On St. Ann and Bourbon: A Story of a Mardi Gras Day

Inez says Bourbon in French (BOR-bon) while flirting with Lanette from Poplarville. “LAAAnettE, pass me a clOve, s’il vous plait.” Lanette laconically slithers one out of a white and blue cigarette box and shakes it onto Inez’s hand. “OUAI. Merci,” Inez cries in rapt glee, using the word “yes” as a sign of joy rather than positive affirmation. Lanette is smeared with cakey doughy make-up and her teeth shine with the brightness of adult braces; she’s a dishwasher at a corner hotel restaurant on Dumaine and Royal. Inez wears a grey t-shirt and jeans, her hair cropped, her face round like a kewpie doll. I had never met them before; they’re my friend’s Tony’s friends but they had graciously given me a ride from the corner of Magazine and Elenore to the Quarter. Standing at the corner, watching the défilé of cars, I felt like a street prostitute, early in the morning -- the people perched in their cars eyed me up and down, everyone, as they rode passed, following the chartered Magazine, that follows the chartered Mississippi. The mind-forged manacles I hear.

I am dressed blandly, but I figure I complement the colors with my bright yellow collared shirt adorned with Endymion and Bacchus beads and a blue blazer, looking bohemian in performance but nothing compared to Bianca Del Rio, the hostess on stage -- she wears a whole new set of eyes to look pretty and a Raggedy-Ann hair-do two shades of orange to the left. She only has three jokes in her repertoire: ‘Dam that levee with a tampon, hon’; ‘Bitch, you need to get off this stage’; or jokes that were only funny because she peppered them with, ‘fuck, whore, and mother fucker’.

The crowd is full this year. It is hilarious to see the mix of people on the street filing pass centre stage. I see an octogenarian and his octogenarian wife decorated with sequins and grinning from ear to ear. A couple from MinneSNOWta cupping their mouths in fake horror at the debauched language push through the crowd and out of sight. A Dallas football player with a Yin-Yang symbol on his abdomen grabs my ass and tells me he loves Bianca. A mealy, shirtless dude is pawing the concrete floor for fallen dollars; he claims to be a priest.

Jason, a Tulane architecture student (with a Roman-style haircut)told me about his plans to rebuild Tremé, a rotted out neighborhood plunged in depths of floodwater. There were two Adonises in greeney vines who kissed one another on the cheek every time a joke cracked on stage, holding tight to each other’s buttocks. One was younger than the other; the older like a handsome middle-aged spirit, an Oberon with his Puckish fairy in tow -- a sight to behold. One of my favorites. They looked like a Pierre and Gilles photograph. Tony took a photograph of them with his cell phone.

Lanette flames a cigarette with the quick light of a match on the back of a red pub matchbox. The balcony above us is filled with spectators and Larry, the compulsive liar in our group, claims to know the most beautiful of them all. He points to a River Phoenix god and grins. Waving. He is Capote-esque in his flair and deceit. A large, reddened scar, adorns his right cheek and I am afraid of him. He is my best friend Tony’s boyfriend. Larry, dressed in a boa lifts his beer to the Olympian skies. The sky cover is azure blue and pimpled with one-dimensional wisps of smoke. That night, in my dreams, I dream in black and white, over-stimulated from reality’s rainbow of color. Tony thrusts his canteen with gin and tonic in my face, “Drink it, you’ll need it.”

During Mardi Grass, I think of Judith Butler and Divine. Pink Flamingoes. Whew. Gender Trouble. Is that a boy or a girl in front of me? I don’t know. Although I had dressed up as a Georgia floozy once for kicks, I had never before been so unsure of sex! Are we really imposed with post-Freudian categories of sex, inscribed on our bodies? Is all this a show or is this true identity? I am getting really sick, quick, of the stupid post-structuralist categories and take another swig of a gin and tonic. Looking for something to interpret without being mired in Queer Theory, I stare at a cute boy, my mind all tabula rasa and the images infiltrate my brain unmitigated by my insane hermeneutics. Unanamuo is right, “Consciousness is a disease!” (Or is it Nietzsche?). Note to self: never think of literary criticism when you are dranking and smoking in the French Quarter on Mardi Gras, I say to myself. “I’m not drunk! I’m just dranking!!” goes the old jazz tune.

In France on Mardi Gras, Inez tells me, in her village not far from Lourdes, they wear masques and profess their love or hate to those they would never confess in the flesh. A boy kisses a girl hidden beneath a masque he would never dream of meeting during Ordinary Time. Mardi Gras is a time to be someone else, to wear a façade for the evening. Social class collapses and the streets glisten with artificial egalitarian glory. The queers, dykes, jeeves, proletariats, monks, nuns, whores, bosses, boys, nerds, punks, skaters, preps, WASPS, bible thumpers, republicans, and democrats converge on our city in harmony -- for a while. Utopia, indeed. Mardi Gras is a weird version of Passover. You get rid of all the old leaven by consuming king cake and Abita Beer. You act out your repressed desires and try something different.

At the end of the party, on Ash Wednesday, the faithful crash at the end of this blitz and drag their tired bodies into church to be smeared with cendres mortes du souvenir. We all become one body in need of salvation on Mardi Gras. Vincent, also from France, tells me, though, he isn’t getting ashes on Wednesday. "Maybe next week," he says. His red and yellow costume looks a little faded and I ask him who he is supposed to be for Mardi Gras. “This is not a costume, mon ami. I wanted to dress up but couldn’t decide what to wear.” A shirtless bear passes us by with a placard that read, “God Loves Gays. After all, why did he make so many of us?” The drag queens were thinning out and people were being forced down the street like an insane parody of the entrance into Inferno: "Abandon all hope ye who enter here"

Camouflage underwear, usually not my type, but from all the boys dancing on the bar, I choose stripper #1 to tuck a five-dollar bill underneath the slip of his pants, shortened — staring up, like a kid awing a parent, my mouth drops open and I motion him to squat down to my level, “what are the rules?” I ask and he replies, “Whenever I want you to.” The place is dirty and dark, the only visible lights illuminate the trash and ATM receipts on the floor. The music is too loud for intimate conversation. Raw energy invades the place. A threesome in one corner. Two high school boys in another corner dancing. A drag queen who looks like Lucy Rubble smokes a cigarette by the stairwell. A drunken kid appears by my side and gives me an orange-tinged drink; he is so drunk that he falls toward me and I have to hold him up. I walk him outside to the light and prop him up against the concrete wall of the bar; he is a tan boy about sixteen years of age. I can’t help but be paternal, and say, “Aren’t you too young to be drinking?” He mumbles something as if I have said something horrible and casts his eyes to the ground. Two women come by who claim to be his mom and aunt; “He’s a little worldly for his age and we are trying to help him out.” Oh my god, I think. The poor thing. I have no fucking clue to what they mean by “trying to help him out” but I become maternal and stray my wrist against his cheek and tell him to behave. I am stunned at how soft his skin is; the women help him along the Mardi Gras streets of New Orleans and he disappears into the din.

When I go back into the bar, stripper #1 is about to go back to work. I put my arms around his shoulder and tell him he doesn’t have to do anything for me. “You’re just beautiful. I just want to tell you that." “That’s the nicest thing somebody has told me today. Thanks.” I imagine him coming back to my hotel room but the fantasy vanishes as quickly as it comes and I feel depressed. Stripper #1 climbs back on the bar and winks at me. All he needs is a can of Pepsi and he could be an advertisement in Advocate.

Tony calls me on my cell phone, upset. Bianca Del Rio has just confessed to him that his boyfriend is a compulsive liar and that she can’t stand him. “You deserve better than that bitch,” she told him. Bianca is very talented and has become nominally famous with a fashion designer in New York. Her photograph on a poster in the bar has her looking up into heaven, her eyelashes longer than a #2 pencil. Tony has vacated Larry’s hotel room and we exit the French Quarter quicker than Bonnie Clyde out of a Kansas bank. I am still really sad about Stripper #1. I can’t keep my mind off him and half pay attention to Tony’s break-up story. “It’s over with him. I can’t stand to be lied to. He told me he loved me. Now I am never going to believe it when someone says they love me. You know? And I haven’t even seen my mom in days. Because of Larry. He buys me all kinds of shit as if that’ll make up for all the lies he has been spreading. It’s over.”

We walk underneath a sign spread out between the streets, “The Mayor of New Orleans supports GLBT issues. Go to glbtnola.com for more information. When I get home I check out the site.

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Milton’s ‘Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint’: Eros, Lust and ‘Writing a Prostitute’

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint…

Leo Spitzer, replying to a colleague’s claim that Milton is an inferior poet to Shakespeare, uses the sonnet “Methought I saw my late espousèd saint” to show that Milton is every bit as universal as Shakespeare. Spitzer counters the charge that Milton’s apparently “private” reference to a spouse limits his reach; instead, he argues that the poem embodies the Platonic Donna Angelicata ideal (Spitzer 21).

Spitzer’s article is refreshing because most scholarship across two centuries has obsessed over the identity of the “late espousèd saint.” Critics agree she must be one of Milton’s two wives (he married three times): Mary Powell or Katherine Woodcock. I favor Katherine—Occam’s razor applies here—for three reasons. (1)

First, Milton never saw Katherine’s face; he was already blind when they wed. In the sonnet she appears veiled, matching what we know of blind dreamers, who often envision unfamiliar people as faceless or shrouded (2).

Second, Katherine died soon after childbirth—the “spot of child-bed taint” evokes the Levitical purification law, fitting her story precisely. Debates over identity split scholars into camps, but my focus is the poem itself. I adopt a post-Spitzerian reading: treat the sonnet as a self-sufficient Petrarchan jewel (3).

Anyone who studies Milton faces an avalanche of criticism. Even after deleting every article obsessed with the saint’s real name, the secondary stack devoted to Spitzer-style textual readings is remarkable for a 14-line, 119-word poem (4).

Like Spitzer and Wheeler, I contend the poem is less about a historical wife than about eros and grief—love imaged, lost, and yearned for anew.

Milton is seldom labeled “sexy”; Puritan restraint seems to forbid it. Yet he wrote Paradise Lost, brimming with marital sensuality, and blank-verse passages on Adam and Eve echo Sonnet XXIII’s final line: “She disappear’d, and left me dark, I wak’d” (Schwartz 99). His divorce tracts dwell on the “burning need” for wedded conversation, and Comus teems with erotic imagery. Puritanism never barred Milton from frank engagement with desire.

In Areopagitica he cites Christ’s wheat-and-darnel parable: good and evil grow together; virtue comes from confronting temptation. That worldview is essential to feel the poem’s struggle between heavenly eros and earthly loss.

Yet the eroticism is implicit: a veiled figure glimpsed by the poet’s “fancied sight,” tantalizing precisely because she is unreachable. The veil is both fabric and fantasy—a Platonic image and a dangerously alluring blank.

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
  Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
  Whom Jove’s great Son to her glad husband gave,
  Rescued from death by force through pale and faint.
Mine as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint,
  Purification in the old Law did save,
  And such, as yet once more I trust to have
  Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;
  Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight
  Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
  But O, as to embrace me she inclin’d,
  I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

The saint is at once pure and tainted, rescued and fleeing, veiled and “seen.” She is no simple donna angelicata; she is fantasy plus fact, shimmering on the knife-edge between eros and loss. The poem’s turn—“day brought back my night”—exposes desire’s futility: the dream’s bliss collapses at dawn.

Notes

1. (1) Scholars backing Mary Powell: W. R. Parker, John Shawcross, Thomas Stroup, B. J. Sokol. Advocates for Katherine Woodcock: Fitzroy Pyle, Leo Spitzer, Maurice Kelley.
2. (2) Hurovitz et al., “The Dreams of Blind Men and Women,” Dreaming 9 (1999): 183–193.
3. (3) For identity arguments see bibliography.
4. (4) Alternative readings emphasize Euripides’ Alcestis (Williamson et al.) or Levitical purification rites (Schwartz).
5. (5) Mythic resurrections—from Orpheus & Eurydice to Persephone—exact a price.
6. (6) Pornē (Gr. prostitute) + graphein (to write).
7. (7) Simon Blackburn, Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins, 2004.
8. (8) Freud’s eros = libido.

Selected Bibliography on Milton’s 23^rd Sonnet

• Bloom, Harold. John Milton. Chelsea House, 1999.
• Cheney, Patrick. “Alcestis and the ‘Passion for Immortality.’” Milton Studies 18 (1983): 63–76.
• Fiske, Dixon. “The Theme of Purification in Milton’s Sonnet XXIII.” Milton Studies 8 (1975): 149–163.
• Gregory, E. R. “Milton's Protestant Sonnet Lady.” Comparative Literature Studies 33.3 (1996): 258–279.
• Hall, R. F. “Milton’s Sonnets and His Contemporaries.” In The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 98–112. Cambridge UP, 1999.
• …

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Aesthetic Thursday: "Agrippa Fecit": The Pantheon of Rome

I bookmark a few facts about the Pantheon in Rome in this post.

View of the Exterior of the Pantheon
Image Credit: Greig Roselli

1. The Pantheon in Rome is an ancient temple built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian between 118 and 125 AD on the site of an earlier temple commissioned by Marcus Agrippa. 

2. It was initially dedicated to all the gods of Ancient Rome, but it has since been used as a Catholic church known as Santa Maria ad Martyres.

3. The building is renowned for its architectural achievement, with a giant dome that covers the entire main chamber and an oculus at its center, which allows natural light to enter the room below it.

4. The Oculus measures approximately 8 meters (27 feet) wide. It allows sunlight into the Pantheon during daytime hours when opened fully - although there are no windows or other means of entering direct light inside otherwise!

5. Inside, you can find many beautiful sculptures, such as statues of major gods from Ancient Greece & Rome, and paintings on marble walls depicting scenes from Roman mythology & history - making this one of the most impressive monuments in Italy!

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Video Credit: Ariel Viera

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A Poem Written During Hurricane Season: "on the vacation of spirits"

I wrote a poem about Hurricane Katrina - because I lived through it. Here is the poem (and yes, I took the photograph too).

on the vacation of spirits

when the zephyr blazed through MR GO, the gods, naiads, goddesses, with their hollow shrieks vacated the levee womb, a deposit bereft of running life
left, vacant and empty where once
spirits danced and melancholy wept –
on the corner of St. Claude and Alvar –
now split into dry wood, a gaping gash,
unsutured and sullied with faded peeled shrimp –
drained,
as if blood itself where all that is necessary for a full spectrum rainbow –
now only empty houses, prom dresses

milton’s house,
left on top of a pickup
because there are no longer laughing gods to re evacuate,
no longer a god to sit on the stoop at the fish market,
a boy to close the door behind him when he leaves

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text and image © Greig Roselli

Book Review: The Hours

When I read the required reading list for the Virginia Woolf Seminar I took at Southeastern Louisiana University, I was happy to see Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours included in the list. I had read the book before and liked it so much that I read his two other books: Flesh and Blood and A Home at the End of the World (which along with the Hours was made into a motion picture). My favorite is Flesh and Blood, his first. It is a drama spanning three generations of a suburban New York family; quite dysfunctional, of course, because no one wants to read about normal people. They’re too dull. All of his novels deal with family issues. A Home at the End of the World is about three friends who try to make a family together, to raise a child and to make a home for themselves. The Hours is about family as well; most poignantly when family becomes suffocating and you want a way out.

It’s funny the images that Cunningham frequently uses in his novels. In an interview with Cunningham in the Kenyon Review (I think it’s the Kenyon Review), he talks candidly about his books and how they have been received by the general reading public; especially his role as a gay author writing books that do not necessarily fit into the Gay and Lesbian genres. It could be said that Cunningham is breaking new ground by writing books from a queer perspective accessible to the non-queer type and not solely formula fiction. Typical gay books tend to follow a formulaic outline: 1.) boy (or girl) is unsure of his/her sexuality 2.) has a sexual experience 3.) there is talk about the danger of AIDS 4.) then “coming out” to family and friends 5.) maybe more sex 6.) falling out with partner 7.) and either a reconciliation or more commonly, going separate ways. I have even heard that some formula fiction (whichever the genre) is so predictable that you can flip through the book quite easily and find all the parts. While not all queer fiction is formulaic, the books I’m talking about are either “coming out” books, gay bildungsromans with stereotypical characters, or they tend to be Harlequin romances or Barbara Cartland yarns with a homoerotic theme. Suffice it to say, hopefully, Cunningham's books represent a shift in queer fiction. He doesn’t even use the word “gay” (if at all) in his novels. Sexuality is fluid for him; what I mean is that sexual identity is not fixed in stone; like the Kinsey model -- none of us are either completely one way or the other; most of us lie somewhere in the middle of the sexual spectrum.

And also, as we mentioned in class — we read novels because we want to read them; we shouldn’t read a novel because a character has or has not a particular “orientation” — so what if a character is gay, straight, transgendered, bisexual or whatever? It’s the same problem we affix to other genres — Christian fiction, historical fiction; as if the genres themselves dictate how we are supposed to enjoy the book. Someone mentioned in class last night that walking into a Barnes & Noble, you get the sense that the books are choosing you not you choosing them.

I can’t help but mention the fact that in the interview in the Kenyon Review the interviewer mentions that in every one of Cunningham's novels there is mention of baking a cake. In Flesh and Blood the mother is baking a cake for a birthday party; in The Hours, Laura Brown sticks her hands into cake dough, evanescent of her repressed sexuality and in a Home at the End of the World, Bobby learns to bake a cake from his best friend’s mother and eventually becomes a chef. Responding to this observation about cakes in his novels, Cunningham laughed and said that it wasn’t done on purpose. But, he said, it was true — cakes are everywhere in his works. If you want to know the symbolism of something in a book don’t ask the writer because he will deny any kind of signification; writers don’t like to give away “why” they wrote a book (as if there is something to “give away”);. Readers, however, are different from the writer of the book in that we want to discover meaning behind recurring images in a novel but authors are reluctant to say, “yes I meant this when I wrote that.” If I were to give meaning to baking in Cunningham I would say that he is very much involved with domesticity, uncovering the mundane “stuff” we do in our everyday superficial lives. But, he just as well may say that it was a coincidence.

Speaking of cakes and domesticity, it is interesting to note how Cunningham “places” his novels. He doesn’t portray starving people in Ethiopia nor does he showcase the horrors of war in Iraq — his novels are about sometimes superficial peoples’ lives in an artificial world trying to find a home. Clarissa in the Hours lives in a fabulous apartment; she is privileged; she is throwing a party for her former lover; like Mrs. Dalloway, it’s all rather superficial. What’s the point? What’s the so what? Cunningham is writing from what he knows just as Woolf wrote from what she knew, her (and his) collection of memories and experiences that serve as the fodder for the novels. What’s more universal: dying of AIDS in Uganda or dying of AIDS on the Upper West Side?

I don’t know if the Hours (or any of Cunningham’s novels) will make the list in the years to come. It’ll be interesting to see what’s included in the canon before my own life is finished. The Hours is a fine book; it is not an imitation of a previous masterstroke, but nor is it a genius piece of work either. I enjoyed it a second time after reading so much Woolf in a short span of time. It was a nice dessert! I can’t help but think, though, that perhaps cake may be Cunningham’s only perduring legacy.

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Virginia Woolf and the Intellectual Sphere

Virginia Woolf, Photograph: AP

Not only is Virginia Woolf a cultural icon, as Brenda Silver in her book, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere, demonstrates, but she is also influential in the current intellectual sphere.

But, what is the intellectual sphere and what does this have to do with Woolf studies?

The intellectual sphere is the realm of influence surrounding the propagation of ideas, forming an intellectual history from Confucius to Kant, et cetera. Intellectual history is the record of this journey; mainly domineered by men, so it is curious to consider Woolf as a member of this sphere.

Will Durant, the well-noted historian, listed the top-ten most influential thinkers and did not include a woman. It is difficult to think of the most influential thinkers in history without thinking of class and gender. And besides, do we think of Woolf as an intellectual, anyway? Novelist comes to mind. Essayist. Woolf did write 500 essays on topics ranging from current British figures, novelists and literary criticism. In A Room of One's Own she contributed to the idea of the androgynous mind, the idea that the most creative artist creates from the locus of both "man" and "woman".

Also, Woolf was a member of the Bloomsbury group: artists, writers, poets who didn't include the masses. She was a member of a higher social class than most; she didn't have to work. She was very well-educated -- more than many men -- but she didn't have a university education like her brothers. She was able to be educated because she was the daughter of an educated man; she read the books in his library. She describes herself as being between the devil and the deep sea (Three Guineas 74 See more on this page). Her father's library educated her: the Victorian books that surrounded her educated her; She received a pastiche education, pulling knowledge from wherever she could. She did feel bitterness about this; she writes in the Three Guineas about "University Education": "What is this mysterious process that takes about three years to accomplish, costs a round sum in hard cash, and turns the crude and raw human being into the finished product -- an educated man or woman?" (24).

But, are we speaking about an intellectual elitism here? Would Woolf consider herself a part of an elitist intelligentsia separated from the masses? How did Woolf imagine herself in the context of the intellectual elite and/or the public sphere? It is difficult to speak about "the intellectual" without also speaking about a class society. Intellectuals, as Gramsci puts it, come from the different social classes so as to articulate the identity of that particular class. This is different from Plato's idea of the Philosopher King in his dialogue The Republic. Ancient Greece was a democracy of free men, women excluded. The intellectual was a man who had the leisure time to spend writing and thinking. He was taught gymnastics in school, learned the art of war. The slaves worked or went to war -- the women stayed home and kept their chitons tight around their belts.

Plato does ask the question, though, why is it that Women are reserved the role of nurturer, thus the weaker sex, and man has the role of a warmonger, the stronger sex? Marx can be called a public intellectual for he wrote about the rise of the working class. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. were intellectuals for the Civil Rights Movement in the '60s. Cuddy-Keane, in her work on Woolf and the intellectual/Public sphere, argues against the popular notion that Woolf was an elitist. Woolf deliberately published her essays in magazines that many people read: Ladies' Home Journal, for example. Woolf gave lectures at schools on the importance of education. Again, in the Three Guineas, she writes about the importance of education, "judging for yourself, comparing the views" so as to distinguish between fact and fiction. Woolf didn't trust the status quo. She realized that the war effort wanted able bodies, producers, and women were fixed to provide for the state as long as they were forbidden from an education; the women's college that asks her for a guinea, she argues, will only purchase matches and petrol that will burn the college to the ground! (36). She noticed that the world is divided into public and private spheres.

In a comical way, she broke into this private sphere. As a young woman, she poked fun at government security by dressing up as an Ethiopian prince and boarding the HMS Dreadnought to the chagrin of the British Navy who fell for the hoax! Woolf realized that women were excluded from the private sphere and she wanted to bring the divide that separated them closer. Woolf published two book series called the Common Reader. In it, she published essays, literary criticism and biographical sketches for anyone to read. In a way, this is her most accessible work for the public intellectual sphere. The Three Guineas, which we read in class, is her most polemical attack; but also, her most insistence insertion into the intellectual sphere, championing her cause as a pacifist.

Works Cited:

Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge. 2003

Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader: First Series. Harcourt Brace. 1925, 1953.

--------------------. The Second Common Reader. Harcourt Brace. 1932.

---------------------, Three Guineas. Harcourt Brace. 1938, 1966.

I also consulted the Philosopher's Index, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Dictionary of Intellectual History to find entries on Woolf. Woolf had one entry in the 2004 edition of the Philosopher's Index and none in the others, except a cross-reference note at the end of an article in the Philosophical Encyclopedia. 

I also have a fuller, annotated bibliography on Virginia Woolf and the Intellectual Sphere posted here.

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Journal Entry on Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. 

- Virginia Woolf

The first realization, in hindsight, that I was not a part of nature, but rather of culture, was when I first assumed that I was a boy and not a girl. At some point in my development culture assigned me the gender of male and I, for the most part, accepted the sign. But, signs, as we know, do not always point to something that is really real, rather, they sometimes merely point — which is an oddity, if you think about it, because we expect a sign to point to something. Real, that is. And when I say the word “something” (or the word “real”) I mean a metaphysical something. This metaphysical something - that for millennia was assumed and presupposed until Ferdinand de Saussure came along and said: No, I don’t think so — there is no referent in language -- language does not point to a something. So does my gender point to something real about my sex or is it just a sign that really leads to nowhere in particular? I would have to say that signs do point to something, but I would hazard a guess that it is not an A = A equation. Rather an A = “A” equation. And when it does point to something, at least something we perceive to be rooted in the real, we cherish those rare moments; we stand back and gasp -- and call that experience Aesthetics. I call it the art of the “awe”. We stand in awe. Like Orlando, in Virginia Woolf's gender-bending novel, standing up after a long trance: always a woman and at this point a man (or a woman). She is not perturbed when she stands up and find herself a man, or a woman, in fact, she is nonplussed. Woolf puts no words in Orlando’s mouth but rather describes the situation as if Orlando is waking up for her morning ablutions or walking her Seleuchi hound. Ordinary events, really (I can hear Woolf chuckling): “It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since (p. 139). She doesn’t explain anything, as if she has to give a reason why Orlando is now a woman and not a man. We merely stand in awe. Woolf states: “Let other pens treat of sex and sexuality” (p. 139). I guess I am one of those other pens.

In reading the biography of Orlando, I have to step back and wonder what sign indicates who we really are. I usually have taken signs for granted, a given — signposts to help guide me in this strange land (1). Take de Saussure’s tree, for example. The sign for tree seems easy enough, but the sign for “me” is more difficult to get a hold of, despite the omnipresence of our bodies — we can’t escape ourselves, yet we remain indefinitely perplexed by our very selves (2). Especially if we have been disrupted somewhere along the way. Abuse. Violence. These traumas can either be signs of grace or asphyxiation. The signs no longer work. Or grace seeps in and we can see again. The signs that clue us into our gender are based on assumptions about what it means (how it is comprehensible) to own a phallus between your legs or a pair of scissors on your lap (tongue in cheek). These assumptions either become whole or fractured.

Gender is not only a lesson in anatomy – yes, certain physical features of our anatomy, so we are told, designate us as male or female — but there are other dynamics at play here. Either you are a male or a female? It seems easy enough, but already, before the child even leaves the mother’s womb, the infant is beset with the problem of sex and gender. Gender presents a host of possibilities, many of them rife with problems. Just think of all the restrictions that gender places on us (that Orlando seems to be liberated from, miraculously enough).

If you have a penis you cannot speak of shopping with the same reckless abandon as you would if you have a vagina. The who-has-what is culturally conditioned. Orlando can play (and did) both gender sides. Case study: A boy playfully applies his mother’s lipstick when no one is looking (see the film, Billy Elliot or L.I.E.) or a girl dodges her father’s resistance and joins the boxing league, despite the opposition. A father tentatively embraces his son after his ex-wife drops him off. Why is it that these gender roles are so fixed in culture? I know the question is hopeless, but I ask it indefatigably.

Gender remains a cultural construct, while sex is a hazy reminder of our once intimate link with nature. Now that we have shaken off nature, any idea of a utopian society in the feigned vein of a Rousseau (or even Plato) have fallen by the wayside. We are products of culture, and thus, depending on our cultural milieu, must endure certain gender roles that society places on us. I guess we could fight it but I am not going to risk the humiliation of wearing a dress to class with burgundy lipstick. Maybe Orlando can wake up one day, a different gender and amiably stride into her new role – but, I must confess, I don’t think I could do that. The gender roles are too much ingrained in me. Yeah, some gender constructs I can elide easily enough — like the idea of blue and pink as being exclusively male or female -- so that they no longer serve as signs of gender, but rather remain as spectrums in the rainbow of light No matter what we do to fight it, I feel, the legacy of the west remains, placing ideas in opposition (form and matter, good and evil, black and white) as if the tension between the two will actually produce something that is knowledgeable and meaningful. We are so binary about the whole thing. I hate that.

As a boy, I am sure (because Lacan assures me (3)), I looked in a mirror and saw an image reflecting back that I assumed was a whole image of me, even though it was a misrecognized image, incomplete, a partial imago of the real me, flabby, infantile and totally dependent on mum and pop. And I am sure, completely self-involved — more than I am now! Somewhere along the way, I looked in the mirror, butt-naked — like Orlando — and was gendered. Not solely by me. But by my parents. TV. Et Cetera. I was male. I am a male. I was wondering? Especially after a few beers. Will I wake up one day and find myself changed? Orlando had no qualms about her sex: there was no doubt about his sex (pg 1) but she is two-gendered in the novel. It makes for awkward pronoun usage because you don’t know if you should use masculine or feminine pronouns to describe her. In the novel, it is not problematic at all because the narrative is progressive. Woolf brilliantly avoids any grammatical ambiguity although the text remains rather ambiguous. Or is it androgynous?

There is a song by the Crash Test Dummies called “Androgynous”:

Here comes Dick, he's wearing a skirt
Here comes Jane you know she's sportin' a chain
Same hair, a revolution
Same build, evolution
Tomorrow who's gonna fuss?
And they love each other so, androgynous
Closer than you know, love each other so, androgynous

We'll don't get him wrong, and don't get him mad
He might be a father but he sure aint a dad
And she don't need the advice that is sent to her
She's happy the way she looks, she's happy with her gender
And they love each other so, androgynous
Closer than you know, love each other so, androgynous

Mirror image, see no damage, see no evil at all
Cupie dolls and urine stalls will be laughed at
The way you're laughed at now

Something meets boy and something meets girl
They both look the same they're overjoyed in this world
Same hair revolution
Unisex evolution
Tomorrow who's gonna fuss?

And tomorrow Dick is wearing pants,
Tomorrow Jane is wearing a dress
Future outcasts and they don't last
And today people dress the way that they please
The way they tried to do in the last centuries

And they love each other so, androgynous
Closer than you know, love each other so, androgynous. 

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(1) I stole this from the title of Walker Percy’s posthumous collection of essays Signposts in a Strange Land.

(2) Percy wrote about that too in his book, Lost in the Cosmos. He describes two phenomena that I can remember: walking by a mirror in a department store and not knowing who that person was you just walked past, so you back up and see and startled to discover it was your reflection in the mirror. Or why is it that when you look at a photo, for instance, a family portrait, the first person you seek out is yourself?

(3) See Lacan's writings on the subject in “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”