4 November 2019: their jangling I esteem a sport

Monday 4 November 2019

I woke up feeling gross, hot and cold at the same time. I knew it was brewing Sunday morning, when I started feeling dizzy on my walk to a meeting, and then again when I met my friend Dina to read aloud from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and talk about it together. But then this morning I started sneezing out foul error’s children, so I’ve been taking it slow.

Lying in bed with Patsy and listening to Jenny Hval’s dreamy/creepy album Blood Bitch, which my friend Art recommended (actually I think he recommended her Apocalypse, Girl, which is also amazing, being that I am sucker for musicians weaving talking and singing together). Since finding Nina Keith’s MARANASATI 19111, I’ve been hungry for more albums that collage sounds (especially found sounds) and styles in order to narrate the exploration of the self, or to philosophize.

This morning I also read the entry on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All after watching some of a blah indie movie based on the play. Reading the Garber made me pull out HD’s Hippolytus Temporizes & Ion, because Garber points out:

…as the play has already hinted, what lies beyond is history, tragedy, fable, and loss: the offspring of Hippolyta and Theseus will be the ill-fated Hippolytus, the erotic obsession of Theseus’s second wife, Phaedra, and the beasts in the wood will not always be so gentle as the ass-headed Bottom or the timorous man-headed lion. (237)

I also pulled The Golden Ass by Apuleius (translated by Robert Graves) off the shelf. The text occupies a prominent spot in my imagination because I love its nesting stories and the version of the Cupid and Psyche it bears within. But at this moment it isn’t the story of Cupid and Psyche but the frame story I’m concerned with. Garber again:

The Roman writer Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass, translated into English in the sixteenth century, tells the story of a man who is mistakenly turned into an ass (he anoints himself with the wrong ointment, having sought to become an owl, the emblem of wisdom) and then is coaxed into a sexual relationship with a highborn lady. At one point his noble lover kisses him tenderly on the nose, rather like Titania. Since the time of the Greeks the ass has been a figure of ignorance and stupidity in fables and proverbs. But Titania’s infatuation is also clearly one of the body. It is not Bottom’s conversation that attracts the Fairy Queen. Both on the level of carnality and of social inappropriateness this “high”/“low” pairing, queen and donkey, ought to send out danger signals in addition to producing smiles of amusement. And Bottom’s hybrid status—his is not an ass but an ass-headed man—links him with the kind of monstrous creature that fascinated and horrified Elizabethans, a sign, as indeed his is, of the human capacity to degenerate into an animal state. (228)

Apologies for quoting at such length. It felt important for me to follow the whole arc from TRANSFORMATION to DESIRE FOR and FEAR OF the hybrid. For comparison: what monster (forgive me for tarrying with this overdetermined trans trope) hasn’t read Autobiography of Red (valid critiques of Carson notwithstanding) and wondered if someone couldn’t love them in their monstrosity? Bottom perhaps? Or the changeling child grown up and speaking.

 Is it very contemporary of me to think that the fear of desire for the hybrid is a species of the fear of communicability, transmission, contagion? Or perhaps it has to do with hybrids provoking withdrawal from the normative hetero circulation of desire with our HOTNESS, threatening the whole fabric or foundation of heterosexuality (pick your own favorite metaphorical schema).

One of my most clear and vivid early memories is going with my parents to see some sort of Shakespeare in the park production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was very young, so it went fully over my head, but it marked me nonetheless. And I remember my parents, and the hot summer night, the cheap polyester blanket we were sitting on offering limited protection from roving fire ants and the scratchiness of the sun-blanched crabgrass poking through it. I remember drinking cantaloupe juice—the first time I ever had—and watching until my sister got restless and then I did, and we packed up and went home.

I remember later on, watching the 1968 Peter Hall version with Judi Dench, on a VHS cassette my Dad checked out of the library. Its 60s new age nudie hippy energy influenced how I imagine this imaginary world. Later watching the 1999 Michael Hoffman version with Kevin Kline. Listening to Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation. These are ordinary memories of a text twisting through a life. Easier to catalogue names and titles and point to moments of viewing than to string together moments of sylvan reverie.  

I love this magic wood. It’s never been good enough for me to visit the magic wood and return—I want to live there, in all its confusion and liminality. The carnivalesque, as I understand it, is meant to channel chaos in order to restore order. What would happen on a midsummer’s night cut off at the knees? In which the patriarchal Apollonian order of Theseus is never restored? Going further, what if even the Dionysian misrule of Oberon were upended? I speculate about what it would feel like if these were Titania’s woods.

Thomas the Rhymer, votary of the Fairy Queen. Hippolytus, votary of Artemis. Zoe…votary of femininity? But not some Gravesian White Goddess soft boy, but someone who prayed to the gods to be changed and was—albeit under permanent suspicion, never to be a full citizen of the category woman.

An ex of mine, a gamer and a cosplayer, wanted to know why I couldn’t be content to play at different identities, rather than to really become them and be them in an ongoing way. It feels important to mention that this wasn’t just about transgender, but about queerness, too, and anarchy, and magic. One last quote from Garber:

The wood world and the fairies un-metaphor these metaphors, literalizing figures of speech, creating an interior space—we could call it the unsconscious—where people who act like asses look like asses. (218)

When I say I long for the woods it is for a simultaneously enchanted and un-metaphorized space, correspondent to the un-metaphorized reality of being a trans woman. Call it twee if you want, but sometimes I perceive in the small social world in which I move and am correctly recognized and in which I recognize others, as a kind of fairy court.