Wear your Heart on your Sleeve
Two years ago I saw this book popping up everywhere. Everyone loved it, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. I bought it too, I read it, and I didn’t understand the slightest. I got the story. She was together with a non-binary person, Harry, who was on testosterone as she took extra hormones so she could get pregnant. They went through IVF after IVF, it cost them a fortune. But she got pregnant, and gave birth to a son, Iggy. That’s what I remembered. Nothing else.
In the bookshop my boyfriend drags me to every week, I didn’t want to buy anything. I already had this big pile of books I was never going to read. Until I saw Bluets. By Maggie Nelson. I was afraid to start it because my expectations were high, and I started going through The Argonauts again. And suddenly it all made much more sense.
She writes about her life, she tells us everything. On the first page she wrote this incredible three sentences:
“'The words ‘I love you’ come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? ‘What’s your pleasure?’ you asked, then stuck around for an answer.'
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'Some people find pleasure in aligning themselves with an identity, as in You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman—made famous by Aretha Franklin and, later, by Judith Butler, who focused on the instability wrought by the simile. But there can also be a horror in doing so, not to mention an impossibility. It’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered selfconsciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature.
A friend says he thinks of gender as a color. Gender does share with color a certain ontological indeterminacy: it isn’t quite right to say that an object is a color, nor that the object has a color. Context also changes it: all cats are gray, etc. Nor is color voluntary, precisely. But none of these formulations means that the object in question is colorless.' (from The Argonauts)
A friend says he thinks of gender as a color. Gender does share with color a certain ontological indeterminacy: it isn’t quite right to say that an object is a color, nor that the object has a color. Context also changes it: all cats are gray, etc. Nor is color voluntary, precisely. But none of these formulations means that the object in question is colorless.' (from The Argonauts)
Color. Colorless.
Her other book, Bluets, the one I bought in a bookshop in Gent. It’s about her lifelong obsession with the color blue, about heartbreak, about depression. In numbered short stories, she lets us have a peak at the relationship that broke off, what she read, at her thoughts about color:
38. For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it’s orange, that we’re normal.'
The backcover of the book links it to Roland Barthes’s A lover’s Discourse. Just like that book, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken. This was my state this summer. It was also the time I started my blog, when I decided I was ready to share almost everything with almost everyone. When Verwoert talks about the I CARE, the act of giving what you don’t have to people who don’t want it — an act that is more affective than effective, I feel home. I don’t know what my writing is offering people, what my Pink Performance was. All I know was that I cared, and I care about everyone who reads and sees it it. But it’s also so scary, and I’m not alone:
196. (...) Clearly I am not a private person, and quite possibly I am a fool. “Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!” Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Sei Shōnagon felt similarly: “Whatever people may think of my book,” she wrote after her pillow book gained fame and notoriety, “I still regret that it ever came to light.'
My mom won’t read my blog, because she tried once, and all she could think was “oh honey, just come home."