Afterglow_a dog memoir

by Eileen Myles

  Look at the shows that are around right now—in LA, in New York. One in Spain. Everyone’s looking at women. It’s big. [Look down.] Great. My foam just rang. Ha-ha. Julie’s not coming. Great. But [puts phone away] this guy, the scientist Julie told me about is recording melting. Sound tells us how fast global warming is occurring. I once called a glacier and heard it speak. No that’s true. You’ll find it in Iceland not to uh utterly reference my own work. The structure of crystals is not unlike the structure of foam. I’m talking in a women’s thing today. Right and today millions of women are rising up all over the world in light of the violence against them. The feminist shows I think are in light of war. Didn’t we just attack Iraq for no good reason. The Brooklyn Museum in response bought Judy Chicago’s dinner party. So fucked up! [Slam hand.] Other museums had similar shows. To create the illusion of an economy. I don’t think it worked. But here’s what women artists did. They were measuring. They were recording the family as part of the science of feminism. This is serious. This is what they did in the sixties seventies and eighties. Mary Kelley creates a chart of her baby crying on graph paper. Eleanor Antin does one about the in-laws coming over. Go right to the museum and see it. It’s like personal art gone conceptual or vice versa. Because the feminist artists understood the radical ironies of living in the 20th c. more than anyone else because they were women and had not ever been fully breathed into the economy. In the pathetic course at UCSD (I sprinkle it here) I simply taught that those guys studied with these women. The gay ones even having dances for themselves with long velvety banners and making cushions with things on them about dyke love. They were making craft stuff in the seventies and eighties not like PTSD World War II dads making bird houses in the garage (well exactly the same.) These ladies no their collectivity was something monumental that floated rage and was for sexual freedom and also made jokes. Problem still was they were women. The art world had to wait twenty years for the guys to come along and paint their diaries large on the walls of major museums and write about their personal lives and make bad cartoons and knit bunnies. The concept is clear when a man does it because a man has to DO SOMETHING in order to be pathetic. He is not intrinsically pathetic like a woman is.

  Mike Kelley actually said in an interview around 2004 that despite people always asking him about feminism and its affects on him it was really beside the point because when he does craft he is being IRONIC whereas when a woman does it she is being natural. I don’t think these women knew that. Which is the difference between a woman and a man. A woman may think she knows something but in time history will see that she is just being a natural woman whereas if man means something, it stays. There’s a monument to men, that’s what the world is.

  Okay. I’m still thinking about the books we read in class. Dialogues in Paradise by Can Xue has a woman who had an awful mother. A horrible ranting woman. Makes you jump a bit? I like that. A woman so bad her own daughter had to leave the room. There was a bucket of water in the room and when the daughter returned her mother was gone and there were just some dirty bubbles on the surface of the water. And dirty clothes next to the bucket. The mother was gone yet her cruel complaining words were still bursting out from under the water. Bah Bah Bah. Complaining and making life miserable for people. The horrible speech kept ascending and falling back into the slimy bucket. It was beautiful. She was melting, becoming less. In the end the mother was just this slimy residue. Of sound?

  There was foam all over the books I assigned. No one was following it but me. Foam again I’d shout. It was not the thing the class was about. This slime on the side saying something. My plan for today’s talk was to go back and re-read those books and see what the foam was all about. Valerie Solanas. Robert Walser. Samuel Delany. Laurie Weeks. Dodie Bellamy. Kevin Killian. Deleuze. All frothy spitters and droolers. The books among other things were about gender. Because gender makes excess especially when it’s unstable which it always is. It’s pathetic. It has some extra stuff and it expresses itself in nature in these tiny bubbles on the sides of trees. Speech coagulated or blasting from the corners of your mouth. Balloons rising from the cartoon heads. Talking, yeah, but what about thinking.

  That’s where bubbles come in. It’s pretty quiet in here right now but I know that you’re thinking. Like to take responsibility for those thoughts. [Opens can of diet coke with a loud pop.]

  OK there’s just something hopelessly queer about foam. Last night I found these things about buildings in China:

  The Water Cube employs water as a structural and thematic “leitmotiv” with the square, the primal shape of the house in Chinese tradition and mythology. The structure of the water cube is based on a unique, lightweight construction derived from the structure of water in the state of aggregation of foam [my emphasis] deduced by Weiare and Phelan of Trinity College, Dublin.

  Behind the apparently random appearance hides a strict geometry found in natural systems such as crystals, cells and molecular structures. By applying novel materials and technology, the transparency and randomness is transposed into the inner and outer okay blah blah blah … Conceptually the square box and the interior spaces are carved out of an undefined cluster of foam bubbles, symbolizing a condition of nature that is transformed into a condition of culture.

  I don’t think there’s a wrong place to turn here, do you? So marvelous. One of these descriptions of foam architecture actually talked about the yin and the yang the implicitly masculine and feminine aspects of these kinds of structures. And of course sea foam.

  In Greek mythology, Aphrodite is the goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture. According to Hesiod, she was born when Uranus (the father of the gods) was castrated by his son Cronus. Cronus threw the severed genitals into the ocean which began to churn and foam about them. From the aphros (sea foam) arose Aphrodite, and the sea carried her to either Cyprus or Cythera …

  When I told Jocelyn Saidenberg about this she informed me that Cronus in fact castrated his father because he could not bear the spectacle of watching his mother Gaia be incessantly raped. That is so amazing to me. I have always hated Ovid because it is just rape. I hate reading myths. I liked them when I was a kid because I didn’t know what sex I was. And I hate history. Iceland is essentially populated by the descendants of raped women. Probably all of us are, right.

  When I moved to New York in the mid 70s my roommate showed me a lesbian poetry magazine called Aphra. I kept throwing my stuff at them and got rejected again and again. I didn’t even like the poems in that magazine. I didn’t know it mattered. I didn’t know about liking yet. The journal ran for only eight issues. I think it’s because they named it wrong. Because aphra means dust. To be fair, a snowflake is dust with a little activity going on. Yet foam (aphros) is code for a deeper knowing. Like magazines. And even books are not about the work, but an experience or a place. I can already imagine you getting mad when you hear this. Good! My purpose is this.

  Aphroi (Africans): Name of a people; the Karthaginians. [They are descended] from Aphros who was king of Libye, the son of Kronos by Philyra.

  See the information’s a little buried here. I’m reading it to Joan (Larkin) and she says that makes sense because supposedly Africa was “the middle of the world.” The birthplace of the human race. You okay?

  April is first recorded in English in 1297, as “aueril.” It comes from Old French “avrill,” which is from Latin (mensis) Aprilis “(month) (mons) of Venus,” the second month of the ancient Roman calendar, dedicated to the goddess Venus.

  The Roman goddess had many names, as she absorbed different regional and cultic fertility goddesses in Italy. The name used for this month [the one we’re in!] is perhaps based on Apru, an Etruscan borrowing of Greek Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty. Her Greek name traditionally is derived from aphros “foam,” from the story of her birth, but perhaps it is ultimately from Phoenician Ashtaroth (Assyrian Ishtar).

  Let me give you this one little bit of finale:

&n
bsp; Aphrodite’s counterpart in ancient Roman mythology, Venus, was the goddess of beauty and love, especially sensual love, and Venus in Latin literally means “love, sexual desire, loveliness, beauty, charm.” The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European base of this is wen—W-E-N—“to strive after, wish, desire, be satisfied.”

  I feel like this talk is a libretto. It’s not here. You know what I’m saying …

  My point? Foam means I want. Is it the trail of it, the tingling stuff on the side as I’m reaching. Cunty, even? Waters churning when they pitched the severed genitals in. Like cooking right. Not that I cook.

  Joan, it’s like magic. The woman stirring the pot is a witch. The woman’s place in the kitchen is like … a castrated form of magic.

  Eileen I think cooking is powerful stuff. Joan’s a good cook. Okay but … don’t you love the idea of a dick and balls whatever Cronus cut off his father becoming an ingredient, like mandrake root, lizard foot rather than a grand force, just another item in the soup. Throw it in. [Splash.]

  Stir, stir. Well that’s good said Joan. I like ingredients, she said.

  I think foam also looks like pubic hair. Sort of curly. Waves, like design. In church, I thought. This is from 1960 or ’61. I’m with the Delays, Patty and Ruthy. We’re in a pool in my backyard and my mother had thrown some soap flakes in with us so we are playing in foam. I guess when mothers see kids in water they immediately got cooking turning play into a bath but we turned soap into hair. Did you do that—you know draping soap bubbles under our arms, on our chins and sideburns and laughing when my mother went upstairs—between our legs. Make a big hairy ass Patty urged as Ruthy obligingly got on all fours. The future was a joke and we told it in soap.

  But how did we know about all that hair, our sex, what did we feel. Did we know hair falls out when you’re old. How do I feel about this. And you stay clean longer. The soap goes the hair goes everything. They wash your body when you’re dead. The foam dries between your legs and nobody cares. Doesn’t even feel bad.

  Look at these little wands I have. Like letters. Bubbles on a stick.

  Joan reminded me of soap pipes. This is in the forties and fifties. You would have a pipe and your mother would supply you with a bowl of soapy water and you filled your pipe and sat at a table blowing bubbles out of it, streams of soap bubbles pouring down. Not hair but smoke, that was the sign of the adult. Pouring out of their nostrils, drifting from their hands as they spoke. Lighting up when they got together. Sharing a light. Got a match. Think of the magic of that intimate sharing. The bending, cupping and smiling. Cigarettes in bed. On the plane. Opening the jacket. Now the smokers are all outside. Shall we join them?

  My dream is that history is backwards. What if I’m born of him, Cronus—of his anger and his drunkenness and the ripe destruction of his father’s weapons. I’m for it. And I know these men.

  This myth might take the story back. When I was a little kid we went to a beach called Stage Fort Park in Gloucester just like on over-cast days. It was foggy and I was always dreaming of my little men. I feel I was born there. The beach was a dream all covered in fat brown seaweed and these rubber balls I thought grew naturally there and I feel I could almost hear my boyfriends wandering and whispering. Blinking and vanishing. My family was always in such a rush. We didn’t have time. Can we go back there and find him. He has to be there. I keep looking in the spray and mist for him, my son.

  5. I gave this talk at the San Diego Women’s Center in 2007. Then I wedged myself onto a panel about Hyper-objects at the Eco-poetics conference in Berkeley (2013). Timothy Morton was our chair but he didn’t show. Probably my fault. Then in April of 2015 Jennifer Firestone invites me to give a talk at the New School on Feminism, Pedagogy & Writing. I gave it there, I give it here. EM

  xxx

  We’re sniffing in front of the techno house that has fights and Ernie jet black Ernie is there. Who pissed here. It’s later in the day and the shadows are covering the street. The neighbor says hello but I think she’s monitoring us. She laughs cause the cat’s taking a walk with us yeah I actually make her laugh in that friendly way. I say something and she dangles her baby out the door so I can take her picture too.

  We examine the glories of a very distressed yellow fireplug marked with the tell tale “R.” Not graffiti. That’s fire department. Meanwhile the gentle tap tap tap of the music of the house still pouring out. One side of the fireplug is blue. Chalk blue. I want to say scrawl. The cat seems to get distracted so I’m luring him in. He looks back at this day. More agitated it holds a white dog barking jumping up and down. The wall behind him is rose faded salmon in sunlight going to white. Blazing. My yard he barks. My sidewalk. We’re close up and all we see is whiteness and fence. The entwined genius of chain-link fence. Leg’s barking a brindle head staring. Is it two dogs. I see anger & long stuffed yearning. These dogs are fucked.

  Finally Rosie leading with her head. Fences covered in dried vines strings of green leaves. Rose says (sniffing) covered in piss. Her fur has thinned one black stripe gleaming in the sun as it fades to the sides. She’s clean as hell she’s bathed a lot because of her skin. Here’s another dog. Poodle I think, white. Each dog animates a yard: I’m here and what the fuck do you think I’m doing. Everyone’s “in” when they’d rather be out—they’re in-out in their kingdom. This is all ours me and Rose. Cause of this ritual, our walk. Because of the camera. I remember when they built that strange web of supportive stone beneath this fence. Really fucking ugly. It’s the fashion here. To r-a-i-s-e the yard. I think of the violent husband I met one day yes this is the violent reward. Beauty just a big apology. This dog’s got button nose button eyes lifts his head to show chin but mostly he stares. This dog wants to play. I am locked in my position attached to you and you continue to sniff. Now a baby squeals, dogs barking and across the street on a low wall of brick lions. We look across the street and back. Bark bark bark. Thank god there you go with your sandy back. Oh and now an empty bag of Lay’s. I’m trying to duplicate what the dog sees like ecstasy but it’s not. There’s a small purple flower the sweetest thing with its folds and its brighter pinker twin you look in the flower and it’s paler I can’t just go white but the flower does. A silent blaring horn. Finally you head with the white dab onto the screen. Into the square. We walk along a row of leaves chewed on by bugs purple flowers cars telephone poles trees this is California. Little luxuriant a little condemned. O look what we did. When all this was canyons and wild. Only blue. That god. Wand of the telephone pole reaching beyond makes this blue square active. Wad of me walking and you. Head and shoulders. Little mayor with your neck and head covered in light now and we turn onto a street that is dirt.

  The Navel

  Women above all should not drink. Gender is an untrustworthy system and at the deepest point its waters are pure myth. If you could see the supreme board of all of mankind unfortunately these records are being updated really wish I could show you but I can’t. Trust me that where each of us is checked off as M [] or F [] that column is blank. Well what am I you’re asking. Blank. That’s what I said. My father? Blank. My lover? My mother? Blank. Gender is a place you have parked your car one day and one day only. That day is your life. And in that spot a mother’s inattention opens directly onto the Chora6 space which is everything, the source of language for example so in every instance we urge females not to drink because with each sip they are destroying the language which will happen soon enough. I do not mean no drinking so that they will not be raped. They will be raped. The females will always be raped. The tablets have been smashed, and they will be smashed again. We are keeping no secrets but holding back only temporalities. And as to whether you are this or that (I mean gender) obviously there is no need to keep records of that tiny insignificance.

  I said earlier that if every cell in your body had a vote, you would be in the minority. Now think of yourself as a working cell of some other kind of entity, not even an entity, but something huge and dog-shaped. Recall
if you will the Jeff Koons leafy dog that spent some weeks in Rockefeller Plaza maybe ten years ago. You saw it right? Go there now. Think of that dog being pulled through history on a leash and that is time. Imagine a model of dog, god, dog, god. Like that. Imagine its mind. You are in it.

  On the cover of this book will be a picture that came to me one day and I7 took it with my cell phone and it became my wallpaper. I looked at that picture daily until the end of Rosie’s life and we shall say it is a photograph of an abstraction we are living in which is the universe and the dog’s position in it. The dog stands between the darkness and light, the dog only knows. An earlier poet Rilke said this. What the Rilke did not know because there were not cell phones yet and so the union of the picture and sound was not yet complete (except in churches) is the fact that yes a dog was looking at death but in this photograph I share she is also looking beyond it at the light. And then the darkness again.

  That is the procession of the universe, a system of stripes, or a time which is one of the codes of knowing. People like stripes. I urge you to read my talk on liking. Perhaps it is in here. Footnote maybe. It is essential. More than love. Yes. I suppose at the simplest level stripes are a picture of the sea. Also we may associate them with a nautical uniform. But because a navy’s ultimate aim is destruction and death, to create higher and higher incidences of drowning we have to remember that the navy’s use of stripes is not on the order of knowing but of seeing.

  The navy, all navies are faulty reaches towards wisdom, the simplest reaches towards wisdom, the simplest fisherman or sailor is not, the scuba diver is not, though the touristy scuba diver is faulty, is hurting the coral that is related to foam which I believe I may say quite a lot about in the past. I see foam as the subject of a book. Foam is pure knowing, foam is pure birthing, foam is a depiction of the supreme board without pictures. It is a dream of cells, a dream of being. And as you know the ocean is covered in foam and so is beer and that is very soon where I am going. The presentation on foam will be naturally incomplete. Necessarily. Even a wheel is full of holes. Spokes to turn … That is it.