Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  22.

  Because we are, at heart, a stone, or understand that our short impulses have unyielding stoniness as their career’s end, we try to fill our days with as many impediments as possible. “Very difficult very difficult,” Vincent van Gogh repeated, without a comma, in a letter to his brother Theo. Vincent was in the last year of his life; fresh from the asylum, he busied himself with forecasts. “For there are beautiful autumn effects to do . . . [T]he olive trees are very characteristic, and I am struggling to capture them. They are silver, sometimes more blue, sometimes greenish, bronzed, whitening on ground that is yellow, pink, purplish or orangeish to dull red ochre. But very difficult very difficult.” (“Mais fort difficile fort difficile.”) Is he bragging about the difficulty? Worried about it? Difficult for him, because of his addiction to infelicity, or difficult for anyone, even the most conventionally skilled? Did he understand that this difficulty would become, in a decade or two, modernity’s braggart signature? And are we wrong, or hasty, or tendentious, to point out an affinity between difficulty and a sentence’s tempo, its repetitions and pauseless staggering? It’s tendentious, perhaps, to cling to any system, including the protocols I employ to inch forward my language, as if I feared that language’s deeper wish (its bottom nature) were to cease, and as if I were (as writer) always in the position of goosing language to keep it going. Dreams, in Freud’s view, might have been a system to keep wishes going; dream-codes (condensation, displacement, and other forms of symbolization) served not to express wishes but to produce them, and then to pretend that the wishes came first.

  23.

  “The odor of rot had become so general that he no longer smelled it,” writes Richard Wright in his story “The Man Who Lived Underground.” I don’t live underground; nor, precisely, did Wright, though he lived within a system of racism and actual bodily peril that gave him license to use the metaphor. How I generalize, and why I generalize, and if I have the right to generalize, are the questions preoccupying me now. Rot has become general; I don’t want to be complicit—or to admit my complicity—with its spread. (If, in this essay, I have an unstated, impossible subject, it might be ecocide and its embeddedness within linguistic inattentiveness—call it the rot of the world’s speaking mouth or the world’s listening ear.) If we carelessly lump concepts together, or if we think too rigidly within a system of concepts, we may succumb to false certainty, and to tones of voice that can speciously argue for anything, and that can malignly side with a cultural system forbidding slow discernment.

  24.

  Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, who lived underground, at least for a time (he escaped from a prison camp and lived secretly in an apartment), and who lost his left eye to shrapnel in 1945, had a complex relation to systems. Was his relation amative or suspicious? (Although he is celebrated for engendering a math-oriented compositional philosophy known as musique stochastique, I imagine that he regarded systems with a mixture of fear and love.) In an essay entitled “The Crisis of Serial Music,” he writes: “Linear polyphony destroys itself by its very complexity; what one hears is in reality nothing but a mass of notes in various registers.” I hear the semicolon dividing his sentence in two. The text’s original is in French, though published in a German journal; Xenakis was born in Romania to Greek parents. Did he experience this abundance of languages as a destructive polyphony? Please note that stochastic comes from a Greek word meaning “aim.”

  25.

  My aim? I fear that aiming is violent. To tend—stochastic music relies on probability, not on ironclad will—is gentler than to aim. Poets rarely aim; essayists sometimes aim. (Maybe Homer aimed. Homer wrote the book about shrapnel.) John Yau, an art critic as well as poet, composed a poem (“830 Fireplace Road”) that consists of variations on a sentence by Jackson Pollock, who pioneered a metaphoric relation between urination and painting, and whose works seem governed by wish rather than intention, and by tendency rather than decision. “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing”: that’s Pollock’s line. One variation, coined by Yau, is “When I am my painting, I’m not aware of what I am.” “I” is an aim; I don’t need to aim my “I,” which comes equipped with memories, patterns, and habits. To mute the possible violence of an aimed “I,” we punctuate our impulses, lest our impulses take revenge by punctuating us. Pollock didn’t aim at the tree his car hit.

  26.

  We have reached the end of our journey. On October 17, 1970, Unica Zürn, a Surrealist artist and writer, killed herself by jumping off the sixth-floor balcony of photographer Hans Bellmer’s apartment, in Paris. Her novel Dark Spring (translated by Caroline Rupprecht), written in 1967, ends with the suicide of a twelve-year-old girl. “‘It’s over,’ she says quietly, and feels dead already, even before her feet leave the windowsill. She falls on her head and breaks her neck. Strangely contorted, her small body lies in the grass. The first one to find her is the dog. He sticks his head between her legs and begins licking her.” These last two sentences have no commas. Speediness and matter-of-factness and pauselessness underscore their obscenity, their lack of affect. Who sees the dog lick the dead girl? The writer sees. Unica Zürn sees, and writes it down, and wants us to see it, too. Dark Spring was written originally in German. “He sticks his head between her legs and begins licking her” might have commas in German. “The first one to find her is the dog” might have commas in German. I don’t know why it matters whether or not these two sentences have commas; I came to the scene of this essay, the one I’m now ending, to get assistance in figuring out why it matters whether or not there were commas in the German original of the death scene. It would be tendentious to point out that Paul Celan killed himself, also in Paris, in April 1970, almost exactly six months before Unica Zürn leapt to her death. It would be misleading, it would be melodramatic, to say that six months punctuated the two suicides.

  (2014)

  ON FUTILITY, HOLES, AND HERVé GUIBERT

  In a somber essay I wrote in 1989 and haven’t reread in twenty-five years, a piece whose heavyhearted title was “Speaking in the Shadow of AIDS,” I concluded: “The motive behind this brief inquiry into AIDS and language has been an attempt, perhaps immodest, to mold words into something stainless. AIDS has made me watch my speech, as if my words were a second, more easily monitored body, less liable than the first to the whimsy of a virus. . . . Bodies have always wanted only one thing, to be aimless: or so I say, knowing that bodies, and always, and aimless, are among the most seductive, and the most outdated, of the several rhetorics I must soon discard.” I still haven’t discarded those rhetorics. When I wrote these words, I hadn’t yet heard of Hervé Guibert, the French novelist, memoirist, critic, and photographer who would die of AIDS in 1991, at the age of thirty-six. I regret my ignorance. Now, after reading his posthumously published journals, translated into English by Nathanaël and published by Nightboat Books, Guibert’s life-work looms before me not merely as what Keats called (describing the Elgin Marbles) the “shadow of a magnitude” but as the magnitude itself, sans shadow.

  I might as well mention some impediments. I can’t write about Guibert without mentioning his beautiful face: his literary greatness is tied, Laocoön-style, to his attractiveness. I can’t write about Guibert without noting the historical coincidence that he’s dead and I’m not: he was born only three years before me. And I can’t objectively evaluate the work of a writer I take personally and envy, though I can’t entirely wish to trade places with a man—however much he qualifies as an idealizable hyacinth—who died so young.

  Must I admit impediments—or, as Francis Ponge put it, “open a notebook”—to write a simple essay? No essay is ever simple. Listen to Ponge: “I never choose the easiest subjects; that’s why I choose the mimosa. And since it’s a very difficult subject, I must open a notebook.”

  Time to plunge into the explanatory task. End of notebook.

  Genet’s work might have taught the young Guibert to connect violence and desire, or
maybe the wunderkind figured it out for himself. With or without tutelage, he quickly discovered how to worship a beautiful body while also wishing to despoil it. Punctures and holes gave him literary energy; gold-panner, he remapped the male body (not famous for its holes) as a gap-ridden and therefore ontologically profound locale. To acknowledge plural orifices is to acquire—if not agency—then majesty, complexity, cavernousness, tingle, introspection, enigma. And therefore Guibert (with Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, Tony Duvert, Dennis Cooper, Pierre Guyotat) sought to write hole-conscious fiction and theory, a prose eager for rifts in maleness wherever those rifts could be found.

  Guibert’s journals, The Mausoleum of Lovers, form a vast arena of such holes—an operating theater, a humming phalanstery; filled, yes, with jetting, penetration, jacking off, and with anuses that are distinctly male—but also writing these hot zones in time and not as monolithic forces, writing these pricks and surges of desire as mistakes, falls from grace, and narrative absences. Where story falls apart, Guibert’s journal begins; where an erection happens, writing becomes futile but also gains the energy to articulate its own futility. Erection—occasion for journal-writing—announces not a triumphant arrival but an aporia, a goof, a misprision, a chance to stumble into impossible, irresolute speech.

  Guibert became famous in France in 1990 when he published a roman à clef about Foucault’s death, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. (This book’s notoriety seemed to center on Foucault’s scandal, not on Guibert’s artistry, as if the younger novelist needed the sage philosopher’s authorization to register on the media’s map.) Guibert published many short, svelte books that straddle the line between memoir and novel (including My Parents, Blindsight, and The Gangsters), but every project took root in his notebooks, a hive of errant record-keeping, with family resemblances to such untidy masterpieces as Gide’s and Thoreau’s journals, Valéry’s Cahiers, and Lichtenberg’s Waste Books. Guibert’s published work, even at its most elegant and stylized, retains the casual intimacy of his journals. He valued the diary, as genre, not because it had the potential to be supremely honed but because it wrote time and wrote body accurately, wrote body as it actually occurred, nonmonumentally, in time. Plotless, accidental, the journals exceed authorial jurisdiction; they do not reduce to a clear, univocal intention. Gestated originally for private purposes, they are not wholly aimed toward reader, publication, or closure.

  An unbridled, impatiently probing eroticism gives heat to Guibert’s clock-haunted Mausoleum. What he eventually suffered, and what killed him, took place in time, and had a relation to his sexuality. Let me put it more “safely”: the discourses engulfing AIDS were precisely the languages of wound—of contamination, filth, and mistake—that he’d already been plumbing and relishing, vocabularies he obtained from Genet, from the données of the French language, from Barthes and Foucault, from looking in the mirror, from his camera, from pornography, from his crazy great-aunts, from his mother who wiped his bottom until he was thirteen years old, from his father who punched him in the jaw. The rhetorics of wound and of abjection that nourished him and that formed the nucleus of his sexual imaginaire were then drowned out and ventriloquized by the mythologies of AIDS; Guibert already spoke the lingo of Wilde’s Dorian Gray before AIDS rewrote Wilde and took him on as its untimely echo. Guibert investigated sexuality; a private eye, working for no government, he sleuthed with a rare ferocity and candor. Premature death cut off the investigation.

  Enfant terrible, Guibert in his journal took on the project of writing sexuality in time—the project of writing sexuality as time—at a moment in history when the time-bound nature of sexuality underwent a Grand Guignol twist, a contortion that forced Guibert to play sacrificed subject as well as documentarian and theorizer. Although the journals rarely mention AIDS by name, we’re stuck, reading Guibert, within a sexual reckoning in which AIDS serves as dreaded, detested curtain. He attempts to conquer time by anatomizing orgasm’s prequels and sequels: “Then I remember how I came, watching him jerk off, naked, from afar, while crying (but all of this is unmentionable).” Eroticism’s contingency thrives—or finds brief staging—within parentheses.

  Sexual, wounded, hole-ridden, philosophical, the pages of his journals drip with ontology—so much Dasein he can’t stuff his sentences back into their undies. Guibert’s clauses, groomed and ungroomed, bring jacking off or being jacked off into propinquity with the Crucifixion and other emblems of sacred, unbearable duration: “I am licking icons (the thought arrived while coming alone last night).” Dead art gives him a boner: “A strange thing happens, as soon as I enter a museum, infallibly, I become hard. . . . I harden among all those dead faces.” Desire instigates ossification and reification: the “I” stiffens. No way to photograph without understanding astonishment; no way to write (or publish) a sentence without surrendering to erotic marmorealization, an unmelting, Madame Tussaud–style knowledge that aches.

  Filth is Guibert’s passport to infinity. Filth, as literary terrain, belongs to Sade, but Guibert reroutes S/M through the pastoral landscape of religious interiority, as if ghosted by hungry Simone Weil, or by Wilde’s scarified, Christological denouement. (To skeptics, such spirituality might seem papier-mâché, but I’m a believer.) Guibert sees a cute young man at a party and “instead of imagining his sex or his torso or the taste of his tongue, in spite of myself it’s his excrement I see, inside his intestines.” In Guibert’s universe, shit may be scary, but it possesses the indisputable, definition-proof aura of Dickinson’s “Circumference.” He writes, “There were traces of shit, from after sodomy, visible on the top of the nonetheless dark sheet on which I was sitting, while I was attempting to seduce the young man sitting next to me on the armchair, I realized the young man might catch sight of those traces of shit.” No problem, if Hervé’s gentleman caller glimpses sodomitic stigmata, a soiled badge of honor crucial to the journal’s sweet-tempered transvaluations.

  To have a cock is to wish to destroy the cock; “having” a cock, not a secure position, causes consciousness to teeter, tumble, and misplace itself. “I would like to chisel bits of grease out of my skin, disembowel myself, open my stomach and void myself.” Sex unwrites a body’s wish to remain composed: “On my way home, I want to scald my cock.” Another characteristic sentiment: “if I fuck him, if I decide to fuck him, it’s first to annihilate him.” No simple sadism here, no simple equation of fucking and killing, of penetrating and violating—instead, the wish to fuck or to be fucked, like the experience of “having” a cock or of only semi-having a “cock,” is a sensation (or a memory cathedral) of being voided, chiseled, scalded, disemboweled. Is this consciousness a queer privilege? Is it shamanistic? Is it in fact not trans or queer or anything of the sort, but simply poetic? “I am forced to concede that I adore wounds,” writes Guibert (author of the screenplay for Patrice Chéreau’s film L’Homme blessé), after HIV has already made its presence felt in the world.

  Though Guibert, like Gide, is no stranger to melodrama, nor to the tendrils of self-pity and self-stylization that drape the thespian face, The Mausoleum of Lovers doesn’t sugarcoat desire: “Dream of the joy obtained by the spectacle of a very small child raping a man,” writes Guibert, who reflects occasionally, and without an abundance of veils, about a sexualized love for children. “In the morning I jerk off to discharge some of my tension, but it is also like a prayer for a child’s cock to come as soon as possible into my mouth.” This prayer comes from a man who as an adolescent put his own hard cock over a glossy picture of an actor (Hiram Keller) from Fellini’s Satyricon; like Genet’s narrator at the conclusion of Our Lady of the Flowers (where a prick dovetails with its pencilled outline), Guibert wanted to shove his body directly into words and images, without polite filter. He sought a prose as direct, voracious, and soul-capturing as photography. Visually oriented, process-centered, he hoped at the end of his short life to write a “treatise on drawing.” Journal-keeping, as he practiced it, shared drawing’s flu
ent, linear, accident-prone, time-scarred nature: “(I feel as though I’m writing a book when the writing is something like drawing on the pages.)” You prove a book’s veracity, Guibert suggests, not by its content but by the sensations you experience while writing it. The writer, not the reader, knows best.

  Fathers are depressing but necessary and sometimes sexually alluring; fathers, and father-substitutes, and ghost-fathers, appear often in Guibert’s journal, as do mothers, who are also depressing but necessary and sometimes sexually alluring. “T. licks my ass while I’m talking to my father on the telephone” is one way to deal with fathers and their necessity. Another way to deal with fathers is to record nuggets like the following: “My father ate my snot.” An innovative approach to nuclear-family ecology! His mother, who tried to have a miscarriage when she was pregnant with Hervé, later confesses to him, “I would like so much to be lying on your bed, motionless, without saying a word, so as not to bother you, while you are writing in the next room.” His mother and his father dwell inside Hervé’s writing, even when he tries to expectorate or exile them from it. Hervé admits to his mother, “If I had a child . . . I would rape him, I would kill him”; and he dreams of getting fucked by his father, who, in the dream, says, “He who has his ass stuffed is damned.”