The poetic imagination and freedom

Return to the curtains that are drawn, opening ¹

A young man enters the low stage, wearing

a black leather miniskirt, a minimal tank top, moves his hips,

not quite dancing.

He’s as undressed as you can be.

Balancing his nudity between his hip’s narrow, almost

imperceptible moves. There. Hold fast.

Keep that tension, the observer’s gaze.

The stage is red, the folds in the curtains even redder.

The young man is so beautiful

I cry

His hips are moving slightly, he is dead serious

A concentrated toss of the head

I realize they have to be slim this is 1986

I realize 1986 that it’s desire for another man

My glittering gray fixation

give in to it, spit it back, give in and

I spell out: a dark inscription.

like restraint. This is us.

*

She divides the dark into darkness and what comes from the mouth

she divides the dark into what’s beaten and what’s felled

In a ward of grass and wheat girls lie in straight lines

Yellow shines from beneath the letter e

I present my finest letter to thee

Winding it roughly around the neck

*

It has to be yellower

it has to be like madness to seem so very yellow

it has to be yellower

it has to be like decay to seem so very yellow

The waves must be yellow and the foam

the foam of the sea must be shot through with yellow

Your autumns smell like almonds, drag them out

The sky, of course

The 6^th of October 09

Even metaphors are just another way of getting laid

It was a Monday in mid-February. I received an email from my friend Elizabeth, an American poet and translator residing in Stockholm. The poetry magazine Iterant wanted to publish a couple of my poems that she had translated from Swedish into English. I answered: go ahead. After a few rounds of proofing the poems were up on the journal’s website that Friday already. ² Elizabeth immediately began circulating them on social media. Even C-J, critic and author caught them. C-J is 71 years old and besides being a classic erudite, he is conservative, at times eccentric with a particular sense of style. At public appearances he frequently sports a passed-down mink fur along with a hoodie. As long as I’ve known about him he has been open about his homosexuality. His most recent work, on Marcel Proust, was unanimously celebrated in the press. Now he had read my poems and was circulating them on social media, late that Friday night, with enthusiasm: ‘Read Mara’s poems!’ he wrote, linking the website. I was moved. There was one line in particular from my poem, that he promoted: ‘Metaphors is just another way of getting laid’.

The following day, a Saturday, two questions occupy me. Both concern Alice Walker’s book The Temple of My Familiar. First, I wonder why the book has been given the bland Swedish title The Companion (Följeslagaren). My second question is why the peacocks, whose gorgeous feathers are pulled off one after the other on the first page of the book don’t fill me with any sense of compassion. Is it because my anthropocentrism is incurable and other species simply do not arouse any sympathy in me? Day turns into night. I am about to go to bed. Then I accidentally log onto fb, which I don’t do an a daily basis. I’ve received a new message. It’s from an acquaintance, D, whom I haven’t seen in many years. D writes:

‘Hej Mara. I would like to have a martini, or two, with you. Or beer, or wine, si tu veux!’

I answer:

‘Hej D, yes, long time, let us be in touch’.

D is 100% wonderful. Terribly handsome, painfully glamorous, and 10 years younger than me. One of the country’s foremost musicians who has performed for royalties and presidents all over the world. I immediately get a response:

‘Hej Mara; yes it’s been a very long time. I want to see you. Love’.

I don’t have time to answer, another message arrives instantly:

‘Come over to my place. Strandvägen’.

I look at the clock. Nineteen minutes past 10. I lean my hands against the broken back of the kitchen chair. A wooden sliver pierces my palm.

I freeze there for a couple of seconds. Feel a bit scared, uncertain, but also uplifted. Then shame, of course, precisely for feeling uplifted. Humiliated and chosen at the same time. A booty call. But the odd thing was that we never had any relation to speak of. We had run into each other at parties, or concerts of classical music. One time had been special. We were at an after party in an enormous flat. There were ballet dancers, opera singers and violinists, no writers. We danced a very slow dance. He was excellent at leading. We glided by a gilt wall mirror. I caught a glimpse of his face, his eyes were closed and he was breathing in my hair. He was perfect, top to bottom. The attraction between us was so strong I was filled with laughter. I could not take it seriously. I also didn’t. ‘Nothing’ happened.

And now, more than 10 years later, he sends me a booty call on messenger. Why? He ought to be 40 by now, or 39 maybe. Did he know that I am turning 50 this year? Or that those pretty images of me that sometimes pop up on social media are nothing but images? Fashion images, from Vogue and Gucci, or those when I am straddling a motorcycle advertising hand bags. Images that I say yes to doing in the name of representation (age, race), but that do not say anything about menopause, constipation, or mucus membranes as thin as last year’s leaves. But then something strikes me, and I am filled with laughter again. Many in the higher spheres of culture follow C-J’s Facebook account. D must have read my poem, that is the only logical explanation for why he is getting in touch at this particular moment. He must have read it and taken hold of the line ‘Metaphors is just another way of getting laid’. Dear god. I have spent half my adult life teaching students that the reader can chose to disregard the intentions of the author, that there is no final interpretation that establishes the meaning of a literary text. The other half of my life I have spent considering the performative, or rather the illocutionary in language. Words that do what they say, that have the capacity to give reality a new direction, create something that wasn’t there before. And now when I see that force literally backfiring in my face, I am terrified.

I look at the clock again. 22:22, 22/2 -22. It’s no coincidence. I call the only phone number I still know by heart, Taxi Stockholm.

No, I’m kidding. Of course, I did not take a taxi to fancy Strandvägen. (furthermore, the date and the day of the week are not correct; anyone can check). Instead, I answered with a polite excuse and ended the conversation. But I did entertain the thought, and I admit that I might have spent a minute fantasizing about what D wanted with me that evening. Whether it was something ordinary, or something more high-octane he had in mind when he crossed the border between fantasy and reality through social media and contacted me, an almost complete stranger that he hadn’t seen in 10 years. He must have had an image of me, an old image that was still living somewhere, deep in his unconscious, and that was given new life with this poem.

We know that words are power. What is unique about poetic language is its capacity to communicate directly with our dreams, the unconscious. But what then happens with words for each individual dreamer, is beyond the reach of the poem. This is where the individual’s imaginary power takes hold: our capacity to fantasize, but also to make stuff up. The possibility of creating new, better worlds, but also misinterpretations and alternative facts. Poetry can conjure up an impulse to enter into the new rooms created by words: make us actually cross the line. When D sent his messages to me it was from the platform of fantasy and dreams. And even if my answer to his fantasy was a clear no, there was another, private answer in the form of my fantasy of still getting into that taxi that breaks in at Strandvägen. Legs that then, one at a time and in a gracious manner, not at all how I usually get out of cars – lumping myself together and spilling out like a dizzy goat. An extra space had been created in me, a room where I am the kind of person who gets out of taxis in a sophisticated way. A final thing that can be noted is how D took a chance with the imperative form; a mood that can be extremely sexy when uttered by the right person. In a lecture Agamben (2011) describes how the imperative has created three discourses: religion, law and magic. God’s imperative form is given, but Agamben wants to stress that man also uses the imperative in prayer, when she turns to God. ³ However, interpreting D’s messages does not require any exegetical skills. But still. His utterances seemed to gain their power and legitimacy both from structures that are partially invisible (desire) and visible (gender, class) in a combination that for me finally appeared as equal parts magic, law and prayer: Come over to my place. Strandvägen. ⁴

The reasonable reaction on my part should perhaps have been indignation. Indignation over him crossing the limit. My limits, and messing with my fantasy. But the idea that it was my poem that was able to create a meeting between two fantasies made me excited, despite it all. (Even if I am fully aware that it might not have been the poem, that it might just have been chance that made him reach out at that exact moment).

The room of imagination

The force of imagination is peculiar. Its allure must have been decisive for many who have made the decision to become writers. The realization that this is where I want to be. This is a room that I want access to, not simply for a few stolen minutes in the middle of the week, but all the time. The freedom of staying in the room of fantasy at first appears massive. So many paths, possibilities. Soon enough the question emerges: how do I handle this freedom? The knowledge that I as a literary author literally can write anything I want, kill constantly, abuse and rape with no consequence – weighs increasingly heavy and worrisome. I have touched on this earlier. Among other things, I have written that writing involves ‘an enormous, lust-filled freedom and a terrible sense of responsibility. An autonomy that must be balanced by an ethical boundary’ (Lee, 2014: 41). ⁵ But I have also written: ‘Maybe the freedom bestowed by letters feels extra lovely for bodies that are used to being stopped and stopped, suspected and examined’ (Lee, 2014: 221). That is to say: On the one hand, writing as freedom must be balanced by a sense of responsibility, on the other hand, writing may become a necessary room for those whose space is constantly cut off by the external world. Between these two points of departure new relations and perspectives emerge. Here is one:

For me as a writer, fantasies, images and fictions, are some of the most important raw materials. But as a woman who is racialized as Asian I am aware that fantasies and images also can be my worst enemy. In particular those fantasies and images that others have created of us. I know which fantasies and fictions stick to my appearance. I also know that these fantasies and fictions have been repeated so many times that they seem to have become reality to some. Almost truths.

So for me, and many others like me, visibility is often connected to threats, and danger. An important thing for me as I write – but also in my life in general – is to challenge and tear apart this tapestry of fantasies and fictions. Literature gives me an opportunity to create new images – of myself and of others who are figured in a stereotypical or derogatory way.

Non-white women inhabit both the worst nightmares and the wildest fantasies of the western world, and many encounter us far more often in their dreams than in reality. Most probably know what this does to people, that is, when people prefer to stick to their prejudice rather than to actually get to know us. We know what this can lead to in terms of distorted perceptions of reality or even complete loss of grounding in reality. But a more important question might be: what happens to us in these cases? What does it do to our desires, our fantasies, to know that most of the time we are placed in the western subconscious, their secret, forbidden rooms? Their basements? What kind of room does fantasy, the creative unconscious, become for us? And then: what does this mean for how we can make sense of fantasy and reality?

Clarification: if the Western unconscious is overpopulated by delusions of us, where are we to go with our actual problems? American poet Elizabeth Alexander (2004: 5) writes, ‘I imagined that in dream space I was a somehow ‘neutral’ self, but I found no such neutrality there’. Alexander (2004) is citing playwright Ntozake Shange (p. 4) who asks where ‘the black unconscious’ may be articulated: ‘Where are our dreams? Where is our pain? Where do we heal?’ ⁶

Feelings are central here: finding a space where one’s feelings count. This yearning is not unique to women who are racialized as non-white. Let me explain.

In an earlier text I expressed that the use of rational arguments in discussions with people who hold on to their hate, their prejudice and their delusions like pacifiers, is pointless. Instead, I proposed, with some confidence:

Rational arguments are not enough if the struggle is fought against unconscious desires and narcissistic fixations. Rather: the struggle must be fought in the same register. The struggle must be played out on the level of the unconscious: that of the dream, the fantasy, of art of the potential. And as long as the writer and the artist manage to address that level, there is hope. (Lee, 2014: 204)

Today I would not have formulated it in such a way. I don’t think I would have used the word ‘struggle’ (and above all I think I would have hesitated before the word ‘hope’, but that is a different discussion). I still believe that the creative force has the capacity to address its audience on a subliminal level, but today I would also underscore the affective level, and poetry’s capacity to hotwire affects. The reason that this becomes extra important in my example here, is that racist ideas cannot simply be viewed as opinions or ideas in general, but equally as a passion. ⁷ This would explain why some people with racist beliefs seem ready to go to war for their right to continue to be racist. Because it is hardly a question of a burning commitment to freedom of expression. No, the violent reaction is rather a response to a feeling of having one’s emotional life questioned. Or worse yet: that someone is shaming their passions, which also may be tied to pleasures, and we know from Žižek that there are few things that are as horrifying as being caught by others in one’s enjoyment.

The room that fantasy and dream open up can be a place for feelings that aim for emancipation or equality, but they are equally frequently a breeding ground for hate. The common denominator for all who enter that room is that it is a space that can receive one’s emotions.

To approach the concept of freedom from the horizon of fantasy and poetry is a challenge. Especially in today’s political climate under liberal capitalism where the binary opposite freedom-captivity seems to have lost some of its former relevance. Instead of capitivity it is today common to see safety set up against freedom. Security questions are highly prioritized on the political agenda whereas questions of integrity and freedom are mostly advocated by lawyers and other experts. Thus new ways of interpellating our subjective vulnerability and insecurity have developed. Through this interpellation all subjects – regardless of race, gender, class – have become potentially vulnerable and unsafe in our rooms.

Maybe this is why the space of fantasy – virtual, real, material, and so on – have become so important. A refuge, a sense of safety, because nothing is more exhausting than being in a state of uncertainty and fear. The feeling of someone who comes and tries to deprive us of this room, this breathing space, will be seen as an attack on the most intimate, the most valuable, as if someone is attempting to rip out a part of one’s soul. This is why poetic acts matter more than ever before. They provide other spaces for us to dwell in, rooms that we have not chosen ourselves, rooms where we can see each other and not only our own, constantly diminishing, increasingly self-reflective and impoverished fantasies.

One of my greatest weaknesses as an author is that I love tying things together. I know that it does not add anything, quite the opposite. That the production of meaning runs the risk of stopping, and that I am limiting the imagination of the reader. But I just can’t help myself. It is a secret dream to be able to step in there, into the imagination of the reader and poke around. Adjust, correct, and then to finally be completely understood. This dream is as seductive as it is potentially dangerous, that is, if it was to be realized. Not only does it have clear authoritarian overtones, but also because all language that communicates with 100% comprehension is a language without poetry. But that doesn’t mean that attempts to obtain comprehension are in vain.

To be clear: one hardly places peacock feathers in a literary text without using them. What Alice Walker does with her feathers I do not know. I haven’t finished the book yet. Sometimes it is better to let those peacock feathers remain. Gorgeous, wonderful, like a sign that something incredible has happened or might happen. I will eventually pick them up. And then I will also take the opportunity to pick up my feelings, those I left on the ground next to them. But something always remains. Something small, unplucked. The remains of exaltation and shame. And perhaps another reader will bend down and inspect these remains. The reactions of this reader I cannot know. Perhaps they will continue to deny it until death. Probably. But I know that this is a person who also dreams.