The Annual Queer Theory Lecture
In honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Lynne Huffer
An Autobiography of an Extinction
Lecture and Interactive Exhibit
– So welcome to all of you. As many of you know, my name is Gabriel Rosenberg. I’m associate professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, or GSF, and history here at Duke University. I chair the Sexuality Studies Advisory Board, and I’m also the director of graduate studies.
It is my honor to introduce Prof. Lynne Huffer, who will be giving this year’s Queer Theory lecture to honor Eve Sedgwick. Before I say more about Prof. Huffer’s work, I do want to say a little bit more about this event to contextualize it, and give us a sense of what we’re doing here.
So you are joining us for our annual Queer Theory lecture in honor of Eve Sedgwick. Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies hosts this annual event to welcome, celebrate, and think alongside individuals that are going to be the most incisive and provocative scholars in the interdisciplinary field of queer theory.
And to do so to honor, in particular, one of its most incisive and provocative critics, that being Eve Sedgwick. As many of you probably know, Eve Sedgwick spent much in her career here at Duke in the Department of English, where she authored field defining works of queer literary criticism,
Including “Epistemology of the Closet” in 1990, and “Tendencies” in 1993. Although she moved to the City University of New York in 1997, where she taught until her passing in 2009, she left an indelible mark on this community here at Duke, and in North Carolina as well. In particular, Sedgwick worked,
Sedgwick’s work helped to establish Duke as an intellectual leader in the critical study of sexuality. Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies host this event every year, and has done so for more than a decade now as both a tribute to Sedgwick and to continue her legacy. The lecturer asks leading scholars
To not only showcase new research, but ideally to also offer broader perspectives on the state of the field, its past, and its future trajectories, as well as to tease those boundaries, setting new itineraries, engaging new audiences, and perhaps fostering new republics. In this sense, we sometimes ask,
Perhaps too insistently, not only what queer theory is, but what it might then become. More broadly, the Sedgwick Lecture is the centerpiece of sexuality studies programming at Duke. That programming covers, lectures, workshops, film screenings, and other events, and also supports an undergraduate minor in sexuality studies in GSF, as well as content related
To the GSF Feminist Study Certificate. All of this activity is oriented towards charting the centrality of sex, sexual identity, and sex practices to contemporary political and cultural formations in the United States and around the world. And I’m thrilled that sexuality study enjoys a close relationship with Duke’s Sallie Bingham Center
For Women’s History and Culture at the Rubenstein Library. I think it’s important to note that that center now houses the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick papers, an archive that, as of this spring, pardon me, as of last spring, is now open for research. I’d also like to take this opportunity
To thank Hal Sedgwick, whose generous support allows us to record and digitally archive this lecture. And now to the matter at hand. It is my pleasure to introduce Prof. Lynne Huffer. She is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. She previously taught at Yale and Rice,
Prior to arriving at Emory. She’s held numerous fellowships, including one most recently from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I’m not going to list the entirety of things that she’s published, because we would be here all evening, rather than hear Prof. Huffer herself. So I will summarize,
Or at least make things a little bit more concise by talking about the five books that she’s authored, beginning with important works of feminist theory, in “Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing” from the University of Michigan Press in 1992, and “Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures, Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference”
From Stanford University Press in 1998. However, starting with “Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory” from Columbia University present 2010, and continuing through “Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex,” also from Columbia. And “Foucault’s Strange Eros,” also from Columbia in 2020.
The Foucault Trilogy, as I believe it is called, has been published exclusively with Columbia University Press, which is great credit to them. In these works, Huffer has focused on thinking with the provocations of Michel Foucault, and particularly how his thought has been both formative for contemporary queer and feminist theoretics.
And Huffer’s readings of Foucault I think are original, deft and incisive. They re-situate Foucault’s textual corpus in ways that challenge conventional formulations of his influence on queer theory, and potential genealogies for both feminist and queer theoretic modes. In particular, “Mad for Foucault” forces us to rethink Foucault’s early texts
On madness in relationship to the emergence of queer of theory, which is generally credited to his work on the history of sexuality. In addition, Huffer offers powerful analyses of the role that sexual difference in particular plays, or shall we say, fails to play in much of Foucault’s thought,
Showing I think with exceptional care what might be characterized as important queer and feminist theoretic tensions, as well as convergences, an argument made through rethinking of various practices central to queer theory, from fisting, to sodomy law, in the work “Are the Lips a Grave?”
Her current work, which will be the basis of today’s talk, heads out in an entirely new direction, as far as how I’ve summarized it so far. Undoubtedly there are continuities, which we will explore. But it considers aesthetics and art in the period that we sometimes call the Anthropocene,
And that Huffer analyzes in relationship in particular to mass extinction. I’m not gonna say much more about the content, in part because I don’t know it. (laughs) But also because I wanna call attention to the fact that this lecture, as I suspect Prof. Huffer will talk about, is accompanied by an art installation.
And I invite you and truly hope that you will join us in exploring that art installation after the lecture and the Q&A. I think Prof. Huffer is gonna talk about that art installation at great length. When she does so, I suspect that she will not say what I’m about to say,
But I’m happy to warrant it nevertheless. This lecture and the accompanying art exhibit showcase a creativity and vitality of intellect to say nothing of an extraordinary sensitivity to affect and aesthetics that truly honors Eve Sedgwick’s memory and scholarship, and makes it my great honor to introduce Prof. Lynne Huffer. – This lecture grows out of my obsession with fragments. But before I start, a few words of gratitude for the generosity with which this obsession has been received. I want to thank Gabriel Rosenberg, Jennifer Nash, and the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies for the invitation
To speak here and to do something experimental with my fragments in the exhibition space. A special thanks to Gabriel again and also to Julie Wynmoor for all the logistical support, to Lauren, the wonderful videographer, to Michael Eng and Kimberly Lamm for helping me scope out the exhibition space here at Duke.
Many thanks to Robyn Wiegman who, several years ago now, nudged me onto a path called autotheory. I don’t know if that’s what this is. I’m not sure, but certainly her nudge gave me permission to play with form in ways I hadn’t before. A huge thanks to my colleague Lauren Guilmette,
A philosophy professor at Elon, and the folks Lauren recruited to help with the installation, James and Devonne, two of her students. Their artistry is visible in every detail of the installation down the hall. Lauren is an artist and a thinker who inspires me in so many ways.
I really feel that we’re on this journey together. How many workshops have we done? How many have we led? Finally, inexpressible gratitude to my partner, Tamara Jones, who drove up here with me from Atlanta. She encourages me in all these experiments, she too contributed to the installation,
And she’s lived among my fragments day after day, ducking beneath them on her way across the living room, teaching me every day how to live in this. This lecture/reading/installation has three components. First, substrate: what I regard as the epistemic conditions that allow my fragments to be seen and heard,
Substrate as their underlying medium. Second, a reading of excerpts from my new fragment book. And third, an interactive installation of fragments down the hall that you’re all invited to enjoy at your leisure during the reception following the reading. I want to dedicate this lecture/reading/installation to a former student, Alexa Cucopulos.
Alexa was a graduate student here at Duke in the Program in Literature when she passed away in April 2020. Before coming to Duke she was a philosophy major and my student at Emory. Like Sedgwick, Alexa was also a poet and an artist. She taught me how to think the way a philosopher-artist-poet does.
Alexa loved all the strange inversions and chiastic reversals that pepper Michel Foucault’s writing. She taught me so much. Teacher follows student. In Derrida’s “Post Card,” Socrates inverts Plato. Alexa’s honors thesis on chiasmus reveled in these inverted successions, these queerings of sequence and lines of filiation, all the twists and obliquities
People often miss in Foucault. Here, in this lecture, in this book and in other things I’ve written, I’m still thinking with Alexa. And this phrase, this envoi, this sending, keeps returning like a mantra in my head. It was first uttered by Deleuze in his course on Foucault, a year after Foucault’s death. “Each one sends their arrow into the target of the other.” Deleuze’s course on Foucault was a kind of mourning. Mourning as the eternal recurrence of a sending, an envoi: a sending’s path crossing, criss-crossing, crossing again, untimely. Substrate. Last year I was on leave, living in an apartment
At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, participating in a seminar called Climate Crisis Politics. I was writing a book that I thought would be called “The Ethics of Extinction.” Instead, another book appeared, “These Survivals.” I had gathered together fragments of art and philosophy, environmental science and experimental writing,
Not knowing how to write what I wanted to write. Out of sheer frustration I started stringing lines across my living space to get a better look. The lines zigzagged, mostly at eye level, some slightly higher, some slightly lower, like geological sedimentations inside an apartment. At first I was tentative.
But slowly the zigzagging movement took over and before I knew it I was living inside a collage, as if the place where thought lives, the contents of my head, had been turned inside out. Mind inside-out, hollowed out. Shards of mind in an assemblage of pieces. When colleagues and friends
Stopped by or came to visit, they said it felt like entering a kaleidoscopic cave. “It’s an art installation,” they kept saying. So it was only through these interactions, through this plurality of speech I received from the mouths of others, that this private chaos became something that I felt like I could share.
So a book was born in a relation with others, in an interactive installation. And as a visual form, this installation of myself just became like this confluence of lines. Also it felt like a murmur of voices and a play of contingencies. So it felt accidental, it felt impermanent, and it felt like not-self.
Self becoming lines said and unsaid, right? So the self unsaid, crossing and uncrossing. And reflecting on this apophatic speech, I kept hearing the lines from the “Heart Sutra” Sedgwick quotes in her “Bathroom Song.” “Gone, gone, forever gone. Utterly gone.” So again, apathetic. Sayings that unsay. So, self gone into the autobiography of an extinction. The main part of my lecture will be a reading of excerpts from that book in fragments, the one I hadn’t planned. A chopped up collage of everyday life and specialist knowledges. So the purpose of this introduction
To the reading is to give you a sense of the book’s philosophical and archival substrate, a substrate that consists of work I’ve been doing on mass species extinction, as Gabriel mentioned, within the frame of the Anthropocene, which I’m sure we’re all familiar with at this point, a now pervasive term that names
Humanity’s destructive impact on the planet. And the work I’ve been doing pairs Michel Foucault with Sylvia Wynter to rethink the emergence and disappearance of man. The genealogy of an anthropos whose biosphere, our substrate, is literally coming undone. This somewhat daunting project was in the foreground of my thinking for many years.
I’ve actually been working on this for like 15 years. It’s still unfinished. But in pursuing that project on extinction, I felt myself zooming in and out from questions about knowledge, in a play between background and foreground. And that zooming, of course, was not only epistemological, it was also ethical and ontological.
As Dipesh Chakrabarty describes in “The Climate of History in a Planetary Age,” a disturbance has shifted the planet’s usual role as the background of human activity, the stage on which human history unfolds. With climate crisis, Chakrabarty writes, “The background is no longer just background. We are a part of it.”
And he describes this as an experience of falling into the planet, into planetary time. “I had fallen into deep history,” he writes, “into the abyss of deep geological time.” And over the years I’ve experienced something very similar, this feeling of falling. So this fall into the background,
Into the unstable substrate of planetary time, has brought forth fragments, like fossils emerging from sediment. These are actually Proust’s notes, his fragments. He compared writing to making a dress. (laughs) What was in the background is now the foreground, but broken into pieces. Staying with or in that fragmented foreground
Has required a different writing practice, a different way of working with thought. And this extreme montage, this experimental practice has included collaging, erasure poetry, haikus, artist books, text-image assemblages, Oulipian writing generated by constraint, the amplification of blank space on the page, obsessive redeployments of the brackets
Anne Carson inserts into her translations of Sappho, writing in columns, recursive self-writing in a broken mirror that constantly undoes me. So, it’s a practice of thinking that privileges juxtaposition over continuity, and it’s extracted from this substrate of concepts. The creation of fragments then interrupt the abstractions of concept-making activities.
In that sense, the practice is counter-conceptual. Its sensibilities are more poetic than philosophical. And its slogan is “Less is more.” It generates a book but also something more than a book, installations. But that more than a book is less than a book. It’s just fragments hung for a few hours, then gone.
If the object called a book makes it feel like something has coalesced, that assemblage-as-book will soon be dispersed, not only as an installation, but even in the fragmentation that is reading, right? A book gets dispersed in its readings. So as a practice in fragments, the project’s endurance
Is actually a function of its incompletion, its movement of gathering and scattering again. That’s what fragments do. And there’s an ethics in this, ethics in the doing, in the making and unmaking. Ethics as a practice in relation to others. This making and unmaking cultivates various ethical capacities: patience, so much patience,
A willingness to wait, an openness to not knowing, an embrace of experiments that fail. Sometimes they just fail. More patience, being with others in creative activity, finding joy in the midst of planetary, existential distress. In the making and unmaking of something new, in the making and unmaking of ourselves in it.
So for over a decade, Foucault was my foreground. I wrote three books on Foucault. (laughs) Today’s foreground pushes Foucault into the background. But the background keeps whispering: how to think a genealogy of extinction? So he’s still whispering in my ear. How to feel it? Foucault’s archive and fossil are part of the whisper,
And Foucault wrote and spoke quite a bit about Georges Cuvier, the supposed father of paleontology, who first conceived of the fossil record as nature’s archive. That archive is a record of extinction. This is one of Cuvier’s fossils. But like human archives, that earth archive is radically incomplete.
In the 4.5 billion-year history of the planet, the vast majority of its living inhabitants die without leaving a trace of their existence. The traces that remain are fragments, written into the earth “like speech marks around a lost quotation,” as David Farrier puts it. The earth’s deep, virtually recordless past
Is periodically punctuated by such a fragment, a fossil, what a paleontologist might call an event in deep time. And we use fossils to weave stories, but fossils are fragments. They’re fragments of fragments. As one paleontologist puts it, “By itself, a fossil is a punctuation mark, an interjection, an exclamation even,
But it is not a word, or even a sentence, let alone a whole story.” Also in the background of the sort of practical ethics of the fragment book that I’ve just described is a kind of meta-ethical question, ethics as a question, the question of ethics. This ethics begins with a suspicion of ethics,
Which is not the same as its dismissal. It’s Foucault’s ethics, culled from Nietzsche, right? Ethics as a question that puts into question the system of values that led to the questioning. Such an ethics puts morality’s idealizations into question. It asks questions about itself in its specular capture of shifting, contingent relations that
Somehow become these ethical norms. False universals. One of morality’s captures is the concept of life itself, invented in the 19th century as man’s epistemic ground. This anthropocentric truth is inextricably bound to vitalist moralisms, moralities driven by the value of life itself as a concept. So its logic is circular,
Anthropos and life itself reflect each other. To interrogate the ground of that vitalist self-reflection is to devitalize the moralities of life itself, to rethink ethics through the lens of extinction. And I just wanna be clear, this is not a glorification of death. It is, rather, an invitation to rethink
The life-truth relation by listening for what we cannot see, extinction. It is to rethink ethics through a fossil record, the planet’s archive, as the kind of voice-not-voice of bodies after death. This self-unvoicing voice is the background, the kind of rifted abyssal ground of these survivals. So, “These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction.”
The title of my new book signals these sapphic fragments emerging into the foreground of my thinking. The words of the book, distillations of years of writing, rumination, cutting and pasting, are best heard, I think, as borrowings from the substrate that I just described. And more concretely, these borrowings gather
Into an assemblage through the practice of collage. So these are all collages that I’ve made over the years. In my own academic/not-academic journey of many years, collage offers a new way of speaking, offering itself to me unexpectedly as a practice born out of distress and upheaval. Trump, COVID, January 6,
White nationalism, Marjorie Taylor Greene. The list goes on. And with collaging come other bookmaking activities: accordion folds, pop-ups. Lauren and I have done lots of pop-up workshops together. Text-and-letter imaging, cutouts. So, you know, here’s one of my cutout books. Tunnels, altered books. And I’m just gonna click through these as I keep talking.
These embodied, fleshy, analog practices, fingers sticky with glue, are, for me, trainings for survival in a time of mass extinction. So I just wanna say something about this word trainings. In his 1977 College de France lecture course, How to Live Together, Roland Barthes contrasts training with the more common term, method.
Method, he says, is “the straight path that enters into the service of a generality, a morality.” Barthes, queerly, invokes training, the paideia of the Greeks, “as a kind of dispatching along an eccentric path, stumbling among snatches, between the bounds of different fields of knowledge, flavors.” And for me, such training means stumbling
Like Barthes, or falling like Chakrabarty, and then getting up again and again and again. But unlike the Greek path of paideia that leads into the light of the philosopher-king, here, in this training, there’s no leaving the cave. It’s geological. The plasticene, the pyrocene. The acidification of oceans. The alteration of atmosphere.
We are in the planet. We’re in the cave, right? We’re in the planet, in the cave where we anthropoi are chained, mesmerized by the ever-proliferating images of ourselves that we see flickering on the screens of our smartphone. So there’s no going up out of this. This fall into planetary time
Is both singular and collective, I with others, in a beat Barthes calls idiorhythmy, from idios, particular, and rhuthmos, rhythm. So it’s a practice of solitude in the midst of communal life. “These Survivals,” what I’m left with, a book-not-book, reflects my own idiorhythmic need for this solitude in community in planetary time.
Living together isn’t easy. Fragments mark the tug of idiorhythmic survivals, their conflicts and difficulties, their passions and disappointments. Our dread, our fragile endurance. So the book, this reading is actually a text with fewer words than I’ve ever written in any book, and yet the book feels thick with words. It’s thickly intertextual.
It’s a mosaic of citations, a path of speech. It’s full with the words of others. And this is just a list of some of the many, many things that I cite in the book. So the text collage is densely exuberant or mournful, angry or wistful. It’s excessively layered, like my collages.
But also, like Carson’s brackets, like apophatic speech, these thick words are thin. This more is less. These sayings that unsay, unsay me, unsay us, into the space where a thought would be but you can’t get hold of. Into the line break that separates the fragments. Into how Foucault once described himself
As a slender gap in the path of speech. So my reading, like the book, starts with an ending. The last page of my last book, “Foucault’s Strange Eros.” A last page of a last book that dissolves into fragments. That’s the very last page. It’s just a collage of sapphic fragments.
So, let’s begin again. “These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction.” So this is part two. “But what was scattered gathers. What was gathered blows apart. One. Fragments comingback. What you wrote, quoting Sappho, at the end of a book, the last in a trilogy you made, feverish was the promise of an ending.
I will go. Eros growing cold after Sappho. Yet here you are again, led astray by words and the silences they shape. One day, perhaps, you will no longer know what this was. This heat. This cutting and pasting, collaging yourself into negative space: both steadfast and strewn.
You will have gone your way among dim shapes. Having been breathed out. Anne Carson notes, ‘Cognate with words for wings, flying, fluttering and breath, the participle ekpepotamena, with its spatter of plosives and final open vowel, sounds like the escape of a soul into nothingness.’ These pages saying, ‘Poem lives. Dim shapes. You, me. Petrified bits of tooth. Rockglint in gullies.
Pere Cuvier’s archive. Paleo fossil record. And you and me, stone cold human anatomy.’ What is black in the museums of Paris? If you’re Sarah Baartman, you bear the cost of the stone-cold archive. Kidnapped from Africa for London parade, this unbearable display for postmortem parts preserved in Parisian Man Museum jars.
These stone-cold fragments dug up from gypsum mines in the Paris basin. In museums, unbearable, fragments endure. Poem life overburden. Dread, surprise, suspicion, longing, and wish my pussy could live in a different shape and get some goddamn respect. Poem lives. Dim shapes. One day jars will shatter in the Musee de l’Homme,
And whiffs of freedom, whiffs of respite pause at stations of reflection saying sapphic breaks in world ending Anthropocene violence. A rule for writing, don’t say Anthropocene. The word sags from overuse. Unsay Anthropocene with a Holocene fragment. Spring 2023. Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. At the end of her public lecture
For our climate crisis seminar, the anthropologist Anna Tsing showed us a picture of a skull. A classic still life. Vanitas. Miniaturized collapse of civilization. A vanitas image is the pictorial equivalent of an open landfill where heaps of meaningless yet valuable things are laid to rest, along with the worldly values
Attached to them, for everyone to see. Carefully arranged. Bleached bone radiating an arrangement of objects: grasses, leaf bed, lavender nodules of laccaria amethystina bubbling up from the earth. Tsing interpreted the red deer skull sprouting amethyst deceivers as purple mushrooms as the return of Holocene life in an Anthropocene patch.”
That’s how she interpreted that. “So psychedelic fungi figuring purple respiration. A skull breathing in the overburden of an abandoned coal mine in Denmark. So, some haiku fragments for Anna Tsing. ‘Unexpected things happened when they left the mines, left them leaving piles of unstable sand mixed with coal.
With the mine, red deer died together where they had gathered. In Denmark almost extinct. Herd becoming sign. But skull doesn’t speak forevering void: unspeaks last of a species. Vanitas instead: generations fragmenting, returning to us as the Holocene, she said, skull unsaying these newcaught animals, comingback bits in the midst
Of our sad planet’s pits of disturbance.’ Such excitement collaging these Holocene fragments in carefully counted comingback time. Sick to death of necrotic Anthropocene prose. Break the rules, old jars, reassemble the shards. Anne Carson again comingback in her ‘Oresteia,’ where she says ‘Words are coined by pressing old words together into new compounds.'”
So this is what she does in “Oresteia.” “‘Dayvisible. Comingback. Lightbringing. Comingback. Dreamvisible. Manminded. Comingback. Dewdrenched. Haredevouring. Crimsoncovered. Comingback. Purplepaved. Redsaturated. Griefremembering pain. Comingback.’ The comingback fragment endures. Its endurance not steady, not continuous, not a line across a page but lines that break, returning across a page or a space for living
In comingback time. Not the time of madness but the time of unreason, like speech that unsays by saying. The fragment endures while the whole crumbles. The Holocene fragment red deer skull still life speaks more truthfully, Adorno thinks, thinking fragment with totality, than any Anthropocene whole. Tsing believes in this renewed possibility
For a Holocene ecology in the remains of Anthropocene mining. That might be something to look for, she says, as you carry your own Anthropocene history out the door. In the remains of Anthropocene, me, my, mine. So give yourself rules for writing, how you create form. Exercises for sapphic erasures, or haiku condensations,
Or verbswept weather reports, or abecedaries, or acrostics, or word collage. But forms will be broken, decollage. Try as you might, or perhaps not trying you will trip and fall. You will break a rule, then another, even the experimental ones you’ve set for yourself and no one else.
New forms like old Greek compound words, like all broken things. Newforms will scatter. Let her scatter. For yourself and no one else. For yourself and no one else. Remembering 66 Signs of Neon, police killing in Watts, so hot neon signs melted. More signs in these times all the time. Breath mark, luftpause.
If you’re singing or talking, wind instrument, take a breath. This is not a comma. Respite. The fragment endures while the whole crumbles. It is the whole that is fragile, transitory, poignant. Another rule for writing, it’s okay to say ‘I,’ but let her scatter. She was already scattered. ‘Wearing nothing but a shirt,’
She and I, sapphic, would have been condemned, along with Damiens, sodomites, witches, mystics and hysterics, to be consumed by fire, ashes thrown to the wind. We admire a text because it scatters well, like ashes strewn to the wind. 1966. A snapshot. Low country. Mom with me on the back of her bicycle.
We both seem lost in the flats. Knew nothing of ‘The Order of Things’ published the same year. Same year, 66, as post Watts assemblage, knew nothing of this. So much disorder, things large and small. Small thing, Leiden, kindergarten. Don’t know why, but I laugh so hard I pee my pants.
The Dutch don’t laugh much, even the kids. Teacher whisks me into the kitchen next to the classroom, peels away soaking underclothes, door wide open, child bottom turned toward the sky, she’s scrubbing my bare skin in a sink, and kids wide-eyed, and now they know how to laugh. And then still in Leiden,
There was someone I love in a straitjacket. Thing not so small. Straitjacket in my head, your most faithful revenir. Your most faithful ghost, this comingback fragment. Things large. All the turmoil of the late 1960s, but we were far away lost in the flats. The ‘Oresteia’ comingback once more,
This time as Klytaimestra who’s trashing Kassandra. Oh, she’s mad. Hearkens only to her own mad mind. I scattered into the future, climate crisis. Kassandra can see it. A fiction? A ‘Drowned World?’ Abandoned department stores, water-logged hotels, London sinking, now a steamy lagoon, crawling with iguanas, swallowed by a Paleozoic past. ‘No,’ says Kassandra.
‘That’s a novel, storyline unbroken, an Anthropocene tale, not the Holocene fragments I’m seeing.’ In the low country photograph you’re holding something, some pages. Nonfiction. Documentary. Broken. We like nonfiction because we live in fictitious times. You unfold them now, these Holocene fragments, and Kassandra, with her language that breaks open
Like dada in the desert. For her way of turning is that of a newcaught animal’s. Kassandra’s way of turning like a newcaught animal’s, turns to see the future. A prophet sees it truly, but she’s a foreigner. Captive Trojan doesn’t speak Greek, and no one ever believes what she says. What’s ungraspable about Kassandra has to stay that way.
Futures set in motion with verbs. How silk shimmers, billows, squints, spins, tucks, measures, pinches. Futures set in motion with sliding: a book’s energy derived from juxtaposed scenes, an assemblage, an agencement of fragments. Vanitas. Skull nesting in brown leaves with lavender fungi. Reading is sliding, although some don’t slide. Can’t slide, don’t want to.
Some stumble in the overburden of fragments. Some slip at the line break, suddenly narcoleptic. Drop, plummet, plunge, sink, dip, buckle, collapse. Knees’ abrupt cataplexy into the bone blank white of the page. Another rule for writing. The painter’s touch, literally, painter’s paw. Let random constraint drive the dada beat of your own unique fingers or claws. The ABCs of the segmented essay. Write the entire alphabet on a sheet of paper, then pick one letter, T. Make a list of all the things
You can think of that start with that letter. Tiger, talented, titillating, tiny, timid, terror, Tyrannosaurus. Next, choose one of the words from that list and write a brief paragraph about it. The next step is simply to repeat the previous steps. You may repeat this process as many times as you like.
Bingo: a segmented essay is born. T is for tiger. My friend Nayanika wrote a book called ‘Paper Tiger’ about Indian bureaucracy. It’s also about real tigers, not paper ones, but flesh and blood beasts with teeth and claws, fur the color of cracked orange clay. She’s lived among them in Northern India,
On the border with Tibet and Nepal. She’s felt herself watched as she walked to the store, narrowly escaping being prey in a beastly tale. ‘Being Prey’ is a famous title by Val Plumwood, feminist philosopher of nature, deathrolled by a crocodile, not once, not twice, but three times in the East Alligator River
In Kakadu National Park, thrice surviving the deathroll. Not taken. In Australian news reports about crocodile attacks, a reporter will often write, ‘She was taken,’ ‘He was taken.’ So too with Plumwood, 20 years after Kakadu, she was taken. Down, down taken by a stroke. From the moment of birth, we’re in a deathroll.
To live is to enter the time of the will have been. Will be taken. Taken with a stroke, last mark of a pen. Finitude is being crossed out being taken. It will be crossed out you. ‘This breath could be your last.’ Such a sentence feels trite, like crocodile tears.
You hear a meditating monk say the sentence during death meditation, but do you really believe it? ‘T is for tiger.’ A slice of animal terror. How finitude feels. These serpents slay men and they eat them weeping. Renee Green’s ‘Survival’ exhales the new thought of a canceling-out effect of too muchness.
In the midst of densities of information, there are absences, lacunae, holes. Holocene fragments can pause in the break of that which is beyond understanding, comingback bits in the midst of coal mine disturbance, in the midst of emptiness, in the midst of glut, where knowing too much we pass something over,
Suffocated by a surfeit of things to be known. Collaging born in restlessness, becoming respite: Holocene fragments in the midst of abandoned Anthropocene pits. Collaging an exercise in constraint, like haiku, even the rulebreaking kind, for bearing the unbearable. Endurance of fragments. Bear, verb, old English beran, to carry, bring, bring forth, endure.
You piece things together, sticky with glue, rearranging bits of broken off world in order to, in order to… How to finish this sentence? A meditation teacher tells you to beware of the ‘in order to’ mind. Joan sends me a haiku: ‘Moral gives cover for a host of venal sins performed in its name.’
Wah, I’m speechless. To collage is to track-think-feel this scattered ethics. Ethics is a verb: to track-think-feel fragments in archives. Family photos in a long forgotten suitcase under a bed. Let their glow change you. A famous philosopher’s love letters tucked away in a loose leaf binder in someone’s apartment. Asylum registers.
Flyers from Black Panther rallies in Rose Library in the same neighborhood where ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ was filmed. Accounting books that track and measure the enslaved, the colonized, the queer. Cuvier’s specimens. ‘Species is to earth as tooth is to galaxies as asteroid is to cratering, like a thumbprint in clay the.’
Knowledge is made for cutting. An inspiration, Hannah Hoch, ‘Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany,’ 1919. Borrowing her kitchen knife: perfect sapphic collagist’s tool. Before splicing and gluing comes cutting. Domestic. Re-calling the dark of a Paris theater. First time seeing Jeanne Dielman,
’23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,’ falling in love at the end, with the end, with this caesura in domestic order, after being stuck in real time, unbearable. Will this ever end? Three hours of repetitive tasks: peeling potatoes, setting the table, shining shoes, putting them on a shelf,
Pushing back a chair with a swing of the hip, breading veal, buttoning a shirt. Always the same. Peel, set, shine, put, push, bread, button, peel, set, shine, put, push, bread, button, peel, set, shine, put, push, bread, button, set, bread, button, bread, button, and then suddenly the cut.
Decollage, not the knife but its anticipation. An inner abyss gapes open when Jeanne misses a button, and the audience gasps. Ubu Trump, the vile sovereign. My blade mimics hers, stabbing the word vomiting belly, making it red like Jeanne Dielman. The violence of paint, an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself.
Can stabbing it here make it a small thing? Moved on her like a bitch. Comingback fragment. Proliferation of perversions. Can’t stop, can’t stop, can’t stop. This incitement to speak. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything. You can do anything. Purple paved. Red saturated. Grab ’em. Pussy. Raw flesh eating lion. Grab ’em. You can do anything. Grab ’em. Pere Ubu seizes power on a whim.
A toilet brush his scepter, taking out the king, nobles, finance ministers, and much of the population. His shit spreads far and wide. Administrative grotesque of clowns and buffoons, Mussolinis and Hitlers. Moved on her like a bitch. Grab ’em. ‘An investigation is like an onion. You never know.
You pull something back, and then you find something else.’ Murdering the text, literally cutting it into pieces. On January 6th, the mob comes, blinding white. Some move in tight formation in tactical gear. Others come bearing flagpoles, zip ties, bear spray, crutches. Everything becomes a weapon. ‘A defiance of authority,’ scorching rage. The crowd burns. A retired firefighter throws a fire extinguisher at Capitol police, cracks open Brian Sicknick’s skull, fatal.
Someone parades a Confederate flag across the antique mosaic floor. Someone else wears a Camp Auschwitz shirt. ‘Outside, makeshift gallows stand, complete with sturdy wooden steps and the noose.’ Robert Sanford. Kevin Seefried. Robert Keith Packer. All night long, I’m aware of evildoing. To break into tears seems the right verb.
Shattered and scattered into the nation of cry. Into language that breaks open like dada in the desert. These comingback fragments of a body politic not whole never was, just nation, imagination for some, for many not nation, never was. My childhood friend says the world is changing for the better.
‘Look at all the women getting elected,’ she says. ‘Women are different. More peaceful.’ AOC hid in Katie Porter’s office, terrified, lights out, no talking. She borrowed a staffer’s athletic shoes in case she had to run. Ubu’s mob would have killed her if they’d found her. The mob was cheered on by another woman
Elected by Georgians, sisterhood forever. Add women and stir feminism. Equality means women can now hunt like men. Marjorie Taylor Greene is on the hunt: scanning the heavens for Jews with laser beams, or prowling the underbrush for Satanists, pedophiles, and lizard people. ‘Many members of Congress are afraid
To be in the building with her.’ Moved on her like a bitch. Chop chop, snip snip, jab jab. A tear here, a cut there. I light a match to edge the paper with bright flame. Poof. Poof. Fire goes out, dark ash floats in the air. This counter-chopping-and-scorching feels like respite.
I dab glue over burnt shapes. Gently, with great care, I pretend to put the world back together again. There’s a space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. If you’re singing or talking, take a breath. The fragrant-bosomed lovely gifts girls, clear melodious lyre:
Body old age now. My hair’s turned instead of dark. Sappho is to Plato, as fragment is to whole. Fragment is to whole, as particular is to general. Particularities endure while generalities crumble. So much for metaphysics. A place where a thought would be. Love that space.” These next two sections are much shorter. “Two.
In the middle, in the dark, between us. The last time I heard you you said ‘I will go,’ yet here you are again, led astray. Why again? Comingback fragment. Trying to say something. Trying to unsay it. One of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side,
And forthwith came there out blood and water. I cut you with a kitchen knife, glued you to white paper, the very last page in my own clothbound psalter. God unsaying, for holding, staying with, being with, breathing with you in the middle, in the dark, between us.
I made you during COVID and the reign of Donald the Bad. Now you’re back. Looking at you again on the internet, cloisters.com. Going and meeting you in person at the Cloisters, on a hill above the Hudson, Gallery 13, Bonne de Luxembourg’s Prayer Book. Printing you out again, dozens of times.
Cutting you up again, gluing you back together again. Hanging you from clotheslines again and again. Making you my own again: sapphic. In all the ways historical you can imagine. Nothing starts or ends with birth. In the beginning there’s disparity. Birth breaks a path, the path toward death, path that we slide:
We thinking-tracking along births and deaths. Birth births death, death deaths birth. Unbearable my own death thought, like all beloveds dying. But moreso this sapphic mother death, this 6th extinction means end of the line species caesura. End of the path that slides and breaks. In Delhi, the vultures are gone
And now kites soar like flying lizards, and on red zone days, they plummet from the sky like meteors. Three, decollage. Prostration, like a cat rubbing up against your leg. Making ‘Garments Against Women,’ she learned the key to everything was not the time spent on the machine,
But the time spent with a needle in hand. Needle means scissors, glue stick, ink. Fragments composed in multiple stages. Rough copy, overcooked, thrown wet spaghetti at a wall. Start somewhere, see what sticks. Scribbles, paper scraps, painters tape, patterns, erasures. Numbers, quotes, rules, poems. Proustian paperolles, so beautiful to look at.
No longer care what they say. My own assiduously composed scholar prose hacked to pieces. And then one night, a constellation zigzagged its way across my study. Assiduous spider. Dragline silk, cross beaming structures for images and letters. But strung up, painter taped, or glued into a book with a chopped out spine
For these tattered garments. Feral fragilites, these collages beyond saying. Less nouns and more verbs: prostrations and offerings. Cat rubbing against your leg, these beloved verbs enduring while nouns crumble. Forms, nouns do not matter in themselves. Rub, verb, early 14th century Rubben, to apply friction to a surface, like cat pheromones leaving their scent.
Possession feels like love. I know that smell. On dress pattern, cat cutout, yellow onion skin, tissue paper, glue chanced upon in the kitchen. Embroidery thread, butcher paper, white ink, black ink, gold ink, silver ink, fruit netting white, fruit netting red, New Yorker typeface, masking tape, more painters tape, scotch tape,
Artists tape, weather report, writing, fancy tape gifted from a student. Corrugations, ink, magic markers, newsprint already yellowed, blue sheets of plastic. ‘New York Times’ headlines, dirt darkened string, musky fur from the IAS woods, rusted Brillo pad, jute, fibers, seedpods, sequins, and glitter, and spangles, and stickers, and decimated books for altering.
Prostrations for survival. One day perhaps we will no longer know what this was. No archival box will preserve this scent, these rubbings. Weird anarchic portrait, weird history of a present in a dada junkyard. Weird sapphobotic speech. Weird mysterical prayer to some secular God-not-God. Kites fall like fragments from the skies of Delhi.
In a basement they repair a wing. Fragments may endure but the whole crumbles. Inexorable. Unhumaning, a Holoscenic decollage. Gaps gape like missed buttonholes. Nine planetary boundaries like line breaks in earth, sea, sky. Desert dada beat drumming vestibular fields and domestic interiors. But where the lines break in the break, impossible to say.
Deep sound. Sapphic fragments lack precision, a single square bracket gives the impression of missing matter, or these brackets cannot track every thinking, feeling, grief remembering, every disappearance. A blizzard of marks. Every emptying cannot be told, yet must be told, but only through its untelling. We do not need a doctor to say
‘Dance, dance, dance before the song runs out.’ There’s an ethics in this, uncovering moral cover stories, hacking them to pieces. In this asymptotical tending, this unflinching curve of tenderness, this grief remembering tending. You, my student taught me, parasamgate, inside a dark interiority, not my own. Holding this unholding as teaching me now
How to ask about living. How are we to live? Ungrasping, ungrabbing, unraveling substrate at this end of the world. ‘She was called Alexa but believed that Antigone was her true name.’ Died in the midst of thinking-feeling, in the midst of ethics-asking, in the midst of poem life making,
In the midst of vast pits of disturbance. As Antigone is to brave, as light is to shape, as end is to crossing, so X is to grief’s acrostic assignment. Sapphic couple, interracial. Momentarily unglued and breaking into tears, mine not hers. ‘Why are you crying?’ ‘Because I’m a Weepy White Woman.’ Capital W thrice-rolled.
‘The Crying Book’ c’est moi, then we laugh. Same sapphic couple, silver screen in the dark. ‘What’s the role of Black people in movies?’ ‘To help white people get in touch with their feelings.’ Each one sends her arrow into the target of the other. Same couple. We joke about Weepy White Woman, W thrice-rolled,
And our common refrain about Black people in movies. Joke funny not funny. Remember Cheryl Dunye’s ‘Watermelon Woman,’ those ‘Plantation Memories.’ Black people beast of burden bearing white feeling in films and in life. Black back breaking labor. No. Tongue breaks and thins fire is racing under skin,
And in eyes no sight, and drumming fills ears. Such a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty girl. Same couple longing, and your comet, a birthmark, a remembering of those Hubble photographs after Sappho. Pictures of you dug up from an archive of star clusters, fireworks, whirligigs, spirals, arcs, eagles, pinwheels, bubbles, horse heads, sombreros, butterflies,
Mystic mountains, pillars, eyes of God. Dust and gas gathered after 10 billion light years, then comet made flesh, ex-static. Collaging the practice of a childlike mind. Proust placard rolled in a tube, no longer legible, and white woods fur in a tube, I know that smell, like a paintbrush or Proust-ended blade for beheading. Mind turning like the mind of a new caught animal. Child mind, scatter mind, thought feeling mind. Everyday minded minding of the ills of a planet, or just a gaggle, or a crowd, or a flock holding on, or a herd dying. Species extinguishing, impossible to see. How to every day mind this extinction.
Child minded mind, an adult growing down, losing words. Wah, I’m speechless. But heart still full to overflowing. But Dawn stood speechless at the last gate, for as she looked at the old friends beside her and the new ones before her, her heart was full to overflowing,
And her thoughts, like the world about her, were golden with the joy of a new day. When day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid. Cadence, cadere, to fall. Rhythm of her voice: find light there now in a youth poet laureate’s cadence. Brave enough to see it,
Brave enough to be it. Just now gold sandaled Dawn. Spangled is the earth with her crowns. To hold. Spangled. And I not-so-famous, unlike inaugurating sweet poet voice. I-speech scatters, becoming speechless at the gate. Another day, cracking open an empty page, picking up pen, knife and glue, or strange fur-tufted Proust-tube
For painting or beheading, lodging myself ever scattering in the breach bone valleyed, in the middles, in the darks, with others whispering, idiorrhythmic. These survivals gathering as I pause. Wah, I’m speechless. Arrows flown, missed buttonholes. All that breathes. Slender gaps in all those paths of speech. Light strands and dark strands.
Flying, fluttering, breathing this earth. My darling one.” Thank you.