Track Mangoes

The other day I was walking down the street and a man approached me and my friend and struck up a conversation. He's one of those familiar faces you see around downtown, always playing music in front of the CVS, smiling and greeting everyone who passes. From start to finish he was all smiles and high energy. It was a little disconcerting, but in an non threatening way. Near the end he guessed where my friend and I where from: "Maine and.... Ohio!"

Surprisingly, he was pretty close. It caught me off guard for a moment. "Actually... I'm from Iowa." He then went on the say that he thought that Midwestern girls are the prettiest, a sentiment I disagree with wholeheartedly. Please note that I have a special place in my heart for the Midwest, and think its a starkly beautiful place, but to say that the prettiest girls are from the Midwest, a sentiment, might I add, echoed by Jack Kerouac in On the Road , is misguided and superficial.

I began thinking about the beauty of flat, the beauty of plain, the beauty of scarcity. Since I've moved to the east coast, I've become accustomed to mountains and trees, but whenever I return home I'm always struck by the comfort I find in the wide, open skies of Iowa. An image from Danny Wilcox Frazier's amazing book Driftless came to mind. It is titled, "Shooting bottles along the Iowa River, Johnson County, 2003". I grew up near Johnson County, and I welled up with nostalgia when I was flipping through Frazier's book last falll, which I came across quite by chance one day in the library. In the picture there's a solitary, identity-less man, facing an unknown foe, surrounded by flames, and framed by trees and gray sky. The smoke, the hoodie, the framing; everything hides and obscures the truth of the situation. The beauty I find in the Midwest lies in this feeling, not in the chubby, overly processed face of a farmgirl, although I suppose that's almost symptomatic of what's under discussion.

And then again maybe I'm just trying to reject my place of birth, set myself apart (that's why I moved to Massachusetts, isn't it?). Sorry Iowa, but I quiver at the possibility of a stranger identifying me as Midwestern, I know too well what it implies and entails.

It's a love/hate relationship.

Flannery O’Connor once said that when you write the South the way the North wants you to write it the critics call it realism; but when you write the South the way it is the critics call it grotesque.

Three prominent figures seem to receive most of O’Connor’s criticism in her short fiction. In chief, academics and intellectuals, particularly those of the secular persuasion, come under harsh condemnation. Intellectuals form the butt of O’Connors conception of evil/the devil, that being any intelligence that is determinable on its own terms, a cerebral force that defines its own nature, a nature that, theologically speaking, is out of one’s hands regardless. Intellectuals must be shaken, violently, from the shackles of their arrogance in order to realize their moment of grace and return to god. Secondly, O’Connor criticizes women for their pedantry, their fascination with cultural minutiae and fetish of artistic scintilla. Thirdly, children, bratty and catty, never seem to deserve the love they receive, despite their unique power to reveal the hopelessness of the convoluted plight of seculars. Those who took American Lit in high school will surly remember the noisy John Wesley, "a stocky child with glasses," and the whiney June Star from "A Good Man in Hard to find.

In a strange way O'Connor's fiction is deprication. She criticizes the three things that she most closely related to: women, intellectuals, and children, while writing about something she was simoultaneously a part of and distant from: The South. But these social slots were alloted to her, she had not say, and perhaps harbored a self-hating resentment. She had no control over her gender and surly felt suffocated as a woman living in the post WWII South. She was also an amazingly bright and well read intellectual, graduating from today’s most prestigious school for English majors, the Univserity of Iowa, being sent there on the whim of her family. And finally, and perhaps most tragically, her crippling illness forced her to forever be at the call of her overbearing mother, pigeonholing her into a role of snowballing infantilization.

In her short story “The Crop” Miss Willerton, a well-to-do literary dilettante, attempts to pound out a composition on her old type writer only to be distracted constantly by her nagging family and, most troublesomely, by her own lack of skill, which she mistakes for arch.

The story begins at the dinner table where the Willertons have just finished their morning breakfast. “Miss Willerton always crumbed the table,” the narrator proclaims in the first sentence. “It was her particular household accomplishment and she did it with great thoroughness.” The narrator goes on to describe the myriad menial tasks the women perform in the kitchen, “Lucia and Bertha did the dishes and Garner went into the parlor and did the Morning Press crossword puzzle,” interspersed with onomatopoeic expletives and catty stream of consciousness rejoinders like “As if…after having [added Agar-Agar to Garner’s Cream of Wheat every morning] for fifty years, he’d be capable of doing anything else.”

This sporadic pastiche of tasks, thoughts, habits, and exercises of etiquette perfectly sets up the tenor of the entire story, in which Miss Willerton will sit at her type writer unable to think of a subject for her stories. “That was always the hardest part of writing a story, she always said. She spent more time thinking of something to write about than she did writing.” Willerton discards subject after subject, first writing about bakers, but later deciding that baker’s were neither picturesque nor did they provide provocative social commentary, moving on to teachers, which she immediately dismisses, “Teachers? Miss Willerton wondered. No. Heavens no. Teachers always made Miss Willerton feel peculiar.” Finally Miss Willerton settles on a sufficiently incendiary muse: “Teachers weren’t timely anyhow. They weren’t even a social problem. Social problem. Social problem. Hmmm,” Miss Willerton thinks before finaly settling on: “Sharecroppers!”

The monkey mind of Miss Willerton poses an interesting postmodern problem. Postmodern literary composition often used, as a device or technique, metaconscienceness as a means of problematizing the auteur-reader relationship. The opening chapter to James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," for example, mediates on the perverse quality of the observer, in this case a Northern journalist, trying to examine Southern subjects, impoverished and, above all else, "dirty." Agee sits on his porch litstening to Beethoven and smoking cigarettes, thinking that perhaps he should not write the book he needed to write because he could never do the truth justice. The work itself called attention to the fact that it had a process, a conception, and an architect.

Miss O’Connor, who was writing at the forefront of the postmodernists, refused the inanity of the mere technique of metaconsciousness. It wasn’t enough. Metaconsciousness had to be delicately weaved into the plot, which, for O’Connor, was at the forefront of the problem of literary creation. In “The Crop” O’Connor satirizes her own creative process as a means of simultaneously using the postmodern device of metaconsciousness and remaining staunchly faithful to the old time tradition of plot plot plot.

“Lot Motun,” the typewriter registered, “called his dog.” “Dog” was followed by and abrupt pause. Miss Willerton always did her best work on the first sentence. “First sentences,” she always said, “came to her—like a flash!” And she built her story up from them.”

Eye Imagery and The Violent Bear it Away

During Mason’s first encounter with Bishop in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away the narrator takes special care to point out the immense gravity in the eyes of the idiot child; the old man can only see “one spectacled eye” staring at him from the crack of an open door. Eyes stand out starkly even though they never function as an imagistic singularity.

From a psychoanalyst viewpoint this method of imagistic representation, seems chronologically fitting. For O'Connor, as many have noted, the inconsequential details of the scene stick in the mind as inexplicably vivid, even though the central horror of the experience is not missing, see the work of Phyllis Greenacre. Eye imagery also surfaces in descriptions of natural entities like lakes, moons, suns, or the dreamy sky, which Tarwater sees as “dotted with fixed tranquil eyes." O’Connor’s environment becomes a projection of impulses and fears so strong that they dissolve the ego’s power, a figureative death.

The eyes, then, act as a kind of axel for the wheel of novel’s imagery. When Tarwater burns Powderhead to the ground he hallucinates a pair of eyes wreathed in flame. Eyes also reflect certain aspects of character development. Tarwater’s inability to look at Bishop in the eye, for example, indicates his unwillingness to face his destiny. The narrator describes non-human objects with imagery of the eyes to suggest the existence of a divine power in the cosmos and elsewhere, staring from above or below. In humans, however, eyes act as the body’s vessel of God and any desire to repress this presence is expressed as a physical weakness.

The usage of eye imagery to describe elemental bodies, like lakes, suns, moons, and skies, suggests the presence of an oppressive power in nature. After being dropped off at Rayber’s house, Tarwater spends a few moments sitting on the doorstep, too scarred to enter, contemplating the eye-like quality of the stars. He cannot look directly at the sky even though “he was unpleasantly aware of the stars." Nature serves both as the hand of God and as the barometer registering Divine disapproval or benediction. This could explain why Tarwater felt so uncomfortable under the immensity of the sky, why the stars “seemed to be holes in his skull through which some distant unmoving light was watching him, as if he were alone in the presence of an immense silent eye." The sun, for example, like an omnipotent father floating in the sky, keeps an observant eye on Tarwater. The sun “watches” Tarwater. Water too becomes a physical entity that responds to Tarwater’s actions. Tempted to baptize Bishop in a fountain Tarwater stands at the edge, staring “deep into its eyes.” “I’d drown him first,” he says to the fountain—simply a reflection of his own face in the water—to which the eyes eerily reply “Drown him then."

In the same way that nature, described with eye imagery, suggests the presence of an oppressive divinity, human eyes act as mirrors, reflecting the supernatural forces already latent in a body. All the devil figures, for example, have terrifyingly bizarre eyes, whether it is the “yellow-rimmed” eyes of the ‘stranger,’ Meeks’s “soot-colored” eyes, or the neon violet eyes of the ‘friend.’ Their ocular abnormality sets them apart from the city folk whose eyes “didn’t grab you like the eyes of country people." The eyes of the old man also possess a divinity; even in death they glow “silver” and can focus sharply on something from across a room, suggesting that the eyes can live on without the body. For human characters, the acceptance of fate and the presence of God in the body cause the eyes to glimmer and glow.

Tarwater, who constantly tries to evade his fate by refusing to baptize Bishop or bury his uncle, suffers from visual blurriness, suggesting that the evasion of fate causes blindness. Tarwater physically struggles to focus his eyes in the presence of characters who have realized their destiny, like the old man. When looking at the old man Tarwater keeps “his vision located on an even level, to see no more that what was in front of his face and to let his eyes stop at the surface of that." Before burning Powderhead to the ground, an figurative act of rebellion against his fate, Tarwater’s eyes become “half-open” and “unseeing." Additionally, in a flashback during which he disobeys one of the old man’s commands Tarwater’s eyes are described as “open but not well focused." Any event or action integral to his destiny has some effect on his vision and when he resists the divine powers will push back. Tarwater finds it difficult, in effect, to look at his future.

While Tarwater’s evasion of fate causes blindness Rayber’s evasion of fate makes him incapable of looking at the spiritually grotesque. He becomes agitated staring into the eyes of the young evangelist, Lucette Carmody. She stares at him through a window, her “dark gaze” finds him, causing him to experience “a deep shock” that makes him “certain that the child had looked directly into his heart." In order to withstand the severity of the moment Rayber turns off his hearing aid, deafening him to the word of God, a figurative blindness. Rayber cannot bear to see or hear this sound. Even the memory of the old man’s eyes, full of God, disturbs him. In the following passage Rayber meditates the similarity between Tarwater’s gaze and the old man’s:

Something in his very look…seemed to feed on him. With Tarwater’s eyes on him, he felt subjected to a pressure that killed his energy before he had a chance to exert it. The eyes were the eyes of the crazy student farther, the personality was the old man’s, and somewhere between the two, Rayber’s own image was struggling to survive and he was not able to reach it. (115)

The affliction was in the family. It lay hidden in the line of blood that touched them, flowing from some ancient source, some desert prophet or polesitter, until, its power unabated, it appeared in the old man and him and…in the boy…He had kept it from gaining control over him by what amounted to a rigid ascetic discipline…He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made. (114)

His eyes as they turned and looked down at her were the color of the lake just before dark when the last daylight has faded and the moon has not risen yet, and for an instant she thought she saw something fleeing across the surface of them, a lost light that came from nowhere and vanished into nothing... convinced she had not seen it, she muttered, ‘Whatever devil’s work you mean to do, don’t do it here.’ (156)

In ancient Greece small penises were coveted over large penises. This particular aesthetic preference, though strange to our modernized afro-fetishized culture, fit in perfectly with the characteristically Greek adoration of the beautiful boy.

Pretty boys (and their small penises) represented what could be beautiful about the more Apollonian side of human existence. The seething Dionysian, found in the expression of the Gods, ie nature, and the portrayal of animals, who, consequently had large penises, was something to be conquered. The calm, cool, collected Apollonianism of the Greeks sought, more than anything else, to subdue the Dionysian, but in a way that did not require brute force, the way Neanderthals subdued nature. Apolloniansim sought to, in effect, subdue Dionysianism with beauty, put it in a frame, to colonize nature with human brilliance.

The beautiful boy aesthetic carried on in western art for hundreds of years after. The want for big penises really emerged with the advent of pornography, which didn't exist (as we understand it today) until the Victorian Period. It is no accident that pornogprahy was created at the same time major archeological digs uncovered thousands of erotic artifacts from Rome to Pompeii. Up until that time a penis was simply enough to get you up and out. We weren't so blasé, not immured by sex as we are now. It was around this time, with the emergence of pornography, that the mode by which the western cultural apparatus viewed the beautiful boy shifted to something more sinister.

I used to date a man who's entire artistic oeuvre centered around the sinister aspects of the beautiful boy aesthetic, how it has hindered culture at least as much as it has helped it, how it has decimated as much emotional material as it had created. He thought he was cutting edge. But the main idea around which he centered his work, that being the "beautiful boy as destroyer" aesthetic, was entirely not his. Indeed this idea is quite old. It, in fact, was the precursor to European modernism. Case in point: Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray."

After the ACTUP riots (oh and they were riots) during the later part of the AIDS crisis, around 1987, the "beautiful boy as destroyer" aesthetic was no longer interesting as cultural material. The pearly faces of the Stonewall demonstrators showed a much more politically involved way of being and manner of expression. With the maundering of beautiful boys and politics came the idea of the sissy boy as badass, and, consequently, queer culture, for a short while, merged with punk culture, which, for all intents and purposes, was stolen from street culture, which had been there all along (punks just gave a name to it).

The Death of Matthew Shepherd complicated things. Here we had a beautiful boy who was the victim of homophobia, tied to a fence in a Jesus like pose...the story was ripe with meaning. In demonstrations queers held up his face on posterboards and demanded justice. His face became a symbol for all gay justice. And for awhile we used his image ethically. But as it happens with all images, people began to fetishize his position of martyrdom. Beautiful boys essentially reverted to the old Greek way of being: they represented something already dead, something temporal and delicate, like a wilting flower, ready to be plucked. In a way Matthew Shepherd holds a cultural place that is enviable. He, like a Lancelot, died in his prime and is remembered in state of perpetual youth. Lucky him.

Yet cultural consciousness never forgets. And we cannot forget the tenor of modernism, the sinister side of things, the multiplicity of consciousness that complicates any straightforward view of any one thing. (Damn you modernism, you make life so difficult.)

This is why Gay Martyrdom is about to end. Gay culture is, like western culture, is experiencing a postmodern renaissance thirty years late. And then, it's fitting. The cynicism and reductive attitude of Postmodernism was preceded by the eclectic sixties, in which academe and art tried to get back to its roots, sampling from all over the world, experiencing a kind of cultural nirvana, a connection that we find almost comical these days. Peace and love and vegetables. Et cetera.

The peace and love for Gays is over. The contemporary sincerity, think Cascade AIDS project, SMYRC, the "we are just like you!" rhetoric of the nineties, coupled with the radical sexual questioning on college campuses in the naughts, and now it follows of necessity that gay culture will begin to explore the ineffable sides of sexuality, the maddening emptiness of queer expression. Where is our nihilism, some ask. Don't worry your pretty little heads off, I say. It's coming. And when it does, when it does, I don't think you'll like it.

What I am saying is that Gay culture is on the verge of apocalypse. Gay will no longer mean gay. Straight will be a moniker of mundane inanity. Naming is violent, but we will, as postmodernism did for art, find that it poses a satisfying artistic paradigm.

Gay culture is becoming normalized. When it does, when gays become straights, are allowed to marry "just like everyone else" then a subculture will form. Nope, no Golden Era for the Fags. No time in which we will revel in the goal we have sought so long, equality; but when we finally get what we are looking for we will suddenly realize that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be and then we must ask the really hard question: if equality isn't really what I want, then what do I want. My answer to the question we as a queer culture have yet to ask is this: the point is to experience the existential pain of the question to which there is no answer.

To quote Plath, sometimes if we are wanting many things it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing at all.

" [Janie] was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid."

The only justifiable usage of the word "gay" as a synonym for "stupid" is the one in conjunction with any discussion of Notre Dame's football team. Case in point, Irish QB Jimmy Clausen.

I could expound on the myriad injustices Clausen has brought against culture, but instead I will just direct you straight to his myspace page. He is a Virgo, in case you were wondering.

Now don't get me wrong. Football is great. I often think of myself as a free-safety, constantly roaming the field, scanning the players, being furtive, until, WHAM, you take someone down when they least expect it. Gay men and lots of women, I feel, through their inattention to football have missed out on an education in strategy. The reason conservative women like Clinton, Palin, Rice and Reno have enjoyed so much success in Washington is due, in part, to the fact that these women grew up around football, around strategy. I almost want to liken the sport to military tactic. But I digress. No one should miss out on a well rounded education in ass-kicking.

Maybe if I start watching football again I will be able to finish that novel. Or, worst comes to worst, I'll jut get a boner.

Now maybe someone can explain to me Brady Quinn.

Old Grandma shook her head slowly, and closed her cloudy eyes again. "I guess I must be getting old, " she said, "because these goings-on around Laguna don't get me excited any more." She sighed, and laid her head back on the chair. "It seems like I already heard these stories before—only thing is, the names sound different."

Spencer stops the car,
The window downward rolling.
He scrambles to unbuckle his jeans
While a policeman approaches
In slow strides forward ambling,
His car behind us, red and blue flashing,
Just before he raps
His knuckles on the glass.
The belt comes off,
The buckle jangling.
Spencer reveals
A zip-loc bag,
Wrinkled and dusty,
Having been opened and sealed
A dozen times over.
He unbuttons his fly
And lifts the shirt above his navel,
Shoves the bag inside,
Releasing five coos in succession,
As if they were smoke rings
Ejected from his lips.

And what if I were the bag,
Shoved between the cheeks?
Coiled like a copper snake,
Or worse?
Will I be pulled from Spencer
Like a worm?
Pinched between a blue jay’s beak,
Its grip on me unyielding?
Or maybe I won’t be found at all,
Festering for a year.

Rap. Rap. Rap.
The knuckles say.

To opt to live inside my friend,
The dismal day to day,
I think I will admit to you
I’d do it anyway.

"Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."

Listen to Jens read Hartford Jew: click here.



Hartford Jew

I remember you, Harford Jew,
And your friends also,
A tight circle of curly haired heads,
Tittering at my lip then swollen
To the size of a tangerine.
I stand at your bedside now,
Touching your skin,
Loose and cold and wet,
Like the thin slimy fin of a gefilte fish.
I don’t utter in the room, breath
Or even sneeze. Achoo.
I mouth farewells.
Hartford Jew, do you remember when
We practiced the violin together?
I quit it for Jazz.
Harford Jew, do you remember when
You took year of Hebrew
And I studied the Germanic tongue.
You used to hate it when we were young.
Gornisht gornisht, you used to say, kicking.
I still remember the taste of the shoe
In the mouth, the boot on the face,
My shirt’s buttons coming undone,
And the children chanting Nazi scum.
I said rumors were untrue,
That you treated speech with an unjust fist,
That the words themselves were
Soft and supple, a cotton ball,
Not the ich bin du you knew at all,
But something delicate and small.
Hartford Jew, children can be so cruel sometimes,
And loving, and fun, and mysterious too,
But only when they speak clearly, and
Clearly your language was silent to me—
A machine with a gear and a spoke.
Bei mir bist du shayn. How obscene.
But then, the words always
got in the way? Didn’t they?
Oh Shit became Auschwitz, and
Kvell was hell and a schmuck
Was something into which you stepped.
You said there was a loch in my kop.
I called you my mazeltov man.
Oh you.
Oh my tangled tongue, tied everyday
Like a cat wrapped in razor wire,
Hewn in halves, mewing.
I could hardly speak, thinking:
What is your language, Hartford Jew?
Surly not the Guten Tag I knew.
And how do you say “thank you”
when the words are biting and foreign?
Gratitude never was our forte.
No cards or a flower
For walking you through that far-off town,
Grass huts galore,
Hour after hour of monstrosity, a city
Pummeled by the mindless chatter of women
And men, both of them, yes, though mostly the latter.
Hartford Jew, you stand atop a pile
Of rubble in a picture I have of you,
A smile stretched across your face,
White grin shining in the sun,
And in your belt a gun,
Warm and smoking, recently shot.
I turn this picture over in my fingers
As I listen to your breathing, still lingering there.
Death is an island and I don’t speak the language.
I never learned until we met.
I was in pieces then, kaput, after seeing
A Bosnian baby quartered by the hands of war.
You stuck me back with string and glue.
I wanted to do the same for you, or more,
More than I could say for the child,
Always on the brink of death,
Coughing, hacking, short of breath.
I didn't know what to do.
So I took a ball of matzo dough
And made a model of yourself:
A gypsy girl with the blackest hair.
She had a word for everything,
Just like you,
For cock and for screw.
We fell in love. I said I do, I do.
But, the three of us still felt like two.
And If I left her. And I leave you.
And you’ll leave me too, the both of you.
Harford Jew, we’re no longer children.
Men move deathward to a moment when
You cease completely and I can speak again.
Relax, I’ll say. Auf wiedersehen.