The Sore Throat

I’m inventing a machine for concealing my desire. And I’m inventing another machine for concealing the machine. It’s a two-machine system, and it sounded like laughter. And I’m inventing a machine for concealing the sound. You, to me: “Why are you concealing the beauty of your machine?” Every machine has more beauty than the last, for everything whose purpose is to conceal seems to change, in the end, into a sign of what it’s concealing. And now the sound that once sounded like laughter is so loud that it seems more like sobbing or laughter concealing sobbing. All my inventing is a complete disaster. It’s not concealing my desire, it’s talking about my desire to conceal my desire, like a voice on a message machine that would say: “Hello. About desire, I’d like to say a word or two. It’s not your eyes, it’s not the word you say, it’s not your complaining voice that I desire. All I desire is your applause.” It’s hard not to hear what the message is

saying, also it’s hard to keep myself from inventing another machine to keep from hearing it. So invent a machine for disinventing. This will be the last machine I ever invent, and its purpose will just be to change every machine into shit. No more inventing (for me). —What a shame. It once was a wonder of a machine; now it’s more like a disaster. —I think he left a message . . . —You’re wrong: he just left a mess.

-Aaron Kunin

a p o r t r a i t o f t h e m a n a s a y o u n g a r t i s t

(or)......

“so, i’m wandering around an essay, writing a library in my head”

or maybe i’ll just call it...

Dear “John”,

As Rimbaud says: “Je” est un autre - that is to say, “I” is someone else.

So, the day after our last class, “I” spent the afternoon re-reading “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” outside of the Art Library, perched on something that I can never remem-ber the word for, but it is neither a railing, a platform, nor a ledge.

Kathryn was in the library writing a paper for Parker, and when I checked my e-mail, I burst into tears. She came out of the door and asked me what had gone wrong, under the impression that something horrible had happened. I told her that I had read your e-mail, and I reproached myself for crying so openly, outside the art library, but I told her “I cry when I am incapable of understanding my feelings”; I said that I cried when I was “inca-pable of comprehending the immensity”.

I think that the head is small. The mind, however, I cannot measure.

This might seem off topic, but it is only because we have yet to reach the topic, now, finally, thank-fully, we are currently on it.

Almost.

That afternoon, I had finally felt comfortable slipping into Joyce- upon re-reading it, re-turning to it for reference, dogearing the pages and tearing off the cover, I had finally be-gan to understand it and love it- I was taken aback, however, startled by the sincerity of your words, shook by the reality of that sort of language- at once, emotionally embroiled in Joyce, and then, only a moment later, touched in my own life- through joyce, through your e-mail- through learning. I’m still learning what it means to learn, honestly- it’s as hard as learning a task or a tool, to know what it means to know something always seems harder than knowing how to name or mention or recall. So, following that train of thought, I’ve written this overtly long essay regarding the ways we learn about ourselves through litera-ture.

“and she said, softly- that she cries when dogs die, which reminds me of a story I would like to tell you.” edited fragment from my memory outside the art library-

She said she loved Bach. So did Hutton. That was the bond between them, and Hutton (a very bad poet) always felt that Mrs. Dalloway was far the best of the great ladies who took an interest in art. It was odd how strict she was. About mu-sic she was purely impersonal. She was rather a prig. But how charming to look at! She made her house so nice if it weren’t for her professors. Clarissa had half a mind to snatch him off and set him down at the piano in the back room. For he played divinely. Mrs. Dalloway pg.176

This essay is about “three” things. It is about literature, love, and growth-

hopefully, I’ll at least scrape the surface of such weighty, tempermental topics. “Three” is in quotations because, honestly, this essay is about “me”, and loving literature al-lows me to grow, and yet the whole is less than its parts, I am only “I” in so many words or less.

This should not be read as an essay about a movie, but instead as an essay about movies as a contemporary form of identity. The essay is structured as a complementa-ry personal/cultural form of remembering; by utilizing the narrative of the film as a conceptual corollary, I re-turn to the relationships that define my memory, the pri-vate, shamed moments of my childhood, the literature that has come to define me, and the difficulties one faces when they view their existence as a composite of creative urges.

In class, as we watched the film, I left the room three times. Once, as soon as the score began (00:00:35), then, once more during the childhood sequences, and fi-nally, towards the end- directly prior to the house exploding. These “lacuna”, or gaps in my presence, were each caused by an immediate synaptic reaction be-tween the images and sounds of the film which triggered a visceral, emotional re-action in my face- that is to say, the movie made me weep.

The ability to weep in the face of a fiction is indicative of the profound effects that culture can have on our cerebral architecture, that is to say- the associative interplay that is forged between a fiction (a cultural object) and a person (a bio-logical cogito) is demonstrative of the conditioning effects of culture as well as, in a more positive sense, the intrinsic, humanizing value of reading, seeing, and experiencing media, in the form of film, music, and literature.

1. Learning about human existence through a stylized stream of consciousness-{frame of reference}

(This paper will go in reverse. That is to say, from the past to the present- the same way the film works- which is a linear, logical, and cumulative form of de-compresssing time)

I first saw “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” during the spring se-mester of my first year in college, at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia PA. At the time, I had been devoting all of my energies towards art, in the form of drawing and painting, but in all honesty, I was devoting all of my time to Emily- her ID is to the right with an index of its memory-

Still frame from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”Kate Winslet as “Clementine”

Still frame from my memoriesEmily Kane as “Clemintine”

I saw “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” with Emily on a rainy Sunday afternoon in Philly, afterwards, writing in my small black moleskin of how “I wanted her to forget to remem-ber me”- and immediately after- after I scrawled this in my little notebook, she turns to me, and she said “I need to forget to re-member you”. I told her that I had just written that, and, since she said it during its transcription- (and since it is the plot of the film we had just seen together) it’s clear to me now, looking back, how formative such fictions were; not only did we expe-rience art together, but art, in many ways, structured our expe-rience of each other, morphing a rainy afternoon in Philly into a romanticized hyper-reality, the metaphors given by media be-coming metaphors for our love, our lives.

Seeing a movie gave materiality to a fantasy, filling in the gaps of reality.

“I am not aware” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but once, “that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that person, my dear.” Great Expectations pg. 87

I hesitated to use the term “love” in describing my relationship to Emily, because the word itself exists, in many ways, as merely the product of the cultural manifestations that structure many peoples identification of the experience, and rightly so, as the concept of “love” far exceeds the capacity of four letters. Of course I loved Emily, but it was a par-ticular, young, projection of love- the way that Paul loved Snow White, or Pips infatua-tion with Estella- the idea of love, the “fiction”- in many ways, exceeding the capacity of reality. To romance someone without sex, to adore them without possession, to seduce them without expectation- this is post-modern, this is adolescence- but as a form of ex-perimenation, it has taught me a great deal about what it means to be a person.

The capacity for literature and culture to cement and structure our relationship to concep-tual categories that have far outgrown their biological, emotive origins is

a. Often conducive to hyperbolic mis-identifications.b. an historically positive, stabilizing force that sustains traditions and encour-ages communities.c. A fascinating field that I know nothing about. But it makes sense to me.

I would have to say all of the above, or none, but that’s because it’s rigged, and opinions are irrelevant at this point. Literature maintains the integrity of otherwise long forgotten thought patterns, acting like an internal archive of world views and logics of life, in this sense- literature, as an archive of desire reconstitutes the dead (or absent) consciousness of the author through the mass proliferation of the transcribed, written structure- moving

through the minds and often then, into the lives of those who love or relate to the original figure and the form of their feelings. Extrapolated emotive structures can then act as social lubricants in the self-as-cultural-composite”s gradual formation, laying down guidelines and ways of life to encourage experimentation and the furthering of the human spirit. It does this through memory. It allows us to remember the meaning of humanity, the lineage of life insomuch that literature re-enacts itself in the life of the reader, sustaining the past by varying the ways in which the present is accessed, influenced in large part by the differ-ent ways that language structures social experience.

The lore which he was believed to pass his days brooding upon so that it had rapt him from the companionship of youth was only a garner of slender sentences from Aristotle’s poetics and psychology and a Synopsis Philosophiae Scholasticae ad mentem divi Thomae.” (Joyce, Ch. 5)

As Jameson points out, “perhaps the immense fragmentation and privatization of mod-

ern literature-its explosion into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms-foreshad-ows deeper and more general tendencies in social life as a whole.” That is to say, the idiosy-cratic and personalizing connections that I have forged with different authors and filmakers have altered the linguistic makeup of my weltanschauung, stylizing my experience of reality due to the ways that my understanding of the world hae been shaped in a large part from lit-erature like Joyce, Dickens, and a slew of other thinkers. Being queer has also left me with a fragmented sub-culture, as it has been difficult to develop a lifestyle in relation to others who share my sexual preference due to the social ambiguity surrounding queer identity, leaving me in love with William S. Burroughs and Jack Spicer; as Jameson points out how the impli-cations of modern fragmentation have caused, “each group... to speak a curious private lan-guage of its own, each profession developing its private code or idiolect, and finally each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island...” This type of post-modern self, the pas-tiched personality, was for me from the very beginning a creative act, a way to invent a self out of the literature and culture I loved since other structures were difficult to relate to. Ini-tially, incapable of being myself, I found myself incapable of expressing myself, incapable of feeling as if I could every actually know an other; and due to this, instead of creating art,

I found myself creating a self, effectively a euphemism for my identity, a way of rework-ing my language and my external self construction through the filter of social codes and con-structs- that is to say, a style of self, where the language and ideas of literature or culture can then act as a sociable enactment of the stylized self.

This self, effectively “born” and created at art school, was nothing other than the accu-mulation of the culture that provided me with a structure to grow through, a structure that in many ways, stretching far back into my childhood, owes its foundation to what I consider to be a form of post-modern Victorian literature.

“Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought that few people know what secrecy there is in the young, under terror. No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be terror. ...I am afraid to think of what I might have done, on requirement, in the secrecy of my ter-ror” page 15-

As a child, I remember cherishing a chintzy, mass marketed collection of the “Great Il-lustrated Classics”- in particular, two versions of novels by Charles Dickens, “Oliver Twist” and “Great Expectations”. These were thick, weighty hardcover copies- glazed with cheap, shiny covers and rather poorly drawn illustrations; post-modern in terms of the synthetic re-construction of a masterpiece through the commodification of the classics into re-worked, re-written widely dispersed and inexpensive “accidental” pastiches. In “Oliver Twist” I found one of my earliest erotic memories, as it seems, now, looking back, that my relationship with Oliver was one of my earliest moments of literary identification, and as a young child, grow-ing up gay meant growing up alone, in the privacy of a novel. A place where my mind could imagine how it would feel to be someone else, to know someone else- to let Oliver be the boy that I wanted to be, to live through literature a life that I knew I’d never live as a person.

In “Great Expectations”, I chiseled out a small section of the novel, creating a ragged, rigid square in the center, a hollowed out hiding place where I hid the only thing inside of me that had no where else to go- my sexuality, something that was only known to me through creativity. Pornography, at the time (prior to the advent of the internet), was still im-

possible to come by, especially any of a ho-mosexual nature, and as such, I often trace the roots of my drawing habits back to those early, primal creative acts, the private mo-ments when I began to identify as a particu-lar type of person. The drawings themselves were crude re-interpretations of “Blond-ie” comic strips, paper dolls of Bumstead and Blondie in various states of nudity, and as it turned out, I eventually stopped draw-ing Blondie, and my “Great Expectations” eventually became a pile of naked Dagwood Bumsteads.

Conclusion- Preserving a Way of Looking at the World:

“What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural light from the misty yellow rooms?” Great Expectations, Charles Dickens- Pg 96

I shared this previously shameful memory with Emily, a year later, when I came out of the closet to her in a Hostel in San Francisco. After leaving Art School, I took a long, sprawling road trip to California with a childhood friend, Steven, and we roamed the coast, homeless, vagabond gypsies, living out a personalized pastiche of the Beat Gen-eration, reworked in twenty first century with a GPS and a cell phone. Finally settling in Eureka, California- a decision based solely on nomenclature, we rented an apartment, and- directly after settling in, rented “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”- just re-cently re-leased on DVD, watched by two men, laying on the floor, alone with one an-

other in the middle of nowhere California. Months later, after the movie had been pur-chased, re-watched numerous times, and eventually lost, Steve left for South America, and Emily came from Philadelphia to visit me. I had to drive 6 hours to San Francis-co in a 1988 Chevrolet Suburban with a wooden angel found in suburban new jersey nailed to the front bumper, smattered with dead flies and debris. In San Francisco, I met up with myself, came out to Emily, and told her that I loved her regardless of the deception I had conveyed, and that I had not been lying, I had, instead, been inventing- and there is a difference.

“Historically the concept of the self has changed constantly; an Athenian citizen, a member of the great Roman family, a Christian anchorite, a Renaissance artist, a Romantic poet, a Freudian psychologist, and an existentialist philosopher will have vastly differing concepts of what constitutes their self, and their works will inevitably reflect their assumptions about its nature.”- Craig B. Brush- A Self Portrait is not an Auto-biography: Essays on Montaigne’s liteary portraiture

Fiction can offers the imagination the ability to speak through a re-oriented and stylized plane of the person, which can arguably result in the most honest means of communica-tion, a strainer, if you will, by which the thoughts of the author force themselves through a stylistic filter which universalizes the personal into a re-constructed reality of desires, translated into prose through the beautification of language- eventually resulting in more than reality, a supreme non-fiction; literature thus allowing humans to enter a world far more real than our own, the world of the imagination. The world that I know, this ob-jective “reality” is only available in the form of a room, the space between buildings or the highways and streets that lead out into the unknown. Non-fiction is organizational, and while it establishes structure, sustains and preserves history, it does this such a thing thanks to the dichotomy formed by the remainder, (and I remember, in first grade asking the librarian what the other one was, “Non-Fiction” she said to me, or- while at a bar, hit-ting on a psychologist years ago, mis-pronouncing dichotomy as dyke-oh-toe-me). Be-yond these pragmatic foundations which provide culture with a politics, fiction is, quite obviously, that which provides culture with a logic- a way of imagining itself, as more

than an area demarcated by boundaries, but moreover, through its reflection in a lacanian mirror of literature, the cohesive gestalt of a fragmented assortment of the past- sustained by history and society- which then can organize itself through its shared hallucination, as the dreams of a culture become eternal when transfused with material- the history of liter-ature, humanity as its own mirror.

Mankind has amused itself with the lie that there is no longer any un-charted ter-ritory, merely since we’ve organized the world into a lexicon of countries and geogra-phy. Writing, imagining, and inventing occur in a realm that far exceeds the boundaries of physicality, where the mind fills in the blanks of reality- resulting in both culture as well as the psychological framework of personality. I am aware of my body. The surfaces and textures that compose me can not resist comprehension, I am cognizant of my organs, my heart beating, my cheeks reddening. Yet, when someone takes a picture of me, oftentimes- (unless I am self-conscious, and thus posing) I realize that I do not know what I think I look like. I can never fully step outside of my body- (video aids in this, to a degree) –and

in the same manner, a culture cannot comprehend itself through the documents that form its government, these are ideals as much as any collage of Helen, such rigid networks of objective relationships form a tautology, to be sure- but they do not define the personali-ty of a country any more than an image defines me. I only look like myself when I write in a way that externalizes how I feel, how I think- Joyce can know Dublin, can know Ire-land, but only because he knows himself, and such a thing then becomes pure, a style of writing that is a style of being, a reflection that is internal yet ruptures the very surface of the self in its scope. To be sure, I can pretend I know “America” after reading “on the road”, but it is then up to me to make literature live, vividly- to carry out the legacy of other lives that lends themselves to me, a life relived in leisure, a world of words that can enter this cell of cells and reorganize its architecture as a vision understood only through culture.

“here I am, getting on in the first year of my time, and since the day of my being bound, I have never thanked Miss Haveisham, or asked her, or shown that I remember her.” (pg 111)

Literature is a self perpetuating system, a malleable, pliable, amorphous structure: an analog, if you will, for human memory- a means of immortality, sure- but not neces-sarily for the “individual”; instead, it would seem more apt to say that literature keeps life alive, an immortality of experience rather than any ephemeral notion of interiority. Of course, inclusive in such a broad introductory sentence is a pre-occupation with the arts, generally speaking- and yet it is so easy to get off track, to think of the Mona Lisa as more than a painting of a dead person, to think of Jane Eyre as more than a woman. To think of the arts as anything more than an imitation of an intention, the intention to understand what it means to be a human, is to over think it, and rightfully so, as the complexity of hu-man history is indeed beyond any simple explanation, and as such, such broad topics often evade relation, or fall into the obscurity of a pedantic reductionism.

We are so plagued by purpose, by origin or inception, that we often fall to notice the meaning and value of influence, mimesis and inspiration, the sense that the effulgence

that surrounds us is much more than us, and as such, our experience, my experience, is effec-tively one of a placeholder, a point on a graph, a cipher, a centered perspective, nothing more, nothing less.

In literature, “I am myself become other.” - Maurice Blanchart

Again, thank you so much, I can’t tell you how beautiful my education has been for me, and your guidance and compassion have meant a great deal in the past several months. I hope we have a chance to stay in touch.

Prolouge 1a-

So, after writing this, I searched for Montaigne in the Library. It took awhile to find which versions were in English and in the library that I was in. Then, it took awhile to find them, since wrapped around the bookshelves there was a huge yellow line of caution tape, which I had to duck under and pass through in order to find Montaigne. I ended up mistak-enly in the children’s section, which I was astonished to find. The first two books that I saw were titled “Emily” and “Henry”, so I grabbed them, eventually found Montaigne, and then stopped by a good friends house on the way home.

Heather Yaden is a beautiful person that I’ve had the ability to get to know, and I stopped by her house to show her the books that I had found. When I showed her “Emily”, the children’s story I had borrowed on impulse alone, she burst into joy, as it turns out that it was one of the most important books for her as a child. She told me of how, unbeknownst to me, “Emily”, the children’s book is actually a story about Emily Dickenson, and that, af-

ter reading it as a child, hundreds of times over through the voice of her mother,and now, Heather’s love for Dickenson has grown with her, through the course of her growth and deep into the present of her varied interests. By seeing a bundled pile of papers that she hadn’t seen in years, Heather re-touched a part of herself, and my self in the process-

Epilouge 2-

I saw a girl from our class at Starbucks yesterday, and made the mistake of mis-re-membering who she was. The girl in question was a person whom I had been prone to a form of casual confrontation over the course of the semester, and mis-remembering her identity was surely a step backwards in terms of knowing one another, which was unsat-isfying for me, at first. However, I had the chance to speak with her about her paper, and she was nervous, but I smiled- telling her she’d be fine, telling her that you love her, that you’d be fine with her paper. Of course, you weren’t there, I don’t know how you feel about her, and frankly, her paper might be a disaster. I was impersonating your earnest-

ness, because I have that in me as well, and knowing you allows me to know how to know myself, and thus how to know others. I left her smiling, and walked home to write this.While walking, I began thinking of my memories of this girl from our class, and how- odd-ly enough, the first moment that comes to mind was during the class on “Portrait”, and how I argued with her, softly, regarding the “myth” of identity, etc. (and you seemed pleased to see me being post-modern).

What a ruse, what a lie that we tell ourselves, I think now, to myself. Just because my past is a fragile slew of CDs and DVDs, even if the present is nothing more than an imperson-ation, even if this dramatic conclusion knows itself to be a dramatic conclusion- none of this can get rid of the person. Post-modernism can teach us about dissembling the self- to critically unearth its cultural ontology, to tune us into the contemporary context we’ve been born into- but, it should also be able to enlighten us and invigorate our expectations by ex-posing, through these temporal transmutations and cultural means of contextual identifica-tion, that there is, beyond all of these smoke and mirrors- somewhere, out there- in here; despite language, despite all these codifications, that there remains much to be understood,

that there are vivid, agile, and resilient aspects of human identity that have yet to be cat-egorized or comprehended, that while we are making it up as it goes along, the world is making us up as well.

thanks so much for such a great class- take care- so long then- enjoy your day- thanks again-

dp