Longer Views (35 page)

At some point, through the same mechanism by which the picture initiates its dialogue on objectification (whether one takes it as a picture of a biological lie, a statistical leaning, or a visual truth), someone has to ask: What would the picture be saying if the body in polyester was white and male—or a white female body with the fly a-gape around some hefty labia? Or a black female body? Or with a small dick, small cunt, etc.?

They would all be shocking. But what would the different trajectories of that shock be? Only such questions can sketch out the nature of what the picture-as-is is doing.

Without its schlong a-dangle, “Man in Polyester Suit” could be a sales photo for a late '70s issue of
GQ Magazine
. It is, after all, a funny picture. (It's the visual inverse of a joke people, black and white, have been telling for years: What's ten inches long, three inches around, and white? The white answer, straight and gay, male and female, is: “Nothin'!” The straight black male answer just removes the exclamation point. And the black gay answer is: “Not a thing, honey!”) Its laughter is directed, however tastelessly, at straight white males—but desire (would you like to suck or fuck one? Would you like to have one?) implicates all persuasions in its dialogic thrust. Hemphill, Mercer, and Julian all ask sensibly: “What do [Mapplethorpe's images] say to our wants and desires as black, gay men?” As a black gay man, I'd suggest—sensibly—the answer starts with what one feels about big black cocks, and only point out that that answer is not necessarily conditioned one way or the other by being black alone. The larger question is, however, how predictable does the picture appear to presume the answer to be?

Just how old is the joke? And how new does dressing it up in polyester make it?

To engage these questions at all is to risk becoming the butt (as it were) of the joke. But clearly that goes for Mapplethorpe as well.

A suggestive historical note to close with: Within six weeks of the October 1839 date Louis Daguerre took out his patent on the Daguerreotype, the first man was arrested on the steps of the Louvre for selling pornographic photographs: naked women against backgrounds and in poses suggesting the most famous nudes on the museum walls within—putting high art, pornography, and photography into a contestatory wrangle that has not silenced since.

20. “Novelists ought not to be deaf,” write Disch and Naylor on page 59 of their wondrous historical reconstruction
Neighboring Lives
. But, for better or no, I am losing my hearing.

21.
The Twin Cities:
One is made of polished sewer grills, violet neon tubes, and twelve-foot mosaic panes reflecting other mosaics.

The other is made of words: “tenebrose,” “ineluctable,” and “abrogation”—but not “sybaritic,” “nilotic,” or “alpine.” (They cleave to other geographies, urban, agric, or mountainous, all together.) The second, like the first, has a history. The first, unlike the second, has only associations.

The first is populated by tall women in translucent plastic raincoats, short, muscular men in tanktops and loose camouflage fatigue pants, one out of thirteen of whom has a walrus moustache and is hung like a
buffalo. The Japanese population is on the rise; and Native Americans have, recently, been migrating here from the west.

The second has a free public transportation system of pneumatic capsules, is cut by a river of No. 3 watch oil, and crouches in the shadow of the first. There are more animals in it than people—most of them with silver fur, ebon scales, or scarlet feathers. What human inhabitants stroll its streets tend to have hair the hue and crispness of rusted Brillo. They speak in gnomic phrases, punctuated by silences during which they examine their pocket calculators, the bolts on their roller blades, their antique calipers and circular slide rules.

The cities share, however, a dump.

And when the garbagemen from one poke pitch forks into the black sacks deposited there from the other, they step back, breathe in sharply—one or two brave ones scream—while still another stands there, eyes closed, the green canvas of his right pantsleg trembling.

22. Title for a Lacanian paper on heterosexuality: “A Lass and a Lack.”

23.
The Palace and the Sea:
Late that night in the palace of Alcinous, the Traveler regaled the king and his courtiers with tales of the storm-bound, sun-shot sea. As the fire burned in the walk-in fireplace and serving women moved among the guests, refilling goblets with wine, he told of mast-high waves, rafts of ice, ropes of white fire that netted the winter waters, and the slow metamorphosis of the periplus, from split cliffs a-glitter in dawn sun to the black lace of forests under indigo evening; and of how his ship had sailed through mayhem and magic to the gate of hell.

But the little princess, whom almost everyone had forgotten by now, thought to herself as she heard him: Where is this fabulous sea? Isn't it all in the wash and wonder of his words, brought here, safe within the palace stones, made tame as a summer's pool beside which one picnics with the other girls, off in the forest . . .?

For outside she could hear the rhetoric of the ocean, as it crashed at the foot of her home, yowling and growling around the rocks, leaping and hissing as high as her father's anciently laid foundations.

In the roaring fireplace a moist log at last took flame and—
cracked
, spouting sparks toward blackened chimney stones, sifting more ash onto the hearth and, for a moment, interrupting the flow and weave of the Traveler's cunning discourse on (his understanding of) the sea.

As if having heard his daughter's thought, King Alcinous now asked: “Say, once again, Traveler, where is that sea . . .?”

23. “To Newton and to Newton's dog Diamond,” Carlyle reminds us in
the second chapter of
The French Revolution
, “what a different pair of universes . . .”

24. “Man,” says Dennis in the half-dark, “I'll fuck you up the ass so much the cum'll be runnin' out your nose—you won't need any moustache wax!” Odd how affection manifests itself in various ages and epochs, in various social niches.

25. If rhetoric is ash, discourse is fire . . .

26. The desire to be conscious of the process of losing consciousness, of having no consciousness at all—this paradox is source and kernel of the anxiety over dying and death.

27. I am awed, and just a bit terrified, at the mystery of my own existence. That something so rich and wonder-filled as fifty years or more of living should be given to someone as fallible and unimportant in the universe's larger scheme and just plain ordinary as I is astonishing.

28. The twin cities are, of course, Xanadu and Wagadu. Telemachus awaits his father's return in one; Telegonus, Odysseus's son by Circe (who, according to Eugammon of Cyrene, eventually slew his father by a spear tipped with fish bone, during Odysseus's shadowy second voyage), lurks in the other, waiting for the wanderer who, after divorcing Penelope and marrying Collidice, Queen of Thesprotia, took off on that mysterious second journey Dante, Tennyson, and Kazantzakis all write of.

Coleridge gave us the first city, while Leo Frobenius (the turn of the century's Robert Ardrey) and, more recently, Neil Gaiman in his Sandman comic,
The Doll's House: Prologue—Tales in the Sand
, brings the second to our attention.

29. Jabès's
Book of Questions
, Calvino's
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
. . ., and Silliman's
The Alphabet
all seem to share something. The Silliman, by keeping the furthest from argument, seems the most radical to me right now. (I have moments when reading the fragments that compose
The Book
seem all too much like reading
The Journal of Albion Moonlight
—which unfortunately is not to praise either.)

30. In human society, there are two forces constantly in conflict: One always moves to socialize the sexually acceptable. The other moves to sexualize the socially unacceptable. Over any length of time, these two forces are always at play, revising the contours of the socio-sexual map.

31. Quasimodo's tercet,

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra

trafitto da in raggio di sole:

ed è subito sera
.

[Each alone at the earth's heart,

fixed there on a sun ray:

and it's suddenly evening.]

seemed to describe a romantic stance when I first read it at age 19 or so. Here, weeks before my 50th birthday, it seems a harsh metaphor for an all too hard-edged situation.

“And it's suddenly evening” has the same number of syllables as “ed è subito sera.” But the English has more than twice the number of consonants and takes almost twice as long to say.

32. Here in Amherst, the present slides between the leafy and layered fact of immediacy and the drowsy retreat through darkness.

33. What does it mean, now that it takes me so much longer to remember things than it did even five years ago? I ask my mind to call up facts; where once they were yielded up to me in two, three seconds, today it's ten, fifteen, eighteen seconds before thought arrives in the brain, words mount the tongue. And occasionally they will not come at all without prompting—recently: the last name of the late actress Ruth Gordon; the term “certified” for a letter. When I was thirty-five, I recall noting that my dyslexia was substantially worse than it had been at 25. Is the memory situation a continuation of the same phenomenon—or is it some other development entirely?

And will I ever know?

What about the malaise, the extra weight, the free floating anxiety, all of which have their current forms in my life—if I'm honest—as much as they did when they last put me in the hospital at 22?

34. “Well, you can't see the sex / for the heterosexuality,” writes Isaac Jackson in his poem “The Birds and Bees (Blues Poem).” How pleasant, a year after I read it, to run into the poet at MIT working as a computer jockey!

35. Four writers who, each reaching in an entirely different direction, achieve a sentence perfection that dazzles, chills, and—sometimes—frightens: William Gass, Joanna Russ, Guy Davenport, and Ethan Canin.

36. The poet sees two things: the world's absolute wonder and beauty in the way its edges and surfaces almost fit together in a purified geometry of desire appeased; and, at the same time, the poet sees through the world's interstices the banalities and uncomprehending stupidities with which its subjects constantly blat out what it's constituted of. Language—in its blather and breathless suspension—is at once villain and hero. Perhaps this is why reticence is such an overarching element of modernist esthetics.

37. The unarticulated myth of the American poet currently controlling so many American poetic non-careers is that anyone who has it together enough to teach regularly, edit anthologies, and write criticism cannot possibly live passionately enough to write a truly interesting poem—a good deal of this, doubtless, a holdover from the personal catastrophes of the once popular “confessional poets.”

But even as “confessional” works grow less and less interesting with time, what sediments in the literary psyche still drags and dredges our ideas through its flour and egg.

As someone who has taught for four years now, there's something to the argument: only I would like to see it leave the realm of unspeakable myth and enter the pinball-courts of articulation: certainly I've never been happier that I'm not a poet since I've been a professor . . . !

Silliman is the first poet I know who really breaks through these constraints. He does it, basically, by writing such impassioned—and intelligent—criticism. He does it by embracing—passionately—the insights of contemporary literary theory and difficult discourse. He does it by eschewing as intellectually wimpy the notion that criticism itself is not as potentially passionate as poetry. What he convinces us of, in his criticism, is—quite apart from its relevance and rightness—he lives the most passionate life of the mind in America today!

He is a political poet par excellence.

At the same time, he takes the poet niche shaped by Valéry and lurches with it to the American coast.

Poets I read for pleasure: Auden, Van Duyn, Howard, Hacker, Heany, Neidecker, Bernstein, Hudgins, Levine, Cummins, Ashbery, Michael Dennis Browne . . .

But Silliman is a poet I read to break through into new halls and colonnades of verbal richness that, before, I simply didn't know were sealed up behind those walls and dead ends in the palace of art. His work must be studied, lived with. Its pleasures cannot be simply lapped up off its surfaces. But they are the subtler, sharper, and more resonant for the time they take to taste.

I wonder if I shall ever actually meet the man . . .?

38. Too developed a sense of the usefulness of things militates against the preservation (rather paradoxically) of bourgeois order.

The sock lies in the middle of the rug. It's easy to say that the slob who's left it there simply wasn't thinking. But much more likely some nether thought of the following order did, indeed, occur: I don't know where the mate is. If I put it away, i.e., out of sight, if the mate turns up they will never get back together! Leave it lie there, then, and if, in an hour or a day or a week, the mate comes to light, I can put them together and then put the pair away. And sometimes—in an hour, or a day, or a week—that's what happens.

The problem is that, at such a tempo, the forces of disorder will simply swamp the forces of order.

The person maintaining neatness, however, must constantly go through some version of the following: That sock has no mate. Out it goes. Now I shall forget it. And if—in an hour or a day or week—the other turns up, out it goes too! And I shall forget it, too!

It is worth remembering that bourgeois order is only maintained at the expense of a ruthless, if not outright violent, attitude toward the objects—if not the people—which deviate from it.