The Argonauts (18 page)

The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time
. If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one’s undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I love her very much?

What is good is always being destroyed:
one of Winnicott’s main axioms.

I considered writing Iggy a letter before he was born, but while I talked to him a lot in utero, I stalled out when it came to writing anything down. Writing to him felt akin to giving him a name: an act of love, surely, but also one of irrevocable classification, interpellation. (Perhaps this is why Iggy is named Iggy: if territorialization is inevitable, why not perform it with a little irreverence? “
Iggy:
Not a good choice unless you’re planning for a rock star or the class clown,” one baby names website warned.) The baby wasn’t separate from me, so what use would it be to write to him as if he were off at sea? No need to rehash Linda Hamilton in the final scenes of
The Terminator
, recording an audiotape for her unborn son, the future leader of the human resistance, before she sets off toward Mexico in her beater jeep, storm clouds gathering on the horizon. If you want an original relation to the mother/son dyad, you must turn (however sadly!) away from the seduction of messianic fantasy. And if your baby boy is going to be white, you must become curious about what will happen if you raise him as just another human animal, no more or less worthy than any other.

This is a deflation, but not a dismissal. It is also a new possibility.

When Iggy had the toxin and we lay with him in his hospital crib, I knew—in a flood of fear and panic—what I know now, in our blessed return to the land of health, which is that my time with him has been the happiest time of my life. Its happiness has been of a more palpable and undeniable and unmitigated quality than any I’ve ever known. For it isn’t just moments of happiness, which is all I thought we got. It’s a happiness that spreads.

For this reason I am tempted to call it a lasting happiness, but I know I won’t take it with me when I go. At best, I hope to impart it to Iggy, to allow him to feel that he created it, which, in many ways, he has.

Babies do not remember being held well—what they remember is the traumatic experience of not being held well enough
. Some might read in this a recipe for the classic ungratefulness of children—
after everything I’ve done for you
, and so on. To me, at the moment anyway, it is a tremendous relief, an incitement to give Iggy
no memory
, save the sense, likely unconscious, of having once been gathered together, made to feel real.

That is what my mother did for me. I’d almost forgotten.

And now, I think I can say—

I want you to know, you were thought of as possible—never as certain, but always as possible—not in any single moment, but over many months, even years, of trying, of waiting, of calling—when, in a love sometimes sure of itself, sometimes shaken by bewilderment and change, but always committed to the charge of ever-deepening understanding—two human animals, one of whom is blessedly neither male nor female, the other of whom is female (more or less), deeply, doggedly, wildly wanted you to be
.

After Iggy is released from the hospital post-toxin, we celebrate with one of our living room dance parties, just me and the three Irish guys, so called to honor the otherwise un-addressed genetic link each of them has to Irish stock. We play “Tightrope” by Janelle Monáe over and over again (after years of noise metal, Harry now also keeps abreast of the Top 40, so that he can discuss the finer points of the new Katy Perry, Daft Punk, or Lorde). Iggy’s big brother holds him by the armpits and spins him around in a wild circle while we scramble to make sure Iggy’s chubby legs don’t hit any windows or end tables. As one might expect for brothers seven years apart, they almost always play too rough for my liking.
But he loves it!
his brother says whenever I tell him to take the heavy faux-fur blanket off Iggy’s head for a moment, so we can be sure he hasn’t smothered. But for the most part, he’s right. Iggy loves it. Iggy loves playing with his brother and his brother loves playing with Iggy in ways I could never have dreamt. His brother especially loves dragging Iggy around his schoolyard, bragging about how soft his little brother’s head is to mostly preoccupied peers.
Who wants to touch a really soft head?
he yells, as if hawking wares. It stresses me out to watch them play, but it also makes me feel like I’ve finally done something unequivocally good. That I’ve finally done my stepson an unequivocal good.
He’s mine, all mine
, he says as he scoops Iggy up and runs off with him to another room.

Don’t produce and don’t reproduce, my friend said. But really there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production. No lack, only desiring machines.
Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration
. When all the mythologies have been set aside, we can see that, children or no children,
the joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing
.

But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don’t know. I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

Parts of this book appeared, in different forms, as a talk for
Tendencies
(a series in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick held at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, cu-rated by Tim Trace Peterson); as a zine for A. L. Steiner’s 2012
Puppies and Babies
installation (published by Otherwild); in the magazines
jubilat, Tin House
, and
Flaunt;
and in the anthology
After Montaigne
(University of Georgia Press, 2015). This book was supported throughout by a Literature grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, for which I remain grateful.

Special thanks as always to PJ Mark, for his shrewd intelligence and ongoing faith in me: I stand lucky and grateful. Thanks also to Ethan Nosowsky, for his profound editorial wisdom and support, and to Katie Dublinski. For their advice, assistance, and/or inspiration, I also wish to thank Ben Lerner, Eula Biss, Tara Jane ONeil, Wayne Koestenbaum, Steven Marchetti, Brian Blanchfield, Dana Ward, Jmy James Kidd, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Jack Halberstam, Janet Sarbanes, Tara Jepsen, Andrea Fontenot, Amy Sillman, Silas Howard, Peter Gadol, A. L. Steiner, Gretchen Hildebran, Suzanne Snider, Cynthia Nelson, Andrés Gonzalez, Emerson Whitney, Anna Moschovakis, Sarah Manguso, Jessica Kramer, Elena Vogel, Stacey Poston, Melody Moody, Barbara Nelson, Emily Nelson, Craig Tracy, and the Purple Team at the Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. To my Irish guys: thank you for your daily presence, support, and love. I’m so glad you found me.

In loving memory of those who departed during this book’s time: Phyllis DeChant (1938–2010), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009), Lhasa de Sela (1972–2010), and Maximum Dodge (1993–2012). You are missed.

This book would not exist without Harry Dodge, whose intelligence, foxiness, vision, fortitude, and willingness to be represented have made this project, along with so much else, possible. Thank you for showing me what a nuptial might be—an infinite conversation, an endless becoming.

Note to the Reader: In the print edition of
The Argonauts
, attributions for otherwise unattributed text appear in the margins in grayscale. Because of limitations in the conversion of printed books to reflowable ebook files, there is not an adequate way to reproduce those marginal citations alongside the main text in the ebook. Therefore, all quoted text that is not attributed within the body of the text is listed below, with italics indicating the quoted material.

I stopped smugly repeating
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly
and wondered anew, can everything be thought. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nuptials are the opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines: question-answer, masculine-feminine, man-animal, etc. This could be what a conversation is—simply the outline of a becoming
. —Gilles Deleuze/Claire Parnet

(What is that triangle, anyway? My twat?)
—Eileen Myles

Many feminists have argued for
the decline of the domestic as a separate, inherently female sphere and the vindication of domesticity as an ethic, an affect, an aesthetic, and a public
. —Susan Fraiman

When or how do
new kinship systems mime older nuclear-family arrangements
and when or how do they
radically recontextualize them in a way that constitutes a rethinking of kinship?
—Judith Butler

If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so
. —Jacques Lacan

It’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered selfconsciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature
. —Denise Riley

The bad reading [of
Gender Trouble
] goes something like this: I can get up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. I can take out a piece of clothing and change my gender: stylize it, and then that evening I can change it again and be something radically other, so that what you get is something like the commodification of gender, and the understanding of taking on a gender as a kind of consumerism…. When my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very formation of persons
, presupposes
gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen and that “performativity” is not radical choice and it’s not voluntarism…. Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in
. — Butler

What if where I am is what I need?
—Deborah Hay

The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy
. —Sara Ahmed

And I have long known that the
moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you
. —Ahmed

Do castration and the Phallus tell us the deep Truths of Western culture or just the truth of how things are and might not always be?
—Elizabeth Weed

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art
. —Susan Sontag

If there’s one thing homonormativity reveals, it’s the troubling fact that
you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority
. —Leo Bersani

You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows
. —Pema Chödrön

Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes mothers find it alarming to think that what they are doing is so important and in that case it is better not to tell them. It makes them self-conscious and then they do everything less well…. When a mother has a capacity quite simply to be a mother we must never interfere. She will not be able to fight for her rights because she will not understand
. —D.W. Winnicott

In other words, the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, and for a structural, eidetic reason. My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discursive coherence
. —Luce Irigaray

What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted?
—Anne Carson

I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it
. —Beatriz Preciado

A becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning, a certain turning inward,
turning into my own
/
turning on in
/
to my own self
/
at last
/
turning out of the
/
white cage, turning out of the
/
lady cage
/
turning at last
. —Lucille Clifton

It’s painful for me that I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity. Either people didn’t really read the book, or the commodification of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write, even when it’s explicitly opposed to that politics, gets taken up by that machinery
. —Butler

We ought to say a feeling of
and
, a feeling of
if
a feeling of
but
, and a feeling of
by
, quite as readily as we say a feeling of
blue
or a feeling of
cold
. —William James

And I said, do labia really start to hang? She said, yes, just like men’s balls, gravity makes the labia hang. I told her I never noticed that, I’d have to take a look
. —Dodie Bellamy

I think we have—and can have—a right to be free
. —Michel Foucault

The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window … the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window
. —Naomi Ginsberg, to Allen

This reading treats Wolf Man’s memory of his parents’ encounter “a tergo” as a primal, coded fantasy of gay male sex, a scene of proto-homosexuality. —Lee Edelman (paraphrase)