And why get angry at Helen?
As if she singlehandedly destroyed those
multitudes of men.
As if she all alone
made this wound in us.
CARSON
There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don’t say what I want them to say. And that’s true of the persona in the poem who’s lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it’s also true of me as me.
INTERVIEWER
When you look back on ”The Glass Essay” do you consider it a personal poem? Do you see it as a failure?
CARSON
I see it as a messing around on upper levels with things that I wanted to make sense of at a deeper level. I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life. But when I wrote things like “The Glass Essay” I also wanted to do something that I call understanding what life feels like, and I don’t believe I did. I also don’t know what it would be to do that, but if I read Virginia Woolf or George Eliot describing emotional facts of people, it seems there’s a fragrance of understanding you come away with—this smell in your head of having gone through something that you understood with people in the story. When I think about my writing, I don’t feel that.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think you don’t feel it because even though you’ve written about it, it’s still part of your ongoing personal experience?
CARSON
Well that’s possible. But how can one ever judge those things?
Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale-white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.
To live in the world of creation — to get into it and stay in it — to frequent it and haunt it — to think intently and fruitfully — to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation — this is the only thing — and I neglect it, far and away too much; from indolence, from vagueness, from inattention, and from a strange nervous fear of letting myself go. If I can vanquish that nervousness, the world is mine.
Many people accept the idea that each of us has a certain resolute innerness—a kernel of selfhood that we can’t share with others. (Levin, at the end of “Anna Karenina,” calls it his “holy of holies,” and says that, no matter how close he grows to the people around him, there will always be “the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife.”) What interested Woolf was the way that we become aware of that innerness. We come to know it best, she thought, when we’re forced, at moments of exposure, to shield it against the outside world.
There can be something enjoyable, even revelatory about that feeling of self-protection, which is why we seek out circumstances in which we can feel more acutely the contrast between the outside world and our inner selves. Woolf was fascinated by city life—by the feeling of solitude-on-display that the sidewalk encourages, and by the way that “street haunting,” as she called it, allows you to lose and then find yourself in the rhythm of urban novelty and familiarity. She was drawn to the figure of the hostess: the woman-to-be-looked-at, standing at the top of the stairs, friendly to everyone, who grows only more mysterious with her visibility. (One of the pleasures of throwing a party, Woolf showed, is that it allows you to surprise yourself: surrounded by your friends, the center of attention, you feel your separateness from the social world you have convened.) She showed how parents, friends, lovers, and spouses can become more unknowable over time, not less—there is a core to their personhood that never gives itself up. Even as they put their lives on display, she thought, artists thrive when they maintain a final redoubt of privacy—a wellspring that remains unpolluted by the world outside. “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter,” Clarissa thinks, at the end of “Mrs. Dalloway.” Of course, it’s the chatter—the party—that helps her know that she has something to lose in the first place.
To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this Leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. “Will he (the Leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain!” But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try.
The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together; the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death!
Of course, the bitter harvest begins long before a child ends up on the streets. When Ben, the youngest son of a Baptist minister from New Hampshire, asked his mother at age nine what the word “gay” meant, he didn’t realize that the answer she gave would describe his own feelings – or that those feelings would, from that moment on, impact his emotional development. “She explained what it was and told me that it was an abomination,” Ben tells me in the sunny group-therapy room at the Ali Forney Center, which he ran away to at age 17. “It was like telling a nine-year-old that they are broken. I remember being on the kitchen floor just crying, praying to God for him to make me normal. That’s how I looked at it: ‘If it’s this bad for me to be this way, why did God make me? I wish I were dead.’” When Ben finally did come out to his parents at age 16, they sent him away to a Christian school across the country and began to explore reparative-therapy options, all of which reinforced the idea that he was terribly flawed, so much so that “the people closest to me thought I needed to be changed, fixed.”
The problem is, running away, as Ben did, may deliver youth from their parents’ judgment, but not from that of God – whom more than half of the youth I spoke with said they still believed in – and once on the street, the psychological trauma that’s inherent in this deeply internalized shame often plays out to their detriment. And yet, as hard as it might be to imagine conservative faiths backing down from their demonization of homosexuality, it can be equally hard to get activists to address the issue. “LGBT advocacy groups don’t want to talk about religion,” says Mitchell Gold, founder of Faith in America. “One, they don’t want to come across as anti-religion. And two, they just aren’t familiar with it. But the number-one hurdle to LGBT equality is religious-based bigotry. The face of the gay-rights movement shouldn’t be what I call '40-year-old well-moisturized couples.’ The face of the gay-rights movement should be a 15-year-old kid that’s been thrown out of his house and taught that he’s a sinner.”
Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world—this moment I stand on. Also, it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous, we human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light? I am impressed by the transitoriness of human life to such an extent that I am often saying a farewell.
Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.
Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
At the same time [as men were being imprisoned for homosexuality], women were increasingly caught up in the psychiatric system, and women who desired other women were diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia which was the same thing the authorities would use for political dissidents. So in a way, women who desired other women became sexual dissidents, and they were committed to psychiatric institutions and given all sorts of cures. For instance, electroshock therapy or sometimes even putting them into a diabetic coma with the hope that when they came out they would stop desiring other women.
[…]
So while men were caught up in the law, women were caught up in a psychiatric cure that also served a chilling and terrorising effect on those populations because of course you never knew when that could happen to you, if your relatives would commit you, if the police would use that to blackmail you. And it was used in a very similar way, although it was a very different idea, of men having sex with men as a crime, and that to be punished, and women having sex with women as a form of psychiatric illness that had to be cured.
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
Whether it’s suicide, Aids (a particularly maudlin Ed Harris performance in The Hours employs both), being beaten to death, state execution, getting shot, or getting raped and then shot, LGBT characters are just not allowed the happy endings that their straight counterparts enjoy. My personal favourite comes from A Single Man, in which Colin Firth simply drops dead for no reason. Presumably overwhelmed by sheer homosexuality, his heart can no longer keep beating. Beware, non-heterosexuals: Sudden Gay Death Syndrome can strike anywhere.
Well. I mean, yes, it is AWFUL that it’s nearly impossible to find serious portrayals of queers in popular media who don’t come to tragic ends. Of course it is. But the problem isn’t that there are movies in which gay men kill themselves. The problem is that there isn’t an abundance of other, more positive representations of queer people to round it out, and when people create things of that nature, they’re told it won’t sell. Yes, we need popular queer romantic comedies and road-trip buddy movies and action movies where the girl gets the girl at the end. But we do also need tragedy.
I can’t help but notice that both of the movies cited in the quote are based on books by gay men. I’ve read both, but I read A Single Man much more recently. I haven’t seen the movie, and don’t plan to, but the book is a furious queer protest novel, and also an aging writer’s meditation on death and decay. The entire work is focused on death: it couldn’t end in any other way. I almost hope the movie was terrible, because otherwise the writer of this article is being a dismissive twit.
I feel like an obnoxious pedant even writing this, because we’re clearly on the same side, but I care because those are the kinds of stories that I’m drawn to in my own reading and writing. And I want to explore ideas about death and failure and disappointment without feeling like I’m hurting people like me, you know?
Yes, I agree. It is, FOR SURE, extremely problematic that there is not more diversity of representation in terms of queer narratives in the mainstream media. The Tragic Gay Martyr trope has been done to death, no question. But confronting death (and other loss) is pretty much the one universal task that we as humans all have to do, so to say that queer peoples’ narratives shouldn’t address it, is very limiting.
I think there’s a real difference, here, between people like Marijane Meaker or Ann Bannon, those mid-century lesbian pulp novelists whose characters all died or went insane in the end because the obscenity codes at the time prevented their books being published otherwise; and narratives by queer folks that address death and tragedy because death and tragedy are the ghosts haunting those individuals’ souls. The AIDS crisis strikes me as particularly relevant, because for gay men half a generation older than me—hell, even for moderately cosmopolitan straight people half a generation older than me—that epidemic WAS inescapable, and it WAS devastating, and it DID completely alter the landscape of the queer community. My godparents, who are straight, had a year or more where they went to friends’ funerals every single month. So of course queer artists are going to address that, to try to work through the grief and the loss of it. Even largely comic queer novels spanning the late 70s and 80s, like Armistead Maupin’s Tales from the City series, take it on.
The whole issue is difficult from a creator’s perspective, because to be honest the art that I consistently find most interesting doesn’t conform to this notion of the “happy ending” at all. In a lot of cases there’s not even a question, Romeo & Juliet style, of happy versus tragic ending. There’s just messy humans doing messy human stuff: fucking up, and trying their best, hurting themselves and each other, and sometimes, very rarely, achieving moments of genuine connection. If you end a story on a moment of genuine connection it can sort of resemble a “happy ending”—and those are the kinds of hopeful endings that resonate most with me—but make no mistake: it’s a fleeting if a beautiful state. It WILL get fucked up again, and transcended again, and fucked up again, and that will keep happening until we die. I mean that’s what’s so great about humans! Repeated moments of transcendence in the face of limitless capacity for fuckups! And stories that encompass that truth are the kind of queer narrative I’m most interested in reading and writing, because that’s the kind of narrative that reflects my experience of actual human existence.
But there are undoubtedly also queer people who are most interested in writing rom-coms and action flicks with incidentally-queer characters; and novels set in alternate worlds where being queer is accepted without question; and triumph-against-adversity stories where queer characters face down homophobia and win; and…you know, tons more possibilities I’m not thinking of, and those people shouldn’t be shut down by bullshit arguments about there “not being a market” for what they’re doing. I just think the burden rests on the industry and the audiences to support all types of quality queer projects, rather than on individual creators to censor death and tragedy out of their stuff if that’s what they feel called to create.
But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!
At Cambridge, the most memorable event of the summer [1909] term was staged by Geoffrey [Keynes], now in his final year at Pembroke. He and two friends had invited the novelist Henry James to visit Cambridge, Henry James accepting, so Maynard [Keynes] informed Duncan [Grant], ‘in an enormous letter even more complicated than a novel…’ On Sunday 13 June 1909 Maynard gave a breakfast party for Henry James at King’s. It was not a success. He had invited, among others, Harry Norton, who responded to each remark with manic laughter. Henry James was not amused. Desmond MacCarthy found him sitting disconsolately over 'a cold poached egg bleeding to death’ surrounded by a respectful circle of silent undergraduates. However, the visit did produce a classic James remark. Told that the youth with fair hair who sometimes smiled was called Rupert Brooke, who also wrote poetry which was no good, Henry James replied, 'Well, I must say I am relieved, for with that appearance if he had also talent it would be too unfair.’
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!
Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—There she blows!—the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.
Is everything quite impossible? The world is too intolerably confused. I understand nothing. I see too many points and too few. I wander eternally between Duncan and Virginia and Sicilian prostitutes and chastity and resignation and the wildest hopes and despair. I’m dreadfully afraid that I may do something mad for one minute and ruin my life, but it’s just as likely that I shall never do anything at all. The only consolation—and the true one—is that whatever may happen or not happen in this frantic universe we shall always have been ourselves.
Ah! There are so many difficulties! So many difficulties! I want to write a novel about a Lord Chancellor and his naughty son, but I can’t for the life of me think of anything like the shadow of a plot, and then—the British public! Oh dear, let’s all go off to the Faroe Islands, and forget the existence of Robin Mayor and Mrs Humphrey Ward, and drink rum punch of an evening, and live happily ever after! It’s really monstrous that we shouldn’t be able to. Vanessa would cook for us. Why not?
[S]uddenly observed in the extreme distance, dressed in white satin and pearls and thickly powdered and completely haggard… Miss [Ethel] Sands! que diable allait-elle faire dans cette galère? — buggering Karin, I suppose, — the incorrigible old Sapphist —
I guess I’ve never felt entirely female, but then probably lots of people don’t. But I think that at different times in my life I located myself in different places on the gender spectrum, and for many years, throughout my thirties which is when I did that pilgrimage, I didn’t have any connection to the female gender. I wouldn’t say I exactly felt like a man, but when you’re talking about yourself you only have these two options. There’s no word for the “floating” gender in which we would all like to rest. The neuter comes up in the unbearable poem, the neuter gender, but that doesn’t really capture it because you don’t feel neuter, you feel just wrong. Wrong vis-à-vis the gender you’re supposed to be in, wrong vis-à-vis the other one, and so what are you?
Historically we use man for people of any gender because men win. So it’s useful to do that when cornered.
I thought to myself, as Lytton was talking, Now I will remember this & write it down in my diary tomorrow. And as I thought that, everything melted to mist. People don’t say things, except in biographies. True, Lytton was smooth & mild & melancholy beyond his wont; but with intimates, when talk is interesting, one sentence melts into another; heads & tails merge; there is never a complete beast.
The open air and the sense of being out of doors bewildered Sasha Latham, the tall, handsome, rather indolent looking lady, whose majesty of presence was so great that people never credited her with feeling perfectly inadequate and gauche when she had to say something at a party. But so it was; and she was glad that she was with Bertram, who could be trusted, even out of doors, to talk without stopping. Written down what he said would be incredible — not only was each thing he said in itself insignificant, but there was no connection between the different remarks. Indeed, if one had taken a pencil and written down his very words — and one night of his talk would have filled a whole book — no one could doubt, reading them, that the poor man was intellectually deficient. This was far from the case, for Mr. Pritchard was an esteemed civil servant and a Companion of the Bath; but what was even stranger was that he was almost invariably liked. There was a sound in his voice, some accent of emphasis, some lustre in the incongruity of his ideas, some emanation from his round, cubbby brown face and robin redbreast’s figure, something immaterial, and unseizable, which existed and flourished and made itself felt independently of his words, indeed, often in opposition to them. Thus Sasha Latham would be thinking while he chattered on about his tour in Devonshire, about inns and landladies, about Eddie and Freddie, about cows and night travelling, about cream and stars, about continental railways and Bradshaw, catching cod, catching cold, influenza, rheumatism and Keats — she was thinking of him in the abstract as a person whose existence was good, creating him as he spoke in the guise that was different from what he said, and was certainly the true Bertram Pritchard, even though one could not prove it. How could one prove that he was a loyal friend and very sympathetic and — but here, as so often happened, talking to Bertram Pritchard, she forgot his existence, and began to think of something else.
for hours at the end I kissed your temple stroked
your hair and sniffed it it smelled so clean we’d
washed it Saturday night when the fever broke
as if there was always the perfect thing to do
to be alive for years I’d breathe your hair
when I came to bed late it was such pure you
why I nuzzle your brush every morning because
you’re in there just like the dog the night
we unpacked the hospital bag and he skipped
and whimpered when Dad put on the red
sweater Cover my bald spot will you
you’d say and tilt your head like a parrot
so I could fix you up always always
till this one night when I was reduced to
I love you little friend here I am my
sweetest pea over and over spending all our
endearments like stray coins at a border
but wouldn’t cry then no choked it because
they all said hearing was the last to go
the ear is like a wolf’s till the very end
straining to hear a whole forest and I
wanted you loping off whatever you could
still dream to the sound of me at 3 P.M.
you were stable still our favorite word
at 4 you took the turn WAIT WAIT I AM
THE SENTRY HERE nothing passes as long as
I’m where I am we go on death is
a lonely hole two can leap it or else
or else there is nothing this man is mine
he’s an ancient Greek like me I do
all the negotiating while he does battle
we are war and peace in a single bed
we wear the same size shirt it can’t it can’t
be yet not this just let me brush his hair
it’s only Tuesday there’s chicken in the fridge
from Sunday night he ate he slept oh why
don’t all these kisses rouse you I won’t won’t
say it all I will say is goodnight patting
a few last strands in place you’re covered now
my darling one last graze in the meadow
of you and please let your final dream be
a man not quite your size losing the whole
world but still here combing combing
singing your secret names till the night’s gone
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greywash, with whom I often post about the writing process as well as day to day life stuff. We bought a house earlier this year, so there may be posts about that whole deal! I have a kind of stressful job in the nonprofit sector and sometimes gripe about it even though I also feel lucky to be able to make money doing something that I consider worthwhile, and which gives me the ability to ensure my art-making is as divorced from commercial concerns as humanly possible. I do yoga, ran my first 10K earlier this year, and possibly most importantly I really love dogs. They're the best.But Virginia Woolf’s sexual squeamishness, which plays a part in the deflections and self-censorship of the novels, is combined with a powerful, intense sensuality, an erotic susceptibility to people and landscape, language and atmosphere, and a highly charged physical life. “Frigid” seems a ridiculously simplistic description of this complicated, polymorphous self.
[Sontag and Leibovitz] met in 1989, when both had already established notability in their careers. Leibovitz has suggested that Sontag mentored her and constructively criticized her work. […] They never lived together, though they each had an apartment within view of the other’s. Leibovitz, when interviewed for her 2006 book A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005, said the book told a number of stories, and that “with Susan, it was a love story.” While The New York Times in 2009 referred to Sontag as Leibovitz’s “companion”, Leibovitz wrote in A Photographer’s Life that, “Words like ‘companion’ and 'partner’ were not in our vocabulary. We were two people who helped each other through our lives. The closest word is still 'friend.’” That same year, Leibovitz said the descriptor “lover” was accurate. She later reiterated, “Call us 'lovers’. I like 'lovers.’ You know, 'lovers’ sounds romantic. I mean, I want to be perfectly clear. I love Susan.”
It was a November night of wind.
Leaves tore past the window.
God had the book of life open at PLEASURE
and was holding the pages down with one hand
because of the wind from the door.
For I made their flesh as a sieve
wrote God at the top of the page
and then listed in order:
Alcohol
Blood
Gratitude
Memory
Semen
Song
Tears
Time.
An example of a decision we are presently facing may help focus the issues involved in transcribing Beckett’s handwriting. On 21 April 1969 Beckett wrote to Harold Pinter to acknowledge receipt of Pinter’s new play and to make a suggestion about it. The letter opens: “Thank you for sending me Silence. I like it greatly, the writing so precarious and [something]. Just one speech (p. 19 beginning ‘A long way’) I suggest you reconsider.” One Beckett specialist, not of our team, has transcribed the missing word as “numinous.” This would make sense, even if “numinous” doesn’t sound especially Beckettean. But it simply does not fit the letters on the page. One of our team has suggested “numerous”: a set of letters that looks plausible. But what could “precarious and numerous” possibly signify? The job of transcription requires one to commute between the evidence of the eyes and the semantic possibilities. Another suggestion was of a very Beckettean word—“umbrous”—but the first letter does not much resemble a “u.” One further reading gives “cumbrous,” a word that possibly fits with what Pinter says elsewhere of this play, that in it “There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed.” Many possibilities, but only one can be right. The editor-jury is still out, and it may be that in the end we shall have to indicate our doubts (which we do by including a question mark before the dubious word).
There is a always a violence in “translating” handwriting into printed text, because the very particular “feel” of each letter risks being lost. The colour and quality of the paper Beckett chose, the degree of legibility of the hand—my colleague Gérard Kahn, who has been so helpful in our transcribing, believes that Beckett writes most illegibly to Barbara Bray because of an ambivalence about being read and understood by her—are just elements of the letter that are eroded when it is mined for text alone.
timeasmymeasure