Category: 2018 Blog Post
On Lisa Dordal’s “The Living Room”
“then down the narrow hallway / to the back of the house, past / the empty rooms of siblings long moved on.”
In this quote, the “empty rooms of siblings long moved on” refers most obviously to the now scattered state of the speaker’s family, her (most likely older) siblings having grown up and moved out of their father’s house; however, there is a darker implication in this line. Those empty rooms could also be taken to symbolize the empty space left behind by dead LGBTQ+ people who, unlike the speaker, succeeded in taking their own lives. This can be supported by the use of the word “siblings,” which indicates that the people in question are innately like the speaker, who we know is a lesbian from reading other poems in Mosaic of the Dark. The existence of this symbolism doesn’t mean that the speaker hasn’t passed by her grown siblings’ old rooms on the way to her own room; however, it does add a second layer of significance to that passing. Meanwhile, the line break in the second to last quoted line emphasizes the word “past,” which in turn emphasizes the people who preceded the speaker (both her literal siblings and the figurative siblings who died). There is a tension between these two groups, as one group is absent because they grew up and the other because they will never grow up. Furthermore, the emphasis on the word “past” is significant because the speaker, in this moment, likely believes that she only has a past. She is, after all, attempting to give up her future.
In Tendencies, Eve Sedgwick references some horrifying statistics about LGBTQ+ youth suicide. That reality—that even today, LGB youth are three times more likely than straight youth to attempt suicide, and four times more likely to make medically serious attempts (see this) (A note: we don’t even know that much about the statistics concerning transgender youth, but one study found that 41% of transgender and gender nonconforming adults had attempted suicide in their lifetimes)—forms the context of this poem. That reality is also why poems like this are important. This moment in the poem focuses on the past, on the “siblings” who came and left, yet there is an implied future for the speaker as she imagines her father’s careless words, “Asprin? he’d say. / Asprin can’t kill you.” While what this reveals about the relationship between the speaker and her father is its own tragedy, there is some relief in knowing that the speaker herself lives on. She does indeed have a future, a future from which she recounts this experience (the poem is in the past tense). Though there is value in remembering the past, including those who have passed, this poem does more than linger on the tragic history of LGBTQ+ suicide. It also suggests that the future exists, that at least some LGBTQ+ youth survive to adulthood, that LGBTQ+ stories are, as we discussed in class, “survival stories.”
Pain as the Measurement of Love
“Why is the measure of love loss?” (Winterson 1993, 9)
Reading this quote in the beginning of Written on the Body I didn’t understand what Winterson meant by this. As I read further in the book I began to understand what she meant. When the narrator was breaking up with one person to get with another, they were seeking love by leaving what they thought love could be (with that person), but realized was not. With each person that the narrator broke up with, they were entranced by someone new. Each time that they moved on from someone they felt pain from the messy breakup before. This is how they knew that at one point they had loved; the feeling of pain told them that they had loved. They were confused with themselves, knowing that the relationship that they left was no longer love, but also uncertain about finding love with the next person.
Another time in the book where I saw a connection to this quote was when the narrator left Louise. They claim that they left out of an “act of love” for Louise’s health and wellbeing, but she had no input in their decision to leave. All the narrator ended up with was pain and longing to be reunited with her.
When reflecting on what this all means, the “so what,” I found that for the narrator, pain is the measurement of love. Consistently throughout the book the author recognizes their love through pain, and in the end pain was the only way that the narrator could feel, remember and relive their love. In the first example they couldn’t measure the love that they had so they jumped from relationship to relationship quickly, hurting after each breakup. In the second example they realized that leaving Louise was as mistake when they could no longer bear the pain of being separate from her. Pain gave clarity to love that the narrator could not previously identify.
Temporary Love
“In the park in the rain I had recognized one thing at least; that Louise was the woman I wanted even if I couldn’t have her. Jacqueline I had to admit had never been wanted, simply she had roughly the right shape to fit for a while” (Winterson 61).
Life with Jacqueline was stable, normal and everything that heteronormative culture tells us is the purpose of life – to find a partner who provides stability, both in life and financially, who grounds you and offers up a sturdy platform for marriage, children, and ‘growing old together.’ Life with Jacqueline is a security of warmth, a mother bringing a steaming bowl of chicken-noodle soup to her ill child, nutritious but light on the tongue, satisfying in the moment but unable to quench the thirst for flavor on burdened taste buds. When the narrator says “she [Jacqueline] had roughly the right shape to fit for a while,” they identify their entire relationship with Jacqueline as temporary, something necessary to experience but no longer needed (Winterson 61). They equate their relationship to Jacqueline as if it were coat, thick and quilted for the solemn bitterness of winter but quickly shed for the kisses of sunlight on skin.
The narrator longs for otherness, a life and place besides Louise. Louise incites an incredible hunger in the narrator that goes unsatisfied by Jacqueline. Louise offers promises of a life in lust and love, of romance and passion, without the restrictions/tethers of the status quo.
Life with Louise, by heteronormative standards, would be anything but considered ‘desirable.’ It is “immature and even dangerous” in the same lens (Halberstam 5). A life spent with Louise would be without the constraints of the familial monolith, without designated roles of gender and sexuality. Life with Louise opens the “potentials of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” (Halberstam 2). It would be as if the two are delicate ribbons, curled into one another and uplifted by a strong wind, relentless and powerful, each hour bringing new places and sights for exploration. Never stagnant, never without variation.
The narrator’s relationship with Jacqueline and Louise represents this crossroad between choosing normalcy, therefore losing their individuality, and embracing queer identity – all the possibilities and avenues that would blossom beneath their eyes should they choose it. With their arms outstretched for love, they create their own narrative.
Believe us.
“The women feed him, bathe his feet / with tears, bring spices, find the empty tomb, / burst out to tell the men, are not believed. …“ (Kenyon, 42)
These three lines belong to Jane Kenyon’s poem “Depression”. The lines describe the biblical story of the discovery of Christ’s resurrection. The first part “The women feed him, bathe his feet […]” refers to two stories in which Christ was still alive. The women welcomed him into their home and cared for him and washed his feet with perfume. The second part “[…] with tears, bring spices […]” refers to the biblical story in which the women come to visit Christ’s tomb, to care for him, even in his death. However, they find the tomb empty and when they report to the men waiting outside, they are not believed until one of the men goes into the tomb to see for himself. The verbs ‘feed’, ‘bathe’, ‘bring’, ‘find’ and ‘burst’ are all active on the women’s side, they do this on their own account. Still, the last verb ‘believed’ is put in a passive voice, indicating that the women’s sincerity is only validated by someone else, or rather by a man. Their voice is only heard and acknowledged through someone else – they do not have this advocacy on their own.
In these few lines, a lot of history can be found. Women have a long history of not being believed in all areas of life, but health is a very important one. Often, women talking about issues of health are not taken seriously because people believe them to be weak or whiny. Consequently, a huge number of women has been suffering from medical conditions, often mental health issues, which are not being treated or they have to diagnose themselves. Additionally, relating this to the title of the poem, “Depressions”, people with depression are often not believed concerning their condition and some doctors still refuse to treat it as a serious mental illness. Women and people with depression alike are an important part of society, but as soon as they don’t align completely with the monolithic expectations of society anymore their opinions are dismissed. Furthermore, both are, to a certain extent, subject to the patriarchy, as women, like in the story, need a man’s validation to be heard and similarly the health industry is, like so many others, still strongly influenced by the patriarchy.
What I am trying to say is, that society still lacks a lot in terms of equality and understanding. The women in the biblical story should have been believed and their words should have been accepted to be the truth. Exactly like people who suffer from depression should be believed when they talk about their illness and their opinion should not be questioned by people who don’t believe in it just because they have never experienced it themselves.
Enough
“Her lips parting for me every time- / a deep-throated “hey” or “hello” / was enough, the way a weekly token / of bread or wine can be enough” (Dordal, 26).
This passage from “Clues” shifts from sexual references to casual conversation to religious ritual. These lines are suggesting that sexuality and faith are both internal human needs. Repetition of the word “enough” is significant. It is emphasizing the way these two desirable things intertwine, i.e. they both provide a rooted place of support and connection. These casual, habitual actions tying back to sexuality and religion are subtle reminders of the desires every person craves; they provide a temporary sense of fulfillment for the narrator. A passage from Written on the Body exemplified this deep yearn for human connection as well, “I didn’t only want Louise’s flesh, I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together” (Winterson, 51). This passage describes the need for sexual connection, the raw need for body-body interaction that the narrator of “Clues” is longing for.
This passage relates to the rest of the poems in Mosaic of the Dark because religion is a repetitive theme. The religious references are used periodically throughout the volume as a guideline for life, to show the evolution of a person by outlining important religious ceremonies. However, these references are also used to mimic how the narrator is presenting herself and her feelings. These lines shed light on the use of Christian references as a metaphorical expression of the narrator because they emphasize the way the narrator’s sexual desires have to be satisfied by small conversation, the way bread and wine must signify Jesus’s sacrifice. The narrator has not come out as a lesbian, so she needs to get her fix by moments like this because she has not yet claimed her new identity, one challenging heteronormative views. Her body has come to terms with her sexual orientation before her mind has, so for now these small interactions are “enough” to gratify her desires. Mention of religion to mimic the narrators thoughts and feelings appears in many other passages as well, including “until the last day, when I came out- / one part Christian, one part Jew, all queer (41)” used to show what it felt like for her to honestly voice her sexual orientation.
I’m her best chance
Like my mother // who won’t stay dead, her eyes fixing into mine like she knows // I’m her best chance.
For the closing piece in Mosaic of the Dark, titled “Even Houseflies”, Lisa Dordal writes a beautiful poem about how even houseflies have angels, just like the rest of us. One of my favorite moments in this poem is when Dordal mentions her mother, comparing her to the fly in the room, gently reminding her of her presence even after death.
Dordal writes “her eyes fixing into mine like she knows // I’m her best chance”. I love these lines because it feels like there are multiple meanings here. At first, I read these lines as simply her mother watching her from afar, knowing Lisa is her best chance of communicating with the world. This has been an ongoing theme in several poems in Mosaic of the Dark, and Dordal has made it clear that communication between her and her mother could be strained at best. However, as we have also discovered throughout this book of poems, Dordal’s mother was quite possibly a closeted lesbian. After reading this through a few more times, I realized this moment in the poem may be a metaphor of not only her mother as a fly on the wall but also of their relationship while she was alive. I believe Dordal’s choice to write “I’m her best chance” is critical here because there are of course many people Lisa’s mother could have tried to communicate with after death. In fact, she probably had a better relationship with a lot of other people. However, for Dordal to claim that she was her best chance means that there was something specific about Lisa that would allow her to understand.
I would argue that the detail only Lisa carries is her experience as a lesbian. Coming out is such a difficult thing for anyone, but to come out to someone who understands, let alone has experience in, the LGBTQ+ community would be a logical first step. I believe this line in the poem was a very intentional and beautiful message from Dordal that LGBTQ+ identifying individuals understand each other and share a lived experience unlike anyone else. However, as much as I understand and agree with this point, I also think it is interesting to relate it back to Michael Warner’s idea about how even LGBTQ+ identifying people can be dismissive and even discriminatory of other “deviant” sexual choices. Certainly, not all queer people are completely accepting of all other queer people and to believe otherwise is somewhat naive, in Warner’s eyes. I imagine that Dordal would be very accepting of her mother’s sexuality, but I have to agree with Warner that, in general, speaking with just any queer person when coming out is not always going to be the “best chance” at acceptance.
What is Queer?
“If we think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity and come closer to understanding Foucault’s comment in “Friendship as a Way of Life” that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex” (310)” (Halberstam, 1).
My first thought is Sedgwick’s Tendencies, specifically Sedgwick’s definition of queer, as well as the exercise we did on the first day of class of what queer means. Sedgwick describes queer as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses, and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick, 8). While Sedgwick is referring to queer as elements of sexuality or family that differs from the “list” society has made as acceptable; Halberstam define queerness as abnormalities or as something differs from the norm, but not just family and sexual identity but everything, like time and space. Their core definition is similar, not sticking to the norm or the status quo in whatever way (this also reminds me of the song “Stick to the Status Quo” from the first High School Musical). What is truly interesting is that on the first day of class before we read anything, we talked about what does queer mean. We used many words and phrases to describe this word, including one particular phrase, something different than “cis”. In Sedgwick’s Tendencies, she has two lists that describe elements that makeup, in the first list, what a family is, and sexual identity in the second list. The elements listed are what we would consider being “cis”, just a bit fancier.
My second thought is about the quote from Friendship as a Way of Life that Halbustam uses, “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex”. This is interesting because a lot of people use words like “lifestyle” and “choice” when talking about homosexuality. In their minds, people are making the conscious decision to stray from the list of what is acceptable. That these people are more afraid of their lives being upturned than of how a couple or group likes to have sex. If people start turning away from what is “right” and “acceptable” then what does that mean for the people that have structured their lives around it. We see this is Lisa Dordal’s Mosaic of the Dark in the poem Intersection, “Have you ever thought you might be… – / …It wasn’t an option, you said. / Your head never turning, both of us looking straight…” (Dordal, 11). Dordal’s mother tells us in this snippet that being anything other than a heterosexual woman, that being attracted to anyone other than a man was not possible. What is more terrifying, two people of the same sex having sex? Or the timeline people are brainwashed into believing is the only is not the only way?
Sixth Grade (21)
In the poem, ‘Sixth Grade’ Lisa Dordal transports us to a warm June afternoon in which she is ‘married’ to a boy named Bruce under the watchful eye of her classmates. Dordal takes note that this event transpired in the “race-sore” seventies of southside Chicago. This stands out because their difference in skin tones is not the problem, it is their queerness that is not tolerated. I found this particularly interesting because it’s interesting to compare the 70’s in this particular instance, to today’s society. Today race and queerness are still touchy subjects individually, but now even more so if they are combined in the way they are in this sixth-grade marriage, (i.e. interracial same-sex marriage).
Secondly, Dordal’s attention to detail in the clothes that they both wore during the ceremony caught my eye when I later realized Bruce is also gay. Specifically, the color pink of Bruce’s oxford button-down, which from my own sixth-grade experience, recall cis-males stereotyping as being a gay color that straight males just can’t be seen in. This spurred my questions of whether or not their classmates knew that they were, in fact, marrying off two gay people. Did they make assumptions based off of visual cues such as this one? Or did they simply do it out of boredom?
Finally, what I found most striking was the remark that the officiant Peter, had said to Lisa. “…There were two types of women: that I was the kind men married, not the kind men used for practicing (what they never wanted to perfect).” I interpreted this as Peter telling her that he, and perhaps other boys liked her but did not find her sexually appealing enough to “use for practicing.”
Relating this to the rest of the collections of poem in Mosaic of the Dark, I wonder how Lisa Dordal had interpreted this remark herself. Clearly it made an impact on her because it made it into one of her poems. Yet I still find myself wondering if that remark was an insinuation that her classmates had their suspicions about her sexuality or if that boy in particular just didn’t find her attractive. Most notably, I wonder why this is the sort of thing that these sixth graders are concerning themselves with. I think that this serves to the point in time that this took place, where sexuality was slowly becoming more enthralled in conversations, and perhaps this was something that these kids were hearing from their parents. Which wouldn’t surprise me considering Lisa’s own mother was lesbian and that was a topic of conversation between her and her father.
Infidelity
“’We could decide in three months. That would be fairer wouldn’t it? To Elgin, to you?’
‘What about you?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve done with Jaqueline. I’m here for you if you want me.’
She said, ‘I want to offer you more than infidelity.” (Winterson 84)
This passage stood out to me because it revolves around the active decision to continue infidelity. The first sentence indicates premeditation and affirmation that went into their affair. Louise is deciding when to leave her husband, Elgin, so that she can continue her affair with the narrator. Additionally, that process of decision making affirms the notion that Louise wants (more or less) to be with the narrator that she is willing to leave her husband. From my knowledge, most affairs do not end up with the cheater and the wife/husband/partner getting together. Furthermore, the sentence “that would be fairer, wouldn’t it?” is ironic because she is talking about being “fair” while cheating and while still being with her husband rather than leaving him as soon as she started the affair. Continuing the affair behind Elgin’s back for three months is beyond asking what is fair.
Moreover, Louise’s statement of “I want to offer you more than infidelity” depicts that she feels she may be at fault for the affair. While, yes she is at some fault, I believe the narrator is more at fault for continuing the affair knowing that Louise was married. Written on the Body is all about infidelity and is told from the perspective of a cheater rather than of the cheated on. This perspective is important because there are always two sides to a story and when it comes to affairs, we only ever hear the side of the cheated on and not the thought process or story of the cheater.
In relation to the book as a whole, this passage is about cheating and cheating is a concept that has no sexuality or gender. Reading Written on the Body from a character whose gender is unknown allows readers to read without prejudice. Reading from the perspective of the cheater not only strays away from the norm of only hearing from the cheated on, it also offers an explanation as to why they decided to cheat and what made them decide to continue (or not continue) the affair. I, personally, do not condone cheating and am not trying to justify cheating, but I believe Written on the Body offers a perspective, explanation, and some sort of closure as to why people make the decisions they make.