I've been reading Dominick LaCapra's book Writing History, Writing Trauma for the last couple of days and I am really loving it. It is a simple text that reminds me of something of a mix between Raymond Williams' Marxism and Literature in its obsession with definition and distinction and Jacques Rancière's The Names of History with its vision for how we might best approach historiographic projects.
LaCapra spends a lot of time carefully differentiating between loss and absence and also arguing why such a distinction is important both materially and politically. One of the interesting gestures that the book makes is to equate Freud's notion of melancholia with absence and his idea of mourning with loss. In this way, he notes that when something is absent we cannot properly mourn for it: the thing for which we might mourn – if we could mourn – was never present, and therefore practices of mourning for the absent are doomed to cause repetitive behaviors that never actually deal with absence as such. These repetitive, anomic behaviors Freud has termed melancholia. Mourning, on the other hand, is about dealing with loss and coping (slowly, perhaps, but coping nonetheless) with that loss, and possibly recognizing the lost object as irrecoverable.
So, LaCapra says:
One might further suggest that mourning be seen not simply as individual or quasi-transcendental grieving but as a homeopathic socialization or ritualization of the repetition compulsion that attempts to turn it against the death drive and to counteract compulsiveness – especially the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes of violence – by re-petitioning in ways that allow for a measure of critical distance, change, resumption of social life, ethical responsibility, and renewal.
And:
Historical losses [LaCapra always means the word loss as historical loss] call for mourning – and possibly for critique and transformative sociopolitical practice. When absence, approximated to loss, becomes the object of mourning, the mourning may (perhaps must) become impossible and turn continually back into endless melancholy.
Let me depart for a moment from the notion of trauma that is LaCapra's true subject. I have been in Virginia for a month now and I have become reacquainted with a man here who pursued me romantically last year. I have been having no small amount of difficulty dealing with this – thinking about having been loved and then thinking about having lost that affection has been sad for me.
I have realized a couple of things, though (I will come back to LaCapra in a moment). First, the man that loved me or at any rate pursued me is not the same man who I see here. On the contrary, what I miss is a phantasy of a man who pursued me: I miss the feelings that he had for me. Those feelings are no longer present and so the man himself is only an approximation. He will always fail at being what I am/was wanting him to be.
The second thing is that I become sad about the idea of being single, and I find myself afraid of always being alone, of never having someone with whom I can share a life. Neither of these fears is related to trauma, to be sure, but what I am doing in my sadness about being single is confusing absence with loss. Experiencing the loss of this man is not the same thing as – and I ought not to take it as either representative or derivative of – the absence I feel at not having someone permanent in my life as a partner.
As LaCapra says – I will paraphrase – when we misrecognize absence for loss, we confound the processes for coping with the experience of absence. We assume that we can deal with what is in fact an existential or transcendental issue with tools more suited to lack or an experience of loss.
Instead, it is important to be clear that what we lose in life is tangentially but not essentially related to our experience of absence or feelings of loneliness. This means that I want to deal with the grief I feel over losing the men I lose in my life in a different way than the way I deal with my real – but impossible to pinpoint because they are originary or linked to subjectivity itself – fears about being truly alone.
As I say, this is not about trauma, and LaCapra's book is manifestly about trauma, but my experiences this summer and my reading of this book have collided in an interesting and, for me, productive way.
Showing posts with label dcw. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dcw. Show all posts
10 June 2012
22 November 2011
From The Castle
I read this today in Howard Barker's The Castle. I feel like I don't remember this from before, but there it was staring me in the face when I read it today:
I do not know how we will win!
It is not a failing not to know the end at the beginning.
Our power comes out of our love.
Love is also a weapon.
I do not know how we will win!
It is not a failing not to know the end at the beginning.
Our power comes out of our love.
Love is also a weapon.
02 October 2011
Leaning
One of the things I miss without you is a kind of attuning.
Before, even though we were far away,
you were attuned to me.
I felt your presence throughout the day,
not just in the small messages I'd receive as the day progressed
("Hope your day is the greatest!")
but something else,
a feeling of knowing you were there behind me,
the way you walked up that night
after we drank wine in that field under the tiki torch –
I knew you were there,
felt you on the wind long before you materialized to put your hand in mine.
Losing you has been tangible to me,
though you may pretend there is no loss,
that this now is no different from that then,
because I know the difference between now
and the way you used to bend your thought toward me
even when we did not speak,
even as we both existed in our separate busynesses of the day.
I miss the way you could talk to someone else in a crowd
while all your energy was directed, palpably, toward me.
It is this feeling of loss that makes me the saddest.
I sense not that you are gone, but that I am gone for you,
that you do not lean toward me across the distance
the way you used to.
So: mourning for you, for loss, for myself, all of the above. I do.
And I am awash with self-pity. Why not? And
I am not speaking, either, about love, although falling for you was a true pleasure.
I mean, instead, to speak around something I have
never been able to articulate when it comes to you
and your presence in my life. Call it magic or spirituality –
the physical sensation of connecting as we did.
And now I must relearn that connection as something other
than I thought it was, As something
more subject to the space between us
than I had imagined it before.
—This is from 29 August 2011
—This is from 29 August 2011
26 September 2011
Dreaming Backward toward Twilight
Twilight where you live is different from twilight where I live.
The gloom of the onset of night hangs over the trees and the marshes here like a net, something tangible, like a felt blanket of almost-night or a shawl.
Where you are, where I imagine you to be, the sun sinks behind a ridge of towering mountains in blazes of pink and orange and heartbreaking lavender.
It disappears from view defeated by itself, tired of the day, perhaps, but still so willing to give so much of itself, like my mother must've done, weary from hours of crying or bickering or the need need need for attention with which children approach adults.
And there my mother is, dreaming of quiet, of, perhaps, some moments alone, or the feel of my father's hand on the nape of her neck, patiently reading to me before I fall asleep.
I might have invented the memory of my mother, willed it up, an object of fantasy, unicorn-like.
And I might be imagining the sunset in your hometown; I only ever drove through it once or twice, after all, but you, you are not imaginary.
No. I imagine you as well.
You are my invention, fabricated by longing, by age, by the eye of my desire for someone just like you.
I dreamed – I am sure of it – long before you ever appeared, of exactly this smile, this devious but innocent twinkle in the green of your eyes, the rough touch of your left hand as it slips into my right, awkwardly at first, and then snugly fitting.
--from 30 July 2011.
The gloom of the onset of night hangs over the trees and the marshes here like a net, something tangible, like a felt blanket of almost-night or a shawl.
Where you are, where I imagine you to be, the sun sinks behind a ridge of towering mountains in blazes of pink and orange and heartbreaking lavender.
It disappears from view defeated by itself, tired of the day, perhaps, but still so willing to give so much of itself, like my mother must've done, weary from hours of crying or bickering or the need need need for attention with which children approach adults.
And there my mother is, dreaming of quiet, of, perhaps, some moments alone, or the feel of my father's hand on the nape of her neck, patiently reading to me before I fall asleep.
I might have invented the memory of my mother, willed it up, an object of fantasy, unicorn-like.
And I might be imagining the sunset in your hometown; I only ever drove through it once or twice, after all, but you, you are not imaginary.
No. I imagine you as well.
You are my invention, fabricated by longing, by age, by the eye of my desire for someone just like you.
I dreamed – I am sure of it – long before you ever appeared, of exactly this smile, this devious but innocent twinkle in the green of your eyes, the rough touch of your left hand as it slips into my right, awkwardly at first, and then snugly fitting.
--from 30 July 2011.
21 September 2011
Puppy Love with a Tongue Hanging Out
He brings me his former lovers,
Those who have had crushes on him.
Not as baggage, though,
He doesn't want me to carry them.
No. He brings them like a dog might,
To prove his worth,
Show me that he has been wanted,
That he has been loved in the past,
Is worthy of it again. By me,
If I'm paying attention. Am I
Paying attention? Am I listening?
Derek crushed on him
And this guy with a C name.
There's a J, too, and another J,
I think, and a girl with a T name.
And the exes – not as many of those.
And another two
Or three who regularly proposition him
In the clever ways the internet provides
For propositions.
All of these are presented to me,
Paraded, really, so that I will come around.
So that I will look on him
And love him.
But he is already too late;
Not one of these men matters. Because I
As it happens, am already falling.
—From 2 August 2011.
Those who have had crushes on him.
Not as baggage, though,
He doesn't want me to carry them.
No. He brings them like a dog might,
To prove his worth,
Show me that he has been wanted,
That he has been loved in the past,
Is worthy of it again. By me,
If I'm paying attention. Am I
Paying attention? Am I listening?
Derek crushed on him
And this guy with a C name.
There's a J, too, and another J,
I think, and a girl with a T name.
And the exes – not as many of those.
And another two
Or three who regularly proposition him
In the clever ways the internet provides
For propositions.
All of these are presented to me,
Paraded, really, so that I will come around.
So that I will look on him
And love him.
But he is already too late;
Not one of these men matters. Because I
As it happens, am already falling.
—From 2 August 2011.
23 August 2011
Back to (Talking About) the Future
Sometimes it takes me a little while to get to things.
I had initially put José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity on my comprehensive exam list for Critical Race Theory, but it eventually (and wisely) got replaced by my professor in a move to include more foundational texts on my reading list.
And, well, there are a lot of things to read. I have shelves of books I haven't gotten to yet.
But as I have been writing (and writing and writing – made it to page 27 today) I have noticed my own debt to queer theory, not simply because it is the discipline in which I have done the most reading (though it is) but also because queer theories have allowed me to have an easier life. I have found these theories helpful in explaining my own world, the life-worlds of the students who come to me needing advice, and situations in which my friends and I find ourselves. Today I wrote the following paragraph for the dissertation as a sort of apology-cum-acknowledgement of the place of queer theory in a dissertation that is supposed to be in the field of theatre studies:
If this book seems heavily dependent on the field of queer theory and on theories of sexuality, it is because those fields of study have felt comfortable and capable addressing questions that other fields have deemed unworthy of interest and shameful. This is, of course, not a book about queerness per se, but rape, no matter the genders of the persons involved, is not a normative sexual experience by any measure. Male/male rape in particular is queer because it replicates and perverts a homosexual sex act, and queer because rapists and victims both frequently understand themselves to be heterosexual. We might further understand male/male rape as queer because rape is an act invariably and ineradicably linked to criminality, shame, and secrecy – attributes still considered immanent to queerness itself in many parts of the world.
And so tonight I picked up Cruising Utopia – it's a relatively thin volume, after all – to read a little more in this discipline I so love and for which I am so grateful. Muñoz begins the book like this, and the genius of such an opening struck me immediately. I highlighted the page in its entirety beginning with his first sentence:
Queerness is not yet here.
What??!?! Oh yes:
Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.
And a little later down the page:
Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.
If this all resonates with me in particular in this moment, it may be because I have lately been so down on myself for trying to imagine the future, because I have been striving so hard to live in the moment.
And it makes me wonder. Fantasies and imaginings of the future are part of the pleasure of the present. Perhaps instead of focusing on only the present it might be possible to conceive of temporalities in altogether different ways, where the present and the future are not mutually exclusive of one another.
More on this soon, I am sure.
I had initially put José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity on my comprehensive exam list for Critical Race Theory, but it eventually (and wisely) got replaced by my professor in a move to include more foundational texts on my reading list.
And, well, there are a lot of things to read. I have shelves of books I haven't gotten to yet.
But as I have been writing (and writing and writing – made it to page 27 today) I have noticed my own debt to queer theory, not simply because it is the discipline in which I have done the most reading (though it is) but also because queer theories have allowed me to have an easier life. I have found these theories helpful in explaining my own world, the life-worlds of the students who come to me needing advice, and situations in which my friends and I find ourselves. Today I wrote the following paragraph for the dissertation as a sort of apology-cum-acknowledgement of the place of queer theory in a dissertation that is supposed to be in the field of theatre studies:
If this book seems heavily dependent on the field of queer theory and on theories of sexuality, it is because those fields of study have felt comfortable and capable addressing questions that other fields have deemed unworthy of interest and shameful. This is, of course, not a book about queerness per se, but rape, no matter the genders of the persons involved, is not a normative sexual experience by any measure. Male/male rape in particular is queer because it replicates and perverts a homosexual sex act, and queer because rapists and victims both frequently understand themselves to be heterosexual. We might further understand male/male rape as queer because rape is an act invariably and ineradicably linked to criminality, shame, and secrecy – attributes still considered immanent to queerness itself in many parts of the world.
And so tonight I picked up Cruising Utopia – it's a relatively thin volume, after all – to read a little more in this discipline I so love and for which I am so grateful. Muñoz begins the book like this, and the genius of such an opening struck me immediately. I highlighted the page in its entirety beginning with his first sentence:
Queerness is not yet here.
What??!?! Oh yes:
Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.
And a little later down the page:
Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.
If this all resonates with me in particular in this moment, it may be because I have lately been so down on myself for trying to imagine the future, because I have been striving so hard to live in the moment.
And it makes me wonder. Fantasies and imaginings of the future are part of the pleasure of the present. Perhaps instead of focusing on only the present it might be possible to conceive of temporalities in altogether different ways, where the present and the future are not mutually exclusive of one another.
More on this soon, I am sure.
09 August 2011
She Writes about Love after All
I was saying just the other day that all of Mary Oliver's poems were about nature, and yet last night when I got into bed and pulled out West Wind, I came across the play's titular poem, which includes the passage:
There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistakable pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming—then row, row for your life toward it.
And a little later in the poem she says:
There are night birds, in the garden below us, singing.
Oh, listen!
For a moment I thought it was
our own bodies.
There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistakable pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming—then row, row for your life toward it.
And a little later in the poem she says:
There are night birds, in the garden below us, singing.
Oh, listen!
For a moment I thought it was
our own bodies.
30 June 2011
The Future of Love
One of the great lines in Sarah Kane's Crave – a play about need, obviously, but also a play about wanting hunger that powerful to go away – is the following non sequitur:
Because love by its nature desires a future.
Like many of Crave's lines, I am not sure what this means or what the speaker's point of view is about the sentence. But what the line suggests to me is a struggle to which I relate.
I have this ability to leap down mental rabbit holes and start to imagine futures that exist only in my mind, possibilities that exist for which I fill in all the details, creating an imaginative universe where these possibilities come to fruition. I mean something like this: I know I want to get a good assistant professor job out of graduate school, so when a possibility opens up, I begin to imagine where it will be, who I will meet, what kinds of classes I can teach, where my research will move after the dissertation is over... you get the idea. But this isn't real, of course. It's a fantasy, a lovely one, and one that is certainly possible, but that is what my imaginative fantasy is, a series of possibilities that feel extremely real because I've made them real in my mind.
I blame this struggle on being a Pisces, usually – mostly because I have Piscean friends with similar abilities. And most of the time, this is a very good trait to have. It allows me to be very intuitive with students and their capabilities, to know how to help them through difficult things. I also feel like this trait is part of the reason why I understand dreams so well.
But when it comes to matters of the heart, this trait has gotten me into trouble once or twice. Probably more times than that, if I am honest with myself. What I mean is this: it's really easy for me to imagine entire futures for relationships even when they are still in their most nascent states. We probably all do this, right? (I always think it's funny when people run home after a date to check their astrological compatibilities. As though my horoscope can answer the questions What will our kids look like? and Am I still going to love him when I'm fifty?)
But this is just not the right way of going about things. And the reason for this is that each tiny, almost imperceptible stage of a relationship, of getting to know someone, of learning to trust someone, of synching up with his or her rhythms is its own space of beauty.
Part of enjoying the time that we're in is about avoiding the future, allowing ourselves to worry less about where we're headed, and to pay more attention to the moment in which we are living now. The future is great, of course; it's a fantastic place to live, really. In fact, my heart cries out for the future, begging the future for its secrets. But the moment I want to live in is my own moment.
To talk about the piece I'm working on and not question whether I'll be able to come back next year. To dance with a girlfriend and not wonder when I will next see her. To play Risk with my friends and not worry about whether or not this will ever happen again. To sit and have a sandwich and a beer with my best friend in a random coffee shop in Lynchburg VA without wondering when we'll be able to gossip like this again. To kiss the man whose hand I'm holding and not scare myself by asking whether or not he's going to want to kiss me tomorrow. To hug my mother and be in that moment without the shadow of doubt about her health.
How, in other words, can I ask love to avoid desiring its own future?
Because love by its nature desires a future.
Like many of Crave's lines, I am not sure what this means or what the speaker's point of view is about the sentence. But what the line suggests to me is a struggle to which I relate.
I have this ability to leap down mental rabbit holes and start to imagine futures that exist only in my mind, possibilities that exist for which I fill in all the details, creating an imaginative universe where these possibilities come to fruition. I mean something like this: I know I want to get a good assistant professor job out of graduate school, so when a possibility opens up, I begin to imagine where it will be, who I will meet, what kinds of classes I can teach, where my research will move after the dissertation is over... you get the idea. But this isn't real, of course. It's a fantasy, a lovely one, and one that is certainly possible, but that is what my imaginative fantasy is, a series of possibilities that feel extremely real because I've made them real in my mind.
I blame this struggle on being a Pisces, usually – mostly because I have Piscean friends with similar abilities. And most of the time, this is a very good trait to have. It allows me to be very intuitive with students and their capabilities, to know how to help them through difficult things. I also feel like this trait is part of the reason why I understand dreams so well.
But when it comes to matters of the heart, this trait has gotten me into trouble once or twice. Probably more times than that, if I am honest with myself. What I mean is this: it's really easy for me to imagine entire futures for relationships even when they are still in their most nascent states. We probably all do this, right? (I always think it's funny when people run home after a date to check their astrological compatibilities. As though my horoscope can answer the questions What will our kids look like? and Am I still going to love him when I'm fifty?)
But this is just not the right way of going about things. And the reason for this is that each tiny, almost imperceptible stage of a relationship, of getting to know someone, of learning to trust someone, of synching up with his or her rhythms is its own space of beauty.
Part of enjoying the time that we're in is about avoiding the future, allowing ourselves to worry less about where we're headed, and to pay more attention to the moment in which we are living now. The future is great, of course; it's a fantastic place to live, really. In fact, my heart cries out for the future, begging the future for its secrets. But the moment I want to live in is my own moment.
To talk about the piece I'm working on and not question whether I'll be able to come back next year. To dance with a girlfriend and not wonder when I will next see her. To play Risk with my friends and not worry about whether or not this will ever happen again. To sit and have a sandwich and a beer with my best friend in a random coffee shop in Lynchburg VA without wondering when we'll be able to gossip like this again. To kiss the man whose hand I'm holding and not scare myself by asking whether or not he's going to want to kiss me tomorrow. To hug my mother and be in that moment without the shadow of doubt about her health.
How, in other words, can I ask love to avoid desiring its own future?
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