Notes on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (Part 1: pp. 1-74)

Cover of the Melville House edition 

(2016) [a]

 

 

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: Maggie Nelson is one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical [b].

 

I still think she has an unfortunate tendency to overshare and give us just a little too much personal information, but that might just be me being a bit uptight and prudish [c]. And, for all the times when I want to look away from the page, there are many more occasions on which I'm grateful as a reader for her honesty, courage, and intelligence.  

 

And so, let's take a look at The Argonauts (pp. 1-74), but please note this is more a response to the lines or paragraphs that most resonate with me, rather than a review of the book as a whole (some aspects of which, even if central - such as parenting - I don't really care about [d]).  

 

 

I. 

 

Nelson tells us that before she met the great love of her life, the artist Harry Dodge, she had "spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained - inexpressibly! - in the expressed" [3] [e]. 

 

It was this profound but paradoxical truth that enabled Nelson to keep her faith in language - words are good enough! - and continue writing. But then Dodge, "equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough" [4], obliged her to reconsider the matter; perhaps words were "corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow" [4] and that to name is to kill; perhaps we can't conceptualise and articulate the world clearly (and non-destructively) after all.

However, I'm not sure that Nelson, as a writer and poet, ever quite accepts this; a little later she asks: "How can the words not be good enough?" [8].

 

 

II.

Nelson has always thought it a little romantic to allow "an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one" [10]. 

 

And I agree, it is romantic to just love Thelma, Alice, or Nicolas Poussin, rather than identifying oneself in terms of a fixed sexuality, although maybe that's easier for me to say than for someone who is (or has been) persecuted or discriminated against for their queerness; I don't have to worry about how certain pieces of legislation, such as Clause 28 or Prop 8, are going to impact on my life [f].

 

 

III.

 

This is very similar to how I feel and act when it comes to home improvements and domestic chores: I don't want to lift a finger "to better my surroundings" [14], or even keep things ship shape and Bristol fashion. I prefer to literally let things "fall apart all around" [14] and then, "when it gets to be too much" [14], just move on and flee the scene.   

 

IV. 

  

This is an undeniably correct observation (one that reminds me of something Baudrillard might have written, although Nelson credits the idea to Lacan, whose idea of the Real is not quite the same as the former's): 

 

"To align oneself with the real [...] can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis." [17]

 

In other words, whilst aligning with a real or natural identity can be a source of pride and pleasure, it can also bring with it a touch of horror and be impossible to sustain for 24/7; no one can be themselves all day every day, can they?

 

There have to be moments when we don't quite feel ourselves and we take a breather from reality. 

 

 

V.

 

I like the fact that Nelson doesn't just keep banging on about difference and otherness; the fact that she acknowledges that encountering sameness can also be important, "as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled" [31]. 

 

And this encounter with sameness can also allow self-discovery: "To devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own." [31]

 

And I suppose that matters; although not as much as the "shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy" [31] - the kind of sentence which one simply has to let pass when reading an author like Nelson who passionately believes that there is "some evil shit in this world that needs fucking up" [33], such as the phallocratic order and capitalism, even if she has "come to understand revolutionary language" [33] as a mixture of fantasy and fetish. 

 

 

VI.

 

This is pure liberalism: "I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please" [37]. 

 

The problem is such groups don't live in a giggly bubble on the moon; they have neighbours and they belong to wider society and so their decisions and lifestyle choices invariably impact others. They also inhabit the planet with other species and, like Nelson, I think our relationship with animals and plants in sacred terms.     

 

 

VII.

 

"Even if women are consulting the same satellites, or reading from the same script: their reports are suspect ..." [47]

 

This remark about the perceived difference in reporting accuracy between male and female weather reporters is interesting. I'm not sure, however, that the reason for it is the one Nelson (and Luce Irigaray) imagine; i.e. that women are somehow removed as a sex from the language game that assures objective coherence and predictive ability.

 

But there does seem to be some sort of difference involved based on sex and a woman's greater attunement to her own body in relationship to the world; it's very rare that the Little Greek, for example, will say it's cold outside (giving reference to the air temperature), preferring instead to tell me she's feeling cold.  

So yes, it's a different (more subjective) way of articulating reality; but I don't think this is the result of patriarchal forces looking to silence women or discredit their weather reportage.

VIII.

 

I'm grateful to Nelson for mentioning the poet and literary scholar Michael Snediker (whom I didn't know of) and his book Queer Optimism (2008). For his critical examination of waxing lyrical - as summarised here - is one I find very interesting.

 

For there is something problematic (and irritating) - particularly to a working class sensibility - when writers indulge in histrionics. Even issues of "maximum complexity and gravity" [56] can be discussed without exaggerated language and overarching concepts which can sometimes negate the "specificities of the situation at hand" [56].

 

(This returns us to Wittgenstein and the idea of speaking plainly.)  

IX.

Is transitioning from one gender to another (or even just floating somewhere in-between) really the same as a becoming as Deleuze and Guattari understand it? 

 

I don't think so. But perhaps Nelson's reading of the above on this topic is superior to mine; more true to the radical spirit of everybody's favourite nomad philosophers and certainly she and Harry Dodge know more about gender, sexuality, and identity issues than I do. 

 

Thus, best perhaps that I say nothing further here: for I don't want to run the risk of being thought presumptuous or another comfortably cisgendered straight white male know-it-all, who has forgotten (or is yet to learn) that "the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality - or anything else, really - is to listen to what they tell you [...] without shellacking over their version of reality" [66].

 

But then, having said that, this sounds suspiciously like an attempt to silence those who don't care about personal truth and refuse to value lived experience above everything else.         

 

X.

On my first day at school, I cried when they pinned a name badge on me and tried to remove it (true story). Ten year later, I smiled when Poly Styrene informed her audience that identity was the crisis (having already seen that) [h]. 

Thus, like Nelson's professor of feminist theory, Christina Crosby, I would be mortified were a student - or anyone else - to hand me an index card and ask me to write on it how I identified and then pin it on my lapel. For like Crosby, I've "spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same ..." [73]  

 

Notes 

 

[a] The Argonauts was originally published in the United States by Graywolf Press, in 2015. The first UK edition, published by Melville House, followed in 2016, and it is this edition to which all page numbers given in the text refer.  

 

[b] In 2016, a year after the publication of The Argonauts, Nelson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship; known to many as the genius grant. See the two-part post 'Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009)' (5 Sept 2024): click here.   

[c] See the post 'Can a Writer Ever Overshare? On Maggie Nelson's Self-Exposure' (9 Sept 2024): click here. 

[d] I'm sure Nelson would say it's this indifference to parenting - particularly the maternal - that disqualifies me from being a feminist; see pp. 48-52 and the story of a seminar with Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. Nelson stands with the former, but I have to admit, I'm slightly more sympathetic to the latter. 

 

[e] I don't want to split hairs - though some say that philosophy is nothing other than the endless splitting of hairs - but I'm not sure Wittgenstein quite said this. 

      What he said, rather, was that the inexpressible (i.e., that which can be shown and, aguably, that which mysteriously matters most) forms the background against which whatever we can express has its meaning. In other words, context - not containment - is the crucial word here. 

      See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 16. A revised edition of this work, ed. G. H. von Wright, was published by Blackwell in 1998.

 

[f] Like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I want to use the word queer to include "all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation" [35]. 

      On the other hand, one feels obliged to acknowledge historical and contemporary prohibitions aimed specificaly against those who identify as lesbian or gay, for example. As Nelson notes, this is kind of like wanting it both ways. 

      But then, there is "much to be learned from wanting something both ways" [36] and Nelson concedes that "annoying as it might be to hear a straight white guy" who is comfortably cisgendered talk about queerness, "in the end it's probably all for the better" [36].

 

[g] I'm referring to the single 'Identity' released by X-Ray Spex (EMI, July 1978): click here. 

Before heading to part two of this post - which will be published shortly -  readers might like to see an earlier post anticipating this one, entitled 'Argonauts' (26 Aug 2024): click here. 

Can a Writer Ever Overshare? On Maggie Nelson's Self-Exposure

Author Maggie Nelson: skilled in the art of making 

the personal and the private public and political

 

 

I. 

 

Someone recently asked me the following question: Can a writer ever overshare?   

 

Well, having graduated from the Deleuzian school of literary theory, I'm certainly uncomfortable with the idea that the writer's main (or only) task is to give expression to the feelings, or impose a coherent and conventional model of language on lived experience.

In other words, literature should not become merely a form of personal overcoding and writing a novel, a poem, or a play is more than an opportunity for an author to confess and tell all. 

 

Like Deleuze, I'm of the view that any genre of writing reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing, but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality [1].

 

I don't think it makes me a philosophical prude to say that just as it's advisable to exercise a degree of caution [2] as an artist, so too do terms such as modesty, reservation, and self-restraint have crucial importance. Oversharing and trauma dumping is not the only way - or even the best way - to produce genuinely transgressive work.     

 

 

II.

 

Although she sometimes refers to Deleuze's work - particularly the books written in collaboration with Félix Guattari - Maggie Nelson doesn't seem to be overly concerned with the danger of giving herself away via the giving of a little too much personal information. 

 

In fact, she's a little defensive and prickly on the subject having, I suspect, been accused of oversharing by numerous critics on multiple occasions. So it is that when in conversation with the Canadian artist Moyra Davey in 2017, Nelson responds thusly to the idea that tell-all memoirs can sometimes be a bit much and leave the reader uncomfortable:

 

"Besides mainstream celebrity memoirs or other genres in which artistry need not apply, I don't know where all these narcissistic tell-alls are, not to mention the fact that there can literally be no such thing as a 'tell-all'." [3]

She continues: 

 

"Personally, I never think to myself while reading, 'Why would you want to tell me this?' That question seems to me to speak volumes about the reader/critic more than about the writer. What I hear in that question is the baseline assumption that the writer should not be telling you all this [...] that there's shame in the telling, and the critic's job is to wake the artist or writer up to the shame she/he may have missed." [4]

Nelson concludes:

"At the far end of this logic lies the virulent idea that we're better off with less speech, less telling, less expression; nearly every nasty review of a work of autobiography I've read contains this latent or manifest wish that the writer/artist would just shut up [...] it bugs the hell out of me." [5]

 

 

III. 

 

Whilst one can certainly sense Nelson's irritation - and whilst I don't doubt the genuineness of such for a moment - I don't share her conclusion. 

 

For one thing, I'm of the view that confronting (and achieving) silence is the ultimate aim of literature; that it should push language to its own external limits (which are not outside language but are the outside of language). 

 

In other words, the writer does have to learn how to shut the fuck up due to the fact that, once spoken, speech immediately and directly "enters the service of power" [6] - even if that speech is born of the writer's ultimate nakedness, wherein we like to believe ourselves to be essentially free and shameless.

 

In sum: there's nothing radical, liberating, or progressive about self-exposure and articulating one's seceret desires. On the other hand, there's a good deal to be said for those who know how to remain the soul of discretion and have the ability to withhold certain details [7].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Gilles Deleuze, 'Literature and Life', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 1-6.   

      Of course, all writers can be guilty of self-obsessed dead writing (necro-narcissism) at times; of being a little too personal. But this is something to try and keep to a minimum and an author should always aim to become-imperceptible as far as possible. Or, as Wilde says in the Preface to Dorian Gray: "To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."

 

[2] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 160-61, where they advocate caution and the Nietzschean art of small doses, since overdosing - like oversharing - is a very real danger when it comes to dismantling the organism, following a line of flight, or effecting a strange becoming via literature. 

 

[3] Maggie Nelson, 'A Life, A Face, A Gaze', in Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Fern Press, 2024), p. 137.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See Roland Barthes's 'Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France', in Selected Writings, ed. with an introduction by Susan Sontag (Fontana Press, 1989), p. 461. 

[7] For an alternative view, see Lucretia Rose McCarthy's essay 'Radical Exposures: Crip and Queer in Maggie Nelson's Autotheory', in C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2023): click here. In a nut-shell, McCarthy argues that through her autotheoretical writings: 

      "Nelson familiarizes crip and queer experience, embracing difference through detail whilst challenging stigma and otherness common to the categories. She rejects the mundane and pathological associations of 'oversharing' and shows the way self-exposure can deepen understanding of marginalized lives." 

 

My Naked Nakedness is Positive Atrociousness: Notes on The Deadman (1989)

 Jennifer Montgomery as Marie in The Deadman 

(dir. Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn, 1989)

 

"When Edouard fell back dead an emptiness opened inside her,

a prolonged shudder went through her, and bore her upward like an angel." [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence insisted that there was "no real battle" between himself and Christianity [2] and that's certainly true when it comes to the question of nudity in art and the importance of retaining the essential beauty and dignity of the human form.

 

For like any devout Catholic, Lawrence believes that the human body is sacred - not least in its sexual aspect - and that whilst art affirms this fact and manifests being, pornography attempts to deny it; to reduce the human form to base matter and to do dirt on sex.  

 

Pornography, says Lawrence, is an insult to the flesh and to a vital human relationship: ugly and cheap it makes human nudity; ugly and degraded it makes the sexual act; "trivial and cheap and nasty" [3]. 

 

And that's nothing to be proud of ...    

 

 

II.

 

I was reminded of Lawrence's vital opposition to pornography - defined as the "grey disease of sex-hatred, coupled with the yellow-disease of dirt-lust" [4] - when reading Maggie Nelson's favourable review of the short film The Deadman (1989), by Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn. 

 

Based on Bataille's story Le Mort - written sometime during the period 1942-44, but first published posthumously in 1964 - The Deadman is summarised on IMDb as a "strange tale of a woman who sets off on a wild adventure before returning home to die" [5]. 

 

Somehow, that doesn't quite prepare the viewer for the 40 minutes of black-and-white depravity that follow; a symbolic free play of bodies and images that many queer feminist commentators - including Nelson - find liberating.     

 

According to the latter, what's great - and important - about The Deadman is that by giving back full and uncompromising sexual agency to a nearly naked female protagonist (played by Jennifer Montgomery), it reclaims the pornographic imagination from its confinement within a certain (male) cinematic history and genre for a female audience:

 

"It's a funny, radical, stand-alone reclamation of realms in which so many of us have too often had to hold our noses and practice a robust disidentification in order to play." [6] 

 

And that's a good thing, I suppose ...

 

 

III. 

 

Although Keith Sanborn - who had read Bataille in the 1970s and produced his own translation of Le Mort - is co-credited as a director, Nelson seems to think that Peggy Ahwesh - who "comes out of the anti-art sensibility of punk, out of feminism, and out of lowbrow horror" [7] -  is the real driving force behind the film, responsible for getting the actors to do "real sexual things to each other, with all the mess and stakes" [8].  

 

When, says Nelson, you combine Bataille's transgressive philosophy with Ahwesh's anarcho-feminist sensibility, you get "an exploration of perversity that nods to misogynistic tradition and feminist corrective while also devoting itself to nongendered erotics - the erotics of chaos, of self-abandon, of wrestling, of scatology, of necrophilia, of ugliness, of aggression, of suicidality, and so on" [9].

 

And you also get a film that is, says Nelson, "laugh-out-loud funny" and "crackling with distubance and pleasure" [10].

 

Though Lawrence wouldn't like it - and, to be honest, I'm not sure I do either ... [11] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Georges Bataille, The Dead Man, in My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Marion Boyars, 1995), p. 168.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'There is no real battle ...', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press,1988), Appendix I: Fragmentary writings, p. 385. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornograpy and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 241. 

 

[4] Ibid., p. 242. 

 

[5] See the entry on The Deadman (1987) on IMDb: click here.  

[6] Maggie Nelson, 'A Girl Walks Into a Bar ... On Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn's The Deadman', in Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Fern Press, 2024), p. 70. 

[7] Ibid., p. 71. 

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., p. 72.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Readers who wish to judge for themselves can watch an eight minute excerpt from The Deadman on Vimeo: click here.  

Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 1: Propositions 1-120

 Jonathan Cape (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

As long-time readers of Torpedo the Ark will know, whilst, as a nihilist, my default position is always paint it black, I do also have a philosophical fascination with a colour much loved by painters and poets and which Christian Dior identified as the only one which can possibly compete with black: blue. 

 

This includes, for example, the lyrical blue celebrated by Rilke and Trakl; the deep blue invented by Yves Klein; the blue of the Greater Day that D. H. Lawrence writes of; and my fascination with this colour extends to blue angels, blue boys, blue lenses, and blue lagoons.  

 

Thus, no surprise then that I should eventually get around to reading Maggie Nelson's wonderful little book Bluets ...

 

 

II. 

 

First published by Wave Books in 2009, Bluets consists of 240 numbered propositions arranged not so much randomly, but with what we might term considered whimsicality to create the illusion of logical precision and continuity à la Wittgenstein. Each proposition is either a sentence or a short paragraph; none exceeds two hundred words in length.

 

The book documents not only the author's bowerbird-like obsession with the colour blue, referencing many famous figures along the way associated with the colour, but also provides an insight into Nelson's understanding of love and mental health and examines what role - if any - beauty plays in times of heartache or depression.

 

In 2016, she won a MacArthur Fellowship - known to many as the genius grant - and, on the basis of this one book alone I think that Nelson is indeed one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical.  

 

The title doesn't refer us simply to those small and delicate blue flowers belonging to the genus Houstonia, but also to a triptyque by the American abstract artist Joan Mitchell, Les Bluets (1973), which Nelson describes as perhaps her "favourite painting of all time" [a]

 

Here, I would like to provide a commentary on the book, picking up on some of the things that particularly resonate with me or pique my curiosity to know more. Hopefully, in the course of doing so I can demonstrate why the author and critic Hilton Als was spot on to praise Bluets as a "new kind of classicism" that, whilst queer in content, remains elegant in form [b].     

 

 

III.

5

 

Are we to understand that when, like Mallarmé, one replaces le ceil with l'Azur - "in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations" - one ceases to be a crypto-theologian and becomes a poet-philosopher? 

 

Is it true to say: whereof one can perceive blueness, thereof one cannot imagine God ...     

 

 

18

 

"A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck."

 

For a moment I thought I was reading Young Kim's A Year on Earth with Mr Hell (2020). 

 

But then I read the three sentences following: 

 

"Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my seceret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence."  

And realised I wasn't.  

 

20 

 

"Fucking leaves everything as it is." 

 

This is a very un-Lawrentian sentence; perhaps the most un-Lawrentian sentence you could imagine. 

 

For Lawrence insists that, on the contrary, fucking is transformational of the individual - changing the very constitution of the blood - and that a politics of desire, founded upon the act of coition, has revolutionary potential. 

 

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence believes that the lover is richer and stronger than those who do not fuck; that lovers grow wings and possess new capabilities. And there arises, he says, a post-coital "craving for polarized communion with others" [c] - not just for cigarettes. 

 

 

26 / 31

 

Nelson says that she's heard that "a diminishment of color vision often accompanies depression" and I couldn't help wondering if that's true; if feeling blue ironically makes the world seem greyer ...?

 

Well, apparently, it is: depression lowers the production of dopamine and this can impair neurotransmitters in the retina, making the world appear less vibrant and colourful. 

 

But then Nelson reminds us of the case of Mr Sidney Bradford, who had his vision restored in his fifties (having lost his sight as a baby) and saw the world at last in full-colour:  he died of unhappiness due to disappointment soon afterwards [d].      

 

35

 

"Does the world look bluer from blue eyes?", asks Nelson, before concluding that's probably not the case. 

 

But, like her, I like to imagine it does.

 

 

56

 

When reminded of Saint Lucy - patron saint of the blind, who was tortured and put to death by the Romans in 304 CE - I can't help thinking of Simone, the teenage erotomaniac at the heart of Bataille's notorious short novel L'histoire de l'œil (1928). 

 

For whilst Lucy didn't - as far as I know - insert the eye of a murdered priest into her vagina, she is often depicted in "Gothic and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her blue eyes staring weirdly out from it".   

 

Depending on what sources one refers to, Lucy's eyes were either gouged out by her captors, or she removed them herself in order to avoid male attention and prove her religious devotion. For as Nelson writes, there are numerous stories of women "blinding themselves in order to maintain their chastity" and to demonstrate their fidelity to God (i.e., the fact that they 'only have eyes' for Christ).   

 

 

62

 

Nelson's definition of puritanism: the exchanging of corporeal reality for ideal representation. Not something that appeals to her: 

 

"I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses ..."  

 

Fair enough: but this is still an image conjured up with words, is it not? And as Merleau-Ponty pointed out: Words do not look like the things they designate [e].  

 

 

71 / 72 

 

Hard to find dignity in loneliness; easier to find it in solitude. A pair of propostions of such high truth value that we may for all intents and purposes declare them true.  

 

 

101

 

When Nelson's friends were asked "how much time they would grant between 'a blinding, bad time' and a life that has simply become a depressive waste", the consensus was "around seven years". 

 

I suspect - based on my own experience between April 2016 and February 2023 - that that's probably about right; that the seven year mark is the limit. Perhaps that's why when a person goes missing there is a presumption of death after seven years. 

 

(As for how long it takes to fully recover having reached one's limit, that's a question to which neither Nelson nor her friends provide an answer and I suspect it might take longer to retreat from the edge of the abyss than it does to get there.)

Notes

 

[a] Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), Prop. 145, p. 57. Note that I will henceforth only give proposition numbers (in bold) in the post.      

 

[b] Hilton Als, 'Immediate Family', The New Yorker (11 April, 2016): click here. 

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 135. 

      Later, in proposition 201, Nelson does acknowledge the truth of change, newness, and becoming-other: "I believe n the possibility - the inevitability, even - of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters [...]" (p. 80).

[d] This is a real case, although Nelson is taking artistic license with her conclusion. For whilst Bradford did admit to finding the world visually disappointing following corneal grafts - and did die two years afterwards - he also had chronic health issues and no specific cause of death was entered on his death certificate. 

[e] Nelson quotes this line herself in proposition 70. It can be found in the essay 'Cézanne's Doubt', in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwyn (Routledge, 2003). 

 

This post continues in part two (selected propositions from 121-240): click here. 

Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 2: Propositions 121-240

Joan Mitchell: Les Bluets (1973) 

Oil on canvas (281 x 580 cm) [f]

 

 

NB: part one of this post (reflecting on selected propositions from 1-120) can be read by clicking here.  

 

 

131 

 

This makes smile: 

 

"'I just don't feel like you're trying hard enough,' one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan?" 

 

 

134 

 

Once, I began assembling a book of fragments to do with the practice of joy before death - suicide notes, if you like. This proposition would've made a welcome addition: 

 

"If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones [...] and head down to the river." 

 

Philosophers, however, from Empedocoles to Deleuze, usually like to leap to their death like iridescent jumping spiders. 

 

 

150 

 

"For Plato, colour was as dangerous a narcotic as poetry." 

 

And, many centuries later, the Puritans also hated colours and "smashed the stained-glass windows of churches, thinking them idolatrous, degenerate". 

 

I knew both these things. 

 

But I didn't know that, before becoming a holy colour - one particularly associated with the Blessed Virgin - blue "often symbolized the Antichrist" (i.e., he who comes out of the blue to deceive mankind and deny the Father and Son).

 

 

156 - 161

 

According to Lawrence, it's a terrible thing to educate children into abstract knowledge, so that they may understand the world. For adults to solemnly explain to three-year-olds why grass is green is, he says, inexcusable stupidity and will arrest their dynamic development [g]. 

 

As there is always something a bit childlike about poets, it didn't surprise me to learn that although she had been told the answer several times to the question 'Why is the sky blue?', Nelson can never quite recall the explanation. 

 

The only part she does remember is that "the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it". 

 

Never mind the scattering of sunlight and the length of waves, etc., for Nelson the blueness of the sky "is something of an ecstatic accdent produced by void and fire".        

 

I love this thought: as I do the idea of divine darkness and agnosia - the latter being a form of unknowing that one discovers (or accomplishes) within the former: 'Explanations', as Wittgenstein once said, 'come to an end somewhere' [h].

 

 

164

 

I agree with Lawrence that the proverbial ideas of beauty as something sinful and shallow are all of them false [i]. 

 

And because I agree with this, I also very much like Maggie Nelson's proposition that, "despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said", beauty "neither obscures truth nor reveals it". 

 

And that blue - the colour of sex [j] - is perhaps the most beautful of all colours. 

 

 

167 - 168

 

When - like Cézanne, Artaud, and the American artist Mike Kelley - you've had enough of psychology and the narcissistic pleasure of seeing your own reflection (on film screens, for example), then it's time to attend to colour:

 

"Perhaps this is why I have turned my gaze so insistently to blue: it does not purport to be me, or anyone else for that matter."

 

 

171

 

Philosophically, this is at the heart of my project to do with the Ruins: gathering fragments of blue has nothing to do with paying tribute to (or wishing to recreate) some ideal model of blue wholeness; "a bouquet is no homage to the bush". 

 

 

183 / 185

 

Readers might recall that in proposition 20 Nelson stated: Fucking leaves everything as it is. 

 

Here, she echoes this by writing: "For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is."

 

That's an unusual thing for a writer to say: usually, like Goethe, they are anxious about the possibly destructive nature of language; the fact that words can kill the essential quality of a thing. 

 

If for Warhol sex was just another (occasionally quite satisfying) way to pass the time, then that's pretty much what writing is for Nelson [k]. 

 

 

204

 

And now, finally, thanks to Nelson, I have an answer when someone asks why I can never be bothered to have things repaired (even when this will cause significant damage and expense in the long term): I have little to no instinct for protection ...

 

"Out  of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty - if one can be cruel to objects - I have given them up to their diminishment."   

 

Notes

 

[f] Maggie Nelson names this as her favourite painting in proposition 145 of Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), p. 57. She later admires Mitchell for her chromophilic recklessness, that is to say, for choosing her pigments "for their intensity rather than their durability". See proposition 154, p. 61.     

[g] See D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 123. 

[h] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell Publishers, 1953), §1. Nelson quotes this line in proposition 161 (p. 64).

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Artcles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182 - 217. Lawrence writes: "Beauty is not a snare, nor is it skin-deep, since it always involves a certain loveliness of modelling [...]" (p. 192). 

[j] Again, see Lawrence; 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, pp. 143 - 148, where he asserts that "sex and beauty are one thing, like fire and flame" (p. 145). 

[k] Later, "upon considering the matter further", Nelson admits in proposition 193 that writing does in fact do something; namely, it replaces the memories it aimed to preserve.   

On Board the Ship of Theseus With Melissa Mesku

Melissa Mesku and the 

Ship of Theseus

 

 

I. 

 

A correspondent who knows her Greek mythology (and her French literary theory) writes:

 

In a recent post [1] you refer to Roland Barthes's reference to a ship that has each of its parts replaced over time until it has been entirely rebuilt and how this reinforces one of the key principles of structuralism; namely, that an object is not necessarily born of a mysterious act of creation, but can be produced via the substitution of parts and nomination (i.e., the giving of a fixed name that is not tied to the stability of parts). 

      Barthes, however, mistakenly refers to this ship as the Argo, on which Theseus was said to have sailed with Jason. In fact, it was a different vessel (of unknown name) on which the former sailed from Crete that has given rise to the question that has so intrigued philosophers. Probably you know this, but I think a note for general readers might have been useful so as to avoid confusion and the spreading of misinformation.    

 

I'm extremely grateful for this email which arrived overnight and my correspondent is quite right in what she says; both about Barthes's error and my oversight in not fact checking what he wrote and supplying a brief note of correction.    

 

II.

 

Of course, my correspondent is not the first person to have pointed out that this famous French theorist misremembered his Plutarch; Melissa Mesku, for example, also mentioned this in a brilliant piece in Lapham's Quarterly a few years back [2].

 

Founding editor of ➰➰➰ - a website that delights in recursion and weirdness [3] - Melissa Mesku is someone I greatly admire for daring to celebrate divergence rather than diversity and I thought it might be fun to examine her ideas in the above essay on Theseus's Paradox ...

 

 

III.

 

As Mesku reminds us, Theseus was the mythical hero who famously slayed the minotaur and returned victorious from Crete on a ship that the good people of Athens decided to preserve for posterity; removing old timber as it decayed and replacing it with new wood. 

 

Perhaps inevitably, this soon attracted the attention of the philosophers, who wanted to know if, after many years of such maintenance, the vessel that remained was essentially still the same ship. Some thought it was; others that it wasn't - and philosophers have been arguing over the Ship of Theseus ever since, inspiring many modern ideas to do with the persistence of identity and the return of the same. 

 

Thus, whether this tale has any historical basis or is simply an invention of Plutarch's doesn't really matter, although Mesku is keen to point out that Plutarch "is known for taking liberties as a biographer, and most of his source texts have been lost to time". Further, she adds, the veracity of Plutarch's story "seems especially dubious when we consider that Theseus himself likely never existed". 

 

Leaving the question of whether he was or was not an actual figure, Mesku rightly points out that "the conundrum of how things change and stay the same has been with us a lot longer than Plutarch". Plato, for example, certainly addressed the problem; as did pre-Socratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, to whom it was clear that you can never step in the same river twice. 

 

Two-and-a-half thousand years later, and philosophers are still puzzling their brains over this, although folksy American thinkers often prefer to articulate the question with reference to an axe belonging either to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln depending on who you ask. Followers of John Locke, meanwhile, prefer to think things in relation to an old sock [4] ...!

 

 

IV.

Moving on, Mesku returns us to Maggie Nelson's reference in The Argonauts (2015) to Roland Barthes's discussion of love and language. For Nelson, the Argo functions as a foundational metaphor - retaining what Barthes imparted to it, but also expanding as "a metaphor for the paradox of selfhood, of the 'I' which is immutable yet undergoes constant change". 

 

Since this is where my interest mostly lies - rather than with the work of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei or the ancient Japanese method of pottery repair using gold lacquer - I think I'll close this post here if I may. 

 

Like Mesku, I'm amused at how changes to Theseus's Paradox have only "augmented its paradoxical nature", whilst leaving us still faced with the question of "just how much change something can withstand without it changing into something else".

 

As a Nietzschean, however, i.e., someone who has stamped becoming with the character of being [5], it's not particularly concerning to realise that the eternal return of the same is an illusion and that what actually returns is difference.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The post referred to was entitled 'Argonauts' and published on 27 August 2024: click here.  

 

[2] Melissa Mesku, 'Restoring the Ship of Theseus: Is a paradox still the same after its parts have been replaced?', Lapham's Quarterly (21 Oct 2019): click here to read online. Lines quoted in this post are from this digital version of the work.  

[3] ➰➰➰ (spoken as 'many loops') is a website launched in 2019 that publishes prose, fiction, poetry, photo essays, and artwork alongside various hybrid forms and is preoccupied with the concept of recursion - something which Mesku explains far better than I can here.   

 

[4] Mesku suggests that Locke's version of Thesus's Paradox holds up as a metaphor and might even be preferable with a contemporary audience: "Except for one small problem. Scholars are unable to locate any references to socks in Locke's work." Despite this, it has become, according to Mesku, "the current identity paradox par excellence". 

      Personally, I think Hobbes rather than Locke provides us with a far more interesting development of Theseus's Paradox in De Corpore (1655), where, he asks: What if the discarded parts of the original ship were not destroyed, but collected and used to create a second ship? Mesku notes: "As a thought experiment, Hobbes' version solicits different philosophical proofs and can float on its own like the second ship it posits. Yet it is considered to be a mere addition, a twist - just another plank on Theseus' ship."

 

[5] See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), III. 617, p. 330. Nietzsche opens the section with the following line: "To impose upon becoming the character of being - that is the supreme will to power."

Readers interested in reading the 'Life of Theseus' should see Vol. 1 of Plutarch's Lives, trans. Aubrey Stewart and George Long (George Bell & Sons, 1894). Click here to access it as a Project Gutenberg eBook (2004) based on this edition. Section XXIII is the key section for those interested in the fate of his thirty-oared ship once it reached Athens.

 

 

Argonauts

Lorenzo Costa: The Argo

(detail of a panel painting c. 1480–90) 

Civic Museum, Padua, Italy

 

 

I. 

 

As everybody knows, the Ἀργοναῦται were the heroic crew aboard the good ship Argo who, sometime before the Trojan War kicked off, accompanied Jason on his quest to find the Golden Fleece, protected by the goddess Hera.  

 

Whether there is any historical basis to this ancient Greek myth - or whether it was pure fiction - is debatable, but hardly important. It remains, factual or not, central within the Western cultural imagination and, in the modern world, the term argonaut refers to anyone engaged in any kind of quest of discovery ...

 

 

II.       

 

For Nietzsche, a philosophical argonaut was one who continually sought out what he terms die große Gesundheit - that is to say, a form of well-being way beyond the bourgeois model of good health we've been given and endlessly told we have to protect; a form of well-being that doesn't make us superhuman, but, on the contrary, allows us to conceive of that which lies overman. 

 

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes this new and greater type of health as "more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health" [1] and he argues that anyone who wishes like an artist-philosopher to experience every desire and sail round the dangerous coastal regions of the soul, needs this great health above all else.    

Argonauts of the spirit, who stand divinely apart from others and who "with more daring than is prudent" risk disastrous shipwrecks, will eventually come upon "an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed [...] a world so overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine" that to return home no longer holds the slightest attraction.

 

 

III.

 

In 2015, the genre-defying American writer Maggie Nelson published her award-winning and best-selling book The Argonauts; a series of autotheoretical reflections on desire, identity, family, etc.

 

For Nelson, the term refers to one who sets out to explore (in a quasi-Barthesian manner [2]) the possibilities (and limitations) of love and language and she discusses in detail her relationship with the transgender artist Harry Dodge, with whom she lives in Los Angeles. 

 

This queering of the term Argonaut is certainly an interesting development and one wonders what Apollonius would have made of it ...? 

 

Of course, as almost nothing is known about this ancient Greek author who composed the epic poem about Jason and his quest to locate the Golden Fleece in the 3rd century BC - the Argonautika - it's impossible to answer this question. 

 

However, as Apollonius was clearly interested in the pathology of love, I'm fairly confident he'd approve of Nelson's "always questioning, sometimes wonderfully lyrical" [3] attempt to document the series of bodily experiments she and Harry engage in in order to construct a happy and rewarding life [4]. He might even recognise Nelson's book as belonging to a classical genre of literature that deals with queer phenomena: paradoxography. 

 

The literary critic and cultural historian Lara Feigel rightly identifies the question that haunts Nelson's book; namely, can a love that claims to be radically-other or queer unfold within a conventional domestic setting? Or, to put it another way: can one be a sexually and socially transgressive Argonaut and also a regular mom?

 

Although she attempts to get round this by insisting that "queerness can hold together forms of strangeness that have nothing to do with sexual orientation" [5], Nelson remains "conscious of the dangers of 'homonormativity' [...] and aware that the more the state opens its institutions to the LGBTQ world, the less that world will "'be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe'" [6].

 

Perhaps that's the ultimate sign of the Argonaut: someone who wants the best of both worlds; someone who thinks it reasonable to demand the impossible ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Die Fröliche Wissenschaft (1887), V. 382. I am using the English translation by Walter Kaufmann published as The Gay Science (Vintage Books, 1974). See pp. 346-347. Lines quoted here are on p. 346. 

[2] According to Nelson, the title is a reference to Barthes's idea that two people in a long-term love affair have to continually renew things without changing the form of their relationship - i.e., a bit like the Argonauts had to gradually replace each piece of their ship. Nelson expresses her surprise and joy at the manner in which love can be forever renewed. 

      See the sections Le vaisseau Argo and Le travail du mot in Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 46 and 114. 

 

[3] Lara Feigel ...'The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review - a radical approach to genre and gender' The Guardian (27 March 2016): click here. 

 

[4] Whilst Maggie busies herself becoming pregnant with a sperm donor, Harry undergoes a bilateral mastectomy and begins taking testosterone. 

 

[5-6]  Lara Feigel ... op. cit. 

 

 

Fot a follow up post to this one - on board the Ship of Theseus with Melissa Mesku - click here. 

 

I am grateful to Maria Karouso whose blog post on the Greek poet Seferis and mythic history inspired this one: click here.