#Postcards from America: X-rays from Hell

[secretnameofeverydeath]

At least I won’t arrive one day at my eightieth birthday and at the eve of my possible death and only then realize my whole life was supposed to be somewhat a preparation for the event of death and suddenly fill up with rage because instead of preparation all I had was a lifetime of adaptation to the preinvented world—do you understand what I’m saying here? I am busying myself with a process of distancing myself from you and others and my environment in order to know what I feel and what I can find. I’m trying to lift off the weight of the preinvented world so I can see what’s underneath it all. I’m hungry and the preinvented world won’t satisfy my hunger. I’m a prisoner of language that doesn’t have a letter or a sign or gesture that approximates what I’m sensing. Rage may be one of the few things that binds or connects me to you, to our preinvented world.

Postcards from America / X Rays from Hell - David Wojnarowicz (essay in the essay collection Rebellious Mourning)

[carefullydoesit-blog]

Postcards from America: X-rays from Hell (1988)

Late yesterday afternoon a friend came over unexpectedly to sit at my kitchen table and try and find some measure of language for his state of mind. “What’s left of living?” He’s been on AZT for six to eight months and his T-cells have dropped from 100 plus to 30. His doctor says: “What the hell do you want from me?” Now he’s asking himself: “What the hell do I want?” He’s trying to answer this while in the throes of agitating FEAR.

I know what he’s talking about as each tense description of his state of mind slips out across the table. The table is filled with piles of papers and objects; a boom-box, a bottle of AZT, a jar of Advil (remember, you can’t take asprin or Tylenol while on AZT). There’s an old smiley mug with pens and scissors and a bottle of Xanax for when the brain goes loopy; there’s a Sony tape-recorder that contains a half-used cassette of late night sex talk, fears of gradual dying, anger, dreams and someone speaking Cantonese. In this foreign language it says: My mind cannot contain all that I see. I keep experiencing this sensation that my skin is too tight; civilization is exploding inside of me. Do you have a room with a better view? I am experiencing the X-ray of civilization. The minimum speed required to break through the earth’s gravitational pull is seven miles a second. Since economic conditions prevent us from gaining access to rockets or spaceships we have to learn to run awful fast to achieve escape from where we are all heading . . .

My friend across the table says, “There are no more people in their 30’s. We’re all dying out. One of my four best friends just went into the hospital yesterday and he underwent a blood transfusion and is now suddenly blind in one eye. The doctors don’t know what it is . . .” My eyes are still scanning the table; I know a hug or a pat on the shoulder won’t answer the question mark in his voice. The AZT is kicking in with one of its little side-effects: increased mental activity which in translation means I wake up these mornings with an intense claustrophobic feeling of fucking doom. It also means that one word too many can send me to the window kicking out panes of glass, or at least that’s my impulse (the fact that winter is coming holds me in check). My eyes scan the surfaces of walls and tables to provide balance to the weight of words. A 35mm camera containing the unprocessed images of red and blue and green faces  in close-up profile screaming, a large postcard of a stuffed gorilla pounding its dusty chest in a museum diorama, a small bottle of hydrocortisone to keep my face from turning into a mass of peeling red and yellow flaking skin, an airline ticket to Normal, Illinois, to work on a print, a small plaster model of a generic Mexican pyramid looking like it was mad in Aztec kindergarten, a tiny motorcar with tiny Goofy driving at the wheel . . .

My friend across the table says, “The other three of my four best friends are dead and I’m afraid that I won’t see this friend again.” My eyes settle on a six-inch-tall rubber model of Frankenstein from the Universal Pictures Tour gift shop, ™ 1931: his hands are enormous and my head fills up with replaceable body parts; with seeing the guy in the hospital; seeing myself and my friend across the table in line for replaceable body parts; my wandering eyes aren’t staving off the anxiety of his words; behind his words, so I say, “You know … he can still rally back . . . maybe . . . I mean people do come back from the edge of death . . .”

“Well,” he says, “he lost thirty pounds in a few weeks …”

A boxed cassette of someone’s interview with me in which I talk about diagnosis and how it simply underlined what I knew existed anyway. Not just the disease but the sense of death in the American landscape. How when I was out west this summer standing in the mountains of a small city in New Mexico I got a sudden and intense feeling of rage looking at those postcard perfect slopes and clouds. For all I knew I was the only person for miles and all alone and I didn’t trust that fucking mountain’s serenity. I mean it was just bullshit. I couldn’t buy the con of nature’s beauty; all I could see was death. The rest of my life is being unwound and seen through a frame of death. My anger is more about this culture’s refusal to deal with mortality. My rage is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.

On the table is today’s newspaper with a picture of cardinal O’Connor saying he’d like to take part in operation rescue’s blocking of abortion clinics but his lawyers are advising against it. This fat cannibal from the house of walking swastikas up on fifth avenue should lose his church tax-exempt status and pay retroactive taxes from the last couple centuries. Shut down our clinics and we will shut down your “church.” I believe in the death penalty for people in positions of power who commit crimes against humanity, i.e., fascism. This creep in black skirts has kept safer-sex information off the local television stations and mass transit advertising spaces for the last eight years of the AIDS epidemic thereby helping thousands and thousands to their unnecessary deaths.

My friend across the table is talking again. “I just feel so fucking sick … I have never felt this bad in my whole life … I woke up this morning with such intense horror; sat upright in bed and pulled on my clothes and shoes and left the house and ran and ran and ran …” I’m thinking maybe he got up to the speed of no more than ten miles an hour. There are times I wish we could fly; knowing that this is impossible I wish I could get a selective lobotomy and rearrange my senses so that all I could see is the color blue; no images or forms, no sounds or sensations. There are times I wish this were so. There are times that I feel so tired, so exhausted. I may have been born centuries too late. A couple of centuries ago I might have been able to be a hermit but the psychic and physical landscape today is just too fucking crowded and bought up. Last night I was invited to dinner upstairs at a neighbor’s house. We got together to figure out how to stop the landlord from illegally tearing the roofs off our apartments. The buildings dept. had already shut the construction crew down twice and yet they have started work again. The recent rains have been slowly destroying my western wall. This landlord some time ago allowed me to stay in my apartment without a lease only after signing an agreement that if there were a cure for AIDS I would have to leave within 30 days. A guy visiting the upstairs neighbor learned that I had this virus and said he believed that although the government probably introduced the virus to the homosexual community, that homosexuals were dying en masse as a reaction to centuries of society’s hatred and repression of homosexuality. All I could think of when he said this was an image of hundreds of whales that beach themselves on the coastlines in supposed protest of the ocean’s being polluted. He continued: “People don’t die – they choose death. Homosexuals are dying of this disease because they have internalized society’s hate …” I felt like smacking him in the head, but held off momentarily, saying, “As far as your theory of homosexuals dying of AIDS as a protest against society’s hatred, what about the statistics that those people contracting the disease are intravenous drug users or heterosexually inclined, and that this seems to be increasingly the case. Just look at the statistics for this area of the lower east side.” “Oh,” he said, “they’re hated too …” “Look,” I said, “after witnessing the deaths of dozens of friends and a handful of lovers, among them some of the most authentically spiritual people I have ever known, I simply can’t accept mystical answers or excuses for why so many people are dying from this disease – really it’s on the shoulders of a bunch of bigoted creeps who at this point in time are in the positions of power that determine where and when and for whom government funds are spent for research and medical care.”

I found that, after witnessing Peter Hujar’s death on November 26, 1987, and after my recent diagnosis, I tend to dismantle and discard any and all kinds of spiritual and psychic and physical words or concepts designed to make sense of the external world or designed to give momentary comfort. It’s like stripping the body of flesh in order to see the skeleton, the structure. I want to know what the structure of all this is in the way only I can know it. All my notions of the machinations of the world have been built throughout my life on odd cannibalizations of different lost cultures and on intuitive mythologies. I gained comfort from the idea that people could spontaneously self-combust and from surreal excursions into nightly dream landscapes. But all that is breaking down or being severely eroded by my own brain; it’s like tipping a bottle over on its side and watching the liquid contents drain out in slow motion. I suddenly resist comfort, from myself and especially from others. There is something I want to see clearly, something I want to witness in its raw state. And this need comes from my sense of mortality. There is a relief in having this sense of mortality. At least I won’t arrive one day at my 80th birthday and at the eve of my possible death and only then realize my whole life was supposed to be somewhat a preparation for the event of death and suddenly fill up with rage because instead of preparation all I had was a lifetime of adaptation to the pre-invented world – do you understand what I’m saying here? I am busying myself with a process of distancing myself from you and others and my environment in order to know what I feel and what I can find. I’m trying to lift off the weight of the pre-invented world so I can see what’s underneath it all. I’m hungry and the pre-invented world won’t satisfy my hunger. I’m a prisoner of language that doesn’t have a letter or a sign or gesture that approximates what I’m sensing. Rage may be one of the few things that binds or connects me to you, to our pre-invented world.

My friend across the table says, “I don’t know how much longer I can go on … Maybe I should just kill myself.” I looked up from the Frankenstein doll, stopped trying to twist its yellow head off and looked at him. He was looking out the window at a sexy Puerto Rican guy standing on the street below. I asked him, “If tomorrow you could take a pill that would let you die quickly and quietly, would you do it?”

“No,” he said, “not yet.”

“There’s too much work to do,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “There’s still a lot of work to do …”

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

I am busying myself with a process of distancing myself from you and others and my environment in order to know what I feel and what I can find. I'm trying to lift off the weight of the preinvented world so I can see what's underneath it all. I'm hungry and the preinvented world won't satisfy my hunger.

David Wojnarowicz, ‘Postcards from America: X Rays from Hell’ in Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief

[womanhouse]

David Wojnarowicz, Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell, 1989

[queer-a-dictionary-blog]

one hundred nineteen.

David Wojnarowicz’s essay for ‘Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing’, Postcards From America: X-Rays from Hell, was a declaration of war. 

‘Nan read it, loved it, and said thank you. Then, in a conversation later she said Artists Space was talking to their lawyers to see if they could publish it. I said “What?” She said it’s probably just talk. So I waited and then I get a call from [director] Susan Wyatt asking me to change it. It was the first time I’d been confronted like that in almost nine years. People hated my work or liked it, but I never had anybody tell me to change it....  

‘I’ve been writing this kind of stuff for years, and bottom line, it was a few government coins—I should say public coins but obviously the public doesn’t determine where the money goes—pennies, connected to a bunch of writing. The only difference between this piece of writing and other writings I’ve done is that it named names.’

The names in question: 

‘…cardinal O’Connor… this fat cannibal from that house of waking swastikas up on fifth avenue…’

‘…I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw rep. William Dannemeyer off the empire state building.’

[Wojnarowicz defended his position in a follow-up piece, Postcards From America: The Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet.]

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

I have attended a number of memorials in the last five years and at the last one I attended I found myself suddenly experiencing something akin to rage. I realized halfway through the event that I had witnessed a good number of the same people participating in other previous memorials. What made me angry was realizing that the memorial held little reverberation outside the room it was held in. A tv commercial for handiwipes had a higher impact on the society and large. I got up and left because I didn't think I could control my urge to scream.

David Wojnarowicz, ‘Postcards from America: X Rays from Hell’ in Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

But, bottom line, this is my own feeling of urgency and need; bottom line, emotionally, even a tiny charcoal scratching done as a gesture to mark a person's response to this epidemic means whole worlds to me if it is hung in public; bottom line, each and every gesture carries a reverberation that is meaningful in its diversity; bottom line, we have to find our own forms of gesture and communication. You can never depend on the mass media to reflect us or our needs or our states of mind; bottom line, with enough gestures we can deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding the control room.

David Wojnarowicz, ‘Postcards from America: X Rays from Hell’ in Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

Each public disclosure of a private reality becomes something of a magnet that can attract others with a similar frame of reference; thus each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves as a dismantling tool against the illusion of ONE-TRIBE NATION; it lifts the curtains for a brief peek and reveals the probable existence of literally millions of tribes. The term "general public" disintegrates. What happens next is the possibility of an X-ray of Civilization, an examination of its foundations. To turn our private grief for the loss of friends, family, lovers and strangers into something public would serve as another powerful dismantling tool. It would dispel the notion that this virus has a sexual orientation or a moral code.

David Wojnarowicz, ‘Postcards from America: X Rays from Hell’ in Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

It is a standard practice to make invisible any kind of sexual imaging other than white straight male erotic fantasies. Sex in america long ago slid into a small set of generic symbols; mention the word "sex" and the general public appears to only imagine a couple of heterosexual positions on a bed - there are actual laws in parts of this country forbidding anything else even between consenting adults. So people have found it necessary to define their sexuality in images, in photographs and drawings and movies in order to not disappear. Collectors have for the most part failed to support work that defines a particular person's sexuality, except for a few examples such as Mapplethorpe, and thus have perpetuated the invisibility of the myriad possibilities of sexual activity. The collectors' influence on what the museum shows continues this process secretly with behind-the-scenes manipulation of curators and money. Jesse Helms, at least, makes public his attacks on freedom; the collectors and museums responsible for censorship make theirs at elegant private parties or from the confines of their self-created closets.

David Wojnarowicz, ‘Postcards from America: X Rays from Hell’ in Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

I gained comfort from the idea that people could spontaneously self-combust and from surreal excursions into nightly dream landscapes. But all that is breaking down or being severely eroded by my own brain.

David Wojnarowicz, ‘Postcards from America: X Rays from Hell’ in Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

I found that, after witnessing Peter Hujar's death on November 26, 1987, and after my recent diagnosis, I tend to dismantle and discard any and all kinds of spiritual and psychic and physical words or concepts designed to make sense of the external world or designed to give momentary comfort. It's like stripping the body of flesh in order to see the skeleton, the structure. I want to know what the structure of all this is in the way only I can know it.

David Wojnarowicz, ‘Postcards from America: X Rays from Hell’ in Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief