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My new crush is not a sexual thing. Unless I am saying that because I am being bi-phobic. I’m going to call her Sasha. Not that she’ll ever see this. She’s what I call a depression influencer. Plenty of people are performative about their mental health, or lack of it. But her stink has the ring of truth. She shit-posts, not shit talks. She recently completed a month of semi-gross-out selfies on her stories. Each one, if not totally rancid, was close to it. And it’s very clear that she’s doing all this intentionally.

I’m in love.

It might seem something far worse than mere cringe to feast on the spectacle of someone’s collapse. But I think with Sasha, again, who I’m crediting with crystallizing the emergent aesthetics of depression influencer behavior, in the year of our lord, 2026, it’s all intentional. And I want to be clear, she doesn’t go for the cheap seats which I’ve resorted to myself for pity likes whenever necessary: tribute posts to dying family members, hashtags about world tragedies, detailed accounts of an abusive employer or various tirades concerning dickless, toothless men. Though come to think of it, she does allude to the latter. I can tell she has a roster of Jacobs and Trevors hovering right behind her.

Sasha’s moroseness is more classical, philosophical even. Lately, probably a sign of my own depression, I’ve allowed myself to bed rot for hours in the morning and late evening scrolling and scrolling through reels of faces I will never meet and mostly do not want to know.

Then Sasha appeared.

We have friends in common. She looks 45, or thereabouts. I mean I would bet on that. But she could be 25. I don’t know. Like really. I’m so convinced at her projection of psychical unwellness nothing would surprise me now. She’s Gen Z. Maybe she’s Gen X. Who knows.

It started with a series of screenshot text messages she posted about someone she once dated years ago. There was a brief editorial about how she wasted at least a year of existence post-breakup imagining this Connecticut Fuck Goblin leading some far better or far worse life than in fact what was happening. Relatable, sure.

But what really caught my soul was a rant that she posted from her Notes. She frequently collects her disturbing dreams. In the one I think got me started on Sasha the Depression Influencer, she describes being restlessly awake in her bed (very meta for a dream), then reaching into her mouth with her left hand, forcing it down, as she did during her late teenage college days as a professional bulimic would-be sorority sister, and just cramming her pudgy fist deep, deep into her throat. But in the dream the hand squishes through various cavities of her head until she is able to pluck out a random tooth (not hers) that has become lodged in her brain since childbirth and clearly the cause of her ensuing life-depression.

Yes, Internet, I do want this kind of content. Maybe it’s very gay and ethically questionable of me to join the ranks of non-women who enjoy the dramatic sufferings of socialized women: from, I don’t know, Sylvia Plath’s domestic terrorisms to Lana Del Rey’s exquisite frolicking in Southern Gothic snowfall, sticking her head in and out of the stove with her new hubby. I want in on their fantasies. Even as the entrances are all exits.

Sasha feels different. Depressions have flavors, I swear. Some feel more granular and abnormal, like a failed cocktail. My bestie refers to this sometimes as Chemical Head. You feel like someone poured the wrong type of gasoline down your brain-socket. You are not meant to guzzle pure crude. Or sometimes my own brain betrays me because I feel like a minor electrical storm in the back alley of a 7-Eleven in Nevada. Sasha herself however does not go in for metaphors. I love brazen, emboldened metaphors, that are decadent, and unreliable, like the sinking cake in Sleeping Beauty. My whole life I have felt—sometimes—asleep—but like the prince in the red robe, not the Princess. I am waiting for my Princess to wake me. My friend SB likes to tease me (and her) about our shared weakness for BPD Princesses. Is that ableist, even though we are both neurodivergent, mentally ill people? Maybe. I don’t know.

But getting back to Sasha. No cutesy poet shit. Just the visceral. Sometimes her posts have the grotesque of like mood-boarding care of the film Seven. Not that she goes in for gore, exactly. But I appreciate how she auto-documents her enervated, lifeless eyes; the way she poses in a bathtub with all her clothes on, without the water running; the fact that she likes to ostentatiously display her pudge: love handles, finger-fat, back-fat, chin-fat, heavy cheeks, lumpy fingers, weird breast shapes in various blouses that are designed to make her seem completely liberated from Male Gaze, Incorporated. Not that that has been entirely successful.

It turns out there are plenty of straight men, lowkey everywhere, who enjoy Sasha the Depression Influencer’s demonstrations and digressions. She reminds me of certain LA comedians who have sizable social media followings precisely because they have fully embraced their body shapes not being conventionally beautiful, attractive, toxically white, symmetrical, whatever. That said, I think even if Sasha the Depression Influencer was Sydney Sweeney’s doppelgänger, she’d behave the exact same way.

As I was saying: depression has flavors. I got sidetracked.

Aside from Chemical Head (a kind of defective product feeling, very take your complaint up with the corporate office), there’s the standard model of depression. Suicidal Trauma Loop Replay. Which I believe is really our infernal entrapment in the past. The fact that our psychic clock got stuck or shattered and is still somewhere without us, running on some hamster wheel, forever locked, inside a foggy nether-region or blocked territory. Say, for example the Blizzard of 1996 when my brother was hospitalized for his delusions, or fast forward to 2001 when my fake-aunt had the misfortune of dropping dead of a heart attack a day or two before (was it after?) 9/11. So the event of her sudden demise was subsumed in other business, even for us, who knew her so closely. Her name was Annie.

There is the sacred suffering that’s like depression for those who are persecuted and oppressed unfairly. I think most gender minorities, straight or not, fit into this category more than only somewhat. It’s not that Sasha is or is not a feminist. I would argue she of course is. Especially with the compulsive foregrounding of her body as contagion and confrontation, as enjoyable revulsion. But her performances resist any type of familiar heroism, self-congratulations, pride in resistance.

She stares into the camera from her car and you swear, her eyes are catatonic, lifeless, dry, flatlined. I find it RIVETING.

My life is a little shit lately. I can’t complain. I don’t have her joy in decay, however. Her braveness. To flaunt one’s ugly. To make public one’s I-have-nothing-go-on, her “Oh look, you want to see something? How about nothing. I have nothing. I am nothing.” It’s like an updated medievalism for the Age of Looksmaxxing voids. We are all normalized now to be creepily voyeurs. Exhibitionists. Sad sacks. There’s no escape. We don’t want one.

The thirst trap economy is based on actually seducing strangers to want to become your sexual partners solely because they find your vanity (status)—which by its very nature excludes any kind of real authentic relationality—appealing. Imagine wanting to be picked by a barbed-wire fence? Well, that does sound a little dumb and hot. Transgressive, sure. But there’s no fence behind most of these gym rat, twink model boys, and I’m thinking primarily of the ones I am most attracted to yet am entirely uninterested in. I’m not one to talk.

Sasha the Depression Influencer has convinced me, while I study the exaggerated lines of her face, the curated slop mess of her apartment, the many vomit-colored beige rugs she owns in every room (there are not that many rooms yet they somehow feel different each time)—who needs sex. Who needs a partner. Who needs an ex. Who needs touch.

It turns out screen culture is profoundly asexual. Perhaps I should say de-sexual. Sasha is the desexualized goddess of our time and for our time. She will pose in a way to flex her shoulders, somehow neatly sculpted. While she looks drugged out on Zyprexa. She will press her boobs (not something I am prone to fetish in any way whatsoever, mind you) in recognizable ways that scream: sex, fuck me, I’m an object, I’m a toilet plunger, I’m a sneaker to piss in, etc. But then she drains her self-image of its necessary emptiness.

She is never vapid. Not even in her post-ironic pretense of vapidity. Or the opposite. Sasha is just Sasha. Clearly depressed and fully on view. Yum. I also have no idea. Behind the camera maybe she has an army of successful, buxom, bright-eyed friends, and they spend elaborate weekends at clubs all over the city. I doubt it. But the internet’s an illusion.

She posted one text-rant recently. About how exes aren't supposed to go away. They're horcruxes. Emotional debris lodged somewhere between your lungs and large intestines. (I really enjoyed that “somewhere.”) How the correct response is never healing culture. Destroy healing culture. Evil. Rather, her stance is study. Self-fascination.

To become a faraway stalker. To bathe in the glow of their digital waste. I bristled, wide-eyed, reading this. I could care less about the writing. The art. It’s her content I find refreshing. We are all, in fact, very sick. So she’s conducting the orchestra.

Fatness is still so hated. It’s not the world’s ultimate oppression. But it’s interesting how it’s safely there in both gay and straight worlds. It’s anti-woman, it’s anti-Black. Sasha uses it, like a weapon but also safety blanket. She describes it as repellant, sometimes a mask, sometimes a cudgel. I find that hot. But I don’t mean sexually hot. Unless I do?

Sasha may not even be considered thicker-bodied or “fat” (her word) to some. Her body might be read as only pudgy, a little lopsided, or whatever. I don’t know. There’s a whole neurotic pseudo-science to the world of skinny-fat, its meticulous tiers, credited and discredited labels. I am not a body positivity expert nor any trusted source. But I trust Sasha’s hatred of being objectified, her willingness to be objectified. I suspect she’s great in bed. Not because I think she necessarily “performs” sex well, or would want to. But there must be something thrilling to anyone whose consciousness is clearly so painfully there.

Like the exposed tacks in certain wall-to-wall carpet.

I grew up in the suburban homes of New Jersey in the 1990s.

Sasha does not own a pet. Sasha sometimes seems posed in proximity to parents or relatives that I assume live in the same city. She is not very interested in posting about them or strangers. She posts her writings which are musings. Both smarter and less polished than a “professional” writer’s amateur clickbait.

I worry about some of her politics, which I can only project, half-imagine. I just know this: her hollowed sadness; her deadened gaze; her messy bed. Her books and clothes strewn about a table; on the floor of a new-condo bathroom; some tchotchke objet in the backseat of a smallish car.

She must have money from somewhere. She must have some kind of job. She is not happy. But she does not brandish any victim narrative of the dejected. She only has this vital, angering force, centered around, I don’t know, life is shit, I’m over it, this is all there is, it’s not enough, don’t bother me, wake me when it’s over.

Who fucking knew it. Depression influencers are now a thing. I’m so into it.

Does that make me sick?

Mama, I want to be ugly.

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But to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. ’Tis unmanly grief.

If I had to sum up my philosophy of life, or maybe I just mean my spirituality or makeshift poetics — a ridiculous proposition either way — it would be that’ve I always tended to place more significance on what’s absent in my life than what’s present.

That is: what people don’t talk about in their daily conversations; the ever-looming void of one’s past; the sometimes almost permanent sense that one’s purpose or drive far from being empty or missing is, although desirable or fulfilling, still incomplete.

Does that sound, I don’t know, terribly depressing?

Rimbaud: “The true life is absent.”

What did Rimbaud mean by that? I once wanted to call my second book of poetry The True Life, or simply True Life. Not that I expected anyone to get the allusion. What the hell did Rimbaud even know about truth, whether fully lived or only imagined. He stopped writing poetry by the time he was 19. Talk about a quitter. And yet.

I recently watched a clip where Solmaz Sharif throws into question the whole tradition of taking Keats’ idea of “negative capability” seriously because he was after all 22 years old. Again, commonsensical wisdom might say (warranted): What the hell would some 22 year old know about aesthetic theory? Of course, he wouldn’t be equipped to acknowledge the consequences of being a white subject of the British Empire. Though it would grow yet bigger in the following century, by 1817, when a young Keats was about to pen his great odes, it already ‘had’ Canada, parts of India, South Africa, Australia, and maritime bases elsewhere.

I enjoy Sharif’s reality check. But I also reject its reductive ageism. If anything, as people get older they are less likely to take stock of a tragic sense of life, to acknowledge the personal and political ramifications of how we collectively live. Or fail to.

On the other hand, Joyce thought poets were the antennae of the race. I don’t know about that either.

Concerning Rimbaud, whose truncated, dramatic and certainly questionable life, leaves much to study and reexamine, I think it’s fair to say he did know what he was talking about. Childhood gives us enough material to brood upon for just about forever. Rimbaud inherited an absent military father; an overpowering mother; a life in Charleville that was far from satisfying for a young punk let alone ideal for a would-be prince of poets. The boy with wind in his heels.

Absence is not always a bad thing. But it’s also complicated. Bad, complicated… these colloquial expressions leave a lot of room for slack. They also get at the knot of experience. The double-faced gift that is age, time, relationships. Emily Wilson in her translation of The Odyssey by calling the hero of the epic “a complicated man.” No one had ever translated the opening like that. She comments brilliantly on this bold choice on her Substack:

… for some readers, “complicated” sounds “too modern”. The word “complicated” isn’t particularly modern in English (OED cites 1656 as the first known instance of the modern meaning). But maybe “complicated man” has been on the rise (Google ngram tells me that phrase, and “complicated relationship”, have risen in popularity since the turn of this century). Maybe for some people it has resonances of Facebook (which I don’t use or recommend to you), or, better, Avril Lavigne. But I actually like the Lavigne lyrics for “Complicated” as a text with a kind of resonance with the Odyssey: “acting like you’re somebody else” is a central feature of Odysseus’ polytropia, and it’s essential to how and why he survives – so if you do hear the song in the line, maybe it helps suggest the connotations of “many guises” that are there in the original word. Sometimes you do have to make everything so complicated, sometimes you gotta wear your preppy clothes and strike a pose (or at least get your multiple goddess makeovers), if you want to survive as the warrior king of Ithaca.

I think absence is like a spiritual radar. It welcomes and honors the dead. It makes space for the invisible. It also acknowledges that whatever appears to be going on, on the mere surface, as in Henri Cole’s charmed title The Look of Things, is not all there is. Psychoanalysis is built upon Freud’s insight into the unconscious as the royal road to understanding human beings, that is, our contradictory behaviors. It’s very possible, however, as John Ashbery describes what’s so alluring about Abstract Art, that it’s all founded on nothing. Rather than seeing this as only a weakness to certain artists, he acknowledges it’s precisely what’s so compelling.

Ashbery:

The complicated part, for me, I guess, is complicated grief. Or prolonged grief disorder. If you want to get all DSM-V about it. It seems to me that the history of poetry, which I often pin to Sappho, goes further back, even before Homer, to the story of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh loses his friend who is really a beloved friend if not boyfriend. The second half and bitter ending is all about the possibility of resurrection, or rescue. While Gilgamesh comes close to achieving the impossible, at the last second he loses the chance. Much like Orpheus unfortunately needing to look back (anxious attachment style) to see Eurydice. Oops.

It’s all well and good to claim grief has no timeline, that even breakups whether romantic or not, need to take however long as they require to be properly processed, maybe healed. Yet obdurate, stubborn grief extols quite the price. As Falstaff says about grief: “It blows a man up like a bladder!” Shakespeare might comically be pointing to weight gain, making another fat joke, given Falstaff’s portly comportment. But Shakespeare knew an awful lot about persistent grief.

It’s why Hamlet for all his adolescent mayhem remains a kind of ethical North Star to so many (though tragic, compromised, perhaps ultimately a grand failure). For though Hamlet is a prince and privileged brat as they come, he suffers. And he doesn’t only suffer, he grieves. Hamlet can’t stop grieving though his grief is confused for mania, though I don’t think psychiatrically they’re necessarily that distinct or even opposed states of being.

Toni Morrison:

Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.

I don’t know if there’s much that links my taste in art. But I’m sure grief and absence, the disquiet sense of being haunted, some kind of rational or irrational loyalty to the dead, to ghosts, all of it counts for something. In Hart Crane’s poetry there is the “perpetual music of self-elegy.” In Elizabeth Bishop, one feels she’s drunk a glass of tears beneath her tidy, fastidious, gleaming descriptions of nature, animals, miniature objects and scrutable things. Plenty of people enjoy melancholy and mourning as a stance for art making. I don’t know anyone that would cry out, like Claudius, “Tis unmanly grief.” Though I love that phrasing. Of being un-manned, or de-manned. But I’m biased, as a nonbinary person. I think gender roles and gender itself is like one big friggin’ exit sign.

The complicated part might be, from the outside POV, as it were, when you feel the poet or person starts to desire their living mausoleum or entombedness. Dickinson: “You who were Existence, / Yourself forgot to live.” That’s from Dickinson’s starkest, most bold elegy. But she’s chiding her beloved, too. There’s the literal why did you decide to die, as if one could forget that, like leaving a house without an umbrella or a pair of rain boots. But there’s the deeper, pervading curiosity we have towards people who seem to shrink like the snail into their shelly world: avoidant, retreating, dismissive, fearful. The world may try hard to entangle me in its joys or seductions for more life, to celebrate, to think green thoughts—but not enough.

Tennyson worked on his sequence of elegies for Arthur Hallam for 17 years. Hallam died in 1833 and the work was not complete and published until 1850. Arthur died suddenly of a brain aneurysm at age 22. Talk about prolonged grief disorder. He refused to marry until he finished the book, it seems.

Siddhartha gave his clothes to a poor Brahmin on the road and only retained his loincloth and earth-colored unstitched cloak. He only ate once a day and never cooked food. He fasted32 fourteen days. He fasted twenty-eight days. The flesh disappeared from his legs and cheeks. Strange dreams were reflected in his enlarged eyes. The nails grew long on his thin fingers and a dry, bristly beard appeared on his chin. His glance became icy when he encountered women; his lips curled with contempt when he passed through a town of well-dressed people. He saw businessmen trading, princes going to the hunt, mourners weeping over their dead, prostitutes offering themselves, doctors attending the sick, priests deciding the day for sowing, lovers making love, mothers soothing their children - and all were not worth a passing glance, everything lied, stank of lies; they were all illusions of sense, happiness and beauty. All were doomed to decay. The world tasted bitter. Life was pain.

These lines towards the beginning of Siddharta (Chapter 2) always make me think of Whitman’s stretch in “To Think of Time”:

When the dull nights are over, and the dull days also,
When the soreness of lying so much in bed is over,
When the physician, after long putting off, gives the silent and terrible
look for an answer,
When the children come hurried and weeping, and the brothers and sisters
have been sent for,
When medicines stand unused on the shelf, and the camphor-smell
has pervaded the rooms,
When the faithful hand of the living does not desert the hand of the dying,
When the twitching lips press lightly on the forehead of the dying,
When the breath ceases and the pulse of the heart ceases,
Then the corpse-limbs stretch on the bed, and the living look upon them,
They are palpable as the living are palpable.

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Narcissism is by far the trickiest framework because it’s something we already seem, poet and non-poet alike, equipped to recognize. We are told that our smartphones, laptops, AI—all the nefariousness of screen culture—not to mention the rise of fascistic populism driven by celebrity culture and polarization, ensures we are living in the unfettered Age of Me.

It could be forgiven that most people assume narcissism is shorthand for being a self-absorbed asshole. And if it’s not a grave moral flaw, then it must be a pathological illness: incorrigible as it is incurable. Narcissists are individuals so bent and warped by, so trained and loyal to their own perspective, that the ability to tolerate—let alone cooperate with—true otherness becomes impossible.

Yet Freud meant something quite different. Narcissism begins as a primary means of coping: the child has to be concerned with its own needs, born as it is into a world where it is not self-sufficient. Melanie Klein pushed this further: for her, the foundational emotional response to life is aggression, because the very source of sustenance—the breast’s milk—is also, seemingly, trying to smother us. Beyond that, Freud saw narcissism as a secondary defense mechanism. The more wounded we are in our attachments—energy he calls object-libido—the more we retreat internally, into the world of ego-libido.

Freud’s claim that homosexuals must have suffered some ur-crisis with their mothers—since they seek partners like themselves rather than like the mother—is, of course, wrong. Plenty of homosexuals seek partners to complement and differentiate against, exactly as heterosexuals do. Where Freud has firmer ground is in the department of trauma: patients can remove themselves to a fantasy world, an internal world, as a means of defense.

In a way, Freud encourages us—as do poets—to return to the primal scene of the Narcissus myth. Narcissus was not vengeful or proud, neither rude nor cruel. He was simply, unfortunately, captured by the power of an image in the water that he mistook for someone else. This follows Lacan’s argument that the young psyche, during the Mirror Stage, becomes the prisoner of a body-image or self-image.

Lacan would later refine this further, reminding students of analysis that between the child and the mirror stands a parent, a voice of authority, who approves and sanctions the judgments that territorialize the self. Much as no one who hates their body is ever truly alone—culture is in the room, telling them how and what their body should really be. That all-powerful should implicates the Third Party in all narcissisms, structurally speaking.

Now let's take a poem to consider. Sylvia Plath's "Mirror" has never been regarded as a major poem of hers. Yet in tenth grade I had to write one of my first essays about a poem, and whether this one was assigned or chosen I can no longer recall.

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Plath positions herself as the mirror. Which is really interesting. Rather than placing herself as a certain self or image (which happens later, in the second stanza), we begin with her as the object of meditation itself. This is precisely what Narcissus cannot see or know. It calls to mind the opening of a Dickinson poem:

I would not paint — a picture —
I’d rather be the One
It’s bright impossibility
To dwell — delicious — on —
And wonder how the fingers feel
Whose rare — celestial — stir —
Evokes so sweet a torment —
Such sumptuous — Despair —

In the following stanzas, Dickinson imagines becoming music rather than a musician, being an ear rather than a poet. Both Dickinson and Plath share the same innovative intuition: cut out the middle man, maybe literally. Whether this constitutes some emergent queerness of autoeroticism, some form of self-objectification, or a more primordial retreat — I’m not sure. Poetry resists easy dissection, like the Dickinson lark vivisected open to inspect the bulbs of her song. Though that’s precisely what readers, teachers, and critics tend to do.

What I find most compelling is Plath’s flatness of approach. While she calls herself, as the mirror, “the eye of a little god,” the object registers as simultaneously ominous (”swallow immediately”) and indifferent (”unmisted by love or dislike”). This seems inevitably to invoke the position of the feminine: being socialized into becoming the receiver, the projection screen, the veil of other people’s desires. Which is, of course, why Lacan considers all subjectivity to be inherently feminine. We don’t author our desires, not really. We’re the place they are acted upon, like the mirror. The poem is provocative and original for what is arguably a tired conceit: poet, mirror, self-reflection. If it ended at the first stanza, though, it would be far less memorable.

In the second stanza, we shift rapidly: the scenic context of Narcissus comes fully front and center. Suddenly we have “a lake,” and another figure: “A woman bends over,” who we might assume is Plath herself. Yet again Plath has switched positions—she is not Narcissus looking into a stranger; she is the lake looking up at the interloper upon the scene. Plath has the daring to identify herself not as the subject, not as the human, but as the image itself: as if an ego-projection in search of a host body, a likeness or floating resemblance trying to find its source. That’s uncanny. And if you sit with it a moment, it becomes more disturbing than grotesque—though grotesque is Plath’s preferred route of visceral lyric intensity.

Light sources are enemies, called “liars”: candles, moon. We focus on the back of the person, not their face. Finally we arrive at the lines that might seem, at first, dull and straightforward:

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

I can remember not knowing why the fish was “terrible.” How different from Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” or Marianne Moore’s — poems that course with description and scientific scrupulousness, committed to objecthood. Bishop is less neutral than Moore, and closer to Plath than readers have perhaps admitted. Bishop’s fish is allegorical because it stands in, as animals often do in her work, for the poet herself. In this way Bishop is more like the Lacanian narcissist: projecting self into the world in a way that reveals it was always just a compelling image we took for the real thing. It’s kind of how poems work: imaginary verbal mirror technologies.

Plath keeps us more fully inside the mirror-world. Yet the final lines come closest to argument or resolution: a young girl has been drowned; an old woman “Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” Why terrible? Scary? Repugnant? Creaturely?

My father, helping me read the poem in high school, argued it was terrible because it was dead—that fish, when they die, float up sideways to the surface. I don’t know whether that’s botanically true, but it helped my essay receive an A+. Thanks, dad.

One scholar suggests Plath may have had in mind Ted Hughes’s “Pike,” written in 1960, a year before “Mirror.” The closing stanza:

Pike

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

[…]

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.

The last line has something—“that rose slowly towards me, watching”—that may or may not anticipate Plath’s close: “Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” Whether or not the influence is real, it illuminates what Plath’s version does differently: where Hughes’s fish watches from outside, Plath’s rises from within.

“Mirror” highlights something too little understood about narcissism. We think it’s a judgment against other people, or a sign of self-involved isolation. In fact, psyches—like poems—incorporate the remains of otherness. And those distorted images of self are signs of an encounter that might otherwise be forgotten entirely.

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I STILL MISS MY EX

There are few miracles left.
Portable religions are not enough.
The new gods feast on liver.
The old ones, however, the ones that
break your heart and cause a great deal of suffering,
are as reliable as ever.

So one hungers and angers after something
as one also gets hung up on a sock.

Online, I admire people who present themselves
as happy and desirable like anyone addicted to a lie.
But I admire others more:
the cheated-on and cheating,
whoever’s stuck clinging to false testimony.
One day your destitution comes to you
in the shape of a text message
with the faded glamor of a car ad,
some drug prescription, a podcast
about the joys of staying in bed all day.
Though sun shines as it must.

Imagine a monk leaving his perfect cell
to tread the grounds in fuzzy slippers.

As a child, I found tornados interesting.
I did not care for dragons nor dinosaurs.
Sports were for people who
didn’t have a tiny bruised thumb.
I kept my own counsel, went to school
dressed like Henry Ford, brandishing
a plastic suitcase meant solely for toy food.

This is only one of the many reasons
that I still miss my ex.

The queer keep records of their suffering.
The lavish nod of a stranger can lead to ravishment.
For the world is a closed door.
Around the block, any number of bakeries
are getting ready to dump uneaten goods
into piles of departing trash.

Mentally my ex may reappear as any number of things:
a white barn owl hovering in the rafters,
the soft-armed sticker on a discount book,
the eyeliner of a hostess left at her reception stand.
I’m not someone who remembers their dreams.
Still, I appreciate a good helping hand.
I’m not always set in an anti-social stance.

Sex did not interest him; agony did.
Is it possible to miss someone’s depression?
The paltry world of words is an ashtray.
Elaborate doodles locked in a drawer wither away.

Like any Christian idiot,
I find people’s painful privacy to be riveting.
So he was an island unto himself,
someone who wore wax ears,
was filled with high silly laughter,
completely unfazed by TV or death.

What has become of my melancholy assistant?
Everyone’s stuck on a crystal highway.
We suspect, with good reason,
our way will not turn out well.
Some take to large blankets; some to Nembutal.

Meanwhile I wish I could relieve his wine-soaked migraines.
Or tempt him once more,
to step back into the light.
Hands filled with adhesive mustaches
or a prop cigarette.

In my next life, I will fall in love inside a small medieval theater.
I will stomp through vineyards
and probably fall for a swimming guard.
I don’t mind wearing the emblem of the wrong gender.
I respect people who scoff at troubadours
and the intricate lies of fictional ladies.
My own mind cooks up aqueducts.
I watch people review skincare products in the shower.
I picture hamlets in Utah, LA, San Juan or wherever.

Even so, it’s quite the experience
to affix your hopes on someone who at bottom
basically holds life in general contempt.
More people should refine their sense of apathy.
Wisdom dries; dead fish roll in the ocean;
gills are cut; feminist literature remains in fashion.

I miss bright feathers pinned to walls.
The hand-sewn lining of an executioner’s hood.
Among giants and creeps, pedantic avoidants,
the new circus consists of algorithms,
geese and fake credit lines. Yet consider
the mushroom; the nervous tendrils of soil.

And yet, the gods are never far.
It may be wrong to date a comet.
To actually catch in your lap a falling star.
I scrawl on the back of a napkin not a #
but some hidden password prayer.
In the dressing room mirror, I watch her
adjust cleavage and curse out her ex-husband.

He could whistle through his teeth.
He was a young crane calling in the shade.
Every offering of sorrow he made
(little of which had to do with me)
I could never refuse. Even now he’s probably
near some rec center or exiting a bathtub.
Holding onto his silver trident.
Staring down some healthy bowl of grains.

He cut a lovely figure. He was kind in a broken kind of way.

I’m pretty sure he was sad before the world was born.

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PURGATORIAL MICE

1

Scholars debate why mice are the only animals
Dante allows in Purgatory.
Intuitively, I see the implication.
My own life becomes a model of near hell.
There are escape hatches even
adorable vermin can’t flee from.
You and I are such, amid petrichor
and popsicle sticks.

2

It’s always very interesting when someone claws
away their beauty to make their suffering
plain. Take the example of a certain saint
who ripped the nipples off her breasts.
That says a lot. Does one hurt from others, or
for them? Sometimes a siren call
is reverse seduction: Stay away. My
mousey scalp is clay and fire. I think
about my ex’s depression constantly.
Boredom is not always a fuselage or carapace.

3

Escalators used to take children through malls
of the great American suburbs the same way
one could charter the Alps then skinny dip
in the south of France on a lark. Now
vices drip from black-bough trees.
Continents drift. Moroseness has a certain chemistry
when it comes to eating disorders.
I’ve often dated people in my life who I think
would rather die than be vulnerable. Ex:
The farmer meets in the middle of the earth
a shaky lump of fur before his plough.
He steps aside and moseys on.

—The Friend

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KEYWORD: MERCY

I don’t think is the clearest theological or dramaturgical argument W.H. Auden ever gave. It was written in response to Shakespeare’s quite disturbing (and incredible) play Measure for Measure. But I take his emphasis to tease out and separate the meaning of mercy as divine gift vs. legal matter:

The command to forgive is unconditional: whe…

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by Joe Weil

To have courage for whatever
comes in life
everything lies in that:

Whether it be tomatoes,
or asteroids, or a day when
you start out with a tomato
and end up with an asteroid:

or maybe it’s a tree limb which, after kissing
the garage roof for many years,
decides to “Jump its bones”
An old expression from the neig…

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EVENING STAR

Someone borrowed your nervous system and never gave it back.
Looking at an evening star in a coloring book,
Or noticing things in a van,
You became the evening star. You hid in a hoodie.

Numb and prince-like. Full of dread. Posted videos
From the passenger seat while
Infant hills licked pink soles of feet.
Un-blocking a number you call the West.

I’ve always been able to tell the different weeks apart.
To avoid too much culture or sitcoms.
Someone picks up a phone in a hospital.
I don’t live on the open road like you.

You collect license plates and burger wrappers.
I’m sure you’d like to be a villa somewhere.
Empty and complete. Your body shape of choice in a
World where that existed or mattered might be

The zipper of a monster costume come undone;
The backstage mask for a character in a school play;
The sense of very fine and rough pebbles on a glass tray.
Gibberish is fun. You’re a very old young person.

Hey, I like old people in whatever form they take.
Sometimes you must think it sucks you were born a boy.
But more accurate might be: born at all.
Imagine a fallen lolly on a curb outside a mall.

I forgive that you hate sex and frolic emotionally
When it comes to perdition, triangles, hostage
Negotiation. You still drive wide awake thru barns
At night. Clubs and highways. You go to the same.

On the shoulder of the road, you draw walls in
Your notebook instead of cracked-open doors.
You dream in fences and satellite detention centers.
You’ve only loved one person. She was not enough.

— The Friend

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Realism is one of the most elusive of artistic terms. ‘Unrealistic’, for example, is not necessarily the same as ‘non-realist’. You can have a work of art which is non-realist in the sense of being non-representational, yet which paints a convincing picture of the world. Conversely, Jeffrey Archer’s novels are representational but unconvincing. Jane Austen’s novels are realist, but you could claim that the spooky Gothic fiction she disliked so much reflects more of the anxiety and agitation of an Age of Revolution than Mansfield Park does. Life can be a good deal more surreal than André Breton. Walter Benjamin considered that Baudelaire’s poetry reflected the urban masses of Paris, even though those masses are nowhere actually present in his work.

Bertolt Brecht thought that realism was a matter of a work’s effects, not of whether it recalled something familiar. According to this theory, realism is a relationship between the artwork and its audience, in which case your play can be realistic on Monday but not on Thursday. One person’s realism is another’s fantasy. Realism is as realism does. Verisimilitude – showing a dockyard on stage, say – is not necessarily realistic in a politically and artistically evaluative sense of the word. Realism, in this view, is a matter of what the audience or readers get out of the thing, not what you put into it. ‘If one wanted an aesthetic,’ Brecht writes, ‘one could find one here.’

If realism is taken to mean ‘represents the world as it actually is’, then there is plenty of room for wrangling over what counts in this respect. You cannot decide whether a work is realist simply by inspecting it. Suppose we discovered a piece of writing from some long-vanished civilisation which we knew was in some sense fictional, and which paid inordinate attention to the length of men’s noses. We might categorise the work as non-realist, until further archaeological research revealed that the civilisation in question regarded nose-size as an important index of male fertility. In which case the text might shift into the category of realism. Literary critics in the distant future would not be able to tell that Endgame was non-realist unless, for example, they had historical evidence that putting old people in dustbins was not standard geriatric practice in the mid-20th century.

Artistic realism, then, cannot mean ‘represents the world as it is’, but rather ‘represents it in accordance with conventional real-life modes of representing it’. But there are a variety of such modes in any culture, and ‘in accordance with’ conceals a multitude of problems. We cannot compare an artistic representation with how the world is, since how the world is is itself a matter of representation. We can only compare artistic representations with non-artistic ones, a distinction which can itself be a little shaky.

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THE BOOK OF HOUSES

for Alice Notley

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IN THE PARALLEL VERSE

In the parallel verse, your father comes first.
He walks out with his sad pair of tits.
My father is not there until I realize, in the parallel verse,
I am my father. You are still you.
There are ruins of a playground in our breath.
The low stains of secrets soft on lips.
Someone plays an accordion that makes no sound.
Clouds are plastered on a wall of sky.

Underneath a lot of addiction—a pocket comb
From Walgreens or 1852—is unhappiness.
But no one till this day can say what that is
Or what it isn’t. It’s a job for twin larks.
In a parallel verse, we attention seek without
Ripping hands; we skid and scuff
By without being roped in by who or why.
And I think better than reunion is shared fate.

You crouch in a dark pink wood with a horn.
I walk by with dirt pants wet from a stream.
The night grows thick without irony.
As if to remind the grief has grown weightless.
In the real world, we cannot weep nor laugh,
Talk nor express anything like a coordinated truth.
Yet in the parallel world we are fretted diaphanous.
In the parallel world our fathers can’t hurt us.

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IN GRIEF

“In grief,” my friend starts to say and
Before he can finish the sentence
My mind hears “in Grief” as if he’s just
Returned from some foreign country.

What kind of flags do they wave there?
I picture badges, passports, coats worn
Or not. The slender sleeves of parasols.
How do houses stack together in Grief?

The streets seem as clean as aisles
In a dead facility. The kind of place
That suggests something worse than
The routine means of human decay.

Drawers full of blue exotic butterflies.
Obsolete manuals in perfect type
Replete with broken cheats and codes
For long since vanished machines.

In Grief, there are no citizens exactly.
It is a republic without borders.
The roads are unpaved. Through a sidewalk,
Weeds offer their dry salute.

In Grief, you often feel someone standing
Beside you. And sometimes someone is.
Friend or stranger, bleeding and bending
In the shape of something made of words.

Others harp over yesterday’s newspaper.
They see the same headline from
Forever ago. They hang in the balance
Between promise and neglect on tiny hills.

The sun shines, pleasantly, as if a headache.
Meanwhile I walk through streets flowing
Along hypothetical avenues all day.
I come upon a field of stones and nothing else.

In the distance, someone dots their hair.
Someone sides wide-eyed in a perfect square.
Someone holds a chicory comb and scrapes
The surface of their sex with a finger.

The courtyards of Grief are quite lovely, though.
Even mediocre flowers smell miraculous.
The light is vegetative, dry, which is nice.
And so I make my way toward a small thin house.

I nod to the neighbor and realize you live here.
Inside an open doorway, where shadows stretch
Across a carpet. Where a bowl of rocks sits
Waiting. I hear footfall. I imagine you in white.

Music plays lightly like the language of lovers.
The bitter taste of time bothers no one now.
It’s kind of you to come so far, my love, to greet me.
To keep this place we built together, centuries ago.

In Grief, you almost appear with those same
Missing eyes, in all places, here, in a pose
I know by heart. No matter what happens
We are here. For in Grief, we are always here.

—The Friend

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My crash out princess has gone mad again.
He dunks his feet in a basin of pure doubt.
His drunk arms knock about the stars.
The elements are rubbing off on him.

Soon the smells of tall city nights lick
And paw his open clothes and rest
Their ache in his wiry eyes before he
Collapses like a fine French wine in a stale

Bed where he has always slept alone
Though he prefers not sleep nor wake
Or anything behind the thumbs of suns.
Ginger fires curdle the corners of his scalp.

Soft gray camera powders blot his ears
And wet glass jaw. I hear cold laughters
Dot the memory of his great depressions.
Some smoke is fit for the disgraced.

The internet is like the idea of opera or a prism.
It takes a simple image that wants for nothing
And soon breeds itself on screens in tens of
Millions of rooms where some of us touch.

THE METEOR

When the small meteor came down
and destroyed my house
and killed my wife
I didn’t know what to do.
That’s how the poem should’ve begun.
But of course
I had no wife
and I own no home.
I was in love
with a boy
who was absent
both when he was in
and out of my life
and he would’ve hated
the word wife
even more than boy.
I will never be married
to anything
but my grief
and fond disasters. Still,
when I tried to tell people
about my apartment being flooded,
my books being lost,
spending six months
moving from void to void
that was never my own
I had no idea
how I could tell them
what happened each night.
I would imagine
a small meteor,
no bigger than a hook,
crashing down
and changing my life.
When does the mystery
of sacrifice
become interesting again?
I spent most days
taking photographs
sometimes of beautiful people.
Sometimes,
at early evening,
I’d be lost in conversation
with questions
that are always too deep
yet never enough.
It’s very possible
the soul
is like a crystal cabinet
with little pieces
coming and going.
I am terrible
at losing things,
but I guess
I’m still a sucker
for loss.
Some grow pregnant
with absence.
Some work on
their mind-lives
filled with the lush foliage
of lust
and grief though
my good friend says
they’re basically
the same.
I have never asked
for much.
I’ve always felt entitled
to keep
what I had.
We stare at our eyes
over a cup of coffee.
You ask me
what I’m thinking about
and know
I can’t be honest.
I keep thinking
about the meteor.
Its perfect little
foamy tail,
its flame
and flint
like an eyelash
of dust.
Of course
I miss my wife,
whom I think of
every day.
I know
it’s not so likely
we will speak again.
I even miss
our tiny little
imaginary house.

POEM WITHOUT YOU

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NO MORE CIRCUS

Eli was one of those students who was a walking disaster. It was my first semester teaching creative writing, though not my first semester teaching at all. The school I worked at had already put me through the hellish Siberia of English comp. Otherwise known as Expository Writing, or to students: Expos. There, most students failed the first and even the second major assignment, all but guaranteeing no chance of an A. Even smart, hard-working undergrads found the stakes grueling.

Now, someone like Eli—chronically late, never submitting the right assignment, constantly needing sidebar explanations and emotional triage—of course would get an A in my class. It was creative writing. My mentor once told me there are only two kinds of students who don’t get A’s in such classes: corpses and assholes. Corpses never show up. Assholes are assholes. Eli somehow combined the worst of both yet was technically neither.

He was plausible deniability incarnate.

If he was late, he had a note somewhere, or might get one next week, if that was okay, professor? He missed the one class I begged no one to miss—on adjectives—and emailed me immediately afterward, confirming that, per the syllabus, two unexcused absences were allowed. Correct? Oh, and by the way, could I explain what he missed?

“I heard it was magical. Sorry to miss!!!” he ended the message.

We’re not allowed to say this, but I sensed it almost immediately. I had found my student nemesis. No matter what corners he cut, no matter how he ignored instructions, there was always a reason. He was never at fault. Life was hard. Something had just happened, oops. Everything came in that exhausted, pre-apologetic tone of I know this sounds dramatic, but… And lo, whatever followed drained you of life. I tried to stay patient. This was before the internet gave us nomenclature like softboy or fuckboy for master manipulators. Eli was ahead of the curve.

He was also a soul suck. An energy leech. But he had perfect timing. He could terrorize on command. Never before had he asked to stay after class. But the day we covered poetic misdirection, he did. I let the class out early—something I never do—because I wanted to catch an earlier train to NYC for a hot date. I told them it was because my sickly uncle needed help. Both of my uncles had been dead for years, mind you.

Yes, I was lying. Common enough for underpaid adjuncts. After all, lies are our social lubricants to maintain sanity. Ways to buy back time from the corporate university, which like an Eli—or a sea of Elis—is bent on squeezing the last drop out of you. All while you await their eval score.

The class dispersed. Eli asked if we could talk. I explained I had to leave, mumbling something about my uncle’s bad kidney condition. He asked me to elaborate on why Elizabeth Bishop focuses on the fish’s “beard” when describing wisdom. My eyes narrowed. I restated my talking points, briskly. I didn’t believe for a second he cared about Bishop, let alone metaphorical fish hair.

“Oh, that’s fascinating, professor, really fascinating, but…”

The ellipsis in his voice stretched on for miles.

He was such a gremlin.

Then suddenly, I smiled. I knew what was happening. Eli was not going to let me catch that train. But I thought: don’t react, don’t be mean. This is his paid-for ten minutes. Let the student go about his business and pester you with his annoying questions.

So I made my quiet play: “Eli, let’s walk and talk. I have to head toward the train, but you’re right, this is fascinating. Accompany me.”

“Of course, professor!” he beamed. Everything about Eli arrived in exclamation points or ellipses. It drove me nuts. His priapic, tyrannically chipper demeanor was bad enough. But it was the hesitations—the low-key melancholies, the recursive pauses, the way his speech could suddenly capsize into silence—that made one feel appropriately murderous.

I slung my silly professor suitcase over my shoulder and exited the door. From behind me: “Professor?” I stopped in my tracks. Turned. I knew it was coming.

“I don’t mean to bother you, but—” Then Eli broke into sobs. Real, hysterical sobs. A viable mess of tears. I felt beyond terrible.

I panicked at once. Led us back into the classroom. Got him tissues. As he calmed down, I asked what was wrong. He soon expounded. Rapaciously. His fear of never being published. His worry about not getting into grad school. His dread of what the other students must have thought of him. On and on the litany went. Oddly, though I was now certain to miss the train, I saw an opportunity. If I could meet this moment with true compassion—become entirely submissive to his needless emotional domination—maybe he’d stop being such a galactic ballbuster for the rest of the semester. If he felt even slightly guilty or somewhat secretly gratified, maybe I’d be spared from then on. No more theatrics. A new victim would be found.

Eli’s strange eyes flickered at me. “I don’t want to keep you from your important appointment.”

He said appointment with a tremulous doubt half-buried in his throat. Yeah. He knew I was lying. Which, of course, I was. “My grandfather has kidney problems too,” he added, bashfully. “I could pass along our doctor’s info, if it helps.”

“Oh, Eli, that’s so kind of you. Please do. But I don’t want to interrupt this moment. I’m just going to text my roommate to meet my uncle on my behalf. No worries.”

“No, professor, please, don’t! Another time! I must be going!”

I told him it didn’t matter. I’d already missed the train anyway. It was just a routine checkup.

He nodded, looking quite frozen and hollowed. His face like a pale shell only recently washed ashore. But I held firm. I transmitted radiant patience. I folded my hands as if warm and durable. All was fine. I pretended not to want to stab him in the eye with a whiteboard marker.

Then he whispered, in a slow teary hush: “Dialysis?”

I blinked. “Dialysis?”

“Kidney dialysis. Has your uncle reached that critical juncture yet, in his treatments?”

That night I fantasized about train wrecks, plane crashes, plagues of insects taking Eli away forever. That single phrase—reached that critical juncture yet—was so smug, so deniable. It made me, a hippy-dippy pacifist, want to buy a shotgun.

Let me pause.

My boss Aimee, the angel who runs our department, is what we call a character. Shoots from the hip. No bullshit. When I recounted my Eli stories, she howled. Then she shut the office door behind me and said: “What an evil fucker!” She demanded every detail.

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The above poem by Edwin Muir would be reason enough for me to remember this writer for the rest of my life. Like F.T. Prince, Muir is an underrated lyric poet of tremendous fragrant delicacy as well as hard-nosed existentialism. The sense of the Classics seems to stand behind both, a bit, that Ancient Roman literary tendency towards the lapidary line. Yet he has a greater claim to fame.

Muir and his partner, Willa, constituted the first set of thorough, comprehensive translators of Kafka’s works, both the stories and novels, into English. Some have criticized and improved on their choices since, but for the full scope of Kafka in print today, at least in the creative works, I think they remain the unrivaled kings and queens for all things Kafkaesque. That they did so, and so early on, with such dedication for decades, is a permanent miracle of translation as well as critical devotion.

“The ever-present that in their absence are with us…” writes Muir. So what about absence?

I am 41. Both of my parents are dead. My brother lives out on the streets unhoused in Florida. I reside in Brooklyn, New York, in my most favorite city, though Paris and Mexico City are close rivals. I write from Brooklyn during a US-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians. I work inside the largest police-prison state in history. Within a bloated empire that—among other things—through its devices and technologies, its cultural assemblies, basically fucks with in real time the entire planet. 

Whatever spiritualism I share is written in the face of that.

I love poetry. I have since I was young. I think of Robert Frost’s line “I have been one acquainted with the night” and rewrite it as I have been one acquainted with absence. I believe everyone, of course, has a profound relationship to it. Through the course of my own existence, especially with a sick brother, and then later, among the dissolutions of friends and lovers, time’s handiwork, most notably the death of someone I was in love with at college, I’ve taken on a very pronounced and reverent relationship towards absence.

Someone I’ve cared deeply for the last year or so is no longer in my life. 

Whatever spirituality I do have, and yes I have one, comes from my love of such negativity. That is, the formal, lived aspect of negation (I don’t mean Debbie Downer outlooks.) This changed in 2020 when the whole world paused. I got sober for some four plus years. As I did so, my weirdo faith booted back online. I’ve come to feel the weight of absent things. One of the reasons why I turn to psychoanalysis as I once turned for decades to poetry is that not just Eros but absence is taken very seriously in that framework.

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Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.

You also help other people to survive. Memory about them does not disappear, because they are on your pictures.

Yes. It is about keeping a record of the lives I lost, so they cannot be completely obliterated from memory. My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them. The people are gone, like Cookie, who is very important to me, but there is still a series of pictures showing how complex she was. Because these pictures are not about statistics, about showing people die, but it is all about individual lives. In the case of New York, most creative and freest souls in the city died. New York is not New York anymore. I've lost it and I miss it. They were dying because of AIDS.

You decided to leave the United States because of the effect the AIDS epidemic had on the community of New York gay artists and writers?

I left America in 1991 to Europe. I went to Berlin partially because of that, and partially because one of my best friends, Alf Bold, was dying and I stayed with him and took care of him. He had nobody to take care of him. I mean, he had lots of famous friends, but he had nobody to take care of him on a daily basis. He was one of people who invented the Berlin film festival. This was also the time when my Paris photo dealer Gilles died of AIDS. He had the most radical gallery in the city. He did not tell anybody in Europe that he has AIDS, because the attitude here was so different than in the United States. There was no ACT UP in Paris, and in 1993 it looked very much like in the US in the 1950s. Now it has changed, but at that time people in Europe told me: 'Oh, we do not need ACT UP. We have very good hospitals'.

Your art is basically socially engaged...

It is very political. First, it is about gender politics. It is about what it is to be male, what it is to be female, what are gender roles... Especially The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is very much about gender politics, before there was such a word, before they taught it at the university. A friend of mine said I was born with a feminist heart. I decided at the age of five that there was nothing my brothers can do and I cannot do. I grew up that way. It was not like an act of decision that I was going to make a piece about gender politics. I made this slideshow about my life, about my past life. Later, I realized how political it was. It is structured this way so it talks about different couples, happy couples. For me, the major meaning of the slideshow is how you can become sexually addicted to somebody and that has absolutely nothing in common with love. It is about violence, about being in a category of men and women. It is constructed so that you see all different roles of women, then of children, the way children are brought up, and these roles, and then men, then it shows a lot of violence. That kind of violence the men play with. It goes to clubs, bars, it goes to prostitution as one of the options for women - prostitution or marriage. Then it goes back to the social scene, to married and re-married couples, couples having sex, it ends with twin graves.

Nan Goldin - Valerie and Gotscho embraced, Paris, 1999, Galerie Yvon Lambert

Nan Goldin - Clemens, Jens and Nicolas laughing at Le Pulp. Paris. 1999

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Brooklyn, N.Y.
April 21st, [1924]

Dear Waldo:

For many days, now, I have gone about quite dumb with something for which "happiness" must be too mild a term. At any rate, my aptitude for communication, such as it ever is!, has been limited to one person alone, and perhaps for the first time in my life (and, I can only think that it is the last, so far is my imagination from the conception of anything more profound and lovely than this love.) I have wanted to write you more than once, but it will take many letters to let you know what I mean (for myself, at least) when I say that I have seen the Word made Flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility. In the deepest sense, where flesh became transformed through intensity of response to counter-response, where sex was beaten out, where purity of joy was reached that included tears. It’s true, Waldo, that so much more than my frustrations and multitude of humiliations has been answered in this reality and I promise that I feel that whatever event the future holds is justified before hand. And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another. . . .

HART CRANE TO WALDO FRANK

Today is the birthday of my favorite poet, Hart Crane. I don’t know why, but there are so many dear people in my life who were born in July: my father, on the 13^th; my dead beloved (C.C.), who was born and died on his 21^st birthday tragically, on the 6^th; as well as John Ashbery, my sweet friend and nutty mentor of many years, born on the 28^th (the same day as my grandfather, in fact).1

To pay tribute to Crane, I wanted to quote from one of this most famous letters (excerpted above).2

Hart Crane tragically committed suicide in April 27, 1932, while he was on the way back from Mexico. Accounts and interpretations vary, but he jumped off the back of the Orizaba into shark-infested waters in the Gulf of Mexico, slightly before noon. His body was never recovered (inspiring John Wheelwright’s epic elegy: “Fish Food”—which I often teach).3

For many decades, everything about the poet’s life was considered a failure, a splendid failure, gifted but damaged. Crane was a raging alcoholic who had a habit of ending friendships and making scenes. He was also an unapologetic homosexual, not a boon in any social age of American history, as well as another reason for friends and critics to turn on him, blaming his poetic style or suicide on a ‘disordered’ or ‘pathological’ nature.

To the degree he had one, the Danish sailor Emil Opffer was the love of Crane’s life. Opffer was a ship writer (journalist), and went on many long travels around the world. This made Crane a tad sulky. And I say this with love and identification, but it really brought out the moody-ass bitch in the young poet. As they became lovers, Crane’s poetry intensified. Typical poet shit: he was already trying to write some love poems, totally unrelated right before he met Emil. Yet finally the muse arrive. This erotic—and spiritual—experience crystallized something for Crane. He would work on them for years, the sequence now known as Voyages sprang into existence: what I still claim as the finest short sequence of love lyrics in the English language: dense and intricate, high-voltage and slightly impossible.4 They are so very tender in spots:

But now
Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.

The story begins in April 1924, in Brooklyn, soon after Crane met the blond-haired, blue-eyed Opffer. In the above letter to a friend, with his typical rhetorical intensity, Crane marks the encounter by boasting at having seen “the Word made Flesh,” recalling the opening of the Gospel of John. But something in the next sentence always stayed with me even more: “I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility.” I’ve felt that! Have you felt that?

To pay tribute to Crane, I want to ask, as earnest and intense as he was, no shame: Is there such a thing as indestructibility when it comes to love? The Romantic mode of looking at love, especially erotic, sexual or romantic love, something that happens between two or more partners, has been widely debunked from pop psychology, statistics, and anti-capitalist critique. It’s basically seen as a teenage fiction. Something to sell movies or trap people in unhappy marriages. I mean…

Let’s boil them down some soundbites on the supposed Realist side, that is, against the idea of indestructible love.

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A young man leans with one shoulder against the wall, and his slender body remains motionless against the huge open slab of night sky and night water behind him. He is facing the river. Little waves scuttling shoreward from a passing, passed scow slap against boards: perfunctory applause.

—Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)

A lot can be made out of the appreciation for a famous novel’s first sentence. Years ago, the internet was inundated with think-pieces ranking or elaborating such rival openers drawn from the masterpieces of the English language. Ok fine. Tiring, yes. Even so, I was charmed to learn that while David Harvey struggled to teach all of volume one of Capital in a single semester, Derrida was devoting a whole seminar to the opening page. Reading and study as bourgeois fetish porn? I mean also why not. I guess certain close readings make others seem standoffish.

Still, beginnings matter.

I want to look at the first three sentences from the opening page of Nocturnes for the King of Naples by the newly deceased Edmund White. Which I know many people consider his best written book, or one of. I came to White through a summer in Paris, tramping around with mostly two books, a slim monograph by Levinas on existentialism (one of the densest texts I had ever read) and White’s own monumental biography of Jean Genet. I continued throughout the years to read White’s literary essays and bios (Rimbaud). Last night I bicycled to McNally Jackson and grabbed Nocturne for the King of Naples, introduced by Garth Greenwell (the foreword is majestic). This is how Stacey D’Erasmo blurbs said book: “The most gorgeous evocation I have ever read of the 1970s gay male nighttown at New York’s old rotting piers, a twisted, rusting, metallic ruin of anonymous sex and unexpectedly sublime tableaus.”

A young man leans with one shoulder against the wall, and his slender body remains motionless against the huge open slab of night sky and night water behind him. 

This sentence does a lot of work. Isolated, we may not know yet Chapter 1 opens with the narrator trolling for dick in Manhattan. This is not an image of someone on their knees or a description of a murmuration of shadows under the piers, near the slapping sound of water and bodies (that comes later). Instead we have a rather statuesque image, something out of Keats (half-recumbent on its own might) or Scott Fitzgerald. Or maybe a more fay T.S. Eliot. There are many neat repetitions and parallels afoot. “Against” and “night” emphasize not only position but contact, not only setting and mood but envelopment. A nocturne, pointed to by the title, is a short piece of music known for its ambient, dreamy, melancholic or evocative atmospherics. The sentence has some supple symmetries: “shoulder” and “slender,” not to mention the contrapuntal force of “leans,” “remains,” “motionless.” The sentence points to movement yet seems to lack it. But it gets even better. Notice the telescopic shift in scale: from a mere wall where a lone boy perches, to the “huge open slab of night sky,” which is quite baroque, I’d say. 

One thinks of Eliot’s Prufrock: those “lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows” as well as, ala the night slab, the famed opening: “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Eliot’s line is more iconic, sure, and original. But it’s also ghastly. Determined. White’s night is not just huge and slab, which is visceral and textured enough, but importantly: “open.” Why is something so large and heavy yet accepting and inviting? It might say something about gay sex, in general. But specific to this scene, I think there’s already hunger and expectation leaking through.

On a very good day I might have written “a huge open slab of night sky and water,” but White has me beat. I would not have thought to write “a huge open slab of night sky and night water,” because that repetition might seem redundant. Repetition is to modulate and emphasize, never to succumb to diminishing returns, right? But the double use of “night” so close together is not redundant. It’s brilliant.

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