Perhaps it's natural for my students to shut down, push it away. The urge to shut down and push away discomfort is strong in all of us. How else do we survive the day to day horrors and erosions of what artist Gregg Bordowitz calls our “proto-fascist moment.” Two days after my class demolished Wojnarowicz, I went to a talk Bordowitz gave at the California College of the Arts. When Bordowitz announced he was going to look back to 80s and 90s AIDS activism as a model for contemporary art and grassroots political practice, I felt like my prayers had been answered. I needed to think through my feelings about Wojnarowicz, and Bordowitz would be examining the New York scene he arose from. Bordowitz inspired me, reaffirmed my fledgling conviction that writers as well as artists need to start making people uncomfortable—again. Radicalism is like this crusty old vampire rotting away in its crypt. We need to prick our fingers, summon its disruptive spectre to loom up strong and ravenous, to work from what Bordowitz calls a place of “passion” rather than “responsibility.” We need passion because a sense of responsibility simply does not have enough juice to get anybody up off their ass. As the ever blunt Wojnarowicz put it, “We were born into a preinvented existence within a tribal nation of zombies.” It takes a lot of juice to tackle that. I guess my job as a teacher is to figure out ways to make people want to be uncomfortable, or at least willing. The task at times feels Sisyphean and I want to throw my hands in the air and walk away from it all. If I didn't carve out time to write things like this essay, I would walk away from it all.
Summer, 2004, I went with Kevin to see Fahrenheit 9/11. As I left the theater, still trembling with emotion, we ran into the poet Chris Stroffolino, and we all stood there in the wide, carpeted hallway of the Metreon here in San Francisco and chatted about the film. When Chris suggested that satire always leans to the left, he and Kevin launched into a hearty debate about that, with Kevin bringing up Swift, and Chris grabbing onto Swift and running with it. Afterwards I was troubled. Instead of responding to Michael Moore's images of torn bodies and the profound sense of loss the film provokes, we'd moved on to the comfortable abstraction of literary terminology, the safe cultural and temporal distances of Swift. To perform as serious intellectuals we feel twin pressures to appreciate Moore's film but also to distance ourselves from it and to critique it. We cannot appear to have descended to the level of his ever present wailing mothers, where the body takes over and we revert to the preverbal, the primal—raw with screaming, a being spasms with the abject horrors of capitalism's carnage. The beauty of Moore's film is that he's constantly pushing us there. We look at global politics and we have to fight back tears. In an email Matias Viegener wrote to me that Moore's method has more to do with sarcasm than satire. “ Moore doesn't often reach for satire, which let's face it, most Americans don't get.” For satire, I see this hoity toity stiff upper lip, perhaps a curt chuckle over a stemmed cocktail. Very Noel Coward. For sarcasm, I see the face twisted into a sneer, an ugly, contorted sneer, shoulders hunched, fists clenched. Sarcasm is Quasimoto grunting and spastically banging his whole body against the giant bell in satire's pristine castle. Matias is right, sarcasm is crude and stupid. Sarcasm is American. It's time that intellectual discourse of the left learn from the operatic emotionality of the right. Emotional vulnerability and engagement are too precious to be banished to the realms of rightwing manipulation with its placards of aborted fetuses and clips of doe-eyed children being “saved” by US troops.
If we ask our readers to stumble into discomfort, we owe it to them to provide some kind of pay off for that discomfort, some meaningful reason for being there. Many people are leery of the experimental or transgressive because they're impatient with writing that's masturbating itself on its own cleverness. I've grown impatient with such work. What I long for in writing is the authentic, whether it's collage, porn, or Alice Munro. By authentic I'm not necessarily talking about verisimilitude or naturalism. Authentic doesn't need to mimic “real” life. In Bush-hostaged America, “real” life needs to be questioned at every turn. Something can be highly contrived and still be authentic, if it's upfront in its contrivance. I'm drawn to writing that touches core human issues, how we categorize the world, how we survive the chaos that engulfs us. Gossip as a labor of disenfranchized subjectivity feels rich, as do the cagey subversions of Kevin's Amazon reviews. When the ground shifts beneath the reader's feet, even the teeniest bit, this is good. The ground is already shifting. We need to start feeling it. I'm particularly intrigued by writing that addresses the body—illness, ingestion, desire, display, sexual passion, subtle eroticism. The writers I most admire celebrate vulgarity and emotion, and, yes, even sarcasm. By engaging the body in their work, they explore desire, loss, human experience that's often hidden from view. Who/what am I talking about? Kathy Acker's stagy appropriations, Joe Brainard's stripped down I Remember, Wojnarowicz's rants, everything by Bob Flanagan and Phoebe Gloeckner, the sublime impenetrability of Lawrence Braithwaite, the alliterative clobbers of Sylvia Plath, Diane di Prima's Loba poems, even the marvelous fakery of Anais Nin's diaries, even Doris Lessing, and of course the unflinching cruelty of Diane Arbus' “Notes from a Nudist Colony”—the list is starting to spin backwards, a sputtering reverse evolutionary writing machine—James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, Jean Toomer, Mary Shelley, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Shirley Jackson, Genet, Mishima, Franz Fanon, Ovid—names like bullets spray out of me—Gertrude Stein, Dennis Cooper, Catherine Clément's Syncope, Sapphire, Lucy Lippard's bio of Eva Hesse, Marguerite Duras, Eileen Myles, J.G. Ballard, Samuel Delany, Bob Glück, Guyotat, Gillian Rose's Love's Work, the writings of children and the “insane” I read in Moholy-Nagy's Vision in Motion when I was in high school. I could go on and on. To steal and tweak Jack Spicer's words, to hold all the writing I love I would need a list as long as the state of California. Name comma name comma name comma name comma. By reducing meaning to a nervous tic, am I saying anything new, anything at all, about the body, vulgarity, or emotion? The list, the most abstract of strategies, is the antithesis of what the body wants. As I sit here in my desk chair, pain moves across my lower back in bands. So few words to describe this specific pain. A pulling pain, a stretching pain—not a jab. There's a chill to the morning and I haven't put on any socks. My ankles are cold. In a world under siege, arguments over form—the old disjunct versus conventional battlefield—begin to feel like bickering. My point is not formal but tonal. Writing can and should offer an emotional engagement with materiality. That engagement can be highly mediated or direct, but that engagement begins a politics, a morality of writing.
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