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Notes on The Argonauts

I finished reading Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015). One down on the list of books I've set out to read this summer. It will very likely be the easiest of them all, I had no intentions for this one. I heard The Argonauts mentioned a few times by peers, I even had parts of it assigned in class, but I never bothered to look into it properly. I knew at a glance at a professor's scan that I liked the way Nelson incorporates quotes into her writing. I've always hated formal citation, cutting up my sentences with information. I also don't like compromising on others' ideas. If I could write only in a collage of block quotes, I would. I'm glad someone finally stuck it to them. It's Bluets I had actually intended to read, perhaps for silly reasons. First, simply because it wasn't The Argonauts, second because I like it when people have a thing and I thought the colour blue might be a thing, and third because the blurbs I skim-read announced a mix of prose and verse, which, in my experience of Anne Carson, is a great thing.I ended up with The Argonauts just because I wandered into a book store on a lousy day last month to indulge (a small few times a year I let myself buy a book new: on lousy days, or when there's really nothing else to go around). It was displayed right across the entrance. The shop had some kind of watery theme going. This edition has blue-purple waves for a cover, it's nice and simple. I did what I always do: opened to a page at random and gave it a glance to see if it looked palatable. There were lines of verse (good), they were about motherhood (this I wasn't so sure about, felt uneasy even). Either way, I walked out of there comfort-book under arm, without knowing anything about Maggie Nelson except her name, and completely forgetting about Bluets. I leave a trace in my books, so I can find my way again. The folded corners at the top tell me at what pace I read. The ones at the bottom tell me where I wanted to remember something the most. For Argonauts ,I tacked on a few other things: some blue post-it notes for further readings, three exactly, various pencil annotations, and a few words scribbled in the margins. I know I will came back to The Argonauts. The books I seem to refuse to preview properly are always such a surprise. I had that happen with The Bell Jar. I was 18 and had absolutely no idea what it was about and knew nothing about Sylvia Plath either. I was reading quite a few classic American novels that year (I know Why the Caged Bird Sings, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Post Office, Fahrenheit 541, Brave New World,  Lolita etc.) and, given such a list, the Bell Jar could land pretty much anywhere in terms of what it was about. For some reason I had it pegged as something pastoral, perhaps Southern, and coming of age. My guess is Plath's gender amongst all the men had me lump it with Maya Angelou and Harper Lee. Nonetheless, the modernity of it, the content of it, the sincerity of it... hit me like a ton of bricks. Argonauts didn't have quite such a jarring effect, but it was a definite experience in the un-anticipated. I've spoken to a few girls my age about the strange turn some things appear to have taken in recent years. No one thinks to warn you. It suddenly dawned on me one day that pregnancy was something that I couldn't quite get in trouble over anymore. For the longest time accidental pregnancy just had this death-factor reaction of "I'd be completely fucked". It meant shame, it meant secrecy, it meant incredible burden if uttered. But somewhere in the midst of my extended family growing larger – older cousins and siblings making babies – it struck me that mothers (my mother, my aunts, 'my many-gendered mothers'), that is the gyroscopes of opinion and permissibility, were anticipating the emergence of a new generation of care. Hints are dropped in the form of stored children's books and stuffed animals – carefully, quietly, pragmatically kept. A tattoo artist warned me about places not to get tattooed. It is my responsibility to anticipate my body. The irony, and I love it all the more for it, is the tattoo I have of my family motto: nunquam non paratus, or never unprepared. It's from this strange perch – discovering what it means to be a fertile body in the eyes of others, and tentatively in my own – that I read The Argonauts. It is also from a place of naming and recognising, for the first time realistically, what ordinary devotion to someone means. I know this book is a valuable reading, but I'm aware of my own prematurity. I can anticipate the need to return to it, for whichever reason, and I know the next times will be different. For now, I've gathered some passages that struck me now, as I feel, as I was reading, as I am writing. They might seem oddly selective, but I think this is only a sign of how versatile The Argonauts is. In its richness it offers a multiplicity of readings (and I feel sure its generosity of quotes have just this purpose). Here are the lessons I gathered from Nelson and from those she speaks through: Writing: "As I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness (fidelity to sense-making, to assertion, to argument, “however loose)—I’m no longer sure which of us is more at home in the world, which of us more free.” (65) "What other reason is there for writing than to be traitor to one’s own reign, traitor to one’s own sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority? And to be traitor to writing.” (Parnet, 122) "Over the years I’ve had to train myself to wipe the sorry off almost every work e-mail I write; otherwise, each might begin, Sorry for the delay, Sorry for the confusion, Sorry for whatever. One only has to read interviews with outstanding women to hear them apologizing.” (Wittig, 122) "Writing to him felt akin to giving him a name: an act of love, surely, but also one of irrevocable classification, interpellation.” (175) I've been thinking for a while now about an act of naming and how names arrest things in flux. Also, see Anne Carson's introduction to Autobiography of Red. "Ordinary words are good enough." (25) “What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted? Can it be that words comprise one of the few economies left on earth in which plenitude—surfeit, even—comes at no cost?” (Carson, 60) "You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. That’s part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide." (Myles, 121) I concur, writing is horrifying. I've also learned that writing can be wilted (129). "I gained an outsized faith in articulation itself as its own form of protection". (154) Gender/sex/binaries: "As if I did not know that, in the field of gender, there is no charting where the external and the internal begin and end—" (64) "How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?" (66) "Let him stay oblivious—for the first and last time, perhaps—to the task of performing a self for others, to the fact that we develop, even in utero, in response to a flow of projections and reflections ricocheting off us. Eventually, we call that snowball a self (Argo)." ( 118) In-betweenness: Matter and liminality are two of my research topics. It's been so pleasing, uncanny, to see them flit in an out of sight. It's really what this is about: being, becoming passage. “How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?” (65) “On the one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories—predator, twilight, edible—on the other, the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live. Becoming, Deleuze and Guattari called this flight: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-molecular. A becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning” (66) Matter: "Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!” (Emerson, 41) "Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining. That’s what you kept telling me when we first met—that in a real, material sense, what is made from where." (151) "Made of star stuff" reminds of Nostalgia for the Light. I think it's the first time I understood space as a material history. Dust to dust and all that. Argo-, ordinary devotion, revisiting: "It reminds us that there is difference right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion." (116) The year I fell in love with theory, theory of all kinds, even though this course was called "anthropological", I was assigned 'difference' as a theme to explore for one semester. I hold onto the word dearly now, because it has so much to teach. Now I hear the word "difference" and it makes me think of Deleuze in a purple jumper, slouched in a chair, talking about refrains. Deleuze taught me about communion too. What it means when two refrains commune, when two different scales encounter each other. Anthropology is all about encounters. Encounters are only possible with difference, however large or small. A zine called Friendship as a Form of Life, which is as beautiful as its title sounds, divided its pages into the following chapters: Common, Commune, Communion. I think about this sequence a lot. “The Argo’s parts may get replaced, but it’s still called the Argo. We may become more used to jumping into flight, but that doesn’t mean we have done with all perches. We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. We ought to, but we don’t—or at least, we don’t quite as readily. But the more you do, the more quickly you can recognize the feeling when it comes around again, and hopefully you won’t need to stare as long.” (68) Hello from my perch. "Privilege saturates, privilege structures." "The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic…. [Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible." (Philips/Taylor, 126) I am learning this. "That’s enough. You can stop now: the phrase Sedgwick said she longed to hear whenever she was suffering. (Enough hurting, enough showing off, enough achieving, enough talking, enough trying, enough writing, enough living.)" (128) Yes, I can stop. Please stop. I'v been spiralling a little lately. "But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life." (140) This quote means so much to me at this particular time: as I cease to recognise myself, as I come undone and remade (argo-), as I learn what it means to feel so easily, to be so ordinarily devoted to someone. I was so ready to feel confused about questions of loss and gain, whether it was something to feel self-conscious about, to lose oneself to, or to rebel against. But the pleasure is simply what it is. It seems so obvious that I feel naive. Of course it's about the knowing itself, about matter and touch. It's always about what hangs in the air. I have someone to learn ordinary devotion for and the shock of this is still wearing off. I thought of it as a thawing at first, but 'to revisit' will be my mantra instead. Revisit, revisit, revisit. I am not gone, I am not new, "I am made and remade continually". (Woolf) "But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don’t know. I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song." (178) Refusing the nothing has been part of my venture these past months. It started with Elizabeth Povinelli's suffix "-ish", and all other blurring of boundaries, like between the living and non-living. Tim Ingold also refuses the nothing of atmosphere. Nelson's quote brings me back to communion: line-making, care, drifting, song-making, correspondence. Mother: "If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way. You will have realized that death will do you too, without fail and without mercy. It will do you even if you don’t believe it will do you, and it will do you in its own way. There’s never been a human that it didn’t. I guess I’m just waiting to die, your mother said, bemused and incredulous...” (167) "But to let the baby out, you have to be willing to go to pieces.” (155) "It's a happiness that spreads." (176) "...save the sense, likely unconscious, of having once been gathered together, made to feel real." (176) The things I want to look further into: André Breton's Mad Love Deleuze/Parnet dialogues Barthes' The Neutral (No, my francophilic tendencies are not getting any better).