Author: Chase Dimock

Chase Dimock teaches Literature and Writing at College of the Canyons. He is the Managing Editor of As It Ought To Be Magazine.

The Incredible Bipolar Hulk: A Conversation with Poet Daniel Crocker

Posted on by Chase Dimock

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The Incredible Bipolar Hulk:

A Conversation with Poet Daniel Crocker

By Chase Dimock

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The genius of The Incredible Hulk is that everyone can identify with him. All people have a reservoir of anger inside them, and we all know the painful discipline of managing anger, lest it erupt into senseless rage. The Hulk Smash is the fantasy of acting on our anger with a violent ferocity that mirrors the inner, emotional experience of pain.

In his latest chapbook, Gamma Rays, Daniel Crocker identifies with the Hulk as a metaphor for the experience of bipolar disorder. As It Ought To Be debuted Crocker’s Hulk poem “The Incredible Hulk Tries to Write a Poem” last January. For Crocker, the Hulk is more than just a momentary outburst; he is an enduring persona who embodies the manic energy of bipolar disorder. Crocker’s poems humanize the Hulk, and in turn, provide insight into the mind of the bipolar person as they navigate the impulses within them. I had a chance to ask Crocker about the Hulk and how he personifies the bipolar experience in his poetry.

 

Chase Dimock:  The first question on anyone’s mind when they first look at your cover is going to be “Why the Hulk?” In the past, you’ve written poems in which you take on the personas of Cookie Monster, Skeletor, and George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life among others. What is it about the Hulk that made him worthy of an entire collection of poetry? What does taking on his persona uniquely achieve among your pantheon of pop culture icons?

 

Daniel Crocker: The simple answer is, I love the Hulk. I wrote one Hulk poem, the one where he goes shopping after taking klonopin, and then I couldn’t stop for awhile. I was filtering everything through the Hulk. I originally thought I might end up with a full length, but after about 20 poems I realized I was kind of done with the story I wanted to tell. But, he’s a great metaphor. Any negative aspect of your personality, especially those that center around losing control, that’s basically the Hulk. He’s the things you bury deep. In a lot of ways this books is about coming to terms with that.

So I used it as a metaphor for my bipolar disorder because you never know when you’re going to have another episode. You just try to keep them at bay with medication. Then I started thinking about what it means to navigate love and a relationship when you have this hanging over your head–when you’re not always sure you’re going to wake up okay. Unlike Shit House Rat, however, this is more about coming to terms with it. It is, I think, a happy book with a happy ending.

 

Chase Dimock: The Hulk has been incarnated as a comic, a cartoon, a TV show, and several movies. I know the TV show version of the Hulk the best because I grew up watching reruns. In that version, he’s somewhat of a loner who tries to manage his rage alone and channel it toward productive ways to help the people he runs into. The show always ends with “The Lonely Man Theme.” It seems like your Hulk is more like the Hulk from the comics, which places him in a romantic relationship with Betty. Why was it important to focus so many of your poems on the Hulk in a relationship?

 

Daniel Crocker: In the end, it’s a book about navigating a relationship while having a mental illness. In my favorite runs of the Hulk, Bruce was always afraid of his anger coming out. He would do anything to keep the Hulk away–even though it’s a part of him. He was so obsessed with finding a cure that his relationship with Betty would be strained. When I was diagnosed with bipolar, I read up everything I could on it. So, I understand that level of obsession. I also, of course, worry that my symptoms could come back at any time—even while on medication.  So, I hope it shows the impact of bipolar disorder on one’s immediate family as well as just the person who has it. In the end, though, it’s just coming to terms with the monster inside of you–whatever that may be.

Continue reading “The Incredible Bipolar Hulk: A Conversation with Poet Daniel Crocker” →

In the Mental Architecture of the Deceased

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In the Mental Architecture of the Deceased

By Chase Dimock

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Five years ago, my father, grandfather, and I remodeled the bathroom in our family cabin. This was no luxury ski chalet or time share condo masquerading as a cabin. My great-grandfather built it himself in the 30s with the help of his five daughters and the boy scout troop he lead. Great-grandpa was not a master carpenter or plumber, so as we tore away the rotting drywall and jackhammered the cracked cement floor, we discovered an unexpected and unconventional layout of pipes. It was a map of kludges, improvisations, and applications of sheer brute force.

The more Dad and Grandpa studied how the pipes were fashioned and connected, the more it became clear that the success of the remodeling job became dependent on interpreting Great-Grandpa’s plumbing choices, and then predicting where the pipes would take us. They had to think like Great-Grandpa, and in the process, his cognition and imagination became reanimated. The pipes were a network of thought like the neural pathway of synapses in his mind. Debates between Dad and Grandpa over the next step in the project evolved into nostalgic appreciations of Great-Grandpa’s resourcefulness. They were once again enveloped in the creative vision of a man who built his own carnival rides and managed to keep a citrus grove thriving during the severe rationing of WWII.

If you clicked over here from Facebook or Twitter, you are probably wondering why I am beginning a remembrance of Okla Elliott with an anecdote about plumbing. My Great-Grandpa died well before I was born, so the experience of a man’s resurrection through exploring his handiwork was only secondhand. I could see it in Dad’s and Grandpa’s faces, but I could not feel it directly. Last August, when I took over As It Ought To Be following Okla’s untimely passing, I finally experienced this phenomena first hand.

As the new Managing Editor, I have been combing through nearly a decade of articles on As It Ought To Be. This has meant figuring out formatting, style, and organization as Okla had established them, and charting how he evolved in these ways. I’ve read through all of the posts Okla authored from the beginning of the site to his final article about Lent and its political and social possibilities posted just weeks before he unexpectedly passed. Just as the plumbing revived the spirit of Great-Grandpa for my father and grandfather, so too has editing and organizing As It Ought To Be kept Okla’s voice as a writer and thinker perpetually resonant in my mind.

Although I have known Okla since right around the founding of As It Ought To Be, one tends to forget how people were when you first knew them. You don’t always remember them as they ended either. Rather, you remember people for their established role in your life and you preserve them in that stance. You build a home for them in the structure of your existence, and when they die, that’s where they stay, beautifully enshrined in your memory as a witness and an ally. This would be the Okla of 2010-2014, when we were grad students drinking Bushmills, debating Sartre, and geeking out over the genius of Professor Cary Nelson. Like so many published here on As It Ought To Be and in many of his other creative endeavors, he encouraged me to expand my mind, amplify my voice, and apply my sense of reason and empathy toward engaging with the world’s social issues and political problems. Continue reading “In the Mental Architecture of the Deceased” →

The Very Southern Pronunciation Still Rings In My Ears: A Conversation With Poet Mike James

Posted on by Chase Dimock

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The Very Southern Pronunciation Still Rings In My Ears:

A Conversation With Poet Mike James

By Chase Dimock

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Keats had his nightingale, Shelley had his skylark, Poe had his raven, Stevens had 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, and Mike James has a jukebox full of crows. While fans of poems about birds will not be disappointed, Crows in the Jukebox is just as much about the jukebox as it is about the crows. James’s book reads like the playlist of an old jukebox in a roadside, greasy spoon diner. There are folk songs that retell old family lore, slow ballads that honestly and sweetly pay tribute to his love, and melancholic memories of a self-destructive father on par with any country tune sung by Loretta Lynn or Tammy Wynette. You can hear the drawl in his words, but James is not constrained by the clichés or expectations of his background in the Carolinas. His poetry is, as the crow flies, direct in its route and positioned with a vision that can muse on the specific while connecting it to a wider, areal view.

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Chase Dimock: Crows pop up as the subject of several poems in your book, Crows in the Jukebox. In “The Crows,” you write that you “love those damned birds for what they aren’t” and in “Poem” you declare that “crows are good at waiting, much better than we are with our alphabet of needs.” What is it about crows that makes them such a fertile subject for poems? How does your interest in crows connect with some of the other ideas and themes in your work?

 

Mike James:  I’ve always loved crows. They are, with pigeons, my favorite birds.  Part of what I like about them is their intelligence, but I also love the fact that they exist at the margins. No one goes to the zoo to see crows. They are always around, watching and plotting survival. Many people have a real aversion to them. That marginality probably interests me as much as anything since I think the best writing comes from working against dominant culture, of getting by at the margins. So many of “the great dead” I admire worked actively outside of the mainstream.  (I’m thinking of poets like Stephen Jonas, Bill Knott, Jack Spicer, Lorine Niedecker, and Mbembe Milton Smith.) I don’t make a conscious decision to work around any specific themes; however, I have a real love for the decayed, the failing, and the decrepit. In so many ways I am in love with ruination. Give me the choice between walking through a mansion and walking through a closed factory and I will choose the factory on every occasion.

 

Chase Dimock: Let’s talk more about your interest in marginality and resisting the dominant culture. I feel that one way writers cultivate a unique voice and resist the dominant culture in their work is through identifying with the unique region and culture in which they live and write. Steinbeck had Monterrey Bay and Faulkner had rural Mississippi. You were born in the Carolinas, and you currently live in Chapel Hill. A number of your poems make references to places in the South, including a town in the poem “Off Interstate 95” where “people hope for jury duty ’cause it’s a job.” How does living in this region inform your poetry and influence your feeling of marginality?

 

Mike James: It’s easy for a southerner to relate to marginalized cultures because the south has always been either looked down upon or romanticized in an unhealthy and non-useful way.  Coming from a blue collar background, as I do, presents two choices:  Either accept the dominant culture imposed by wealth and commercialism and forget your origins or stand slightly outside the mainstream and question basic assumptions. Good writing, for me, is all about questioning assumptions.

I’ve been very determined to never lose my, fairly thick, southern accent.  My voice identifies my birth region.  So many people have negative views of southerners.  Once, at a training seminar for my job, the instructor, who I had not spoken with, mentioned her hatred for southern accents because, she said, southerners do not sound educated.  When I questioned her, she asked, “Honestly, don’t you ever think you sound like a hillbilly?” I replied, “No.  I think I sound like William Faulkner and Reynolds Price and Tennessee Williams.”

One way the south definitely influenced me was through the orality of the culture I grew up in.  During my childhood, my relatives gathered on an almost nightly basis and told stories. Even though I’m not a narrative poet, that spoken tradition still informs my work. And the very southern pronunciation still rings in my ears. It’s only in the south that tired and hard can come off like off-rhymes. (You can hear that rhyme in Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”)

All that being said, I really don’t consider myself a southern writer. James Dickey and Everette Maddox are, probably, the only two southern poets I can definitely say have influenced me and those are two wildly disparate voices.  Most of the poets I read and relate to are from places outside of the south.

Continue reading “The Very Southern Pronunciation Still Rings In My Ears: A Conversation With Poet Mike James” →

Letting the Meat Rest: A Conversation With Poet John Dorsey

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Letting the Meat Rest:

A Conversation With Poet John Dorsey

By Chase Dimock

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If you pick up a copy of Letting the Meat Rest, hoping to find tips for juicy pork chops, luckily, John Dorsey’s got you covered:

a pork chop sizzles in a pan
for six minutes tops
any longer & you’ll let the imagination
bleed out all over your plate
& escape into the woods
like magic.

Yet, Dorsey’s subject matter extends beyond pork products. Reading Letting the Meat Rest is like rummaging through a friend’s box of old Polaroids. You want to learn more about these people and moments captured in time. Some snapshots are brief, impressionistic prints of a person frozen in a sliver of life, while others have their detailed history scrawled on the back. These vignettes present us with visions of addiction, poverty, and trauma, but also optimistic moments of youthful ambition, rebellion, and intimate friendship. No matter what Dorsey depicts, whether it’s a full portrait or a quick sketch, it’s always crafted with deep humanity

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Chase Dimock: I first became acquainted with your work when a mutual friend of ours told me he was driving up to Central Missouri to pick up the Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. At that moment I learned a few things: 1. That a town named Belle, MO exists 2. That a town of less than 2,000 people in rural Missouri has a Poet Laureate, and 3. That the Poet Laureate of Belle, MO is John Dorsey. Having lived for a few years in Cape Girardeau myself, I know there are quite a few cultural gems to be found in rural Missouri. How did you become the Poet Laureate of Belle, MO and what has that experience been like? I saw one poem in Letting the Meat Rest depicting the appropriately named Dinner Belle restaurant in town, so I am curious to know how this experience in Belle has impacted your writing.

John Dorsey: Well, to make a short story long, Chase,  I ended up in Belle at the end of 2015, from Wisconsin, after being awarded a residency at the Osage Arts Community and through that connection, in particular with the Executive Director Mark McClane, I started to meet more people in town,  including Mayor Steve Vogt, who seeing all of the work I had done and was continuing to do, offered me the appointment as Poet Laureate, I’m actually the first Poet Laureate the town of Belle has ever had. Since my appointment we’ve opened a Non-Profit used bookstore, Barb’s Books, and I founded, and Co-Edit, with Jason Ryberg, a literary journal, the Gasconade Review, which received grant funding through the Friends of the Belle Library, from Kingsford/Clorox. As far as the impact on my work, the first full book I finished here was Being the Fire, which was 80 new poems, written in my first two months here, and published by Tangerine Press in London in Fall of 2016. Since I’ve been here I’d say I’ve written between 300-400 poems, which have gone into 6 or 7 different books or chapbooks and have written a full length feature film, Missouri Loves Company, which was produced by Paladin Knight Pictures out of New Jersey, on a budget of around $60,000, which was shot on the East Coast and here in town, and is currently being edited. In terms of my poetry, I’d say that at least half of everything since I’ve been here has to do with Belle itself, so the impact has been significant. Continue reading “Letting the Meat Rest: A Conversation With Poet John Dorsey” →

Snuffleupagus as Depression: A Conversation with Poet Daniel Crocker

Posted on by Chase Dimock

Snuffleupagus as Depression:

A Conversation with Poet Daniel Crocker

By Chase Dimock

 

If you ask Daniel Crocker how to get to Sesame Street, he’d point you toward a twisting road of manic depression, frustrated desires, and existential malaise. In his latest book, Shit House Rat, Crocker’s poetry reimagines the furry childhood icons of Sesame Street embodying torments and foibles as adult and human as the people whose hands are lodged up their muppet behinds. Cookie Monster is an addict, Big Bird has mania, Snuffy is the haunting specter of depression, and Grover’s anxiety led to a hell of a divorce. But, Sesame Street is only the starting point. Shit House Rat takes the reader to Leadwood, Missouri, Crocker’s rural, predictably lead polluted hometown, where he engages themes from his childhood to his adulthood, including mental illness, queer sexuality, poverty, and small town conservativism. I got a chance to ask Crocker about the appeal of dark humor in poetry, the struggle of growing up bipolar and bisexual in rural America, and most importantly, what exactly a “shit house rat” is.  

 

Chase Dimock: The first thing your readers will notice about your new book will obviously be the title, Shit House Rat. I know that as you were working on this collection, you had some trepidations about how the title might be perceived by your audience. Where did you get the idea for this title and why did you ultimately decide to use it?

 

Daniel Crocker: I have trepidation when it comes to just about anything, so I try not to let it worry me too much as a writer. I really put myself out there, especially in this new book, and there’s always a lot of anxiety that comes with that. I did have some specific concerns about the title though. I got the idea from the old saying, “Crazy as a shithouse rat.’ I don’t know if it’s a Midwestern or southern thing, but I’ve heard it a lot growing up and even now. It’s a nice turn of phrase, really. So, I just took the last half of  the saying (kind of like I did with Like a Fish) and used it. My worry is that it’s a real putdown to people, like me, with a mental illness. I don’t want anyone with a mental illness to think I’m making fun of them at all. My hope is to take the phrase and subvert it. Own it.

 

Chase Dimock: I think it will be clear to anyone who reads your poetry that your goal isn’t to make fun of the mentally ill, but to use humor to explore the experience of mental illness. A lot of your poems are funny, and I mean literally laugh out loud funny, which is pretty rare for modern poetry. (Robert Lowell wasn’t much of a yuckster) Why are you drawn to using humor in your work? What does using humor reveal about the experience of mental illness?

 

Daniel Crocker: A lot of my early work is pretty dark and without a lot of humor. I don’t like a lot of that early work either (some of it still holds up). But, I always like humor. I thought I was funny. Eventually, I wrote a short story or two for Do Not Look Directly Into Me that were funny, and I quickly found that I loved doing it. I haven’t written fiction in a while, and it’s pretty clear to me now that I’m mainly a poet. However, once humor started seeping its way into my poems it was like a creative flood. I guess it was me finally finding a voice that was all my own. As Steve Barthelme one said to me, it has to be more than just funny though. I think that’s true. For me, the perfect poem of mine is something that makes people laugh when they first read or hear it, but then they find they are still thinking about it later because there was something deeper and darker in it as well. Which I guess if you think about it, it’s the two extremes of bipolar disorder mixed together.

I can’t say what dealing with mental health issues with humor means for anyone else, but for me humor is just a way I deal with a lot of things. When you have mental health issues, every day can be a struggle. With my own particular diagnoses–bipolar, anxiety, OCD, probably PTSD, I worry about a lot of things. I’m doing well on medication right now, but when I wasn’t little things like planning an extra ten minutes before work just to get out of the house just in case there was something you needed to check over and over. You never really know what kind of mood you’re going to wake up in, what your anxiety level for the day is going to be, etc. If you’re going to be successful in any way, you have to plan ahead for just about anything. It’s tough to commit to anything in the future because you don’t know where you’re head space is going to be on that day. Or, before medication for me, I might commit to a ton of stuff while manic and then regret it while depressed. I guess this is a long way of saying if you don’t have a sense of humor about things they can become overwhelming. At least that’s my go to stress relief. Jokes.

The good thing about writing funny poems is everyone usually likes them. The worry is if they are going to take them seriously or not. In Shit House Rat I’m using Big Bird as a symbol for mania and Snuffleupagus as depression. Will people buy it? I dunno.

Continue reading “Snuffleupagus as Depression: A Conversation with Poet Daniel Crocker” →

Bernie Sanders’ Gay Pride Day Proclamation and the History of LGBT Advocacy

Posted on by Chase Dimock

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Bernie Sanders’ Gay Pride Day Proclamation and the History of LGBT Advocacy

by Chase Dimock

The above image is of Bernie’s declaration of a “Gay Pride Day” in Burlington, VT in 1985. I was born in 1985, which means that this man has been advocating for my civil rights my entire life. As we near the democratic primaries, I believe it is important for the LGBT community to consider the value of such a long history of support. I don’t want to vote for a candidate that only chose to recognize my humanity when it became politically expedient. I want to vote for a candidate who has been standing up for me since day one.

To fully understand what these 30 years of advocacy mean to me, it’s important to contextualize what standing up for LGBT rights entailed in the 80s. In 1985, the LGBT community was struggling through one of its great tragedies, the AIDS epidemic. In the four years since its first documented case in 1981 (then called the “gay cancer” and later “Gay Related Immune Deficiency”) AIDS ravaged the community and claimed thousands of lives. The AIDS epidemic spurred a public panic. Little was known about the disease or its transmission other than its association with gay men as its principal victims. Just days after Bernie Sanders signed this proclamation of a “Gay Pride Day”, Ryan White, a teenager from Indiana who contracted the virus from a contaminated blood treatment, was expelled from his school due to fears he could be contagious.

While the American people’s fears stirred into a frenzy, the government’s response to help those affected by AIDS was notoriously slow. Despite thousands dead, President Reagan did not even mention AIDS until months after Bernie’s proclamation. The modern Gay Rights Movement born in the late 60s had achieved some small victories for LGBT rights through the 70s, but the AIDS epidemic threatened to erase their advances and reinforce the bigoted view of the gay man as both mentally and physically ill. Advocating for the humanity and dignity of LGBT people in the middle of the AIDS crisis meant standing against an overwhelming surge of hate, ignorance, and fear. While I applaud all allies who today advocate for LGBT liberties as courageous individuals, I must say that to do so in a time when gay men were stigmatized as plague rats and evangelists referred to AIDS as a gay punishment, required not just courage, but a bold, almost radical commitment to the belief in the principle of equality.

Yet Sanders’ statement went beyond simply stressing the humanity of these men and women. Sanders asserts “lesbians and gay men are making important contributions to the improvement of the quality of life in our city, state, and nation.” To Sanders, they were not just victims to pity, but integral members of a society that was being diminished by the great loss of LGBT talent and leadership due to AIDS. We preach tolerance in America, but mere tolerance is insufficient to deliver equality. Tolerance is just the act of allowing someone to exist. The AIDS epidemic could never be conquered through tolerance; it required compassion and an appreciation of the lives of those touched by it.

Though one could contend that the stakes of supporting LGBT rights for a mayor in Vermont were considerably lower than for a higher profile politician, it’s important to note that Sanders faced considerable opposition to his proclamation. When Sanders signed a letter of support for Burlington’s first Gay Pride celebration in 1983, the measure was met with protest. According to Paul Heinz:

Opponents, such as Alderman Diane Gallagher, a Ward 6 Republican, questioned why the march required official recognition.

“Can’t you just go out and have your party and enjoy yourselves and make your point without asking the city to have a proclamation?” she asked.  (Seven Days)

Letters to the editor were less cordial in their disapproval:

Some of them went after Sanders — particularly in letters to the editor published in the Free Press.

The mayor’s “support for ‘gay rights’ and the city’s support is giving this town a bad name,” Burlington’s Patrick McCown wrote. Essex Center’s Stephen Gons questioned why the city wouldn’t designate a day for Nazis if it was willing to do so for gays. (Seven Days)

Along with his 1985 proclamation of a Gay Pride Day, Sanders and the Board of Aldermen passed a housing non-discrimination ordinance. In a letter to the community, Sanders explained his support:

“It is my very strong view that a society which proclaims human freedom as its goal, as the United States does, must work unceasingly to end discrimination against all people.

I am happy to say that this past year, in Burlington, we have made some important progress by adopting an ordinance which prohibits discrimination in housing. This law will give legal protection not only to welfare recipients, and families with children, the elderly and the handicapped — but to the gay community as well.” (Scribd)

It is this kind of thinking about LGBT rights- the ability to see how issues like housing that are not directly related to sexuality or gender still uniquely affect LGBT individuals- that makes Sanders such a promising candidate. The LGBT community is intersectional, meaning that its members are affected by all of the other forms of discrimination present in our society. LGBT people come from all walks of life, thus issues about race, social class, immigration, and religion among many others are LGBT issues. It is crucial to understand how issues not specific to gender or sexual identity affect the cause of LGBT equality. LGBT people need access to education, health care, and a living wage. The right to marry a partner of the same sex is important, but LGBT people struggling with poverty need leadership committed to vision of social justice that sees us as whole individuals affected by all aspects of American politics and not just as an interest group defined by a single cause.

Recently, The Human Rights Campaign, the most influential LGBT organization in Washington, formally announced the endorsement of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the race for the democratic nomination. For those who have long followed the HRC, this was of little surprise because they have a history of supporting the establishment and focusing on a narrow view of LGBT issues. In 2011, The HRC awarded Goldman Sachs their “Workplace Equality Innovation Award.” (Huffington Post) In doing so, the HRC sent a clear message that their advocacy was aimed only at the interests of the most privileged of LGBT people. In praising the protections given to the handful of LGBT people who participated in Goldman Sachs’ predations on the American economy, they ignored the thousands of LGBT people who lost their jobs and homes due to the irresponsible greed of poorly regulated investment banks.

The HRC-Goldman Sachs-Clinton relationship represents a disturbing turn in LGBT politics toward the interests of the privileged over those of the community’s most vulnerable members. Goldman Sachs and other corporations used LGBT protections like domestic partner benefits to maintain the veneer of benevolence and progressiveness in the hopes that we ignore how their corporate greed has undermined many of our other civil liberties.

When I hear Sanders explaining his arguments about issues like overhauling the regulation of our financial institutions, I hear someone who is opening a space for my liberties as an LGBT person. When Sanders criticizes Citizens United and argues against the influence of big donors on the political process, I see someone who is committed to making our representatives more accountable to us. LGBT issues will be better heard and addressed when our voices aren’t drowned out by the Koch Brothers and the Sheldon Adelsons of the world. When Sanders argues for better access to education and free admission to college, I envision a better educated population less prey to the bigotry that often accompanies ignorance.

Sanders’ support for a Gay Pride Day in the 80s is just one small part of an overall philosophy of government attentive to the complicated ways in which different populations are affected by political decisions. It is one thing to voice one’s support of LGBT people, but it is quite another to demonstrate an understanding of how LGBT inequalities are generated by our political system and how they uniquely affect our community, especially when it means criticizing entrenched economic behemoths. It’s the difference between condemning an evil versus studying the roots of what causes that evil to develop. Marriage Inequality did not create homophobia, but rather marriage inequality was a symptom of homophobia caused by a nation living in an unequal system. It is Sanders’ commitment to addressing the economic, political, and social roots of inequality that will most benefit the future of LGBT rights.

Saint Turing: A Few Reflections on Gay Iconography and Martyrdom on the Occasion of Alan Turing’s 100th Birthday

Posted on by Chase Dimock

Saint Turing:

A Few Reflections on Gay Iconography and Martyrdom

on the Occasion of Alan Turing’s 100th Birthday

By Chase Dimock

 

This weekend marks the 100th anniversary of British mathematician Alan Turing’s birth. In celebration of his enormous contributions to the fields of mathematics, computational science, cryptology, and artificial intelligence, the scientific community has dubbed 2012 the “Alan Turing Year”, commemorating the occasion with numerous conferences, museum exhibitions, a series of articles on his life in the Guardian and BBC, a Google doodle, and even a functional model of his famous Turing Machine made of Legos. By his mid 20s Turing developed his theory of the “Universal Machine”, thus ushering in the age of modern computer science. A decade later, Turing devoted his studies in cryptology toward cracking the German naval enigma. By developing machines known as “bombes” that could decrypt the messages the Nazis relayed to their U-boats, Turing’s intelligence gathering re-shaped World War II. Historians have argued that cracking the Nazi code shortened the war by two years and saved millions of lives.

Such accolades coming 58 years after his death evidence not only his importance as a historical figure, but also how his ideas continue to influence contemporary research and debate on computer science in our increasingly digitized society. As the “Father of Artificial Intelligence”, Turing’s 1950 article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” foresaw how rapid advances in information science would produce a future in which the line between human intelligence and artificial intelligence would become blurred. Asking, “can machines think”, Turing postulated that ultimately the true mark of artificial intelligence would be whether or not one could tell the difference between communication with a human versus a machine. Turing’s standards for evaluating artificial intelligence have not only framed the scholarly and ethical debate in the scientific community for the past six decades, but they have also proven to be a prophesy of daily life in the 21st century. Living amongst automated phone banks, internet chatterboxes, GPS navigators, and Apple’s Siri app, everyday life has become a series of Turing tests as we increasingly rely upon forms of artificial intelligence and speak to it as if it were real.

Yet, less emphasis has been placed on the tragedy of his untimely death. In 1952, Turing was arrested and convicted of gross indecency for a consensual sexual relationship with another man, the same 1885 statute under which Oscar Wilde was imprisoned more than half a century earlier. Instead of serving prison time, Turing chose to undergo an experimental hormonal treatment prescribed by the British government. While this chemical castration via a synthetic oestrogen hormone curbed his sex-drive, it had dire side effects. Turing began to grow breasts and developed a deep depression. His conviction also caused him to lose his security clearance, thus barring him from continuing to work with the British intelligence agencies. The man who did as much from inside a laboratory to defeat the Nazis as any general did on the battlefield was now considered a threat to national security solely by virtue of his sexuality. Two years later, on June 8th, 1954, Turing took a few bites from a cyanide-laced apple–an elaborate end designed to let his mother believe that his suicide was actually an accident due to careless storage of laboratory chemicals. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology for Turing’s “appalling” treatment, but a 2011 petition to pardon Turing’s conviction was officially denied by the British Government.

While infinitely more qualified scientific minds have written amazing tributes to Turing’s contributions to computer science and mathematics this year, I am interested in what Turing’s life and legacy mean to gay history and queer thought. I first heard of Alan Turing when I was 14 years old and just starting to reconcile my sexuality with the images and stereotypes of gay men in the media. He was mentioned in Time Magazine’s list of the “100 Persons of the Century” and with just a brief blurb on his life and death my concept of what a gay man could achieve and contribute to the world was forever changed. I came of age in an era of unprecedented gay visibility, but the Elton John and “Will and Grace” imagery of an ostentatious, campy gay world did not seem to fit my shy, nerdy bookishness. Although I never excelled in math and science, Turing became one of my first gay heroes because he proved to me that a gay man—a nerdy man, can change the world through the power of his intellect, invent the future, defeat the Nazis, and stand up for his rights.

This brings me to the first of my appeals for Turing’s importance to the modern gay rights movement: Gay nerds deserve a gay icon. In this month of June, the month of LGBT pride, I am reminded of our community’s production of iconography. From Mae West to Lady Gaga, we have been inspired by strong, sexually transgressive women that challenge gender roles and have supported their gay followers. Entertainers have Freddie Mercury, Ian McKellen, and a new generation of young talent like Neil Patrick Harris to look up to. Literary gays like me have Oscar Wilde. Gus Van Sant’s film Milk sold Hollywood on the idea that Harvey Milk was the gay Martin Luther King Jr. and Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign has launched him as the digital gay guidance counselor for queer teenagers. Yet, no place in the world of gay iconography has been carved for Alan Turing.

As I stood two weeks ago and watched a heavily commercialized gay pride parade trumpet reality TV stars, shill major beer companies, and celebrate banks that crashed our economy, I realized that the notion of gay pride has become more about celebrating the materialism of the present than honoring the past and galvanizing the community toward the cause of social justice for all individuals. This is not to say that we should cut down on the frivolity, merriment, and general debauchery of Pride. One of the most important liberties that the LGBT movement has helped to realize is an expanded right of the individual over the use of his or her own body, including pleasure and bodily expression. Rather, I am arguing for the de-commodification of pleasure (i.e.: using sex to sell) and the integration of the intellectual into sexual. If knowledge is power, and power is sexy, then we must renew our focus on how sexuality informs the genius of an individual like Turing. What made Turing gay and what made Turing a brilliant scientist were not exclusive or accidental traits; they informed and nurtured one another. It is not an accident that the defining essay on artificial intelligence was written by a man who inhabited a human mind that some psychologists and biologists would have deemed degenerate or corrupted by human vice. Rather, it is outsider status—the ability to demystify the “normal” as a gay man, as a nerdy man, that fortified Turing’s genius.

For the balance of this essay I have four arguments for the importance of Turing as a gay icon. The first two are from his biography, what we can learn historically from his persecution as a gay man, and the second two are ways in which his philosophy of determining artificial intelligence have prophesized issues of gender and sexuality in the 21st century. In short, Alan Turing is part martyr, part theorist and an inspiration beyond the sum of those parts.

Turing’s Hormonal Treatment and Sexual Orientation

As mentioned earlier, Turing opted to take hormonal injections as a treatment for his homosexuality in order to avoid a prison sentence. Although the injections curtailed his sex-drive because they amounted to a chemical castration, they did nothing to treat the real root of his homosexuality. The rationale behind the injections conflates homosexual acts with homosexual identity, assuming that annihilating the libidinal desire for sex somehow freed the individual of the effects of homosexuality. In the 1950s, the concept of a sexual orientation independent of all other behaviors was still yet to become universal knowledge. Previously, homosexuality was widely considered a gender disorder. Gender identity was so tied to desire for the opposite sex that it was naturally assumed that a man who would desire another man would have to somehow be a woman on the inside. Homosexuals were often called “inverts”, individuals with the body of a man, but the soul of a woman. Turing, was by most accounts, not particularly feminine and thus he was not legibly homosexual according to the standards of his era. His guilty plea to gross indecency came as a surprise to many because he did not fit the accepted profile of the homosexual.

What we understand today is that a homosexual orientation is more than just an act or an urge. While we know that there is a biological component that predestines most to a proclivity toward attraction to the same sex, gay identity also includes one’s individual history. Same sex desire may be in-born, but the way in which that desire is channeled, what types of men, what kinds of acts, how one thinks of one’s self in relation to other men, and all of the infinite characteristics of our sexuality are products of attachments and affects that we develop over the course of our lives. While the injections may have curbed Turing’s interest in a sexual act, they did nothing to reverse his attachment to men as figures of desire that informed his sense of self and world around him. Turing’s case is a reminder of both the resilience and malleability of sexual orientation and the dehumanization that ensues when we reduce the human mind to a mere organ running on hormones.

Cold War Paranoia and the Problems of Queer Citizenship

Due to his conviction, Turing was stripped of his security clearance and thus he was barred from his work on cryptography with the British intelligence agencies with which he collaborated during World War Two. This revocation of his clearance was not due to having a criminal record, but instead because of fear that his homosexual identity would make him easily corruptible. It is important to remember that Turing’s conviction happened at the dawn of the Cold War. The British government worried that Soviet spies could easily blackmail government agents with shady personal lives. This fear was not unfounded, at least not as a fact. Turing’s conviction came on the heels of the discovery of Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean (both gay) as spies for the KGB. This paranoia was echoed in America with the Red Scare ushered in by the McCarthy hearings and the House Committee on Un-American Activities that sought to root out communists from government positions, the media, and Hollywood. The Red Scare was paralleled by what David K. Johnson terms “The Lavender Scare”, characterized by a series of purges of homosexuals from government offices and renewed enforcement of sodomy laws. Johnson writes:

In popular discourse, communists and homosexuals were often conflated. Both groups were perceived as hidden subcultures with their own meeting places, literature, cultural codes, and bonds of loyalty. Both groups were thought to recruit to their ranks the psychologically weak or disturbed. And both groups were considered immoral and godless. Many people believed that the two groups were working together to undermine the government.

During the Cold War, to be homosexual was not just contrary to social standards or vice laws, but many considered it treason. The homosexual’s morality and physiology had always been in question and now his very citizenship was questioned as well.

Turing’s descent from war hero to potential traitor in less than a decade solely on the basis of his sexual identity dramatically illustrates how deeply society had come to see sexual practices as constitutive of one’s essential identity. Homosexuality signified the complete break from any moral fortitude, leaving the individual not only susceptible to, but also craving of corruption and destruction of all forms, including treason. Turing’s treatment during the Cold War also sheds light on why the modern gay rights movement that developed 15 years after his death was perceived as so radical. If the homosexual’s allegiance to his own nation was in doubt, then seeing gay men exercise their civil liberties as a citizen seemed to be a radical departure from the accepted image of the homosexual. Harvey Milk’s “radical” gay activism, which consisted of public gatherings and running for elected office appeared radical because he was using classic, democratic measures protected by the constitution in order to campaign for civil rights. Turing’s story reminds us that not long ago, the question was not if homosexuals should be granted equal rights to marriage, adoptions, etc., but whether or not they could even be considered loyal citizens.

Gender, Closeting, and Online Communication

In an article from 2010, I used the Turing Test as a way to make sense of a job I once had posing as a female sales agent on an online retail store. What I found fascinating was how when customers typed their questions to me, they conducted their own Turing test to determine if I was real or just a computer program. The fact

that my chats were accompanied by the image of a blonde woman named Jessica attempted to use gender to not only assure them of my humanity, but to use femininity to “soften” internet retail. In reality, “Jessica” was a real person, a marketing ploy, and a computer program all rolled into one. What Turing’s essay on artificial intelligence made me realize is that the difficulty of telling the difference between man and machine resides in the fact that so much of our human responses are practically mechanical—rehashed clichés, talking points, and stereotypes that we employ to make our ideal self legible to and validated by others. Humans try just as hard as machines and in equally artificial ways to prove our humanity. “Jessica” ultimately signifies the co-operation of human and machine to prove “human” to others so as to seem trustworthy and to ease the consumer on the other end into purchasing a product.

Turing’s inspiration for his determination of artificial intelligence was based on a parlor game called “The Imitation Game” in which individuals guess the gender of a hidden individual based on responses to questions. Turing defines it by the following:

“It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator(C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either ‘X is A and Y is B’ or ‘X is B and Y is A. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

“My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.”

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as “I am the woman, don’t listen to him!” to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make  similar remarks”.

Turing’s model relies upon the subject of speculation being closeted. This closet, which can be seen by the interrogator, presupposes the content of either a female body, a male body, or in the case of the AI test, a machine or computer of some sort. The ability to detect the contents of the closet depends on the player’s ability to visualize a presence, knowing that something must be there to send the notes. Even when the machine is nothing but a box that can produce a tickertape, we project our sense of agency upon it. Because the mind works with sound images and visual signifiers, we cannot possibly imagine pure information without a visualization of authorship or some origin of the words. Therefore, we must attribute some sense of our selves via personification onto the product that produces the information in order to understand it

With the goal of the game as to fool as many people as possible, gender performativity becomes the ultimate modus operandi for victory. Without the context of voice or handwriting due to a neutral individual or teleprinter reading the responses, the only way to prove gender results from the content and phrasing of the information given. Per Turing’s example, if a woman were to have short hair, it would be in her best interest to lie and talk of long hair if she believes that the audience would expect a woman to have long hair. Therefore, the actual woman may not be bodily woman enough to correspond the signifier of woman formulated in the mind of the interrogator and must perform to what the interrogator pictures as a woman so as to prove her own authenticity

Just as artificial intelligence uses repeated programmed responses contoured around the expectations of the user to appear natural, so too does a woman’s gender appear natural as it countlessly repeats the same gestures and affects that we have come to associate with authentic femininity. The more a gesture is repeated, the more natural it feels until that gesture becomes ingrained in the unconscious as instinctual when it is in fact learned behavior. Thus, gender performance is both an unconscious involuntary process and a tactical employment of signifying acts of masquerade

As a final point, what I find additionally fascinating about the Turing test and the gender imitation game that inspired it is how closely it resembles the forms of online communication that we use to meet others on social networking sites. This is especially true for gay men because we increasingly use gay-targeted sites to meet other gays due to the stigma of meeting in public. Just as the gender imitation game occurs in a closet, so too do chats on a gay social networking site happen in a digital closet. We must make our ideal ego (or at least what we think the other man may want) legible and attractive via online communication. We can send textual descriptions, pictures, and even live chat via Skype, but the interaction we have is always managed to present the self in the most flattering light possible and supported by various forms of (soft) artificial intelligence such as the computer programs that broadcast us and the digital manipulation of photos. The person in Turing’s gender imitation game must prove he is male. In the online game of cyber courtship, we must prove through technology that we are a specific type of male that the other would want.

Turing’s Onion Model and the Queer Mind

One of Turing’s most startling, yet overlooked arguments in the aforementioned article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” is his questioning of how we define human intelligence and the human mind in opposition to artificial intelligence:

In considering the functions of the mind or the brain we find certain operations that we can explain in purely mechanical terms. This we say does not correspond to the real mind: it is a sort of skin that we must strip off if we are to find the real mind. But then in what remains we find a further skin to be stripped off, and so on. Proceeding in this way do we ever come to the “real” mind, or do we eventually come to the skin which has nothing in it? In the latter case the whole mind is mechanical.

Here, Turing creates a distinction between the anatomy of the brain and its compartmentalized functions and what we may call the “mind” as the psychology of the individual composed of thoughts, emotions, memories, etc. The mechanical functions of the brain resemble the capacities of information storage and the mechanical operations of a machine like a computer. Just like how we know which parts of the brain control certain motor functions, so to do we know the role of each part of a machine and where information is stored on it. Yet “the mind”, which we presume a machine not to have, is not merely the sum of these motor functions and stored information in the brain. The mind is metaphysical; it is a social construction, a product of individual consciousness, and a subjective experience. The mind is an onion because it has no true core; just mutually informing layers of consciousness.

What I am arguing here is that Turing justifies his subjective model of determining artificial intelligence by reminding us that the “mind” that we all have that separates us from the artificial is itself a mysterious, socially constructed concept. The brain is naturally organic, but the mind is as artificial as the language, ideology, and various embodied states of subjective consciousness that we use to understand it and inhabit it. In this process, Turing “queers” the mind. Turing reminds us that there is no such thing as a normal or stable mind that we can access or locate if we just peel away the layers of subjectivity. Instead, this subjectivity defines the mind itself and defines our humanity.

For a gay individual, the demystification of a “normal” or a “real” mind is the key toward dismantling the notion that heterosexuality is the natural state of human sexuality and that homosexuality is an unnatural degeneration. As a function of the mind, homosexuality is as much of an invention of the cultural as heterosexuality (both words that did not exist prior to 1869) and thus both are “artificial” or “unnatural” because they are categories we fabricated to describe and categorize human psychology. To call one man’s mind natural and the other unnatural is to attempt to take human constructions and concepts and somehow force the rules of nature to comply with ideology. In featuring subjective judgment as the determining factor between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, Turing opens the door for an argument that all forms of intelligence and all faculties of the human mind including sexuality are products of subjective reasoning and individual consciousness.

“From the Same Source as Her Power: A Threnody for Adrienne Rich” By Chase Dimock

Posted on by Chase Dimock

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How do we account for and preserve a writer’s power after she dies? At the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, any researcher who wants to access the lab books and notes of the legendary scientist Marie Curie must first sign a waiver acknowledging the danger of leafing through her papers. Over a hundred years after Curie’s discovery of radium and polonium, her lab book is still radioactive enough to set off a Geiger counter. Perhaps this is why when I heard of Adrienne Rich’s passing last month, I immediately thought of her 1974 poem “Power” about Marie Curie. Just as Curie’s words literally radiate from her pages with the physical properties of the power that she discovered, so too does Rich’s six decades of poetry continue to empower the reader with her social critique and introspection.

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The Poetical is the Political

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In the past few weeks, several obituaries and memorials have been written to commemorate the life of Adrienne Rich after she passed away from rheumatoid arthritis at age 82. In every remembrance, Rich’s status as a “feminist poet” comes to the forefront and in the process of assembling a biography, the age-old rift between politics and poetics, art for art’s sake versus art for raising social consciousness, is still being waged over Rich’s death. Most of Rich’s critics and detractors over the course of her career dismissed her work as overly polemical, accusing her of sacrificing poetics for politics, as if these are somehow mutually exclusive entities. As Rich herself once said, “One man said my politics trivialized my poetry…. I don’t think politics is trivial — it’s not trivial for me. And what is this thing called literature? It’s writing. It’s writing by all kinds of people. Including me.” For Rich and other feminists who came of age under the belief that “the personal is the political”, it was impossible for the deep introspection of poetry to not find the political oppression of gender and sexual non-conformists as inextricably determinative of one’s psyche and soul.  Rather, Rich would contend that to believe poetry could be written outside of the political is to naturalize one’s worldview and political privilege. Being “apolitical” is the privilege of those who have power.

The poetical is the political, but according to Rich, the poetical needed protection from the political. In 1997, Rich refused the National Medal for the Arts as a protest against the House of Representatives’ vote to end the National Endowment for the Arts. She argued that ”the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration,” adding that art ”means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner-table of power which holds it hostage.” While Rich believed in poetry’s ability to illuminate the political, she was unwilling to allow politics to use her poetry as a token gesture to feign interest in women’s issues while camouflaging the growing disparity of power in the nation and the fact that, as Rich put it, “democracy in this country has been in decline”.

Rich did write political essays as well, including the seminal “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience” in 1980, which predicted the anti-normative analysis of queer theory that would be pioneered by Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick a decade later. Her essay identified the power of heterosexuality in our culture to define and naturalize standards for acceptable social and sexual practices and to marginalize and pathologize those who did not comply. She contended that this power not only harmed lesbians, but all women because it reinforced a sex-segregated delegation of social obligations that denigrated the power of women to pursue their own desires. Rich declared that all women should think of themselves as part of a “lesbian continuum”, which valorizes all same-sex bonds from the platonic to the erotic in order to create new practices and knowledges outside the constraints of patriarchy. It is in this respect that I understand Adrienne Rich’s power to be more than being a poet: she was a theorist on the very nature of power itself, scribing in verse and lyric what Michel Foucault wrote in volumes of philosophy.

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Excavating Power

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When Adrienne Rich wrote her landmark poem “Power” in 1974, the concept of Women’s History, the study of women’s historically marginalized contributions to society and the experience of women living under patriarchy, was still taking form during the second wave of feminism. “Power” performs much of the work that the study of Women’s History has done in the past four decades. Rich does not just call attention to Marie Curie’s contributions to science, but she also examines the social context of her work in the male-dominated world of scientific inquiry at the turn of the century and how her status as a woman and her research on radioactivity created a mutually informing, and ultimately fatal relationship. Her research on radioactivity granted Curie the worldwide fame and prestige in the academy that few women had ever enjoyed; yet as radioactivity empowered her social being, it weakened her physical being as it ate away at her body and slowly consumed her. Writing in the great rising of feminist consciousness, Rich updates Christopher Marlowe’s famous maxim “quod me nutrit me destruit” (that which nourishes me destroys me) for a generation of women challenging patriarchy’s Faustian pact that offers material comfort at the cost of social agency.

Rich frames her poem as an excavation of that which is “Living in the earth-deposits of our history”. This sets us up for a reconciliation of two aspects of history, its socially constructed aspect built on master narratives and received knowledges and its material aspect composed of the actual artifacts left behind and the impact it had in shaping the present . Both aspects mutually inform each other to create a palimpsest of discourse and knowledges, both conceptual and as material as the very ground in which we bury the past and build the future upon. The privilege of excavating this past and to reconcile it with present cultural narratives and mythologies is the power to create knowledge and truth.

In the first full stanza, Rich burrows into a material engagement with the historical palimpsest: “Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth/ one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old/ cure for fever or melancholy a tonic/ for living on this earth in the winters of this climate”. This bottle found in the ground would seem neutral enough just as a mere object, yet when placed in its historical context, it becomes a clue toward illuminating the lived-experience of women a century in the past. As Christopher T. Hamilton writes:

“the bottle of tonic is likely a symbolic reference to quackery, an indirect analogy to charlatans who looked for opportunities to exploit others for financial gain, and ultimately for power…A common feature in many towns in the 1870s was a type of male “doctor” who preyed on the sick, capitalizing on their vulnerabilities to make a quick reputation and a quick dollar before moving on to extort more money in other towns and cities.”

I also add that the 19th century was a time of renewed interest in the physiology and psychology of women and that a tonic that could cure melancholy may also be a reference to hysteria, a now discredited feminine psychological disorder or catchall diagnosis that lumped together depression, anxiety, and other nervous constitutions as one overall condition that stemmed from the perceived inferiority of the woman’s body. These symptoms of depression that very well could have resulted from unhappiness under patriarchal control were treated as a disease with tonics, dietary restrictions, and even electrical vibrators by doctors who believed women’s unhappiness was the result of sexual dysfunction. In short, the rise of interest in women’s health in the 19th century was guided by the patriarchal bias of feminine inferiority that attempted to naturalize the subjugation of women through pathologizing their anatomy. For Rich, it is not enough to just preserve artifacts of the past; we must also preserve the social context of the artifact in order to become literate readers of history as determinative of the present.

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The Toxic Remnants of Power Exercised on the Body of the Earth

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Before I move to Rich’s address of Marie Curie in the next stanza, I want to draw a parallel between the perfectly preserved amber bottle of tonic and the still present radiation in Curie’s lab books. Last weekend, I had the privilege to hear an excellent talk by Phillip Dickinson of the University of Toronto at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference on Michael Madsen’s documentary “Into Eternity” about the Onkalo nuclear waste facility in Finland. The film documents the construction of a deep geological repository for nuclear waste, which will seal drums of radioactive material 2,000 feet into solid bedrock “into eternity” and take until next century to fill. The repository will not be safe for human entry for another 10,000 years, and accordingly, the film raises questions about how we will warn generations thousands of years into the future about the radioactive danger we have buried for them, given the fact that no human structure has ever existed for that long and that human civilization could be radically different from our present state, just like it was at the dawn of recorded history 5,000 years ago. How do we both bury and warn the future about the damage our generation has done when we ourselves can barely understand the social conditions of history from only 100 years ago, let alone thousands of years ago? How do we preserve our present social context for future generations when we seem so inclined toward always burying and concealing the unpleasant aftermath, the toxic spillover of our civilization?

I believe that Rich’s poem is addressing a similar issue in trying to investigate and preserve the social context of found artifacts and historical discourse for women. Just as we may fear that generations thousands of years from now may find Onkalo, the refuse of our ability to produce power, and think it may be a historical treasure akin to our “discovery” of the tomb of King Tut, so too does Rich reiterate that the bottle is not some benign novelty, but evidence of the damage that the power of a generation had inflicted on the bodies and minds from a century ago. Unlike the nuclear waste, the contents of the bottle were chemically benign, but the social politics built around it were oppressive and, like a radioactive fall-out, we have yet to experience the half-life of the damage that it has wrought on the future.

In this context, the radioactive properties of Marie Curie’s lab book become sadly ironic. Shifting from the amber bottle to the biography of Marie Curie, Rich’s poem at first gives us the illusion of a stark contrast between a scene of women’s oppression at the hands of science and a scene of a woman empowered by science whose work would revolutionize the practice of medicine. Yet, as she further investigates Curie, we see that even in the hands of a genius, power (both in the social sense and in the scientific sense of the term) is a complicated relationship between forces without any possible mastery. Rich writes: She must have known she suffered from radiation sickness/her body bombarded for years by the element/ she had purified/ It seems she denied to the end/ the source of the cataracts on her eyes/ the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends/ till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil”.

Curie’s discovery challenged the 19th century law of the conservation of energy, and her resulting fame challenged the laws of the land that subjugated women. Curie discovered power in its very material essence–the power that would be refined into running the engine of 20th century civilization through its nuclear power plants and fight its conflicts when dropped from the heavens to annihilate entire populations.

This intellectual power to discover physical power made her a woman of nearly unparalleled fame and power, yet as Foucault reminds us in philosophy and Rich reminds us in poetics, power is not something one can possess, but it is instead a relationship between entities that determines knowledge, discourse, and constitutes our identities and social realities. We can direct and influence power, but we cannot control it. Curie discovered the effects of radioactivity and helped to channel its use toward productive means, but she herself could not control it or keep it from infecting her. For Rich, these relationships of power are inherent in patriarchy. Patriarchy builds civilization, but its cost has been the subjugation of billions of gender, racial, class, and sexual minorities, generation after generation. Civilization has harnessed the generative powers of radioactivity for medicine and for energy production, but it comes at the cost of nuclear waste that will outlive us and scar the planet for thousands of years.

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Denying our Wounds

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Ultimately, we, like Curie at the end of the poem are left denying our wounds, denying our wounds came from the same source as our power. We bear the scars of civilization’s oppressive foundation, but we powder over them with talk of democracy, humanitarianism, and spirituality—preferring to dwell on the powers it has given us instead of those that have been taken away. Yet, I do not believe that Adrienne Rich set out to make Marie Curie a tragic or pathetic figure. Rather, she makes it clear she believes that Curie, “must have known she suffered from radiation sickness”, meaning that she was fully aware that the source of her power was killing her, but that she decided to pursue her research regardless.

Writing from after the advent of queer theory, which owes much to Rich’s work, I have to think that Curie becomes “queered” toward the end of the poem. Her orientation toward futurity and self-preservation inherent to normative heterosexuality becomes deferred in favor of the pursuit of knowledge and a devotion to her research that will ultimately kill her. She chooses a truncated, but brilliant and fulfilling existence, to channel and exercise a power that she understands will cripple her. According to Rich, this is not just the fate of Curie, but of all women rising up during the second wave of feminism in the 60s and 70s who understood that the same institutions of empowerment guaranteed to them by liberal democracy to articulate themselves and redress their grievances will also be used against them by state authorities to silence and intimidate them. Rich saw in the 60s that freedom of speech and public assembly would greeted by the state with riot gear, fire hoses, and police dogs.

Yet, Rich knew that these wounds came from the same source as one’s power and by speaking back to these institutions, like the state and patriarchy that grant us freedoms on paper but endeavor to restrain us in practice, Rich articulated the inner-workings of power and revealed that power relations exercised by social institutions work because they operate from within. We internalize them, shape ourselves by their imperatives, then deny the violence that they wreak inside us. Rich’s greatest revelation is this denial—and that this act of denying is in of itself an exercise of power.

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About the Author: Chase Dimock is the Managing Editor of As It Ought To Be Magazine. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois and his scholarship has appeared in College Literature, Western American Literature, and numerous edited anthologies. His works of literary criticism have appeared in Mayday Magazine, The Lambda Literary Review, Modern American Poetry, and Dissertation Reviews. His poetry has appeared in Waccamaw, Saw Palm, Hot Metal Bridge, The San Pedro River Review, and Trailer Park Quarterly. For more of his work, check out ChaseDimock.com.

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More By Chase Dimock:

“In the Mental Architecture of the Deceased”

“Removed from Society: The Prison System and the Geography of Nowhere”

“Growing Up on the Island of Misfit Toys”

“Different From the Others: LGBT History Month and the Almost Century-Old Legacy of an Early Gay Rights Film”

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All images in the public domain

Robert McAlmon’s Psychoanalyzed Girl and the Popularization of Psychoanalysis in America

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

Robert McAlmon’s “Psychoanalyzed Girl”

and the Popularization of Psychoanalysis in America

by Chase Dimock

Last fall, I wrote an article for this journal that argued for renewed interest in the life and works of American expatriate author Robert McAlmon. As a writer, publisher, and connoisseur of the Parisian nightlife and artistic community, McAlmon was at the center of most of the lives and works of the now romanticized era of the Lost Generation in Paris. Yet, for those of you who (like I) enjoyed Woody Allen’s nostalgic ode to these artists in Midnight in Paris, you will notice that McAlmon does not make an appearance in the film. While Woody Allen’s vision of the expatriate community gilds the bars and bistros of Montparnasse as a golden age, McAlmon’s own contemporaneous literary renditions of the era are pessimistic, dark, and cynical. For McAlmon, the Lost Generation was truly lost–morally, psychologically, philosophically, sexually lost artists who managed to brilliantly wring out their despair onto canvases and into novels between bouts of boozing, fighting, and crying.

Early in his period of expatriation, McAlmon wrote “The Psychoanalyzed Girl” as one of several collected vignettes on the characters he met on the streets of Montparnasse.  The story below comes from McAlmon’s first book of fiction, A Hasty Bunch. James Joyce himself suggested the title to McAlmon, commenting on the speed with which he wrote the stories and their roughness. By reading just a few sentences of the story, it is apparent that Joyce’s judgment is well justified. “The Psychoanalyzed Girl” should be considered part of McAlmon’s juvenilia as its awkward phrasings search for the more polished voice of ironic detachment and sardonic wit that would come with his later, more mature work.

Nonetheless what I find fascinating about this piece is its place as a cultural artifact of the influence of psychoanalysis on the Lost Generation of American writers. McAlmon’s opinion in this story is none too favorable. He satirizes the hyperawareness and self-centeredness that psychoanalytic therapy causes in his friend Dania, depicting her as perpetually self-analyzing and becoming progressively more alienated from her own reality as she obsesses over self-knowledge at the expense of self-experience.

Written in 1922, McAlmon’s short story testifies to the sudden rise in popularity of psychoanalysis in America in the 20’s. Freud made his first visit to America along with Carl Jung and others in 1909 and gave a series of five lectures at Clark University to both academic and lay audiences. The fact that psychoanalysis would become widely adopted in America in just over a decade after his visit wildly exceeded what Freud and his contemporaries thought was possible. As Sanford Gifford writes:

“Freud had an abiding distaste for America and a mistrust of Americans. He attributed this, half whimsically, to the effect of American food on his digestion. But his real fears were based on the American propensity for popularization, for  the dilution of analysis with the base metal of psychotherapy and for American opposition to lay analysis.” (631)

Furthermore, Freud initially doubted that psychoanalysis would catch on in America due to its lingering history of Puritanism. In January of 1909, Freud wrote to Jung in a letter “I also think that once [the Americans] discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us. Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great.” (as cited by Benjamin 124)

What Freud could not have predicted back in 1909 was the great cultural shift that would take place in America shortly after World War One that would produce the Jazz Age and the Lost Generation of the 20s. Nathan Hale explains:

“In America, rebellious intellectuals supplied an important sustaining agent in the spread of psychoanalysis—an enthusiastic clientele. The writers in the group were the first to publicize psychoanalysis…the Great War provoked a disillusioned turn to their rebellion against traditional American culture…[they] launched attacks on the entrenched American faith in morality and the superiority of Anglo-Saxon race and culture… [and emphasized] the importance of the sexual instinct and the  evils of repression” (Hale as quoted by Benjamin 124).

In the wake of a devastating war that killed millions, the young artists and intellectuals of the 20s questioned the traditional values of nationalism, capitalism, and religion that led to such bloodshed. Psychoanalysis’ anti-moralistic penetration into the repressed regions of the human psyche proved to be a valuable method for understanding the en masse brutality of WWI and imagining alternative social and political structures. Cultural revolution could come from a revolution of the self.

Yet, while some thinkers and writers explored Freud’s theories for the sake of these more noble pursuits, for the majority of Americans, Freud’s scandalous discovery of the sexual libido as the root of all human endeavors was met with a sensationalism that overshadowed the intricacies of his method. Not only did Freud’s fear of American popularization come true by the mid-20s, but he himself became a part of the American popular culture as well. Daniel Akst writes:

“During the 1924 murder trial of Leopold and Loeb, Chicago Tribune publisher Col. Robert McCormack cabled Freud with an offer of $25,000 or, as he put it in telegraphese, “anything he name,” to come to Chicago and psychoanalyze the killers. Later that year the movie producer Samuel Goldwyn (who called Freud “the greatest love specialist in the world”) offered him $100,000 to write for the screen or work as a consultant in Hollywood.”

Freud rapidly became known as the guru of all things sexual at a time when American popular culture was entering an age of sexual liberation. These attempts to commodify psychoanalysis for popular entertainment only served to reinforce Freud’s conviction that America was savagely materialistic and that its people sublimated their libido through money.

Beyond the fascination with the scandalous, psychoanalysis also gained popularity because its individualizing attention catered to the focus on the self that the rebels of the Jazz Age wished to cultivate. This revolution of the self with an infinitely explorable unconscious gave the individual’s naturally narcissistic sense of self-involvement a wholly new dimension of self to devote attention to that could be justified as the noble pursuit of mental health. There was now more self to fixate upon with varying degrees of fascinated self-love or loathing. McAlmon’s story mocks the results of the American popularization of psychoanalysis with Dania’s claim that she has “the mother, and brother complex.” This phrasing suggests the dilution of the psychoanalytic method that Freud feared where structural analysis of the psyche is replaced with the unqualified diagnosis of a few “complexes” that sound clinical, but ultimately mean nothing.

The young McAlmon recognizes the roots of pop-psychology, in which psychoanalysis would be progressively reduced to a few simple, memorable phrases for one’s own self-diagnosis and self-fascination. This was the “selling” of psychoanalysis in America via the reification of method and analysis into portable vocabulary. Under the belief that constant self-analysis is helping her to know herself intimately, Dania is instead presented as becoming more estranged from herself. Replying to Dania’s complaint that she cannot compel herself to pursue a handsome man that she sees everyday, the narrator states,  “Why stand on the threshold of ‘experience’ eternally saying that you don’t live, but merely exist? You must set Rome afire if you’re going to sit watching the flames with enjoyment.” McAlmon calls attention to how constant self-analysis creates a substitute for one’s own existence. Instead of the risk of participating in her own life, she settles for the pleasure of commenting on herself from a distance. Pop-psychology satisfies the basic human will to knowledge, in which the satisfaction of having neatly identified and labeled our “complexes” is confused for the real benefit of actually working through them. She “enjoys her unhappiness”. McAlmon’s psychoanalyzed girl is the alienated subject of modernity who fetishizes her estrangement from her own existence at the expense of her ability to act upon it. Whether or not he knew it, McAlmon’s story in truth satirizes Freud’s nightmare of popularization and not the true psychoanalytic method itself.

 

The Psychoanalyzed Girl

By Robert McAlmon

 

Dania wasn’t in the room five minutes before she was telling whoever it was that sat near her that, “I am all tangled up psychologically. I have the mother, and brother complex.”

She was a strange girl, Dania, that is to a person not used to strange girls, and people who live in “Bohemian Quarters”. In Paris she could be seen walking about the Montparnasse district with a Paisley shawl thrown over her shoulders, a many-colored beribboned hat, mauve stockings, or pale green—some exotic colour always—and the skirt that showed beneath her coat made of Paisley shawl was generally a corded silk one with red, white, and green, broad and thread, stripes.

Needless to say people noticed her as she went by. They might have noticed her anyway, had she dressed quietly, because her eyes were soft brow, shaded with impossibly long eyelashes; her skin was bronze olive, and days when it might look sallow, Dania knew just how much rouge to put on to give her cheeks a warm glowing appearance. Very narrow shoulders she had drawn up within herself usually. She contradicted her own manner, giving alternately a quiet, mouselike impression, a hard embitteredly sophisticated one, and again an impression of confused, wounded naive childishness.

“I don’t know how to be happy, that’s me; don’t know how to have a good time, and when all these Americans here want me to go around I can’t find any pleasure in the noisy things they do”, she said, one day as I walked down the Boulevard Raspail with her. “There! That’s me. Analyzing myself again. Why can’t I leave myself alone?”

“You are suffering from life rather than from sickness, Dania”, I commented. “Don’t look so hard for happiness, and stay away from the Bohemians at the Rotonde who are neither labourers, artists, nor intelligent—only moping incompetents, scavengers of the art world.”

One day Dania hailed me from across the street, so we joined each other and when walking down the street together. It wasn’t till afterwards that I remembered how artfully Dania managed to stop and ask a direction of a young Frenchman, who was a helper about a piano van-wagon.

After talking about where a certain street was for five minutes, very conscious that his eyes were admiring her with open curiosity and desire in them, she came on saying: “Ain’t he the handsome devil though.”

“There you are, Dania; you say you want experience. He’ll take you on. Look back. His eyes are following you yet.”

The young Frenchman was a swarthy, black-eyed being; with lithe energy. He was wearing a red shirt, and had a red scarf bound about his waist making a corsage for him. Except for Dania, he’d simply have been part of the local colour of the quarter for me. Now I wondered whether he was from the South of France, or of Spanish or Italian descent. There’d been boldness, respect too, in his attitude towards Dania. He must have been Paris bred not to have had some shyness in him.

Another day I ran into Dania, and we passed the young Frenchman again, loading furniture into a van. He looked at Dania, and an expectant look came into his eyes. Dania was returning his glance from under her long eyelashes, and flickered a tiny smile at him, whereupon his entire set of straight teeth showed in a smile.

“He always smiles at me now”, Dania said.

“You pass him often do you?”

“O yes, I usually manage to come down this street at about the same time everyday, when he’s coming in on the van to the storage house to put up the truck…Isn’t it ridiculous though. He catches my fancy, but of course I couldn’t.”

“Rats, Dania, take a chance. Start something with him, if he doesn’t with you; and he will if you’ll bat your eye the right way. Why stand on the threshold of ‘experience’ eternally saying that you don’t live, but merely exist. You must set Rome afire if you’re going to sit watching the flames with enjoyment.”

It was useless for me to remark however. The last time I saw Dania, two months after that day, she said, “I’ll have to go back to New York and get psychoanalyzed. I must find out why I can’t have average emotions, and enjoy life just a little bit.”

“Tut, tut, woman. Some of them there will be telling you again that you’re setting out to hurt yourself because of perverse instinct in you when you slip on a wet floor because of new shoes.”

If one could be sure that Dania enjoyed her unhappiness as the only thing she dared permit to give importance to her egotism…But there she is—in Paris—Dania.

 

Image: Freud (far left seated) and Jung (far right, seated) at Clark University in 1909

Robert McAlmon: A Lost Voice of the Lost Generation

Posted on by Chase Dimock

Robert McAlmon: A Lost Voice of the Lost Generation

By Chase Dimock

A writer, publisher, and a connoisseur of the Parisian nightlife, Robert McAlmon was a fixture of the Lost Generation’s expatriate community in Paris in the 20s and 30s. McAlmon took Hemingway out to the bullfights in Spain that he would immortalize in The Sun Also Rises. He typed proofs of James Joyce’s monumental novel Ulysses, and due to the convoluted system of notes and addendums in Joyce’s manuscript, the voice of Molly Bloom that the first generation of readers received was actually McAlmon’s interpretation of Joyce’s. Through his publishing company Contact Editions, he was the first to publish works by such luminaries of the modernist movement as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Nathanael West. Yet, his own reputation as a writer never reached the heights of those that he helped.

In past couple of decades, a few scholars have begun to rediscover McAlmon’s work and wrest it from the dusty margins of the archives. Three of his works of fiction (Village, Post-Adolescence, and Miss Knight) were republished in 1991 for the first time since the 20s and accompanied with a forward by Gore Vidal. McAlmon grew up with Vidal’s father in the Midwest and subtly hinted in the semi-autobiographical Village that he had an adolescent attraction to him. McAlmon’s memoir Being Geniuses Together and the newly rediscovered novel The Nightinghouls of Paris provide new insight, caustic commentary, and fresh gossip into the lives of the icons of the expatriate community. McAlmon was an avid gossiper and twice got into fights with Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald for spreading rumors that they were pansies. McAlmon himself was a bisexual and although he never declared this side of his sexuality in his work, he nonetheless had brief flings with writers like John Glassco and Claude McKay among others.

Beyond the gossip, McAlmon’s work provides a rare glimpse into the lives of gay and lesbian writers and artists in the 20s. In The Nightinghouls of Paris, he portrays the relationship between Glassco and Graeme Taylor as the two young Canadian writers struggled to understand their attraction to one another in a culture that had not yet developed the vocabulary we have today for expressing and realizing these queer desires. He also fictionalizes the stormy relationship between Djuna Barnes and Thelma Wood, who was the inspiration for Robin Vote in Nightwood. Wood also makes an appearance as “Steve Rath” along with Marsden Hartley, and Dan Mahoney (the inspiration for Dr. Matthew O’Connor in Nightwood) in McAlmon’s collection of short stories Distinguished Air: Grim Fairy Tales, which chronicles the underground, queer cabaret culture of Berlin in the early twenties. McAlmon’s Berlin stories predate those of Christopher Isherwood by a decade and go much deeper into lurid details about drugs, prostitution, and the sexual dissidence of the expatriates who emigrated there to find a space in which their persecuted desires could flourish.

Below, I have included a few poems from McAlmon’s 1921 collection Explorations. In McAlmon’s first book, we see the young writer experiment with modernist techniques and themes. He revels in innovation, irreverence, and liberation from the stuffy verses and bourgeois sensibilities of the American tradition. In the first poem, McAlmon finds all three themes trumpeted through the chaotic notes of Jazz music. For McAlmon and his contemporaries, the Jazz Age was the post-war generation’s moment to radically reinvent American culture, even if they had to do it from inside the bars and bistros of Montmartre. In “Jazz Opera Americano”, McAlmon turns to stream of consciousness writing to keep pace with the frantic tones and rhythms of jazz music. For modernists like McAlmon, Jazz music was part of a wide-sweeping interest in primitivism—an artistic fascination with reinvigorating the west’s long repressed primal urges by appropriating non-western art to inspire cubism, surrealism, and other non-realist expressions. While well intentioned, this interest in the primitive came at the cost of stereotypical constructions of minority cultures, even though these artists thought they were promoting these cultures and saw their patronage of the Harlem clubs and the racially integrated bars of Paris as a sign of their racial inclusiveness. Though splintery with immaturity, these lines of poetry capture the urgency of the Jazz Age and the Lost Generation’s mantra to “make it new”.

Jazz Opera Americano

Come now, come now.   For Gawd’s sake, shiver your spine.
Syncopate  the  spectrum. French  horn  blast, potato
whistle shriek.

One ancestor was a boar tusked dog wolf who howled mad
bayings at the moon—a lonely wolf—a vicious hound—a
sad brute—but a hell hound for noise :

Show us how you spend the money, spend the money.
God, man, feel my pulse, dear God—I’m a liar—it is
spurting Semitic Blood. Niagara rush in my veins with
Semitic caution. Show me how the money is spent. Magnifi-
cently gorgeously. Highcolors. Peacocks, humming-birds,
pheasants?  Nature, bah!  Spend big money.

In the line was a bull moose who bellowed mating calls
forever and ever, mate or no mate, he still had hungers deep
an impalpability not to be torn from him however he
bellowed—tom tom, a hunter’s horn, with a high yodel and
the rattle of a string of missionary teeth—all in the high
wind shriek and the moon splintered to white and ver-
milion orange dripping, green swirling and a dizzy spectrum
and I fainting but never fainted in a swirling vortex of
colored rhythms, uneven dissonant and tragic—wild, wild,
wild man, why are you shouting wild man?  Dance jazzo,
swirl me—my legs are buoys on an unsteady ocean of sound.

Young, young—hell no, not youth but energy, and what,
sweet blood tattooed Jesus, do we do with energy ?  Strong
rushing red blood—whatt’hell’s to be done with it ?  Desire ?
Growing sophisticated ? . . .  My thoughts will not be sup-
pressed however.  Set that to music, kid.  Reality.  Give
it a shivery tune.  Jewish, Chinese, East Indian.  Shakety
shake, shakety shake—Jazz, Jazz, whirl, wild women,
whirl.

Sucked into sound—thrilled voluptuous—and the waves of
rhythm carry me away, lap sensuous rhythm tongues about
me  soul-body-mind,  push me,  seduce me.  And I am
willing—anxious for the seduction, Jazzo, Jazzo swirled
and swung into the vermilion, the purple, swinging, sway-
ing, bending, tones—not in the feet moving, not in the body
bending, but in the blood leaping to a syncopated rhythm.
High recklessness. What comes after what comes after ?
Be careless. Sensible cautious—damnfoolishness—with a
half pint bottle for six—O yo ho—O yo ho—my ancestors
were savage brute vicious ones—the line’s diluted—
Crack—crackle—lights out—the bulls.

Obsequy

There is inestimable companionship in graveyards
Where the unavailing gestures of impotent hopes
Are sealed in earth overset with rock, and many dead
No longer fret and fume, but rest ;  while the knowledge
Of the life their corpses once have housed
Is breathing on the granite and the marble slabs
When the atmosphere about is conscious, if with vainest grief.

History Professor

“Now, in the interests of scholarships—uh huh—yes—
in the interests of scholarship” he’d lecture, asking for
bibliography, collateral reading, and annotations, which
requests never interfered with students’ thoughts on
Saturday night dances, or Monday night drunk ons.

It’s a shame, kiddo, I’ll tell you it’s a shame that jazzy
people like Alexander, Cleopatra, Hannibal, and Henry
the Eighth should be annotated thus by a male pedagogue
who wears his winter underwear through June, and uses a
Pinkham pill for a laxative twice a week to keep his system
in order.

Burial

Geometry is a perfect religion,
Axiom after axiom :
One proves a way into infinity
And logic makes obeisance at command.

Outside of the triangle, cubes, and polystructures
There is restless pummeling, pounding and taunting.
The end is diffused into channels
Every step into eternity—and steps are endless.

Versailles Guide

He told me historic scandals :
Of how various queen-wives
Died of broken hearts
Because their kings
Had so many mistresses,
That Louis XIV. and that the XV.
He spoke of Le Duc Phillippe
Who painted his cheeks—
Also his eyebrows—
And rode in the streets
Regardful only of men,
Who poisoned his wife
Or in somewise rid himself of her.

If the guide would only be contemporary
With his scandalous information
He would not need to be a guide.

But he had rosy cheeks himself,
And perhaps a romantic nature.