Cereus Blooms at Night

“Drenched in sweat, she stopped to catch her breath, not taking her eyes off the man. Then she dragged his unyielding weight into the sewing room. She ran out slamming the door shut behind her. Her mother used to keep a key on the ledge. She reached up and found it. She locked the door. She leaned against it with relief and then mounted the stairs. At the top she shut and locked the door.” (Page 229) The story of the sewing room, and the symbol it has represented in small vignettes in the novel, comes to its’ final scene. A fitting room to lock away the ultimate demon.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes the friendship and tenderness between Lavinia and Sarah. After Lavinia returns from Seminary school, she goes to visit the Ramchandins. Chandin feels the purpose of Lavinia’s visit is because she has missed him, but Lavinia’s joy comes from being reunited with Sarah. Chandin feels snubbed yet again. The news of Lavinia’s broken engagement led me to conclude that there are stronger emotions between Sarah and Lavinia than has been alluded to. They become inseparable and their feelings grow, until the two of them can no longer be confident that their adoration and tenderness could be hidden from prying eyes. Poopoo saw the gentle caresses and knew they meant something very special, she just didn’t know how to classify it, but was encouraged that these two women were happy, and that there was a “rightness” to their relationship that felt natural to Poopoo. Her protectiveness of the space the four of them shared was intrinsically, intuitively precious.

With Chandin growing more jealous and hostile at Lavinia’s indifference to him, Sarah and Lavinia started spending more time together when he was away, down in the sewing room downstairs, locked away from prying eyes and kept safe in each other’s company. Sarah, started leaving the house before she would have to see him. Both fearing Chandin’s reaction if they were discovered, knowing his uncontrollable jealousy and the sense of entitlement and privilege always implied but ultimately denied him, could lead him to a fit of rage. He begins to realise he was nothing more than a vanity project for Rev. Thoroughly, and his visions of inclusion to that class would remain a pathetic yearning. He was too grand for his own people, yet too lowly for the social strata he aspired to be part of. He settled for Sarah, but longed for Lavinia. That both women would have no respect nor regard for him, and turn to each other for love is the ultimate rejection of his manhood and maschismo.

The sewing room played another important role when Lavinia and Sarah were attempting to run away with the children. It was important for Sarah to clear out all things in the sewing room, all traces of what they shared, pictures, portraits, and the velvet hats of the daughters on that fateful day when only two of the four females were to find freedom, where two children were left behind to become enslaved to their father’s demons, desires and depravity.

This reminds me of that safe space, that island of emotional and sexual discovery shared by Narrator and Louise in “Written on the Body.” Both couples seeking to find a shared and mutual identity in a safe space, locked away from the oppressive heteronormative world. A space where their own truths could be explored, and dreams and fantasies of freedoms away from the threats and stigma against anyone who does not want to contort their identities to the world of male dominance and submission.

Hi everyone,

I’ve uploaded 2 songs written and performed by Patty Griffen, with the lyrics. These two songs really resonate with me and some of the things we’ve spoken of in class. The first is titled Tony, and addresses teen suicide caused by the bullying that many young LGBTQAA people are confronted with, and the unfairness, isolation and lonliness that can lead to hopelessness. This is why Sedgwick really spoke to my heart. I have felt that kind of hopelessness in my life, and was “talked off the edge” when a therapist gave me a book to read, which forever changed my outlook on suicide, and the terrible legacy left behind for the ones who have lost someone to the forever decision. The book is free and available online.

http://www.qprinstitute.com/forever.html

When I revealed to my ex-husband and children the depression that almost took my life, we started an honest dialog of moments in their lives where they experienced that kind of hopelessness,  also entertaining the idea. Thank God we spoke about it, because I never knew they had felt that kind of pain too. We all cried when the reality of the magnitude of grief we could have felt at such a horrible loss hit us. In shock, we promised each other that we will always reach out to one another when hopelessness feels like it will rip your soul apart. When your heart is so swollen and raw that it threatens to break your ribs to be free of you, filling you with fear and certainty that things will never change and there is no other way out, please remember that there is. Getting past the pain in that moment might seem impossible, but there are alternatives to a forever decision. The alarming reality is that those who know someone who have taken their lives are at a much higher risk of making the same choice. This devastating legacy is called the suicide contagion, because it spreads like a malignant tumor, invasive and deadly, pulling others into the grave as well. Death is not pretty, romantic, or reversible.

The second song, “Change”, is about how women are forced to conform, to keep in line with what someone else thinks we ought to be. In this song, it happens in little increments of passive/aggressive acts of “love”, because those who love us want what’s best for us, right? And every time we accept or adopt the changes that are suggested, we lose a little bit of ourselves, until the only thing that’s left isn’t recognizable at all anymore, not even to ourselves. Professor Kersh printed out a part of “Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose” for me, the section titled Compulsory Heterosexuality, and I am forever thankful for the clarity the piece has brought to my awareness and how things really are for women in the present heterocentric system. (no, I haven’t become a hater, just pissed off) So I think the next time I hear someone say something like, “I think you should wear THAT dress” instead of what I’ve chosen, I’ll answer with, fuck off!

 

Utopia and Buzz Killers

My head hurts… but I think I get it now.

In reading Munoz and comparing his arguments with the queer theories of Leo

Bersani he alluded to in his piece, I think I now understand the point he is making.

Munoz begins with “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality.” explaining that it is something that is evolving. It is on the horizon for those who follow behind today’s LBGTQ activists and theorists to identify and determine what it’s future will be. What we know in this place and time is evolving, and what it will become, the future will determine.

Leo Bersani’s book, Homos, Munoz explains, tells us of a world that now exists where queerness has become mainstream. The Gay Rights movement wanted America to listen and accept the civil liberties and rights of all those in the LGBT community, and America did to some extent. There are primetime sit-coms depicting LGBT families and daytime talk show hosts that are openly gay, making it seem that America accepts and supports the inclusion of all people. Gay icons in the arts, fashion, broadcast media, politics and intelligentsia are embraced by all but the extreme right, but still homophobia prevails. But why and by whom? Is it, as Bersani suggests, that some “anti-social queer theorists” wish to distance themselves from anything normative and mainstream and are gay-image-homophobic? Is social acceptance forcing a group identity on people that are so diverse in every possible sense of gender/biology/sexuality/emotionality that feels just as oppressive as exclusion, therefore causing a pushback in the strata of gender and queer philosophers and theorists? Did the invisibility of the previous counterculture provide a kind of security from public visibility to those who wish to remain out of the spotlight? Or does antirelationality serve to avoid labeling identities that can be fluid and transient, ever evolving as we ourselves evolve and reinvent our realities. Nevertheless, the antirelationality arguments fueled Munoz’s position that some theorist’s view this as a perversion of uncontaminated sexuality.

My ah-ha moment came at the bottom of page 11, in Munoz’s last 2 sentences. Leading up to those last words, he says that queerness is something still out on the horizon, still out of reach, and that it has little to do with our present and contemporary view of gay identity. “My argument is therefore interested in critiquing the ontological certitude that I understand to be partnered with the politics of presentist and pragmatic contemporary gay identity. This mode of ontological certitude is often represented through a narration of disappearance and negativity that boils down to another game of fort-da.”

He compares it to a child’s game of “Fort-Da!” which Freud first reported while observing a young toddler in the home of a family he was visiting. The young child had a close and nurturing relationship with the mother, and when the mother left the child for a bit, the child would play calmly with an object, throwing it into some corner or under a piece of furniture, exclaiming “fort!” the German word for gone. The child would then look to retrieve it calling out “da!”, meaning here it is!, delighted when he found it. This self-invented child’s game served to reassure the child that good things do materialize, like his mommy.

A Queer Utopia may well be “da” in a promising future.

 

“Squint your eyes and look closer/ I am not between you and your ambition/ I am a poster girl with no poster/ I am 32 flavors and then some/ And I’m beyond your peripheral vision/ so you might want to turn your head/ ‘cause some day you’re going to get hungry/ and eating most of the words you just said/ Both my parents taught me about good will/And I have done well by their names/ Just the kindness I’ve lavished on strangers/ Is more than I can explain/ Still there’s many who’ve turned out their porch lights/ Just so I would think they were not home/And hid in the dark of their windows/ Till I’d passed and left them alone.”

 

I was thinking about the lyrics of 32 Flavors through the lens of Sedgwick in Queer and Now, “–since being a survivor on this scene is a matter of surviving into threat, stigma, the spiraling violence of gay- and lesbian-bashing, and (in the AIDS emergency) the omnipresence of somatic fear and wrenching loss.” (pg 3)

The opening lines to this song are such strong words, in my opinion. She tells the listener that she is not stopping them from pursuing whatever it is they want. She happens to be different, and she does not have any other agenda other then pointing out her right to happiness as well. Ani tells her audience that although she has learned her parents’ lessons well about how to behave with respect towards strangers, her neighbors feel they need not show her the same respect, because she falls outside of that which is culturally acceptable to them. They feel it is better to scurry inside and hide, as if she were an ominous threat rather then accept her as a valuable and equal member of the community. Maybe they do think of her as a threat, embodying an unfamiliar and frightening alternate reality to their “little pink houses.” The cognitive effort required in informing one’s self about a world full of the complexity of the human condition is hard to fit in between Fox News and Dancing with the Stars. But Ani rises above the haters, saying, “I never try to give me life meaning by demeaning you” which is a statement of strength. She does not have to retaliate at their ignorance, nor does she allow them the power over her to determine what makes her happy. “God help you if you are a phoenix and you dare to rise up from the ash, a 1,000 eyes will smolder with jealousy while you are just flying past” tells me that those who would “smolder” are absolutely inconsequential in the eyes of the phoenix, and that’s how it should remain.

I decided to try out the café, out of masochism, out of habit, out of hope. I thought it might comfort me, although I noticed how little comfort was to be got from familiar things. How dare they stay the same when so much had changed? Why does your sweater senselessly smell of you, keep your shape when you are not there to wear it? I don’t want to be reminded of you, I want you. I’ve been thinking of leaving London, going back to that ridiculous rented cottage for a while. Why not? Make a fresh start, isn’t that one of those useful clichés?(p. 180)

The narrator has returned to London and has been to see Louise’s mother and sister, hoping they would tell hum where Louise is, but hu is denied this information, and reminded of how very deeply hu hurt Louise. In desperation, the narrator goes to Elgin’s house and they get into a fistfight, and again hu does not find out where Louise is or what might have happened to her.

In this passage, Narrator has just left the cemetery and goes across the street to the café where hu and Louise used to meet. Perhaps she will be there, hu thinks, but of course, she isn’t. The reflection of how familiar things can be painful reminders of a love lost is an indication of the inner conflict going on in the narrator. Perhaps most of the pain springs from guilt. Guilt for being a coward, and not staying with Louise when she needed hum most, and ignoring her wishes, insisting that she will never return to Elgin, under any circumstances. But, here’s another thought; maybe hu should have asked what Elgin’s motivations for disclosing Louise’s illness were before hu just deserted the love of his life. What if Elgin really wanted to punish Louise in the only way he could, by insisting on painful, debilitating treatment when all the other doctors disagreed with that course of action? Or was Elgin perhaps aware of a character flaw in the narrator? Did Elgin anticipate an underlying fear of real commitment, and the failure of the narrator to carry though with the relationship when faced with such horrific news? Did Elgin somehow know that hu would cut and run, not out of self-sacrifice, but out of fear? The letters from other doctors said that she was asymptomatic and they didn’t recommend treatment yet, so why didn’t the narrator consider that Elgin’s desire to treat Louise might have been an unholy one.

I feel that the narrator has overly romanticized their relationship, (Why does your sweater senselessly smell of you) thinking that hu was doing the right thing by taking the decision away from Louise on how she wanted to proceed with her own life and death. The reality of how selfish and gutless the decision was to just leave is hitting hum hard, but not enough from keeping hum from considering it yet again. The absence of Louise has left a black hole in the narrator’s universe, and finally returning to try to reclaim what hu lost might have redeemed hum, were it not for hus gut instinct to flee. The tendency hu has of always considering a way out tells me that hu is a coward and incapable of carrying responsibility in a real relationship, with all it’s magnificence and distresses, demands and rewards.

She said, ‘Don’t you know that Renoir claimed he painted with his penis?’ ‘Don’t worry’, I said, ‘He did. When he died they found nothing between his balls but an old brush.’ (p. 22)

‘Yes,’ she said. Do you know why Henry Miller said “I write with my prick”?’ ‘Because he did. When he died they found nothing between his legs but a ballpoint pen.’ (p.60)

When I read these two passages, I doubted whether either Renoir or Miller actually made the above statements, so I did a little research, but was not successful in finding anything. So why did Winterson add these words? What meaning is she trying to convey?

What symbols are the penis and prick intended to represent? Are they more than just a man’s anatomy? When aroused, the organ become engorged with blood, which facilitates penetration and finally results in ejaculation. Semen fertilizes the ovum, thereby creating life. Are these words meant to convey the desire, drive and passion for creative expression? Blood pulses through the organ, giving it a life that is greater than the sum of the mere tissue, cells, and nerve endings it is, in its’ flaccid state.

The tools of the artists, paintbrush and pen, are filled with creative power when manipulated by the creator of that work. The liquids, ink and paint ejaculate, allow the fertile imagination of the artist to be expressed on mediums, canvas and paper, that bring to life the artists’ vision. Their works then become an entity unto themselves, with a life of their own that even outlive the creator. A work of art, of passion, of love and of life, survives to be greater than the sum of the mere pigments and fibers of the mediums used.

This use of phallic symbolism brings me to another question. If the Narrator does not want to be identified by gender, and the author is female, why use the artists Renoir and Miller, to represent creative genius? Why not use Georgia O’Keefe and Elizabeth Bishop instead? Is it because the tools of these artists remain the same, regardless of the gender of the creator? Our language lacks the appropriate symbolism for creative artistry through the reproductive powers of women and women’s anatomy. Are not women often only regarded as receptacles of the seed of creative power, and is that why the phallic symbol has no correlate in our vocabulary? This could also be just one more example of the use of clichés, put into the mouths of Narrator’s lovers, which the narrator claims to hate the use of.

But, alas, sometimes a prick is just a prick.