—
Birth and death, the interregnum; Ayşegül Savaş, Shakespeare, Twombly, Lacan; zen buddhism, the body, the erotic, sacrifice, names, being transgender; Something has got to be done!
“I dreamt tonight that I did feast with Caesar,
And things unluckily charge my fantasy.
I have no will to wander forth of doors,
Yet something leads me forth.”
— Cinna, Act 3 Scene 2, Julius Ceasar
***
“Whom I encounter, I choose to meet.”
— Liberation from all obstructions
***
I feel a solidarity with babies — especially when they are crying. When I hear a baby crying I think yeah man, right on. Birth is a catastrophe and crying about that is correct. I try to think about what it’s like to be them, but, pretty much, I can’t. The actual situation of the infant is beyond any of our powers to imagine, in adulthood, now. Insanity is its approximation. Our edenic conceptions of childhood are the product of our limpid, adult selves. This is the true fantasy; beneath it, reality is boiling. It was Freud, or perhaps the Brothers Grimm, or perhaps Iphigenia, who first saw that.
Helpless, inarticulate, dependent; these are unenviable conditions. But they are not only the province of birth. All of us are caught in a web of dependence, to say nothing of our inarticulation; moreover, no sane person wants to free themself, which is fine, because you can’t. Modern civilisation has brought unimaginable things, and the community has always done better than the individual in the history of our species; human beings are social animals, alas, we are better together.
The contract is always uneasy. In fact, if we were fully free to leave, being together would be easier than it is. The problem is that we are bound together no matter what. Even when we hate and fear each other. And not everyone is suffering equally — not everyone is in the same circumstance. It is not right to analyse dependence without understanding that really you are analysing power. Right now I feel that quite keenly, especially since I threw the towel in and became dependent on testosterone. Now I have need of a medical supply chain and the goodwill of my fellow voters. A grim and precarious position.
In Ayşegül Savaş’s The Wilderness, a chronicle of the first forty days after giving birth, her baby does nothing but cry no matter what she does. On day 10 she herself is crying miserably, and to her own eyes foolishly; unhappily concerned that her own mother is immune to her cries. Her mother is there with them, cooking and cleaning and helping with the new baby, but — “I’ve lost my mother” she tells her husband repeatedly. “The loss feels insurmountable, though I begin to suspect that my mother stands for something larger, a loss of many things,” she tells us.
The impossibility of communicating the reality as it unfolds is the central topic of the memoir. Savaş has to circle the issue of even trying to communicate that — it’s not easy to communicate a lack. By day 18 she is comparing it helplessly, fruitlessly to an episode written by Nastassja Martin who was mauled half to death by a bear: an absolute blank entry, a yawning, awful semiotic breach, a vaccuum gap, through which no structure can pass and from which no meaning can escape. Thus there is necessarily a rupture: “The experiential crux that no standard relationship can describe.” — (Martin) “This is our situation now, the bear’s and mine: we have become a focal point that everyone talks about but no-one understands.”
Can I just say: Savaş is a genius. It’s genius to understand that birth is the same experience as being mauled by a bear. The quote from Martin goes on:
“This is precisely why I keep coming up against reductive and even trivialising interpretations, however lovingly meant: because we are facing a semantic void, an off-script leap that challenges and unnerves all categories. Hence the rush on all sides to pin labels to us, to define, confine, and shape the event. Not allowing this uncertainty about the event to remain requires normalising it so that, whatever the cost, it can be made to fit into the human project.”
Birth is in the category of things that are only similar to their own opposites. Birth and death, as the Buddhas say, are of supreme importance. At the Greater Boston Zen Centre where I first practiced, this line was so presented: “Let me respectfully remind you: Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.”
Or, if you prefer, this can be formulated as the timeless transgender proverb:
Don’t die wondering.
I think I recognise this nebulous, experiential, formless feeling, beyond words or any kind of description, that Savaş and Martin are pointing to. This is kensho — it is this which one makes contact with in the first experience of enlightenment, even if only for a second. It is not unrelated to intimacy, love, and the erotic. (This presents a community of meditators with a set of predictable problems.) These things can be configured as a kind of mutual death-and-birth. They involve contact with the absolute, which I think is what Lacan would call the Real, and some people might call god. Because of that contact, these events are porous (if the meditator remains sane). They form in themselves a kind of permeable membrane. Thus, they take the form of the symbolic.
The corpus of zen texts is as such a massive collective effort to deliver textually the signification of this inexpressible lack. Whatever you think zen is, it isn’t. Whatever you think zen isn’t, it is. It’s not that zen is vacuous — it is that semantic void. This truth is not expressive. Any soundbite about zen is wrong. The great bulwark of Dogen is anxiously trying to counsel you not to think that “there is no self” — not to think that there is no self. No-self-ness is the highest teaching and you must not think that there is no self because as you can see there clearly is one. “One's self is neither existent nor non-existent; it is “not-doing.””/ “Birth, death, going, coming are the true human body.”
On day 23, Savaş’s baby now has a signifier: “a name that sticks to her, whereas before it was make-believe.” This is so interesting, to me, for it is exactly the same when you make-believe your own new name, and to some extent, this is even true with gender. Even though gender is to a great extent discovered, while the name is much more invented, the two things inform one another. Gender is a positionality, not a speech act. To take up a new gendered position, something really has to be remade.
The new name needs particular gestation. Even speech acts are more than speech acts. Slowly, though, with sustained effort, one can make it stick. Like every other significant creative act, it is birthed with great determination. The seed or the pearl-grit spore starts inside you; the fruiting body finally erupts.
By the end of the 40 days, Savaş’s life has returned to normal, in a certain sense, or semblance. But she has no idea how it has done this.
***
Names are always slippery; they only seem to be solid. If you gave me time, there’s a chance I could take yours off you. But I wouldn’t.
My own birth name denatured like a protein. The new name struggles to be born. While this happens, one indeed enters the wild; the interregnum. It is not, as Zizek stylishly mistranslated it, the time of monsters. “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid phenomena appear” is closer to the actual Gramsci quote. On the other hand, “monsters” is not such a bad translation.
The interregnum has a kind of flickering component to it. There are instances of jumping back and forth, of failing to converge. It is not the case that one slowly progresses up the mountain or whatever. The process is highly nonlinear. Savaş puts it for her own situation as: outside of linear time.
The murky realm of subconscious thought is a kind of muscular arena. There is always an aspect of viscera. These things seem to take shape in the body. Though it may be hidden relatively well, some version of this is involved or courted anytime the conscious mind puts its problems down, or focuses on the wrong thing (which is often). I actually almost prefer the way Paul Keegan puts it, about its milder version, the Freudian gap, or slip: “While doing things, or in the interstices between doing things, we do other, less obvious things.”
Perhaps nothing is less obvious than gender transition, as a gesture or movement; especially towards the nonbinary. The modernist poets get that, however: I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, etc.
If you ask the Jordan Petersons, they will cast becoming transgender as a kind of (post)modern madness untethered from reality, needlessly complicating simple truth with too much solipsistic thinking. But very often it is thinking that constructs simplicity, and doing that uncovers its opposite. For that reason, true progress often has unlikely sources. Engineers and programmers, for example, are often discovering interesting information that humanities scholars like Peterson lack. (That is not to say that they notice what they discover, though, of course, some of them do. You should read Patrick McKenzie’s short, excellent public service announcement, Falsehoods programmers believe about names.)
The name change in particular is a challenging moment of disorder in the literal or literary sense. If we take our cue again from Lacan, we can say that one must shrug off a powerful symbolic order — talk about the name of the father! — in order to get this done. For Lacan this is always a symbolic father not your literal dad per se; in this case, it is whatever system gave you that name — you are refusing the signification placed on you. This rebellion of the signified is inherently extremely dicey, in Lacanian thinking as well as, indeed, in life.1
The most famous literary prosecution of this line of thought is of course in Shakespeare. It’s hard for any high school student to forget when Juliet says “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” but she is of course wrong and lying. Consciously or unconsciously, she says this only to soften the blow of the magnitude of what she is seeking, the ultimate act of psychological power: Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Names feature again though less heavily in Lear (well, they hardly could feature moreso) but are still very important. Edmund, the bastard child of Gloucester, strips his brother Edgar of his name and title — and even, indirectly, his clothes — the whole play is subtextually angled toward incest — where are the mothers??! — so at this point you can hardly be surprised.
Edgar, who before now has been oblivious to his brother’s heavy machinery of plot, immediately recognizes that he has been truly robbed: his name is in another’s mouth; “I heard myself proclaim’d,” — his only choice now is to descend into the abject, to take refuge in the storm:
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast. My face I'll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots,
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky.
The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
Enforce their charity. 'Poor Turlygod! poor Tom!'
That's something yet! Edgar I nothing am.
Voila: the interregnum. He wanders in the wilderness as mad tom, and as fool. He brushes against true insanity, which is to say, rebirth. When he returns to the stage as Edgar, he is not the same Edgar; yet he is somehow more himself, and he says this:
Know my name is lost;
By treason's tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit.
Yet am I noble as the adversary
I come to cope.
Edgar is the male version of Cordelia. He loses his name because he is overly loyal to his father and brother — to power. Cordelia, by the temperance of her loyalty, and through her refusal to speak, can keep her name.
Curiously and ironically, it is in rejecting Cordelia’s act that Lear brings the act to fruition. If he had accepted or even simply tolerated her refusal to speak, he would have neutered her. She would have remained loyal enough to his will and unable to stand against her sisters. I am speaking psychologically, within the oedipal construct, but it is also true narratively-literally, because it is made absolutely clear that in that case she would have married Burgundy, not France; it is only the disinheritance that keeps Burgundy from wanting to have her, and it is only France who is impressed with Cordelia’s refusal, and who is actively pursuing the honesty he sees. He first offers her to Burgundy, and sings her praises, contradicts her father, and speaks to all these most romantic lines:
“Love’s not love
When it is mingled with regards that stands
Aloof from th’ entire point. Will you have her?
She is herself a dowry.”
France is of course correct that Lear does not love his daughters; instead, he seeks to devour them. The play makes this explicit in the denouement: he cannot understand how it is that Goneril and Regan overthrow him in their will. He had thought himself their absolute ruler. Paradoxically it seems he thought that by willingly giving up his power, he in fact would enthrone himself forever. This reveals that parental self-sacrifice is often a form of ideological martyrdom, akin to the suicide bomb.2
Perhaps moreover, if Lear had not banished Cordelia, he would not have been driven mad by what he had done, because he would not have done it. The mistake of giving power to the false is recoverable — the mistake of casting off what is true is not (& these are two different things). It is not merely the rejection at last by the other two daughters that fells him — his own inexpressible, unfeelable guilt, or the lack of the guilt he should feel, devours his mind into madness. He dies when she dies, for at that point the (lack of) guilt is overwhelming.
Cordelia’s refusal is the first sane act in all of western literature. The position she stakes out is complex and, in that nuance, draws power. But refusal is powerful in general, and its manifestations are often complex, and it has complicated effects. Spiritually and emotionally speaking, total refusal somehow appears to be impossible. (Note that Cordelia does not shrug her father off, or disavow him, though, frankly, she should have.) Any full disavowal of anything actually raises the thing like a demon. In some sense this is the closest definition of the Real: the pain point, the loss of mastery; the thing that is raised by being negated. The stronger the negation the more powerful the entity it conjures. The negation is the summons itself.
I have found this to be true psychologically, though it takes incredible will to persist with the inquiry into the mind and heart long enough to see it. It is perhaps for this reason that Lacan does not believe the signified produces the signifier (ie he is not a positivist) but rather than these things are coproduced and that if anything it is the signifier that creates the signified thing. I do not think that is true in general. But I think there are some things, including perhaps most notably unwanted desires, that are literally created at the point of disavowal. Where there is not the need to disavow them, there they themselves will not be. And, when they are welcomed, they die.
The complexities of the psyche are so impressive that this means a sufficiently advanced practitioner might disavow something in order to bring it into being. Or, to put it in another way: since it is from the shadow, in the Jungian sense, that our urges can most freely operate, sometimes the mind shoves something into the shadow in order to allow it to be free.
Our lives are lived from there. That which you can never understand can still compose your acts. The demand for full explicability is in itself a kind of murder. But murder, also, comes in many forms. Freud himself noted those lines in Julius Caesar spoken by the poet Cinna, who eventually is murdered for his name. Although, Freud notes this by saying somewhat cryptically: “The twisting of the name, as I have already stated in regard to lapses in speech, often signifies a depreciation” (ie he is against the deadname and refuses that its use is an accident?); this point is more amply described by Norman Holland as “an instance of the practice, common to magic, dreams, forgettings, and lapsus linguae, of using the name in lieu of the person.”3 This is the ultimate metonymic act — the self-ossification, the complete verbal fetish.
***
Shakespeare’s most famous onomastic transition is of course the making of Henry V out of Hal. And how does he do this? By killing Harry Percy.
The entire sequence is one of the most dreamlike and surreal in shakespeare, which I guess is to say, it is among the most psychoanalytic.4 Their initial struggle is not with swords but begins with the symbolic:
Hotspur (Henry Percy). If I mistake not, thou art Harry Monmouth.
Henry V. Thou speak'st as if I would deny my name.
But it was a reasonable inference from Harry Percy. That surely is who Prince Hal seems to be; that is why Harry Percy is ascendant. So rotten, filled with hatred for his father, that he would cast off if he could the very name that links them. What Hotspur does not realise is that Hal is already inside the interregnum. It is in this moment that Hal intends to change.
Death, like birth, can (in some sense must) open up the gap to the sacred. This is the logic of sacrifice in general — if we take Hubert and Mauss’s anthropological scheme, (and we should), sacrifice is a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim and then the merging of the sacrificer with that victim, purifies or modifies the sacrificer in some way. H&M make it very clear that this is not a matter of representation: it is a merging. During this moment a gap is made or found in the armour that separates the real and the symbolic, the sacred and profane. The knife is then thrust in the gap.
“The profane thus enters into a relationship with the divine,” Hubert and Mauss say, “because it sees in it the very source of life.” And/but it is the profane that constructs the sacred! That is very clear. It is the procedure of sacrifice itself that confers divinity on the victim, that in turns makes the victim dangerous; that danger is what signifies the real. Anyone who has tried, on their own even perhaps small terms, to change, realises this — the old version of your self fights back.
For that reason, in the end, even though we know Hal must triumph over Hotspur in history and life as in Shakespeare, every single time, he makes you doubt it. The scene would not work otherwise. Hotspur has to feel dangerous to us, centuries later, and he does. Even when you only read the words, which is not Shakespeare’s intended vehicle, young Hotspur comes in screaming off the page, so hot indeed he’s flesh and blood right there, right up until Hal stabs him in the guts.
Until that very moment, Hotspur is always a breaching force; he does not tolerate being breached in return, nor offer up the maidenhead of his affairs to chance. In comparison Hal is a passive fluidity, flung on the bull's horns, somehow molten and yet darting and receptive — able to go and be where he is and what he likes. Like liquid iron, he forges himself in and on Harry Percy, the anvil. Thus, the act promotes and at once contains a shocking reversal of roles and fortunes, a Samson and Delilah moment in which Hal plays the role of the woman, that is, desire, unmaking the stoic war god, that is, death; Mars in swathling clothes, This infant warrior.
The act is startlingly erotic. In that moment, the two men, really boys, merge into each other in full. They fuse and then pass through one another — Hotspur, to the sodden grave where Hal’s been so far wasted, Hal, to Henry V, to these exalted heights. Henry finishes Hotspur’s death speech for him. Then he even says thank you to himself.
Now all that’s left is the transfigured Henry, who was Hal, who was until then that sylphlike wraith, the gamine, abject nymph, miserable, scheming, defensive, lovely, semi-nihilistic, hating this world and kingdom, and now he has changed, standing ready to save it; reconciled to his fortune, prepared to assume his place. In slaying Hotspur, Hal slays the superegoic image of himself, his father’s ideal son. And in that violence, Henry comes alive.
In this context it feels particularly beautiful that Hotspur taunted Hal by saying he had no achievements or accolades, no decorative garlands for himself, and Hal responded by saying effectively “I will have yours, when I kill you.” And this has been premeditated: That I shall make this northern youth exchange / His glorious deeds for my indignities. Through this exchange, he sheds his identity as Hal, and thus his name.
Well well, Harry Percy — So much for your powerful sword.
***
For Lacan, it is speech, or articulation in some form more broadly, that constitutes identity. But such speech is not an act of mere decision. You have to mean it. How do you come to mean it? The underlying thing must be remade. The signifier becomes attached to the signified via an alchemical process (or Lacan and Saussure I think would say it evokes and co-produces the signified). This relation is more than an act of will. A type of transmutation must occur.
It is the symbolic (meaning-systems, language) that provides the architecture of this transubstantiation, the bridge between the relative and the absolute, in Zen — or as (I think) Lacan puts it, the imaginary and the Real. This is in part why talk therapy works. But it is even more powerful to embody the symbolic. And this, I think, is what is being driven towards by and in and at and through the Zen koans.
No part of zen is more interesting to laypersons than the koan practice. The only famous thing about zen is this: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” This is not one of the koans, at least not as I was introduced to them. But I think there is, if memory serves me, a related question: “What is the sound of the single hand?”
The response to the above is through a gesture. The exhortation is to produce the intuitive, non-discursive, non-intellectual response. The discursive response would be to click your fingers or clap your fingers back against their own palm, a weird parody of a usual clap. The non-discursive response must be discovered within.
The body is central to this art form. One does not “answer” the questions. You are being asked to literally embody a response; it is closer to inhabiting the question than answering it. You have to live the question, such as it is. To me this is straight out of Lacan — the oedipal conflict (which for your purposes you can just think of as the “you can’t always get what you want” problem) cannot be resolved. You live in the oedipal question. In a sense, you must act out your answer.
Gesture is key to the traversing of the koan world. I think gesture has its place in all religion, but it is sharpened, in Zen, to an art form. It is not the mind that responds to the koan. It is the body. It is not the mind that configures speech, either. The lips and tongue must do this. You might be surprised, at times, at the things you can think, but never say. But also, vice versa. Sometimes you might find you say something you never dared to think.
Sometimes when I sit down to write these essays my hands say and do things I never expected. Sometimes when I prepare for writing these essays my mind thinks up sentences to say, but when I sit down to do it, my hands go, no can do, boss.
One time I was on the cushion and I wanted to scratch my nose. Movement is forbidden in zazen. Don’t scratch your nose, don’t scratch your nose, don’t scratch — I thought about something else for a second. A moment later I was coming back to myself, and found myself scratching my nose. My body had taken up the gap.
Being transgender begins with the body. It is the body which announces that something is wrong, or that something is here. To the extent that it is easy to demonize this it is becuase we demonize the body’s drives and needs, its hunger, its frailty, its response to the erotic, its transgressions as well as its refusals.
***
Zen is often seen as austere and forbidding; strict, and filled with discipline. But the zen texts do not demonise the body. “We should let all things and eating be intimate with each other because when each thing is Reality then eating is also Reality.” Notice how this sounds slightly garbled, like something a toddler would say. That is no accident and not a mistake.
Naive readings of Zen, and even naive practitioners — and some of these people are even teachers — get so excited by the concept of emptiness that they forget form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. The mark of this naivety is saying things like, why would one need to change one’s external form (eg via transition, or getting a phd, or a boob job, or a million dollars, or whatever) in order to reflect inner sentiment? Aren’t these impulses the pure fault of the ego? Being stuck in the popular conceptions of zen, where it is conceived that one can and should permanently kill or at least substantially reduce the ego, is surprisingly common well up the chain.
Practice is not about, and never can, diminish the ego. It changes your perspective. You see how the ego works, you see how it attaches to the body, you see how the body sometimes has its own ideas. This makes you more full in understanding. It adds. It never subtracts. (By the way, not everyone needs their ego diminished. You have to have a functioning ego strong enough to mediate between reality and the id; if you don’t have one, you have to develop one.) Why transition? — Why eat? Why shit? Why be born the first time? Is every day a good day? When you know the answer to all these questions, then you understand being trans.
In the bowls discourse, Dogen says: “Name and reality are both equal. All are equal in stainlessness”. Admiringly, he adds: “Meals are the naked display of all things”.
It is in the body that everything happens. In birth, as in transition, as in sex, as in death, it is the body that constitutes the site of this complete devastation — everything is made, remade and unmade with-and-in it. The body’s main function and purpose is not to be beautiful, or desired, or to produce anything, or to perform, it is to contain the centre of destruction, to house, in some way, inside itself, the real; to be alive. When Butler describes gender as performative, the meaning intended by the word is more like enacted.
Failure to understand all this is behind our failure to contend with the erotic. Our general supposition is that the erotic must concern sex, but of course, this is not true. The erotic must concern desire of some kind, but there must also be lack. This dynamic is what creates tension; it is tension alone that hints at the possibility of release; release is erotic, but there cannot be release unless there is something to be released from. It is for this reason that the vast majority of porn is not erotic; not unless you as the viewer are able to eroticise its failure to attain that which it intends. But spilling a glass of wine on yourself could give you the same result.
Stabbing a man in the guts is erotic, like eating a fistful of grapes. Getting lost in a dark wood is erotic. Plucking a single string on a guitar or violin or even better yet a lute or cello. High quality leather is erotic because it contains the scent of death. Perhaps all leather is erotic — the preservation of violence like a static exhalation. But to take especial care of this exalts it, like the thigh bone of a saint.
Even ugly things, perhaps especially ugly things, can be erotic, because they are so visceral, provoking — moles and birthmarks, pimples on the breasts, or a sharp slap, harsh words or split lips. Part of why people cut themselves is that this action is erotically ugly. Part of why people chew their fingernails or lips is that this too is erotic and gross. Part of why people do not like veganism is that this is a refusal to be ugly, gross and dirty like the rest of us. Clinical and sterile, which are not erotic, unless they too are taken to excess, the topic of a wrong, obsessive zeal.
Some porn is erotic, especially if it is weird, because there is a kind of purity in weirdness. The kind of zest for life that true weirdness requires has a kind of innocence about it — combined with pornography, then, we have all the elements we need. This makes things refreshing. It is the predictability, the staleness, the lack of risk, the cynicism, that makes most pornography boring. By that same token, many literary depictions of sex are not erotic at all, even or perhaps especially when they intend to be. (It’s not that I think the erotic is only produced by accident, far from it, I just think most people do not know how to produce it in their art.)
Some time ago I came across an essay that defended, like, booktok erotica and romance novels in the dumbest possible way — by defending their predictability. This is the worst thing about them, the thing that robs them of their potential to transform.
Shock and surprise are essential to this modality — hence, how much we like it when Hotspur is gored by Hal.5 There has to be a kind of unravelling, as well as a certain sort of challenge. At the end of his powerful essay, “Is the rectum a grave?”, Bersani rebukes Foucault’s attempt to include gay sex as an example of just one more natural, naturalised, respectable form of loving.6 Sexuality is only powerful in that it refuses to ever be corralled — that which is erotic can never be respectable. What is respectable, what is vaunted, what is held up, to an extent what is even able to be safely wanted at all, can never be erotic. There has to be an aspect of disruption. It cannot be couched or housed in neutral terms — nor any terms at all.
That is why there is perhaps no greater erotic artist than Twombly. Picasso comes close, but Picasso was not as good. Even at the end, there’s too much thinking. Picasso is just too smart. Twombly could not make it as a cryptographer.7
Twombly, who so often chooses silence, blankness, white, and who erupted into obscenity around the time at which his life seemed, “on paper at least”, “practically perfect” — newly wed, and with a newborn son. (I’m kaleidoscopically quoting Nicholas Cullinan, from his essay in the book Twombly: Cycles and Seasons.) The Ferragosto series, especially Ferragosto IV, is bloody and engorged, dire and anxious; he is in the Freudian boil.
But even Twombly’s silences and graph-like memes configure the erotic. I can’t quite figure out why, but I think it is the presence of the hand. The work of almost all other artists either pretends or aspires to a spontaneous self-conception, an idea wherein the artist was not there at all and the artwork somehow supernaturally or else technologically emerges — like in Monet, Mondrian or Pollock — and it would not be too much to call this an attempt at virgin birth — or else it does the opposite, and configures the artist’s identity as a symbol that forms part of the work, like in Van Gogh, Cindy Sherman, and Abramović. It is Twombly who gives us his hand print. It is Twombly whose lines say I was here. But, not having configured himself as immortal, godlike, not having made himself a portrait, no eyes to stare back at the viewer, he is gone — I was here, and now, I am gone. He bares himself, then he leaves; he goes in and out, sometimes silent in interviews, sometimes he leaves paintings untitled, then he dies, leaving only the impression of his hand.
Twombly finds the middle. There is a viscerality to all these lines. God only knows how on earth he was able to express this. Nicholas Serota, then-director of the Tate, said it perfectly in that same book: “The physical experience of Twombly’s art is an important element in our gradual comprehension of his trajectory. The hand of the artist is ever present. We have to feel, even hear, the difference between the rasp and caress of a hard or soft pencil on paper. We have to witness the explosion and suffusion of colour as the brush touches the canvas and the fingers manipulate the viscous paint.”
It is the simultaneous presence and absence of the hand that makes the work erotic. This gap, or lack, is central to Lacan. The pre-oedipal moment is one suffused with the comfort of union, in which no separation can intrude. In my understanding it was Lacan who rescued the oedipal metaphor from a literal supposition to a symbolic struggle between the newly minted individual and the realisation that desire will always be thwarted. It is at the oedipal threshold that the individual must take up a position, and the conditioned world of separation begins. This is the genesis of longing.
Lacan foregrounded desire, which he defines as being sustained, so you might say longing, or yearning. There is something pleasurable about yearning in itself, about wanting before there is getting. There is something alluring about never being sated. I am not raising up this situation to a goal; no, not at all, one must eat. But first one must also be hungry, and this involves not eating. Then, we are in Lacan’s graph. What else could happen, when hunger presents as both a need and a propulsion? That hunger becomes alive itself, in that way; one thing as both a drive and as a lack.
Or, As Barthes said re Twombly, here is the attempt: to “link in a single state what appears and what disappears; [not] to separate the exaltation of life and the fear of death [but] to produce a single affect: neither Eros nor Thanatos, but Life-Death, in a single thought, a single gesture.”
***
I hesitated to title this essay with the —.
It is powerful to signify the void. It’s just an ordinary em-dash, but used as a title, to me at least, it looks and feels quite mentally unstable. Maybe that’s just my anxiety, but half the reason we get good at words is to be able to hide stuff like this. Words make good defences. Why do you think this essay contains so much Shakespeare? I’m trying to convince you that I’m sane! And it works! Who would like to show — to the world? You might as well open your legs.8 No, this is the kind of thing that typically people keep hidden. This, the fragmentation, is discouraged.
Obviously some things have to stay private (obviously). But there is a problem if we suppress such things too much. We end up with a culture that cannot understand its own process. A mouth that cannot speak its own name.
It is this, on top of everything else, that makes it difficult and dangerous to alter your gender in public. It is not the fact that you can switch that makes the problem — it is the denouement of switching itself, the unravelling that this involves.
I get the sense that most people, even most trans people, abhor the interregnum, hate the process, and would like to disappear and reappear again, perfectly well-reappointed. And yet: “Is not life one as we live it, which we cut to pieces by recklessly applying the murderous knife of intellectual surgery?” — DT Suzuki p26 Essays in Zen Buddhism Introduction. One page later: Question: “What is Zen?” : “Boiling oil over a blazing fire.”
Dogen’s Master Rujing once said:
"The whole body is a mouth, hung in space.
It doesn't matter from where the wind blows
-- north, south, east, west --
the windbell always speaks of perfect knowing:
-- rin! rin! rin!"
The chanting and the corpus and the Shakespeare are essential. But silence is also essential. Saying nothing, not moving, fragmentation, boundaries, refusal, —; all these are also zen.
Approached like that, from this angle, I think about 4’33. John Cage’s attempt to signify the fullness and potential of lack looks all the more impressive now. The audacity required to point not just your own but many others’ attention towards nothing is remarkable; or rather the remarkability of the attempt itself is audacious; desperate. And yet, you can see why he did it — Something has got to be done! Specifically, “something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices.”
Cage, like Twombly — apparently they were friends, though I don’t think they ever fucked, like Twombly and Rauschenberg did — seems able to render the void into being in a way almost no other artists can. (Though I do think of Fontana’s three slashes; this could be a koan.) Anne Carson in the LRB linked above quotes Tacita Dean about Twombly:
“I always believed it was about the encounter and a bit like a medium with a Ouija board. When he’s in the moment, he cannot be interrupted (even by himself) or the connection is broken. When he’s in the moment, the encounter becomes the painting and nothing else matters.”
I actually got the Barthes quote from this same Carson essay. I cannot seem to find the Barthes essays — and I don’t feel motivated to try all that hard, because by the quote it seems to me that I’m already saying essentially the same thing here and that doesn’t make me think I need to read it. If I had to guess, I would say that what both Barthes and I are noticing in Twombly and thus trying to express is Lacanian jouissance, which is why what we’re saying sounds so similar. Jouissance closely matches with my sense of the erotic: Disruption, displeasure-and-pleasure, ecstatic disorder, the place where pain begins.
The mind is always trying to get away from this. I am not deifying the ego — the ego often betrays the body. Ew. What mind wants to give birth? It’s dangerous, it’s painful, it’s deadly; it’s the body, stupid. Yelling, screaming, wandering the moors, refusing to say things, going mad. Sitting in silence, not knowing. — ? Being transgender is, in some ways, a throwing off of one’s inheritance in favour of indignity; a prince sloshed in a tavern while the painted world of politics goes by. Who would do this? Who would make an aural portrait of lack? Who on earth would paint the Ferragostos? Who, like Cinna, wanders out of doors?
Twombly could have been Monet. He could have been Monet’s successor, in fact, if you look at the green paintings (untitled in 9 parts, 1988) you can see a lot of Monet there. But he didn’t become Monet. Instead, he became Twombly, and gave birth to himself. (How do you do this? You can’t. Give up. Aha, there! It’s done.)
Elusive, unfathomable. ‘Too specific to be imitated’/ ‘Luck has no home’ (Richard Schiff). ‘Intense pleasure comes from restraint’ (Barthes).9 In the land of the symbolic, the name itself is at risk of becoming a fetish item. Sometimes it is better to refuse.
Statistics takes all this up also. The fundamental concept of inference is that there is a desired object that one only ever approaches, about which only indirect statements can be made.
Twombly, scratching with his hand, like he’s gnawing without end at the canvas, or fucking himself on or through it. He is outdoing Picasso! And if you don’t look you can’t even see it. Sometimes even now if I don’t look I can’t see it either. The portraits dissolve into scribbles. Through noticing, however, I can take things up again. Whatever it is Twombly is evoking is older than the caves of Lascaux.
Or else quite young: “It is utterly stupid to think that a three-year-old child could not express the Buddha Dharma or that whatever a three-year-old child expresses must be easy.”
The Zen Teacher, unable to restrain his compassion, went on to say, "Perhaps a three-year-old child could say it, but even an elder in their eighties cannot practice it."
Time is running out though. I wonder if I only became transgender because I had a little brush with death. How long would I have let this sit inside me?
I think a lot about how we disavow what we want and are scared of and what we perceive to be true and possible by saying that it isn’t possible. But even as we say it, we sound anxious even to our own ears. This anxiety rings the alarm bell.
Rin!
***

I thought it was surely impossible that I coined the term “the rebellion of the signified”, so I went and looked. There are a very small handful of other mentions of it, sourced mostly from this bewitching book: Signs Systems Studies, Vol 26, University of Tartu, 1998.
(And this is the logic of the death drive.)
Both the Freud quote and this are in Holland’s article on Freud and Shakespeare.
This strange mood, and every single one of these themes, is reprised in even greater depth in Coriolanus, but we do noooooot have time to get into that here.
I am indirectly semi-quoting Kenji Yoshino on sexuality in general here https://www.kenjiyoshino.com/articles/epistemiccontract.pdf
Ie he says: “The argument for diversity has the strategic advantage of making gays seem like passionate defenders of one of the primary values of mainstream liberal culture, but to make that argument is, it seems to me, to be disingenuous about the relation between homosexual behavior and the revulsion it inspires.” ! ! ! My thinking on all of this is hugely informed by Bersani.
He took courses. All this and more thanks to the MoMA book here.
Okay not quite!!!!!
Also quoted in the Schiff essay, Charm, in the book Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons. He also quotes Rauschenberg saying “I try to act in the gap [ between life and art ]”; I found this book after I wrote the first 2/3rds of the essay.
I love it when you read Shakespeare
While certain parts of this resonated with me, (viz, `interregnum') I'm not sure how I feel about the part locating names in `denial of the father'. As a trans person whose current name was chosen by my parents before birth, and in fact before the differently gendered former name that subsequently accrued to me by mere accident of ultrasound, the experience has been felt less as a rebellion than as a return.
Maybe this is not a common transgender experience; your essay has made me consider whether by this fact of ordering I might be, discursively, cisgender, or even a detransitioner.
Disorienting.