The Damnable Bell

In preparation for publishing a new chapbook of poems that use images from the myth of Ys, I wrote this little piece on Joanna Newsom's song "Sawdust and Diamonds" from her 2006 album Ys.

For those who don't know, Ys was a city off the coast of Breton, France, that was flooded and sunk in the Middle Ages by its Queen, Dahut. I'm (re-)writing my own myth of Ys that will be released with the new poems, so to get the basics of the story refer to these sources for now, and know that there is more to come. A few key details to know: my reading is a feminist one. I do not cast Dahut as a corrupt woman. In my story of Ys Gradlon, her father, is to blame for Ys' corruption and eventual destruction. Thank you to Bird Lindsey for this summary of one possible feminist story of Ys: "In some stories Dahut's painted as a woman of lust having many lovers and being evil and flooding the city when she didn't get her way. I see it as a woman who was born at sea, who resembled her mother, which brought her father joy and pain. He built a city for his lost love and Dahut on the water so he would never have to leave his dead wife. How I see it is, Dahut represents women and the city is patriarchy... [Dahut] is accused when she doesn't love men back; they make up lies because their pride has been hurt about her being a 'whore.' [Dahut] finally destroys the city...just like how we have to destroy our society that was built for us, without our consent."

___

Joanna Newsom resurfaces the story of Ys in her album of the same name. The track "Sawdust and Diamonds" most directly references the story of Dahut, daughter of Gradlon and Queen of Ys. In the first verse Newsom sings: "drop a bell down the stairs / hear it fall forevermore / drop a bell off a dock / blot it out in the sea / drowning mute as a rock / sounding mutiny." This lyric is a reference to the church bells of Ys, which rang wildly in the vacuum that the ocean's rushing water created as it devoured the city. In Breton the bells can still be heard when one is out at sea.

Like Dahut's narrative, "Sawdust and Diamonds" (as well as many other tracks on the album) tells the story of Newsom's manipulation. Over the course of the song she is turned into a series of puppets--a woman, dove, a donkey--and is handled and forced to perform over and over. Who moves her is unclear; we imagine a man, but Newsom continually addresses herself: "settle down, settle down, my desire."

Though Newsom appears conflicted about the role she plays in an abusive relationship, it is clear that her lover isn't a safe person. Newsom sings "push me back into a tree / bind my buttons with salt / fill my long ears with bees / praying please, please, please / love, you ought not! / no, you ought not!" This image--Newsom as a clumsy animal with a buzzing in her ears attempting to fend off a violent hand--comes shortly after her portrait of herself in a public cameo with the same person: "and the articulation in our elbows and knees / makes us buckle as we couple in endless increase / as the audience admires."

These vignettes are punctuated by the image of "a little white dove / made with love / made with love / made with glue and a glove / and some pliers." As the song progresses, Newsom reveals that the dove is also herself: "and a system of strings / tugs on the tips of my wings / see me warble and rise like a sparrow." However, it isn't until close to the end of the song that the origin of the dove is revealed: "A slow lip of fire moves across the prairie with precision / while, somewhere with your pliers and glue, you make the first incision / and in a moment of almost-unbearable vision / doubled over with the hunger of lions / 'hold me close' coos the dove / who is stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds." In this verse there is no escaping that the same "you" being addressed throughout the song as both Newsom's collaborater and manipulator is also the one who created her.

Finally Newsom tears it all down: "and I crash through the rafters / and the ropes and the pulleys trail after / and the holiest belfry burns sky-high... / then I hear a noise from the hull / seven days out to sea / and it is the damnable bell / and I believe that it tolls / that it tolls for me!" Again Newsom's ambivalence about her own guilt or implication in the relationship surfaces, but we see the choice she has made. Ys, Gradlon, the dove, the knight--they're left behind in the ocean. Newsom closes "Sawdust and Diamonds" with the image that opens it--she stands "at the top of the flight / of the wide white stairs," presumably looking down at the sea and wondering: "though the rest of my life / do you wait for me there?"

Lost like a Snakeskin in High Grass: Queerness, Trauma, and Accountability

tw: sexual assault

When I opened my laptop to start this piece, "Where is My Mind?" by the Pixies started playing in the bar I am writing at in Portland, OR. Coincidence, sadness, and the importance of place all mark the intersection of my queerness and my mental health, so this feels like an incredibly fitting start. Appropriately enough, since my task in this essay is looking back at myself, I was at the Gemini Lounge. 

I think I've felt crazy for as long as I've felt queer and sexual. Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I began having intense dreams and hallucinations about my missing penis, fucking someone who had tits and a cock, losing my own breasts, and being/becoming a boy. I stopped recognizing myself in the mirror. During this period of time I vividly remember staring at anonymous, often elderly men and women on the subway and feeling so emotionally dead that I could be attracted to anyone. I felt so depressed and scared, by some of these feelings but mostly in general, that I entered counseling. I started taking Zoloft and was put on a high-ethisterone birth control (an early testosterone analog) because my cycle was extremely irregular and infrequent. I had my first genital lesion as a result of Beçet's syndrome, my autoimmune disorder. I frequently vocalized feeling bad, wrong, and incomplete as a girl or with a "girl" body.

However I was also definitely confused and secretive about my sexuality. Unfortunately for me, there was nobody around to hear and respond to my confusion in a way that helped me make sense of those feelings. I was obsessed with the L word (with Shane), obsessed with my best friend Violet [name has been changed], who I fell in love with, obsessed with myself and with the power that older androgynous women and men around me seemed to hold. It was a confusing time during which I generally left decisions about my identity to the people who encountered me.

I felt this vague about myself in the next year, 2007, as well. Beginning around June I started hanging out exclusively with a group of 20 year old straight men and Violet. Drawn there because Violet was being pursued by a few of them, I was the youngest person in the group. I realized quickly that if I was to hold my own with everyone I had perform straight and vulnerable. And so began one of many processes of sublimation, repression, and confusion of myself. I let my hair grow even longer than before. I did a lot of things I thought a good "bad" girl would do to get attention. And, during it all, I was even more deeply infatuated with Violet. Even at the time, I knew I was performing for these boys because I wanted to be near her. I wanted her to see me as they would if I pleased them: as worthy of attention.

And so, over that summer, I gave up my dream of being or passing as a boy. I hid in a straight community so that I could be near the girl I loved, and along they way I repeatedly either dipped my toe into or was dragged down by the undertow of experimenting with a straight identity.

I can say that my first experience of being "out" as queer -- of outing myself -- came after I was sexually assaulted by a man at the end of that summer. At the time of my assault I was almost seventeen, and the perpetrator was the first anonymous straight man I attempted to pick up as (in my mind at the time) a cis girl. I noticed a boy who had graduated from my high school, age 20 or so, in the same subway car as me and invited him to a house party. I often think about what my life would be like absent that moment of horror and horrible luck; if I hadn't been brave enough to pick up a near stranger on the subway, and if he hadn't decided to rape me.

This assault, which came after my attempt to hack it as a cis woman, suddenly inverted of all my attempts to survive in the straight world. Though I wouldn't realize it for many years, being assaulted after my first confident sexual move as a "woman" exploded the effectiveness of presenting or being female as a strategy for survival in my mind. Flaunting my femininity was suddenly dangerous, and shortly after my assault I shaved my head with the help of my one out lesbian friend. In that moment I gave up worrying about straight male reactions towards my own presentation because I felt like I would never want to be touched by a boy again. In other words, I felt I had nothing to lose by looking gay.

It was a genuine surprise to me when I started feeling interested in a male friend a few weeks later. When he and I started seeing each other the friend who shaved my head accused me of being a faker. Somewhat of a prince in our scene, she used her own social capital to police my presentation, remarking after I ran into her at a show that it was too bad I wasn't actually gay, because with my short hair I finally looked like someone she'd want to fuck. This is the place where the narrative of my assault, my feelings about gender and sexuality, and my experience of what I would later come to call mental illness first coalesced--outside the Knitting Factory in NYC, being harassed for somehow inauthentically performing my own queerness.

Her jab confused me. It was no secret that in 2006 I'd fallen frighteningly in love with Violet, that she'd stopped talking to me in part because of it, and that we'd had sex a few times. I think that Violet stopped speaking to me then, and even feared me, because I wanted to be her. Or perhaps more accurately, I wanted to be what I thought she was -- someone capable of living outside of gender, outside of the oppression and power of the binary, and of getting away with it.

Despite having no exposure to a self-proclaimed queer community, both Violet and I chafed at the social expectations levied upon us as women. The difference between me and Violet was that -- in my eyes at least -- she had the kind of body and the kind of confidence that could carry androgeny, whereas I did not. She was able to move fluidly between male and female worlds and aesthetics, but especially as her shorter, younger, and heavier sidekick I felt exiled to inexorably failing at being female. Since I was in love with her, and specially if I had failed at being a boy as well, how could I not be a gay woman?

My infatuation spiked again after a reunion in the early months of 2007, but not too long after I was assaulted Violet insisted on another period of separation from me. Strangely, at the time of our falling out in 2007 the pain of failing to mirror the person I was in love with (and, in my mind, losing their love as a result) felt fresher than what I conceptualized at the time as a negative and painful one night stand. In many ways, separating from Violet was actually emotionally harder than surviving rape. On a social level, being assaulted seemed to take away a power I'd been toying with, but unsure of; losing Violet felt like forever being cut off from the source of my identity.

What I didn't count on in my process of self-care and surviving was the extent to which my brain was affected by my rapist's attack. In the six months that followed I would become increasingly uncritical about the straightness of my appearance, but this confidence was accompanied by an accelerated descent into another psychological world, one which I now recognize as being marked by persistent and severe dissociation. My memories of that time feel underwater, hazy, and like they're saved in a different file than all the others in my brain. I was doing a lot of drugs in the winter of 2007, but I also remember distinctly and consistently feeling as though a part of me was lost. I felt like a new, ruined person, capable of anything and nothing. That was the first time I started actively seeking out self-identifying queer people as sexual partners.

∞

I'm 23 now. In the last seven years I've spent a huge amount of time working on surviving my assault and managing the PTSD it left me with. In my freshman and sophomore years of college I experienced my first PTSD symptoms, and they were accompanied by a wild resurgence of femme and female pride. For the first time in my life I had something in common with a lot of other women and girls: I had been sexually violated. I made art around this, organized around it, and constructed a spirituality based upon it. I began identifying as a feminist. I spoke the birth monologue when my college's feminist student union performed the Vagina Monologues.

But, slowly, queerness came back again. It took me almost three more years to understand, finally, that I could be a queer, genderqueer survivor of sexual assault. That my assault didn't mark me as woman. My body, my mental health, and my experience of gender had been so shaped by an instance of gendered sexual violence that I didn't stop feeling like a(n increasingly uncomfortably failing) girl until I accepted and acknowledged how huge a role having sexual trauma played in my self-identification as female. Now that I know definitively that I don't have to be female to have a legitimate experience as a survivor of assault, I feel much, much more able to articulate my identity and my needs.

The arc of my story could end here, but I keep coming back to the year before my assault, 2006: when I first started feeling queer and also when I first started feeling like something was wrong with me. I have asked myself what happened to make me feel so depressed countless times.

I believe that part of it was being raised with an anemic attitude towards the discussion of personal boundaries. My parents didn't inquire about my sex life or my gender; they also didn't inquire about my reaction to the increasingly scary emotional outbursts of my little brother, the person in my family whose problems are easiest to see. In my home during the middle of high school, I felt like plastic bag in a windstorm: neglibigle, manipulable, disappearable. I felt like it didn't matter where I landed, who used me for what, or if I ended up carrying dogshit or diamonds inside me. My parents were too worried about dumbing down the wind. I was openly in love with Violet, dressing like a boy, and coming downstairs from my room with hickies on my neck from another girl, and my parents said nothing. We only talked about my sexuality when a different friend punched me in the face. My parents asked me if I was dating her. We had one conversation that I can remember about my decision to enter therapy, and it ended once they ascertained I wasn't an immediate threat to myself.

In my current work around mental health, I'm concerned that because of this neglect and the neglect inherent in my assault, I tacitly permit myself to disrespect the boundaries of other queer people. Though I've positively identified as a survivor and a feminist for years, I've had some friends tell me that my behavior in certain spaces fits a worrying pattern. They see that I enter scenarios where I feel disempowered by other queer friends, and react by attempting to dominate and disempower them.

I can't leave this part of the story out. I own the fact that my assault, my confusion about my gender, my neglect: these do not excuse ways in which I am negligent, harmful, and confusing. I am extremely grateful to my community for pointing out this behavior because, at this point in my life especially, I yearn to be recognized as a whole, healthy, and (most importantly) safe person. I can't be that until I know who I am; until I know that I am. This is the first time I've had a queer community to respond to my failures, my bad decisions, my unaccountability, my attempts to hide the dark parts of me. Thank you for your consenting contributions to my process of integration as an out, proud genderqueer person who hopes to be cusping on sane.

So Yr Born on the Cusp

"So you're born on the cusp / or it's a run of bad luck / yeah it's bigger than us / it's bigger than love / it's underhanded / and you never feel it... so you never look back / yeah you never look back."

The American Analog Set's Born on the Cusp, a breathy song about love lost to bad stars, has stuck with me for years. I always want to put it on mixtapes for people to remind them of me, but then quickly remember that the song is actually about walking away from a cusp-born sweetheart who is just too confused and fucked to get their shit together and pick a self--or a someone--to stick with. It's sad, but I could listen forever.

As a tween and a teenager my confusion about being born on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius was much sharper than the ambivalence expressed by AAS' drizzly aesthetic. My feelings about astrology were marked by perpetual crisis best characterized by the question: "am I or aren't I?", and much of my life being a "scorpittarius" -- born on the cusp of revolution -- was a turbulent experience. It was scary to feel like I wasn't placed in any order; like I could swing both ways but never come to rest in either.

I would tell people that I was technically a Sagittarius, but that it was close enough to be a coin toss as to what I really was. This flexibility provided a mutable security for me for a while, but as soon as I hit puberty I longed to be secure in the knowledge of myself as being only, purely, and truly a Scorpio.

The sexual politics of middle school were definitely where my obsession with the "status" of my sign began. Now that I know more about astrology feeling secure as a Scorpio sounds like an oxymoron, but as a naive kiddo the Scorpio ethos oozed cool. I resented my four-hours-shy birthtime (yes, I looked it up) almost as much as the dowdy sportswear and precautions against gossiping too loudly that were leveled weekly at Saggitarians who read Teen Vogue in the early 00's.
I wanted to be sexy!

By 12 I recognized (like many of my peers) that sex appeal is power. I pined for the watery mystery and turgid hotness of the Scorpio thing. I wanted that vibe, really badly. So I just told everybody I was one. After all, a couple of magazines did say that I squeaked in on the last day. It was weird to realize that I could lie about something so (seemingly)significant to my identity and get away with it. Trying to suss out the cusp thing was probably one of my earliest attempts at both drag and self-deception.

While I did care about astrology in middle school, I was more interested in it for fashion than philosophy; my either/or anxiety surrounding astrology-as-ontology really ramped up in high school. I became best friends with a really intense Scorpio I from Upstate New York and the Lower East Side, and a lot of our relationship was based on what she and I saw as our shared Scorpio pathos and displacement. Of course half the time I was freaking out about being an impostor, but for a while I managed to channel this anxiety by learning as much as I could about Scorpio and scorpions in order to effectively cross over to the water side of my hybrid existence. Did you know that scorpions fuck for 24 hours, glow under UV radiation, and taste and smell with six nerve bundles that grow out of their stomachs? Or that Scorpio actually has three manifestations--scorpion, serpent, and eagle--that represent the sign's often ignored narrative of transcendence?

More than anything Scorpio seemed to be an almost Nietzschean sign: dark as fuck but hell-bent on self-improvement no matter (and here's the unfortunate Scorpio cross to bear) how self-destructive the means might be. As someone who was pretty much obsessed with the idea of the übermensch in high school, it's not surprising that this sign was my golden ideal. So I worked really hard (no matter the means) at perfecting what I saw as the perfect Scorpio persona: critical, dramatic, scathing, Machiavellian, and uncompromising. Fortunately I didn't know anything about Ayn Rand yet.
For the most part my hardball Scorpio self was sustainable, except that I noticed myself becoming less and less happy the more I tried to avoid what I characterized as, well, happiness; without totally realizing it, I had linked feeling satisfied firmly with a Sagittarius point of view. So, for a couple years at least, I stuck with the hard road of the Scorpio process. I made and lost a lot of friends.

Looking back, I think my troubled experience with cuspiness acted as a placeholder for deeper anxieties and questions I had about how the outer world shaped and marked me as a human being. My concern about which sign I was mirrored questions I was starting to ask concerning deeper facets of my identity. As I grew I started to wonder: had something really bad happened to me in childhood or not? If so, what the f was it? Did I have depression or anxiety? Could I have both? Was I gay or straight; what even the fuck was up with bisexuality? At the time of my preoccupation, the answers to these questions (that I liked) all seemed to be given explanation with a Scorpio personality. As a Scorpio I could be unhappy, but ok. It seemed like a Sagittarius identity came with the necessary caveat of total(ly embarrassing) self-confidence.

Being a cusp sign is something that only began to sit well with me once I learned more about how brains--and mine in particular--grow and develop. In college I learned that trauma can cause brains to literally split into two--albeit very differently sized--areas of function: one where trauma is stored on ice, and one where normal brain function still occurs. It's like staying in a hotel that you realize, after one too many wrong turns late at night, has a huge secret meatlocker full of creepy stuff that might not be as frozen--or trapped--as you think. In other words, when something really bad happens to you it's pretty normal to feel like you're constantly trying to solve a huge and high-stakes mystery about what's actually inside you. For me, trying to understand my sign often pointed to this process.

However, I don't want to reduce the essence of my feelings and attitudes towards astrology to surviving trauma. Getting over the Scorpio thing definitely did engage and involve something beyond how coming to know and accept that experience changed me. Returning to my fire roots was as much a choice as alienating myself from them. As I grew up, I came to see tremendous value in the flames that used to just turn my murky waters into steam. Instead of ruthlessly discomforting myself in a patriarchal and masochistic attempt at personal growth, these days I put a lot more stock in sticking my nose in the wind and running with the things that excite me. I like striving to meet the goal of being embarrassingly self-confident. I like knowing that being all brash and Jovian and loud has helped tremendously my ability to advocate for myself. I did this work on my own, but it's cool to be able to accept and identify with a sign that advocates for the outward, enthusiastic, unselfconscious and unfettered devotion to the things we love.

Plus, it's nice to just be half-something and not have to change or worry about it. I'm part beast, and it feels good to have heat under my hooves again.

response to Patriarchy in the Movement

tw: sexual assault

i used to be really freaked out by riot porn and super not into what i conceived to be politically "violent" tactics (mostly property destruction, oddly most acts of interpersonal violence from positions of subjugation that i heard about made sense to me even if this didn't). i was even unsettled by militant feminism. looking back, this was definitely because i still wasn't ready or able to accept the amount of violence that i've been exposed to in my own life. at the period in my healing process that i was starting to encounter a lot of new political tactics (about a year and a half ago, when Occupy started up), i was definitely still living in a much more sensitive and emotionally evasive place than i am now. 

i felt, at that time, like exposing myself to more "violence" would cause me to become further traumatized and scar me more.

the interesting thing is that the more nuanced my understanding of power became--and thus, the more i was exposed to political content that i previously would have deemed "violent"--the less easily triggered i became. the more i came to terms with the fact that others in the world had been hurt and responded by lashing out, the more enabled i was to come alive emotionally. for so long i was frozen by the fear of violence and cloistered by my determination to avoid it. i truly never expected that this would happen--i literally never thought that accepting that i'd been harmed would allow me to overcome being further hurt by it. as such, being reminded of the trauma i carry actually did cause those references to be further traumatizing. it was only once i started allowing myself to feel the deep fear and sadness i carried as a result of being assaulted and privy to emotional abuse that i was able to move out of the paralysis that had held me for so long.

i thought about this most recently after the panel about Patriarchy in the Movement that was held at the Red & Black. after a surprise callout and an offensive attempt to shut it down, things got really heated. at one point an amazing woman named María was shouting angrily about the way that rape culture has formed the very basis of her existence. she was literally yelling about the fact that her ancestry--she's mixed Latina--is a product of rape. 

a year ago, i would have likely felt like María's anger was violent in a way that i wouldn't have been able to tolerate. It would have terrified me, because i would have identified with it. it would have shaken me deeply because it was so different from how i was relating to trauma then.

after the panel, i went up to María and thanked her for her anger. calmer, she was shy about it. "no," i said. "thank you so much. i'm sure you can understand--as a survivor, there is nothing more empowering and uplifting for me to see another survivor angry and fighting for their life instead of hopeless and sad." and it's true. instead of scaring me, María's open display of "violence" made me feel empowered in a way that i never have before.

it really never ceases to amaze me that tactics and opinions that i once thought of as destructive and violent became the vehicles of my liberation.