Tremble, creatures! Below you will find a couple short religious notes, and a v. emotional book note.
On the Solemnity of St Joseph I went to what I think is the first Catholic Arts Street Fair at “Old St. Mary’s” in DC. I loved the variety of media on display, from paintings to woven arts to t-shirts to role-playing games. (I loved playing Back Again from the Broken Lands at Doxacon and am looking forward to playing Autumn Triduum.) I should have known that I would not get away without buying something! I will probably update you all with more artists whose work I loved, but for now I will just point you to TwitchUpon, aka my friend Grace, whose beautiful mushroom-themed embroidery will turn up in at least one person’s Christmas stocking this coming year.
I spoke at George Fox University (“Gay and Christian: Is there a place in the church for me?”, my book talk; I could speak where you are!) and had the pleasure of hearing my friend Wesley Hill speak on “The Trouble With Normal and the Order of Love: St Augustine, Queer Theory, and Sexuality Today.”
This was a very fun talk with a new angle on what can seem like a repetitive, depleting discussion of queer sexuality in the churches. I think Wes is still wrestling with how to say the both/and here, both exposing the Fall’s distortion of our loves and discerning the good Creation’s traces gleaming here and there within them. But I take his central argument to be that Augustine and queer theory converge in the recognition that “normalcy” need not be our goal. Poststructuralism (maybe??? I am a simple unfrozen caveman philosophy major) adds the caution that our ideas of “health” and “normalcy” are at least partly shaped by those in power, by the economic and political structures of our society. The God become Man spends a lot of His time casting down the normal and lifting up the queer. He does not seem to concern Himself solely with restoring wholeness, but also with glorifying wounds.
Around this central argument Wes gathered some thought-provoking ideas and questions. These are from my notes, so they reflect my own (mis)interpretations and concerns, but:
# What forms or structures of discipline do we offer gay people, for the education of our desires?
# Sarah Coakley (per Wes) distinguishes asceticism as strongly from “moral condemnation” as from pleasure-seeking. Can the practice of asceticism teach us to witness without judging others?
# Wes uses Alan Jacobs’s work to argue that Augustine’s “suspicion” of sex provokes greater compassion than a more “sex-positive” approach. After all, success divides but shared (in fact, universal) failure unites. Not all of us will get happy marriages or orgasms or what have you, but all of us can recognize in our own lives at least some aspect of sexual sin. (Including, cf. Coakley, the sin of judging others.)
The House That Dripped Blood
All right I’m on Johnson Avenue in San Luis Obispo
and I’m five years old or six maybe
and indications that there’s something wrong with our new house
trip down the wire twice daily
—the Mountain Goats, “Dance Music”
Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a memoir, and for that reason, it can’t be written realistically. For like our ideas of health and normalcy, our standards for literary realism are conditioned by the experiences of the privileged: the white, the straight, the trusted. So Machado depicts her experience of abuse in a lesbian relationship by exposing the silences of the archives, and all the ways her real life fit the genre conventions of folktale and horror.
That’s a funny thing to do, and the short chapters of Dream House are frequently funny: in the description of the “Lovecraftian heating system” of the house where her girlfriend became the kind of woman you write abuse memoirs about; in the constant footnotes marking all the tropes Machado’s story shares with lore and legend (“Magic power lost by breaking taboo”). And it’s not funny: “When it was humid, the front door swelled in its frame and refused to open, like a punched eye.” It’s political, “A house is never apolitical,” a house is defined by who controls its boundaries and determines which of its occupants can belong; the house is the household. (That’s why there are so many haunted houses.) And it’s breathtaking, as one section ends, “...and you would gladly drown that way, giving permission.” It’s an “exercise in style,” of course, but also an interrogation of the reasons for that exercise, as Machado recalls all the fancy explanations she gave for why she fragmented and broke down the stories she wrote during this time, when really she couldn’t focus and felt her own reality breaking down around her, or within her. It’s a rueful critique of the tropes of the genre: diagnosis (what if your doctor tells you to lose weight when your health problems are being caused by 105 extra pounds of girlfriend? And it’s a furious critique of the tropes of the genre: proof, where your word can always be doubted, where “You have no reason to believe me.”
And it’s not written to be impressive, but to serve the readers who need it. It’s written for anyone who might recognize herself (yourself) in its pages.
What does it take to get a drink in this place?
What does it take?
How long must I wait?
—the Postal Service, “This Place Is a Prison”
I haven’t had an abusive or cruel relationship; I won’t pretend I’ve had my back against those knives. But I recognized myself in this book too, and that’s one reason it left me crying on an airplane. Because Machado has one section, “Traumhaus as Lipogram.” A lipogram is a literary work written without a specific letter—usually, as in this case, the useful e. So this chapter is about “saying a story without a critical part”: about the pain of unknowns, unanswering spaces. “Folks say nothing but Why didn’t you go / Why didn’t you run / Why didn’t you say?
“(Also: Why did you stay?)”
And that’s a question I think comes up for most people who experience addiction. Why can’t I just stop? Why does it feel like I am trapped when I can see that the door is wide open?
This book helped me put into words something I have felt. It’s something I think I sense hovering at the edges of narratives of both domestic violence and addiction: the feeling that the fact that you haven’t left yet proves that you won’t, and that you don’t deserve to. Nobody would stay in this place who didn’t like it here. Nobody would stay in this place who didn’t belong.
I love that Machado gives so much space to what happened after the last breakup with the Woman in the Dream House. I do this too, I always linger in the aftermath. I want to romp around in it. Toward the end, the tropes and genres offer freedom instead of constraint (or, freedom through better constraints). There’s a twist ending! And there’s a life beyond the twist ending, too. A life where the folkloric motif is no. 53, “Magic restoration of cut-out tongue.”
icymi
I watched a bunch of movies, mostly ’80s horror, and offered short notes.
Now Playing
Mountain Goats, “Genesis 3:23.” See how the people here live now./Hope that they’re better at it than I was….
Haunted house via Wikimedia Commons.