"BEAUTIFUL BOTTOM, BEAUTIFUL SHAME" by Kathryn Bond Stockton

Stockton’s “Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame” evokes such a storm of ideas — well, not QUITE ideas, but sort of shadowy concepts that seem so vital that I try to capture them in ideas, words, diagrams. I’ve said in the past that I’m very hard to shame, but I carry a lot of guilt. There are scholarly discussions about the difference between shame and guilt.

In some strange way I relate that to Bob Scriver’s observation that I know what I CAN do, but don’t know what I CAN’T do. Of course, he was so innocent that he asked his fourth wife if she were an alcoholic and when she said “no,” he took that as fact. I think it was a way of putting the blame for her excesses on her, so that it was not his fault for not recognizing and dealing with her binges, but rather hers for misleading him, in spite of the facts being so obvious that everyone in town not only saw that SHE was a drunk, but were always telling me that HE had become a drunk. I refused to believe that. 

Humans are so bad at looking at plain facts because it demands changes in what we do, and giving up old attachments to what we wanted to happen. Is repression the came as constipation? Or depression?

This Stockton book made me look again at the binaries I’ve been claiming as the basic neurological construction of “the world” that an infant must make in order to think. I’ve talked about the intrauterine binaries of moving/static, sound/silence which are constructed (actually built into neurons as soon as they exist) from experience in the womb. And then the falling/embraced, fed/hungry, quenched/thirsty, cold/hot, bright/dark; all expressed as simultaneous in the efforts of the saints to describe their mystical experience of the Holy.

But I never even thought of the binary of filthy/clean, a nearly pre-word concept expressed by a gutteral hiss signalling, “Put that down! It’s filth!” Of course, babies — like puppies — put it right in their mouth anyway. It is the most morally tagged, most unilaterally stigmatized of all the pairs.

Only recently have I understood that proper solid excretion is at least in part controlled by the management of water — drinking a glass of water may provide enough hydraulic whateveritis to release the gut knot. Rather Freudian counsellors have interpreted constipation as refusing to surrender to the mother, who demands obedience and then immediately destroys the evidence.

There’s no doubt that my mother and I had a boundary problem, and that she had plans for me that I refused to fulfill. In the end she forced compliance with the enema nozzle, medically authorized but experienced as rape. 

Kozy Kamp

This next vignette will seem like a tangent, but slightly more polite. In the Fifties we were camping in our Kozy Kamp, a travel tent trailer and spent the night in some campground that had good old pit privies. My mother had made coffee for herself with a percolator on the Coleman stove and dumped the used grounds out onto newspaper, along with some other food scraps. She had not emptied the coffee basket, expecting to do that at the hole in the seat of the privy. Half-dreaming as usual, I just threw the whole packet of stuff down the hole.

When my mother discovered what I had done, she was enraged. She threatened to make me climb into the pit to retrieve that basket. I thought she meant it. Even my father paid attention. My brothers thought it was a good idea. Only lately have I reflected that it wasn’t just the basket lost, because she used coffee as a goad to keep her doing all her many chores, because that’s what her role was as the mother. How would she make coffee now?

My mother and my youngest brother.

I’m much older than she was then. (She conceived me when she was thirty.) I recognize that she was depressed. (Her mother was dying and my father was showing the first symptoms of his head injury, plus there was never really enough money and my father objected to her two ordinary comforts: alcohol and cigarettes.) It took her all concentration to keep us respectable.

Looking back, it seems to me that she had a curious lassitude that intensified at the end into the blood cancer that killed her, until she had little energy for anything. I feel something like the same lassitude in myself except when I’m writing. She went back to a little alcohol and many cigarettes. I go to ideas. Which I can have lying down.

But I share her idea that coffee would help. She often said, “I wish I had a cup of really strong hot coffee!” No matter how I tried to produce that or how competent the restaurant was, the coffee was never strong or hot enough. I finally decided it was symbolic.

I make cone filter coffee and it’s often cold when I drink it because once I hit the keyboard I forget everything else. I have to make a rule never to set my mug down where it can spill onto the keyboard. I’ve never gotten into espresso except at Starbucks where I drink latté and enjoy teasing the barrista. (“What flavor would you like?” “Coffee flavor, please.”) Even as latté, it’s very hot. Just recently my local Albertson’s evidently bought a low-cost supply of Boyd’s coffee which was my mother’s brand. I recognized the first sip. An Oregon store must have closed out.

But all this is only elaboration of the ideas in Stockton’s book, which relies quite a bit on Bataille’s philosophy, a guy who spent a lot of time thinking about shit. As in a pit privy. As in Pasolini:  in one of his movies there is a scene that haunts me.  A woman being punished is naked, sitting up to her neck in what appears to be sewage. Her crime was disobedience. (I hope for her sake it was not real excrement but rather gravy and meatballs, which look similar, which is also something to think about — how sometimes food-going-in looks much like food-coming-out.) And then I think about “Mineshaft.” If you don’t know what the reference is, don’t look it up.

Pasolini

The opposite of clean is dirty, but filthy means something different, more like infective, dangerous, totally rejected. Dirt can be the matrix of growth, something fertile, a source of life. The opposite of dirty is clean, but clean doesn’t have to mean sterile, just safe, digestible. Clean dirt? One’s mother teaches these things to her toddler. To defy her, think filthy. Smearing excrement is not an unusual symptom of child rage.

It takes me a long time to work through all this stuff, because I have to figure out what the abstractions and structural relationships are, and then translate them into human memory and story. Then I have to go walk it off. (That’s a lie. This kind of thing fills me with lassitude. They say walking is good for that, but it’s a little like telling a depressive to cheer up.) Writing like this — going from “high” academic theory to applications in my real past (and note that all the people mentioned have been dead a long time — except me, of course.) is quite unlike simple memoir or even testimony.

It is not lightly done, because it changes one’s view of the world. It’s like doing psychoanalysis, which is not usually done alone. And it often hurts, because it takes the depths of loss and misunderstanding even deeper before it can be reconstituted into something better. One might even say “cleaner.” But at least finally more free. It appears to be something I CAN do.

The point of the clean/dirty dyad is that dirty things get pushed away, denied, even criminalized. The point of this Stockton book is that both being black and being gay are “dirty” and therefore denied, stigmatized, sometimes equated. She proceeds by talking about the “Down Low” but I’m not up for that yet. More reading. It pulls in boys-at-risk, because the worst “dirty” thing about MSM is that it spreads the infection of HIV to innocents (if there is such a category).

"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."