On Permeability

Nighttime, when small noises become writ large. My room, through which a pinkish California light is struggling despite the lean glass pane. I sit at my laptop. I drag my mouse fitfully. I watch Youtube pixels dance across the screen, coagulating into some semblance of an image. I feel my solitary world distill into a tinny sound that emerges from the speakers—a voice with an affective strength that penetrates despite the weakly electronic medium through which it is being delivered—undeniably: Judy Garland.

Specifically, Judy Garland in the 1941 movie Ziegfield Girl. A medley of liltingly shallow tropes depicting “ambitious young women trying to make it” in Mr. Ziegfield’s competitive Broadway Revue, this film classic is studded with stars of the age—Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner. Still wholesomely groomed and ruddy-cheeked, Garland plays the youngest—the naïve ingénue, whose father has trained her in a dying Vaudeville tradition. Finally breaking away from his outmoded instruction, she stuns everyone at her audition with a lingering version of I’m Always Chasing Rainbows. She wears a somber black suit; it swamps her tiny frame. It seems as though the sopping musical introduction will overwhelm her. She wrings her pale hands. Her mouth gapes with the first note, unnaturally, beautifully. Captivated, a crew member looks up from his cup of tea. Judy’s dark eyes strain forward with the effort. She slides her hands back and forth over her father’s shoulders. Her fingers twisting into knots. The dejection on his face. Her delicate touch rendering him obsolete.

The song she sings is about the infirmity of the impossible, about unaccomplished vision: “My schemes are just like all my dreams, ending in the sky… believe me, I’m always chasing rainbows,” Judy warbles, the high note glitching into static from the poor quality of the video. A quiet night. The goosebumps on my arm; something arcane flickering through.

*

At a reading and talk at City Lights about her new book Du Bois’ Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, a critical inquiry into the relationship between literature and its surrounding institutions, Juliana Spahr introduces her project as less concerned with the necessity of literature and more curious about how it has become estranged from political activism since the social movement writing of the 60s and 70s.

Juliana also proves herself to be the master of the Q&A form. Faced with someone who entirely disagrees with her premise that art will never be autonomous, she gently recontextualizes her project as more interested in the history of how art has become institutionally domesticated, while affirming still its value. Faced with someone who demands to ask if she has read a specific text about DuBois’s papers, she capably summarizes it for him, points out its limitations and draws some connective threads to her project. And although of course at this end of this event, there are no certain nor enlightened answers about, LOL, the value of art or its connection to political efficacy per se, I feel like Juliana has accomplished a particularly complex two-step. In other words, nothing changed; she started and landed in the same position, but it was the process in the middle that was skillful, thought-provoking, that made a difference to me.

At home, reading the book, I find that Juliana writes with depth about a variety of works and issues—the recuperation of social movement poetry by the FBI, the relationship between private foundation funding for the arts and nationalism. But what strikes me most is the pains she takes in situating herself as a subject in the tangled web of teaching, learning, fighting for and against the specter of capital L literature. The omissions and failings she has, to this date, perpetuated or rejected. More than any critical text, more than any account of poetry as cultural or historical artifact, Du Bois’ Telegram is a complicated foray into Juliana’s specific location within a disconcertingly sentient mix of historical fact, aesthetic fantasy and state manipulation at both a personal and national scale. With as much clarity as is possible to bring in this regard, she lays down the brusque reality that poetry, no matter how beloved, will always be mediated and complicit. In the book’s conclusion, she writes, “my intention in this book was not to just complain that literature is a genre that is unusually manipulated and dependent. It is to write a history of how it got that way. It is unclear to me how literature might be reclaimed from institutions short of revolution. Not that I want to give in to what I have described. And yet I give in at every moment. Everything I have done in my life to get me out of this ecosystem has felt minor in impact.”

The connections between literature and the state, poetry and politics are so numerous as to be all encompassing. Facing it, I am paralyzed; I cannot exactly figure how I am embedded within this teeming mass without some level of feverish sentiment or paranoia, even if I respect Juliana’s candid ability to do so. And perhaps it makes me a weaker person but when I try, I yield to the mythic. I treasure the resolutely immaterial. I believe, despite everything, in the small value I think poetry does have, which is also what a polemic can’t do—hold all the shadows, show all the parts within an affective vortex.

In one of my favorite Juliana poems, “Transitory, Momentary,” she writes, “The room will be dark. The light will be on in the hall. There will be shadows, in other words. And the singer will know about these shadows at this moment and know they had agreed to be with shadows.”

What is a shadow if not for an imperfect representation that bends with the light? That appears and disappears, warps itself easily with contact and pressure.

What is poetry if not a shadow one chooses to linger within; an unfortunately permeable form. Something that holds a temporary spirit as it passes through. Some wrecked and hollow vessel through which concepts—historic, political, emotional—are endlessly recycled, created, and destroyed.

*

In the first moments of Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland, playing Dorothy, is dreary in sepia-tone. She tries to escape the fast-approaching tornado. She is buffered left and right by the gales of wind that have whipped themselves into a frenzy. Her gingham smock and sensible pigtails flap haplessly around her. She makes it to her house. It is sucked into the eye of the storm. Judy passes out, the camera goes into soft focus, blurring across her face. When she wakes, with a start, the flotsam and jetsam of her world is bobbing in the storm directly outside her window, pulsing to a cheery tune—chickens on a detached roof, two men in a canoe, a woman on a bicycle we will later learn is the Wicked Witch of the West.

Judy lands with a crash and an adorably shocked “oh!,” her mouth in a wide circle. She picks up her dog and emerges cautiously from the bedroom. She creaks her door open to reveal the technicolored world of Oz. Oversized shiny vinyl daisies catch the light. Somewhere Over the Rainbow plays gently, wordlessly in the background.

Judy Garland is a ‘diva,’ revered by many for her ability to elicit sympathy, to sing so piercingly that the sound might wring tears out of a rock. Because of this, Susan J. Leonardi and Rebecca A. Pope write, in The Diva's Mouth: Body, Voice, and Prima Donna Politics that “[t]he diva’s voice is a political force.” And although the emotional rhetoric of Judy’s voice is indisputable, I’m inclined to disagree with their straightforward optimism. From the saccharine charm of Meet Me in St Louis to the ambivalent melodrama of A Star Is Born, Judy’s performances over her illustrious career are indeed “affective sanctuar[ies] in which we seek shelter,” but they are also leaky ones. The true beauty of Judy Garland is in her imperfection—the moment wherein life seeps through, when we notice the real cost of witnessing this moment of her unreality. 

Emerging from her drably brown home into the glitter of Oz, the camera zooms in tight on Judy’s face. Her eyes are slightly glazed, the sides of her lips turn up unevenly, tugged disproportionately by the assortment of emotions she is experiencing—shock, delight, fear. And for a split second, we catch in her blank gaze, her tautly controlled features, such a bewildered estrangement from the pristinely constructed universe of Hollywood, that it never fails to shock the viewer in its perfect reflection of their own alienation from the world.

Some say that it is because of the queer community’s ability to identify with this sense of intense alienation that Judy Garland became a queer icon. There has been much to-do made of the fact that the Stonewall riots that kickstarted the gay rights movement occurred on the same night of Judy Garland’s funeral. Apart from the fact that ‘Judy Garland’ was a popular sign-in pseudonym for patrons of the Stonewall Inn, local myth has also suggested that it was the combination of grief over the loss of cherished Judy as well as anger at the dailiness of discrimination and police brutality that finally galvanized the queer community to fight back. Personally, I find it hard to attribute the riots to anything but the latter.

But I look into Judy’s face, singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I note the attuned lightness of her voice soar with forced discipline above the weight of addiction. I see her eyes roll as they gaze towards the heavens; as they try and fail to find a space outside of the controlling forces of Hollywood studios, forced femininity and fame. I feel an acceleration of tragedy. I graft myself into the generous, beckoning permeability of her narrative. I let the gentle scale of her song well itself into tears at the back of my eyes.

Deborah Paredez writes of the diva that “moved by her voice, we are compelled to expand the dimensions of our own.” Judy Garland’s voice in and of itself may not be a politics, it could not start a riot. But it is an intractable form, one that subsumes everything in its vicinity into fleeting illusion, embeds within us a residual sense of the possible. The beauty that ought to be. Fuel with which to build from the nothingness of thin air.

Some dispersed power, moving with a brick as it shatters a window.

*

Noah Ross’s recent book Swell is a precisely built membrane. Surveying documentation of Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricanes Irma/Maria in Puerto Rico, this slim volume is built out of manipulated conversation, news coverage, statistics, and mediated image data and aims to, as Noah writes, “challenge the media’s commodification of real-life tragedy.”

Much has been made out of how to approach the writing of disaster—from the work of Charles Reznikoff to Cheena Marie Lo’s A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters. In order to best communicate the drastic shifts in language, time, and social order that inevitably occur during a disaster, most texts in this tradition reject narrative guidance and poetic eloquence in favor of arbitrary fact. Maurice Blanchot famously wrote, “the danger is that the disaster should acquire meaning instead of body.” Aptly, these texts favor the brute materiality of document in lieu of any interpretation or elegy that could explain trauma away with simplicity.   

Swell is similarly built out of documentation, but differs from its predecessors in its selective capaciousness. Noah transcribes mostly partial clauses and phrases from a wealth of disparate sources, forcing the reader to work to build complex connections themselves. Because of this, its networks are sometimes faltering, sometimes secure, but always concomitant rather than subordinated to a master narrative. Never choosing statements that get to the descriptive heart of the disaster, we get instead, mundane experiential detritus, sometimes esoteric, sometimes unexpectedly wrenching:  “THE REAL TRUTH About Hurricane Harvey And What They’re NOT Telling You!!!! ”; “oh good oh he’s still alive hold on – what’s – is it – it’s a rooster – it’s ok – cluck … oh my god this is just man uh I’m seriously knee deep right now hold on one second [music]”; “that’s true that’s true it’s too late now it’s too dark I have a guest from India we are going to try.”

This selectiveness reflects back to us the bias of the news media sources we consume—begging the question—who gets to tell the story in each disastrous case and why? How is our information mediated by prevailing trends and cultural assumptions surrounding issues of nationalism, racism, and colonialism? Glitches and empty space in Swell’s holey poetic body only serve to underscore how much of our disaster narrative is filled in by these suppositions and so becomes man-made or manipulative, ultimately serving state, government, and status quo.

A constant translation between different mediums has also left its mark on Noah’s pages. Conversations gleaned from Youtube and radio, copy/pasted text from internet articles and images from CNN translated into raw data files to get around issues of fair use often dictate this poetic material’s form:

I-45-Gulf-@-West-Dallas--////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// --------------------------------------/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// --------------------------------------\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

Because of this, the text becomes not a solid wall of undifferentiated factual matter, but a permeable film that traps within it a range of voices and affects —memory, partial speech, corporate heartlessness, selective fact.

Rather than a text that reproduces the concrete conditions of trauma, or that forms a stridently political critique, Swell instead functions as an invocation —a kind of revival of the horror movie séance in which our participation brings forth a ghostly spirit that will exceed and destroy the unfortunate formal frame that has functioned to bring it into being. And what arrives is a manic and devastating energy, back from being subsumed under disaster’s tamed economy of death. Out of its residue, a vengeful sensibility is remade that cannot be contained. It has to be rectified. It poses a challenge: that out of what our complicity has invoked comes what endeavors to be addressed; what has to be done. Will we?

*

One of my favorite scenes in A Star Is Born is not colorfully bombastic nor soulfully tragic. In fact, it’s unremarkable. In it, Judy Garland sits in a car with James Mason; he has just seen her singing a ballad in the wee hours with her band, in an empty club. He is mesmerized. Recognizing her considerable talent, he drags her away, disheveled, babbling about the “little jabs of pleasure” he experiences when she sings, similar to when “a swordfish takes the hook, or when you watch a great fighter getting ready for the kill,” a series of interestingly violent metaphors.  When Judy finally gets the opportunity to speak, she says, quietly, shyly, “I’m no good at talking about myself...” “I can sort you out,” Mason interrupts, gaily, brashly, and the frightened trepidation on Judy’s face is subtle, an omen of what is later to come as she lets herself be formed, under the guise of generosity, by this domineering man; as she has been formed by husbands and studios in reality.

A Star Is Born is filmed later in Judy’s career. You can see the signs of wear in the contours of her face. The cracks where her makeup lands more heavily. The way her hairline’s pulled too tightly perfect, so that when she smiles, it’s obvious where her skin has to stretch. You sense the anxiety seeping through her energetic gestures as she prances across the stage, her stressful overacting in what are intended as quiet, intimate moments. And yet, she is beautiful, brilliant, her skin will not contain her. She radiates an interplay of effervescence and pathos that leaks from her very pores. Each flaw in her performance, balanced by laborious over-investment in the role, an expanding poetic force strained through the fine mesh of the world’s uncaring cruelty. It’s fucked up how much Judy Garland lets pass through her body. So much she can feel for us, in place of us. It’s fucked up how much we want to feel through her very being.

Breathlessly, in the car, Garland confesses to Mason, “But I had to sing. I somehow feel most alive when I’m singing… you don’t want to hear all this, do you?” She laughs nervously. You can tell she means it. This love of her art, all too earnest, too forgiving of the conditions that she has had to endure in order to make it. You feel embarrassed for her. You feel ashamed for yourself. For ignoring these very conditions; for loving her nonetheless.

*

Last year, I was arrested at a protest for wearing a scarf, something which had been placed on a list of temporarily banned items. When the cops searched me, they found in my pockets and backpack my keys, my ID, a hoodie and a bottle of Tylenol. They charged me with possession of a deadly weapon and held me in jail.

I experienced the most privileged arrest one could wish for. I was manhandled, but not roughly. My cell was reasonably clean. I was told consistently that I would be cited and released that evening after being bussed and booked into county jail. Even so, it sucked. It is remarkable how possible it seemed that my life and agency would be snatched away from me neatly, and permanently. It is remarkable, when you are alone, without a sense of how time is passing or the knowledge of when you will be able to leave, if at all—how quickly you will lose your shit. It is difficult to imagine how others less privileged than I, survive as they are living within these conditions. It is difficult to imagine how so many others live under the constant threat of being placed in these conditions at any moment, for no discernable reason at all.

I was in isolation for approximately seven hours. It was cold and I could not stop trembling. I loathed myself for feeling scared. At some point, I began to panic. The room closed in. All I could hear was the maddeningly regular buzz and slam of the jail’s heavy doors. There had been a trumpeter at the protest; I had found him annoying. But at that moment I heard him faintly. I thought I was dreaming, but there it was, coming from outside the walls. An inkling of a blaring melody. A reminder of a world that still existed. A sense that my real life continued to persist without me, beyond the dead helplessness I was shrouded in. I did not recognize the trumpeter’s cheery tune but it soothed me. I hummed along with it. I steeled myself with its melody. When it stopped, I continued. I sang all the hymns and songs I could remember, no matter how childish, no matter how false. In part, because I sang, I did not lose my shit. I stayed sane. I experienced the most privileged arrest one could wish for.

It is difficult to know what poetry is, or what it does, whether it can lure us into political action, or whether it ever did. In our times, it is hard for me to be anything but ambivalent about how often and in which contexts this question is posed. At the end of the day, perhaps all I can appreciate about poetry is also what troubles me—its permeability to both the shadows and the light; its enduring connection to the conditions that bind us, and the unwieldy affect it can yet invoke.

Something I can hear as I, trapped alone, sit quietly; what warms me as it filters gently through the walls.