the ink dark sea

“Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown.”

In The Odyssey, Odysseus is extraordinary for the flexibility with which he can inhabit many different names, or no name at all. It is this quality of being multinamed and nameless that enables him to survive. By contrast, almost all the warriors of The Iliad yearn to have a name and a story that lasts forever. Their many names and titles, as sons and brothers and comrades and fathers and rulers, are essential to their identities, their connections with one another, and their fame after death. They fear, above all, being humiliated (cursed with a negative name), or forgotten and nameless. The lists and catalogs of names are essential to the poem’s own work, of memorializing and mourning the dead. Once the bodies return to dust, these syllables are all that remain.

To die as much as necessary. […] To grow back as much as needed.

“The future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters. —Jacques Derrida6 MONSTERS ARE ADMITTEDLY horrific entities. But monsters did not sprout autonomous of context or history; they have always been in dynamic interaction with the “city” that exiles them to the wilderness. This is why monstrosity can serve as a cultural means to examine ourselves. To meet ourselves as if for the first time. And, perhaps, there could be no better time to confront ourselves than now, in these times charged with racism and extermination. I read monsters as cultural technology—as mythic figures that have always been intimately entwined with human becomings. From a time past remembering, we’ve needed monsters to define ourselves, to teach our children what not to do, to sound warnings about the future, to define the territorial boundaries of our habitats (and therefore carve out the wilderness), and to dream about the impossible. Indeed, monsters play a crucial social role: they challenge our addictions to particular forms and disturb the familiar. Their unusual appearances and queer bodies have long been employed as warnings of divine wrath to come, or something gruesome and perverse happening behind the scenes. In the sense that monsters cut through the parallelity of our lives, upsetting the business of the hour … astonishing us and opening up new considerations that were previously unavailable, they are transversal disruptions of order. They are playful reconfigurations of flesh and therefore embodiments of the radical openness of the real. Monsters teach us about the otherwise. The emerging picture is that we are truly monstrous, composite all the way down, and that if we were to meet the meaty dimensions of our bodies, we would be frightened by just how unwieldy identities are.”

Where was she? In her own head, like a dream; in the bellows of her lungs. What was she? Perhaps a child. Perhaps a corpse. Perhaps a fern in the forest in the storm; a singing bird.

“…making love is an endless attempt to find a position in which to merge with the other, a position that doesn’t exist, but looking for it exists, and knowing how to look is an art.”

I cloak myself in the opaque darkness, and for you compose these lines, whose recondite rhyme will reveal itself in a flash of divination, each word a nocturnal petal whose message sends an unfamiliar shiver up and down your spine.