:04:43.190 align:middle line:84% living out the future in the present tense, embodying 00:04:43.190 --> 00:04:47.190 align:middle line:84% for others, for yourself, Ernst Bloch's not yet. 00:04:47.190 --> 00:04:50.230 align:middle line:84% It's easy to idealize being imbued 00:04:50.230 --> 00:04:53.870 align:middle line:84% with a sheen of futurity, endless becoming, longing 00:04:53.870 --> 00:04:56.870 align:middle line:90% that propels us et-cetera. 00:04:56.870 --> 00:05:00.750 align:middle line:90% But it's terrible, you know. 00:05:00.750 --> 00:05:04.070 align:middle line:90% Or it is also terrible. 00:05:04.070 --> 00:05:08.030 align:middle line:84% People take up all kinds of postures toward the future. 00:05:08.030 --> 00:05:13.710 align:middle line:84% Hope is one, dread, militarized fear. 00:05:13.710 --> 00:05:19.990 align:middle line:84% I write, if all goes well, to find out what I do not know. 00:05:19.990 --> 00:05:26.710 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, before the war you had been in love. 00:05:26.710 --> 00:05:29.930 align:middle line:84% Not just, that is, experiencing the feeling of love, 00:05:29.930 --> 00:05:31.910 align:middle line:90% but held inside of it. 00:05:31.910 --> 00:05:34.590 align:middle line:84% Held, and then no longer held because love could not 00:05:34.590 --> 00:05:35.950 align:middle line:90% see you as you were. 00:05:35.950 --> 00:05:39.470 align:middle line:84% A man you tried for over a decade to become. 00:05:39.470 --> 00:05:42.710 align:middle line:84% Sex was a scene of your impossibility. 00:05:42.710 --> 00:05:44.470 align:middle line:84% People interpret this in all kinds 00:05:44.470 --> 00:05:48.090 align:middle line:84% of ways, false consciousness, schizophrenia, ego, dystonic, 00:05:48.090 --> 00:05:50.890 align:middle line:84% lesbianism, trans sexuality, the disease of reading. 00:05:50.890 --> 00:05:54.910 align:middle line:90% And sure, sure, me too. 00:05:54.910 --> 00:05:58.190 align:middle line:90% In a prior scene, I am 13. 00:05:58.190 --> 00:06:01.350 align:middle line:84% I've just finished a novel, Middlesex. 00:06:01.350 --> 00:06:04.670 align:middle line:84% I am crouching on the blue carpet of my blue room. 00:06:04.670 --> 00:06:08.030 align:middle line:84% I am straining to sense how I might too have secreted 00:06:08.030 --> 00:06:13.230 align:middle line:90% inside the capacity to change. 00:06:13.230 --> 00:06:17.150 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, about you it was once 00:06:17.150 --> 00:06:19.230 align:middle line:84% reported that your errands were carefully 00:06:19.230 --> 00:06:24.350 align:middle line:84% planned so that you could travel in a circle, not wasting time. 00:06:24.350 --> 00:06:28.150 align:middle line:84% In the essay, I argue that although by the late 1960s 00:06:28.150 --> 00:06:30.850 align:middle line:84% or so you had fallen out of the future, 00:06:30.850 --> 00:06:33.510 align:middle line:84% taken up residence in the past, present tense. 00:06:33.510 --> 00:06:35.510 align:middle line:84% Come to feel history more and more 00:06:35.510 --> 00:06:37.310 align:middle line:90% as a series of closed loops. 00:06:37.310 --> 00:06:41.210 align:middle line:84% We can sense, nonetheless, in your poems, your photographs, 00:06:41.210 --> 00:06:43.990 align:middle line:84% your strained sentences, your trans life preserved 00:06:43.990 --> 00:06:47.890 align:middle line:84% in the aesthetic, you're still latent features given form. 00:06:47.890 --> 00:06:50.790 align:middle line:90% 00:06:50.790 --> 00:06:56.190 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, in 2011, in California, 00:06:56.190 --> 00:06:58.550 align:middle line:84% I rode my bicycle for miles to the office 00:06:58.550 --> 00:07:02.190 align:middle line:84% of a doctor whose name I do not any longer know. 00:07:02.190 --> 00:07:04.790 align:middle line:84% He gave me what nearly a century ago, 00:07:04.790 --> 00:07:09.030 align:middle line:84% I had wanted with a kind of fervor I can never muster. 00:07:09.030 --> 00:07:11.190 align:middle line:90% I'm not saying it was easy. 00:07:11.190 --> 00:07:14.390 align:middle line:84% There had been psychologists and letters and prior attempts 00:07:14.390 --> 00:07:17.350 align:middle line:84% and protracted conflict and years and furtive transit 00:07:17.350 --> 00:07:20.210 align:middle line:84% and paperwork and endless deadening talk, 00:07:20.210 --> 00:07:22.370 align:middle line:90% but it was possible. 00:07:22.370 --> 00:07:25.190 align:middle line:90% 00:07:25.190 --> 00:07:29.430 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, I encounter a thought 00:07:29.430 --> 00:07:30.970 align:middle line:90% that breaks a little more. 00:07:30.970 --> 00:07:32.390 align:middle line:90% My heart. 00:07:32.390 --> 00:07:36.590 align:middle line:84% You say, finally, that race and sex are biologically permanent. 00:07:36.590 --> 00:07:38.650 align:middle line:84% You grow from a child to an adult. 00:07:38.650 --> 00:07:41.330 align:middle line:84% An alien may become a citizen and so on. 00:07:41.330 --> 00:07:43.570 align:middle line:84% But where you have a permanent characteristic, 00:07:43.570 --> 00:07:45.030 align:middle line:84% it is on the basis of one's birth 00:07:45.030 --> 00:07:47.630 align:middle line:84% that one becomes a member of that case. 00:07:47.630 --> 00:07:49.970 align:middle line:84% It is completely imposed upon one, 00:07:49.970 --> 00:07:53.710 align:middle line:84% and there is no way that one can escape. 00:07:53.710 --> 00:07:58.270 align:middle line:84% I don't know when this thought, the finality of it, seized you. 00:07:58.270 --> 00:08:00.810 align:middle line:84% Was it your admiration of Mary Daly, 00:08:00.810 --> 00:08:03.470 align:middle line:90% her writing, her beautiful tan? 00:08:03.470 --> 00:08:06.630 align:middle line:84% Was it that you could no longer bear hope's disappointment? 00:08:06.630 --> 00:08:11.270 align:middle line:84% Was it that you were, in some important way, already dead? 00:08:11.270 --> 00:08:14.230 align:middle line:84% All I know is that, by the end of your life, 00:08:14.230 --> 00:08:16.510 align:middle line:84% having discovered no other way, you 00:08:16.510 --> 00:08:20.570 align:middle line:84% had become convinced that race, that sex, were closed forms. 00:08:20.570 --> 00:08:22.630 align:middle line:90% Pauli, listen. 00:08:22.630 --> 00:08:24.070 align:middle line:90% They aren't. 00:08:24.070 --> 00:08:26.950 align:middle line:90% It isn't. 00:08:26.950 --> 00:08:30.330 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, if you were alive now, 00:08:30.330 --> 00:08:33.110 align:middle line:84% I suspect I wouldn't so admire you. 00:08:33.110 --> 00:08:35.510 align:middle line:84% Lawyer, priest, National Organization 00:08:35.510 --> 00:08:38.429 align:middle line:84% of Women acquainted with the president's wife. 00:08:38.429 --> 00:08:42.549 align:middle line:90% But because you are dead, I do. 00:08:42.549 --> 00:08:44.290 align:middle line:84% Of course, if you were alive now, 00:08:44.290 --> 00:08:46.830 align:middle line:84% you wouldn't be in every important way you. 00:08:46.830 --> 00:08:51.830 align:middle line:84% I spend my whole life trying to convince my students of this. 00:08:51.830 --> 00:08:55.070 align:middle line:84% Our categories have histories, I say, gesturing wildly 00:08:55.070 --> 00:08:57.510 align:middle line:90% with my little nub of chalk. 00:08:57.510 --> 00:08:58.810 align:middle line:90% They're at work. 00:08:58.810 --> 00:09:03.330 align:middle line:84% I use words like contingency, discursive formations, rupture, 00:09:03.330 --> 00:09:04.090 align:middle line:90% rupture. 00:09:04.090 --> 00:09:09.430 align:middle line:84% And yet, today, walking with F around our Massachusetts town, 00:09:09.430 --> 00:09:13.710 align:middle line:84% I insist, as always, on a circular route, coffee, 00:09:13.710 --> 00:09:18.350 align:middle line:84% then groceries, then flowers for its tender efficiency. 00:09:18.350 --> 00:09:21.430 align:middle line:90% Oh, Pauli, how can I help it? 00:09:21.430 --> 00:09:24.860 align:middle line:84% The first, the beautiful thought, you, you. 00:09:24.860 --> 00:09:28.310 align:middle line:90% 00:09:28.310 --> 00:09:32.610 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, I have been wasting time. 00:09:32.610 --> 00:09:42.270 align:middle line:84% Doom is, among other things, why I'm here trying to speak to you. 00:09:42.270 --> 00:09:45.150 align:middle line:90% Dear Pauli. 00:09:45.150 --> 00:09:48.470 align:middle line:84% I guess the truth is that I am not brave. 00:09:48.470 --> 00:09:50.750 align:middle line:90% Do you not want to be brave? 00:09:50.750 --> 00:09:55.790 align:middle line:84% I want my classes, my students, my domestic poems. 00:09:55.790 --> 00:09:58.270 align:middle line:90% I want to move in small circles. 00:09:58.270 --> 00:10:00.550 align:middle line:84% I want 20 minutes in the morning. 00:10:00.550 --> 00:10:01.710 align:middle line:90% The blue couch. 00:10:01.710 --> 00:10:04.670 align:middle line:90% My blue room. 00:10:04.670 --> 00:10:10.210 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, across the country, across the Senate and House 00:10:10.210 --> 00:10:11.990 align:middle line:84% Chambers, and governors' desks and Twitter 00:10:11.990 --> 00:10:13.830 align:middle line:84% feeds, and liberal papers, some of they 00:10:13.830 --> 00:10:17.050 align:middle line:84% is busy legislating sex, race, the people, the human, 00:10:17.050 --> 00:10:18.970 align:middle line:90% et cetera as closed forms. 00:10:18.970 --> 00:10:21.330 align:middle line:84% They are busy, that is, making life impossible. 00:10:21.330 --> 00:10:23.030 align:middle line:90% Always in the name of life. 00:10:23.030 --> 00:10:25.970 align:middle line:84% I can offer endless impersonal explanations, 00:10:25.970 --> 00:10:28.530 align:middle line:84% but I feel at first as numb, hand clenched, 00:10:28.530 --> 00:10:30.590 align:middle line:90% thought bird in the throat. 00:10:30.590 --> 00:10:32.150 align:middle line:90% What was it you said? 00:10:32.150 --> 00:10:35.470 align:middle line:84% Race is the atmosphere we breathe from day to day. 00:10:35.470 --> 00:10:38.530 align:middle line:84% The pervasive irritant, the chronic allergy, 00:10:38.530 --> 00:10:41.030 align:middle line:84% the vague apprehension that made one, 00:10:41.030 --> 00:10:46.230 align:middle line:90% makes one uncomfortable, jumpy. 00:10:46.230 --> 00:10:51.330 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, even now, I can't say what I mean. 00:10:51.330 --> 00:10:54.110 align:middle line:90% 00:10:54.110 --> 00:11:00.070 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, I am writing to you because I cannot write. 00:11:00.070 --> 00:11:02.890 align:middle line:84% Everywhere there is language, language, language, 00:11:02.890 --> 00:11:05.890 align:middle line:84% enumerations of the problem, diagnoses the problem, 00:11:05.890 --> 00:11:09.070 align:middle line:84% beginning as far back as I can imagine, farther still. 00:11:09.070 --> 00:11:11.210 align:middle line:90% In class, I pace with my chalk. 00:11:11.210 --> 00:11:15.290 align:middle line:84% I circle the room, the words e.g. neoliberalism, biopolitics, 00:11:15.290 --> 00:11:18.710 align:middle line:84% coloniality, modernity, the nuclear family form, and so on, 00:11:18.710 --> 00:11:20.890 align:middle line:90% draw desperate crooked lines. 00:11:20.890 --> 00:11:24.350 align:middle line:90% I say and say and what for? 00:11:24.350 --> 00:11:31.710 align:middle line:84% Increasingly, I think, the only word that might matter is no. 00:11:31.710 --> 00:11:37.510 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, the more I look at you, 00:11:37.510 --> 00:11:40.710 align:middle line:84% the more I am overcome with an eerie feeling. 00:11:40.710 --> 00:11:43.150 align:middle line:84% A visceral near identification that 00:11:43.150 --> 00:11:45.170 align:middle line:84% seems, against my better judgment, 00:11:45.170 --> 00:11:46.990 align:middle line:90% that it might rescue me. 00:11:46.990 --> 00:11:50.470 align:middle line:84% I have become, frankly, fixated on this image of you, 00:11:50.470 --> 00:11:52.870 align:middle line:84% you who are prolific amidst Jim Crow, 00:11:52.870 --> 00:11:55.430 align:middle line:84% the fascist American mid-century, the Great 00:11:55.430 --> 00:11:58.190 align:middle line:84% Depression, your endless dislocation and pursuit 00:11:58.190 --> 00:12:01.450 align:middle line:84% of meaningful work, the atmosphere of anti-blackness, 00:12:01.450 --> 00:12:04.400 align:middle line:84% the deathly race, gender politics of the University. 00:12:04.400 --> 00:12:06.600 align:middle line:84% Your loneliness, your unruly mind. 00:12:06.600 --> 00:12:09.220 align:middle line:84% The thwarting of your trans desires during a tipping point 00:12:09.220 --> 00:12:12.040 align:middle line:84% when sex change was heralded as newly possible. 00:12:12.040 --> 00:12:14.380 align:middle line:84% Fixated on the questions of how you 00:12:14.380 --> 00:12:16.120 align:middle line:90% thought under these conditions. 00:12:16.120 --> 00:12:19.780 align:middle line:84% How you endured the present tense, dear Pauli, no! 00:12:19.780 --> 00:12:20.620 align:middle line:90% No. 00:12:20.620 --> 00:12:21.340 align:middle line:90% No. 00:12:21.340 --> 00:12:21.840 align:middle line:90% No. 00:12:21.840 --> 00:12:22.340 align:middle line:90% No. 00:12:22.340 --> 00:12:22.780 align:middle line:90% No. 00:12:22.780 --> 00:12:23.180 align:middle line:90% No. 00:12:23.180 --> 00:12:23.580 align:middle line:90% No. 00:12:23.580 --> 00:12:24.080 align:middle line:90% No. 00:12:24.080 --> 00:12:31.340 align:middle line:90% No, no, no, no, no, no, no. 00:12:31.340 --> 00:12:38.380 align:middle line:90% No, no, no, no. 00:12:38.380 --> 00:12:41.100 align:middle line:90% No. 00:12:41.100 --> 00:12:41.680 align:middle line:90% No. 00:12:41.680 --> 00:12:45.860 align:middle line:90% 00:12:45.860 --> 00:12:46.380 align:middle line:90% No. 00:12:46.380 --> 00:12:50.500 align:middle line:90% 00:12:50.500 --> 00:12:57.540 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, I am standing before a crowd of people. 00:12:57.540 --> 00:13:02.620 align:middle line:84% People I admire, talking incoherently about you. 00:13:02.620 --> 00:13:04.980 align:middle line:90% My pursuit of you. 00:13:04.980 --> 00:13:08.020 align:middle line:84% What everyone will remember is that I am lonely 00:13:08.020 --> 00:13:12.700 align:middle line:84% or that I have formal questions about loneliness, 00:13:12.700 --> 00:13:15.940 align:middle line:84% about whether it is a feeling that produces continuity, 00:13:15.940 --> 00:13:19.420 align:middle line:84% a desire for continuity where there might more ethically 00:13:19.420 --> 00:13:21.500 align:middle line:90% be rupture. 00:13:21.500 --> 00:13:23.620 align:middle line:84% All day they come up to me to report 00:13:23.620 --> 00:13:26.100 align:middle line:84% that they like what I said about loneliness, 00:13:26.100 --> 00:13:28.900 align:middle line:90% which makes me suspicious. 00:13:28.900 --> 00:13:30.380 align:middle line:90% Am I lonely? 00:13:30.380 --> 00:13:32.900 align:middle line:90% Am I lonely? 00:13:32.900 --> 00:13:35.320 align:middle line:84% My days are crowded with other people. 00:13:35.320 --> 00:13:37.940 align:middle line:90% 00:13:37.940 --> 00:13:43.540 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, I look for as long as I can stand 00:13:43.540 --> 00:13:46.540 align:middle line:90% at one particular image of you. 00:13:46.540 --> 00:13:48.420 align:middle line:90% You as young man. 00:13:48.420 --> 00:13:50.060 align:middle line:90% You as Pete. 00:13:50.060 --> 00:13:53.820 align:middle line:84% You as self-proclaimed vagabond and a leather coat. 00:13:53.820 --> 00:13:56.220 align:middle line:90% I go tender for this image. 00:13:56.220 --> 00:13:58.040 align:middle line:90% You are young, little brother. 00:13:58.040 --> 00:13:59.700 align:middle line:90% So young. 00:13:59.700 --> 00:14:02.160 align:middle line:84% This is before Bellevue and the rest home. 00:14:02.160 --> 00:14:04.140 align:middle line:84% Before the arrests and the intake forms 00:14:04.140 --> 00:14:05.740 align:middle line:90% and your desperate lines. 00:14:05.740 --> 00:14:07.540 align:middle line:84% Before you spread beneath the knife 00:14:07.540 --> 00:14:09.360 align:middle line:90% in search of hidden organs. 00:14:09.360 --> 00:14:11.160 align:middle line:90% Before the first end of love. 00:14:11.160 --> 00:14:14.320 align:middle line:84% Before you are refused and refused and refused and made, 00:14:14.320 --> 00:14:17.420 align:middle line:84% I can't help but think, into the bravest thing. 00:14:17.420 --> 00:14:21.180 align:middle line:90% Black girl, Black woman. 00:14:21.180 --> 00:14:23.420 align:middle line:84% Once, after a talk, someone asked 00:14:23.420 --> 00:14:27.580 align:middle line:84% if I thought the name your name Pete was a biblical reference. 00:14:27.580 --> 00:14:29.740 align:middle line:90% Peter, Paul, et cetera. 00:14:29.740 --> 00:14:34.380 align:middle line:84% Honestly, it hadn't occurred to me. 00:14:34.380 --> 00:14:39.760 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, there is, as far as I know, 00:14:39.760 --> 00:14:43.920 align:middle line:84% no tense, not in English, to describe the shape of time 00:14:43.920 --> 00:14:45.340 align:middle line:90% you help me see. 00:14:45.340 --> 00:14:46.820 align:middle line:90% The was will be. 00:14:46.820 --> 00:14:48.500 align:middle line:90% The salted circle. 00:14:48.500 --> 00:14:52.340 align:middle line:90% The still not yet. 00:14:52.340 --> 00:14:58.060 align:middle line:84% Dear Pauli, your name for her, your first great love 00:14:58.060 --> 00:15:04.940 align:middle line:84% was Pan, Pete and Pan, the boy who would not grow up. 00:15:04.940 --> 00:15:08.160 align:middle line:84% The boy who returns and returns to the same house. 00:15:08.160 --> 00:15:09.320 align:middle line:90% The same window. 00:15:09.320 --> 00:15:12.140 align:middle line:90% Though nothing ever is the same. 00:15:12.140 --> 00:15:16.260 align:middle line:84% Pauli, the truth is, after all this time, 00:15:16.260 --> 00:15:20.180 align:middle line:84% I want him, simply, to have lived. 00:15:20.180 --> 00:15:27.820 align:middle line:84% I think this means shamefully, inconceivably, I want to live. 00:15:27.820 --> 00:15:28.960 align:middle line:90% To have lived. 00:15:28.960 --> 00:15:32.180 align:middle line:90% 00:15:32.180 --> 00:15:36.340 align:middle line:84% And though no word was uttered above the tumult of advancing 00:15:36.340 --> 00:15:42.160 align:middle line:84% tide, you came, uncalled, and placed your hand in mine. 00:15:42.160 --> 00:15:42.660 align:middle line:90% Thanks. 00:15:42.660 --> 00:15:45.630 align:middle line:90% [CROWD APPLAUSE] 00:15:45.630 --> 00:15:55.740 align:middle line:90% 00:15:55.740 --> 00:16:02.980 align:middle line:84% I think maybe I'll just leave up this image of Pauli and Peggy 00:16:02.980 --> 00:16:04.890 align:middle line:90% at the beach.