SIT! STAY!

Totally misleading -- this post is about lesbians.

Since I’m already convicted of making a lot of lists (maybe too many), I’ll just add to the evidence.  My real crime is not taking the time to integrate this material into a composed essay, so forcing readers to make their own sense of the list.  Maybe I just have the feeling that this stuff belongs together somehow and want to come back to it later, in hopes that my abilities have increased or that some additional element has pulled it into order.  This effort is very much hindered by the computer’s program which tries to impose some sequence of a faraway technician half my age and probably not my gender.  (Sometimes I suspect not my species.)

1.  The agenda for today was supposed to be the chapter of “The Queer Child” by Kathryn Bond Stockton that is numbered “2” though it is actually the third, since the introduction amounts to a chapter.  The long title of the chapter is “Why the (Lesbian) Child Requires an Interval of Animal.  The Family Dog as a Time Machine." Reading it had the effect of walking through tall weeds with a lot of grasshoppers jumping — thoughts set off in every direction.

Paul Sparks playing "Tom Yates, the writer"

2.  I watched “House of Cards” marathon-style yesterday and was most interested in the daughter/mother/writer triangle that formed near the end.  I’d like to see that as a separate series, not necessarily with the same characters, though I really liked the portrayal of the writer as empathetic but  in charge of himself.

3.  My cousin and I disagreed.  She states as a fact that she tries but cannot manage computers.  I sent her one of my simple (for oldsters) coaching books, after encouraging her to buy her own, which she clearly was not going to do.  She immediately gave the book to her husband and sent me a check for the postage, feeling that both moves were generosities.  With my “hermeneutics of suspicion” background spotting “games people play” I see this as clear rejection.  She topped me. 

Her branch of the family labels me as brainy (which is another way of distancing me.  They applied the label many years before college which probably affected my choice of venue.) I think these ideas about who I am, which she considers praise, could not be more foreign or threatening to her.  And me.  My education has not been “brainy” — more like visceral.  But not informed enough for me to have read Stockton’s list of texts.

Lassie with hair on her chest

4.  The point of the Stockton chapter is that “inverts” (a less scary and image-evoking word than “lesbian”, a word that always made my mother snort like a horse) can cope with a stuck place in their lives — where there is no way to go forward, back or even sideways — by being a dog for a while.  Not Lassie or Rin-Tin-Tin, a pet and guardian, and not a bitch, but a simple observant and reacting domestic animal, included but not consulted.  Usually this animal trope is about how much girls love horses, which is not-very-covertly sexual.  (It works for boys as well.)  But that is about relationship between quite different beings.  The idea of the dog is more about faithful intimacy with hints of mother/child.

Not wisteria.

Now the texts are the Thom Fitzgerald’s vid of “The Hanging Garden”; Djuna Barnes novel “Nightwood”; Virginia Woolffs “Mrs. Dalloway” both novel and vid; Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness”; a photography book by David Douglas Duncan, “Picasso and Lump: a Dachshund’s Odyssey”.  It is haunted by DeleuzeGuattari’s book “A Thousand Plateaus,” which suggests rhizomes as a strategy, about as sideways as one can go.  The writing in this chapter about these elements is inspired, vivid with metaphor gracefully expressed.

When intimacy is described publicly — I don’t mean sex but rather the kind of relationship that sometimes supports sex — it can upset people if it is outside convention.  (It upsets ME when it is IN convention.)  My family is easily upset because they find it unaccountable that I have not followed their script.  (They can’t even figure out what script it is, but neither can I. My script is no-script.  Maybe contra-script.)  

Flush and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

But I always suspect that the deficit, the loss, is in them rather than me.  Their background is immigration (Scots) and homesteading (South Dakota) in an Edwardian era. They happily read “Flush”, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s fond and sentimental poem about her dog, but they keep no pets.  (Except my mother, who is not really part of my father’s family and sometimes snorts like a horse at the thought of them, always wants a small dog and throughout our childhood kept one, though she insisted it was my brother’s.  When I was working at animal control, I had a little Jack Russell and since she had a key to my apartment, she often "dog-napped" him.) 

My own “plateau” has always been cats, though I’ve had plenty of other animals.  I do not inhabit my cats.  Maybe I ought to, but our relationship is rather strongly mother/child with permission for them to be feral, to live their own lives.  The Striped Terror is missing this morning.  I expect him to return stinking of tomcat.  If not, it’s still his life and death.  I feed, I shelter, but I do not control.  Nor inhabit.

The Striped Terror -- back just after lunch.

When I was an AC officer, I scraped up a garbage can’s full capacity of squashed cats every day.  One puts one hand in the plastic bag, grasps the rag-flesh through it, and everts the bag, hoping the mess will stay intact.  But to impound a living dog, one must take it in one’s arms and lift it into the truck, an embrace of relationship that the dog usually accepts.  I always felt it clearly, probably more than is wise or comfortable, esp. if the dog were badly hurt or soaking wet, as dogs often are in Portland, OR.  

The neighbors were always watching and their demand was that I make things “right”, get rid of damage and mess — but more than that — pain, because the idea of suffering is denied in our streets.  Even in our street children.  Most people want the feral eliminated.  Culture is control.  Minorities and inverts are just as hooked on control as anyone else.  But they have to make a convincing case for their suffering in order to be heard (or read).

I commend to you a poem by James Dickey called “The Sheep-Child” which was inspired by a pickled specimen in a lab that looked rather like a chimera created by mating a sheep and a human.  Dickey didn’t make it a joke, as is conventional, but a poem.   (Easy to find on the Internet.) 

“. . . In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes

Far more than human.  I saw for a blazing moment

The great grassy world from both sides,

Man and Beast in the round of their need,

And the hill wind stirred in my wool,

My hoof and my hand clasped each other . . .

If a child or a woman, stalling to get enough time to figure out what is keeping them on a plateau, assumes the guise of a canine, esp. when the source of the anomaly is physical (like desire or gender-identity), it seems to me a benign strategy easily accepted by a biological dog.  It is an expansion into new worlds rather than an acceptance of limits, even if it is done in situ.  

"THE QUEER CHILD" by Kathryn Bond Stockton

One good book (and I’m not talking about narrative immersive fiction — I’m talking about ideas well-explored) leads to a whole shelf and possibly actual consequences based on insight.  Thus “Boyology” caused me to order two more books and put even more on a list that will cost me money later.

One was practically an instant read:  “Caleb’s Friend,” a picture book for kids that’s a gender-reversed “Little Mermaid.”  It’s not about sex (Disney never said that the reason the girl wanted legs was because of what was in between so she could “dance,” but you sort of knew that.)  Caleb is the “white man” in this “Broken Arrow” plot.  (In “Broken Arrow” a frontier white man befriends an indigenous man.  DVD from Netflix. Based on real life.)  That’s a second reversal, sort of like the story of the “The Little Mermaid” from the Prince’s point of view.

1950

Caleb works on a fishing boat, meets a merBOY who is later caught in the fishing net.  In spite of plans to sell him to a freak show for a lot of money, Caleb sets him free.  Later the merboy saves the boat in a storm.  As thanks, Caleb gives him a rose.  The relationship endures and like Joe Dimaggio loving Marilyn Monroe and leaving roses, Caleb as an old man throws roses into the sea.  You can read this book several ways besides human relationship across barriers, including gay sex or simply boy faithfulness and trust.  The art is appealing.  Or you could note, rather cynically, that love is proved by gifts.

The other book that I’m only beginning to digest is “The Queer Child.”  It’s not the title but the cover photo that captured me, a beautiful boy just entering adrenarche (seven to adolescence) which Freud called “latency,” feeling that nothing was happening.  It’s one of his wrongest ideas.  EVERYTHING is happening at that age.

Kathryn Bond Stockton

Kathryn Bond Stockton is not just after what happens, but also about what was a potential in the child, a discarded memory, the kind of thing that in the art world is call “pentimento,” (a painting under a painting) or in writing a “palimpset,” (writing scraped off a parchment so it can be used for new writing).  With new technologies, these earlier works can be recovered.  Also, science tells us that the human brain generates a bazillion neurons and then erases most of them, esp. in the earliest years when it only keeps the binary frameworks of infancy:  warm/chilled, secure/falling, fed/hungry, interaction/abandonment that will persist always as basic unconscious assumptions about the nature of the world.  

Throughout life, humans and possibly other mammals, generate neurons and neurons and then discard the ones not used.  This is called plasticity and is one of the ways we grow and change to fit the world.  It’s one of the strongest strategies of nature — create a million, destroy all but a few thousand who have some advantage giving them persistence that we call “fitness” in response to the changing environment.

This boy is from an old album.

I don't know who he is, but I've not forgotten him.

A few of the frail, the fleeting, the precious, will exist long enough for people to love them. A British child’s story claims that all babies are birds on an island until they are called by parents, discard their wings, and are born.  It made a huge impression on me as a child, partly because of the delicate illustrations.  The point was that some birds didn’t want to become babies and somehow managed to keep their wings.  It’s the kernel for Peter Pan. 

This thinking is not just Stockton but comes from a body of shared thinking that for a few decades has publicly addressed our dysfunctional ideas about gender.  This body of LGBTQ conversation is unknown to me, because it usually takes place in cities or universities.  I must play catch-up as well as slowly learning the vocabulary she is creating to fit new concepts.

This is Brandon, Manitoba, 1946.  

A school to force euro-conformity on tribal people.

The main term I’ve learned so far is “Growing Sideways,” which responds to the dominating idea that one must grow “up” through predictable steps, the pattern assumed in public schools.  If through time there are blockages, brokenness, deficits, challenges, then one must find another way to go, sideways.  The line of development becomes a maze.  This book doesn’t survey possible causes — just the results, which we know about without directly knowing about them.

Fairy tern, small and delicate

Continuing the bird metaphor — maybe a little too long — we know atypical and sometimes troublesome people Nat Lauriat called “stormy petrels,” though some people might be “fairy terns” or even water ouzels who walk in and out of streams underwater.  They turn up in classrooms, churches, and brothels.  They are bought and sold, sometimes by literary agents and sometimes in prison.  Often death claims them early, esp. if they seem to be white crows.  Sometimes they become celebrities.

Stockton uses films as texts.  I haven’t seen them all, so I’ll get back to you, but the one that haunts me always is “AI,” the film about the robot child who somehow has an emotional life, an implanted limbic/autonomic system that people use but don’t acknowledge.  It’s the thing about becoming real.

My family attended movies quite a lot.  Rumer Godden’s “The River” or “Captain from Castille” or “The Red Shoes” are haunts in my shadow life.  Stockton talks about “ghosting,” the faint memories of lives unlived or unresolved or simply imagined.  In one of them I am a hanged child.  

In the Fifties I was told I was creative, a high cultural value among the judicious teachers whose task it was to sort us.  It was oxymoronic to learn to be creative since education then was forced conformity.  I still have the remnants of my shelf of books about creativity, which was defined as combining two dissimilar things into something new.  I think they really meant “metaphor,” which some propose is the most basic strategy of thinking or at least language.  Metaphor is the wings.  Today’s culture wants to tear them off and sell them, even if they have to suggest they will make the buyers able to fly.

Somehow I’m circling back to my undergrad concepts.  Those were the years I traveled with closeted gay guys and was assigned a roommate who was gleefully bi- and pan- and wore black underwear.  (I hadn’t known there was such a thing.)  She wrote poetry and edited a gynecological journal all her life.  I finally crossed her off when she kept demanding homage.  She was a person of community and I wasn’t in any of them.  But we shared the dubious sequence of ideas that creative means original and being original means “queer” -- not in the sense of some gender role but in being atypical, different, and therefore valuable.

Stockton says she sees metaphor as a “moving suspension,” which is to say she brushes aside the insistence on having the Truth, the Actuality, the Reality, which are essentially ghosts of public school where there is only ONE right answer, which eliminates all other options and possibilities, UNlike the explorations necessary for “sideways growth.”  She understands the contemporary cultural moment -- at least in the academic Euro-world -- as one with room to explore, partly because of dynamic confusion and partly because of new and more powerful lenses, which is the metaphor on the cover of this book.  I mean literal telescopes, microscopes, cameras, and computer screens that give us an avalanche of new evidence to reconcile.

Poirot

So — animals, race (skin color), sex, murder and money will be the threads of the argument.  I am not impartial and cool.  I sit here blushing, remembering, getting angry, and occasionally leaving for a while.  I'm working my way through the long Poirot films.  In last night's mystery he advises "if one only shifts one's view a leetle, all becomes a different story."