Tube Be or Not Tube Be

The news cycle spins and, having spun, moves on. Before a certain topic vanishes down the memory hole, I want to offer a work in progress that enlists recent events in a meditation on an ancient theme, to wit:

These Spectacles of Feminine Abjection

The nail she used to hang herself has become a relic.—Tsvetan Todorov on Marina Tsvetaeva

all those words
and but a single nail

but the nail
has the floor

the nail she used to hang herself has become
eloquence

the nail she used to hang herself
has become consequence

the nail she used to hang herself has become
something else

have you noticed that

PAIN
LIT
THEM
HOW

PAIN
LIGHTS
THEM
NOW

with the celerity of relics,
Mother
pipes
up

“There’s nothing left for me
but to _______ myself.”

(what did
the hangnail
say to the
feeding tube)

II.

the nail is
singing praisesongs to the nail
the nail is rational
the nail is national
the nail she used has become a baker’s dozen
the nail she used has become a tinker’s damn
the nail she used has become an odalisque
the nail she used has become political capital
the nail she used
has become a master plan
the nail she used
has become a masterstroke
the nail she used
has become the Taliban
the nail she used has become pickle relish
the nail she used has become rectitude
the nail she used has become an interlude
the nail she used has become impermanence
the nail she used has become the Pentecost
the nail she used’s bent
double with remorse

have you noticed that

the nail
(was) (was not)
poesie

these spectacles of feminine abdication
these spectacles of feminine conflagration
these spectacles of feminine pretty please
these spectacles of feminine c’est la vie
these spectacles of feminine enjoy your day
these spectacles of feminine au revoir

with the celerity of relics once-woman says
there’s nothing left for me but to hang it up

so fucked about
food & God

HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT

disintegrating daughters
heaps and heaps

fucked
up and up

III.

Little Bo Peep
has lost her bleat

a Culture of Life
has found it

the nail she used to hang herself has become
potassium

the hook she used to hang her hankering
has become a feeding tube

the feeding tube
has become a monogram

the monogram
is writing an as-told-to:
I AM TERRI SCHIAVO’S F.T.

the feeding tube is topping the best-seller lists
the feeding tube is signing at Barnes and Noble
the feeding tube is orating
in basso profundo
the feeding tube is shooting an epilogue
the feeding tube is shouting an epigraph
the feeding tube is looming over the crèche
the feeding tube is chasing the cortege
the feeding tube is toadying but why
the feeding tube is singing in the rain
pour on the treacle
we’ll have a culture of none

PAIN
LIT
THEM
WOW

have you noticed that

acaucasoidsockpuppet
tried to say

tube be or not tube be

vice to the
viceless, ho

have you noticed that

these spectacles of feminine abjection
seem meant to bear

repeated repetition
have you noticed that

once-woman =

INNOCENT
INNOCENT LIFE

have you
noticed THAT

hurray
for
martyr
dumb

the nail she used
has become
the cornerstone

Running Tab

April 18, 2005. X approaches me after class and says, “I visited your ominous Web site.” I feel terrible. This is how someone (an intelligent someone, an excellent reader, a member of a computer-acclimated younger generation that seems more likely than most people my age to frequent the bloggosphere) perceives the region of my mind that I’ve elected to expose here. I am seen as a doomsayer, a person in a scary mask, a pervert who takes pleasure in alarming small children. Or: here comes Cassandra, that unsexy party pooper. Will it do any good to say, I never meant to be ominous? I only wanted to talk in matter-of-fact terms about things that are weighing on me. Aren’t they weighing on you, too? I didn’t mean to rivet your attention on The End, inviting you to behave like a deer in an SUV’s headlights. I simply hoped you would consider it worth your while to contemplate how we are dealing (or not dealing) with an evolving reality—our optional mortality as a species–that we’re spectacularly ill-equipped to confront, precisely because our imaginative resources are so far outstripped by our technical capabilities.

April, 2005. Andrea Dworkin is dead. I objected mightily to most of what she wrote (that fraction of it I could even bring myself to read). Talk about spectacles of feminine abjection—she wallowed in them. She rolled in them like a cat in catnip. On the level of theory, I was especially offended by her ahistorical schematism, an operatic rendering of gender oppression that conveniently elided race and class, and the weirdly alchemical ambition to transform maximum victimhood into agency. (“Men fuck us. They fuck us over. They fuck us over and over and over” was how I paraphrased her “analysis” in the early 1980’s.) On a more personal level, I couldn’t stand her sectarian tone, her apparent conviction that only she knew the truth and the way, and was uniquely persecuted for it. (She was definitely not the first or even the hundredth heavy hitter to feel herself doomed to batting a thousand in the Negro Leagues.) Her work with Catherine MacKinnon on anti-pornography legislation, which naively sought to enlist a reactionary court system as an ally in defending women from sexualized violence, was a disaster in practical political terms. A eulogy by leftist commentator Robert Jensen defends her from the charge of being a “man-hater.” Man-hating doesn’t faze me, but I really couldn’t stand how she oversimplified women. Andrea Dworkin was histrionic, messianic, an adroit practitioner of the sort of show(wo)manship that gets a hearing in America. She was heard—and then again, she wasn’t. My conviction that she was wrong about too many things doesn’t cancel out my grudging admiration of her will to brand the public sphere with her outraged and partly accurate perception of ubiquitous, lethal misogyny.

April 10, 2005. I read that it is now respectable among “astrobiologists” (a scientific specialty I hadn’t known existed) to believe that life has probably arisen in many locations throughout the universe; in fact, according to Paul Davies, author of “Goodbye Mars, Hello Earth” (New York Times Op-Ed), researchers are looking for novel organisms, “alien bugs” that might be hanging around our planet, having evolved in an earthly “genesis” that predated our own. This scientific bulletin arrives in my neighborhood like light from a distant star—old hat to some, but the newest of news to me. The last time I paid attention to such things, I came away with the impression that life on earth was an only child. I admit that I find something vaguely heartening about the possibility that, if the human race discontinues itself, consciousness might get another shot. There’s no good reason why this should cheer me up—except that my mind is doing what the mind always does. Age after age, the human imagination works overtime to make mortality palatable.