collaborationism

opening out some office-tones hushy-grey
hard/soft metaphors & back-to-ham radios
, thwarting military commands glitching
some new masculine intimacies or love-talks
I’d order less milk for more tea and insist on
‘or’ as a consequential joining word suspending
two things in lateral flow attuning and framed

your code metaphor is very late-nineties
we’re yoking an idea of the body with one of
not-the-body, as if we ever got rid of ourselves
as if we ever felt that the body’s betrayal
was other than us. knitting circles aside newness
clots and curds, nouns set up suggestively as some-
thing more interesting, less servile

meta-sex talk tsk-tsk-ing, the chills / pink frost:
to collaborate is always already evident crumbing
against an Auckland dusk-light. it’s girlfriend in
a coma but without the irony. across the street cats
lope into themselves, into liquid ambers, as though
their limbs were patterning an ominous index
the easy analogy is this – there are bones in a

battlefield, settled into the seams of the soil &
all the conscientious post-bloodshed grasscover
– and the bones tell us a list of things about the
battle or any number of potential battles. brownian
motion (the path of a drunken bird; measured in
units of exquisite likeliness) and ordering peking
duck (quantities jotted on the underside of a napkin)

come to mind. our love, to put it crassly, is indexical.

Suspended in the sky like so much venison: moving towards a body without organs in Henry Miller’s Sexus

I will go directly to her home, ring the bell, and walk in. Here I am, take me – or stab me to death. Stab the heart, stab the brain, stab the lungs, the kidneys, the viscera, the eyes the ears. If only one organ be left alive you are doomed – doomed to be mine forever, in this world and the next and all the worlds to come. I am a desperado of love, a scalper, a slayer. I’m insatiable. I eat hair, dirty wax, dry blood clots, anything and everything you call yours. Show me your father, with his kites, his race horses, his free passes for the opera: I will eat them all, swallow them alive. Where is the chair you sit in, where is your favourite comb, your toothbrush, your nail file? Trot them out that I may devour them at one gulp. You have a sister more beautiful than yourself, you say. Show her to me – I want to lick the flesh from her bones.

Deleuze and Guattari, in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, speak of a ‘body without organs’. A phrase on loan from Artaud, the body without organs refers to a limit, never reached but always desired, at which all things in flow (that is, all matter and all energy of all bodies) would flow freely into each other, without distinction. The body without organs is described as a set of practices or a collection of intensities, rather than a notion or concept. It is an exercise in continual experimentation, a site of production, distribution, crossing, passing, slipping, becoming and unbecoming, decaying and failing. “The body is now nothing more than a set of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels,” write Deleuze and Guattari. The body is circumstantial matter, dying at once as living, shedding and shrivelling and bloating.

In imagining the body without organs, we can begin to surrender the idea of the organism, a whole bounded by an identity and a destiny. We can surrender the notion of the psychoanalytical inner-spirit. We can even surrender freedom, because we recognise that freedom is unconstrained flow in the same way that capitalism is unconstrained flow. What is left is desire. “Desire is revolutionary.”

At the beginning of Sexus, Henry Miller falls in love with Mara, a woman soon to be renamed Mona – rather inexplicably – and elsewhere called Hildred or Sabina. In Miller’s life, this woman was June, born Judith, his second wife. Throughout Miller’s writing, she is not only nominally schizophrenic but is slippery, variable and painfully unknowable as an object of desire. She is seductive. She is a series of surfaces, a cinematic image, a pathogen. When Miller meets her, he is so sickened by seduction that he renounces ownership of his body. Any romantic notion of the heart as the central organ of love is abandoned. The heart, yes, but only if the heart is seized from the ribcage, torn from its ventricles and then butchered. The heart, but only if the heart is one organ amongst every organ: the kidney and liver, spleen and gallbladder, brain and eyes. Love is disembowelment, love is taxidermy. Total ownership: I love you, therefore I need you to embalm me, marinate me, swaddle me, push me through cheesecloth and collect my curds.

Miller’s self-mutilation moves towards the body without organs. By refusing himself a functional or autonomous body, he becomes a discordant collection of intensities. He is no longer skeleton and muscle, nervous system and blood. He is now just sex-thought and misery, desire and bitterness. He is the memory of a body, patched together with the meagre sustenance of discarded proteins, shed from his lover: ear wax, dead skin, dried follicles and clots. This is true dependence. This is what we mean when we tell someone we need them. This is what happens when give ourselves up, unconditionally, irreversibly, with the full thrust of our surrender.

Miller’s renouncement occurs at the beginning of Sexus, and so we can imagine that for the rest of the book, he is sniffing around the limits of this non-bodily threshold. Fucking, eating and sleeping are intermittent occasions of intense sensation. Here and there, Miller is fed plates of pickled herrings and black rye bread, honey and figs, sweet brandy, cold sausages and hunks of cheese. The meals appear and then disappear. Sex, too, appears and disappears. For all the indefatigable rock-hard-prickness, there lacks a definable consciousness to Miller’s sexuality. And yet, it is not unproblematic. Miller’s synecdochic refrain of cunt-as-woman reeks of classically misogynistic objectification.  Elsewhere, the woman as an unpredictable and terrifying force of seduction reminds us of the abject feminine so over-represented as a cultural archetype and so feared by men.

In every sexual encounter, Henry brings his lover – whoever she may be – to climax at least once, often three or four times. Afterwards, the postcoital euphoria inevitably descends into hungry, hysterical demands for more: “Where do you live?” asks one lover, Elsie, after their first encounter. “Where can I see you alone? Write me tomorrow … tell me where to meet you. I want a fuck everyday … do you hear? Don’t come yet, please. I want it last forever.” It’s easy to get weary of Miller’s interminable sex, his non-committal and flukey ability to push lovers right up to the edge of their sanity. But there is something attractive, at least in terms of language, of his ability write deftly both the absurdity and the banality of sex. Take for example, the paragraph that follows a chance liaison with the wife of a friend:

I had a strange taste in my mouth, of fish glue and Chanel 976½. My cock looked like a bruised rubber hose; it hung between my legs, extended an inch or two beyond its normal length and swollen beyond recognition. When I got into the street I felt weak in the knees. I went to the drug store and swallowed a couple of malted milks. A royal bit of fucking, I thought to myself.

Deleuze and Guattari talk about the “nonstratified, unformed, intense matter” of the body without organs. “The matrix of intensity,” they say, is “intensity = 0”. Zero here is not a quantifiable nothing; it is simply energy, neither positive nor negative. Kinetic energy. Movement. A composition of intensities. The paradox of Miller’s sexuality is that his model of the body without organs is fundamentally impotent. In dis-possessing his organs, in unclaiming bodily autonomy, Miller is merely a collection of senses, each transmitting and transmitted across the membranes of his clumsy protein-hybrid. His love for Mona is an electric current, a feedback loop. It literally holds him together, yet it is corrosive, liable to drop out or skip, unsustainable. He is both masochist and sadist and fulfils neither role particularly well. At the end of the book, Miller becomes a dog. It is both a hallucination and the final transformation of his body without organs. Love has made him delirious, and poverty – a kind of chronic poverty of the body – has made him useless as a man. His only chance of survival is metamorphosis, a becoming-animal, the transformation to skulking mangy cur.

This bodily poverty is of course corollary to a broader poverty experienced by Miller in the solidification and acceleration of industrial capitalism. Food, sex and art have been absorbed into a cultural economy, and Miller is, in every sense of the word, indebted. In the following section from Sexus, Miller returns to New York after a picnic with his first wife and their child. He is on a train, watching as the city-grid starts to appear ahead:

Mr. and Mrs. Megalopolitan with their offspring. Hobbled and fettered. Suspended in the sky like so much venison. A pair of every kind hanging by the hocks. At one end of the line starvation; at the other end, bankruptcy. Between stations the pawnbroker, with three golden balls to signify the triune God of birth, buggery and blight. Happy days. … Every now and then the doors open and shut: freshes batches of meat for the slaughterhouse. Little scraps of conversation, like the twittering of tit-mice. Who would think that the chubby little youngster beside you will in ten or fifteen years be shitting his brains out with fright on a foreign field? All day long you make innocent little gadgets; at night you sit in a dark hall and watch phantoms move across a silver screen. Maybe the realest moments you know are when you sit alone in the toilet and make caca. That doesn’t cost anything or commit you in any way. Not like eating or fucking, or making works of art. You leave the toilet and you step into the big shithouse. Whatever you touch is shitty. Even when it’s wrapped in cellophane the smell is still there. Caca! The philosopher’s stone of the industrial age. Death and transfiguration – into shit! The department store life – with flimsy silks on one counter and bombs on the other counter. No matter what interpretation you put on it, every thought, every deed, is cash-registered. You’re fucked from the moment you draw your first breath. One grand international business machine corporation. Logistics, as they say.

“All writing is PIG SHIT,” says Artaud, and Deleuze elaborates: “that is to say, every fixed or written word is decomposed into noise, alimentary, and excremental bits.” Language, as waste matter, as intensities passed through the body. Composed and decomposed. To shit, to speak. Language as excrement is language as process, rather than language as a device or act of expression. A process that, as Deleuze and Guattari say, “ploughs the crap out of being and its language.” Continuing, D and G suggest that

The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form and content.

Certainly, Miller’s writing ploughs the crap out of being and its language. For Miller, the excremental experience is peaceful and productive. Time alone, passing waste, acknowledging the organic processes of energy transformation. Shitting is not just a quotidian pleasure; it is a consciously non-capitalised act, a counterfeit currency. The material exchange of shitting produces no profits. It is a form of self-gifting. For Miller, an oppositional engagement – we might say, in the form of “immaculate defecation”– with capitalised flow is the only possible engagement. He is a failure as a capitalist (not least for his decision to become a writer).

Shitting is the last point of active contact, the threshold from which all connections pass through a final connection. The rectum as event horizon. All nutritious encounters that the body has experienced are archived in this process, even if only momentarily. For the body without organs, shitting is the seasonal practice of surrendering jetsam overboard.  Miller’s model of the body is a bounty of rot: the gassy and the stinky, the sex-funk and the sweat-drip. His language is a scalpel, an agent of fermentation, colonic irrigation, purge and squeeze.

cripple creek

hysteria starts in the womb—just pluck the first &
the fifth strings towards each other & you’ll see
how osmosis works—it’s not just an act of becoming
equal, it’s an act of becoming written. someone sits a
woman down & tells her to stop “playing into things”
& the woman decides to learn the banjo—do you see
what I mean here by causality? to say that we are
conceived is to say that we are compositions, reams
of paper wet from a kettle, blackness underneath nails,
things exchanged in childhood, an arrangement of brass
& string, a performance in which a letter is posted &
read, a collection of small animal bones, nuts, algebra.
two men sit on a porch in kentucky & play one
meaning.

slug courtship

there must have been a time when we would have found it nervous-making to see a pair of slugs wrapped together in copulation (scientific discourse refers to the getting-to-know-you stages as a ‘courtship’, but to me it looks like one slug eating another slug out) and producing what looks like a string of decorative bluebottles. in fact, these slugs hang from the bluebottles (which remind me of plasticy windchimes bought from market stalls and taken down because of atonal, clinky sounds) as they wrap together in slugfuck. here, upside down, they exchage their genetic information and make more slugs. yes, there was a time, the time before these slugs, that we were dry-throated, and we liked to avoid such ideas, because they were bad ideas and we were nervous people. we had never sat down and really talked over the potential benefits of two slugs in ecstasy sharing their codes of differentiation: the way that these things bring together any mating couple as a sign of camaraderie, a nod of knowingness. the way that knowing how slugs love each other brings us closer together, links our desires with the bluebottle strings.

beefsteak & sex

‘What I call “feminine” and “masculine” is the relationship to pleasure, the relationship to spending, because we are born into language, and I cannot do otherwise than to find myself before words: we cannot get rid of them, they are there. We could change them, we could put signs in their place, but they would become just as closed, just as immobile and petrifying as the words “masculine” and “feminine” and would lay down the law to us. So there is nothing to be done, except to shake them like apple trees, all the time.’ Hélène Cixous

when i was researching my thesis last year, i came across a lot of writing about gertrude stein in terms of her sex. a typical analysis of stein’s work is that it is in opposition to the patriarchal conventions of narrative and poetic language: that is, it is does not follow the structures of a meaning-full*, rational, psychological language. it is not penetrative. instead, it is unknowable, disjointed, paratactic, mysterious, demanding. people who have written about stein, particularly her contemporaries (and mostly men), are dismissive of stein’s work and proclaim it unskilled and nonsensical. often, criticisms of her work are carried with a suspicion of her sexuality and her state of woman-ness. her work is understood to codify the sexual revelations of her relationship with her partner, alice b. toklas. this sensuality, a bodily joy drawn out in an oblique, discrete writtenness, can be ‘translated’ to represent a clitoris, a lip, an orgasm, or the opened-out sex of a woman’s body, but the translation is entirely interpretive. her work does not suggest a single interpretation, it offers the possibility of countless interpretations.

perelman says of stein, ‘her words displace all others’. her language is without an anchor, a vanishing point or a blueprint, it is radically geometric, radically decentred and radically spatialised. if public discourse idealises a static notion of a woman, then stein disputes this ideal radically. her work is not ‘feminine’, it is not emotionally revealing, psychologically self-reflexive, confessional, passionate or domestic**. i can imagine that it would have been an uncomfortable experience for the conservative male critic of the twenties to read stein, her language would have come up against the very limits of his linguistic understanding of a woman. his ideas of a woman’s softness, maternalism, emotionality and desire would have been challenged in an uncomfortable way. in this instance, the impossible nature of a woman’s sex as compared to a man’s ideal brings about a discussion of a woman’s art work and the failing of her femininity. by which i mean, when someone doesn’t ‘get’ stein, and they feel alienated by her poetics, they are likely to make a connection between her work and her person, her work and her sexuality.

any description of stein’s physical self is similar: she was broad, short-haired, stern-faced and wore dowdy smocks with strange indian sandals. her appearance apparently terrified many men, who saw her as a large, demanding, shrewd and loud woman whose ‘femininity’ came in a scary brand that borrowed from the certain traits of ‘masculinity’ that men felt empowered by. anne carson writes that her voice was ‘like beefsteak’, and that hemingway was scared of the sound of her laugh. her femininity, most likely fetishised by men in terms of her sexuality and her relationship with alice, was just as scary because it was unknowable, untouchable; it didn’t need a man. (no doubt a lot of her critics were flummoxed by the idea of what women actually did together, too).

though i am interested in the sex of stein’s work (as i am interested in the sex of all poetics), my own reading of stein is concentrated on the language’s surfaces, rather than its perceived inside-spaces and underneaths. whether or not there are clitorises and open thighs patchworked througout her language is not of particular concern to me. if i find, in the small poem-sentences of her work, a phrase which elicits a sensual response, then i enjoy the moment and move to the next. it is being present in her language that makes the experience of reading stein an experience of bodily and poetic pleasure.

* i use the word meaning-full here rather than meaningful to avoid the qualitative associations of the word ‘meaningful’. instead, in this instance, i mean quite literally, ‘filled with meaning’. this distinction was used by lyn hejinian, and i take it on with much appreciation.

** here i mean that her work does not conform to the historically gendered notions of femininity, it does not ‘express’ a desire for passion and an emotional interest in domesticity in the ways in which women are expected to. i am not implying here that stein is disinterested in desire, passion and the domestic space (tender buttons, for example, is a meditation on the poetics of domesticity), but that her interests are beyond the normalised understandings of women’s role in language (and in life).