Trying to write this post, I’ve been re-reading an essay by Kevin Killian, Poison, which apart from being about New Narrative and life writing and all that other good stuff, is also about “trying to write this piece, Poison… the ways in which the writer’s personality dissolves as it weaves in and out of the sentences he or she so painfully struggles to produce.”
I love so many writers who have seem to have a daily practice, or a clearly discernible critical perspective, where the writing just seems to come – obviously not perfect – but already in frame or in style to represent their whole deal. Or maybe that’s what it seems to me from the outside. Maybe some people are better at obscuring the labor of craft, or maybe I’m just jealous. Either way, thinking about reviving Mixed Feelings, there’s no way for insecurity to not untuck a little from the edges of myself. Back in the tumblr days I preferred the outskirts, lurking in awe of Lazz’s textual acuity, Jeanne’s eloquent panache and not saying a whole lot outside of reblogging actually, if we’re being honest. Not that being more dissolute in the scroll didn’t mean I didn’t perform. I sure did. But maybe it meant I didn’t worry about being consistent and I liked that. In some ways I don’t know how to do this platform not testing versions of myself – unfiltered, drafty or uncooked.
“I’m standing on a flat plain, and then, or so it seems, a little hole appears in the sand ahead of me. The hole grows larger in diameter, this is my sanity, and all the little pieces of my sanity are breaking up and slipping down into the hole,” Kevin writes. “While writing… I notice a host of familiar symptoms. Nobody calls me on the phone. I feel so isolated. I can’t hear very well and wonder if I’m going deaf like Beethoven, like Brian Wilson. When people do speak it’s with loud, ultra-charged voices, as though they’re annoyed with me. I feel like I’m losing my mind and with my mind, the meaning of life I once held onto.”
I wrote the sentence “it’s nice to hear Kevin struggle,” but I didn’t mean it. Because it doesn’t seem like Kevin’s struggling to write about writing so much as it sounds like he’s lonely. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then, that he ensconces himself in the social for the rest of the essay, compiling a bunch of quotes from other poets he admires, culling written representations of himself from writing by friends and lovers. Some texts he sifts through; Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Dodie Bellamy’s description of his flaccid cock in The Letters of Mina Harker, a vitriolic and anonymous note that derides his work, accuses him of being another misogynist homosexual. Sometimes, when Kevin parses these facsimiles of his person and thinks through how he’s received by others (not uh, without a few artfully ruffled feathers), it becomes difficult to tell what’s his slanted poetics, what’s an external account and what Kevin’s unconsciously caricaturizing about himself.
And yet, after all that, still he reaches the end of the essay still not writing, “trying not to write.”
Instead; the hole in front of him widens. The objects and ephemera that compose his life – books, movies, foods –swirl down, cave in. Ineffable gravity as he too, slides towards the void –
“I’m next, perhaps, hold on to me,” Kevin writes.
How to write about one’s life, without losing oneself to others?
Maybe I don’t know how. My favorite thing about Kevin is that I’m not sure he ever did either.
Probably it’s like, gauche or something for me to talk about writing or not writing when there’s COVID at hand, but everything is gauche in comparison to COVID and faced with it, sometimes my feeling is that people don’t know what else to talk about. They still ask me what I’m working on though, probably more out of a matter of habit than anything else. I’m always like, what can I write when I don’t even know what to say, I don’t have anything to say.
But then, “I think performance of self is a really important site of knowledge, actually. For me,” I say to Lazz on the phone and then feel like a fucking idiot.
Because okay, the truth is I haven’t been ‘writing’ towards any kind of goal, but I’ve needed to write nonetheless as a matter of figuring out my shit. And apparently what that looks like is like spitting up close to 200k of fanfiction in the past year or so, an activity I haven’t been so fully committed to since high school. For those unfamiliar, idk, look it up. Most days, I grasp for what fandom is, or is to me and come up embarrassed and stuttering. Is it gross porn, yes. Epic romance, sometimes? Collective consciousness? That too. Intertextual experiment or archive? Maybe fan studies chose to legitimize it that way, which fine, I guess. Hive mind. Friendship. Discourse (derogatory). Object-cathexis (affectionate). All of those things at once.
There’s a lot to say about my return to fandom after over a decade obviously, and even if I’m into public processing, it would be kind of a Lot to get into it On Here. But suffice to say, as much as it’s been about comfort, sure, regression, maybe, it’s also been about the bizarre and inherently queer intimacy of getting to know others online based almost entirely on the type of porn they like to read – their specific kinks and sexual preferences – before knowing anything else about their lives. It can feel more honest that way. I mean, how tame a confession is what food someone likes to eat or what books they like to read if I already know they’re into erotic cannibalism. That age-old adage that you learn more about someone from the way they like to fuck or whatever.
My friend Lee often talks about fandom as public sex culture, like the leather bar or the backroom, and to be honest that’s probably the closest analogy we’re going to get. So much in fandom is ambiently promiscuous – all that rubbing between reader and author, text and fantasy, collective consciousnesses and cultural trend, sex and voyeurism, politics and representation, art and genre. Everything misted with the damp, atmospheric air of the slightly horny. But it’s also always necessarily restrained or mediated – by the internet, geographic distance, levels of anonymity and curated timelines, textual performances. If Lazz talks about “the lubricated seventies of the past and the lonely fifties of now,” then I’m not sure what this kind of space is, where there’s sexual content but not sex, displaced personal disclosure but no ascertained fact, deeply vulnerable projection but no self.
I mean, whatever, look, we’ve all read enough theory to know that what’s hot almost definitely ethical, so I’m not positioning fandom as a utopic space by any means. As with any writing, what’s fucked up about the world gets inevitably dragged into that space too. Not to mention fandom’s still operates primarily through digital-social platforms and the internet, the engine upon which it all runs has no shortage of problems, if there’s anything the self-imploded undead tumblr twitterverse substack cluster has taught us. Still, there’s something about fandom that’s buoyed me, an alternate form of intimate contact at a time where everything is shrink wrapped and “the zoom screen delineates the property lines of the liberal self.” (Lazz) No one makes any money from writing fic really. I have not felt the kind of fuck-it no-stakes energy I’ve felt writing it since I was 13 and writing was what I did for no reason other than it allowed me to share an imaginary with friends and that was a lot of fucking fun.
There’s no way to dance with new paramours or friends in these times, not in any kind of real way; with abandon. But with some of the connections and collective libidinal energy I’ve shared in fandom have produced something… proximal to that, maybe not physically but psychically. That can produce that satisfyingly visceral stomach-curl.
What I do know: there’s pleasure there. That’s not anything to sneeze at.
Once, in a moment of emotional distress, and on the edge of doing something consequential and foolish, as I am so often compelled to do, Jane texted me sternly “yeah, you can’t melodrama your way out of this.”
Unfortunately, she was right, and it was helpful.
What Jane had been referring to in this context was, of course, less related to melodrama’s generic features – a reliance upon scripts and formulas to evoke high sentiment through a number of cliched permutations – and more my desire to find a quick ending to a complex social problem, however illogical. Just the quickest route between point A and B. My desperate quest for a rushed and unrealistic conclusion, imposed upon the situation arbitrarily by means of extreme happiness or tragedy. That patented false ending.
I have narrativized my life for a long time and LOL, continue to do it. I am an addict in all senses of the term. But in the enduring present of ‘personal’ social media branding and mobilizations of experience through legible identity categories, it’s feeling weirder and grosser to use the partitioned events of what’s happened to me as the tenants of any intellectual argument. I used to say that it was important to live critical theory as a way of understanding it and theorize within the messy geometries of my relationships, but maybe I read too much affect theory at an impressionable age.
Maybe all I’ve been doing is trying to file down the ragged tips of my experience; force it into the forms of theoretical hypotheses and conclusions that feel purposeful in a deeply uncertain time. Definition is very attractive, like muscle. Polemics and declarations are good means of melodrama-ing myself out of whatever should have been left alone to mellow and ripen, and maybe decay. Like, surely I’ve watched enough Sirk and Fassbinder to know that it doesn’t actually work?!
Sometimes, I think fiction writers are so much more brutally honest in how their stories contain aspects of their lives. Life writers need to be much better liars.
Kevin writes, “every time I write it’s to expose to the air of the page a false part of my personality… part of my own need to find myself on centerstage always.” Same, and it’s exhausting it turns out, to inhabit a self that’s slipping away all the time. To constantly draft stylized sketches of me to justify whatever abstract concepts I’m noodling around, or trying to compose some strident “take” or argument about.
“I’m good at making people think they know me; very few people actually do,” I say to a new friend and then feel like a fucking idiot.
“I was going to say, that actually sounds very lonely,” another says to me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how fanfiction can take many forms, from pure porn without plot to realist novel-length escapade or screwball romantic comedy. But I tend to write stories where the setup is fraught with interpersonal conflict and the erotics/romance end up serving as stand-in – for an impossible solution to an irresolvable political or theoretical problem. Trying to plug that gap with experiential intensity but ultimately, everything left hanging out.
“haha u found me out that [redacted] is basically jen doyles entire argument in fic form and i am NOT sorry,” I type at Lee one afternoon on Discord, after they’ve completed their first read of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art and clocked similarities between Doyle’s argument and the intellectual thrust of a piece of fanfiction I’ve posted set in the performance art world. In another of my fics, the development of a three-way love affair takes precedence over the minute details of militant leftist infighting. I almost write a remix of a scene in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria where French kissing in a sound studio would patch over the stunningly off-kilter, awkward articulation of difference the film seems to propose.
Weird not weird, I guess, to realize that writing fanfiction like this does a lot of emotional work for me actually. Like, this way I can articulate the maze of my paranoid thinking about art or theory; the contours of how the world’s real and terrible, yeah, but at least I don’t have to pretend I’m capable of saying anything smart beyond wanting to cry or jerk off about it or both.
Making whoever reads my silly little stories want to do the same.
Is that a kind of touching?
My friends and collaborative duo Snack Syndicate write this after Sedgwick, in their incredible book Homework:
“Touch is not a leveling gesture, even when reciprocated… Touch does not make us undifferentiated from the one we touch, nor does being touched mean we become the one who touches us. If anything, the opposite is true: touching emphasizes difference – otherwise we would not experience it as touch at all. And so, we might desire the kinds of touching and feeling that bring us into social and collective forms; a touching and feeling that seeks not to possess that which is being touched but to hold on and then let go. Perhaps we can be more careful in our touching and more critical of our being touched, more careful with the tendency to equate touching with identifying, identifying with seeing, seeing with knowing, and knowing with possessing.”
Recently I’ve been reading this quote compulsively, because or better or for worse, ‘touch’ these days is weighted with constant negotiation – and rather than it being fraught, I want to believe it’s a site that can feel critical, generative – in our nostalgia for touching, our search for new and different forms of it.
Maybe I’m naïve. I’m clearly prone to romance. But –
“Hold on to me,” I read Kevin beg an invisible spectator outside of the frame – right as he’s about to disappear into the hole and grasping for a hand that will never come. He knows he’s made it this way. I do too. And it strikes me that maybe I no longer want to proffer myself or my life to be seen or read in the ways that I’m used to. Not in email, or on twitter or zoom calls, or on the page, none of those glitchy representations that I used to treasure for being archly performative or slyly fake. Maybe I just want to be touched in a way that makes me feel – not like an entity to be deciphered and slotted into place – but situated in the ongoing process of being known. Not as object but in that nebulous, reciprocal way of being shaped by others.
Someone’s hand on the nape of my neck, or my nails skritching gently through their hair. Contact – brief enough to simmer my insides, but intent enough to let me know where I stand. Where the shared outlines blur but we can still belong to ourselves.
And as for Mixed Feelings – maybe it isn’t that, exactly. So much about what I’ve written here already feels frustratingly familiar. Well-trod, both in form and content. Somatic memory, undead return in the scroll, tired PowerPoint presentation from 2016.
Here I am, like Kevin, still not writing, just recollecting and being collected. Maybe I do identify with him, too much.
I want to believe this can be a space to prod around about it. To hesitate and think and yeah, touch maybe, without obligation. How else are we going to find a different way to be.
[redacted] leans down. Soft kiss, grazing his forehead. “[redacted],” he says, fingers cruel in his hair.
When [redacted] comes—wet eyes, arched back—it’s on a pretty half-sob. His volley of masks cracked open, scattering light over the tenderest parts of himself.
And later in bed, slack and sinuous, he binds the rest of [redacted]’s wounds. Lets [redacted] lick the rest of it off his hands. Tongue flat against the creases of [redacted]’s palm, past the dents of each knuckle. [redacted]—who savors every drop, the viscous slide of come and blood and medicine down the back of his throat—and burns. With the unfitness of—whatever this is—the push-pull of it, this love.
How because of it, they’ve found a way to keep going that’s not about dying, or living; or anyone else’s illusion of what might come.
Just breathing and a pulse. Suspended sunrise. What’s here. What’s now.
“Stay,” [redacted] says. There’s meaning to his tone. A halfway look in [redacted]’s eyes.
Anticipation too, can be a posture. Coiled tension before a jump.
Hold me. I won’t mind if you let go.
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