[ week 24 | 38 ]
Dancing with myself.
Monday, 23.23
Don’t bother cuing up the Billy Idol; James Marsters does a better sneer. —Thus does the Xerox surpass the original.
•
Yes, it’s been quiet here lately. Apologies to my regular readers—when Geocounter’s up, I can see you checking in, in vain: there’s David, there’s Lisala, there’s whoever-it-is who bounces in from Hanne Blank’s links page just about every day (and do you, too, find yourself using other people’s blogs—or even your own—as a set of bookmarks, because your own dam’ bookmark list has gotten too fuckin’ long and unwiedly?). Hi, folks. Apologies all ’round.
Part of it—a large part of it, or so I tell myself—has been the work situation; I’ve been looking for work for a while now, freelance or full time, out here in the brightly lit shadows of the real world, and now I’ve found it with a vengeance. Not that it keeps me in the lifestyle to which I’m striving to become accustomed, honest, I am, but it kicks the mortgage banker to the curb with the wolf for another month, so that’s something. But it’s also involved some seven-day weeks, or some fifty-hour weeks crammed into five or six days, which is almost as bad, and you come dragging home at six or at seven PM and you make the dinner and you say hi to the cats and you dial out and sit down and desultorily click on this link, or that, and maybe you read something that sparks your interest, but you’re too late, everyone else is on top of it, and anyway it’s too much effort to think of something funny and pithy and piercingly insightful to say and then to type all that out and code it and set it and upload it, you know? So you hang up and shut down and go crawl into bed with the latest Kim Stanley Robinson, which isn’t all that good, I’m sorry to say. (I’m starting to understand what someone else said about him, after Antarctica: “He’s becoming the progressive Robert Heinlein.”)
I mean, I was intrigued by my reaction to Judith Thurman’s New Yorker review of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. , which Daze Reader linked to with the provocatively self-contradictory pull quote, “Lust is a great and inexhaustible literary subject, but writing graphically about what excites one isn’t literature. The same stupid things excite everybody.” I mean, that got my dander up, and I hope it got yours up, too. And Thurman goes on to say, “Pornography is a form of pidgin—a trading tongue without the deep wellspring of nuance that produces clarity,” and I hope we’re all well-enough attuned by now to how the canon defines itself by excluding the paraliterary that we can read that sentence properly: “Pornography is anything that is bad. Anything that is good cannot be pornography.” (Or SF. Or comics. Or juvenilia. Or fantasy. Or a sitcom. Or—)
But! It’s a funny, mean-spirited, jaundiced review, and if Thurman’s precis is at all to be trusted, there’s umpteen targets bloated with self-importance floating through this book. (Go, read it; the connections she draws between the confession games she played in childhood and this book—between St. Catherine of Siena, draining off the fluid of cancerous lesions to drink down herself from a ladle, so as to dominate her physical self, and Catherine Millet, who said, “To fuck above and beyond any sense of disgust was not just a way of lowering oneself, it was, in a diametrically opposite move, to raise yourself above all prejudice,” but who never once in this Homeric catalog of fucks sees fit to mention AIDS—or any of the lesser STDs—)
But.
I mean, here I am, sneering at a book I haven’t read, on the basis of a writer—a good writer—who nonetheless doesn’t (appear to) get the pornographic æsthetic and experience; who is a willful collaborator in the games of marginalization and oppression that canons let you play. Whose side am I on? Yes, the reader makes her own text, and her reading is as valid as any other—not necessarily as informed, or understanding, or generous, or intelligent, or charitable, or appreciative, or insightful; merely as valid—but what text am I as a reader making of her review? What am I allowing it to do to Millet’s book, which (I remind you) I haven’t read? —I mean, we get to the end, where Thurman quotes Colette, who once said to Radclyffe Hall, “Obscenity is such a narrow domain. One immediately begins to suffocate there, and to feel bored,” and I’m nodding my head. I’m agreeing with her. What’s going on, here?
Whose side am I on?
•
The immediate response to that, of course, should be the one you have to any dichotomy: collapse it. It’s false. My reading of “obscenity” is necessarily different that Colette’s, than Thurman’s, than Hall’s, than even Millet’s; we’re each of us going to find different things obscene, but I think it’s safe to say we could all agree with that basic sentiment: wallowing in that which we find to be obscene is soon enough after that initial charge suffocating and boring. Any arguments? —And anyway, were one to attempt to construct such a dichotomy with these players, you’d be arraying Hall and Millet on one side, Colette and Thurman on the other, and I trust that’s worth a belly-laugh.
But when you’ve created a nom de plume—not so much an alter ego, no; Nicholas is very much me, and I am very much the guy who writes under the name of Nicholas from time to time—but when you’ve created a mask under which to write one sort of fiction, or commentary, and then you set that mask aside to write another sort—well. It’s hard to escape dichotomies. Entirely.
Why did I create Nicholas?
Well, because I didn’t want people to know I’d written what I’d written. Which, at the time, was a couple of chapters each of The James Sisters and Indigo . Shameful little het-boy fantasies of nubile young nymphomaniacs crawling into each others arms, with a dash of sororal incest to sweeten the pot. So I picked the name of the narrator of The Magus by John Fowles (oh, there are resonances; there are always resonances) and posted them.
But if they were shameful little het-boy fantasies of nubile young nymphomaniacs crawling into their sisters’ arms, why, then, did I post them?
Because I liked them. I thought they were good. Worth reading. Worth having written. Worth putting out in the world. Worth thinking about, tinkering with, pulling apart to see what made them tick, and why, and putting them back together again in new shapes.
Nicholas exists, then, because I didn’t have the courage of my convictions. Still don’t. The Spouse knows; has for years. Close friends hereabouts, in Portland, know. People I’ve never met before but deal with online in one capacity or another can’t help but know Nicholas, but they also know, well, me; the other one. (I’m online, too, but since there’s much less sex over there, I’m not nearly so popular.)
But even though I don’t go out of my way to hide it, I’m not going to put the mask down. It’s still—useful, I guess. He is. I am. I do different things here, than there; it’s not so much that I think differently, or even write all that differently, but—it’s a palpable difference. Writing graphically about what excites me—or how I see excitation working in other people—plumbing the deep and wondrous and awful and terrifying and yes, even banal and suffocating and boring deeps of lust to the best of my ability—it’s not just a wellspring of powerful, satisfying writing and reading and art in general; it’s something big and powerful enough and weird and ineluctable enough and, yes, magical enough that I need the ritual of Nicholas, the mask, the role, almost as a ward, a talisman. A Greater Circle inscribed; a sacrificial goat.
And anyway, I’m a chickenshit. A prude. My inner Comstock shakes hands with King Canute, and that Mark of Cain sizzles on my forehead. I blush mightily. Ask anybody.
•
Tired. Overworked. Grumpy. Questioning. Edgy. Constricted. Not terribly happy with the whole Urfé thing at the moment. If one is edging from writing things intended primarily to arouse to writing things which merely deal bluntly with sex in the course of unwinding themselves, what the heck is one doing?
That’s what I said to Lisala in the course of a perfectly innocent email exchange about the dam’ book Wolfram finally got around to publishing. And she said a lot of wonderful things in response. But I also said, “And what do I know from sex, anyway. That sort of thing. Thbbptptpppttt.” And she said:
You don’t “know” sex. You live it, think about it, study it, practice it, worship and crave it, but you don’t know it. No one does; it’s dependent on relationships and the natural flow and flux of life.
Thanks, Lisa. My hat’s off and a deep bow to you, and I won’t go on to quote the rudely funny things you said about Masters and Johnson.
It’s not that what she said kicked me in the ass and got me back on track, though; this was weeks ago, and there’s still ragged edges around my blogging schedule, a story I owe to Ruthie’s that’s going nowhere, and I’m still tussling between “me” and “me” for writing time (let’s do something with a little less sex in it, perhaps? This time?). But me shutting Nicholas up, folding the tent and stealing away into the night, just because I’ve got a crisis of faith or confidence or whatever it is I’ve got, because I don’t think deep down I know what it is I’m saying (and when has that ever stopped me before?) isn’t going to do any good. We’re very much in unexplored territory here, for all that’s been written about sex and love and lust and the things that excite us; nobody knows. There need to be more voices out here, not less. All of us speaking up and listening in turn and holding up our various ends of the conversation. This feels like a snake to me, like a wall to you, like a palm fan to that guy over there, and she says it’s a whip...
•
(Yes. I did think about shutting Nicholas up. Folding the tent. Stealing away. Thought seriously about it. But I can no more not ever pick up the mask again than I can lay it aside and deal openly and honestly; for better or worse, it’s something I do, now. —Maybe you’ve seen those Coors billboards? “Here’s to Twins”? I’m driving, walking downtown, whatever, these things are all over the fuckin’ place, I see one of these, and I’m thinking about mirrors and Dijkstra and My Friends, the Allens and those Porcelain Twinz and narcissisma and sexism and sex in advertising and why, exactly, this meme is surfacing now and whether in fact this meme is actually surfacing now and words I’ve written and images I’ve imagined and thoughts I’ve thought—this welter of shame and analysis and memory and criticism and analysis and desire that is so much more complicated than a guy looking up a moment to long at a billboard with a couple of scantily clad women on it [which is also what’s going on, yes]—and if maybe I think about this sort of thing more, and more fully, and take it places I otherwise wouldn’t because I’ve been Nicholas, and written what I’ve written as him, well, I couldn’t stop thinking about it by not being him anymore.
(As if what I wanted in the first place was to stop...)
•
So I guess what I’m trying to say is there’s a bit of a rocky patch, but I’m working on it. We’re working on it. Whatever.
•
But.
Every time you think you get a hang of this stuff, a handle on it, something comes along out of left field and gobsmacks you and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry or head for the hills or whistle in wonder. You don’t know whether to feel suffocated and bored or shivery at the weird, absurdly multitudinous—beauty?—of it all. You don’t know whether to roll your eyes and sneer or dig in, up to your elbows, and find out the how and the why and the what on earth. (Maybe I’m being too generous, too charitable, but that’s the sort of mood I’m in right now. With a touch of querulous laughter.)
I mean, Lord above and all His little fishes, with material like this—
