Wildness

I am white, which makes me invisible if I want to be—part of the furniture when it suits me, part of the center when I feel unjustly sidelined. I have benefited and continue to benefit from colonialism and racism. When I was growing up, I read books and saw films which made it easy for me to identify with the main protagonist. I am a cis woman. This world is built for me.

I feel fraudulent most of the time. I recognize that some of this feeling comes from being a woman. I talk to other women who feel it too. I fight it, especially when I am around senior male academics and writers who, for reasons I don’t understand, rarely, if ever, feel fraudulent themselves. I have learned from Maggie Nelson to remove instances of incessant apologizing from my professional emails. I am excellent at bluffing, and I will not be bullied. I don’t let myself forget just how low the stakes are at a Western university. But a part of that fraudulent feeling is not something I want to fight.

In a lecture on feminism, the Gomeroi poet and legal researcher Alison Whittaker talked about white middle-class feminists who like to heap praise on indigenous women writers as if consuming indigenous literature is a form of activism, as if being across the work of First Nations women is in itself a moral act. “We listen in silence,” Alison Whittaker said in the lecture, “astounded at how much labor we are still expected to give and how little is returned.”

I was haunted by the lecture. Haunting, Avery Gordon writes, produces a “something-to-be-done.”

This “something-to-be-done” is a decision to proceed by not pillaging the intellectual property of First Nations women and other women of color, by not picking apart their texts and speeches for insights or battle cries that might just give me a cloak of moral goodness, as if the act of public restatement of their words in my voice was not another instance of micro-theft.

2.
START AGAIN. START WITH MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ and her partner Ulay and a performance they did called The Lovers, which is to say, start by rehashing an old story, about a woman who is now in her seventies, would you believe it, even though she looks half her age, and has the endurance of a young god despite being born in 1946, these are the facts, old story, old woman—we would call her older, not old, in our culture, but that’s the culture’s shop front; put your head in the storeroom and you’ll hear a different language. Note how old and white, conjoined, are the two ur-terms of derision thrown around on social media, as if they say everything that needs to be said, and while decasing the term white from its poisonous neutrality and slinging it as an insult, as a self-oscillating ball of sausage mincemeat, makes many kinds of moral and historical sense, please leave old out of it.

Old women. Old revolutionaries on once-galloping horses. Sooner or later such women might become farcical.

The old story (those old stories on once-galloping horses) takes place in the 1980s when Marina Abramović, born in Serbia, and her partner and collaborator, Ulay, born in Germany, were going to walk toward each other from the desert and sea sides of the Great Wall of China so as to meet in the middle and marry, not that either of them was interested in marriage. But love—they have been making work about it for a while.

Relation in Space, 1976—Two naked bodies run at each other and collide, again and again.

Breathing In, Breathing Out, 1977—Two mouths clamped together exchange one lungful of air. Until oxygen becomes carbon dioxide. Until the two performers come close to losing consciousness.

Light/Dark, 1977—Two people slap each other’s faces faster and faster. The performance will stop when one flinches. Neither one flinches. The performance stops when they can’t slap any faster.

Rest Energy, 1980—She holds the bow, he holds the string. They pull in opposite directions. If he lets go, she could be shot through the heart. Microphones taped to their chests transmit the sounds of their hearts beating.

An essay is not like a lecture. It is disinclined toward emitting authority, toward persuasion. It is not wound up oratorically. An essay is not like a lecture, although as Mary Cappello shows, we have forgotten what a lecture can be. Reclaiming the lectern, Cappello says, is a feminist project. Reclaiming—as in remembering the sweep and sting of the lecture’s history as a form, in the hands of Gertrude Stein, Audre Lorde, Roland Barthes, Mary Ruefle, etc. Or someone like Mary Beard now. “The lecture will have succeeded, if, like the essay, it cannot be summarized, but only experienced,” Mary Cappello writes.

An essay, which may or may not be like a lecture, can go in and out of the old story about a woman, not be done with it before making its move, confident that this kind of not-being-done-with is good for thinking, because thinking is rarely monastically single-minded or sequential, because thoughts do not need to have “happy endings.” The essay moves by sway and swagger, not always, but often enough. What it never does is march toward a preordained horizon. You cannot give an essay its marching orders.

The old story that set this essay in motion is taking place in the early 1980s. Actually by the time the Chinese government gets money from the Dutch government, which is using Abramović and Ulay’s project as a way to restore its “ties of friendship” with the Chinese, by the time an everyman local hero by the name of Liu Yutian walks the Wall—for that walk could not be done first by dirty foreigners—it is already the late 1980s and Abramović and Ulay’s relationship is dead even though she still has, she would later say in her memoir, a little bit of hope left. The new project is this: walk for three months from the east and west sides of the mountains, meet in the middle, break up.

Would this project have felt as vital if they met and married, would it have had as much to say about love? No, not to me.

I want to say—as usual, the woman hopes. I want to say—as usual, the woman is the one who takes the bad side of the mountain. The voice of my “heteropessimism,” as Indiana Seresin calls it.

Abramović is walking accompanied by soldiers, guards, interpreters; she wants to camp on the mountain, but it’s not allowed; she is forced to detour into villages, to sleep in women’s dormitories, to hold hands with other women as they squat collectively in public toilets, singing. This work is about solitude, but she is never alone. Her big Serbian nose is touched to enhance fertility.

Ulay is not alone either. The interpreter who walks with him is pregnant with their child. It is the interpreter Ulay marries the following year.

The photographs of their embrace ninety days later are devastating. Because of what is on her face and what is not on his.

You can look up this photograph. But perhaps instead I can take this moment created by the possibility of you grabbing a computer to look up a photograph, the moment of time literally made out of this possibility, to point you to two recent books on photography. One is Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography. The second is Sarah Sentilles’s Draw Your Weapons.

Citation, Sara Ahmed says, is feminist memory. Citations are, of course, a complicated business. So is feminist memory. Or maybe it’s not so complicated. I would like to think that feminist memory is not celebrating or enshrining. It is not apologizing, justifying, discounting or smoothing out. It is keeping things on record alongside each other, in a state of tension or bewilderment or anguish or war if need be, all the questions, wounds, scabs, alive, pulsing, made visible. In this conception, my feminist memory allows me to remember, publicly and privately, the work of Abramović that remade the world for me as I also re-remember the indefensibly stupid, offensive things she said in her memoir about the time she spent with First Nations peoples in Australia. The two moments spur each other on, rather than obscure each other.

I am indebted to Hilary Mantel for her refusal of the geological metaphors of burial and excavation, which are commonly used to describe how memories are stored and retrieved. Instead, Mantel offers a vision of memory as “St Augustine’s ‘spreading limitless room’” or “a great plain, a steppe, where all the memories are laid side by side, at the same depth, like seeds under the soil.” I am suggesting that feminist memory can be a limitless room; it hasn’t been, it isn’t now, but it can be. Or maybe—it should be. I can walk across this limitless room toward The Lovers, past Abramović’s recent works, which I cannot stand, which Justin Clemens called, aptly, “museal auto-embalming glorifications.”

What I am trying to say is that feminist memory is not totalizing. It is an ever-expanding, dispersed, breathing archive of acts of remembering and re-remembering—remembering with, against, alongside, despite, in the name of, in the face of, in this space, in that moment. Acts of remembering and acts of refusing to forget. I believe in feminist memory as an antidote to the institutional memory of something like the Nobel Prize for Literature, which says we are sorry, but it is simply not in our purview to remember whether this or that writer denied this or that genocide, whether this or that writer wept in public for this or that genocider.

I am rehashing an old Abramović story because The Lovers, with its failures and secrets and incongruities, is one of the best pieces of art about love—or maybe about anything—I know. It is itself like a mountain on which you cannot camp or find a resting spot. It amplifies Abramović’s bad habits of making art that inserts itself into other people’s symbolic and lived worlds claiming an electric, at times transcendental, connection to some part of those worlds. It is a mix of occupation and self-erasure. It can be justly criticized till the end of time. It is also one of the great feminist works of the second half of the twentieth century. It is part of our heritage of what Jacqueline Rose called “scandalous feminism”—the kind of feminism that willingly goes toward and into the dark regions of the human psyche, unafraid of what it’ll find there. Scandalous feminism, Rose writes, “embraces without inhibition the most painful, outrageous aspects of the human heart, giving them their place at the very core of the world that feminism wants to create.”

Because, as Rose points out, to say that the personal is political, that old chestnut, is not just to put on notice in a pressing, public way questions and histories of reproductive rights, the consequences of the unequal distribution of visible and invisible labor, or the sometimes terrifying ways in which power gets encoded and enacted in sex, but also to de-sanitize the way the human interior, including the unconscious, figures in feminist politics. To allow a vision of the interior that embraces self-misrecognition and self-rupturing, as well as incoherence, unintelligibility, and a drive to self-annihilation. To allow that vision into our political thought.

I want to say—this work of Abramović and Ulay is a farewell to love that leaves no stone unturned.

No one is sovereign in love, says Lauren Berlant. In love we are undone by being constituted in relation to each other. In love our primary attachment is to our undoing. “To encounter ourselves as nonsovereign,” Berlant writes with Lee Edelman in Sex, or the Unbearable, “is to encounter relationality itself, in the psychic, social, and political senses of the term.”

These are the kind of fantasies that the nonsovereign bleaches out: mastery, control, autonomy, certain forms of knowledge, especially forms of knowing in advance. To regain one’s sovereignty, to wrestle it back, what fantasies must be forsaken?

Abramović is walking toward the end of something that matters the most to her, through a place in which she is an anomaly, a foreign agent. The walk requires from her an almost inhuman endurance. The meeting point is not a place of convergence or repair but of the final, self-administered cut.

When I say that this work is like a mountain on which you cannot camp, one of the things I mean is that if you are invested in the vision of art as a mechanism for producing compelling empathy, this walk gives you nowhere to go. You are not invited to imagine what it would be like to walk in her shoes. This kind of imagining is out of reach.

Abramović is walking toward the end of something that matters the most to her. I’d like to think of what I am doing in this essay as a form of walking to the middle of the mountain from multiple points; to the middle where it can get hard-core.

3.
DON’T MISTAKE THIS MOVEMENT (downhill, uphill) for Sisyphean labor, a waste or an entrapment. Something vital is made possible by the thinking and not thinking of many things concurrently which an essay is only too happy to give home to, to incite, and that may look shapeless, indulgent, like an ice cream that’s melting too fast to be eaten in time, to be eaten at all. Something vital like a decentering of thought, and a certain kind of wildness. And walking is not marching, so there’ll be detours, slip-ups, “roadside picnics.” (Roadside Picnic by A. and B. Strugatsky: a Soviet sci-fi parable, a beacon of my adolescence.)

Thinkers like Jack Halberstam can take a racialized term like wildness, caked up in histories of colonialism, shake it hard and make it, with qualifications, into a term of sly vitality, but what I want to say about wildness is not even the first stop on these thinkers’ train. What I want to say is way too rudimentary. It is simply that my ability to think and to follow another in thinking falls away when the movement of that thinking and the language for it are overdetermined. My ability to think about being a woman, cis or trans, in this moment in time, or about feminisms, for example.

In a review of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Like a Fading Shadow, Michael Hoffman writes, “He has gained for himself perhaps the greatest objective of the modern novelist: the freedom, in his next sentence, to say anything at all.” In overdetermined writing and thinking, you get the feeling that the previous sentence drags the next sentence in, that the previous sentence effectively writes the next sentence, and there is nowhere for the writer to go but into the next already prewritten bit. The same with thought. Instead of thinking, prethinking. “Sleepwalking” or “sleepwriting” could be another way of describing it.

In evoking certain kinds of wildness of thought as a counterpoint to overdetermination that produces a layer of soporific fog around itself, I have in my head at least three things:

1. How a text or an act of speech feels when there is an undiminished life in every thought and sentence it contains and in the way they link up or break away from each other, so that every new thought or sentence feels as if it could be anything at all.

2. This thing of going all the way, not stopping when it’s prudent, when it’s far enough, when “you’ve made your point.”

3. Instances when thinking remakes the terrain on which it takes place. Both takes place and takes flight.

Of course, these three things I am attempting to describe can sometimes be found in the same text, the same speech act, the same piece of art.

A recent example of the first kind of wildness: Mary Gaitskill’s novella on the #MeToo movement, This Is Pleasure, in which Gaitskill gives us a perpetrator of an extraordinary, subtle creepiness, whose sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, thoughts, and inner worlds produces instances of almost unbearable humiliation and debasement for most women who enter his orbit. His entitlement and the cruelty it breeds come from a conviction that he is gifted with a special insight into what women really want and need (whatever they tell themselves and others). The perpetrator is, in fact, a liberator of women.

Gaitskill brings us close to the kind of gendered sexual violence that has been hard to apprehend politically, hard to talk about in the public language of recognition and condemnation, because in so many women—and I count myself among them—such violence has, until recently, produced only a belated understanding of a violation taking place, a kind of staggered feeling which starts as “Oh, that was fun” and becomes, sometimes over the space of decades, “That was not fun at all.” First, “That was nothing.” Then, “That was not-nothing, not even close to nothing.”

Gaitskill also gives us a woman who stands by this man. The woman is neither blind nor an apologist for her friend’s behavior. She is ambivalent in a way that is hard to talk about publicly. She could say no to him when he got creepy with her and it was totally fine. They became good friends. Why couldn’t others? He was capable of stepping back. It is important to the woman to maintain the difference between this friend of hers who is not a monster and someone like Harvey Weinstein. Everyone stands to lose, she thinks, if this difference is not recognized and asserted.

Read This Is Pleasure, it’s wild. It has made me remember what fiction can do for public discourse.

Number Two. This thing of going all the way and not stopping when “You’ve made your point.” Marina Abramović’s work. I have said enough about it.

Number three. “Driving Thought Beyond Its Boundaries.”

Everything Alexis Wright has written. Anne Anlin Cheng’s insistence on saying “yellow woman” in her book Ornamentalism:

I use the term yellow woman, rather than Asian woman in the West or Asian American woman, because these more ameliorative, politically acceptable terms do not conjure the queasiness of this inescapably racialized and gendered figure. I am not so much interested in recuperating “yellowness” as a gesture of political defiance as I am intent on grasping the genuine dilemma of its political exception. What does it mean to survive as someone too aestheticized to suffer injury but so aestheticized that she invites injury?

She uses the ugly, queasy-making term not to reclaim it but to keep the queasiness it emits in the space of thought. Cheng’s work on what she calls “racialized gender”—underpinned, in her words, by “that intractable intimacy between being a person and being a thing”—remakes the grounds of feminist thought as she works to formulate “a feminist theory of and for the yellow woman.”

Number three is also Rachel Cusk’s trilogy—Outline, Transit, Kudos—which obliterates female subjectivity as we know it. Cusk says this in an interview: “When you create an entity in space, and it’s a woman, and it claims to feel certain things, at the same time you’re creating a target, you’re creating something people can throw rocks at.”

The task Cusk set herself in the trilogy was to write about womanhood without making the female protagonist into a target. To that effect she removes the physical body of the narrator, she conceals the narrative center of the novels, she dismisses the idea of narrative and of character as novelistic conventions, she makes the narrator listen rather than speak. What happens when you remove the woman at the center of a book or books about womanhood? What happens is that a novel feels remade, the place of literature in talking about womanhood feels newly uncluttered.

It is in this kind of eruptive, infectious feminist art and thought that I look for ways of not turning away from this world, which is not the same as hope, but might be simply referred to as—and I hope it doesn’t sound overly vampiric—the energy to keep going.

Okay. I want us to stop there. Put a branch in the soil to mark this spot instead of a flag, because nothing has been conquered. I am going to go to an altogether different place and start walking from there.

4.
I don't remember how old I was when I watched this movie. Let’s say twelve or thirteen. I don’t remember the name of the movie either. It was Soviet, but quiet, a family drama. I remember only one scene. A sick woman in a hospital bed is consoling her husband. She might never get out of the hospital bed, but she is the one wiping his tears, trying to put a curtain of jokes and tender gestures around him to protect him from feeling scared and powerless.

They are in their thirties or thereabouts. If she dies, she is too young to go and he is too young to be left behind.

The gendered nature of the inversion must have felt normal to me at the time because strong women were the norm in my family and I am pretty sure I felt contempt for femininity expressed as mannered fragility—fragility, when made public, always felt mannered to me when I was young. Big eyes, quivering lips, gross. In any case, I was too young to view this scene with a knowing exhaustion or the resentment of someone who was trapped in this kind of power differential for life, too young to feel mad on behalf of the woman in the hospital bed. All I knew was that I wanted to be like her. That kind of strong. That kind of strong and free till the bitter end.

I have circled around this scene for a long time in my head without ever speaking about it publicly. This woman is still a hero to me in some private way, but I now feel the rage I didn’t feel when I was twelve—for women, certain kinds of women in particular, who are expected to hold it together even though they are the ones who are aggrieved or depleted or stuck in institutional beds. Generations of women who need to say, “It’s all going to be okay,” to their families, their communities, or else all hell will break loose.

Something else happened to me in the past five years or so—a realization. In thinking about what it means to be a white woman in this world, in thinking about what the words “white privilege” actually stand for in the most specific of terms for someone like me, I can see now that I am the man in the hospital room demanding to be consoled. I hate being that man. I want out of that room. At the very least, I want to stop the woman from having to do all the work.

In her essay “The Banality of Empathy,” Namwali Serpell tears into the expectations, often internalized, that the marginalized should view their art as vehicles for generating and disseminating empathy. “This grotesque dynamic,” Serpell writes, “often makes for dull, pandering artworks. And it in fact perpetuates an assumed imbalance in the world: there are those who suffer, and those who do not and thus have the leisure to be convinced—via novels and films that produce empathy—that the sufferers matter.”

5.
I have lived with myself long enough to notice some patterns. I keep looking for the strong women, the extra-strong women, the strongest women I can find.

Simi Genziuk started out as a circus aerial artist. She ended up in a more extreme sideshow where the daredevilry was wilder and she, the only woman, wanted to match the men. One, Shep, lying flat on a bed of nails, would have a motorbike run over him. Shep is Simi’s husband. Simi suggested a hair hang. Space Cowboy, the holder of fifty Guinness Book of World Records, remembered a washing machine sitting around out the back. The hair hang is an ancient Chinese tradition performed by both women and men. Hardly even attempted these days. The washing machine’s weight: 75 kg (165 lbs). Simi began practicing with four kg weights in a local park. It took her four years to get to the stage, in front of an audience, where she could hang upside down from an aerial hoop and hoist that washing machine off the ground—twisting it midair—with her hair. The hair had to be perfectly pulled together in a special knot. For pain minimization purposes.

Hair is a metaphor. A washing machine is a metaphor. Simi would ask Shep, who was the show’s MC, to dedicate her hair hang to all the women watching. Hanging upside down is a metaphor for what it’s like to be a woman.

I ask Simi about fear. Maybe she felt it when she was training in her early days as an aerial artist, she tells me, when she needed to let go of the trapeze and catch it with her legs. It never reached her head, but she felt her legs go wobbly and refuse to do what they needed to do. But there is no comedown anymore. She probably could go to sleep after a performance almost immediately. “That’s professionalism,” I say. “That’s sad,” Simi says.

What I mean is that it’s hard-core. Like Abramović.

Both Simi and I are Jewish. Our families are from Eastern Europe. I am a first-gen. She is not. Whatever. Recently a helicopter landed too close to the house in Byron Bay where Simi and Shep live with their nine-year-old daughter, Goldie. Straight away Simi started cycling through images of her family in a state of acute danger during World War II. The day before we spoke, she felt cold in a thin cardigan and remembered stories about her family having to deal with extreme cold. In her mind she saw herself as the weak link. She thought, One weak link could bring the whole family down.

I tell her I do the same thing. The difference is that you could run barefoot through a forest, Simi, and I couldn’t. You could climb any mountain, carry others on your back. You could. I couldn’t.

I understand what this implies. That this thing I have about women who have a way with their bodies comes from being Jewish and the Holocaust. Women and children are the primary victims of wars and genocides. My history makes me fantasize about a race of invincible women.

6.
Something like a year ago, I read Anne Boyer’s The Undying. Boyer was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of forty-one, when her daughter was fourteen. Boyer’s book starts with various world-historical women, including Susan Sontag, thinking about what cancer will do to their work and who they are in the world. I was maybe only ten pages into Boyer’s book when I caught myself feeling…I guess the word, the shameful word, is “incredulous”: this was a woman at the peak of her powers, she was saying things I’d never heard said before. I reread her sentences forgetting to breathe. I was incredulous because of how undiminished Boyer sounded. And the women she was bringing along as she landed her helicopter on those first pages—not only Sontag, but Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Eve Sedgwick, Rachel Carson, global women, women of giant brains—she made them sound undiminished too.

Undiminished, as in steady in the refusal to retreat from the world. From the work of paying attention and not suffering fools.

Before I started reading Boyer, I was reading Janet Malcolm’s cross review of Sontag, a new biography by the writer Benjamin Moser. I found Malcolm’s review, continued reading Undying, reread some of the columns Jenny Diski had written for the London Review of Books after her cancer diagnosis—when she was, as they say, on the home stretch. I read not sequentially but all at once, in a way I cannot describe mathematically. Sometimes just a couple of sentences from one text before my hand started pulling other books, magazines, screens toward myself, and no part of this need for amassing, for assembly, could, in good faith, be attributed to an inflamed appetite or a short attention span even though I was/am, as you’d expect, deranged from breastfeeding and no sleep.

What if the idea of lineage and its sincere, reverence-laden, sisterhoody vibes feel almost as oppressive as the logic of competition with your contemporaries, the logic that is semi-hidden, at least in its crudest manifestations, but kicking along just fine (and it’s almost always competition for the crumbs—job crumbs, grant money crumbs, attention crumbs, space-to-read-or-exhibit crumbs)? What if the logic of lineage feels too single file, too willing to slot into some convenient narrative of commonality and continuity, into the division of time into past, present, and future, while solidarity—because what else am I chasing here but a conception of solidarity I can trust?—means not only acknowledging proudly your debt to other women artists but also letting those women be your muses in a way that breaks the idea of progression? Not breaks with, but breaks, makes kaput.

I need these women talking alongside and on top of each other, at once, as if we are in a cave together, as if we are part of Christian Marclay’s recent installation in which forty-eight war movies are screened simultaneously.

7.
Unlike a traditional lecture, an essay carries within it “the willingness to be defeated,” J. Eleftheriou writes.

Remember when in childhood you’d say one extra-familiar word over and over again till it started sounding first foreign, then kind of ridiculous? This is what happened to me with the word feminism. When I say, “As a feminist, I…” it’s so obvious what I mean. I no longer know what I mean.

I try to hear these words anew—feminism, feminist—not to say them in a habitual voice, to hang on to not knowing what I mean, to keep being wrongfooted by them. I go walking with feminism up and down. Sometimes I try to think as many thoughts about it simultaneously as possible to jam myself. Ten, twenty, all at once. Walking is not marching. Writing is not marching. Thinking is not marching. It’s much wilder than that.