Fistula A Novel

&

The Poetics of Coexistence

Frank O’Hara, Assemblage, and the Case for Relational Poetics

A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Faculty of Humanities

2019

Nathaniel Ogle School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

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CONTENTS Abstracts 3 Declaration 4 Copyright Statement 5 Acknowledgements 6 FISTULA: A Novel 8 Bibliography 364 THE POETICS OF COEXISTENCE: Frank O’Hara, Assemblage, and the

Case for Relational Poetics 369 Introduction – Approaching the Assemblage-Poem 371 Chapter One – O’Hara: “in the seeing / hands of others”? 406 1.1 Introduction: Approaching O’Hara 406 1.2 Everyday Art, Everyday Living: Surface and Presence 411 1.3 A Person in a Poem: Selfhood 419 1.4 A Person Reading a Poem: Orality and Reception Theory 422 1.5 A Person Reading a Person: Who is Frank O’Hara,

And What Does He Want? 428 1.6 Poems for People, Poems of People: Coterie and Coexistence 433 Chapter Two – Assemblage: Insider Art 439 2.1 Introduction 439 2.2 Affective Immersion 442 2.3 Collage and Assemblage: Shifts and Slippages 447 2.4 Bricolage: Interacting with the World 457 Chapter Three – Coexistence in The End of the Far West 463 3.1 Introduction: The Plateau of Coexistence 463 3.2 The Continuity of Assemblages 466

3.2.1 “Being speaks with ‘one voice’”: Kerouac’s Idealism, O’Hara’s Continuous Materialism 468

3.3 Kennedy’s United States: a “vast assemblage” 481 3.3.1 Territorialisation 488 3.3.2 Deterritorialisation 490

3.4 The Frontier Story 492 3.5 The Gulch 496 3.6 From Coterie to Coexistence 502 3.7 Pragmatic Ethics 508 3.8 “My red friends / will pass among you”: Bearing

Each Other’s Differences 513 Chapter Four – Towards Relational Poetics 518 4.1 Introduction 518 4.2 Participatory Art and Biopolitics 525 4.3 Relational Aesthetics and Psychopolitics 533 4.4 Relational Poetics 540

4.4.1 ‘Walking Past Rough Sleepers’: A Relational Poetry Prototype 546

4.4.2 ‘Walking Past Rough Sleepers’: Discussion 555

Conclusion – Kindred Difference 567 Bibliography 578

Word Count: 149, 663

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ABSTRACTS Fistula: A Novel In The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin claimed the “prerequisite of authentic novelistic prose” is an “internal stratification of language, of its social heteroglossia and the variety of individual voices in it”. This interfacing of forms, styles and perspectives spotlights and enacts the vexed but porous “borderline between oneself and other”, providing a formal machinery through which social coexistence can be explored dramatically. Fistula takes this literally: designed as a dossier of evidentiary documents penned by an interrelated cast of characters, this novel constitutes a heteroglot assemblage investigating the breakdowns and recuperations of ethical encounters in sexual, familial, civic, vocational and juridical contexts. As a result, the textual vérité of documentary materials in its dossier format reshapes the novel form in accordance to the contemporary hypertextual media environment and exercises a conception of the novel more commonly accredited to poetry—not only as the depiction of events, but as an event itself. While the configuration of documents does constitute an episodic narrative the reader beholds, it serves also as a heterogenous object for direct interaction, recasting the crime reader’s role from a witness of the fictional detective confronting evidence to a readerly detective themselves confronting evidence. The events that Fistula does simultaneously depict concern the ways in which trauma, betrayal and legal and police procedures subjectively reform its protagonist, Corina, a nephrology nurse recovering from rape. In caring for her dying mother, mourning a lost love, and finding friendship with a new patient, Corina can repair fractured social relations despite, but also because of, an aggravated awareness of vulnerability. Corina’s narrative is juxtaposed with her ex-boyfriend and rapist Cameron’s account of the assault and his guilt-driven descent into insomniac derangement while on bail. This serves as a contrasting study of manipulative narcissism and, structurally, produces a parallax view that reveals the social and psychological antagonism configuring the inconsistency of their perspectives. The underlying argument Fistula enacts is that literary assemblage enables a means of responding to, and engaging with, the social condition, as Frank O’Hara puts it, of “life held precariously in the seeing / hands of others”. The Poetics of Coexistence: Frank O’Hara, Assemblage, and the Case for Relational Poetics This dissertation focuses on the series of poems in Frank O’Hara’s critically neglected The New York-Amsterdam Set/The End of the Far West (1963/64) in order to demonstrate his unmapped preoccupation with a more inclusive notion of the relationality of social life than the exclusive kinships of affinity with which he has been previously associated. This amounts to a shift from employing a “poetics of coterie”, as Lytle Shaw has influentially argued, to exercising a poetics of coexistence, which contrastingly attends to the modalities of difference in the correlated orders of sociality and metaphysics. The poems stand out in O’Hara’s oeuvre not only for this shift in focus, but for their formal idiosyncrasy. Comprising congregated fragments of conversation, the poems engender an immersive textual space whose associate networks of interaction function analogously to plastic assemblages and thus constitute a novel poetic form—the assemblage-poem. As verbal diagrams of concrete social assemblages, these assemblage-poems expose and potentially emancipate the reader from the discursive modes and affective realities of social exclusion and regulation, of coerced consensus and sectarianism, which define the era in which they were written—the Cold War condition in America from Kennedy’s New Frontier initiative to the Vietnam War. As plastic assemblage preceded conceptual and participatory art, from the late 1960s happenings to the relational aesthetics of the 1990s, O’Hara’s assemblage-poems serve as a crucial steppingstone to a what I correspondingly call relational poetry, a heteroglot literary practice that is fundamentally interactive but also participatory, collaborative, ephemeral, precarious and affective.

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DECLARATION No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.

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COPYRIGHT STATEMENT i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trademarks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocuID=487), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First a vast thanks to the supervisory team who midwifed this thesis: Maria Hyland, Douglas Field, Frances Leviston, and John McAuliffe. Without their generosity, patience, encouragement and perspicacity, this work would be largely unintelligible, and probably abandoned. I have fortunately benefited from Maria, Doug and John’s inspirational teaching, advocacy and mentorship since my undergraduate days and feel equally lucky to have found a new ally in Frances, who joined the team at the apex of the novel’s disarray and provided a pivotal guiding and refining force. I am also indebted to the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at The University of Manchester for the financial support that allowed me to spend the bulk of my time writing and reading and also enabled me to attend and present papers at the European Beat Studies Network conference and the Northeast Modern Language Association convention as well as visit the Allen Collection of Frank O’Hara Letters at the University of Connecticut Library. Similarly, I want to thank Waterstones not only for their flexibility and accommodation of my academic commitments, but for a generous staff discount. The novel in this thesis required an enormous amount of time meticulously reproducing legal/policiary documents and researching the experiences and testimonies of victims of rape, so I’m tremendously thankful for the Ministry of Justice and What Do They Know, which make such documents publicly accessible, and also, more importantly, for the victims of rape who have shared their experiences online and in print. This novel was written in the hope that the hitherto perennial relevance of its subject will seem to future readers inconceivable. It is to all victims of rape and of all forms of sexual and domestic violence that this novel is dedicated. The demands of doctoral work are predominantly alleviated by the support, advice and sometimes actual contribution of friends and family. Ali (not the character) has served as a scholarly guru and invaluable postgraduate companion, not least for introducing me, toward the end of my first year, to the concept of assemblage, which refocused the whole thesis. Ted’s editorial nous, colossal intellect and candour in our lengthy transnational conversations has kept me sharp and aiming for excellence. Patty’s juridical knowledge and Ollie’s design skills have enabled my fabrications to claim credibility, and both are part of the continually nourishing ‘Funeral Playlist’ WhatsApp group of my Day 1’s, with Duncan, Jonny, and Richard. Rob provided the first extra-supervisory reading and he, along with the Small and Androutsos families, have given support of countless other kinds. My parents and step-parents, finally, are the most generous people I know, especially in light of my bone-idle and taciturn propensities, and I am beholden to them—Mam, Dad, Tony and Marion—for their love, forbearance and belief. I owe, by far, my greatest debt of gratitude to Anna. The encouragement, comfort and fortification that she has given in relation to this work is just a fraction of the supreme grace with which she has filled my life, making it possible. This thesis is about “life held precariously in seeing / hands of others”. Mine is held in hers.

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life held precariously in the seeing hands of others

—’POEM’, FRANK O’HARA

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Fistula

A Novel

9

People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim, the jilted child discovered its mother. But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar. And what are you going to do to me now? With what, exactly, would you expect to frighten me?

—‘HAPPY HOUR’, DENIS JOHNSON

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CORINA SLATE (C. 2013)

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[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – AUGUST 2016 – PART ONE] Ulcer

Gastric acid will melt a razor blade. I learned this quite late for a nurse, in my

first year at King’s. It made me think about eating a razor blade. Not about

actually doing it, but in terms of what would happen in the body. I thought

about the blade slicing and snagging down the oesophagus. About blood

gushing the passageways. About trying to gag it up, only to cause more cuts in

the cuts already there. About choking on the blood. I didn’t sit in the campus

canteen daydreaming about physiological trauma. It’s like revision to think

through messy emergencies, to understand them, the body, us. With this one

the blade’s route would come to mean something general about destruction.

Sometimes I thought about this destruction in terms of reluctance, fear, like the

blade didn’t want to be swallowed. Other times I thought it was carelessness,

stubbornness, like the blade would try to be swallowed no matter what. I

thought a lot about the route it would take, but also I thought about the

impossible end point, about the blade somehow reaching the stomach, cutting

the stomach flesh with each contraction, slowly, very slowly corroding in the

acid. The same acid is used in making batteries, photoflash bulbs, fireworks. It

removes rust from steel, destroys almost anything it touches. We use it to test

materials’ limits. It leads, in us, to fuel. But if it weren’t for the mucus the stomach

lines itself with, one thing the acid can’t easily destroy, the stomach would just

digest itself, from the inside out. This thought sticks in my mind. Maybe it’s

because this lining is so powerful. It’s a powerful form of protection. But it’s not

a perfect form of protection. Sometimes the acid gets through the lining,

destroys some stomach cells. If too much acid gets through, it gnaws away a

sore, what we call an ulcer, a little burst of white abrasions. Most often it’s only

small amounts of acid that get through the lining, small amounts of cells

destroyed. These cells regenerate in time. New lining is made about every

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three days. Sometimes I think about what we’ve got to protect us. Did you ever

think about that?

/

Power cut

The quiet after the lights go out is a nauseating sound, but the alarm of dialysis

machines is good for torture. There was enough moonlight coming in from the

windows for me to find the reception desk, the head lamps in a drawer. I gave

one to the other staff nurse. Let’s call her Tasha. We each went along a row of

the beds to make sure the machines were still running. I tried to avoid making

my shoes squeak on the floor. Not because it sounded silly, which it did, but

because a rushing nurse unsettles patients. I was saying, “Don’t worry”, “It’s

okay”, “It’s all right”. I told the patients what I was doing as I did it. It’s amazing

how much that reassures people. It establishes the route away from failure,

illness, pain. I smiled into their faces. They had hunted expressions. All animals

have this expression in the dark. The two younger patients, only teenagers,

preferred the dark behind their eyelids. I suppose it’s because it’s theirs. I

promised a back-up generator, forced myself to pat their knees. Their eyes

opened a crack, said, “Okay”, or nodded. Confidence is powerful medicine,

whichever way it’s administered. Like all cures, it also cures the person curing.

One way is to seem unflappable. Tasha makes patients laugh by being fake-

bossy, but they don’t tell Tasha when they’re scared. A few minutes without

power, no change. Each patient had their own way of telling me they were

scared. “How long will it be?” “This better be a drill.” “Corina? Corina?” A

frowning man with black tooth cavities, shrunken gums, possible gingivitis,

maybe a dependency on fizzy drinks, new to dialysis, he asked me why this

would even happen. I said I didn’t know at this moment. Then there was the fire

alarm. The man said, “Well, that answers that.” I saw him shake his head, his

twitchy smile. Before I would have let that go. Now it made my blood speed

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up. I said, “Keep talking and I’ll leave you here.” But he just kept shaking his

head, tried to keep his smile. I looked in his eyes to see what was there. He

must’ve wondered how much of his blood was outside his body, if he was dying

without realising it. A dialysis machine has about 250ml of blood flowing

through it at any one time. If the patient loses this amount of blood, it’s not fatal,

but let’s say it’s sub-healthy. Haemoglobin lowered. Weakness. Dizziness.

Nausea. All along a short scale of severity. It would take two weeks to

regenerate that much blood. So when the fire alarm sounds, the only thing to

do is cut and clamp the tubes, move the patients to another unit. The younger

patients were obedient. The older patients were woozy, agitated, like when

people wake up after overdosing. It’s that little moment before understanding,

becoming themselves again. I struggle not to cry whenever I see someone

wake up. Maybe because you didn’t. Tasha and me went back and forth with

wheelchairs. There was a woman I’ll call Audrey. 76 years old, 6’1”, only two

deep wrinkles in her face from the corners of her eyes, a bubbling giggle that

lets you hear her childhood. She was a journalist for The Sun, a Sally Army

captain. When there was time we’d play Descending Trumps during her

treatments. We were fascinated by each other’s hands. Mine are dry, ashy. Hers

are soft. She would laugh when I mentioned her hands. I let her touch my

hands. She told me she was scared by saying my name, asked me faintly if this

was anything to worry about as I wheeled her out, so I told her, “No, you’ll be

all right soon enough”, but it was extreme hypotension, shock, heart failure. In

the toilet after, Tasha and me hug each other, have a cry. We check our

watches. Tasha says, “We’re only two hours into the shift.” I say, “At least it went

by quickly.” We laugh, shake our heads, feel a little better.

/

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No title

your vulnerability isn’t beautiful

unless someone finds your vulnerability beautiful

you’ll never be safe

/

No deaths today

In the past week there have been seven kidney failures, fatal. The power cut

makes eight. That’s a lot of dead people, in case you thought it might be

common. Eight dead in a week in a hospital isn’t as unusual as eight dead in a

week in a nursery, but it comes close when it’s a kidney unit we’re talking about.

It turned out to be an eighteen-hour shift. I haven’t felt so defeated since my

days in ICU. It’s a kind of loneliness. But then, pathetic as it sounds, I think it’s

how I make sense of things now, as kinds of loneliness. The week passed over

the second anniversary of what your brother did to me. On the anniversary

night I felt I needed help so I watched an American YouTuber talk about her

own experience. “Because the worst thing,” she said, “is if you lose your sense

of humour.” Well, for me, it’s still the rape. I wasn’t thinking about my sense of

humour after giving the morning handover. I was stood in the disabled toilet

slapping my cheeks to rouse the blood in them. The problem with surviving is

what to do next. It can change your life as much as death, but you’re not dead.

I knew I’d have to get back to facing a life that doesn’t feel like my own, to

ailments I don’t know how to heal, to myself, not yet back to who I was, or on

to someone else. I can remember laughing off an eighteen-hour shift. It was

ridiculous, hugging other nurses, tears swelling up from my solar plexus, a kind

of honoured feeling. I remember laughing a lot. I remember feeling goofy. I

don’t think you could call me a pushover. I was happy with myself, I suppose,

proud, as you said once, “in a good way”, maybe explaining why even more

often I feel like embarrassment is lethal. I didn’t have to sleep facing the

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bedroom door. I didn’t feel like there’s someone with a big mouth who knows

an awful secret about me that could ruin my life if it got out. I remember once

going to Lidl to see if I’d lost my purse there and finding someone had handed

it in without even taking a penny. I remember when that’s how I thought people

were deep down. I remember it was easy, satisfying, to care. I remember that

it was my only daily goal, not just, like now, slapping my cheeks a little harder,

with both hands, both cheeks, eyes closed, to salvage every little relief, like

leaving the toilet, looking close to fresh, finding our break room empty. A

weary kind of calm. I stared at the notice board. I wasn’t reading anything. My

cheeks stung, eyes stung, felt woolly. I put a mug of cold tea in the microwave,

watched it turn in the light. I thought of taking off my trainers, second pair this

year, putting my feet in slippers at home, a glass of wine. I drank the tea, not

much warmer than before. I washed up my enamel mug. Then I washed Tasha’s

enamel mug that looks the same as mine. I did this quickly, wanted to get going

before someone else came in, but after drying my hands, my body acted

asleep, it’s good at doing that, apparently, then behind me I heard the General

Manager of the Kidney Service Team say hello with a level of energy that’s

exhausting if you haven’t got it. I said hi, went over to my locker. Talk to the

General Manager of the Kidney Service Team for long enough and she’ll draw

out something painful. “It was a pipe that burst in the basement. It flooded the

electrics. The damages, the costs! One of the firemen was electrocuted.” I

glanced over at her, saw her new fake nails, maroon. She was wearing her Dior

coat. She’s a woman with a Dior coat, fur hood, real fur. She doesn’t talk to

nurses about patients anymore. She talks about budgets, figures, necessary

cuts. I know I’m not immune. She said, “I’m only glad it’s not coming out of my

pocket.” I smile at her. I think I’ll always be able to smile. She knows my salary.

I don’t know hers. “But you don’t need to hear about that,” she said. I turned

my head to her without looking at her, kept on packing my rucksack. The sofa

was between us. “All beside the point,” she said, something she likes to say.

“How are you getting on?” I closed my locker, looked at her. She was right in

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front of me now, making the I’m-so-sorry face that’s taught in palliative care

seminars. I could see the pores on her nose. She put her arm on my shoulder.

I looked at it. She pulled it away. She tries to mother nurses, like women who

actually think they’ll make good mothers. “Fine,” I said. She nodded, said, “I

can look at the rota, you know, and maybe get you a day off soon. Maybe get

you back on day shifts, for a while.” “It’s fine,” I said, something, I’ve realised

from writing these blogs, that I like to say. “Well, if you do need any help,” she

said. “It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t need any help.” I pulled a cigarette from my

pocket hoping the General Manager of the Kidney Service Team would see

that I was ready to go, but she wanted more from me. I suppose she’d finally

diagnosed a cause of my pain, so she said, “But, you know, last night. Hadn’t

you gotten close to—” but she waved her hand in place of her name. “Audrey,”

I said. She nodded. “It must have been—” she said, widening her mouth, her

eyes “—really bad.” I looked at her to see if she was joking. When I saw she

wasn’t, I said, “Yes.” Then the General Manager of the Kidney Service Team

filled her thermos from the tap, and left, quick as if I wasn’t there. No deaths

today. But I still smelled death in the corridor. Past the prayer room, by the staff

toilet, there was a soft fresh-sweat, turned-fruit smell. That’s the smell of death

and life together. A smell you wonder if it’s edible. Not many nurses smell it.

Even fewer can smell it before it happens. It’s the only skill, I think, that we can

have that doesn’t make a patient better, that doesn’t make a difference. But I

wouldn’t give it up if I could. When I can smell it, it’s like it’s allowing me to smell

it. I think it’s a crucial reason why I do this. Tasha, I don’t know. She says she

only became a nurse because her mother was a nurse. One time, when we were

working in oncology a few years ago, she got angry with a woman with stage

one lung cancer who said she couldn’t stop smoking. The woman requested

another nurse. The consultant lectured Tasha about correct bedside manner.

Tasha was determined to quit, saying she’s too hard, unfeeling. I think she just

lacks pity. I think many nurses quit because they’ve confused pity with care. I

don’t think you can properly care for someone if you pity them. Same with

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empathy. I think the nurses with the most empathy only care for patients it’s

easy to empathise with. Smart patients. Attractive patients. Patients like

themselves. Of course Tasha has empathy, but she cares using compassion,

using reason, using a basic instinctive understanding that you have to keep

your hand gently on someone’s back for a few moments after you’ve had to

heave them on a bed. I have always said care. I cared for them. Never treat. It

sounds cold, clinical, which of course it can be, but using that word, even if

that’s more of what you’re actually doing, means the person is a problem, i.e.,

you’re treating a problem. Besides, too many times I’ve said tret instead of

treated. If I’m too stupid not to get that, I’m going to avoid it altogether. Some

nurses use common sense to care. That’s like empathy. It’s just too good to be

true. Tasha and I learned this from the same Sister. She’d say, “Common sense

is hit-or-miss, and we’re not here to miss.” When I went into the staff toilet

before going home, I heard Tasha shout from inside a stall, “Corina?” “How did

you know it was me?” “Heavy steps.” She asked me why I was still so mopey. I

leant my bum against the sink. The lino had come loose, curled up, beneath

the stall door. If I told Tasha why, she couldn’t help telling everyone. I told Tasha

I’d caught a bug. “Bollocks,” she said. “You’re pregnant.” “Of course I’m not,” I

said. “Of course?” “I know I’m not,” I said. We were supposed to take the

graduating students out drinking tonight. She said they were going to

Shoreditch. I would’ve had to find an outfit that’s Shoreditch. I thought I’d rather

sleep. The safest, cleanest way to pass over the lonely idle times. I knew that

another staff nurse, let’s call her Grace, would be going. She’s the kind of

person who never forgets a compliment. She’d judge my Primark heels. She’d

say something like, “I love how you don’t feel the need to wear any make-up,

like, at all” and she’d get men to talk to us. “I wouldn’t know what to wear,” I

told Tasha, “I’ve got nothing I like the look of.” The toilet flushed. Tasha came

out wide-legged with her zips undone, her hands held up as in surgery prep.

“I need a night out,” she said. “I need to not remember going to bed.” “Can’t

you sleep?” I said. “Like the dead.” “I can’t.” “I do a good job,” she said. She

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washed her hands, long enough to sing Happy Birthday. “I close my eyes,” I

said, “and I just keep seeing the bad stuff. I think I’ve forgotten how to distance

myself.” “I want so many margaritas,” Tasha said, “and forgetting everything.”

“I want to sleep,” I said, “no dreams. Just sleep.” “We got paid yesterday, didn’t

we?” “I haven’t looked yet.” “I think we got paid.” She dried her hands. She

pinched and pulled her tunic at the back to see how flattering our uniforms

could look. She asked me if I’d spoken to the General Manager of the Kidney

Service Team. “She told me about the basement,” I said. “Not that,” she said.

“Then what?” “One of the old bird’s husbands came back.” “Audrey’s?” “Yeah.”

“When?” “You were napping.” “She was moved to mortuary by then.” “He

wasn’t there to see her.” “What was it?” “He took a swing at Grace.” “A swing at

her?” “He missed.” “Shame.” “Crying so much he missed her.” “But why?”

“Upset probably.” “I mean why’d he swing at her?” “He said one of us killed his

wife. Saying he’s suing us.” “Then what happened?” “I don’t know. I just heard

about it.” She took off her glasses, put her lenses in. “So are you coming out or

what?” she said. I planned the route to Shoreditch. Two buses there, night

buses back. It’d be late. I’d be alone. I said I needed to take my mother to her

oncologist in the morning. A half-lie. It was in the afternoon. Tasha nodded.

“So, no?” she said. “Yeah. No.” “Well, I’ve gotta go church that morning. Gotta

show my face.” Her voice seemed to get suddenly so loud, stop so suddenly. It

rang around the toilet walls after she left. I washed my hands, long enough to

sing Happy Birthday. I stood at the toilet door like waiting for me to call myself

out from the other side. I wondered if the automatic lights would go off if I just

stood there very still. Then I stood in a stall with the door locked. I knew I

wouldn’t go out. I wish I could go out to Shoreditch. I wish I felt comfortable in

Shoreditch, in the night-time in Shoreditch, in the night-time outside. I wish I

could stop seeing innocent things, like cars, crowds, handshakes, smiles,

laughter, jokes, flirting, food, the Internet, the world, people, as basically

infected, as violent. I wish I didn’t hate and feel afraid. I don’t know if writing

this will come to mean anything, if it’ll be anything any good. I know it won’t be

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seamless. Showing the scars, my own sloppy stitches, that’s the point, if there

is a point. This won’t be a well-made, thought-through thing. Of course I don’t

know what will happen, either. Maybe nothing. But I hope at least that I will

happen. I miss myself. And you. No deaths today, except yours always.

Comments

Zvezdanov Bitch

Barbiemav Wake up.. You are not Alice and this is not Wonderland

andrew_r4495 Lies lies lies

farhadmiah You invited your ex to a party; you got drunk and flirted with him;

he was still in love with you, God knows why; he passed out in your bed; you

could’ve told him to fuck off but you let him stay there; you got in bed with him

because and I quote “I couldn’t be bothered”. The whole thing stinks of bullshit.

You only posted this for publicity as a means to grow your online brand. Gtfo

with your BS and put your face on… tramp

/

I don’t feel silly talking to you through your death

Death separates living people too. For me to be someone else, I would have

to die. Living people manage to talk across that divide every day. The only

difference is you can’t talk back. It’s not ideal for conversation, I’ll admit, but it

doesn’t mean I can’t talk to you. Can you hear? I like to think of you as a wound

in the world capable of listening to my wound.

/

20

A girl

has taken Audrey’s bed. Anorexia has led to diabetes, electrolyte imbalances,

anaemia, malnutrition, hypotension, causing repeated pyelonephritis, chronic

kidney disease. Vomiting, too tired to hold the bowl herself. Pruritus. If

tolerated, an anti-emetic before a small meal of favourite food. Fish-finger

sandwich with tomato ketchup. She has been here a few times before. Her

mother had agreed to donate a kidney. We prepared to wheel the girl to

surgery, but when we went to move the mother, her gown lay on the bed,

hasn’t been heard from since. This girl’s postcode is where a fifteen-year-old

boy from my postcode was stabbed in the liver last month for boasting about

being from my postcode, not that there’s anything to boast about. I remember

in sixth-form a story went around about a girl who was expelled from Buxton

School for ripping open a teacher’s blouse after the teacher told that she had

to wear a bra. That was this girl. One time a friend and I were walking through

Bishops Square with a bag of chips in the summer after exams. The friend was

a netballer I’ll call Chelsea, the only person I’d told that my mother, brother and

I had been homeless since our father left three years before, the only friend

whose parents didn’t ask where I was originally from, something I know now

soothed me. Maybe I passed as white or, maybe, more likely, I confused them

so much they were too busy asking themselves if it was a question worth asking.

Chelsea pointed to this girl sat next to a BMX on the ground near to us. Three

security guards surrounded her. We waited to watch. If we had phones back

then, the kind of girl I was back then, I would’ve filmed it. Eventually two of the

security guards hauled her up by her armpits, dragged her out the square. The

other guard pushed her bike behind them. Then Chelsea shook her head.

“That’s the girl who got out a teacher’s bra because she wouldn’t wear one. She

basically raped her.” EPO injection. Phosphate binders and Alfacalcidol with

meals. Aggressive treatment of hyperlipidaemia. Possible dialysis. She falls

asleep. I take a student nurse aside, the one who started crying when the girl

went into hypoglycaemic shock, who I told to get the fuck off the ward while it

21

was happening, to pull herself together. I apologise for that. I tell her tears are

fine. It’s good she feels. But if it’s out of fear, panic, that she cried, I know she

won’t last long. Where have these outbursts come from? Did you know me to

be like that? The anorexic girl’s stool was slightly more solid than the day

before. It floated in the water. Her hydration is better, blood pressure up. She

wears a crucifix with a long gold chain that gets sharp bends in it from her

clavicle. Her hair is black, would be curly if it wasn’t so thin, greasy. It’s falling

out. Elsewhere, on her body, she’s furry. Except anorexics, only new-born

babies have this kind of down. It’s insulation the body grows to protect itself.

Pity creeps in me. I’m afraid. Pity has crept in me more often lately. I’m afraid I’ll

stop caring altogether, only pity. Another student, who fainted the other day

while taking a blood test from a patient unable to breathe independently, she

brought this girl a tray of Guylian chocolates. I put the chocolates in the break

room before the girl could see them. In the afternoon, the girl managed a bite

of her sandwich. I asked her if she wanted more. She “went monster”. That’s

what she called it later. Frantic, frustrated, prickly, nasty. Then she said sorry.

Her voice sort of frothed. It smelled of mouthwash. Her name is Ali. She doesn’t

mind me writing about her, though she said she didn’t see why I’d want to write

about her, or myself, in the first place. I asked her what Ali is short for. “Alistair.”

“Really?” “No.” I tried to hide how cross it makes me when I’m the butt of a joke.

I asked her what Ali is short for. “Alien.”

/

Some stats

It took 45 days for the word to begin to lose its dread. 66 days to manage the

cinema, in the afternoon, alone. 94 days to imagine a day that I wouldn’t feel

basically drained. 98 to go to a pub. 117 to go to a busy bar. 135 to go to a

busy bar, have a few drinks. 159 days to go to a busy bar, have a few drinks, let

a friend, a girl, stay over with me in my bed. The 248th day was the day I had

22

two separate pisses in the same shower. The 271st day was the first day I

realised that I didn’t think about it on the 270th day. The 301st was the first day

I could use a tampon instead of a pad. The 512th day was the first day I can

remember remembering your brother’s face and not feeling at first the most

scared, the most vulnerable, and then wanting to smash my fist into his nose,

crack the ethmoid in half, flatten the septum, the cartilage mushed, skin burst,

until it couldn’t be called a nose, no, I just felt a vague nausea, a kind of regret,

almost like disappointment, which turns eventually into the black emptiness I

feel seeing a stocky macho white bloke with kanji tattoos on his arm. The 548th

day was the first day I slept without the knife hidden between my mattress and

headboard. The 771st day was the first day that I went to the cinema, in the

evening, alone. The film was called American Hustle. It’s wonderful to watch

Jennifer Lawrence. It’s like her eyes can look right at all the possibilities of life,

but they don’t see value enough in any one of them.

/

Day off

I watched Oprah interviews in bed. Some videos I didn’t watch to the end, just

clicked the next recommended video after a minute or so. I watched the one

where Daniel Day-Lewis interrupts his own interview to talk about Heath

Ledger’s death. He wore a kind of cowboy shirt, black, with shoulder panels, a

gold leaf pattern. Also, a green woven trilby, two huge hoop earrings. “Thank

you, Oprah,” he said, tightening his mouth against tears, shadow falling from

the trilby. “I do pray to God that they allow his family particularly and his friends

to grieve in the way that they need to in the weeks and months to come

because this is something they’re going to be living with obviously for the rest

of their lives.” It faded to black. Then there was a separate promotional clip with

Oprah asking me to subscribe to her channel. “Hello, YouTubers!” Oprah cried.

So now I’m a YouTuber, I thought. I laughed, saying, “Fuck”, eyes getting wet.

23

/

Folds

Many times when my mother appears in my head, a picture of her calling the

council, for example, with a speech written in bullet points over takeaway

menus that come through her NO JUNK MAIL NO EXCEPTIONS letterbox, or,

more recently, gluing loose pages back into the books she has in Japanese, I

fold things. Receipts in pleats. Towels in triangles. When my mother calls, I

answer, “Hi, Ka-san”, and she says, “What’s the matter, Corina-chan?” I fold

expressions into the £5 Queen. “Nothing. I just said hi.” “Hi. That is how you

said it. Hi. What is the matter now?” I’ve learned to drop this one to gain back

some time. I called her every other day for a couple of weeks after she was first

diagnosed. One day she called me. Two days later she called again. It’s

become a kind of custom, whether I like it or not. “Have you eaten yet, Corina-

chan?” “Not yet.” “Did you sleep in?” I tell her I got home late from work before

I realise I should just lie. I’m never more earnest than with her. “I have had my

meal. The meal I make in the morning will last all day.” “You don’t get hungry?”

“I never get hungry, Corina-chan. I’ve never been hungry in my life.” “That’s

ridiculous.” “Ridiculous? Don’t be so dramatic. I had rice, natto, boiled filefish,

an orange, and a light miso soup.” “That’s good,” I say. There’s a silence. Or it’s

more like a space that opens, the distance that Japanese people can’t pass

over with explicit caring or concern. To most people in England, even to me,

she seems very Japanese, uncommunicative, shamefaced, dutiful, meek, but

in Japan, she could be an illegitimate child of Trump. She was the first, maybe

the only child expelled from her school for kireru, snapping. She fell in love

with an English boy. She spoke her mind, even if she lowered her voice to

speak her mind. I know she wants me to fill the space with what I’m eating these

days. She will tell me this in our code. “But I suppose that’s personal

information,” she says. See? This could take us, if I let it, to one of three long-

24

contested diagnoses. 1) I am just like my father. 2) I don’t want my mother in

my life. 3) I don’t value anyone’s opinion other than my own. “Don’t do that,” I

say. My kitchen window holds white clouds full of snow rolling over each other

over roofs. I listen. I don’t. I see clouds. I fold. I listen. She tells me that Tanya, a

cleaner also working at the Premier Inn near Olympic Park, has given her some

Russian face cream. “I cannot read the bottle at all,” she says, “but Tanya says it

will get rid of any wrinkles.” “You don’t have wrinkles.” “Don’t be stupid.”

“What’s wrong with having wrinkles?” “Corina-chan.” “There’s nothing wrong

with wrinkles.” “Of course there isn’t.” “But then—” “What?” “Why don’t you just

try it on your hand if you’re that worried?” “I’m not worried.” “Concerned.” “I’m

not concerned.” “Whatever you are, then.” “Well, Tanya was the one who

sneaked her boyfriend in for sex in one of the rooms.” “And so what?” “Well. A

woman like that.” “A woman like what?” Now there’s a certain silence that even

my mother knows not to fill. “I’m about to make some food,” I say. “What did

you have last night, Corina-chan?” “It was late.” “You don’t eat late.” “I’m just

saying it was late. I went to a kebab place.” “Kebab?” “You know what a kebab

is.” “I do not.” “It’s Turkish I think, and you do.” “Were you on your own?” “With

a friend. Jamie.” “Who is he?” “She.” “She?” “Yes.” “Well, who is Jamie?” “From

work.” “I’ve not heard about a Jamie.” We both know to let this silence carry us

out of the moment into another. “You shouldn’t eat that Turkish stuff. It makes

you sluggish. It’s addictive.” “I don’t have it often.” “It’s expensive. It’s

extravagant.” “I don’t have it often.” “Your grandmother ate like that. When my

father died, she didn’t know how to look after herself, and—” “And she didn’t

even notice the gas leak.” “Yes, I have told you many times, I know. But it’s worth

repeating. A woman must know how to live completely by herself. That’s why I

am here and not in Aomori picking apples.” And because of my father’s air

miles and the family’s fruit shop that was swallowed by the earth. In this silence,

I see her checking the list of things she wanted to talk to me about, making

another bullet point at the bottom, scribbling over it. “Well, I don’t want to take

up all your time, Corina-chan.” “Yeah. I’ve got to make some food.” “Yes. That’s

25

what you said.” “What are you going to do today, Ka-san?” “I don’t know. Some

things.” “How do you feel?” “Good enough for some things.” “Do you need a

hand with anything?” “With what?” “Anything.” “I’m going to call Sally about the

living room wall. She says it is damp. It is my responsibility, she says. But the

wall is wet. Wet. That is a leak. That is not damp.” “I can come over, have a look.”

“You could get a haircut,” she says. I don’t say anything. I lay out my own

silence, full of pain, hoping she’ll cross it. “Ka-san?” I say. “Because that would

be a good thing to do,” she says. “Ka-san?” “What is it?” “I—” “What? Corina?

Because when you let your hair grow like this, I saw a picture of you on the

computer, people think you are sloppy. Sloppy looks lazy.” “Okay.” “Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll get a haircut.” “Good.” “Okay. Well. Talk soon.” “Okay.” “Okay. Bye,

then.” “Yes. Bye, Corina-chan.” “Bye.” “Bye.” “Yeah, bye,” I say, then I don’t say

anything. “Corina-chan? Are you still there? Hello? You’re still here, but, hello?

She must’ve gone. Now how do you—” I should hang up first. I suppose that’s

the daughterly thing, but I don’t. I make her go first, a kind of irusu. Things

around the house are smaller, denser with folds. Tea towel on the kitchen

counter. Underwear on the chest of drawers. I stream an episode of Brazil with

Michael Palin, the laptop on my bed. It plays loudly behind me. With an old

towel I swab the condensation on the windowpanes, black, flaking with mould.

Dust has clogged with rain, crusts the glass outside. The light that tries to come

through comes through a little dirtied. On the street below a group of people

walk past with placards. There have been protests to save the food bank near

Clissold Park from closing. It seems like each day there are more people

sleeping rough on Green Lanes. I signed the petition last month. “Now the only

signs of life are colonies of bats occupying the rooms of the operating theatre.

This is it.” I suppose it’s an obvious motherly thing, but it still amazes me to think

that after every time we speak over the phone, she plans and awaits our next

call. What else she does, I don’t really know. I don’t want to present her

inaccurately with things I only imagine she does. Like ironing work clothes. Or

placing rice and fruit by her living room shrine. I know she calls the property

26

manager about repairs to her flat. I know she thinks about the money she wants

to leave us. I know thinks about cancer the size of a five pence piece in the only

breast she has left. I know she must worry about it. She must worry about having

a daughter who has a mother who has cancer, how that daughter will be if the

mother dies of cancer. She might not worry about leaving her own life, but

maybe about leaving the daughter’s life. What she must not worry about is how

the daughter was raped, because she doesn’t believe the daughter really was

raped. She believes the lawyers who said the drunken stories don’t add up, the

witnesses that vouched for your brother’s sensitivity, his niceness, his respect

for women. But she does worry about the daughter lying about such a serious

thing. About the daughter getting so drunk she could’ve gotten raped, getting

mixed up. And the daughter worries, between all this worry, about her mother

having cancer. She worries about wishing her mother didn’t have cancer. She

worries because she wishes her mother didn’t have cancer, partly so she could

say how much the mother has hurt her.

/

Calculating dosage of calcium channel blockers

Except for his face, your brother would be cast in cement. But he wouldn’t be

able to move his face, couldn’t speak. The cement would come up to his

bottom lip, hold his mouth open. He wouldn’t be able to blink. The blood

vessels in his eyes would be inflamed, some ruptured. Tears would make it look

like his eyes were leaking blood. He wouldn’t be able to look at me. He’d moan.

His oesophagus would make a clicking sound. He’d struggle to swallow. I’d

reach in his mouth, pinch his tongue. It would jerk around. It would try to hide

somewhere. His face would shake with trying to shut his mouth. Eventually I’d

get his tongue in the nails of my thumb, my index finger. It would be hot, dry,

hard. I’d hold it tight as if it might slip away. I’d show him the scalpel in my other

hand. He’d groan like a goat, try to shut his eyes tight, but the cement would

27

hold the muscles in his face. I’d tap the scalpel against his teeth, scrape it across

his teeth. I’d make little cuts in his gums, between his teeth. The blood would

be thin, the white of his teeth still showing through it. He’d gasp, breathe

heavily. I’d place the scalpel on the side of his tongue just above the root. I’d

hold it there. The first slice would open the flesh like tofu. The second slice, on

the top of his tongue, over the puckered taste buds, would give him more

control of his tongue. I’d lift the tongue up over itself. The third slice would

sever the thin hard frenulum linguae like a daisy stalk. Then I’d slice all the way

around his tongue, but not all the way through. The strong hard core of his

tongue would stay intact, but flaps of flesh at the sides would touch each other

then separate with strings and streams of blood. He’d wail, gargle on the blood

flowing down his throat. I’d pull his tongue with both hands using a knee

against the cement for leverage. It would rip slowly with a spurt of blood. He’d

scream, hack blood up out his mouth. I’d show him the stump of his tongue.

He’d stare at me. He wouldn’t believe what was happening. But it wouldn’t be

the tongue surprising him. It would be the pain. He wouldn’t be able to believe

you could feel that much pain. I’d drop the tongue, lift the scalpel towards an

eye. He’d try so hard to close his eyes. I’d slice the eyelid around one of his

eyes from the duct to the other corner. He’d scream without his voice, just

breath. I’d pick up the tongue, stuff it back in his mouth, smother the

screaming. I’d push the scalpel to the bloodshot sclera. The lens would burst

easily. Eggy fluid would drain out the split. I’d keep cutting, gouging deeper

into his eye till it was prawn cocktail, till I was stabbing, slicing his whole face,

and I don’t know what would make me stop.

/

When someone is raped

they’re never raped once, never just by one person, never just by a person.

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[SCAN OF UNEDITED POLICE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT OF CORINA SLATE, DATED: 18/09/14, TWENTY-NINE DAYS AFTER ASSAULT]

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[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – AUGUST 2016 – PART TWO] Ali is in and out of sleep

Glomerular filtration rate >40mL/min. Stage 3. The tipping point before

progression to end stage, renal failure. IV iron. Aiming for ferritin >150mcg/L.

Obtain daily weight. Clip nails, avoid acute paronychia. Don’t make it about

quantitative development. Weeping, openly, kind of forcing it out, like clearing

your throat, exhausted, over an untouched sandwich. “I know I need to eat to

be healthy, mate. Obviously. Healthy and good. But if I do that I’ll feel, like, I

just don’t want to feel that way.” She struggles to stay awake, to read a filthy

ragged Gideons bible, close up to her squinting eyes, as she mouths the

words, replacing pages that fall now and then. I ask her how she’s feeling. We

smile a little together because we know this question is ridiculous, even if it’s

critical, too. She asks me how I’m feeling. I hesitate because very few patients

ask me this, because her eyes, like Jennifer Lawrence’s eyes, seem to see into

the critical thing that properly and truthfully answers that question. “I’m fine,” I

say. “You seem shook, mate.” “No,” I say. “I think you’re on the right track, Ali.

We’ll keep on your binders, your vitamin D. Low salt, high carb foods. When

you feel up to it. I think you’re getting better already.” She doesn’t say anything,

just looks at me. I feel somehow that she knows, but she can’t know, can she?

/

The chain on my door doesn’t work

The bolt at the end of the chain has rusted, ground down so much that it just

slips out the bar. I answer the door one morning, someone explodes into my

home. That could happen. I’m not paranoid. Well, I am, but it does happen. I’ve

heard about it happening. It’s 18:58. I call the estate agents, ask to speak to the

Property Manager. “I’m afraid we’re just closing up for the day. We open at ten

38

on a Saturday so you can speak to someone—” “I’m not going to wait till then. I

want to speak to the Property Manager.” “As I said, madam, we’re closing—”

“What time do you close?” “On Fridays we close at seven but—” “So you’re still

open.” “It’s seven now.” “It’s one minute to.” “Yeah—” “So you’re still open?”

“We’re closing now, and by the time—” “My flat’s just around the corner from

your office. And I have an urgent problem.” “Urgent?” “Yes.” “What seems to

be the problem?” “The problem is that the chain on my door doesn’t work.”

“The chain lock?” “I suppose. Yes.” “And is the door lock faulty also?” “The door

lock is fine.” “Well, as I said, Madame, we open at ten tomorrow so you can—”

“Is the Property Manager still there?” “Well, yes, she’s—” “I’m coming over there

now.” “But we’re—” I slot a screwdriver under my joggers’ waistband, run out,

down Green Lanes, meet them outside the estate agents. Someone is locking

the door. Others are smoking, fastening their jackets. A young woman says,

“That’s—” “I’d like to talk to the property manager,” I say. The eyes turn towards

one woman tying the belt around her trench coat. Her hair is up, pulled back

tight. “Is that you?” I say to her. I cough the warble out my throat. “You’re the

property manager?” She nods. “I have a problem,” I say. “With the chain on

your door?” she says. “Yes.” “Yes and we’re closed now, I’m afraid. If you tell

me where you live I’ll be happy in the morning—” “I want it fixed now, though.”

She makes a face like I don’t understand her language. I know this face well. “I

want it fixed right now. Okay?” She looks at the ground. “What if someone

breaks in my flat?” I say. “What if I call you at ten tomorrow and I’ve been broken

into? What’s your policy on that? I assume you’ll accept responsibility for that.”

“There’s nothing right now that—” “There’s a DIY shop still open just by me.”

“Then I’d suggest that you—” I pull out the screwdriver. They shift away. Eyes

move quicker. “This is your responsibility,” I say. “It is your responsibility to

ensure that my flat is properly equipped. Okay? I’ll fit it myself,” I say, looking

at the screwdriver pointed at them, something I wish I’d thought not to do

before doing it. “I’m not mental,” I say, lower it by my thigh. I feel there’s not

much left of this in me because shame is interfering with the anger, this anger,

39

one of the things I know your brother gave me. “Thing is,” I say, “I’m sure as

fuck not paying for it myself. Okay?” The property manager checks her watch.

I check mine. 19:03. We walk together, me a little ahead, to the DIY shop. The

property manager has to get cash out along the way. She knows exactly where

the door chains are. We don’t say anything till I say thank you quietly on the

dark street. She lifts her eyebrows bluntly, turns, walks away. I walk home so

fast my shins hurt.

/

The General Manager of the Kidney Service Team

pierces the foil lid on a yoghurt pot with her fingernails, cuts around the rim.

The sun comes through her office window at a slice. It pings off the corner of

her glasses. I lean side to side in the chair but there’s no spot where the light

doesn’t hit my eyes, make me squint. The General Manager of the Kidney

Service Team’s office smells of lavender, antibiotic gel. I don’t mind the smell

of lavender. I don’t mind the smell of antibiotic gel. But together... The General

Manager of the Kidney Service Team smiles. Her big lashes have left black

blotches on the inside of her glasses. It’s her breakfast. My shift just finished.

“Thank you for, fucking, being the best, Corina.” I’ve put on about a stone this

past year, but every other day she asks if I’ve lost weight. I’ll go to the toilet

when a cry is coming and she’ll see me after, say, “God, you look fucking great

today.” There are soldiers of toast on a little plate on her desk. She dips one in

the yoghurt. She won’t wait to swallow the food before speaking, but I know

she’ll wait long enough to make me wait. There’s been a compliment. I know

what follows a compliment is a request. “I told you the other day, when you

asked me if Audrey’s husband was suing, and I said he wasn’t.” “And I suppose

he is?” “Yes.” “Right.” “It wasn’t exactly a lie.” “It wasn’t?” “Not exactly. We

thought at the time that he was just upset.” “Is it only Grace that’s involved?”

“No.” “So all of us?” “No.” “Then who is?” “Well,” she says. The second hand on

40

the clock above the filing cabinet jerks like there’s blood pumping through it,

but it doesn’t move forward. She looks at me for too long. I say, “Me?” “Yes.”

“Are you sure he means me?” “We’re pretty certain.” “How?” “Well.” I nod.

“What’s he saying I did?” “Well, we told him that his wife died from shock, from

losing blood in the power cut.” “Which is true.” “But he said that you’d burnt

her that day.” “Burnt her?” “He said there were burns on her from a bath you

gave her.” “I did give her a bath but—” “You didn’t know you’d burnt her?” “Well,

no.” “Well, you did, Corina.” Two years ago a baby died after a nurse dropped

her in a boiling tub. It was in the Metro. That nurse quit. I couldn’t believe, then,

how incompetent a nurse could be. The General Manager of the Kidney

Service Team adjusts the height of her chair, lowers it. “But don’t worry,

Corina.” “Don’t worry?” “No.” “I’m a bit concerned.” “Yes, but don’t worry.

We’ve got your back.” I look at her. “We’ve thought about it,” she says, “and

come up with a plan.” “You’re going to convince Audrey’s husband that her

shock wasn’t from the bath?” “Well, no.” “Then what?” “Well, for a while now

we’ve been looking at your performance.” I will work with my mother cleaning

hotel rooms. I will work for Müller on an assembly line. “We think you’re great.

We’ve talked a lot about you being Sister.” “Right.” “Yeah.” “What’s this got to

do with Audrey?” “Well, obviously, the way we’d have to proceed is to follow

procedure, isn’t it?” “Okay.” “And we’d have to investigate.” “Okay.” “And that

would involve a hearing, a court hearing. Have you ever been in court?” It’s

where I learned I’d brought shame into my life, or so my mother said, on the

big stone court steps, hand clutching my elbow, quietly, deeply, in my ear. I

nod. “Okay,” says the General Manager of the Kidney Service Team, “and after

that, making you Sister might not hold water.” “So?” “Well, this all coincides,

quite beautifully, with talks about Tasha’s future here.” “Beautifully?” “Well, you

know. Fortuitously.” “But what’s Tasha done?” “You don’t need to know that

information at the present moment. All you need to know is—well, did Tasha

give Audrey a bath that day?” “No.” “Oh.” The General Manager of the Kidney

41

Service Team dips her finger in the yogurt. It takes two goes to suck it clean.

“But what about the day before?”

/

On Borough High Street

buses push bright, cold wind. The sun is hot, just far away. A homeless man

holds himself in a ski jacket and sleeping bag by the cash machine outside a

Sainsbury’s. I want a Dairy Milk, 20 Superkings. It’s so far from here to my bed.

I want someone kind, quiet, blind there waiting for me. A female Michael Palin.

Claire Balding? “I don’t have any change on me. Sorry.” I don’t expect him to

believe me, but has he ever been given a note from sitting by the cash

machine? He nods. I think to ask him if he wants me to buy him something to

eat, nearly bump into a businessman in the open automatic doors. “Oops.

Sorry, petal,” he says. And I find that I can’t move. Traffic. The doors keep trying

to close. They slide a little way out the wall, detect me stood there, only just

breathing again, still not sure if the blinking or swallowing instinct will return,

then they slide away, like they’re embarrassed. I’m stunned, yes. But it’s not like

I’m crying.

/

List

Waiting for a takeaway after the delivery time. A young man wearing layers on

a warm day. The General Manager of the Kidney Service Team glancing at me

expressionlessly. The drying rack in the break room covered in limescale, or is

it rust? The sniff of B.O. that might be from me. Past best-before dates. The tree

outside my bedroom window in a wildly windy night. Backpacks on the tube.

Needing to ask for help. A wealthy white girl younger than me asking if or what

I read. A woman who says, “A good man is hard to find”. When someone asks

42

me why I’m not a doctor. A conversation about marriage and children I can’t

back away from. Trainers hung from telephone wires. When I buy a sandwich

to eat by the river and don’t bring hand sanitizer. A busy bar. A crowded bus.

“Excuse me.” Promises. Slipping on wet leaves. People behind me on the

escalator thinking I’m going down too slowly. Having to tell tourists to stand on

the right. Builders. Hiro’s face changing since I went to the police, from stunned

to furious to puzzled to sceptical to embarrassed to sheepish, his hot head

rinsed of the emotions our father left bubbling on the hob. The ulcerous burn

when I think of him not talking to me, avoiding me, the thing I did last month

that made him hate me. The week after our mother was first diagnosed, three

years ago, Hiro had tracked our father down. “Why?” “I want to go see him.”

“Why?” “I miss him.” “You barely knew him, Hiro.” “That’s what I miss.” “Why

now?” “I just told you.” “Don’t do that. Don’t play stupid.” “Just thought about

it the other day, man. Why do you care so much what I’m doing?” “Because

we’ve had this kind of chat before.” “Don’t give me that, man.” “So it’s not like

that?” “No, it ain’t.” “I don’t know what good it would do. For you. For Mum.”

“You just don’t want to be left alone with her.” “That’s not true.” “It is, man. You

want to feel like the good daughter, holding us all together.” “Don’t say that.”

“And you know you both need me to pick up the slack.” “It’ll all be slack if you

go.” “It’d only be for a week.” “We’re better off without him.” “Next you’ll be

saying you don’t need Mum.” “I’m just saying there’s no use reopening scar

tissue.” “Speak normal English, man.” “How’s what I said unclear?” “Listen to

me, yeah? All I want—” “It sounds like you want Mum to freak out.” “Freak out?”

“That you’ll leave for good like him and that she’ll pay your rent if you don’t go

or something. Because you know she would.” “You’re chatting shit, man.” “She

would for Little Hiro.” He snorted, shook his head. “Well it looks like nothing’s

fucking happening with Mother Corina around.” “Are we finished talking now?”

“I’m going to get money off him.” “What money?” “His money. Our money.”

“We don’t want his money, Hiro.” “But we’re owed it.” “We don’t want it.”

“Why?” “Because it’s his.” “It’s just money.” “It’s different.” “But what does it

43

matter where it’s from? If it’s legit, what does it matter?” “Just think about what

you’re saying, Hiro, the words you’re saying.” A white family lived next door to

us in Woodford. Our mothers sometimes went to a café on weekends. Our

dads chatted now and then about the council, the area, the schools, but one

dad would say something about work or dinner to cut the chat short. They had

a boy, older than Hiro, younger than me. The boy had an underbite, a saliva

problem. Sometimes he ate little stones. He was obsessed with an old woman

who lived at the end of our road. She had the biggest house on the road with

a huge garden, a high wall around it. I asked Hiro where he was going one

afternoon after school. He said to climb into the old woman’s garden. I told him

I’d been in there and it was full of spiders because I knew spiders were the only

things Hiro knew he was scared of. “You’ve been in there!” He slammed out the

front door. I felt sick watching him run up the road. Sick with wanting to go with

him. But the boy next door came running back on his own. Saliva made fangs

off the corners of his mouth. Hiro had fallen from the high wall, through the old

woman’s empty greenhouse. He was left with scars right through to his kidneys

from landing on the glass. Now spiders and heights are the only things Hiro

knows he’s scared of, but probably there are more. The blood in his brain is

infused with kuyashii. I knew if I told him he couldn’t go and see our father, that

would be that: he’d take an intensive week-long driving course, drive to

wherever-the-fuck by himself. He was looking hench that day. He had more

time to fill at the gym. “And this is the only reason Hiro? The money?” “That’s

all, man.” “And who’s this money for?” “Us. Mum. Who else?” “Yourself.” “I’m

part of us, aren’t I?” “Are you still working Hiro?” “Yeah. What? Course I am.”

“Doing what?” “I got some software repairs. Some hardware. Pays better.”

“Jobseekers’?” “No way, man.” “What else, then?” “I don’t know. Loads of

things.” “Legal things?” “The money I get from him will be for Mum. And there’ll

some for you.” “Have you talked to Mum?” He looked at his lap. “Hiro?” “I don’t

want to lie to her.” “Then that’s that, Hiro. Just forget it.” “But I am going. I’m

fucking going.” I looked in his eyes until I couldn’t look in his eyes, wondering

44

how many people had seen him grapple back tears at an advert for rescue

dogs, or when wrongfully accused. “Whatever shit you think of me, Cor, you

can’t say I can’t tell her I’m going when I am, and I am.” “So just go!” “It’s not

something you can just do, though, is it?” “I fucking wish it was, Hiro. I wish you

didn’t need me for something.” He sniffed his knuckles like he hated that I

thought he needed me. He exhaled long and strong because it’s the truth. “I

was hoping you could talk to her, Cor.” “That right?” “I’m doing this for us, right.

But she’ll just think I’m flying off the handle.” “Aren’t you?” “She won’t believe

me.” “She believes everything Little Hiro says.” “Not about this. If you help me,

you’ll be saving us.” A private message that starts “You’re an attention-seeking

slut”. Kiosk salespeople outside a supermarket. Ali asking how I’m feeling in a

knowing way. Street fundraisers. When a man doesn’t realise he’s standing too

close to me on the tube platform, or anywhere; not being sure whether his

proximity is innocent or not, whether I should do something or not, the thought

of making a scene, especially if I’m wrong. Insects. Cyclists. Mould.

/

“I can’t help it”

Ali pulls the uneaten sandwich from behind her pillow. “I can’t help it.”

/

With a crisis, like cardiac arrest, like tsunami, there’s often a characteristic

prelude, like ventricular fibrillation, rapid, erratic electrical impulses

causing the ventricles to quiver, uselessly, instead of pumping blood, like

an earthquake, another useless quiver, by comparison, to the waves

Today I looked up catastrophe. It comes from overturning, a sudden turn, a tip,

from one state to the next. With the body, with people, many times, there’s no

gap of calm before the crisis. One thing just leads right onto the next. For

45

example, our father was a little harder on Hiro than me. I used to think,

sometimes do still think, that it was because he loved him more, enough to

spend more time on him, though it wasn’t exactly affectionate, but I suppose

Hiro could be a pushy boy. No matter what time he had to be in bed he’d get

an hour extra squirming to keep his clothes on or hiding behind the sofa, even

if it meant our father would made him spend two hours locked in the basement

or forbid him from playing football on a Saturday. The night our father left, Hiro

was four, it was well past nine, he wouldn’t get out the bath. Our father had just

come home. A dinner meeting, I think. He was flying to America in the morning.

He worked for Midland. Mum stood in front of him with her arms out. Before

he’d even put his briefcase down, she said it was her fault. She’d put Hiro in the

bath too late, she said. He wasn’t clean yet. I was peeking out my bedroom

door down the hall. Our father was tall, or seemed it. Definitely skinny. He wore

big blue suits. Round glasses. Not a looker. He didn’t, or couldn’t, drink. Bits of

stories I can remember make me think he was a bright boy, bookish, went to

Colchester matches with his dad, but never played, preferred to read about it

in the paper. His dad drank, hit his mum. He had never hit our mum, but he did

keep finding reasons to push her out of his way, or hit the nearest surface. He

pushed open the bathroom door. “Basement. Now.” I heard Hiro thrashing in

the water. “Hiro. You’re upsetting your mother. Come on, now. Do you want to

upset your mother?” Hiro laughed, slapped his hands on the water. “Basement.

I mean it, son. Now. Only when you act like a civilised human being and I let

you back up.” Hiro sang “No” between his laughing. I remember the sound of

water splashing over the bath sides. My father strode into the bathroom. Hiro

screamed. Our father came out with Hiro dripping wet, naked, twisting, lashing

in his arms. A leg jerked up, hit my father over the eye, bent the arm of his

glasses. He dropped Hiro, who scurried away. Our father stood still, his wet

shirt dark, stuck to his pigeon chest, looking down the stairs. I remember

hearing my parents shout at each other in their room. I remember being

embarrassed by my mother’s fake threats, then by her pleading. I really hoped

46

he’d find her too embarrassing to leave. I remember in the morning she made

us daifuku, laughed to herself. A week later, when he’d still not come back, we

were sat at the kitchen table, and I know now that I was waiting for her to

explain. She moved a cup of tea on its saucer. Then she asked me what I was

looking at. Hiro didn’t have a bedtime because she wouldn’t lock him in the

basement, or not take him to football. She did try at first to scare him into

obedience with fury, but he quickly learnt that he could pre-empt her fury by

disgusting her with a fart, a burp, a sickening story about eating snot. He would

laugh at her disgust. His laughter became armour. I had a bedtime because I

was told what time it was. I remember a girl in school was telling the class about

all the stories her parents read to her before kissing her goodnight. Sometime

after that I purposefully swung a hockey club into her shin by accident during

a game. I remember that, the smack of it, her wheezy moan, the contusion

bursting instantly, I feel dark. No, I felt dark, but now the dark spells out in

words our family’s basic allergy to affection. It’s made us exactly who we are.

It’s why what’s happened to us has happened. Lisa Simpson said, “the Chinese

have the same word for crisis as opportunity.” That isn’t true, but it’s a nice idea.

An apple falls from a tree. You’d think this was crisis-time for the apple because

the earth starts to eat it. But there’ll be a moment when the apple seed will start

to eat the earth.

/

“You don’t get it”

Ali retches. “You don’t fucking get it.”

/

47

“He was here?”

Hiro wants to destroy the non-physical things about me. My mother knows he

can’t just push her out his way. She stands between us. “He was fucking here?”

/

Ali’s piss

is brown, stinky. Medically speaking. That’s better than no piss at all. The fire is

still outside the house, as my dialysis tutor said. There’s just enough potassium

leaving Ali’s body. One thing death row inmates receive in lethal injections is

IV potassium because it works in massive doses to fully contract the heart into

a fist. Cardiac arrest. Medically speaking. I tell Ali that this might be the thing

most likely to kill her if she enters the oliguric phase. She nods. Her mouth

hangs open, not from shock or disbelief, it just hangs open, dry, grey, brown,

a clay cave. If that happens, I tell her, we’ll give her dopamine to open up her

renal arteries, then a bolus of IV fluid, then a diuretic. “I know that sounds a little

contradictory,” I say. “Not really, mate. Like tossing a bucket of water down a

toilet.” “But hopefully it won’t come to that.” “Hopefully.” “How are you

feeling?” She groans, smiles one-sided. “Is there anything you’d like?” “Cup of

tea?” “Herbal?” She looks horrified. “Can’t I have a proper one?” “No. Sorry.”

“The caffeine?” “That. You can’t have milk, either.” “But I thought it’s good

protein. Good for my bones.” “You can’t absorb the calcium very well, and you

know the problem with potassium.” She nods glumly. “You can have soy milk.”

“Fuck that.” “Well, that’s your answer.” She folds her arms, chews the corner of

her lip. She shakes her head. “Mate, now it’s in my head, I’d fucking kill for a

cup of tea.” “Then you better hire a hitman.” She laughs. “Are they expensive,

like?” “Cups of tea?” “Hitmen, mate.” “It depends on the quality of hitman, I

suppose.” “Sounds like you could sort me out.” “Maybe. What kind of guy are

you looking for?” “Trustworthy. Tall. Funny.” “I used to know a guy just like that.”

“You still got his number?” “I do.” “Mates’ rates?” “Mates’ rates.”

48

/

A builder whistled at me this afternoon on Holloway Road

I know it was at me because I was wearing joggers and he said I shouldn’t try

to hide such a superb arse in joggers. I assume he’s speaking more for other

men because my arse-masking joggers weren’t a problem for his powers of

observation. Or he just needed a reason to mention my arse. Every letter needs

an envelope. He was leaning over the scaffolding high up on the new London

Met building. It was the first time I’d been catcalled in years. The last time was

in fresher’s week. I was with the other three girls from our flat in halls. I stayed

good friends with two of them after uni, good enough to carry on living with

them, but not enough for them to dissuade me from going to the police after

your brother raped me. Sometimes I think the secret to having friends is

avoiding important situations where someone can let you down. The other girl

distanced herself from us by the first Christmas break. This was either because

she’d made better friends on her Anthropology course or because we weren’t

the kind of girls she thought all girls should be. I’d say it was the second, but

I’m not sure. She laughed at the laughable dresses we put on, laughed when

she was putting our make-up on her face, like she’d encountered a ridiculous

new tribe, forced herself to interact, participate in the interests of research. We

went to a freshers’ night. We danced in giddy nervous circles, drinking-game

drunk. The three of us went to the toilet together, the smoking area together.

A couple of much older men stopped across the road from us. They whistled,

waved. They mentioned our hair. Our legs. Our tits. We smiled, looked away.

We looked back now and then. Smiled. The Anthropologist called them

“brutes” or “yobs” or “savages”, I can’t remember which. Eventually the men

crossed the road, paid to enter. “We’ve got to stay away from them,” the

Anthropologist said. “They’ll be hunting us all night.” But they didn’t hunt us,

not like she meant. They stayed at the bar at one of the back sides of the

49

dancefloor, held up their drinks, pointed at their drinks, pointed at a space at

the bar next to them. We were dancing on the other side of the dancefloor. On

our side was the closest door out to the foyer area and the ladies’. When I

needed the toilet I went to the door on their side. I shook my head, but I smiled,

for fuck’s sake. This would’ve made you smile if I ever told you, a little smile,

kind of like you were trying not to smile, eyes to the ground, a smile that could

seem condescending if I didn’t know your impossibly high measure for

whether something in a person’s past is properly worthy of shame. Like you

and I being together, for example, something I did agonise about, not knowing

I was capable of it, even if I knew the feelings for you were real, it didn’t have

anything really to do with your brother, I don’t think, and you said to me a

couple of times, “It’s not like we planned for this to happen.” The second time

I was catcalled, by this builder, I felt like a fool. What was he offering me? A

compliment? A fuck? A relationship? A baby I’d have to raise? Some

compliment. People were looking. The uneasiness, the irritation, whatever, it

could’ve turned into silent embarrassment. I could’ve walked on with my head

down, but instead there was an alien chemical reaction in my brain. I was

reborn as some wrathful demon, as an Asura. I don’t remember what I shouted

at the builder, but I know it was an intimate, overwhelming kind of anger. I don’t

remember if the builder reacted. I can picture his face without a smile, but that

doesn’t mean I saw it. A young girl came out of the uni building, asked if I was

okay. I think I might’ve told her to go read a fucking book like a cunt. A

policeman came out a Subway. He looked around like he’d come out the

wrong door. I walked home. For a long time I stood breathing heavily in front

of my bathroom mirror. I looked like I’d not slept for days, like I’d lived on coffee

alone. The cold wind had pulled the eyeliner off my eyelids. Jagged black

streaks pointing to the temples. I think I saw my own eyes move. I smelled

damp. It was coming from the handtowel under the mirror. I washed this towel,

all my towels, even the unused spare towels. I thought I could still smell damp.

50

I washed them again, handwashed. No one was or is coming to stay, not for a

long time. But if they did, I thought. If they did.

/

There are 5,416 species of mammal

About half are rodents. About a quarter are bats. Of every species of mammal,

only humans, female humans, have enlarged breasts when not lactating.

Enlarged breasts serve two functions, biologically speaking. They carry milk for

nurturing infants. They signal fertility, evolutionarily speaking. Like all female

mammals’ breasts, female humans’ breasts lactate during pregnancy. That’s

from the eighteenth week for us, but unlike any other mammal’s breasts, ours

signal lactation despite lacking pregnancy. On the other hand, but still unlike

most mammals, unlike any other primate, humans conceal ovulation. Not only

do we conceal ovulation as a signal of fertility to prospective partners, but

ovulation is concealed to us, to the female human herself. We don’t know

reliably, exactly, when we are ovulating. We can monitor temperature, for

example, but only now, recently, with tools we’ve had for only 50 years. Before

that, we couldn’t know for sure. On the surface, the female human’s body

signals, biologically speaking, sexual interest and fertility, persistently, across

ovulation cycles, but the assurance of fertility is concealed to males and

females alike. We signal we want to fuck, but whether we want a baby from the

fucking is uncertain, biologically speaking. Evolution has taken our access to

this information away. Why? One theory is that the concealment of specific

times of ovulation in favour of persistent sexual signals has given us an

evolutionary advantage over other primates because there’s the option to

avoid pregnancy and parenthood. More likely, however, is that this

concealment of information, of humans knowing definitely when the female

human is fertile, has protected the female human. The potential cost of

copulation is far greater for us. In most species of animal, sexual coercion is

51

non-existent. In primates, including humans, it is common. In both primates

and humans, female resistance to sexual coercion is likewise common, but, in

primates, it has been suggested, in Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans,

ed. Muller and Wrangham, 2009, that female resistance may serve simply to

assess the physical superiority of the male. Sexual coercion is also common in

dolphins. Dolphins tolerate sexual coercion. They also have to tell themselves

to breathe.

/

Finish this sentence

If a woman doesn’t say “No” when a man tries it on with her and afterwards she

says she didn’t want it to happen, she _________________________________.

52

[COPIED TRANSCRIPT OF CONSECUTIVE VOICE MESSAGES FROM CORINA SLATE (C.SL.) TO CAMERON STRUTH (C.ST.), 15 AUGUST 2014, FIVE DAYS BEFORE ASSAULT] 22:53 C.SL. [whispering]: Hello stranger. I’m hiding in the toilet where we met.

The unisex toilet in the, er, that Hackney pub. If you’ve forgotten that. I’m feeling

very, like, [unintelligible]. I’m older than everyone in here. Like I’m wearing

someone else’s dress. It’s a bit too small for me. Bitch. No. But, er, I can’t even

remember the last time I went out out, you know. It was probably with you.

Maybe it was. Er. The students are on the wards these days and like, I, er,

didn’t want them to think I’m all serious, you know, and past it. I didn’t want

them to talk badly about me. Like I, er, don’t know why I cared so much really.

Like they just keep screaming shots, shots, shots. I’m like again? Already? They

look at me like they don’t know if I’m joking. And now I think about it.

[unintelligible]. Like. What’s happened to me man? Well I can tell you, like, so

far tonight I’ve managed to crack a filling on a lemon pip, I’ve spent like ninety

pounds, and a table of drinks tipped over onto a little man in a wheelchair with a

nasogastric tube and I can’t say for sure it wasn’t my fault. So some, er, glasses

broke over his head I think. I tried to help clean him up but he kept pushing me

away. I said I’m a nurse but he didn’t like seem to think that was relevant. He

just said good for you and he wheeled himself out. I’m, er. A couple of people

took a picture of me stood there not knowing what to do. They weren’t laughing

though I felt like they were, they were just taking pictures. The, um. I saw the

guy in the wheelchair in the smoking section. I tried to say sorry but he flicked

his cigarette at me so, um, yeah I’ve also got a burn on my neck. I, er. When we

met here we were like twenty-six or something and those things made for a

good story I suppose but, like, [unintelligible] gracefully. I remember

[unintelligible] you were, um, you were putting on eyeliner in front of the sink. Do

you remember? You, like, you grinned at me through the mirror when I came

out a cubicle. I remember thinking something like what a beautiful boy and

laughing at that in my head. I don’t think I really wanted anything to do with you.

You said. You said it smells like Tinkerbell’s kidney stone. I said you’ve smelt a

kidney stone? You said only Tinkerbell’s. You said, Have you? I said yes. You

53

said what’s a human kidney stone smell like then? Like I imagine caviar smells.

I.

22:55

C.SL. [whispering]: Shit. Sorry, my thumb slipped. What was I saying? I,

er, well I’m probably in a men’s cubicle because there’s a yellow stain on the

lino by my foot. The door is covered in chewing gum. On the wall there’s a

phone number promising [unintelligible] a life-affirming fuck is what it says. The

number is like fifteen digits long. I keep hearing men come in and piss. They all

spit when they piss. Do you do that as well? Like I can’t imagine you do. Why

would you do it? I suppose it’s because you can. I think I would as well to be

honest. I, er. So in the next cubicle a girl’s crying. She’s been crying for a while

now. Loud. Can you hear her? Sounds a bit, er, like, er, [unintelligible] creature,

or. That’s why I’m.

22:56 C.SL. [whispering]: Shit. Sorry. This was supposed to be one whole

thing. It was supposed to be a quick thing. I’m only doing these because I can’t

be arsed to type. Must be. It will be quick I promise. The people I, er, came with

will come looking for me. I hope. I’m, er, so I let the students take me out

because the. The guy I was, er, seeing we were in love actually, ha, love

actually, [unintelligible], no, but, er, so he, like, he left me, I suppose,

[unintelligible]. You don’t know him. I’m here in, like, the toilet because I, er, I

just got my period actually. So I, er, feel a bit stuck. My. My feet hurt. I’m. I’m

sad. I’m a bit sad. I, um, I thought of you. I was already thinking about you

actually. I was already thinking about you because, well, I’m here, you know. I,

like, I’ve imagined you turning up all night but I. I’m messaging you, a bit drunk

maybe, yeah, I, like, because I see you’re coming to ours next week. Yeah. So.

I wonder if you thought this message was to tell you not to. I, er. It’s not. Really.

Like maybe I should’ve said that first. But, no, like I’m glad you’re coming. I

think. I’ve, er. I’ve been thinking about you, us, more often these days. Like. I. I

don’t know how I feel about seeing you again. Excited. In a kind of, um, scared

54

shitless way. I, er. I looked at a picture of you the other day. It was weird. Like.

Not weird weird just, I, like, I don’t know. I realised that you were actually alive,

a, you know, walking, talking, thinking kind of person, which is obvious but I

suppose you were only kind of, sort of theoretically alive before that, you know.

It was like seeing a picture, like, a new picture of a childhood friend or. I can’t

think of the, um, the word, like, well, it’s probably affection isn’t it? Because, like,

there’s a lot of me that’s still you, you know. If that makes sense. Because I. I

don’t know what I want, or if it means anything but, like, except I do think we

could, you know, use each other these days, because. I mean, do you? I mean.

I wonder, like, why are you coming? Like. What does coming mean to you? You

know. Like. Er. I mean, fuck, maybe this is a mistake. I don’t know what this is.

Maybe it’s nothing, maybe you’ll make it into something or what it actually is

[unintelligible] don’t know but, like, I don’t know, there was something else I

wanted to say. It was. It was. I mean I’m sorry about Sam. I’m sorry about your

brother. I heard, er.

22:58 C.SL. [whispering]: So. Sorry. The girl in the next cubicle has just

stopped crying. Shall I. Shall I. Like. Hold on.

C.SL. [to Doe]: Are you all right?

Doe: [unintelligible].

C.SL. [to Doe]: Do you want to talk about anything?

Doe: [unintelligible].

C.SL. [to C.ST.]: Hold on, I’m.

55

23:01 C.SL. [to C.ST.]: Weird. So I, er. I went out to talk to her but she was

already gone. I just looked in the toilet. Don’t know why. It’s clear. So. I better go

man. There’s so many people I have to say bye to… Or maybe I’ll just leave now.

The, er, the student nurses call that ghosting. Fuck is this a big. I. Hold on. I’ve

just realised the other messages haven’t sent. I. There’s no signal in here. So,

like. Um. So. I wonder if I’ll send them later when, not so or, er, maybe I’ll

remember what I’ve said and just delete everything. I, er, which would mean I’ve

been talking to myself this whole time. So. Well.

[End of transcript.]

56

[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – SEPTEMBER 2016 – PART ONE] Velocity

I’m walking down a quiet narrow street, early December, rain not so much

falling as hanging finely in the air like a ground-level cloud. I see a man’s

silhouette stood along the pavement some way down under the yellow

streetlights. On my left, there’s an estate. On the right, terraces. The silhouette

starts walking. When we meet, will we pass each other? Will he ask me for the

time? I know what that means. If I speed up, walk as fast as I can, barrel past

when we meet, is it more likely that he’ll lose his nerve, let me past, or will he

grab me, my momentum lifting me off the ground thrashing like a child? I risk

it. I speed up. My heels hurt. The silhouette is getting larger. We’re getting

closer. Maybe when we meet I can break into a run. He won’t expect that.

Maybe I’ll just start running now. But he’ll slow if I do that, wait, like a spider in

a web. I ball my fists. I’m angled towards the ground, at him, and I’m closer

enough now to see that he’s walking in the same direction as me, that we’re

only getting closer because I’m walking faster than him.

/

RE: Tenancy Renewal

Dear Ms. Slate,

I hope all is well.

Your Assured Shorthold Tenancy Agreement is due to expire on 09th

November 2016. Please let us know if you would like to renew the tenancy for

a further term of 12 months, by phone or email.

If you wish to renew the tenancy agreement we will then approach your

Landlord accordingly to obtain instructions and review the current rental.

57

Should you precede with the renewal an administration fee of £120.00

inclusive of VAT will be applicable.

I look forward to hearing from you.

If you require anything else, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,

Anika Thompson

Residential Lettings Administrator

/

Washing dishes

Your brother would be strapped to a hospital bed. He’d be naked, ashamed,

scared, on his back. I’d have a bucket of liquefied metal. Gold. I’d pour the

metal over his feet first. The skin on the top of his feet would sputter, blister,

burst. The skin would turn the colour of molten cheese with charred bits, coins

of pepperoni. His toes would scorch black. Veins near the skin’s surface would

rupture. It would smell of steak and kidney pie, burnt milk. I’d pour up his legs.

The metal would spit, crackle, exposing his tibia in a bubbling fissure of skin.

I’d pour it farther up his body, not missing an inch. His skin would foam, fizzle,

become slug’s skin. He’d die from shock soon. I wouldn’t want that. So I’d lift

the bucket over his open, screaming mouth, pour the metal down his throat.

His screaming would stop. I’d wait till his skin cooled, hardened, then I’d punch

the singed flesh into a pulp.

58

[SCAN OF CORINA SLATE’S WITNESS STATEMENT]

59

60

61

62

63

[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – OCTOBER 2016 – PART ONE] “Oops. Excuse me, petal”

There are many things about what your brother did that make me sad or angry.

These things are the things that I even understand. But there is one thing I can’t

figure out. “Oops. Excuse me, petal.” The condom. I think about this the most.

/

List #2

Walk a mile to Crouch End for coffee listening to The Moth. Breaking Bad, Mad

Men, The Sopranos, True Detective, Sex in the City, House of Cards, Orange is

the New Black, The Wire, Community, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, An

Idiot Abroad, any travel show by Michael Palin, in bed. Make enough sushi for

the whole hospital floor. Online clothes shop. Charity shop shop. Clean the

bathroom. Hoover. Paint over mould. Learn how to knit off YouTube. Couple

bottles of wine, dancing to Beyoncé till neighbour pounds on the wall. Couple

bottles of wine, flitting about YouTube, refreshing and refreshing the page until

the recommended videos change. Couple bottles of wine, sleep. Trying to tear

the bedsheets. “Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.” Candy Crush.

/

“Hiro?”

“What?” “Where are you?” “I was working.” “You’re at work?” “What?” “You’re

at work now, Hiro?” “No. I said I was.” “When?” “The other day.” “What day?”

“The day you’re probably pissed off about.” “I’m not pissed off.” “All right,

then.” “Though, to be honest, Hiro—” “Thought as much.” “What?” “This is

perfect.” “What’s perfect?” “This. I was just saying this, man.” “What?” “I was just

64

saying how, like, Corina does one good little deed and acts like she deserves

a medal, like no one else is as good as Mother Corina, man.” “What are you

talking about? What deed?” “Taking Mum to the doctor’s.” “That wasn’t a deed,

Hiro. It’s Ka-san.” “Fuck off with that shit as well.” “What shit?” “The Ka-san shit.

You only started using it when she got ill.” “Don’t do that.” “What are you calling

me for, then?” “Just to see what you’re up to.” “Fuck that. You’re calling to make

me feel bad, man.” “Hiro. I don’t know why you’ve got this in your head but—”

“I’m with Mum now.” “What’s that?” “I’m with Mum.” “Okay.” “Turns out you

didn’t fix her computer.” “No?” “No.” “Right.” “Yeah.” “Okay. Hiro.” “Yeah?” “I

can explain.” “You can try.” “I was just trying to protect you.” “What?” “When he

said he was coming to visit.” “What the fuck are you going on about, Cor?”

“What?” “What are you going on about? Corina?” “Yeah?” “Why did you say

you’d fixed it when you hadn’t?” “I don’t know. I thought I had.” “Well it was

fucked. I bought her a new one.” “A new laptop?” “Yeah.” “For how much?”

“Why does that matter?” “Because I’ll go halves with—” “I can afford it.” “How

can you afford that?” “I’m good this month.” “Don’t be stupid. I’ll send you

some.” “Fuck sake, Corina. Will you just leave it, yeah?” “Well, I’m sorry but I

just don’t believe you’ve got that kind of money, Hiro.” “Want me to send a

picture of my fucking balance, like?” “How did you get it then?” “I told you, man.

Work.” “Where you were the other day?” “Yeah.” “Where you couldn’t take out

a couple hours for Ka-san?” “I’m with her now.” “Why weren’t you with her when

I was with her? Hiro?” “She’s calling me now. I gotta go.” “Hiro?” “What?” “Why

weren’t you with her when I was with her?” “Fucking all about you.” “What?”

“You act like you really care about people but it’s only to make them feel bad

about it and so you feel better about yourself, man.” “Don’t say that.” “Don’t say

this. Don’t say that. It’s fucked, man. When you’re out with me or Mum, like, I

was thinking this the other day, all you do is look around at other people,

seeing if they’re looking at us, if we’re embarrassing you or something, and if

we are, if someone is looking at us, you’d drop all this head of the family shit,

poor, burdened Corina, and you’d act like you barely fucking know us, like, it’s

65

all for show, man, like you keep offering me money, yeah, pity money, like your

money’s more real, more earned than mine, like you’re the only one working

and everyone else is fucking coasting, like, poor, burdened Corina, she went

down on her poncey ex again, felt ashamed of herself, and acted like the

fucking bloke raped her, just so everyone’d feel sorry for her. It’s fucked. You’re

not Mum. Never will be, man. So I don’t want your fucking pity money. I don’t

need anything from you. All right?” “I knew you never believed me.” “Well. I’m

just returning the favour.”

/

Sometimes I’m ashamed of how I’ve changed

I wonder if you’d take it in your stride, so like you, you knew how flimsy we all

are, how petty people can become, you even loved that about people, I

suppose, or wouldn’t you love me because now I’m not who you loved

anymore? I wonder, if you came back, whether there’s anything still about me

that would remind you of your love for me. Today, for example, I was walking

down the tube escalator and the man of a tourist couple was standing on the

right side. I didn’t say excuse me, like you and me both would’ve expected, but

I said, “You’ve got to stand on the right.” The man was flustered. He quickly

lifted his rucksack onto the banister bit, squeezed next to his wife. “Oh, sorry,

do you?” he said, not sarcastically. I didn’t say yes not sarcastically, or say sorry

myself, something you and me both would’ve expected me to do, but I just

pointed at the STAND ON THE RIGHT sign without looking back, hurried to get

on the farthest carriage of the train.

/

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Many times when I think of my brother, I itch

I itch wherever hair grows. When he calls, one of my hands holds the phone,

the other hand scratches. I tried to put him on speaker a few times for maximum

scratching, but he knew and said he’d hang up if I didn’t take him off it. In our

mother’s toilet, I itched. “Cor? Am I on speaker?” “No. I’m just in the loo. It must

be echoing.” “Where you at?” “My place.” “Is Mum with you?” “No. She’s with

the nutritionist.” “Do you know when that finishes? I was heading round hers to

fix her laptop.” “I fixed it already.” “Really? Wasn’t it a hardware thing?” “No. It

was just a settings thing.” “Really? Sorry. Yeah, alright. Well, I was heading

around anyway.” “Don’t bother. She’ll probably just want to sleep after it.” “But

I’m heading there now. I’m basically there.” “Where are you?” “On the 230. I’m

basically there.” “You passed High Road yet?” “Just about to.” “Get off soon as

you can.” “Why?” “I need you to go to the pharmacy.” “What for?” “For Mum.”

“Yeah, but what for?” “I’ll email you it.” “You taking the piss, Cor?” “No. If you’re

on your way you might as well pick it up.” “How urgent’s this?” “Pretty urgent,

Hiro. Get off now.” “Why haven’t you got it yet then?” “I must’ve forgotten.”

“Good job, Teresa. Where’s it then?” “It’s down High Road. Down towards

Seven Sisters.” “What way’s that?” “Opposite way to the police station. You

might have to wait a while for them to make it up.” “But I haven’t got the

prescription.” “I’ll email it you.” “All right. I’m getting off now then. To save the

day.” With him I hang up first. I suppose it’s not the sisterly thing to do. Back in

my mother’s living room my mother and father were sat opposite each other,

still silent. He turned to me, stiffly, in a suit, overcoat. I saw he’s balding now,

greying. Jowly, glum, no, shy, nervous, even gentle. He’d left banking after the

crunch, he told us with a shrug. He’s ended up managing a bus tours company

in Kefalonia. He has a family there, two teenage boys, Georgios, thirteen,

Alexandros, seventeen. He’d brought us a bottle of olive oil, was embarrassed

presenting it. I could tell that if I told him I never thought he loved us, he could

be able to say, “No, you’re right, I didn’t” and I’d be free of it. “If your brother’s

busy,” he’d said after a long silence. I still would like to have never noticed

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Hiro’s pout on him, the same mole above his and my lips. He’d said goodbye.

Now he said, “My flight’s at seven-fifteen, you see. I think I might have to take

off.” Then he was gone again. If you’ve found this, Hiro, if you’re reading this, I

am so sorry. Please understand. I couldn’t have you meet him. I couldn’t have

you leave.

/

Last week Tasha burst out a patient’s room

I asked her what the matter was. “His phosphorous is over nine.” “He’s been

taking his binders?” “That’s what I asked him.” “And?” “And the prick looked

me in the eye, dead in the eye, and you know what he said?” “He always takes

his binders?” “He always takes his fucking binders.” “Well, you’ve just got to tell

him how important it is.” “Too late for that.” “Why?” “I just pretty much told him

he’s going to die.” “Tasha, man.” “I know. But how fucking stupid can you be?

Honestly.” She went on break. I was trying not to remember how we’d been

float nurses together, how we’d cried on each other after the first time a patient

with end-stage told us with serenity in their eyes, our heads leaning on the arm

of the visitor’s chair, that this would be their last treatment. Yesterday I knocked

on the office door of the General Manager of the Kidney Service Team. She

was in a meeting, said she’d talk to me tomorrow. All week I’ve avoided Tasha.

I tried not to remember us. But today, before I was supposed meet the General

Manager of the Kidney Service Team in her office, I saw Tasha crutching the

same patient out of his room. She whispered something in his ear. He laughed,

patted her arm. I saw her again in the break room. “Is everything alright now?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I knew he’s the kind of bloke that needs a bit of fear put

in him. Taurus. His wife died, and from what he’s told me about her, he wouldn’t

brush his teeth unless she showed him pictures of periodontitis.” At the nurses’

station the General Manager of the Kidney Service Team asked if I still wanted

to talk. “No,” I said. “It was just about a shift, but I’ve swapped it with someone

68

else.” There was a Post-It stuck to a computer screen in the nurses’ station

saying it’s a patient’s birthday. On my break I buy an expensive cake from

Borough Market. It doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would when the patient

smiles at me.

/

Google images of anorexia

You’ll find skinny girls in underwear in front of a mirror. In the mirror you see

the same girls in underwear, but the reflection looking back is twice the size.

It’s hard to tell which girl feels more trapped in their body. It’s hard for the real

girl to know whether the ribs, the bones, are more real than the fat. It’s hard for

the real girl to accept the normality of food going inside her, putting fat on her.

Google images of rape victims. You’ll learn nothing, except they’re all white

and blonde. There’ no indication of what the relationship with our bodies is

like. I had only come to love my body after years of the unease of feeling

different, of feeling wrong, then the unease comes back worse because my

body wasn’t just a weird thing to most other people, it was a weird thing to me.

You grow up feeling like an alien, when you allow yourself to remember that,

then you feel better because you learn to reject and celebrate weirdness,

confusion at the same time, but then you’re violated and another properly alien

body encloses you. Ali is hypotensive. “Mate, I just want to fucking disappear.

You understand that, don’t you?” Yesterday she flushed the sandwich down the

toilet. I can’t bring it up because she’s crying. That forceful crying. Is it forced?

Does she cry so I don’t feel like I can tell her off? Is that what’s annoying me or

is it just her crying? I’ll handle it tomorrow. “I don’t know,” I say, though I do

know, I’m just not able to jeopardise my own armour to help her. Her eyes, I

think, see this. She asks me if I’m all right. I tell her I’m fine. She looks at me. I

tell her it’s not me we should be worrying about. “What are you worried about,

mate?” “Nothing,” I say. She smirks, big eyes roll. “All right,” she says, nods.

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Does she feel sorry for me? Pity? I can’t tell anymore. She will not make me tell

her. I’ll let her die before she makes me tell her. I shouldn’t think that. I change

her into more lightweight clothes because yesterday she mentioned feeling

weighed down. She tries to hide herself with her arms. She blushes. She drops

down the bed. She twists a little like trying to compress the air out her body. “I

just like space around me, mate.”

/

No title

Like a blade of grass in the wind

the old woman stung on the back by a wasp at the ATM

doesn’t know that it looks like she’s dancing

/

Ali starts dialysis

She’s surrounded by clear plastic tubes. In the next bed a patient, a 67-year-

old woman, who had been clinically dead for two minutes last week, throws a

banana on the floor, says “No, thank you!” viciously. Ali smiles at me. She seems

weak. I want so much to leave, to be outside, feel the cold wind, between my

fingers for some reason. I want to walk out of this hospital in no particular

direction with nowhere particular to be. Maybe I’d go to a restaurant, a pub,

order a burger, a cider, sit in a booth at the back where no one can see me.

Maybe I’d look like I’m just a waitress on break. I’d get chips and coleslaw on

the side. But Ali has started dialysis. And now she’s stopped smiling. She holds

the sandwich at the front of her mouth. I tell her she has to eat something. “You

don’t get it.” Well, you’ll die because you lie to me. Is it possible to fully care for

someone or anything when you basically mistrust everything? I ask Ali if she’s

hungry. “I’m always hungry, mate. I’m hungry all the fucking time and so I’m

70

scared that, that if I just give in to hunger I’ll just never stop eating and that, that

I’ll just keep eating and eating and eating and eating and it’ll never be enough.”

Ali wants space. Fine. But there’s a limit.

/

I think a lot about the term vegetative state

with a cup of tea shocking my empty stomach. It’s dawn. The kitchen floor feels

cold as pavement. I open the window above the sink. Roofs give the dark out

there some edges. There’s one light on across the back gardens. It’s another

kitchen window, a vase of blousey orange flowers in it. Peonies, I think. I was

given some of those once, probably from a patient’s family member. I’m sad

the window isn’t open. Vegetative state. What does that mean, exactly? I

suppose it means a person has lost all capacity for consciousness, all potential

for self-awareness, that they amount to a vegetable. Your mother emailed me

a few days after you slashed open, vertically, both ulnar arteries, with a Stanley

knife. She said the doctor had told her, “He is more or less a vegetable.” I knew

your death. No warmth, only numbness, efficiency. I’ve seen many patients,

usually old, cut-off, just ready to let go, get away from the ugliness, the harsh

lights, thick tubes, the beeping, blinking lights that carry on after they don’t,

knowing a nurse will come to tidy them up, turn the machines off, a cleaning

team will sweep and scrub through, the coroner will wheel the body away, the

family will be led to a little room with tissues on a low table. I’m glad you didn’t

know what happened to you. I wish you could’ve died right there in your bath.

You’d look so sad, resigned, handsome, all the tenderness you still had to use

expending itself on your face. But I suppose you didn’t care either way at that

point, even before you were more or less a vegetable. When I read the email I

was floored, winded, full of tears, on this kitchen floor. But now the term

vegetative state makes me smile. I know you’d find it funny, too. You were

“more or less a vegetable”, somewhere on the scale, I suppose, between a

71

scollop and a pebble, but probably closer to a loaf of bread. I imagine it was

coined by some alcoholic physician trying to shock nurses, banter with other

physicians in the 1920’s. “That man in there? Well, that man’s nothing but a

vegetable!” The vegetable’s human relatives would’ve overheard this, though,

so the physician, used to excusing his behaviour, would have said it was

actually the proper medical terminology. Then it stuck. The reverse of retard.

Sometimes I say to myself, I’m in love with a loaf of bread. Sometimes, to cheer

myself up, I imagine a musical of your life called You Snooze, You Lose. I will

smile, sometimes. But more often I only know it could make me smile. You were

more or less a vegetable after, and nothing could hurt you. You were more or

less a human before, before, you were already dead, you had already been

dead. The day I read your mother’s email, I think I must’ve felt something of

that pain. I didn’t eat anything, like the day after your brother did what he did.

Two days after you died, though, I was starving. I didn’t feel up to chewing so I

decided to make soup, use up my old, unwanted vegetables. I chopped

through tears the onions brought out. My knife was blunt, not your knife, a

professional job you sharpened daily. The onionskin was too hard for my knife

to make an incision, only pressed the layers apart, a slimy fan. I wanted to add

the tomatoes, left out the fridge, by the fruit bowl of soft lemons and black

bananas, like the Italians do, in the warm air where they belong, like you told

me, but the first tomato I picked up was squishy in my fingers. A blue fur puffed

out at the place where it was attached to its stalk. I noticed a fruit fly whirling

around. The second tomato was the same as the first. When I picked it up, a

few more fruit flies were disturbed, whirled. I blinked, saw even more fruit flies

around the bowl, and when I stepped back, changed my sight, I saw that there

were dozens. In the window across the way, a woman sets down the vase of

peonies. Some of the petals have fallen. Some are dead still on the stalk. She

must’ve changed the water. I don’t think I’ll go out today.

/

72

“I’m sorry but you have to have this”

“Why have you microwaved them?” “There’s only a microwave here.” “You’re

supposed to put them in the oven.” “There’s not much difference, Ali.” “Not for

you. You’re not eating them. They get dry in the microwave. I don’t want them

dry. I want them soft. I’m the one that’s eating them.” “They’re not dry. Look.”

“I’m not eating all that.” “What about half of it?” “Why didn’t you put it in the

oven? It tastes better from an oven.” “There’s only a microwave here. What

about the potato, then? Or the rice?” “I’ll just have two sausages.” “I’d like you

to eat one sausage and some potato and rice.” “Well what’s the fucking

difference? What the fuck’s one calorie of carbs going to do? If I have two

sausages then that’s even more calories.” “It would be great if you could get a

mix.” “I don’t see why I can’t just have two sausages if it means there’s no worry

about if I’ve eaten enough.” “We wrote this together in the meal plan, Ali.”

“Yeah, but what I’m saying is I’ve had my white bread today, and you said I

couldn’t not have it, and so I’m saying I’ll eat two sausages now and have the

potatoes tomorrow.” “Even if you do have two sausages—” “Why wouldn’t I?

Why’re you making me feel like I’m doing badly and I’m not. I’m saying I’ll eat

two sausages. What’s my reward for having that? I don’t fucking want to have

that, mate. You’re such a fucking hypocrite. You’re always saying I’m doing well

and then next meal time you’re throwing it back in my face. Next time I’m not

going to have the white bread. I’m fucking not.”

/

Consolation prize

We planned for you to move here. I wanted you to. I loved you. I miss you. It

hurt me when you died. It hurts to think that it’s better you didn’t move here

because you knew you were going to die than just not wanting to. It hurts to

think I hurt because I’ve lost what we could have had, not what we had already.

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I was a step away from you then, so now I’m a step away from how I feel like I

could feel, want to feel. This might be a gift I’m not willing to accept. I know I

didn’t have you like I wanted you. When I held you, I held you like a window

holds its view.

/

I stand and watch Ali eat

It makes her uncomfortable. I don’t care.

/

I’ve never pulled a sickie

never mind taken a day off work, not since I graduated. I thought I’d spend the

day running errands. I couldn’t leave the bed, never mind the house. Outside

this bed, I know, there’s only moments of encroachment.

/

RE: Tenancy Renewal

Hi Corina,

I hope all is well.

I am writing to inform you that your landlord is happy to renew the tenancy for

a further term of 12 months and he has advised us that your rent will be

increasing to £900.00 upon renewal 17th November 2016, please let me know

if you are happy to proceed at the new rental and I will prepare and send out

the new tenancy agreement to you.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards

Anika Thompson

74

Residential Lettings Administrator

/

Grams

Ali, hooked up, 1.25mg Alfacalcidol, 1.25mg Calcitriol, beta-blockers,

Moxonidone, hydralazine, etc., 92 bpm, BP 115/80, systolic 115 mm Hg,

diastolic 70 mm Hg, BFR 380 mL/min, etc., scrolling through her phone. I stand

up, pretend to take a reading off the monitor. I look by the corner of my eye

down at her phone. Prawn paella. Rainbow bagel. Ramen burger. Homemade

Big Mac. Cupcakes. Cupcakes. Cupcakes.

/

There’s a new patient on the ward

A middle-aged man with diabetic nephropathy. He’s crying, tearless, his

mouth, the deep, sweaty philtrum, twitching. He folds his arms over his chest

when I come near the bed. I tell him he looks upset. You risk a “No shit,

Sherlock” kind of look in saying this, maybe even the words “No shit, Sherlock”,

but more often I’ve found just saying what you see works better than asking

what’s wrong. It works. “I’m a fucking whale,” he says. Saying this makes him

blubber. He sighs heavily, shakes his head, to stop himself from blubbering.

“I’m obese,” he says. He’s not wrong. “Why do you say that?” I say. “She just

said,” he says, pointing down the ward. “Who said?” I say. “I don’t know. The

other one.” “Tasha?” “Whatever.” “What did she say?” “She said ‘You’re life-

threateningly obese.’” “Oh,” I say. She’s not wrong. “God knows I’m no Tom

Daley anymore, but God,” he says. “I’m sure she was just trying to inform you

of your current health situation.” “She tapped on my belly and said I’d have to

get someone to lock my biscuit tin.” “Oh.” “I don’t even have a biscuit tin.” He

75

shakes his head. I find Tasha in the staff room dunking a Hobnob. “How’s your

new bloke doing?” I say. “Who?” she says. “Diabetic nephropathy.” She shrugs.

/

I remember the first thing you said to me

Your brother didn’t want me to meet you or your parents. He’d told me stories

of abuse, neglect, manipulation that I didn’t really believe but didn’t call him

out on either. I’d seen him lie and exaggerate with people he’d only just met. I

thought it must be what he does. I was generous back then. I could tell that he

enjoyed it more when people pitied him than liked him. It was in the Network

Theatre’s damp beery bar, down in one of the arches under Waterloo. He was

Henry 5th. He would’ve told you about the play, I suppose, but told you not to

tell your parents, definitely not to bring them. They were sat next to each other

in silence on a sofa looking kind of furious. You were stood next to the sofa

sipping a pint of orange juice. You were wearing a suit. Even then I found that

funny even though I didn’t know it was a joke, a fuck-you to him. I’d not met

you before but I knew it was you from photos. I pretended not to recognise

you. I stood at the bar, got a glass of red wine. When I turned around we looked

at each other. You walked over. I remember you moved very deliberately, very

slowly. Or do I just remember you that way? I spoke before you were even in

earshot. “Are you Sam? I’m Corina,” I said. You loosened your tie. You must’ve

read my lips because you said, “I kind of hoped you weren’t her actually.” That’s

the first thing you said to me. You told me later that you’d been watching me,

wondering what stories your brother had told. You knew it was me from

pictures. I told you that he’d said you were glum, dark, didn’t talk much. You

laughed at that. A month before he’d told your parents that you’d been fired

from another restaurant. Bringing them was your way to get even, you said. I

felt unsure about you for a moment, but then you seemed so genuine when

you laughed, childish as that sounds, that I’m surprised I didn’t see your brother

76

for what he was by comparison. I suppose I believed the opposite of what I

didn’t want to be true. We talked about him. You said his stage fighting

experience had been learned from you, from broken chair legs as swords,

dressed up as knights, with tin foil armour. Your smile puffed out that shiny

strawberry blonde beard. Your cheeks blushed. You thought that looking away

would cover it. I knew I wanted to fuck you. I felt sick, a kind of exciting dread.

I am remembering one time. The sun was coming up. I still have the purple

birthday balloon you brought. It’s flattened, in a box under my bed. The insides

of the balloon are stuck together like there’s a vacuum in it. Or was it orange?

When I think of you I think mostly of orange. It’s like the air in the memory is

orange. You woke up, made a sound like you were disappointed in something.

I learned that’s just a sound you often made to fill silence, which you found

uncomfortable, which you often were, which explains a lot. I had to go to work.

You had to go home. This made us even quieter, gentler. I didn’t want us to be

quieter, gentler. I held your hand close to my face. It’s amazing to remember

your thumbs, thin at the knuckle, wide around the nail, a little spade. The fact

of your thumbs is amazing to me. The fact that I could have another person’s

body touching mine. I told you the worst chat-up line I’ve ever heard. “Is your

father in jail? Because, if I was your father, I’d be in jail.” “Aye,” your eyes

opened, a small frown, “well, that bloke’s absolutely in jail.”

77

[SCAN OF LOUISE PRIEDITIS’ WITNESS STATEMENT]

78

79

80

81

[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT, FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED ON 24 SEPTEMBER 2014, FIVE WEEKS AFTER ASSAULT] On the 5th August 2014 Ms Corina Slate invited me via social media to attend her

housewarming party, and late on the 15th of August she sent various voice messages

to me in order to persuade me to attend. By virtue of my having to rise early the next

morning for rehearsals—I am the lead in a production of Crime & Punishment at the

Young Vic—along with the fact that I was feeling poorly and black mould had grown

in patches of my room’s ceilings and walls (probable cause), and when I breathed my

chest sounded like a kettle boiling, which, after checking the symptoms online, led

me to believe I had a chest infection—and also because my brother had tried to kill

himself three months before the night in question and remains in a coma to this day,

I did not believe I would be that much of a charming guest and decided not to go.

To be honest these factors coincided with the crucial fact that Ms Slate and I had

separated after a two-year-long relationship that February. The invitation was our

first point of contact since then and I was led to believe that she had not taken the

split too well. On various occasions, friends of hers and mutual friends had contacted

me via Facebook and text messages to communicate as much. On the 30th of May, a

couple of days after my brother’s failed attempt at suicide, I remember Ms Sophia

Doldross messaged me something to the effect of: ‘Corina won’t stop crying. She

won’t leave her room. Do you know anything about this?’ Likewise, a message from

Ms Sade Cully the next day saying: ‘She’s crushed about something. You need to do

something.’ The invitation, I believe, was either sent out of mere courtesy or a fear

of appearing bitter that was facilitated by her heavy drinking on the 13th August, and

thus my attendance, I believed, would only exacerbate any residual hostility between

us. My eventual decision to go followed a discussion with Ms Tamara Johnson, a

colleague and friend of Ms Slate, in which the former assured me that the latter had

recovered from the break-up. Just after 19:00 on the night in question, she messaged

something to the effect of: ‘Fuck, dude, she’s over you, okay? Good lord.’ Confident,

then, that there would be no bad blood, as well as eager to piece together a friendship,

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I intended to alleviate the symptoms of my illness—whenever I felt unwell as a child,

which happened often after my brother had locked me out of the house one winter

night and I experienced hypothermia and subsequent pneumonia, my mother, a

district nurse in my hometown, Darlington, would have me drink a glass of brandy,

and so, on my way home from rehearsals that night, I bought a 35cl bottle of brandy

from an off licence on Barking Road—and I intended to arrive early so as to talk with

Ms Slate somewhat clear-headed. When I got to Ms Slate’s house, two and a half

hours later, on account of travel time and losing my way through Clem Atlee Court

estate because a group of young men had given me false directions, I had drunk about

half the bottle of brandy, but I did not feel inebriated. The time neared 23:00. In the

hallway there were scores of people I didn’t recognise. Making my way to the kitchen

at the back of the house, I met Ms Johnson, who told me that Ms Slate had invited

their immediate neighbours and word must have spread around the estate. These

people had set up enormous speakers in the living room and a stall in the corner of

the kitchen for selling pink dollar-signed pills and balloons bloated not, I assume,

with helium. Again, with rehearsals the next day, I did not partake in these chemical

extravagances, but I did accept a beer that a girl, who I can’t remember much about

except that she had the appearance and mannerisms of a sparrow, had offered me

from an old camp cooler. She said we’d met many times before, and for not asking

her name so that she wouldn’t think I’d forgotten her, I didn’t learn it. To be honest,

I don’t believe she’d been invited or even that she knew the hosts. The beer tasted

like there were coins in it so I asked her if it was old. In retrospect, I believe one of

these uninvited guests had spiked it. She said she didn’t know, and gave me a thumbs-

up. She asked me if I wanted a piece of gum. She chewed manically. ‘Sure,’ I said. It

was stale and soft and bubble-gum, which I loathe, but I didn’t spit it out, so as not

to offend her. (Maybe the gum was what was drugged.) She asked me if I felt okay.

‘Sure,’ I said, and I asked her why she’d asked. She couldn’t say; it was neither

necessarily the way I looked, nor the way I was acting, she said. As far as I was

concerned I felt perfectly normal—self-possessed, even—but she continued to

suggest, seriously, that I spend time sorting myself out and acquiring some

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composure. Affronted slightly, since emotional control is precisely that upon which

I pride myself and base my career, I spontaneously recited all twenty-two lines of my

favourite soliloquy—that’s Edmund’s ‘nature’ soliloquy—while holding this girl’s gaze

for every word, except, strategically, on the words ‘curiosity’, the second use of ‘base’

and also when I addressed the ‘gods’, specifically to emphasise the command I have

of my expression in any given moment and in general, and after this, I asked her if

that sounded like someone who needed to sort himself out and acquire some

composure.

She said, ‘Yes.’

We stood there looking at each other. Her eyelids dipped sleepily so I asked

her how she felt and she nodded. ‘I feel fine,’ she said, giving me a thumbs-up. Upon

that gesture, she said something to the effect of: ‘I feel bright. I feel like I’m a

Christmas Tree. Or I feel like a bonfire. I really feel like Guy Fawkes or someone in

a Christmas Tree. When I close my eyes, I do.’

This is when I began to suspect that she was on drugs—probably MDMA,

since every now and then she would break her frightened reposing expression with a

smile so abrupt and vast it was as if others were watching us and the smile held a

secret only I could know, and as such, her opinion of me clearly couldn’t and can’t be

trusted.

‘Cool,’ I said.

She told me to close my eyes.

‘No, I’m cool,’ I said.

‘You,’ she said, prodding my chin. ‘You might as well be dead, man.’

‘What’s that?’

She said (I remember it exactly), ‘I’m sorry but your life is going to be

meaningless for forever. I can tell.’

Then she stepped back from me and turned away. For a moment I stood there

marvelling at what she might have meant, then I approached and asked her, but she

said, ‘It’s confidential,’ and slipped into the crowd in the corridor. Calling after her,

I saw her lift her middle finger above the heads and aim it at me. The crowd, for

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some reason, seemed to resist me coming through them. By the time I got past,

standing in the space by the front door, the living room entrance, and the bottom of

the stairs, the girl had disappeared. From here I could see Ms Slate in the living room

with Ms Johnson and a man I didn’t recognise. She’d been growing out her fringe, as

I’d seen from pictures, but that night she had a box fringe. This means, I know, that

she’d just turned the corner after a stretch of what she would deem unhealthy,

careless living. She looked happy. Now this is where my memory frays. What I do

remember is talking to Ms Johnson outside by the recycling bins. We were discussing

the Israel-Palestine conflict, particularly the fact that President Nassar had

threatened Israeli annihilation, but Ms Johnson was adamant that this was not the

case. We did not talk about Ms Slate, I don’t think, though I wanted to know why

she had been so insistent that I attended that night. The next thing I remember is

vomiting in the toilet. Whether my illness had peaked or I’d decided to eject the

drug with which I’d been spiked, I don’t know, but it certainly had a positive effect.

My head felt flushed and rinsed, but with that came the painful clarity of knowing I

needed sleep and that I wouldn’t get enough before having to go to rehearsals, so I

looked to see if the room next to Ms Slate’s room was empty. Cracking open the

door, Corina’s other housemate, Ms Louise Prieditis, and another man I didn’t

recognise, both sat up in the bed and asked me what I wanted.

Apologising, I said I needed a place to crash. ‘Have you got a spare sheet or

pillow?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Ms Prieditis.

‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘I won’t be a bother. I’ll sleep on the floor over here. Please.’

She said she had nothing for me.

‘I don’t want to be a pain,’ I said. ‘I don’t, but I’ve seen you do yoga, Louise.

Don’t you have a yoga mat I could use?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t. Try Corina.’

‘She doesn’t do yoga,’ I said.

‘Just try her for a blanket or something,’ Ms Prieditis said.

But I didn’t know if that was appropriate.

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‘She won’t mind,’ Ms Prieditis said. ‘Believe me.’

‘Really?’ I said. (The way she said ‘Believe me’ communicated the affirmation

that Corina would actually embrace it.)

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. I’m sure she won’t. Yes. I’m sure. Okay? See you later.

See you.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Sorry for bothering you both.’

Despite this assurance of Ms Slate’s willingness to welcome me into her

room—in fact, I didn’t, at that moment, even expect to share her bed—I didn’t want

to disturb her. From memory I knew she had a box of spare sheets under her bed,

and there was a cushion on the vanity table chair. The room, when I opened the door,

seemed empty, for Ms Slate made no shape in the bed, totally starfish flat as she is

when she sleeps, but I knew she was there because I heard her snoring lightly. With

the door closed behind me, I stood there for probably up to a minute trying to

acclimate my eyes to the dark. Somehow Ms Slate sensed my presence, and woke.

She asked if it was me. It was, I told her.

‘What were you looking at?’ she said.

‘Nothing. Just the dark,’ I said, which, in retrospect, might have sounded a

little creepy.

She asked me if I was okay.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to find a place to crash. I can sleep in the tub if

you don’t want me here.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t do that.’

She pulled back the duvet, opening a space for me.

Once I was beside her, she said, quietly, with what seemed to me was

intimacy, ‘I thought you’d left.’

‘You missed me, have you?’ I said, but joking, obviously—I thought—only

joking. She didn’t say anything, but I heard her lips part into a smile. After that we

talked idly about the events of the night and what we’d been up to since the break-

up. Our voices reached each other via the dark, and, in my memory, this produced a

kind of tender detachment from the world that somehow seemed to unburden our

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proximity to the anxious demands of being seen and seeing, thus creating the dreamy

release that people feel in the confessional, I imagine, or in those lovely dwindling

moments of a childhood sleepover, before the sky outside shifts tones to pink,

eventually reversing this disembodiment with clarity, the clarity of mutual affection

and, crucially, for the matter at hand, consent. We had sex. But briefly,

unsuccessfully, on account of my unexpected intoxication, and not to mention my

infant cryptorchidism—i.e., my undescended testicle—which means I’m often

unwilling in this regard, especially in conjunction with alcohol. To reiterate, though,

there was no point at which it appeared to me that Ms Slate had not consented. Even

without verbalising it directly, the case seemed to be quite palpably the contrary.

After that, we went to sleep. The next thing I remember is waking up on Ms Slate’s

bed. She was asleep beside me. My phone, I remember, told me it was 12:52. There

was a text from my mother, which said that my father and she were giving my brother

Sam till November to wake up or they would have to let him go. For months I’d

dreaded the text saying he’d died and the text saying he’d woken up, but I didn’t

know how to feel about this, the text that seemed to promise both. Without waking

Ms Slate, I dressed and left. Music still played in the living room but there was no

one else awake. After having taken the tube, then the DLR to Canning Town, I

walked home. I texted Sam asking him if he was okay. I don’t know how I could’ve

forgotten. I was sober. It must have been habit, or maybe wishful thinking. Four days

later, I texted Ms Slate a smiley face. There was no doubt in my mind that what little

had occurred between us was consensual. From my confident perspective, it was only

somewhat messy. It was only somewhat messy. It was only somewhat messy.

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[COPIED TEXT MESSAGES SENT FROM CAMERON STRUTH TO SAMUEL STRUTH, 28 MAY 2014, ELEVEN WEEKS BEFORE ASSAULT] 20:03 Contrary to your advice I’ve drank excessively after a shite rehearsel [sic] and wandered over to Guy’s to wait outside for Cor and ended up following someone I thought was her along the river until the Tate only to discovere [sic] it was actually an amazingly svelte SouthAmerican bloke. Probs for the best. She had the grace to Skype the other week, saying she was in love with someone else and I thought she was only saying it so that I would hate her and move on, but in fact her expression said ‘ I’m in love for the first time.’ That hurt. So I’ve gone up the London Eye. I’m on the London eye. 20:10 Why don’t you answer your phone man? Mam text earlier about you, I didn’t know what to make of it as per. 20:12 Full moon! When you notice it it’s like looking up from your book on the underground and bam! There’s someone looking at you. Look up to the moon Sam! Can you feel it? We’re interfacing. 20:19 8 [sic] miss you man. Christ I thinkninjust [sic] heard your eyes roll. It doesn’t really bother me that much that you don’t like that sort of talk (I don’t really either evidentially [sic]), but what does brotherhood mean in all your philosophy? Is saying ‘ I misse [sic] tou [sic]’ the same sort of things as saying ‘ I’m there for you’ when you’re not actually at hand? 20:29 On me way down now. It’s not long up here. Those red lights cranes have turned on. When they finish London it’s going to be spectacular. Only just noticed a magnificent church by the opera house that’s got a rose window all lit up, and for some reason I just imaged [sic] how amazing it would feel to grow [sic] a brick through that. In rehearsals I had my first scene with the guy playing a policeman and duck [sic] me and call me halitosis. It’s unacceptable, man. It’s impossible to concentrate with animals like him. It makes you want to sew their mouth shut and sew their ducking [sic] nose while you’re at it. We were running through the scene, just reading it out really, and instead of saying ‘ clumsy male hands have dressed her’ I said ‘ lovely male hands have dressed her’ and this

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donkey makes some joke that makes everyone laugh, I could’ve crushed his face against the wall. This cunt wears a t shirt with FEMINIST on it makes me sick. He’s fucked his way around the crew of course. If he wasn’t repulsive I think maybe I’d admire his 20:34 Oh yeah what Mam text me was ‘ you’ve killed your brother’. You know what she’s she getting at? Rev Michael must’ve turned her water into whiskey again. 20:35 Eyare – when I saw Cor last she seemed sort of scared of me. Maybe I’m just ducked [sic] and para but you know I was joking when I said all that stuff last month yeah? Not saying you will have told her or owt, of course, but I was only joking. You know that right? You know I wouldn’t do that.

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[COPIED TEXT MESSAGE SENT FROM CAMERON STRUTH TO CORINA SLATE, 22 AUGUST 2014, TWO DAYS AFTER ASSAULT] 01:10 : /

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[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – OCTOBER 2016 – PART TWO] Waiting for the tube, Piccadilly line, westbound

If your brother was stood down the busy platform, the train due in a few

minutes, I’d stand behind him and watch him nodding his head to the music

playing in his earphones. I’d wait till the train was due, then I’d move through

the crowd slowly towards him. I’d stand directly behind him. When I saw the

lights coming out the tunnel, I’d stab him in the side with a serrated knife, in his

kidneys, between his ribs, in his spine. I’d stab him, all over his body, stabbing

like punching, the knife dragging a little on the way out, but smooth,

unresisting, on the way in. He’d scream, “Help!” He’d fall. I’d step over him. No

one would notice.

/

Finish this sentence

A thirty-one-year-old woman with thirty-eight previous sexual partners is

___________________________________.

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[SCAN OF UNEDITED POLICE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT OF CAMERON STRUTH, DATED: 19/09/14, THIRTY DAYS AFTER ASSAULT]

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[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – OCTOBER 2016 – PART THREE] On the toilet

Your brother would be sat in a cage in a field, Blackheath, while I dug a hole in

the ground. It would be windy. Crows would sit on his cage. They’d watch me.

I’d dig till my chin was level with the ground, then I’d climb out, pull the cage

to the hole. The crows would fly up. I’d tip the cage over so the door would

face down the hole. I’d give your brother a key, tell him to open the door, to

get in the hole. He wouldn’t hurry, but he wouldn’t stall much either. He’d know

there was no way out of this. Then I’d start shovelling the soil back in the hole.

It wouldn’t be long before the dirt came up to his neck. At that point I’d push

the cage away, pat the soil down tight, shovel on some more to make up for

the space I’d made by patting the soil down tight. The crows would land around

him. One would land on his head. It would peck his eyebrows. He’d fling his

head around like The Head from Art Attack. The crow would hang on, dig its

toes into his scalp. I’d laugh, take a rock from out my sack of rocks. It would be

about the size of my fist. He’d watch this with wet eyes. I’d shrug, show him the

rock, as if to confirm the inevitability of my intention. He’d look at the ground

in front of him. I’d shoo the crows around him, the crow off his head, step back,

throw the rock. It would hit him on the nose, smash it. He’d scrunch up his face,

spit. When the pain would hit him fully, he’d groan, pant. Then I’d pick a much

larger stone from the sack, about the size of a kettle. I’d turn sideways, fling it

underhand with both hands. The stone would smack the top of his forehead,

snap his head back against the soil. It would open up a puckered gash. Blood

would flow out like out a toppled bottle. An elderly woman in a beret would

totter over to me. She would carry her own sack. She’d pick out a smallish rock,

toss it at him. Her little rock would hit him right in the forehead gash. It would

stick there for a moment, lodged in the gash, stuck to the mashed flesh. The

woman would pick out another rock, slightly bigger. This one would hit him in

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the lip, splitting it. I’d pick out a rock myself, aim also for his mouth. It would

knock a bottom tooth 45°. Another two people would come, a little boy and

his dad. They’d each have sacks of rocks. The little boy wouldn’t be so confident

with his aim. He’d run up so close to your brother he might as well have pushed

the rock against his face, but one rock would hit him just under his eyes, still

bursting the skin. The man, his dad, would throw big rocks that rocked your

brother’s head, splitting his thick scalp. Blood would stream down his face.

More people would come with sacks of rocks. There would be about 25 of us

now. We’d tip out our sacks into a ring around his head. We’d take our rocks

from the communal pile, throwing together. The dents, gouges, scratches

would come quickly with so many of us. With so many of us, parts of his face

would dislodge, hang, ooze, blood flecked with bits of bone, cartilage, strings

of muscle, slackened tendons, his head a bloody stump, in a matter of minutes.

There’d be enough of us to make the stoning sound like rain.

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[SCAN OF UNEDITED POLICE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT OF CAMERON STRUTH, DATED: 19/09/14, THIRTY DAYS AFTER ASSAULT]

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[SCREENSHOT OF EMAIL SENT FROM HIRO SLATE TO CAMERON STRUTH, DATED 12 SEPTEMBER 2014]

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED ON 21 SEPTEMBER 2014] Happening Blog Sketch #1 – 20/09/14

To be honest, when I looked down at three police pressing my buzzer this morning,

I did wonder if I was finally finished. In the interrogation later I felt much better.

Upstanding citizens with doubts and insecurities and families to disappoint/damage

will fall apart in an interrogation because they don’t conceive it as a game that can be

won. The primary objective is keeping your emotions controlled. If you’re

emotionally stable, you’re practically invulnerable. The real danger isn’t getting

agitated and incriminating yourself, though that is certainly a danger, but rather

allowing yourself to be pacified, susceptible, and thus compliant as a caught child.

Most often detectives particularly talented in the art of psychological manipulation

will get a confession by fazing you with basic respect and decency. Immediately you’ll

soften, feel akin to the rest of the human race, and you’ll seek relief in fraternity and

admitting responsibility. An inspired tactic! I could learn a lot from the police. At

first these two performed quite well, apologising for the early hour and asking if I

wanted a more comfortable chair, and I felt my tongue start to seize, my eyes couldn’t

look any higher than the table—I felt young and weak, in short—but my account still

came out sound, I’m sure, abetted by the fact that a Teesside accent, to southern

ears, can herald a gentle div, and I made a habit of asking them to clarify their

questions, which foxed them, I think, and soon enough they lost focus and got

frustrated, pitching questions that secretly agreed with my answers, such as, ‘So what

you’re saying is the woman’—the woman!—‘has a history of seeking revenge on her

past partners?’ And that’s when I felt I might be in the clear. After a few hours in a

cell whose window looked out on this majestic rust-coloured church on Barking

Road, I even managed a nap, and when I was granted bail I walked to the tube

through an estate’s dancehall BBQ and through the humid cemetery near there with

a scotch egg and a Ribena, and I went riding around the underground feeling

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accomplished and happy [cut/include: trying not to worry about Corina]. Down on

the Central line it had the air of an amateur theatre, with smells of grubby coins and

fusty costumes, and there was a trapped heat that filled my overcoat and itched the

skin inside. The cell’s starchy bedsheets had given me a rash on my left cheek that

felt lumpier than it probably looked. When a few people got off at Stratford, I stood

with my back to the doors so I could check the rash with my phone. It wasn’t long

before [cut/include: the enormity of Corina’s accusation made my gut plunge, just

like waiting in the wings, because I realised then that the truth of what’s happened

is immaterial, it all depends on persuasion, on the alien language of law, and now it’s

out of my hands—très Aeschylus—so] I imagined following someone who could lead

me to something/somewhere different, or at the very least distract me. One stop later

and the only possible targets had been a couple lasses coiled around the support pole

with little crucifixes wiggling off their bellybuttons. They’d been taking pictures of

themselves, bunching up their huge frizzy hair just so it could tumble down again.

They laughed about the clouds outside that threatened to turn their tops translucent

with rain. They were practically begging for my attention [cut/include: so I dipped

my hand into the pouch of talc in my coat pocket to dry my palms], but before I

could plot which role and scenario to pursue, they’d left at Bethnal Green saying I

might as well have taken a picture and giggling viciously. [cut/include: I imagined

telling them that I was actually a fashion photographer, and it was a picture I was

after. they’d giggle differently then. giggle for themselves. I imagined taking them to

a bar because I was out of my overdraft for once in my fucking life. one of them

always gets drunker than the other. the drunker one would come back with me,

definitely. she would be ashamed of herself in the morning. she wouldn’t forget me.

oh fuck I imagined pushing my thumbs into their eyes. bit much? that’s Dad’s instant

fury. you can understand it now—how a man can come to smack his wife. doesn’t

matter if you don’t actually do it.] Their laughter weakened me. My eyes were glazing

over this huge yellow poster on the platform wall bearing the slogan, ‘YOUR

CAPITAL IS AT RISK’, and I did think then about heading home, when, like angels

who’d heard my thoughts, two pitiable men got on at Bank and immediately I knew,

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without properly looking, without reason, just knowing, that it should be one of

them. [cut/include: those girls’ laughter rang between us and inside our selfish/lonely

hearts, and even if these men were unaware of it, the three of us were allies.] The

man who turned out to be mine was oversized, like a monument animated. He wore

a blue suit so tight around his shoulders that the jacket rode up with taut ripples all

over, and the cuffs were halfway down his forearms, the trouser legs turned-up above

his ankles. As I didn’t know then that he had the same bottomless suffering eyes as

[Sam], The other man was a kind of wild dishevelled Pakistani. People were

glancing at him because he had a big, full rucksack. Straightaway I disqualified this

man because I felt like picking him would be racist, and not a moment later I knew

I’d chosen right. The first man, the giant, gestured to a woman sat on one of the

foldable seats by the doors. She held a baby against her chest. Wordlessly he was

asking her to move the collapsed pram blocking the next seat. She snorted, shook

her head, and yanked the pram between her legs. Once he’d squeezed himself beside

her, this man’s head reached above the window and half his arse hung off the edge of

the seat. Sweat gleamed across his forehead and rolled down the cheeks/neck, which

bulged over his sharp shirt collar. He glanced sadly at the woman like a told-off dog.

[things to check in future: wedding ring (in this case, no, but noting the band of pearly

skin in its place, and remember, if there is, note how well it fits, sliding/gappy like it’s

stolen, or embedded in fattened flesh), then the shoes (in this case,

clumpy/scuffed/Clarks/police-baton-long, indicating, but of course not confirming,

length of cock, and thus, the extent of self-assurance), and then the shave (if on a

woman, the legs, and especially, in summer, the armpits, indicating a rule of upkeep

elsewhere, the level of conformity/self-consciousness, but on a man, the face, noting

how recent, how precise, and in this case, it was recent—see the rash above the

collar—and it was thorough, except for a short sprout in the nook beneath the ear

lobe.)] Pity washed through me, dressed up as affection: the deepest sorrows belong

to the fat. What must have happened to him to make him this way? Those lasses, so

seemingly invincible, with their cruel laughter, how would they have belittled him?

Now watching his briefcase buoyed up on his gut, the unavoidable problem of

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morality emerged. This had happened the other times, [cut/include: as the Labour

Party canvasser in Kensington/the mugged immigrant on Fleet Street/the homeless

hostel volunteer/the preteen, shaved bare, undressed on a webcam for those

slouching helpless men; the times when the whole world came to me] but then, like

before, the more I looked at it the more I saw how easy it is to peel that word,

immoral, straight off the surface of a performance like this, and once I’d done that,

as simple as picking up lost cash from the pavement, I couldn’t decipher what it is

that would unite that word and the act that it described in the first place. These

exploits of mine are shady, maybe, yes, at least, but deceit is an inflated word and it’s

not like anybody has gotten hurt. At Notting Hill the woman beside my man got off,

saying, ‘Fat wanker’ as she went. The people around pretended not to listen. My man

shook his head. Where does he go after a High Street Ken yummymummy, who

looks like she subsists on Yakult, dust and castigation, insults him? By the end of the

line there were only a few people left. The la-di-da voice ordered all of us to change.

We stepped out of different doors, my man and me, and I pretended to walk the

wrong way down the platform so he’d be ahead. When an angular woman rushed past

him in the tunnel, causing him to bump against the wall, he turned almost completely

sideways but carried immediately about his business, back on course, just like an

insect. From ten feet behind him, I could copy his habitual movements, pretending

to text so as to keep his pace. He used his credit card to exit, and I used the Oyster

I’d stolen from a house viewing in Knightsbridge. Over Broadway the clouds had a

marble veneer, reflecting sandy light in air that melted just off the surface of

manholes covers/cars/those green [electrical?] cabinets by the curb. It was five

minutes to seven. Just above the rooftops, the sun smeared the covering clouds a

dandelion yellow. Ahead I saw that my man walked with a seesaw motion, not

actually tilting left and right, but his legs and arms made that effect by swinging in

little semi-circles around his body. Are those he lives with, his

friends/partner/children, rooted in some pact of negligence—do they look like this

as well? At the second pharmacy on Broadway, I remembered aping my mother in a

similar way, around the house one morning before she left for work. She darted about

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looking for her medical kit, hissing to herself, and I followed behind doing the same

before she turned, clamped her cold fingers around my face, just below my eyes, and

told me to fuck off. At the second or third betting shop on the street I remembered

that I’d told my father what she’d done and he’d laughed. He said I was lucky it wasn’t

my balls she grabbed, and doubly that she didn’t keep them. Phrasemaker. The man’s

not given me a single word of advice that was his own, and my mother thinks advice

is for the thick. This man I was following—he didn’t look the type to mistreat

children. But how does he fuck? Does he use 4-ply toilet paper and have to Sudocrem

his anus? How would he fight someone off, even—some desperate/vicious lad? Well,

I would’ve protected him. I was his anonymous guardian. Outside an Oxfam he

stopped to look in the window. Now this is it—plot development. It’s to let him see

you. It’s to find his eyes with yours. He was standing before a mannequin in a black

suit, his reflected face hovering over the mannequin’s face like it’s done in films when

the character dreams a better version of themselves, and as my ghost walked through

his ghost in the glass, our eyes did meet. Ahead of him now, I strode on, drunk with

the idea of him following me. Did he notice me? Did he notice the slight instability

on my right foot and know by some sublime perception that [Sam] had pushed the

TV over onto it when we were bairns, crushing the two smaller toes beyond repair?

Did he struggle to decide whether I more resemble cat or dog? It wasn’t enough to

see his eyes see mine so I turned off down the side of a site where only the very front

wall of an old building was held up with scaffolding. In the dark down here I fisted

my hands to work out the tingling. A few minutes passed while I watched a smashed-

up phone box on Broadway. Then, seizing me momentarily like seeing a celebrity

can, my man sailed past. Another minute waiting and I went back to the street.

Farther along, where the shops and businesses broke off to hedged fences, brown

houses and blocks of flats packed in clusters between parking areas and random strips

of grass, the man pulled a lager can from his jacket pocket, cracked it, and drank. He

crossed the street diagonally, not looking either side of him, and he turned down a

road nodding as he passed a lone roadworker sat [what was he doing? texting?]

through a manhole, half-inside the road. After turning a few times we came to a

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square court surrounded by concrete balconies. The clouds pressed lower, thickening

the air. Hanging back, I watched him vanish from the court into the darkness of the

opposite stairwell. With my hood pulled up, I followed. On the balcony there was

nothing but a slab of light from an open door. My plan was to glance in, carry on, and

leave, but near the light I slowed. I stopped to look. The hallway led straight to the

living room. The main lights were off, but I could hear a theme song, a televised

crowd. Listening for what was on the TV—I heard a talk show maybe, and for a

moment wondered what film, what role, would get me on the talk show sofa—my

man appeared at the end of the corridor. He stood there half-silhouetted, only the

edges of his body illuminated, looking at me and filling the empty space. His still

wore his suit, but he was barefoot. And then he walked up to me. His chest was as

high as my face. He had [Sam’s] aching eyes, so dark that what made them look

infinitely agape could be the dense blackness of their very surface. He smelt sour—

raw mince gone off.

‘I saw you on train,’ he said. His voice creaked. His accent was Polish, maybe.

What kind of pain did he feel when he thought about those he’d left behind?

I nodded.

‘All way from Bank.’

I nodded again.

‘You followed,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m visiting my aunt. Mrs Deeds.’

‘Mrs Deeds?’

‘Yeah. Do you know her?’

‘What flat?’

‘Flat forty.’

‘There not forty here.’

‘I mean fourteen.’

‘Fourteen?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Just below here?’ he said.

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‘Yes.’

‘I know her.’

‘You do?’

‘Yes. A tall lady.’

‘Yeah, the bald lady,’ I said. ‘Totally bald. That’s her.’

‘Bald? I see no bald ladies.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yes. What did you say?’

‘Tall.’

‘Yeah. Tall. She’s tall and she wears a wig.’

‘Dreadlock wig?’

‘Yeah. Yeah. Dreadlock wig. That’s her. That’s my auntie.’

‘So dreadlock lady is bald lady is—’

‘My auntie. Yeah. We’re not blood relatives.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But now problem. I remember dreadlock not fourteen.

Dreadlock other side of court.’

‘Well, that’s her husband across the court,’ I said. ‘You must’ve seen her

leaving his house. They’re divorced but live close because of Ben, their son. He’s

twelve. He must play football around here a lot so you must seem him about, don’t

you? They divorced because she got sick. That explains the baldness. She’s bald

because of cancer. Because of the chemo, I mean. She got the cancer, got the chemo,

got bald. That’s the order. Obviously. Cancer. Chemo. Bald. Bald auntie. Totally

bald.’

[cut/include: ‘I’m going to stop you,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘There no Mrs Deeds here.’

‘There is.’

‘Stavi ludzu,’ he said, I think. ‘Dreadlock woman is Olaniyi. No Deeds.’

‘Maybe I am at the wrong place, then,’ I said.

‘Maybe you just want come in here,’ he said.

‘Here?’

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‘Here.’

I remembered then that the border between public and private spaces,

the door, the wall, is not as sacred and secure as we like to believe. Burglars

know this. Now you do, too.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘What do you want?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Are you scared?’

‘Scared of what?’

‘That mean yes. Don’t be scared of accident.’

‘I’m not scared of accidents.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I look for them.’

‘If looking for then accident not accident.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Maybe just something—’

‘What?

‘I don’t know. Something—’

‘Maybe you want come in—’

‘—different.’

‘You want come in.’

‘But I’m not—’

‘You’re not?’

‘No.’

‘Not what?’

‘Like that.’

‘No. But you seem that maybe. Little, no muscle. I could pick you up.’

‘What?’

‘What?’

‘What do you want?’ I said.

‘I want nothing,’ he said. ‘But there nothing I won’t have. I’m alone.’

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‘I just imagined—’

‘And that where it end? Where you imagine?’

‘No.’

‘Is hard keep pretend when found out. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you did this before?’

‘Not like this.’

‘Not with other knowing?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re lucky I understand.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Don’t be scared.’

‘I’m not scared.’

‘Then maybe you want come in. You’re not scared. Then what? What

are you?’

‘I don’t know. I’m nobody.’

‘I say what not who,’ he said. ‘Why you follow?’

‘I’m visiting my auntie, like I said.’

‘Why you follow me?’

‘I told you, I’m—’

‘Why you follow?’

‘I dunno. I couldn’t help it,’ I said. ‘Something good might—I don’t

know. Something.’

‘Did you want me to find out?’

I shook my head.

‘But you did want as well.’

I shrugged.

‘You didn’t care?’

I shook my head.

‘You want control?’

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I shrugged.

‘With me?’

I shrugged.

‘But not for you?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘You think because you can follow you are better?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Or you just want different.’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though pretend.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t matter. And I can pretend. I can pretend

imposter is not found out.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, trying to find the bottom/surface of his eyes. ‘I

don’t know. Are you sure you don’t know Mrs Deeds? I was supposed to visit

my auntie.’]

He looked at me. He seemed set in wax. Then his eyes opened wide, and

slowly, his rigid tongue reached out of his mouth.

The tongue swayed up and down as he leaned towards me.

I stood still, the tongue sliding down my cheek and between my lips. It sank

deep into my mouth.

Let me stay here forever, I thought. Let me be this person now. Let me be

his. Let me save him.

He clutched my shoulder with one hand. The other hand stretched for the

door, which must’ve been behind me, I realise now. We struggled; I couldn’t let

myself go on; I knew he couldn’t save me.

Pulling myself away, I skidded, sending my feet behind his feet, my back to

the floor. As I fell I tore the pocket from his jacket. He stood over me, panting.

There was a magnificent moment of stillness before he shouted in his own language,

Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off! (0r maybe it was come back?) so I scuttled through the

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doorway and onto the balcony. In the stairwell over the stairs my feet moved too fast

and I slipped, cracking my face against the cold court floor below. Then I ran back

to the underground. The fall has given me a black eye/weepy sutures above the brow.

Subject to the swelling, my hawkish understudy [Jamie] will take over the

[Raskolnikov] role. He made a point of shaking my hand in front of the cast before

rehearsal. He asked me who it was who’d hit me. Then the other leads, those playing

[Porify] and [Sofya/Sonya], rushed up to put a hand on my shoulders. They were just

about to ask that question themselves, they said, and they chattered around me like

seagulls round chips. The rest of the cast and the crew kept their distance. Was it

because I kept asking them if the cut looked infected, or did they know that I was

out on bail? Do any of them know [Corina]? Are they wondering if I look like I’m

capable of rape? Are they thinking I’ve got the cool green eyes of a rapist, the gapped

smile of a rapist, all the hallmarks of a rapist they’d only just noticed? Often I did

myself catch the whiff of depravity exuding from me, and I saw it collect in their

nostrils, too, narrowing their averted eyes. I felt afraid, but also didn’t care. In bed,

bingeing on TV, I tried to find solace in what’s beyond my control and decided the

only way to survive until the next hearing was to savour the feeling of this glitch,

remember how tremendous and exhilarating it is to be a suspect on bail, feeling

flashes of genuine dread, and above all, to act like I’m already free. Each night, I will

test the curfew an hour more. What’s admirable is overcoming apprehensions. If

you’re not pursuing curiosity then what are you doing? You’re alone. It’s down to

you. Be brave/keep collected/stick to your lane, not just in rehearsals but life, even

on your own. How many times have you wanted something to happen, like someone

you’re into is into you, and somehow, like just wanting it is a stronger force than any

active choice, it happens? Be cunning, though, always, I told myself, because they’ll

confiscate the Mac at the next bail hearing, or even before, and I must make

redactions on unnecessarily and falsely incriminating info, but before all this, on the

way from the hospital that night I shadowed my man, I lurked by the mouth of

Bethnal Green station, wandering every now and then to Keeling House, the blocks

that look like they’re following each other in circles on a conveyer belt, and I was

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certain that I was bound to find those two cruel lasses. But I didn’t find them, when

I could, and before I left, wishing that I had taken a picture of them, police in yellow

jackets filled the streets—nothing to do with me, just a stabbing, I later found out—

and a huddle of them were watching me, an innocent man. Out of indignation I

looked back. One strode over to me. He asked me if I needed any help. The voice

that came out of him was prepubescent and gibberishly fast as if in x2 speed, but his

lips didn’t move, just held open in a smile showing a lack of the top four front teeth,

while his eyes scanned my face. He asked me if I was waiting for someone. The way

his head tilted, and how it didn’t look natural, but inherited, I suspected, from his

father or another prominent male figure, who was a policeman himself, I suspected,

by the way he hooked his thumbs under the black vest and flexed his arms, and in

the brazen gap in a white policeman’s teeth, coupled with a South-East London

accent, I saw a certain class/race contempt for which he’d fought, and proudly. In my

hand I squeezed my man’s pocket. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was just trying to figure out if I

was supposed to meet my boyfriend at five or six. He’s an actor and he’s receiving an

award tonight. He’s taking his brother as plus-one, which I’m fine with, but he’s lost

his keys so I’ve got him a new key cut and need to give it too him, not that he’ll be

back till the morning, if you know what I mean.’ And the policeman kept smiling,

bobbing his head. ‘All right. All right,’ he said, and when he plodded on, I loosened

the grip on my man’s pocket and rubbed it softly between my thumb and finger, and

when I got home I sewed it to the inside of my overcoat. It made a new pocket in

there, but the stitching doesn’t stay: the threads loosen. The pocket won’t hold an

object too heavy/too small. It doesn’t matter. I like to keep the pocket empty.

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[SCREENSHOT OF EMAIL FROM ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT, ACCESSED SOLELY FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, DATED 20 SEPTEMBER 2014]

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[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – NOVEMBER 2016 – PART ONE] I read in the newspaper that a dentist had killed herself

The headline was, “PUSHY DENTIST TOOK OWN LIFE AFTER YEARS OF

ABUSING FAMILY”. It reminded me of an article I read a little while ago about

a man who’d killed his wife and daughter. I Googled dozens of variations of

“family man kills family” over an hour. Eventually, I found it. The headline was,

“What drives a normal man to kill his wife and daughter?” A “kind”, “quiet”,

“valued member of the community” “struggled” with the “pressures” of being

a “breadwinner” “who took” “his father’s death” “hard” but “on the chin”. Your

death only made a paper that’s not sold in London as a side-note in the

coverage of the trial. In there you were only your brother’s brother. It hurts me

to remember the times I thought of you as your brother’s brother, not

wonderful you.

/

“What would you like to eat?”

“What time is it, though?” “It’s half-twelve.” “What time did we say?” “Half-

twelve, Ali.” “I thought you said half-one.” “Half-twelve. We wrote it down

together. See?” “All right.” “So what would you like to eat?” “Nothing.” “You

can’t eat nothing, unfortunately.” “Yeah, I can. See?” “That’s swallowing.”

“Which is the most important part of eating.” “I’d say food is the most important

part of eating.” “Each to their own.” “So what would you like to eat?” “Does it

matter?” “Yes. It matters.” “You’re just going to give me something to eat. So

just give me something.” “So what would you like?” She shrugs. “Something

plain,” she says. So I got a packet of crackers, put it on the table in front of her.

With her fingernail she flicked up the tag that unzips the packet. Then she

opened it quickly. This was promising. But she only opened the packet, left it

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on the table. “That’s not swallowing,” I said. She didn’t say anything. I took away

the packet, put one cracker on a plate. She picked it up, put it down. I broke it

up into bits. She ate a bit, slowly. She couldn’t eat the whole thing. Since then

we’ve tried the smashed cracker method twice. One time I left her to it. When

I came to check on her, she’d put the pieces together and found out I’d

smashed up two.

/

Sometimes I thought I’d imagined you

Silly cow. And there you were behind me, fucking me. I was painfully, flimsily

enthusiastic about my ability to keep going, making the flimsiness as strong as

wire, fighting off feeling lonely for you because after you came you would go,

or I would go before you did, in my new flat above a dry cleaners on Green

Lanes. Two women stood outside a nail salon on the street below. “I can’t

believe there ain’t a Paks on Green Lanes,” one said. You raised an eyebrow in

the dark. “What’s a Paks?” you asked. “It’s a place for hair extensions and other

hair stuff.” “Listen right,” the other woman said, “I won’t transfer shit if he

doesn’t contribute for Mum’s carer.” “He’s a piece of shit, Chi. He won’t even

come across the river for your graduation. He’s not for you, girl.” You scratched

your head. Your hair was more strawberry than blonde because you’d just had

it cut, maybe a little too short. You nodded, priest-like, your thumb crossed

over your torso. We clung to each other. Both went nowhere, somewhere else.

/

*EastEnders opening theme*

but no spectacle. There’s just the frigid stare. I don’t want to say I’m sorry. I

hope I look sorry enough, but also I hope I look resolute enough for her to

know there was a good enough reason for doing it. “I really didn’t think you’d

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do that, mate.” I nod, but shrug. I want to say sorry. “I hope that’s just your job

doing that and not you.” Me, too. *Ad break*

/

Even you asked me why I became a nurse

But you used the word how. “How did you get into it?” Others have asked me

this. I can tell they’re talking about doctor verses nurse. I believe you just

wanted to know. Maybe because your mother was a nurse. You’d been making

us dinner. An expensive fish with three types of turnip. Or two turnips made

three ways. I think you were trying to impress me. You rushed about my little

kitchen. “Just like me early days.” You were confident. And another word I

couldn’t think of for a long time before I found it in a thesaurus. You were deft.

I was excited for you to be like that in bed. You’d cut your finger quite deeply.

A common injury for you, but I felt the need to show you my own deftness.

That’s when you asked. I rambled an answer that you still accepted because

you knew I’d be uneasy if you pressed me for a clearer answer. I asked you if

you’d always been into cooking. A much better way to phrase the question, I

think, but I wish I’d asked you when you were cooking, not just after you asked

me. You said Philosophy & R.E. was your thing at school. You’d unexpectedly

gotten a few high grades. The teacher liked you. Other kids recognised you as

a Philosophy whiz. You’d never been a whiz before. But then you couldn’t hand

in work. “I got a pretty bad mark in a mock once, and I thought, well, if I’m not

good at this then what am I good at it? If I’m not the Philosophy lad, then I’m

just some lad. So if I didn’t hand in me homework, I’d fail, but not because I

wasn’t any good, just because I never tried. I still had a reputation. So I failed

me exams and got a job washing dishes. And I was good at that.”

/

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After this week’s episode, another

Ali ate the crackers out of spite. I’m not imagining that out of spite. She ate

them saying, “There you go, Little Miss Ritz.” I said, “Thanks” then I went on

break, drank a coffee, nodded off. I used to like to think that you could trust a

patient regardless of their affliction, but I feel my heart warming to her only

when she cooperates, even if it’s begrudged. Back on the ward, feeling sort of

wilted, inaccurate. Ali’s bed is empty. Tasha’s head is in her hands, leaning over

forms, reports. I ask where Ali is. She chews on a biro, grunts something,

sounds like toilet. I say, “Was that toilet?” She looks at me as if I’m fucking with

her. I am. Inside the toilet flushes. I wash my hands. Ali comes out, washes her

hands. I say, “You need to let me know when you go to the toilet.” “Shall I raise

my hand before I speak as well?” “Do you know why you have to let me know?”

“Because you have to monitor my fluid levels?” “Yes.” “Really?” “Yeah.” “What

a guess.” “It’s not a joke, Ali.” “I’m not joking.” Her laugh smells of vomit. I say,

“Did you throw up those crackers?” “No.” “Ali.” “I didn’t.” “I kind of need to know

if you did.” “I didn’t throw up the fucking crackers, mate.” “Sure. Your breath

just smells like puke.” “Yeah. I guess it just smells like puke. Fucking hell.”

“Nothing just smells like puke, Ali.” “Parmesan smells like puke.” “Well, yeah,

parmesan does but—” “Well.” “Have you eaten any parmesan?” “Was there any

parmesan in those crackers I ate?” “All right, just stop it.” “Stop what?” “All this

little kid shit.” “What?” “You’re not a kid anymore, Ali.” “Okay.” “You can’t just

not take care of yourself. I mean, what is it? You want to have people having to

monitor your every fucking move in case you die? Nobody wants to have to do

that for you. So don’t make them. Don’t be so fucking complacent about your

life and expect everyone else to pick up the mess. It’s not fair on people who

care about you. Do you know what I mean?” She’s looking in the mirror at the

door behind me. She nods vaguely, whistles softly, like she’s looking at a plump

spot. She smiles. “You should thank whoever gave that speech to you. The old

ones are still the best.” Unfortunately, you and me both know who gave that

138

kind of speech to me. It made me sick to feel his voice inside my mouth, his

stain on me.

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED 22 SEPTEMBER 2014] Happening Blog Sketch #2 – 21/09/14

[Gareth Laws-Bentham] (aka [Claire Le Packen] in the drag scene), swallowed by

bedsheets, spoke with a furrowed voice: ‘My Ken doll is back at long last.’ His eyes

looked too big for his head. With arms aloft, he drew me into an antiseptic kiss.

‘How do I look?’ he said. ‘With your eyes,’ I said from the end of his bed. All morning,

in preparation for him seeing me, I’d stood in front of my mirror with the wrists

turned slightly out, heels held an inch above the ground, and that slanted smile of

[Ben] (formally know as [Kendall] in the drag scene), the person [Gareth] knew me

to be.

‘Cute,’ he said. ‘Me. I mean me. How do I look to you?’

‘A—’

‘—maciated?’

‘No,’ I said, remembering to cross my arm over my midriff and hold a cheek

with the other arm’s hand—coy/attentive. ‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘I was going to say

amazing.’

‘Amazing,’ he said bitterly. He closed his eyes and held the back of his neck.

‘You lie sweetly.’

‘I’m telling the truth,’ I said.

‘Well. Even if that was true.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ I said.

‘What would be the point, you mean?’

‘No, I mean—’

‘I know what you mean.’

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Slight pause, then his mouth made a smile-shape, but I wouldn’t say he smiled.

That’s what has changed the most—the smile. We met after I’d moved to London,

in 2011. At that time, I was working in a call centre and a Pizza Hut, living in a

Canning Town high-rise owned by a housing association that offered short-term lets

in buildings scheduled for demolition or refurbishment. The bedroom window

overlooked an already-razed site with Canary Wharf in the distance. It was supposed

to be a six-month lease but they mailed eviction letters three weeks in. The night I

got the letter I pretended to be my senile neighbour’s grandson for a little pocket

money and I got arseholed and decided, quite on a whim, to go to The Black Cap in

Camden. This is where, by chance, I first saw [Claire] perform. She lip-synced the

Bee Gees’ ‘Immortality’ and I scratched my cheek to hide a tear. She was the fishiest

queen I’d seen; honestly one of the most beautiful people I’d seen. But her smile was

no act. It was [Gareth’s] smile, too. Anyone with an atom of mettle can get their

queen on, but it’s magic to see the person, the vulnerability, beneath. The smile was

so open I knew that he’d believe whatever lie I told him—of my mother’s TV remote

weapon, her disowning a poof son, my bed- and hostel-hopping, bin-raiding,

nocturnal life to avoid territorial attacks in the night. I knew he’d give me all I

141

needed, and a week later he offered me sponsorship and an invitation to live in his

spare room in the flat at the top of the hill near Hampstead Heath. From the

bedroom window in this flat, where I stood now looking at [Gareth’s] new no-smile,

you could see grassy hills of the park through the trees, where one night we stumbled

and groped, giggled and gasped. With one finger he touched both cheeks [measuring

their concavity?], and I envisaged the immense pallor of disillusionment over his face,

each desperate question vying to reach his trembling lips, each memory replaying to

an altered tone behind his eyes, when I told him who I was and in whose story he’d

been playing a tertiary role—how I might constitute the most momentous person in

his life.

A leaf, for a moment, clung to the glass of the window, then fell below,

presumably onto the street.

He plucked the mug from the bedside cabinet and placed it between his legs

and flicked ash into it. Still blows a perfect smoke ring.

‘Menthols?’ I said.

‘I tell myself they’re diet cancer. I tell myself I’m buying time. I tell myself,

when I’m really on a roll, that they’re one of my five a day.’

‘Want me to open a window?’

‘No need,’ he said. ‘[Pawel’s] not back till next week.

‘Where is he?’ I said, knowing where he was—community service after a

protest outside the mosque off Lea Bridge roundabout turned ugly and he threw

stones through its windows—and knowing [Gareth] would say something like:

‘A conference in Paris. You know,’ he said, ‘when I smoke, my lungs feel brand

new.’

‘They like to be stimulated.’

‘It makes me feel better.’

‘All that matters.’

‘You wouldn’t have made me quit.’

‘Is that a good or a bad thing?’

‘Probably,’ he said, holding a cough, squeezing the urge away, ‘bad.’

142

‘You don’t need my help. You’re indestructible,’ I said, not looking at but

seeing the medicines on the cabinet among tweezers/files/little scissors that squinted

back at me.

‘No, no, that’s [Claire],’ said [Gareth].

‘It’s you.’

‘Shit,’ he said, shaking his head with smirk.

‘You think I’m lying?’ I said.

He shrugged.

‘I’m not lying,’ I said.

‘Hey, I’m only teasing you, kid,’ he said. ‘Only teasing. What’s the matter with

you?’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘Well, you’re not yourself, I suppose.’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘What am I doing different?’

‘You seem—I don’t know. Too—something. Not butch, but—[Pawel’s] not

coming back till next week, you know.’

‘You said that.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Well, I’m convinced,’ [Gareth] said. ‘What—is this all too much for you?’

‘No.’

‘You’re embarrassed for me.’

‘Of you?’

‘I said for me. Are you embarrassed of me?’

‘No.’

‘You hesitated.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Shit, then is it—oh—what—is it girl trouble?’

He smiled, but he couldn’t look at me after saying this.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Kind of.’

143

‘I knew it. Well, there’s no plus-ones at the wedding.’

‘I wouldn’t need one,’ I said.

‘You wouldn’t?’

‘Because there’s no him.’

‘What’s that?’

‘There is no him.’

[Gareth] nodded, looking at me again.

I saw on top of his face, like a mask, the face he would make if I told him—

how the disillusionment would crash behind his eyes.

‘Anymore,’ I said.

He stretched out his palm across the bedsheet. ‘Do you want to—’

‘No,’ I said, feeling his eyes all over me. If I’d thought about not smiling then,

I probably would’ve smiled. ‘It wouldn’t do any good anyway,’ I said.

He made a sympathetic sound.

‘No, don’t,’ I said, practically impersonating Vivien Leigh now, ‘you’ll make

me—’ and I held my breath/listened to him sigh some delicious pity.

‘I’m sorry, [Ben],’ he said. ‘If it does work out you can bring him. Of course

you can bring whomever you want. Of course.’

‘What would [Pawel] say?’

‘Well, a lot, obviously.’

‘Stupid question.’

Gareth shifted in the bed. ‘Besides, I haven’t played anywhere near as many

cancer cards as I should have. He’ll have to say yes.’

‘Except him, the only people who’ve hated me have hated me for who I love,’

I said. ‘He just hates me.’

‘Who you love?’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Who do you mean?’

‘You know,’ I said, remembering the first weeks of new sex, new manners, of

forming our incomplete, asymmetrical affection [cut/include: and mutual love].

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[Gareth] nodded. ‘Well, he doesn’t hate you. He’s just jealous.’

‘Jealous of what?’ I said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

But [Gareth] didn’t speak; instead, he turned his head to the window at the

side of the room. Light draped shadows off his cheekbones. ‘It does look like rain,’

he said. ‘I hope it holds off till the big day.’

‘Even if it rains,’ I said, ‘it’ll be okay.’

He nodded. ‘It should be a nice day,’ he said.

‘Even if it rains.’

‘Even if it rains. And even if it does,’ he said, ‘that ubiquitous coat of yours is

rainproof, isn’t it?’

‘It could manage.’

‘Good. That’s good,’ he said, holding his eyes down at his fingernails. ‘You did

get your invite?’

‘I did,’ I said.

‘Yes. I saw you liked the announcement. It’s just,’ he said. ‘Well, I guess we’ve

been having problems with the post or something.’

‘No,’ I said, and pinched my lip between thumb and ring finger, a gesture of

[Ben’s] I’d forgotten but which resurfaced automatically like [Ben] was stood inside

my skin. ‘I just didn’t open it,’ I said.

‘So you’re not coming?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, picking up the scissors from bedside table. ‘Has Pawel

forgiven me?’

[Gareth] closed his eyes/titled his head.

I nodded. ‘[Thomas] will be there for you.’

‘No luck. [Donna’s] happy for him to see me mewling and puking at death’s

door, but not in a dress. They’ve gone all Jamaican all of a sudden. She wants to take

[Thomas] back to his roots, whatever that means.’

I nodded.

‘He was one of the only people I really wanted to be there,’ [Gareth] said.

I looked at him, wanting him to look at me, but he didn’t.

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‘I guess I could smuggle in some cigarettes,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, looking at me. ‘They’d be appreciated.’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay.’ He smiled.

‘So is it—’ soon, I was going to say, but stopped, before [Gareth] inferred the

rest.

‘Third week of October,’ he said, smiling—mock composure. ‘The 18th.’

Standing off the bed, I shook my head. Part of me was glad that I’d miss the

wedding and part of me wished he were already dead.

‘You’re busy,’ he said. ‘You’re elsewhere.’

‘I am,’ I said.

He looked away, seemed to slump into the bed. ‘Okay.’

I looked up from under my eyebrows, a look that had saved me before and

that I knew would save me again. [cut/include: I seemed to have forgotten about my

predicament and the only good thing I could salvage.]

‘Okay,’ he said, sitting up to square his shoulders with mine, decorous in the

way that always made me tense up, ‘at least I’ve seen you.’

And I managed to smile.

Before leaving [Gareth] to rest we drank tea/looked through photos on his

tablet. [Paige] had crossed the Atlantic; [Cookie] got battered on a stag and couldn’t

face it anymore; [Teet], transitioned, ostracised; [Cruz], suicide. ‘Who’s that?’ I said,

pointing out this campy lass in a red pressed velvet dress and cheap pearls. ‘That’s

you!’ [Gareth] said. And the image of myself, transforming as I watched it, slinked

down my throat right to my centre and its toxic trail left a crack in its wake.

[Gareth] said: ‘I suppose for you it was just a phase.’

We sat there quiet for a while before his eyelids dipped, and I said I had to

go, promising that I’d try to make the wedding. With a hand on the doorhandle, I

looked back as he said: ‘There’s still so much to figure out.’

‘Well, I can do the seating plan,’ I said, ‘and I’ll book the hair appointments,

too.’

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‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not what I mean.’

Outside I managed to check my phone. It wasn’t from my mother; it was just

my phone bill; Sam was still as good as dead.

On the way home I joined a couple of homeless men scouring the bins outside a

Patisserie Valerie. They plucked out flaky Danishes and tiny custard tarts, grinning

like giddy princes. One, some kind of Slovak, whose face was penny-coloured with

sunburn, had worked fitting automatic doors and claimed benefits during bouts of

depression, but for some reason he couldn’t claim them anymore and he was fired for

missing too many days of work. The other one had a home in Kent with a wife and

daughter and he’d stay in hotels while working as a roadie. He was fired for having a

drug habit and he couldn’t bring himself to tell his family, so now it was a matter of

sleeping rough in London while looking for a job before the letters started arriving.

Every now and then he played a harmonica. Soon a woman joined us, and she knew

right away that I was a fraud. Then the Slovak said he recognised me from the

homeless shelter at which I volunteered. What I wanted to say was that I related to

them, or empathised, or sympathised, but I didn’t know what it was that I felt for

them, or whether I felt much beyond knowing how I should feel and just seeing them,

so I didn’t speak. ‘It’s not a lifestyle choice, mate,’ she said, and asked for some money

for tampons. I don’t understand why she didn’t wait for me to turn away, bust my

head with the bottle in her blotched ski jacket pocket and take whatever I had that

she needed more. By the time I got home, it was night. A hoodied pack of

[cut/include: black] blokes smoked and jostled down the street under the only burnt

out streetlamp by the ice cream van that deals 30% confectionary and 70% a

cocaine/paracetamol composite. There was new graffiti on the wall outside my block.

In the dark I had to use the torch on my phone to see: in red, the London Eye, but

instead of capsules there were four severed heads. For a moment I thought the heads

were mine. An insane assumption. But there is a resemblance, no doubt. Must be a

coincidence. Still, I couldn’t get inside fast enough; took eight steps in a single stride.

This upsets me. All I have is bravery. It’s my glue. And now I can feel it start to

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contract/brittle/crack. Out of the unknown, while I was updating various About Me

sections online and liking gap year pictures of friends who I’ve not seen in as many

years as we actually hung out together at school, I said these words to myself, a self-

condemning prophecy: You will only be able to act when no one knows you’re

acting/you will just become an imposter forever.

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[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – NOVEMBER 2016 – PART TWO] There are still a few things in life that I haven’t yet lost

and the looming inevitable is sometimes somehow sedated, but it keeps

coming around, gets impatient, noisy, like a toddler at a funeral. It won’t matter

which one comes first, I don’t think, but I do hope the most devastating loss to

me is my mother.

/

“Corina-chan? You’ve been in there a long time. The doctor is ready to see me” “I’ll be out in a minute.” “I can see him by myself if you want.” “Course not. I’ll

be a minute.” “Have you had an accident, Corina-chan?” “Course not. I’m fine.”

The toilet in oncology is pristine. Not just clean, looks new. I wonder if people

only come in here to cry, for a break, like now. I’m sure there’s been vomit.

Anxiety vomit. Chemotherapy vomit. If there were a window I’d think about

climbing out of it. Do people actually do that outside of films? No. We just stare

at ourselves in the mirror. We stare fear in its pale face. Our eyes don’t seem to

move. We think of ourselves as statues. Can we remember how to walk? We

could vomit. Someone calls for us from the side of the door we should be on.

Too late now to vomit. “I don’t want to keep the doctor waiting any longer,

Corina-chan.” I break my own gaze, sanitise my hands, open the door. Her face.

She looks away quickly. I forgot she was wearing a woollen hat. There’s a fluffly

bobble on the top. We walk together down the corridor, feeble in our own

ways. My mother stops. I stop, too. “Ka-san?” She looks at me, around us. I ask

what’s wrong. She scratches her collarbone. “I was just,” she says, blinks, lips

twitch. “I thought maybe there was,” she says. “What?” I say. She turns and looks

down the corridor rigidly. She’s looking down towards the exit. “Ka-san?” Her

head shakes. “No,” she says. “It’s silly. I was thinking I could just—or maybe there

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was—but no—there’s—no.” She turns back around, looks the other way, past me,

nods. I try to remember if she said she’d eaten today. “Come on,” she says.

“The doctor is waiting.” She walks on. I watch her for a moment, then I follow

her down the corridor. I’d like to hold her hand. I remember one time, actually,

it might be my earliest memory, one chilly April, my mother was leading me by

my hand through Kew Gardens for my first hanami, my first flower viewing. We

were going to sit under a Cherry Blossom. We’d packed a picnic in the morning

with onigiri, dyed pink, sakura mocohi, dyed pink. We were walking by a pond,

hadn’t yet come to the Cherry Blossoms. I remember seeing a peacock strut by

the pond. I remember finding it hilarious. My mother was smiling. From quite

far away, a woman on a bike cut across the grass towards the path where we

were walking. I was a little scared of her, I’ll admit it. She wasn’t looking ahead

of her, was looking down between her legs, at her pedals or the chain. I

imagined that she would ride right into us, knowing at the same time, but

maybe I’m just adding this in, that this couldn’t really happen. I sometimes think

the reason why it did happen is because we didn’t think it really could. I like to

think my mother pushed me out the way, but I don’t know if she did. Maybe I

jumped out the way myself. I just remember my mother folded over, holding

her ankle, the woman circling around us. “Watch where you’re going, thick

fucking chink,” she said, then rode away. I wanted to be able to run after her,

grab her long greasy hair, pull her off her bike by the hair, pull out some of the

hair, maybe, pull her into the pond. She’d cry, be ashamed. She’d be sorry. My

mother wouldn’t like me to do that, but she’d be secretly grateful, I thought.

We walked on to the Cherry Blossoms, my mother limping, wincing. I didn’t

really take the flowers in because I was watching her. We unrolled our blanket,

sat down quietly. She looked up, deep into the pink flower blooms. I looked at

her. I wanted to hold her hand. “We’re not happy with your progress.” “I see.”

A sinking silence. My mother’s expression is like someone’s telling her a

cooking tip. Mr Datta, nodding, the consultant, is a sweet man, I know, a gentle,

trustworthy man, probably ready to retire, the kind of man his daughter would

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hate to disappoint, and still, I see this still in me, I see him as a man first, and

men aren’t just allowed into my world unexamined, now my world is so

miserably, furiously exclusive. He sits forward, hands together on his desk. I can

smell his aftershave. I sit back in my chair. When he speaks you hear something

in his throat. It makes you want to clear your own throat, makes you want to

clear his throat for him somehow. He puts his mug on the desk. Tea slops over

the sides. I wait for him to mop it up. He doesn’t. “Do you have any suggestions

for progression?” I say. “Don’t interrupt,” my mother says. Mr Datta’s eyebrows

go up, eyes turn away. “I didn’t,” I said. “You did. Mr Datta was about to speak.

Weren’t you?” He tries to clear his throat. “Yes, but—” “See?” I look at the ring

of tea around his mug. “Sorry,” I say. She pulls down the sleeves of her shirt. I

look at the sunflower painting on the wall by the window. “Go on,” she says to

Mr Datta. “Well,” he says, swallows, tries to clear his throat, says, “essentially,

you’re not responding to this course of chemotherapy as well as we’d hoped.

The carcinoma, the cancer, essentially, keeps returning.” “What are my options,

Mr Datta?” “Well, first, there’s obviously to do nothing,” he smiles, tries to clear

his throat, “but that’s not something I’d advise.” My mother, surprisingly,

wonderfully, smiles as well. “The course we’ve put you on, as you will know, has

been a very heavy dose-dense cocktail, if you understand me.” “It’s not been

too bad,” she says. “Yes,” says Mr Datta, “you yourself have been remarkably

formidable. You’ve put up a good fight.” She turns her head, a little shrug. “But

your body is a different matter, I’m afraid to say. If we carry on this dosage, it

will do you more harm than good, in many ways, and there’s no evidence that

the cancer will not recur, like it has been.” “So radiation and surgery?” I say.

There’s a silence. Did I blurt it, inarticulate? I hope I don’t have to say it again.

“Do not interrupt, Corina-chan. For the last time now.” “It’s okay,” Mr Datta

nods, strokes his upper lip, tries to clear his throat, then points at me, “and yes,

Corina. We would like to perform a radical mastectomy of the right breast,

removing the tumour and more lymph nodes. It is radical, as I say. Quite drastic.

But necessary, I think. It will be a painful recovery.” She nods. “And the scar

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tissue that will form will hinder your mobility,” he says. She nods. “And of course

we would like to prepare you for the psychological impact.” “Psychological

impact?” “Yes. It’s my understanding,” Mr Datta swallows in what looks like an

uncomfortably dry way, “that the loss of a breast—” “I’ve already lost one,” she

interrupts. “Yes. Yes,” he says, tries to clear his throat. “I mean to say,

aesthetically, to yourself, and more importantly, psychologically—” “There’ll be

no psychological impact, Mr Datta,” she says. We are silent. Mr Datta and I are

in the same silence. My mother’s silence confronts ours. Mr Datta nods, tries to

clear his throat. “Well, then radiation is the next step,” he says. “Radiation.” “Yes,

the—” “I don’t want that.” “Yes, I understand your trepidation. My first piece of

advice is to avoid Google Images.” “I don’t want that.” “But of course, we will

treat your skin for denaturing and radiation burning, so—” “No, Mr Datta, I do

not want it.” “Radiation therapy?” “Yes. I do not want it.” “But, Ka-san—” “Corina-

chan, please. Mr Datta, I‘ve made up my mind. I do not want it.” “Well, I have to

be honest,” Mr Datta says, looks down at his desk, tries to clear his throat, “for

your progress—” “I am not going to do that. Thank you, but no. That’s it.” “I

understand your trepidation, I do, but I simply cannot recommend this

decision.” “Of course.” “Because, if you don’t accept the radiation therapy—”

“Ka-san. Radiation doesn’t hurt. It’s—” “Corina-chan,” she says. Her eyes are

frozen leaves. “Please.” Her hand moves over onto the arm of my chair. I watch

it there. I put my hand around hers. I turn to Mr Datta. His tongue, I can see,

moves around his mouth, like it’s trying to pick something out his teeth. “Are

there any other options?” I say. Mr Datta makes an impatient gesture with his

hands. “More chemotherapy,” he says, “but in a lower dosage. Less toxicity,

and thus, in all likelihood, less impact.” My mother is looking out the window

behind him. At the trees, maybe. The naked winter trees. “Then that’s what we’ll

do,” I say. Mr Datta studies my mother. “Is that the way you would like to

proceed?” he asks her. She lifts her chin. “Yes,” she says. Mr Datta strokes his

lip, begins to scribble on his notepad. On his desk I notice a child’s drawing of

a volcano. Bright blue cloud shoots out the top. Orange lava flows down the

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sides in thick loops. I smile a little, briefly. Mr Datta looks up, grips his pen. “I

would not be doing my job if I did not prepare you properly,” he says. My

mother lets go of my hand, puts hers in her lap. We both straighten ourselves

in our chairs. “It is more than likely that the chemotherapy will slow the growth

of the main tumour,” he says, “but it will not stop it from spreading. It will

spread. Your body will of course fight the cancer, but the cancer will likely win.”

We don’t say anything. The fact of what he’s saying, I realise, is making no

impact on me. If she said she was immortal I’d defend it. Mr Datta shakes his

head, lets out a little cough. “I’ve spent my life fighting this,” he says. “It’s not

like your fight, but in my own way. I hate to see it win.” My mother pulls her hat

over her head. “I have always disliked a sore loser,” she says.

/

I got home, had a good cry

So good, it made me hungry.

/

Ali gained half a pound

The yellow tinge to her skin has faded. She’s eaten a tomato this morning. A

bite of toast with strawberry jam. A small glass of soymilk. We could only look

at each other when the other was looking away. Quietly she said sorry for not

having more. I said, “No, it’s great.” It was. It was four years ago that I passed

my dialysis technician training. It had something to do with me explaining my

initial duty to my mother. An EPO injection in the bloodline tells the bone

marrow to make blood cells, I said. She said it’s the drug doing all the work.

She told me that she could do that it’s so easy. I think she felt particularly lonely

that day. Now I’m rubbing betadine over the arteriovenous fistula surgically

formed two months ago on Ali’s upper arm. The procedure has allowed us to

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talk. It mediates. She says, “How scared should I be?” “Of what?” “This.”

“Dialysis?” “No” meaning, I guess, her life. “Not scared,” I say. I hold the arterial

needle below the plump fistula, purple like a plum. I slide it through the flesh,

imagining the enlarged blood vessel inside pierced, tapped, gushing blood

up into the tube. I tape the needle in place against her arm. I say, “Just careful.”

“Are you scared?” “Of what?” “This.” “Dialysis?” “Yeah. This. Everything else.”

“Do I seem scared?” “No. But are you?” The carer can’t say she’s scared of bad

things happening even though she manages not to care all that much when

she thinks about it so she just says, “No. I’m not scared.” I slide in the venous

needle, tape it against the skin. I say, “Just careful.” I run heparin through the

tubes. It keeps the blood from clotting. “Did you ever get scared doing this?”

“What?” “The job.” “Not really.” I smooth the curve of the tube. I feel pulled into

her eyes. “Fuck,” she says, winces. “Did the tube pull?” “No.” “What’s up?”

“Well, not really.” Her face is so narrow, so knobbly, when her brows are up,

eyes staring. “Sorry,” I say. Her face slackens, fills out surprisingly, wonderfully.

“It’s all right,” she says. I nod. “So you’re saying you never get scared, ever.”

“Sometimes.” “But more when you were younger?” “Well, I used to always wear

a facemask when I started.” “What does that mean?” “It means, when the

patient came in, no one could see me making this face.” Ali laughs. No, her

lungs rattle happily. I turn on the machine. Three hours. Taking of 1.5 kg of

fluid. Rinsing of urea, creatinine. She is laughing. Acidic, hyponatremic blood

flows out one needle towards the machine. The machine beeps, makes

ambulance sounds. This scared Ali the first time we did it, but here the cleansed

blood comes back into her and she is still laughing. She coughs up a hard dark

ball of phlegm. “I feel loose, mate. Loosely holding together. Like, loose.”

/

154

Overheard on a bus

“You hear about that woman she told the police she was raped by 15 people?”

“What? Gang raped?” “I guess.” “Shit.” “Yeah. But she was lying.” “What?” “It

never happened.” “Fuck, man.” “Yeah.” “Fuck, I hate women who do that.”

“Yeah.” “There’s nothing worse than fake rape allegations.” “It ruins a man’s

life.” “I hate women who do that, man.” Well I hate men who pounce on a

chance to have a reason to hate women, man.

/

I’m trying very hard

not to think in terms of victim and culprit. Specifically I’m trying hard not to think

of women as victims. Even more specifically I’m trying hard not to think of

myself as a victim. I hope I find it hard because he is a culprit, not because I am

a victim. I hope he is a culprit because I am not a victim.

/

It’s 17:34

Rain streams down the windows, blurring the streetlamp’s light. I get in bed

with another glass of wine from a crate I ordered with a voucher, my laptop,

the same aimless scrolling through what other people are up to, what makes

them happy, proud, what annoys them. There’s a message. I only have to read

the first few words to know I’ll be accused of lying, a bitch. I open up some

articles, so many that I doubt I’ll actually read them. 18 Of The Most Beautiful

Waterfalls In The World. What Should Be The Emoji For Having Your Period? 23

Words And Phrases That Should Be Banned From 2016. Just Straight Up Sexist

Things Newspapers Print. Back on Facebook, there’s an event invite. Cheese

and Wine at Poppy and Chidinma’s. The last time I remember seeing Poppy

and Chidinma was in our living room, in the house the three of us lived in,

155

where they still live, some time after the party your brother crashed two years

ago, when they persuaded me not to tell the police what he did. There are only

11 people invited. “A low-key soiree for our favourite people!” They were once

my closest friends. Maybe they’ll want to make up. I do miss them, sometimes.

Maybe I only miss myself. They’ll think I’m still devastated, still not myself, or

still ashamed. I decide to go, pour another glass of wine, stream the radio. They

will be sorry, be impressed by how I’ve come through it. I know I want to wear

my black jeans, so I try on a black top. The sleeves are high, though, and I need

to shave my armpits. Could I spend the entire night with my elbows at my side?

No. They’ll think I’m shy now. That’s maybe true, but I don’t want them to think

that. There’s my new green shirt I’ve been wearing a lot, but it’s not like I’ve

recently seen anyone that’s going tonight, so I fish it out the washing basket,

smell it. Bit ripe, not bad, needs an iron. I spray it with perfume, take it to the

toilet on a hanger, sprinkle it with water, hang it off the doorhandle so the

creases fall out. I check my hair in the mirror. There’s not enough time to wash

it, so I scratch through some dry shampoo. Back in the bedroom I find an article

of 17 Stunning Makeup Tutorials That Are Perfect For The Party Season, follow

a link to a video that shows me how to do golden eyelids. I’ll order a taxi, I think,

to avoid the rain, and I’ll take them a bottle of wine. Maybe I’ll make a card for

them out of A4 paper with felt-tip pens. It will be a little lame maybe, but I’ll just

own it, they’ll be grateful, see it as an olive branch. I’ll go over some nights,

watch Sex and the City from the very beginning like we used to. We’ll go to old-

man pubs, stick out like sore thumbs. I’ll stay over on their sofa, or in Chidinma’s

bed, all three of us, like we used to, and we’ll make a fry-up together in the

morning or just give in and get one in a pub. I pour another glass of wine, sit in

bed to do my makeup. I go to check the times of the party again, but the page

has refreshed itself, gone private. I refresh the page myself. It’s gone. I refresh

it again. Gone. I wonder if it’s been cancelled, then wince at how naïve that is.

I push my laptop to the end of the bed, move out of the way of the mirror on

the other side of the room. I lie on my side, close my eyes, clench.

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/

RE: Tenancy Renewal

Hi Corina,

Thank you for your email.

I have liaised with the landlords and unfortunately they cannot accept your

offer at £25.00 for the rent increase.

The proposed amount is reflective of the current market and rental price for

the area.

In relation to the admin/renewal fee this is located on the page 22 of your

signed Tenancy Agreement. (Please see attached).

Please let us know if you still wish to proceed.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

If you require anything else, please do not hesitate to contact us.

King regards,

Anika Thompson

Residential Lettings Administrator

/

“Have you been thinking?”

“Yes. About?” “Tasha.” The General Manager of the Kidney Service Team said

her name like she’d just walked in the room. One of her fake nails had broken

off. The nail left behind was translucent with mild koilonychia, protein

deficiency. “It depends if Audrey’s husband is still threatening.” She nodded.

“Is he?” “Well, as far as we’re concerned he is.” “What does that mean?” “For all

intents and purposes, he is.” “So he is?” “Let’s say yes.” “So yes?” “Yes.” “What

if I can’t?” “Can’t?” “Can’t make that decision.” “I’m afraid you have to, really.” I

nodded. “But the decision is entirely yours to make.” I laughed. After a

157

moment, she laughed. Neither of us knew why the other was laughing, or

maybe even why we were laughing ourselves. I got up to leave. She pointed at

me, cartoon smile. “But make it quick!” she said. We laughed, thick, harsh. In

the lift down through the hospital that laughter echoes cruelly. Tonight I’ll order

a curry. I’ll order three full dishes, two naans, a bottle of their sour headache

wine. The wine I’ll empty watching Kimmy Schmidt again. The food will last the

weekend. On the next floor down, the lift stops, Tasha gets on. “Hey,” she sings,

“Fri-fucking-yay.” “Praise be.” “Plans?” I shake my head, say, “I found this liver

detox I wanted to try.” “Jesus. That makes me want to cry.” “What should I be

doing?” “I dunno. Sucking and fucking.” “Who?” “Strangers.” “Fuck that. I’m

diseased.” “Never stopped me.” “What are your plans?” “I dunno, man.” She

looks up at the lift ceiling, rubs her face under her glasses. “I don’t know,” she

says. The lift stops at the next floor. The doors open. No one’s there. The doors

close. We drop down again. Tasha leans against the wall, looks at her feet. I

say, “My rent went up this week.” She kisses her teeth. I say, “50 quid.” “Did you

contest it?” “Weren’t having it. Saying it reflects the market.” “Which means

there’s one greedy cunt in the area who upped it and everyone else just follow

suit.” “You should see the email. I said something like, while the increase in rent

might represent the current market, it was disproportionate to the unchanged

living standard inside the property.” “Landlords don’t have time for logic.”

“Fuck landlords.” “My parents rent out a flat in Manchester in my name.” “Well,

that’s just smart personal finance.” We laugh, hollowly, walk out the lift towards

the dark doors. Tasha’s smile lingers on her face, but without, I think, her

knowing it. “We should do something tomorrow night,” I say. Tasha’s smile

goes, but she looks somehow happier. “That could work,” she says, smiling

again, properly now.

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED 24 SEPTEMBER 2014] Happening Blog Sketch #3 – 22/09/14

Except infrequent theatre and a couple of Wonga adverts, the only acting job from

which I’ve made money is the one I was—until earlier today—employed part-time to

do. Twice a week I dressed up in a suit for a PR company called [Fig Leaf] in an ersatz

admin role. There were only two main duties stated on my contract: boost office

morale, and report office dynamics back to the managers. My twenty-odd colleagues

were under the impression that I sorted payroll/rota/formatted/letters/updated

records—simple, boring tasks that required no expertise. One of the office managers,

a man-weasel crossbread called [Freeman Newer], who often has Marmite—I hope—

in the corner of his mouth, set up a desk for me at the back of the office facing the

other workers and the wall of glass behind them, where the managers’ offices are. My

computer screen faced the wall behind me. Before coming in this morning I was sure

that I wouldn’t make it to my desk before [Freeman] took me into his office and

fired me. Don’t the police inform the suspect’s employers that he’s on bail? If they

did, it didn’t seem like [Freeman] had told the rest of the office. But if he had, their

powers of pretence rival my own. The plan, then, was to make myself indispensable;

to demonstrate my value. The office was full of clacking and the Shakespearean tones

of customer service. The air itself was grey; it droned. The ceiling lights have not

been working for a couple months and the only light comes from the small windows

on one side of the room. On the other side there’s the enormous glimmering targets

and awards board. It doesn’t have a label, only the words EXCEED YOUR

POTENTIAL embossed on the top. Hundreds of yellow smiley faces next to names

in impermanent ink flash erratically across the board like a fruit machine. It covers

the entire wall but its luminosity doesn’t reach farther than an inch from its surface.

When the glass door closed behind me, my colleagues, hunched in rows of desks, all

turned their heads and smiled the smile you smile at a bairn who’s scored a penalty/at

a street cleaner. Walking to my desk I switched on my work watch, a mini computer

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all [Fig Leaf] employees wear for manually recording details of all work done

alongside an automatic fitness tracking function, and I looked at [Freeman] shuffling

papers on his desk inside his see-through room. He looked up at me with the dead

eyes of a shark, and I should’ve known then what was going to happen later. At the

back of the room the two assistants closest to my desk, [Tom] and [Sarah], were

typing without pause. [Tom] raised his head and grinned. He’s gawky with a £4

haircut—£1 a side—and thick glasses that make his eyes look twice their size. He’s

the most complimentary person I’ve ever met, eats naan with a knife and fork, and

in fact a few people in the office find him excruciatingly nice, which I have to agree

with, in their company, but they don’t realise how useful a namby-pamby man like

[Tom] can be for making you feel good about yourself. A couple months ago, the day

he’d forgone attending his own graduation because someone in the office wanted to

switch shifts, I followed him into the office toilet, pretended to leave while he was

still in the stall—washing my hands and letting the door close again—and I held my

breath and listened to him masturbate. On his deathbed the nurses will use him to

subsidise their childcare costs. But his pain is not my pain; he is not my ally. In fact,

it occurs to me now that he and I are rivals; once, when the managers and duty

managers were at the Xmas conference last year, [Tom] took it upon himself to give

a staff briefing, in which he delegated the duties listed on our job descriptions,

appending this with ‘And have fun!’, an injunction I myself opposed by saying simply,

‘Please don’t say that’—i.e. its abhorrent to suggest that our enjoyment of work is,

firstly, a priority, and secondly, our duty—but, after blushing at the exposure of his

own grandiosity, as we went to our desks, he said to me, ‘You’re right. I never made

the team, never mind captain,’ and adding—I shudder just thinking about it!—‘Oh,

[Cam], you’ve got a black smudge on your forehead,’ and after pretending not to care,

when I checked myself in the toilet, there was no smudge! Condemning him to

[Freeman] was also part of today’s plan.

He saw me watching him. ‘I was just thinking—that is a really, really great

coat, [Cam],’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I ask where you got it? I bet it was expensive.’

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‘Just some charity shop in Holloway,’ I said., hanging it on the back of my

chair. ‘I don’t remember what it was called.’

[Sarah] crammed a handful of something in her mouth. ‘My fiancé has one

like that,’ she said through the chewed food. ‘I bought it for him.’ It was early to start

snacking, even for her. A sack of cashews laid open on her desk spilling nuts among

other scrunched wrappers, a yellow smiling [Fig Leaf] stress ball, and a World of

Warcraft mug. Once, in the little office kitchen, she blubbed to me that she didn’t

know why she wasn’t losing weight. I had noticed that she’d lost weight, I’d said. And

anyway it wasn’t her fault, I’d said; she suffered from body dysmorphia, I said. She’d

simpered, nodded, and sipped her midday cocoa.

‘My fiancé can’t even dress himself,’ [Sarah] continued, looking at [Tom] until

he laughed. ‘I bought his wedding suit for him. For our wedding. I bought the

groomsmen’s suits as well. My mother says I should’ve been some celebrity’s personal

assistant,’ she said before making a joke about her wedding dress that I’m actually

glad I can’t remember because she mutters her jokes sadly like an old forgotten

woman: she likes the protective screen of a joke but she hates the vulnerability—see

how she holds her lips down trembling over her teeth, how one hand tests the grease

in her hair and the other pulls the shapeless faded cotton work dress from clinging—

which she feels when she laughs. She went to the toilet again. For all that disgusts me

about [Sarah]—engaged to God-knows-who and living rent-free with her mother,

fingers yellowed from last night’s curry, pit stains yellowed by cheap deodorants,

taking the lift when we’re only one floor up, etc., etc.—I admire her ploys to run

down the clock. She knows how to hide. From my locked desk drawer I took out a

notepad and logged it. In last month’s performance review, the deputy manager

[Leah] took me out to a vegan café in Soho and asked me if I thought I was

performing my duties proactively. She’d bought me lunch, even offered me a beer,

which I turned down, figuring it was a test, and maybe that’s why I said, ‘I could do

more, I think, and I’d like to’ without really thinking. She asked me how I might

‘action that aspiration’. And I knew immediately: I’d compile a comprehensive list of

[Sarah’s] absences, her movements, the complaints she’s received from others about

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her personal hygiene, her distinctly ‘feminine’ odour, and I’d learn all I can about

[Tom’s] anti-anxiety medication [cut/include: which he’d been prescribed after I

sprinkled MDMA into his broccoli soup one lunchtime, triggering a spate of ‘panic

attacks’]. [Freeman] acted like he knew nothing of this undertaking. Knowledge of

it was there in his mock-menacing looks, but something else darkened his eyes this

morning as I found him watching me again. The look didn’t last long before he

wheeled around in his chair, but my intuition of its meaning lingered as anxious saliva

at the back of my throat. With [Sarah] gone I stopped what I was doing, which is

what I’m always doing—skim articles/fill out personality tests/class tests/find out

which Friends character I should marry (Phoebe, as a matter of fact)/reread past

reviews of shows that predicted a spectacular career, all while keeping a fake

spreadsheet open in the corner of the screen, ready to swap in and magnify if

someone comes near—and aimed my attention on [Tom]. He’d just put his phone

down and entered the action into his watch, making the smiley face next his name

on the targets board flash enthusiastically, yellow. ‘Did you get the text from [Leah]?’

I said.

‘Was it the one saying how lucky she is to help manage such an awesome team

of people?’ said [Tom].

‘No,’ I said. ‘It was the one about what the cleaners found in the toilet.’

[Tom] rigidified, eyes swivelling like every object in the room surveyed him.

‘What did they find?’ he said.

‘Guess,’ I said.

He leaned towards the low partition between our desks. ‘I don’t know,’ he

said. ‘What did they say they found?’

Looking over his shoulder, making him glance back, too, I said: ‘You know.’

But he shrugged. ‘I don’t,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t.

What do you mean, [Cam]?’

He angled his head so the ear was squarer to my face, imploring me to whisper,

but then [Sarah] came back groaning. [Tom] smiled at her though she wasn’t looking

at him. ‘What’s wrong, [Sarah]?’ he said, glancing at me. [fuck, that glance! that was

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it. subservience. supplication. it was glorious. is blackmail the only way to achieve

that?]

‘It’s nothing,’ said [Sarah]. ‘Probably just a cold, I hope.’

Sat down, she forced a round of coughing through her throat so that the last

few were only human barks. Under my desk, I rubbed my hands with sanitizer. After

the performance, she held her breath, one hand against her chest, and shook her

head. ‘Ooohhhhhhhhh, God. What’s wrong with me? What shall I do?’ she said.

‘You should go and get a drink of water,’ I said.

[Sarah] nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Worth a try.’ And she trotted towards the

kitchen, shaking her head for the others to see. ‘Would anyone like a cup of tea?’ she

said at the other end of the office, eagerly counted the rising hands as [Freeman]

watched her, then looked past her at me, and I scrawled something in my notepad.

In his cubicle [Freeman] had turned his back to the office again. He was

talking on the phone. On the targets board [Tom’s] name flashed amber. He saw me

looking at the board, and twisted around himself. He made a little sound, a whimper,

and started typing with the expression of a boy trying to erase a depraved Internet

history with parents knocking on his bedroom door.

Every so often, after watching a video on how to pick simple locks, I’d leave

things in his locker. First it was a wallet with £20 in, and I was delighted when, on

the first day, he took the £20 and left the wallet on the top of the lockers, and the

next day, went around the office asking if it belonged to anyone. Then it was a

magazine which included an article by a sex addict who wanked at work. Then I’d

sent him a photo of some girl’s pussy from an anonymous number saying, ‘guess who’,

and after a night’s flirting over text, I hinted that the pussy belonged to someone in

the office. This taught me a lot about who he considers romantically eligible, who he

thinks would be interested in him, especially when I saw his eyes dance over the

finance manager [Natasha’s] face with a sly smile as she talked to him, even though

that she’s married with two bairns. [cut/include: from another anonymous number I

text him that his father had had a stroke and that he should come home to

Basingstoke and say goodbye while there was time. he missed a couple days of work

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and when he came back in the office, after finding his father in excellent health, he

burst into tears. ‘who would do that?’ Sarah said. I hugged him. I felt every twitch of

his body, every sob in my ear. my appetite for that could never be satisfied—the taste

of having so much control over someone that you can tell them to do something, and

they just do it.]

[Tom] was blinking a lot. It had escalated too quickly. He needed to be

brought back to a state of deluded reassurance.

‘What are you doing over the weekend, [Tom?]’ I said.

He smiled as if embarrassed. ‘I’m going to a music festival,’ he said. ‘I managed

to get a press pass so I’ll be going backstage too.’

I asked him if that’s what he wanted to do in life.

‘I wish,’ he said.

I asked him what was stopping him.

‘I guess I don’t think my opinions are worth that much,’ he said. ‘I only got a

2:2.’

I said if it was his passion he should pursue it because it would be the only

way to feel free and happy in life; something like that.

‘It’s too risky,’ he said. ‘If I just work hard here it’ll be good in the end. And

besides, with managers like [Leah] and [Freeman], we’ve got it pretty good. They’re

very flexible. They allow me to be as creative as I want.’

I told him I’d read his blog of album reviews. I used the word fantastic. He

could really write, I said. Such insights! What imaginative angles! If that’s what made

him happy, I said, he should focus his efforts on that. His eyebrows met between his

glasses and fringe-line, eyes blinking. His jaw widened, a smile bitten straight.

‘I guess sometimes,’ he said, ‘I feel like I could be happier.’

Nodding, with my lips sympathetically inverted, I said, ‘But would you be able

to live in London still?’ His eyes glazed. He shrugged. ‘Because,’ I said, ‘this is where

you’ll need to be.’ He nodded. Before I could lure him further, [Freeman] stood on

our side of his glass door with a flickering smile.

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‘So,’ [Freeman] said, ‘I’ve just been on the phone with [Greg]’—the cluster

manager—‘and we need someone to head over and help run an event tonight in

Bloomsbury. I wouldn’t want to put any pressure on you, but it’s extremely

important. Some big potential clients that we can’t afford to miss. It would pay our

wages for a while, that’s for sure, maybe even a bonus, and who wouldn’t want that?’

[Tom] stood up. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said.

‘Good man,’ said [Freeman].

And [Tom] sat down.

After a moment, I said to him, ‘Besides, mate,’ but before I could finish,

[Freeman] said, ‘[Cam]. Can I have word?’

He continued typing on his computer when I went in and even after I’d sat

down, so I looked about the office, noticing the opened packet of luxury cookies and

framed picture of him with his dog on his desk, and the Keep Calm and Carry On poster

on the wall by the window at the back of the room. ‘Just had a chat with [Tom],’ I

said. ‘I think he’s thinking about leaving. He says the job’s not satisfying him

anymore.’ But [Freeman] didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned, rifled through a

cabinet, pulled out a piece of paper, and slid it over to me. Then he stood up and

looked out the window behind his desk. When I asked if he was firing me, [Freeman]

said: ‘Course not. We just feel that the position has become redundant. It’s

unnecessary for our plans going forward. There’s a payment if you read on.’ His hands

held each other behind his back—mock authority.

‘But I value the work I do here,’ I said, and [Freeman] nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and we appreciate your contribution. We didn’t imagine how

successful you were going to be. It’s quite alarming, to be honest. But we feel the

position is unnecessary for our plans going forward,’ he said, and when I asked him

why, he said, ‘I’ve got a meeting with [Greg] in a minute and so I can’t go into the

details. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.’ Still he didn’t turn around, and I watched

his neck, his shoulders sloped to one side, the side that bore a brittle collar bone,

broken often, as he drunkenly confided to me on a leaving-do drinks, from mountain

biking tumbles.

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‘What if don’t wish to leave,’ I said, picking up the dog picture.

‘That’s not how it works, [Cameron].’

His weakling’s shoulder blades jutted inside the non-iron/sweat-exacerbating

shirt, and I remembered when he waited for the company to scrap their policy of

providing London weighting before making a temp assistant long-term, and I

remembered also when he fired another administrator for stealing milk from the

kitchen to give to her senile/welfare-denied mother (which, I must admit, he learned

through the surveillance of yours truly), and I’d said, ‘How would it work after I told

the office and maybe a newspaper that I’m only employed here to snoop?’

His hands unclasped, arms folded across his chest, and his head shook.

‘So I believe there’s been a mistake on this letter,’ I said.

‘A mistake?’ he said.

‘I believe the payment number is incomplete.’

‘Is that right?’

‘I believe the decimal point is in the wrong seat, too. It should be at least two

places along.’

[Freeman] pocketed his hands, and finally turned around. He’d forgotten to

pluck a division between his eyebrows and rogue hairs revealed their natural

connection. When I looked at his brow and smiled, he covered it with his hand as if

scratching an itch, and sat down. With his other hand, he pointed his pinkie at me.

‘When you took the position I knew you were unhinged,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t realise

the full extent.’

‘You made the job, [Freeman],’ I said, placing his picture facedown.

‘That’s not the problematic here.’ He swivelled to look at the window again.

‘What are we talking about?’ I said, knowing it was about my arrest.

He shook his head.

‘Say it, [Freeman],’ I said.

He said nothing.

‘You can’t even look at me,’ I said, standing up.

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‘You’ll get what you want again, [Cameron],’ he said. ‘You can go now. You

don’t have to come back. We’d prefer it if you didn’t.’

Tearing the wrapping loudly, I took a cookie and left. Only once I’d shut

down my computer and filled my bag with stationery did I realise that my muscles

were swimming beneath the skin. ‘Is it your break?’ [Tom] said. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Doctor’s

appointment.’ He stood up, and pulled me into a hug. We linked like two bicycles

locked side by side. ‘Tonight,’ [Tom] said before we parted, ‘a load of my buddies are

going for a drink. It’d be great if you came along.’ Separated now, I couldn’t look at

him. ‘Your buddies,’ I said. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We’ve all been friends most of our lives,

and then it’s their friends from uni and my friends from uni. The whole gang!’ He

laughed. ‘That’s a lot of friends,’ I said. ‘Well, I’m an only child,’ said [Tom], ‘and my

parents are, too, so I had to make my own family.’ Staring at him, I knew that, even

if I were to try and thrust my fist against his nose to snap the glasses in the middle

so the lenses would splinter and maybe impale his eyes, my hand would only shatter

into infinite see-through pieces, shattering me along the arm, the shoulder, across

the chest, and down both legs, leaving the head trunkless to fall and crack against the

floor, and he’d stand there grinning idiotically, unscathed. ‘You’d be welcome

anyway,’ he said. ‘I think you’d particularly get on with [Abdul].’ Tears stung the

bottom lids of my eyes. ‘Why’s that?’ I managed to say. ‘Well, he’s just a great guy,’

[Tom] said. I nodded. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there.’ He made a high-pitched hum. ‘We

haven’t decided where to go yet, but what’s your number?’ he said, patting all his

pockets. ‘Don’t worry, [Tom],’ I said, ‘I’ve got your number. I’ll text you.’ He smiled.

As I passed the rows of desks each person looked up and smiled. [Freeman] glanced

up at the office then immediately back down at his desk. With a hand on the glass

door handle I turned around. ‘Everybody,’ I called, turning their heads. ‘You should

know that I was employed by [Freeman] to spy on you. Whatever you’ve told me, he

knows. Whatever you do on the phones he gave you, he knows. He knows

everything.’ A moment, their eyes tracing the air as if my words were hung there, and

then the simmer of laugher, which increased as I walked away. Looking back through

the glass: Outside our offices on Soho Square, a terraced building of brown-

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bricked mansions, I rolled a cigarette in the stink/din of roadworks and beeping

delivery vans and counted how many months of rent the severance package would

cover—at least four. At that moment the door I’d just left opened again and one of

the cleaners, [Daniela], stepped out, lifting a cigarette to her lips. We had spoken a

couple times before. We smiled at each other in passing. When you speak to her she

holds a calm smile and her voice comes out slowly and softly. After saying hello and

talking about mundane things—weather, etc.—I suggested we turn down a narrow

alley between two buildings. It was hard to hear her in the roadworks clamour, I said,

which was true, but it was not the reason why I suggested moving; in this tighter

scene we stood much closer, having to let people pass now and then, and I knew that

she was the perfect height for us to walk together with my arm around her shoulders.

She said, ‘I’m going to another job for the afternoon. It’s at the Bulgarian embassy.’

But I didn’t tell her why I wasn’t in the office, and with each time we moved to let a

person pass, me changing sides of the alley to stand next to her, she lowered her head

and turned away. Was she unnerved by my proximity/height/me? Did the cross that

dangled in the opening of her shirt speak warnings in her ear? [cut/include: A certain

asymmetrical dynamic’s tone rang between us and through me that I’d not heard

during my time with [Corina]. A badminton player for King’s, [Corina] matched and

maybe even dwarfed my silhouette. In bed I nestled into her breasts involuntarily.

After quitting badminton, her means of exercise were before-bed runs. Whether at

her old place in Fulham or mine wherever I happened to be that month, I didn’t like

her going out on her own so I wheezed behind her, a nominal precaution or

protection, though Christ knows what I’d do if we did run into trouble. Often I

imagine elegantly and explosively pummelling clumsy opponents in scuffles to get on

the tube, but I remember the instinctive jittery nausea of any kind of physical

altercation, and I wonder if I’d have the balls to do anything other than flinch and

flail and whimper alone afterwards. Is it because I don’t want people to see an actor

and think faggot/exploit me? Or is it some internalised stereotype of what makes a

northerner?] Stood in the middle of the alley, not a foot between my face and hers as

she kept trying to loosen a stray hair from the corner of her mouth, I looked at

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[Daniela’s] thick dark eyebrows and wondered if her armpits were smooth but dark

with the hair still thick beneath the skin; I wondered if she’s the kind that shaves her

pussy all over despite stubborn hair or whether she leaves the top patch untroubled

and just shaves the lips; I wondered if her arsehole was shaven, or waxed, whether it

was dark like the rings around her eyes, as Eastern Europeans do often have. Is she

on the pill? Does she have chlamydia? Would I have to wear a condom? How would

it go—fingers, mouths, cowgirl, missionary, doggy, the set menu? [cut/include: or

would she agree to peg me?] I said to her, ‘Aye, I wouldn’t blame you taking up

another job, not with having to clean up after [Tom] in there.’ And though I wasn’t

sure she understood all of what I said, she cracked her composure for a laugh that

blasted from her throat, like a crow/my mother. My mother would laugh like that

when I found her coddling [Sam] and would ask for a hug myself; she’d laugh at my

boyish needing of her. But I was a boy, and I did. ‘Maybe,’ she said, still smiling, ‘you

could come to mine for food tonight. I cook very well.’ She texted me her address.

She lives in Croydon. But I didn’t go. Croydon is too far away. Instead, I attended an

unofficial AA meeting in St Gabriel’s Church Hall in Pimlico, and intoned with the

lost and powerless, ‘I am useful only in service to God I am useful only in service

to God’. After that I decided against going to a pub in the half-wish of getting caught

by another struggling fiend and eliciting their pity, and I headed, with 45 minutes left

till my curfew, to Westminster Abbey. Once there I told the mousy woman at the

doors that I was ‘here for personal worship’, which allowed me to avoid the entrance

fee. In a creaky pew by a side wall I did try and find something substantial inside

myself, but before long I was on my phone watching a scene from A Canterbury Tale,

my father’s favourite film, where the Glue Man sharpens his scythe—so terrifically

sharp, I thought as a child, that it would be capable of impaling my soul. And soon

after I was trailing through clips of the movie that soaked my own childhood and

changed its shape forever—[either Mommie Dearest, Robocop, Ferris Bueller, Footloose—

pick one]. Bowed with the phone between my knees, I remembered for first time in

many years that I would creep downstairs each night for about a year when I was

younger and I’d masturbate to Lori Singer in Footloose, always delaying myself until

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that moment [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn7d_a0pmio] when she throws

her cowboy hat in the dusty air to start the tractors driving towards each other just

before Bonnie Tyler starts singing, which I would instinctively sing along to in my

head—and would continue singing along to, back in the streetlight glow of my bed

with my head turned to [Sam’s] face in the next bed, as still as if it were drawn—

because the TV had been on mute. Lori Singer, Lori Singer—synthesize the women

of my life and you’ll get Lori Singer.

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[SCREENSHOT OF EMAIL FROM ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT, ACCESSED SOLELY FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, 22 SEPTEMBER 2014]

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[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – NOVEMBER 2016 – PART THREE] “When did it start?

That what you’re asking, mate?” Ali pulls the corners of her mouth down. I’ve

not imagined these beds and their tubes and machines as mini spaceships until

now, with her. “It started when I couldn’t eat around my mum, I think. She’d eat

so fucking much, mate. We did a shop a week, or whatever, but we also went

to the back of the supermarket with bin bags, you know, and filled them with

all the bread and stuff they were chucking out. I remember I used to love doing

that. It was really exciting, mate, late at night, and Mum trying not look about

her all shifty, telling me to get a move on, probably where my stealing started

as well, now that I think about it, and anyway, the bread. We had bread with

every meal, mate. Rolls and rolls of it. It was another bit of cutlery for her, like,

dabbing it in beans, making bean sandwiches, cramming it in her mouth,

cramming it in like she was late for work, her throat all bulged, like, like the

bread was trying to find a way out but it was getting forced down, or

something. I felt like it was puke stuck in my throat trying to come out, you

know. I did puke once, a little, into me hand, then all of it in the sink. She didn’t

even notice, I don’t think, but she noticed my plate, full plate, so she’d shout at

me, and she’d hit me, and she’d even eat what was left of mine. Wasn’t like she

was fat or anything, no mate, she was fit, beautiful, rich-looking beautiful. Rich

blokes were always around her, until they learnt more about her. She had all

this energy. I picture her like some kind of leopard or panther or something.

People in the shops and on the street looked at her like she was some

crackhead, but it was just all the food she ate. In the middle of the night she’d

get up and run for about three hours, I swear to you. I’d hear her leave, you

know, and hear her come back, nearly morning. I just couldn’t stomach it, mate.

The whole thing. Like, if it was possible”—Ali reaches for the IV tube—“this is how

I’d get it in, you know, hook myself up, just pump it in, like a car, or an astronaut

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or something, like, frozen in those pods on their way to Jupiter, like, I could live

normal then, long as no-one knows about it, like, normal, you know.”

/

A clever, fierce, sarcastic girl

who I lived with for a year at uni, who started wearing denim dungarees and

dyed her armpit hair pink after changing from Bio Med to Creative Writing,

who’d say “let’s go pay for our coffees” when we’re already walking to the till,

who ate mushrooms and grapes dipped in hummus, whose weight fluctuated

depending on what kind of people she was hanging out with, who I tiptoed

around whenever she started to doubt science, who I kissed a couple times,

giggling, pissed, she’s emailed me, she’s finished a PhD in Poetry, she’s been

published in an important magazine, a poem that’s a rewriting of a Middle

English poem called ‘De Tribus Regibus Mortuis’. There are a few sentences

that explain the poem. “Miracles are a-priori proof of God only for those

already blessed with the faith that miracles are supposed to engender.” I

remember one time, sat with coffees by the Serpentine after seeing someone

at the Royal Albert Hall, I asked what her least favourite word was and she said,

“No particular word, but it’s the misuse of particular words. Like liberty.” Her

poem is called ‘Three Dead Kings.’

/

Today

I lay in bed for four hours pinching my bottom lip between my knuckles. It was

a warm, moreish pain, felt good. I binged on it. It was hard to stop. When I did

stop, it just hurt. I made myself a bowl of porridge with blueberries, ate it back

in bed.

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/

I watched two people pretending to be a teacher (man) and a student

(woman) fucking on PornHub to see if it would turn me on

It felt like watching the Grand National. I remember my mother putting a bet

on for Hiro and me when we were young. Hiro’s came in last. He cried. Mine

snapped its legs tripping over a hedge. Somehow I knew what that meant. I

never bet again, never watched it. This is what your brother intended. He

intended to rape me sexless, to be the one who finished me. He knew, too, that

for me to manage to fuck again would be to fuck in spite of him. So what I worry

about isn’t just that I’ll never fuck again, but that I’ll never fuck again for myself.

/

I have wondered whether

he did it because he knows we’re all vulnerable or because he thought I wasn’t.

I hope, really hope, it’s the second one. I hope he doesn’t understand the

vulnerability of life. But would it be easier for me to handle if I knew his

reasoning was wrong? Would it make a difference?

/

What happens to me isn’t just what happens to me

What am I doing? Is any of this making me better? It feels like telling pain does

nothing to heal it. But it’s not just my pain. This is no confession. It’s explaining

by example. What if in telling the pain, you find the cure, the cure within in the

wound? Of course this is about me. So what?

/

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Ali looks woozy

I ask if she’s feeling okay. “Yeah mate. It just wears me out a little. It’s not bad.”

“There’s only forty minutes left. I know it’s tough.” “How do you know?” “Well, I

know the change of blood levels can make you feel light-headed.” “So you

don’t really know.” “I suppose I don’t. No.” I watch the blood flowing through

the tubes. She watches me. “Sorry,” she says. I tell her it’s okay. I would’ve been

able at one time to make this sound true. I pretend to adjust something on the

control pad. She smiles because she knows I’m pretending. I feel like she

knows me already better than most people who have for years. Somehow she

sees everything I do, or don’t. “How long is the waiting list?” she says. “It can

be two years.” She nods. “Three. Maybe longer.” “It’s not bad.” I nod. “Is anyone

here getting one?” “Yeah. Couple.” “From family and friends?” I nod. Ali’s

finger, kind of lazily, tries to move a hair that’s tickling her face. She can’t get at

it in any delicate way, it’s too light, so she scrubs at her face with the palm of

her hand. This exhausts her. “Is dad an option for you?” I say. Ali laughs. “I’m

trying to come to terms with the possibility, mate, yeah.” “Are you two close?”

“You tell me.” “How would I know?” “You’d know better than me.” “He’s never

been here. You’ve never even mentioned him.” “Him? That’s what you lot call

it?” “I don’t know his name.” “Goes by Grim Reaper, doesn’t he?” “Why’s he

called that?” “Fuck knows, mate. Just grim isn’t he? Dunno what reaper means.

Why’s he a reaper, you think?” “You keep asking me questions like I know him,

Ali. I’ve not met him.” “Well, you come close to him enough, don’t you?” “Not

once. I would’ve told you if he was here.” “I wouldn’t want to know, mate.”

“Really?” “Fuck no. I’d want him to just have his way with me. I wouldn’t want to

know it’s coming. I’d want it quick and painless.” “What? He’s done that to you

before?” Ali laughs. “Not yet. But a couple mates of mine. My sister. Couple

people here.” “Here!” “Yeah. You must’ve seen him, like, pass through here a

tonne of times.” “I don’t believe this. What does he look like?” “I dunno, mate.

Tall. Big black cloak. Sword thing.” “Sword thing?” “Yeah.” “Are you saying

sword?” “Yeah.” “Who are you talking about, Ali?” “Who are you talking about?”

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“I’m talking about your dad.” “What’s my dad got to do with it?” “That’s who I’m

asking about. What did you think I said?” “Dead.”

/

List #3

A Sun Salutation every morning. 20 minutes of meditation every morning.

Making my bed every morning. Exclusively using vegan, paraben-free

cosmetic products. A weekly facemask, bubble bath. Calligraphy drills. Listing

my gratitude. Reviewing compliments received. Watching the sunset.

Watching the sunrise. Drafting meal plans for myself, managing,

supplementing, recording daily and weekly nutrient intake. Talking through

the toilet mirror to myself, “Today, I am prepared. Today, I am powerful. Today,

I am confident.” Spending one day a month making one room in my flat the

best room it can be, tidying, ordering, reorganising, finding art on eBay.

Starting a monthly standing order of £10 from my current account to a savings

account for a holiday. These are things I’ve done to make myself feel better that

haven’t worked.

/

Vaccination

The immune system produces antibodies when it artificially encounters an

infectious disease. The antibodies are designed to fight this threat. They exist

in abundance only because the body encounters the threat. I was walking

through Victoria Park last October. The trees were just about to let their leaves

go. They were incredibly full of leaves. It was bright, early morning. I was

rushing to work, a hypoxic thickness to my eyes. It’s more like the memory of a

dream than a memory. There was no heat in the sunshine. A man in a suit

walked in front of me. In front of him a man and woman sat next to each other

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on a bench. There was a pram next to the bench. The second man’s face was

red, lumpy from rosacea. The woman had a long scar down her temple where

she must have had a plate fitted for a broken eye socket. They wore black and

grey tracksuits, yellow stripes on the woman, red on the man. The woman held

a baby. This man was watching the first man. The woman pulled her top down

a little, moved the baby to her breast. I suppose the man in the suit couldn’t

trust himself not to look because he turned his head to the grass. But the man

on the bench knew the other man was thinking about it, watched him. “Ow!”

the woman said. The man in the suit glanced over. I suppose he couldn’t help

himself. The man on the bench stood up. “Get a good look, you fucking perv?

Yeah, keep walking. I’ll beat the fuck out of you.” I don’t think it’s how the other

man acted. The threat was not the other man. It’s what women go through

naturally that made this man do that.

/

Vulvodynia

I first felt it after having sex with your brother. We were drunk. He could get

aggressive when he was drunk. The morning after, I felt kind of torn. This had

happened before with guys with more incompatible genitals but it hadn’t

lasted this long, a week. My GP said cystitis, confidently. Antibiotics, creams.

But the constant feeling of tearing and re-tearing continued. My gynaecologist

said lichen sclerosus. I was referred to another gynaecologist who decided

D&C, biopsy. The cotton bud swab test made me actually gasp, tears in my

eyes. Not necessarily from the pain. The results showed “non-specific

inflammation”. I dreamed once that your brother’s come was acid. I mentioned

acid in a consultation. The second gynaecologist remembered vulvodynia. The

name lifted a little of the pain. “There are pills, but you could expect dry mouth,

nausea, constipation, dizziness, an unlikely success rate. We don’t like to

prescribe these pills, and there are creams, but they can also cause vulvodynia.

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It might last a few more weeks, a few years. Some women have it for the rest of

their lives.” Before the next times me and you had sex I soaked a cotton ball in

local anaesthetic, placed it between my labia. I went to another doctor. He

wore a bow tie with little clouds on it. “Honestly, Corina, the female anatomy is

a total mystery.”

/

When we stop laughing, Ali goes on

“I don’t think he was so bad, me Dad. I was only young, like, five, or six, and I

remember I thought he must be bad at the time because of how I remember

my mum reacting to him. See what your bastard father’s doing now. This is just

like your bastard father. All that shit. I got to think it was this power trip thing.

By him, you know, like, deep down he loved us depending on him, and loved

it when we depended on him so much that we got nothing because he got

nothing, but then, you know, I realised that’s just what Mum told us. And I

remember things about him. Proper things. One day he came home fired for

fighting on the job. I remember he still had on that yellow vest. Just how he was

on the sofa. And us all looking at him. The TV playing on in the dark. I just think

it’s all backward, mate. He didn’t love it. It wasn’t power. Not everything’s just

power shit. He just thought that’s what he had to do. So it got to the point,

basically, Mum said she didn’t need him, we didn’t need him. She went all

fucking Beyoncé on him and took us off. Fair enough, like, you’re an

independent women, but you’re an independent woman on benefits.” “Your

mum wouldn’t have left him for no reason. Just because he was your dad

doesn’t mean you weren’t better off without him.” “Maybe. I would’ve liked to

have known I was better off without him, like.”

/

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Man on train

“How often does she give you blowjobs, mate? Yeah, but how often, like, last

week, month, year, what? Don’t get me wrong, mate, I like spending time with

her but she’s a class-one cunt. She doesn’t speak English at all really. Not well.

But not well. She knows what cunt means, like. I get why we voted Brexit. Or,

fuck, why I should’ve voted Brexit. Nah, I was remain. Did you actually vote

Brexit? Gahahahahahaha. I love you, bruv. You’re everything wrong with the

country and everything right, too. I might not be getting a blowjob, but what

the fuck. It’s just classic duck face and strut away like a cunt. I mean, don’t get

me wrong, like, sometimes I do think you’re not as much of a cunt as I thought

you were but that’s just my way of saying I love you. I think it’s one third her

gender, one third her nationality, and one third I don’t know what the fuck. All

right. Well, yeah, thanks, bruv. Next time you’re off, we’ll arrange something

fun. Yeah. Peace.”

/

RE: Tenancy Renewal

Hi Corina,

Thank you for your email and confirmation.

Your mentioned points have been taken into consideration, we will liaise with

the landlord and get back to you as soon as possible.

The renewal addendum is with you now waiting to be signed via DocuSign,

please expect this email from Josh Mills.

If you require anything else, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,

Anika Thompson

Residential Lettings Administrator

/

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Writing an email

I would break into your brother’s flat, hold a knife to him. No, it would be a

shard of mirror. He’d plead. I wouldn’t listen to him. I’d hand him a piece of

paper, a pen. I’d tell him what to say. “There’s nothing I want to say except that

I did it. I’m sorry, Corina. This is the only way to make it right.” Then I’d tell him

to put the paper on the kitchen counter. He’d plead, say no one would believe

that he stabbed himself to death. I’d say, “I know.” There’d be a still moment.

He’d try to get past me, but I’m too quick and he’s too scared of the shard, a

shard as long and thick as my forearm. He’d start to cry, crocodile tears. I’d

laugh, step closer to him, the shard pointed at his throat. He’d step back. He’d

reach the window. He’d plead. I’d tell him to open the window. He’d plead,

open the window. I’d tell him to sit on the windowsill. He’d plead, sit on the sill.

I’d tell him to put his arms outside, hold them outstretched at his sides. He’d

put his arms outside, plead. I’d come close enough to drive the shard into his

throat. I wonder if I could push him. I wonder if I could push him if I could get

away with it. I wonder if I do want to push him out a window if I could get away

with pushing him out a window. I wonder what I would feel after pushing him

out a window. I wonder what I would feel after pushing him out a window if I

could get away with pushing him out a window. In films, wronged women do

this. They’ve been stripped of power, then become incredibly powerful,

masters of their lives. In life, at all times, we are not quite either, or maybe not

quite both. But what if I did? I think I would feel empty, hollow, but I imagine

this emptiness, this hollowness, is folded over itself. I will be able to feel the

folds.

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED 25 SEPTEMBER 2014] Happening Blog Sketch #4 – 23/09/14

Not sleeping well. Throughout the night my mind whirrs. The streetlamp is too

bright for my crooked blinds, my head can’t lay right, my shoulders stiffen, and hot

tired tears sting the corner of my eyes while I shift positions between checking the

hurrying clock on my phone and imagining roadworks clanging outside. As far I know

I’ve not slept, but it’s at dawn when I recall scraps of hysterical dreams that I realise

I must’ve slept a little after all, even if I don’t feel rested. Last night, I rang the

hospital to ask if Sam was still asleep but I couldn’t ask and I heard the man on the

other end say, ‘Honestly, who would prank call a hospital?’ Then I swiftly drank a

bottle of wine, but I kept waking in bedsheets twisted. Deep into the early hours I

woke—or at least I found myself awake—with blood smudges on the pillow; I must

have been picking at my stitches. Maybe I should steal the head-cone from next

door’s Alsatian, I thought, wondering if the wounds on my face are infected. Google’s

pictures of globby gashes relieved me that mine weren’t so bad but also instilled in

me the dread of what these might become, or are already: maybe it’s the kind of

infection that works inwards, tunnelling evil straight to the immune system. That

night I think I dreamt about collapsing onstage like Tommy Cooper, like a drowsy

circus bear, and the audience thinking it’s part of the act, still laughing, and it must’ve

been the weirdly womanly shrieking from the fox den in the hedges by the rusted

playground that woke me, because suddenly I stood at the window looking to the

dark yellow street for them. There aren’t many foxes out and about in Darlington, a

rare spectacle, and when I moved down here to London, I bored everyone by gushing

about them. Their beauty, I said, and would still say, but now privately, silently, is

because of their rural descent, their incongruity, and because of their moxie, the way

they’ll just stop in the street and stare at you, only trotting off if you came too close.

Soon enough I stopped gushing, but whenever I come across one, my breath will stop

like I’m watching something I’m not supposed to see, a secret unearthed. That’s why

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I went out last night. The plan was just to see a fox. It was an hour or so after my

curfew. Spotlighted by streetlamps I went from my building through the estate

towards the playground with my shadows inexhaustibly jumping and sidestepping

around me over the black asphalt, trying to be in three places at once. There were no

lights on in any of the squat houses, and I felt the chill of eyes peering at me between

curtains—like I’ve done myself at furtive neighbours coming home from late-shifts

or drug-runs—just when a man in a grey hoodie appeared from a walkway between

two blocks. Instinctively I ducked behind a car, and watched the man through both

door windows. Sleepless nausea had turned into jumpy exhilaration. Once he’d

rounded another corner I darted from car to wall to shadow in pursuit. He slipped

through a passageway and turned left through the carpark and into the road dead-

ended by the playground. Behind the bushes around the carpark I could see him

facing the side of the tower, imprinting, with a spray can hiss, in red, a circle, spokes,

and severed heads—but one less around the wheel than before. As the man finished,

he turned. In that moment the streetlight caught his face, which I glimpsed, with a

cold slab of dead landing in my gut. Could he really have been [Corina’s] brother

[Hiro]? The notion alone seemed preposterous, but coupling it with the fancy that

I’d seen myself in the severed heads brought both these notions up to the point of

feasibility. And then what of the reducing heads, one a week? A countdown? To

what? From fright or fury, I don’t know which, my throat sent out a shriek. He turned

again, but I couldn’t get a good look at him. For all I knew, he was [Hiro]. Once I

had gone drinking with him and his friends. What I lacked in wisecracking banter I

made up for with some kind of feigned northern no-nonsense aplomb, and they

accepted me for that. In the smoking pen at the end of the night [Hiro] was called a

Chink and had to respond violently. On our way back after [Hiro] had been knocked

on his arse and told to stay there, which he did, we sat together in a booth at the back

of a Turkish grill and I’d told him it was all right to cry. We swapped seats so his

back was to the rest of the place, and he did cry, very gently, so gently I could’ve

watched him for hours. He made me promise to keep it from [Corina], and I did.

From then on there had been tenderness between [Hiro] and I, and often we went

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to the pub and he’d reveal to me the vulnerability that both Corina and their mother

found embarrassing. When his girlfriend or housemates weren’t around he practised

Kintsugi—mending broken crockery with gold glue—and one afternoon we bought

some bowls from an Oxfam, cracked them ourselves with hammers in my flat, and

then put the pieces together again, the scars shining. But all this prowling/lurking last

night had set my mind in a lower beastly mode: seeing [Hiro]—but was it [Hiro]?

could it be?—as only an invader/aggressor, piecing together his plan to play with and

maybe even kill me, I mimicked again the drill-through-metal din of a fox. He took

a step towards me—a gesture of curiosity that spurred me on—and even though he

stepped through the streetlight so briefly that I still couldn’t say for sure that it was

[Hiro], I was all but convinced that it was him. So when I gnashed and I shook the

bush I hid behind, he looked ready to shit his knickers and bolted, and I felt capable

of tearing at my own flesh with my teeth. But then he vaulted the playground gate,

dipped under the steel slide glistening moon and vanished in the maze of lanes and

houses. He was gone, the foxes had been spooked, and I felt silly, running pointlessly

to bed. Pointless because I lay awake for hours as that that very scene paraded

garishly behind my eyelids as I felt a little nauseous, guessing indigestion or acid

reflux, wondering at the chances of stomach cancer or ulcer or the beginnings of that

male hysterical pregnancy from Grey’s Anatomy or a twisted intestine with agony and

vomiting ahead; pointless, too, because this new type of surreptitious sleep was only

brought to light with dawn, actual awakening, and the memory of a dream so vivid

that now the elaborate veneer of life seems faintly ridiculous. [Hiro] and I had

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happened upon a den by the rank track that runs along the tees from Broken Scar

weir, and when we’d parted the shrubs behind a chestnut tree, we found a minute fox

cub, whimpering, unfed. We were going to save it. But I don’t know if we did. Are

dreams always incomplete?

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[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – DECEMBER 2016 – PART ONE] Swords

There’s a sword in the abdomen of both Christianity and Zen. At school I read

an essay called ‘Zen and Swordsmanship’ by Suzuki. The Zen sword is “the kind

of sword that Christ is said to have brought among us.” It is “not just for bringing

peace mawkishly cherished by sentimentalists.” It “performs automatically its

function of justice, which is the function of mercy.” I ask my mother about this

over the phone. I am sat in a few inches of cold water in the bath, pulling the

water gently against my vulva. She says, “I don’t know about that sword. I know

about the sword in Mahayana from what my mother told me. It symbolises

wisdom. The Bodhisattva Manjushri holds this sword. You see him holding a

sword. It is on fire. The fire represents transformation, as always, so the sword

on fire is transformation by wisdom, by cutting through world and yourself to

no-where, no-self. Do you know those ideas? That is what she told me. My

mother. She told me often. Why do you ask, Corina-chan?” I say, “No reason.”

/

“So you said you’ve got a brother, yeah?”

“Yeah. Hiro.” Ali laughed. Her blood was getting cleansed again beside her. I’d

come in early to see her. I sat by the machine. “He’s younger than you?” she

said. I nodded. “He’s your mum’s favourite?” “I don’t think our mum has

favourites.” “Course she does. All mums have favourites.” “No, they don’t.”

“They do, mate. I was my mum’s. I was older than me sister. Still am, like,

actually. Getting even older. But she gave her the boot even earlier than she

did me. My sister couldn’t hack it. She was too young for that.” “I don’t know.

Most mothers I speak to say the whole idea of favourites with their children

goes out the window. It’s all love at the end of the day, they say.” “That’s

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bollocks. Far as I’m concerned, mate, love’s all about favourites. You always

end up loving someone a little more, little less. It’s good. It’s the whole point.

There’s no point to anything if you don’t choose one thing over the other.” “But

I think it’s different with mothers.” “But does your mum have a favourite, mate,

like, really?” “Sure, it’s me.” Ali laughed. Her arm jerked, pulled on the needle

in her fistula. She winced, hasn’t gotten used to it. “And you’re older than me,

right?” she said. I nodded. “You must’ve had people asking about it, then.”

“Yeah. I have. You, too?” “Not anymore, mate.” “Why’s that?” “Well, I did, I

mean, I was going to have one. Didn’t work out.” “Oh.” Ali nodded, shrugged.

We nodded in silence. “I think if I had to give birth,” Ali said, “I’d fucking die.” I

laughed. “I reckon you’d be good, though,” she said. “I reckon you’d be quiet.

Not make a fuss, like, just power through.” “I don’t know about that,” I said. “But

you ever wondered what you’d be like?” “No,” I said, “not recently.” But now,

in the break room, Ali gone home, a few minutes before my shift starts,

listening to the kettle boil, yes, I’m wondering about myself lying there with the

midwife between my legs. My mother’s hips taking revenge on me like I had

with her. I’m imagining myself saying it’s too much. It’s not right. No. I won’t do

that. I won’t. There has to be another way. My knees would come together. The

midwife does what she’ll have to do. She’ll have to tell me to stop thinking this

way. I know she’ll think I’m unable to give birth, that I’ll need an “active

intervention.” She’ll think I’m not meant for it. I’ll feel that I’m useless, that my

body has failed me. I’ll let her hold my legs apart. She’ll ask for the forceps. I

will be surprised again at how big they are. I imagine I’ll cry now. Can’t she see

how much I hate this? She’ll push the forceps up inside me. By now I wouldn’t

have thought about what your brother did to me in years, I don’t think, but then

I will. I’ll be back in it. Held down. Naked. Blood, semen, sweat, shit, stale

breath, amniotic fluid. Ashamed, kind of. Angry, kind of. Too late. Nothing,

gone, no way to get away, can’t. Fucked up. I will not be there anymore. They

can do what they want with me, this filthy slaughtered animal I look down on

from the ceiling, this faulty birth machine a real proper precious person comes

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out of. I will have lost a lot of blood. The midwife will say something polite like,

“Sorry” or, “We’re nearly there” because she can see that I’m in trouble. It will

make me want even more to close up, give up, die, no, just rip it out of me, get

your hands out of there, let me wash my hair, brush my teeth, but I’ll know it

will make sense for her to say a thing like that, hate myself for thinking she

shouldn’t say it. What doesn’t make sense is for your brother to have said that,

“Oops. Sorry, petal.” Who was he talking to? It can’t have been me. I couldn’t

get away from it so I got away from myself. I got away from myself but I couldn’t

get back. I wasn’t there. Who was the condom for? Himself, maybe. Protecting

against disease. Against pregnancy, evidence, a tie. But if it’s so I didn’t get

pregnant, who was that for, him or me? Was it care for me? Was it some kind

of compensation? That would explain the politeness, I suppose, the apology.

But no, that still isn’t enough. I know it will never be enough. I will never know.

I will never know what this stain is. I will never be able to clean it off.

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED 1 OCTOBER 2014] Happening Blog Sketch #5 – 30/09/14

Laird expelled me from rehearsal. He’s a short man, too short for a successful career

on stage, with fragile wrists, and I imagine, if he could, he’d have prosecco and

strawberries every breakfast. He said to me: ‘You’re not revealing the character,

[Cameron Struth]’—he tends to use full names—‘but merely disguising yourself.’ He

led me to the side of the stage and said, ‘Let young [Jamie Brunner] take over for

now, but you’ll have to leave, I’m afraid, because I suspect he’ll be distracted by your

contempt and any success of his will enhance that contempt, I imagine, and, well, the

gash, [Cameron Struth], that alone, good God.’ There was a lot of talk about the

wound above my eye. [Porify] says I should stop picking at it if I want to keep

working. [Sofya/Soyna] says she can smell it. Without speaking I went to leave, but I

couldn’t find my overcoat in the cloakroom. When I asked reception if they’d seen

someone steal a black overcoat, the girl with fluorescently shellacked fingernails,

whose principal expression is one of disgust and disbelief, said, ‘I saw someone take

a black overcoat from their locker and walk away.’ I felt like squeezing her windpipe

till she squeaked. What followed was a week of very little sleep and waking dreams

of [Corina] and [Hiro] knocking on my door and very much weed—Double Fun, a

crossbreed of two Pakistani indicas, guaranteed, as Blue, the cousin of my

Northumbria dealer, said, to ‘iron me the fuck out’—and of negotiations with

Sainsbury’s customer service, inquiring into how many Listerine bottles I could have

delivered for £150, because, if I do have to sequester myself from what I’ve decided

must be [Hiro’s] revenge plot, I figured I best stock up. These distractions calmed

me, and a couple of times I got close to sleeping, but one thing made my nerves

clatter together: every few hours I’d get a call from a withheld number. On the other

side of that call I knew there awaited a voice bearing only hatred and violence. It rang

again as I was rolling the last of the weed, again Withheld, but at this point my mind

was so whisked into bubbles that I felt a kind of empty invulnerability and I

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answered, deciding to get it over with and have it out. But on the other end was [Rory

Gloag], a friend from what was left of our hometown group. When we were younger,

[Rory]’s notable aspect was a precocious appreciation for dark satire—South Park,

Brass Eye, Monkey Dust, etc.—and in this vein, he’d deflect any moment of sincerity

with irony. Then, after his particular method of avoiding failure—not genuinely

trying and thus not genuinely failing, a self-preserving self-sabotage, just like This

had left him with several failed exams, no prospect of attending a redbrick university

and the promise only of retail work, benefits, occasional stints of homelessness,

infinitely respawning unwanted children, diabetes, syphilis, and suicidal tendencies,

or as he thought, and so he buckled down, mobilised his considerable intellect and

would talk about South Park’s critique of neoliberalism at a party without a twitch of

irony. He read Infinite Jest. Though literature became his mode of self-expression by

sixth form, he had sometimes preached to our despised self-styled Lost Generation,

in a moment of rare but not infrequent zeal, about the nobility and significance of

acting, and whenever I had some career news to flaunt online I’d anticipate his

approval specifically [cut/incude: wondering sometimes if it wasn’t those initial

sentiments that made me see drama as anything more than a route through school or

an easy way to get praised and be seen as special. how did I come to love it, when the

first time I tried, my class laughed, embarrassed, and I hated every single one of

them?]. But at university I’d managed to seduce his girlfriend, [Daisy-May Moffatt],

who temporarily and secretly left him for me, which I knew [Rory] knew, and about

which we never talked about and didn’t much after. Even now it wasn’t a personal call.

He was calling to ask if I could rescue him from Hay’s Galleria, where he was detained

by their security for an indiscretion he didn’t want to describe over the phone. He

called me by his older brother’s name, [Kier], indicating that only a family member

could authorise the release, that the totalitarian interning him was in earshot, and

that I had to pretend to be his brother. Pulling open my blinds, surprised briefly to

find daylight, I said, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Please,’ he said [cut/include: and then I

wondered if saving him would somehow save me]. Before opening the door to the

makeshift cell, a security guard stalled. ‘You’re not his brother, are you?’ ‘Of

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course I am,’ I said. ‘I’m only a few years older, but I practically raised [Rory]. Our

father was killed in Afghanistan.’ ‘Why’re you so much darker then?’

‘Darker?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘What—personally?’ I said. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

‘Well, I might have been adopted,’ I said. ‘So you—’ He shook his head. ‘Look,

he’s barred, okay?’ ‘But our mother is paraplegic,’ I said, ‘and The Body Shop

branch makes her foot cream especially.’ ‘Oh, fuck, I don’t care,’ he said, pulling

open the door, and there was [Rory], sat on a stool, chin rested on his fist, and his

mouth horseshoed. He was staring at the ceiling, and for a moment he seemed not

to notice us. Then he looked forward and stood up and said hello, talking out the

side of his mouth, just like he did when he was a secretive, sarcastic lad whose parents

had hated each other more than they loved him and [Kier] and his sister, [Nell], the

first girl my own age that I saw naked after accidentally unlocking the bathroom door

from the outside and bursting in on her just as she stepped out the shower. [Rory]

wore the same petrol station glasses as I remembered him wearing as a boy and

through university, but he dressed differently now. The only way I can describe it is

that he looked like some kind of shepherd. He said he’d buy me a drink in thanks.

My phone had rung twice since I’d been out, both times Withheld. ‘I don’t know,’ I

said. ‘What else have you got to do?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘I’m not suggesting

we gad about till dawn, [Cam].’ ‘What do you mean, cad about?’ ‘Gad.’

‘Oh.’ ‘Or do you want to come back to mine?’ ‘Where do you live?’

‘Putney.’ ‘I don’t know, man.’ ‘What it is? You have a curfew or something?’

I laughed. He laughed. We laughed. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, then,’ he said. ‘There’s

literally—and I literally mean literally—no reason not to.’ On the way to London

Bridge, I let him ‘adumbrate’, as he said, the situation he’d got himself into. He and

his girlfriend [Selena] had been shopping, initially for no particular reason and then

for potential Christmas presents, but she’d left on account of ‘dysmenorrhea’, which

means menstrual cramps, I learnt, after [Rory’s] clarification, and then, before leaving

the galleria himself, he’d gone into a Superdrug to buy something ‘nugacious’, he said,

like gum. It was busy and he was caught in the self-service checkout queue. When he

finally got to the machines, at each stage of ringing the gum through, the screen said,

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‘Please wait for help’, and on the fourth time, with the assistant scuttling around the

other clueless customers and his irritation now ‘ingravescent’, [Rory] smashed the

screen with his fists and tussled with the security guard. As he told me this, [Rory’s]

wayward eyebrow was halfway towards his hairline. ‘I wasn’t myself,’ he said, holding

the door for me as I walked into the din and fried food/fusty smell of the Bunch of

Grapes. Three rounds down and the little news we had to announce about our lives

was already familiar to the other through bits of online self-exhibition. [Rory] asked

me about the wound. A section of the stage, I told him, the door behind which

[Raskalnikov] hides after the murder, had fallen onto me. He asked about the smell,

and I assured him it was ointment. For something to do we went to the smoking area.

The cold sunshine reflected down onto us from The Shard. For a while the sun acted

like a third member of our conversation, and our being in it meant we didn’t have to

talk to each other. But the silence between two people in person can be tolerable for

only so long, so I said: ‘What is The Shard?’ ‘Nowt,’ said [Rory], the drink sagging

his mouth, talking in what was now an especially northern accent. ‘I think it’s just

there, y’know.’ ‘Have you been up it, like?’ I said, realising I was speaking

preposterously northern in kind. ‘Nah. But I read that foxes were living in the

stairwell during its construction.’ ‘So foxes have been up it but we haven’t?’

‘Their eyes are ad astray,’ said [Rory]. ‘But I’m not bothered. Are you bothered?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not really bothered about anything that’s in London. I hate London.’

‘Well, I’m vacating,’ [Rory] said. ‘I’m fucking off. Soon as I can. Cities are

penitentiaries, [Cam], and the captives are synchronously the turnkeys.’ ‘Is that

from a film?’ I said. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it from My Dinner with Andrew?’

‘No. I don’t think so. I just made it up,’ said [Rory], adding: ‘It’s the arable I miss,

y’know. And the down-to-earth folk. Folk up north really are friendlier, aren’t they?’

‘But where’d you go?’ I said. ‘Solus Deus shit,’ he said, I think. ‘Presently I can’t

think of anywhere.’ ‘And what’ll you do?’ I said as Scarlet O’Hara, clearing my

throat after because [Rory] didn’t seem to get the reference. ‘Pedagogy,’ he said,

nodding solemnly. ‘I feel very strongly about it. I think we should give something

back. Volunteer our talents. Like, you should just do Brecht. All you should do is

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Brecht. Seriously.’ In the pub a football match came on the TV, and blokes swarmed

the place. [Rory] led me to a bar he’d heard about in Bermondsey. Walking past The

Shard we talked about [Matty Doyle], the bong-eyed lad from school who was

technically popular but who the popular kids allowed in their clique only in order to

bully him. He’d become an investment banker, already on £45K. He had a studio flat

in Camden. [Rory] had seen a picture of [Matty] in his flat and in the background

there was a personal balcony and a flat-screen TV with a Skybox. [Matty] was a rat

so trapped in luxury, we concluded, that he’d forgotten he was a rat. We laughed. We

were getting along and I was skittish with the possibility of salvaging a friendship.

[Rory] kept saying ‘You’re a nice guy, [Cam], always were.’ On our fifth pint, in what

looked like an old speakeasy with a rusted copper door on Bermondsey Street, I felt

like I could hug [Rory] and we could get drunk enough that he’d come home with

me and sleep in my bed, and I said, ‘I’m not so nice, really.’ ‘What?’ said [Rory]

glancing over at me, then back to group of people laughing and leaning over at each

other across a table on the other side of the bar. ‘To be honest,’ I started saying, but

stopped. ‘What?’ he said, turning his head to me. ‘Yeah. I don’t know. I

feel like,’ I said, but stopped again. ‘It’s the city,’ [Rory] said. ‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Well, not really the city, but,’ I said, but stopped. ‘I feel like that sometimes,’

he said. ‘Yeah? Like when you’re out at a place like this and you know you should

want to be here but you see all these fucking people,’ I said, but stopped, and

rephrased, ‘but it’s like you’re kind of only thinking about how to get home,’ I said.

But [Rory] just stared at me, and didn’t say anything. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘when I’m alone,

I need,’ I said, but stopped, and rephrased, ‘or when I’m alone, you know, I want to

be,’ I said, but stopped, and rephrased, ‘or when I see them,’ I said, pointing across

[Rory’s] face at the table on the other side of the bar, ‘I get so fucking,’ I said, but

stopped, and rephrased, ‘I mean, I don’t know, but I’m really starting to worry that

if this keeps up,’ I said, but stopped again, and rephrased, ‘like, sometimes I get

thinking that I don’t even care if I see anyone or talk to anyone,’ I said, and managed

(nearly) to finish this time, saying, ‘just as long as they say something positive about

me, and then I can be with myself and be happy, and can forget about,’ I said, and

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covered my mouth with the glass and the drink pouring into it. [Rory] nodded. He

said, ‘I know exactly what you’re talking about.’ I looked up, and said: ‘Yeah?’

‘Absolutely. It seems to me that the solution to this particular sentiment is perhaps

a restatement of Wittgenstein’s notion of what is unutterable in fact inheres

unutterably in what can be uttered, but, crucially, reconceived in social terms, which

is to say, in subjective terms, in Jungian terms of training oneself to attain the

capacity for spontaneous acceptance of the unspeakable shadow of the self that runs

through the innermost part of all of us. Does that make sense?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.

I think so.’ [Rory] nodded. ‘Just something to keep in mind,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be

fine, mate.’ I looked at the ground and rubbed my nose. He turned to the table across

the bar, and added, ‘Just nipping,’ and pointed to the toilet. When he came back we

stood in silence, performing contentment to mask our potent unease, and I tried to

finish my drink quickly but not noticeably quickly while rehearsing excuses to leave

in my head. Then my phone rang. It was a withheld number. [Rory] put down his

empty glass. ‘What are you doing now, then?’ he said, meaning, How are you getting

home? ‘We should do something,’ I said. ‘What? Like what?’ ‘I don’t

know.’ ‘Well, it takes me an hour to get back.’ ‘What else have you got to

do?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Got a big meeting with the boss on a Saturday

morning?’ ‘No,’ he said, and looked at the door. ‘Right, then,’ I said. ‘So

let’s do something.’ ‘What’s today?’ [Rory] said. ‘Friday.’ ‘No,’ he said.

‘What’s the date?’ Counting up from the arrest, I said, ‘The 30th.’ ‘I heard

about this band playing in Hackney,’ he said. ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘What do you

want to do, then?’ [Rory] said, looking at the door again. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Let’s go

see what it’s like.’ I didn’t want to be alone. At home I could do what I wanted, talk

to whoever I wanted as anyone I wanted to be, but while I wouldn’t be alone in one

way, I’d be alone in another, greater way. I didn’t know how to be with [Rory] now,

or with anyone, but the only thing to do was to do something. To be honest, I just

didn’t think, or care, if I was caught breaching my curfew. So we took a bus from

somewhere off Fleet Street for Hackney with the sun lower but shooting its shine

between the buildings as if it were a spotlight. By now the pints had had a mighty

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effect on me, tautened my nerves. Every minute or so I felt my phone vibrating in

my pocket, but when I looked at it, expecting Withheld, there was nothing, no missed

call, only a screen as blank as the face of someone just about to realise that you’ve

been talking to them. It was obvious to me that I was being taunted, and probably

followed. [Hiro] wasn’t on the bus, but what if he’d employed someone to tail me?

Two rows behind us, a couple sat bitterly beside each other. Ostensibly it was a recent

squabble that caused their frostiness, but I know the coiled concentration of

someone in pursuit when I see it. Next to them a woman’s burka-framed eyes slid

from me to outside to the couple to me before I turned and asked [Rory], ‘Has that

couple behind been following us? Don’t look,’ I said, but [Rory] twisted his head

around and back again inside a second, and I closed my eyes as he said: ‘An increased

effort towards miscegenation will put an end to racism in the succeeding century,

[Cam]. I truly believe that.’ When we stepped off the bus the Muslim woman floated

past and the couple rode away in the bus. These three I’d rumbled, but how am I

supposed to know if the next concealed woman was an enemy? In my pocket, the

phone rang. Killing it was one solution, I thought, but [Rory] said he didn’t know

where we were going and he’d refused to upgrade to a phone with maps because they

‘contain the very coltan that keeps Congolese guerrillas in pocket’, he said, so I had

to use mine to show us the way. Now, it’s not clear to me if I embarked on last night’s

drinking mission because I needed the courage to be violent potentially or because I

wanted to forget the entire situation. Either way, it’s what happened, and by the time

the band finished, I had in fact forgotten the curfew and [Hiro] and the fear of what

he would do to me, and I convinced [Rory] that we ought to get backstage under the

pretence that we’re budding journalists hoping for an interview. We told their

manager that we were interning for NME. ‘I’m sure they wouldn’t mind a quick chat,’

the manager said, grinning like a bulldog. In the greenroom, three of them were

coiling leads and fastening cases but the singer, wearing only a bra and jeans, was

sprawled on a couch. She popped a beer can. ‘Sit down,’ she said, and flicked her

wrist—a move she kept doing on stage—toward a couple stools. Unprompted she

told us a long and boring story about how the band had lost three drummers in as

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many years. The first one went in a car wreck, she said, a twelve-car pile-up; the

second one overdosed; and the third one was cancer. We looked at the current

drummer. She was nicking a fingertip to test her blood sugar. She looked nervous,

and I was thinking about how I’d feel and act if she started convulsing when the

second keyboard handed me another beer and [Rory] had taken over the interview.

‘So, would you say it’s a good time for women in music?’ he said. The singer

peered at him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Oh?’ [Rory] said, looking pleased with himself,

as if he’d nosed out the nub of our non-existent article. ‘Why do you think that? Is it

because of a lack of attention in the media or the scrutiny of appearances over

output?’ ‘It’s because people feel the need to ask if it’s a good time for women

in music.’ [Rory] nodded, typed her answer in the pretend notes he’d been

making in his phone. The singer looked at me to see if I had anything to say. I kept

quiet and hoped my silence would soak up some of her righteousness. Not a few

minutes later and the conversation was wilting. Everybody knew the interview might

in fact be happening but that it was only simulation. It didn’t stop the singer, though,

from inviting us back to a friend’s house. In her eye I thought I saw a hungry look

that was meant for me. Simmering in my muscles were those wild ecstatic childhood

energies now most often enacted in quips and pictures online. I didn’t want to be

alone. But just the thought of clambering naked with this girl made me flimsy with

fear because the tone of that world which I’d shared once with [Corina] still hums

along my veins in a sound the colour of dimmed neon glowing over us as when she

would reach under my shirt and hook her hands around my waist with a whimper,

with her eyes opening sleepily in the orange afternoons of rain clapping against the

windows. We told the singer we had to get booze first. While [Rory] was in the toilet

I said I’d pick up some drinks for them. ‘Don’t worry,’ the singer said. ‘When we

were signed we bought a load of shares with Red Stripe, and all we have to do is

mention them on our website or in interviews on online and we get more crates of

the stuff than we can use. We did it with New Balance, too, so we get a discount on

trainers.’ She turned her foot on its side, showing me the logo. ‘Do you like them?’

she said. ‘I love them,’ I said. ‘Jesus, what’s that smell?’ she said, leaning

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back with an eye on my my eyebrow. ‘[Rory] stepped in shit,’ I whispered. The

house they took us to was a little terrace by a playground on an estate just north of

Hackney Downs. Inside, it was filled with chattering knots of people pulsating to

techno. Many were scrolling through phones. For a long time I was locked in a three-

way debate with a producer/DJ whose hallmark, he said, was adding imperfections to

his tracks to make them sound ‘more musical’ and with a ridiculously tall

Anthropology student running for a Green seat in Peckham Rye. The producer was

wearing Puma pumps, black slacks and a translucent raincoat. He pursed his lips

when he wasn’t talking. The anthropologist was one of those straight, white,

southern, upper-middle-class, leftist women who privilege group identity as the most

defining aspect of a person while acting so righteously you’d think they’ve forgotten

they’re straight, white, southern and upper-middle-class; who Tweet a lot about

radical intersectional feminist art but their cultural icon is Kate Bush. The debate

was mostly between the two of them and I nodded along. ‘The argument can be

made,’ the producer said, ‘from a business point of view. The fact of it is this: the

male players actually draw more crowds—and that’s systemic, of course—thus

generating more revenue for the tournaments, and so, on those grounds, you could

claim that they deserve a larger share of the prize money—not that I agree with that,

of course.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But the female players train and prepare just as

hard,’ Anthropologist said. ‘Just because they’re women they’re valued less. This is a

man’s world. And tennis is a man’s sport.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You’re not

listening to me,’ Producer said. ‘I am,’ Anthropologist said with a leaned-in

look of such kind attention that I knew she’d once been or still was an actor. ‘And

what I’m saying is gender inequality still exists within sport, and this is a perfect

example.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘and it’s not their fault it’s worse to watch women play.’

‘What?’ Anthropologist said. ‘Well, it’s slower, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Same with

football, rugby, owt.’ ‘What?’ Anthropologist said. ‘It’s not their fault is

what I’m saying. Men are better at sports because sports are made for men.’

Apparently, Anthropologist noticed someone with whom she had to catch up.

Producer went to get another drink. By the window a guy in a black beanie brooded.

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He looked harmless enough so I went over and introduced myself. He was a PhD

student (‘AHRC-funded’) who talked with his volume knob turning randomly and

who has never had to worry about money and I knew this because he kept saying, ‘I

don’t really care that MUCH about money.’ In the corridor I talked to a girl who

seemed so purely self-righteous I kind of admired her, notwithstanding the fact that

her cousin was a good friend of Joe Penhall. ‘Is he working on anything at the

moment?’ I said, ‘because I might be free to audition.’ ‘But what did you mean

when you say London’s just as racist as elsewhere?’ she said. ‘Because, I mean, the

nanny I had when I was a child became very close to my parents, they’re still in touch,

we all went to her wedding, and she’s black, and now she helps with my little one. I

mean, that sense of community wouldn’t happen anywhere else in the world, would

it? Just think of all the marches we have against that kind of thing. This is the only

place that multiculturalism actually works.’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and then she

had to go, too, she said, because her bairn was asleep in a bedroom upstairs. At one

point I found [Rory] and he gave me a beer and key of coke. ‘Do you know how

cheap it is in Barnsley?’ ‘The rent I’m paying, I could buy a nine-bed manor in

Carlisle.’ ‘I’m not middle class.’ ‘Come off it. I came back yesterday and you

were making pesto.’ ‘Well, what would you do with spare basil?’ ‘Oh, when that

egg hit the Tory cunt in the face!’ ‘I’m trying to test about what weird things

you might be into that I would be like, “Wow, that’s weird.”’ ‘Honestly, if I was

in charge for a day.’ ‘What have you been up to since?’ ‘I had short hair at one

point, then I grew it and it was long, but then I cut it short again, and I keep doing

that, really.’ In the kitchen an army veteran with a tour in Afghanistan was

attracting a lot of attention and I stood by him listening to him say, ‘I just flatly refuse

to wear my medals’, and I so envied his possession of genuine pride and hardship that

I felt sick. In the toilet there was no handwash and the scummy toilet seat was down

so I pissed into the sink. When I pulled up my trousers I noticed the pulsing in my

pocket. Withheld. On the landing there was a guy wailing and shaking his head. I

wondered where [Rory] was. There was no sight of him in the house. Suddenly I was

aware of my curfew—violated by two hours. My phone kept ringing. Between the

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calls I tried texting and calling [Rory] but I’d run out of data. Feeling stranded and

trapped, I tramped around the house, checking every room. ‘Have you seen [Rory]?’

I asked the diabetic drummer on the staircase, but turned away before I could see

her say ‘Who?’ because her face was white as a meringue. Eventually I found him by

the kitchen back door, laughing with a guy in a herringbone blazer. ‘Where’ve you

been?’ I said in a crooked voice. ‘[Cameron],’ he said. ‘This is [Carl-or-Charles].’

‘Well, which one is it?’ I said. ‘Either, man,’ said [Carl-or-Charles]. Instantly I

hated him. He was looking at me intently, smiling, reading my body language,

listening, as if he was wholly content with who he was, as if the person he wanted to

be was already who he was, and I can never form any kind of bond with a person like

that. All the same we bought his drugs. We split a gram of coke and found the living

room to dance. ‘We should do this every week,’ I said to [Rory]. ‘I feel like a

boxer,’ [Rory] said. ‘This was a genius idea,’ I said. ‘Right now I’m actually

moving synchronistically with my heartbeat. Are you?’ ‘We should do this every

week.’ ‘Absolutely.’ ‘How long do you think it’ll take for the others to start

dancing, too?’ ‘It’s hard to tell,’ [Rory] said. ‘I reckon they’d prefer some music.’

‘They don’t look up for it,’ I said. ‘They don’t know what they’re talking about,’

[Rory] said. He closed his eyes. Suddenly I faded and I went upstairs to bump a key

in the toilet, but instead I walked in on a bedroom of people sat on the floor in a

circle breathing through purple balloons and staring far into frantic dreams. Both

[Rory] and [Carl-or-Charles] were on the bed looking at, but not seeing, me. In the

next room I tried, I stood behind two men laughing and watching the bare fat

trembling arse of a black lass. For a while I waited for her to turn around so I could

see her face but she didn’t. A girl passed me on the landing with a short tartan skirt

bouncing above one flesh leg and one made from grey plastic narrowing to compact

gnarls of metal where the knees and ankles were supposed to be. She lurched into

another room, and I followed her. This room was another I’d not been in before,

sparsely occupied with people I’d not seen before, and I wondered how I could’ve

missed it when scouring the house for [Rory]. Right then a feverish wind rushed over

me and I felt either as if I were an angel or an aeroplane. Out the window at the other

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side of the room was the flaring edge of something like the sun, which would have

made it about ten hours since we left the gig, I figured, counting gradually with my

fingers. Looking out I saw an assortment of lofts along what looked like Regents

Canal, and I recalled [Rory] spluttering about the singer’s boyfriend threatening him

for kissing her behind a skip, and then I recalled the back seats on the top of a bus

with [Carl-or-Charles] scarfing up a kebab. Then I understood that this was a

different party altogether. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said to myself as three faces gawped at

me. They glanced at each other, these people, then one of them, whose face

interchangeably becomes [Corina] and [Claire Le Packen] in my memory with the

only aspect remaining being lips of red lipstick faded pink in places by drinking, said,

‘So, how do you know Thelema?’ just as the one-legged girl staggered past. ‘Excuse

me,’ I said, breaking through them and fastening myself to the group of people with

whom the one-legged girl was standing. On the flesh leg she had a huge tattoo, I

could see now, of a redheaded pin-up girl on who she’d either modelled herself or had

drawn in her own image. I imagined she liked being tied up. ‘So,’ I said in her ear,

pointing to the fake leg, ‘were you born without it?’ She seemed not to hear me, and

limped away. For a while I listened to people talk to each other, but panicked when

I remembered my need for the pin-up girl. After another key in the corner of the

living room, I went after her again. The last place I looked was the kitchen, and there

she was, loosening bottle caps with her metal knee joint. She opened mine without

looking at me, and we stood with some other people watching the purple bonfire

sunrise through the kitchen window. We were side by side now, and I said, ‘Do you

ever experience phantom limb?’ but when I turned to hear her answer, she was gone.

In her place a man whose face was mostly hair was frowning at me. So that my pursuit

of her wasn’t obvious I stayed there swallowing an acidic coke drip into my octopus

stomach breathing thinly through a bunged-up nose in front of the brightening

sunshine that made the dark and stocky rooftops beyond the window look as if they

could float away. In the next hour or so I had a half-hearted argument with a short

but burly man after I’d convinced myself he’d pinched my bag of drugs and licked the

contents clean, and then I’d exhausted myself by passionately inspiring a portly Goth

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girl with a septum piercing that she was going to be an outstanding mother, before

the group of people watching me started laughing and the fat bitch said, ‘Mate, it’s

my sister, not me, who’s pregnant’, and I went away. But finally I found my one-

legged pin-up girl sitting on the suspended fire escape steps, smoking. Rain had

started to fall from the metallic brightness above. Down the street the rain was swept

by wind in folds as it fell, just like a curtain, and where there were more drops, the

rain was lighter, almost silver, and it was darker where there were less, as if huge

clouds of jellyfish were swarming the sky and casting their shadows below. ‘Mind if I

bum a fag off of you?’ I said, smiling sweetly or suavely, I think. ‘Oh will you

just fuck off, man?’ she said in a northern accent I couldn’t quite place. ‘What?’

I said. ‘Who are you? What are you even doing here?’ she said. ‘I’m

[Cameron Struth]. I know [Carly-Charles].’ ‘Are you some kind of creepy

journalist? Is that why you’re following me around like this?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘No.

I’m an actor.’ ‘Course you fucking are. But I bet you think you’re so much more

than an actor, though, don’t you? I bet you think you can do anything you want. Well,

you’re not the anointed one, mate. You’re not Tom fucking Hiddleston.’ Then

I said something unrepeatably vicious and she said, ‘And what, you’re immortal, are

you? I’ll rip the life right from your fucking throat.’ I went inside. Soon after the sky

dried up and froze and morning came in a sour and glaring way. [Rory] and I walked

the streets, wafting on our feet. In Regents Park, mist gathered in the trees giving

the branches ghostly leafage. Joggers chuffed about as carts on a track. Two

policemen approached from up the main avenue. Either I’d so contravened my

curfew, I thought, that I was done for, or I’d blown right through the offending hours

and I was in the clear. They seemed to march in step. When [Rory] stopped to tie

his laces [was that what he did? or did he actually step in shit right then? or was he

turning up his trouser cuffs?] I was ready to confess everything, turn myself in, hand

over my phone, my computer, and concede finally that transgression cannot be

achieved without a ramification, to get my name and face in the newspaper, but the

police, a man and a woman, now I remember it, were too engaged with bacon

sandwiches, which I smelt without any hunger as they plodded past. We walked on

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and found a bench looking through the fence into the Zoo, where penguins waddled

and swam in their pool, and we sat there. [Rory] had not been in the Zoo before, but

I had, and I told him I’d gone there to see Zaire the Gorilla because she was pregnant

but I’d gotten lost in the aviary amongst the rarest birds in the world and forgot that

I was even inside. [Rory] stared at the twigs and scraps of grass at his feet with his

hands cupped over his ears. ‘I saw [Leona Judd] the other day,’ he said. [Leona] was

his first girlfriend, and the first girlfriend of anyone in our group. They kept this

fanciful relationship going for five years, from age twelve to seventeen, and I think I

tried to steal her, too. ‘She was leaving a bar in Soho with all these people laughing,’

said [Rory]. ‘I just watched her. I didn’t even think about going over and saying hello.

I realised then that we didn’t fuck because she wasn’t ready but because she just

didn’t want to lose it with me. [Selena] and I fucked the first night we met. Oh, God.

Oh, God.’ As he spoke I despised his insight, just like I had as a bairn, and I

remembered suddenly when we were eight years old and [Rory] had slept over. In the

night we decided that he would be the husband. He laid his little body on top of me

and ground his groin over mine. I squirmed and panted under him, cheeping faintly,

something we’d seen wrestlers do on TV. It was the first time I’d done anything like

that with anyone. ‘What were you doing in Soho?’ I said. ‘There’s a masseur

there who’s in love with me,’ he said, ‘and I can’t bring myself to tell her that I’m not

an investment banker and that I’m not leaving my imaginary wife for her.’ The

tremendous noise of many animals at once from the other side of the fence made its

way through my ears. ‘Hey,’ [Rory] said some time later, ‘how’s that problem with

your heart?’ ‘My heart?’ I said. ‘You know. That defect. That atrial thing,

like [Chris Vasey] had. You know. When we were young you said you’d probably be

dead by thirty. He died right after sixth-form. He was a great fucking guy. So? Did

you beat it?’ ‘Oh, yeah’, I said. ‘Yeah, I beat it.’ ‘Great,’ said [Rory]. ‘I had

fun tonight, man.’ Overjoyed with fear, I said: ‘Why did we stop hanging out,

[Rory]?’ And he said, ‘Shit. I don’t know. Yours was the drama clique, and I had

my housemates. I couldn’t stand your friends so I pulled back. That was probably it.’

‘It didn’t have anything to do with [Daisy-May]?’ I said. ‘[Daisy-May]? What,

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because you had that thing with her? No, I didn’t give a fuck about that.’ ‘Oh,’

I said. ‘But we should pick it up,’ [Rory] said. ‘You’re a nice guy. And I could

use another friend in London.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Completely.’ After that

[Rory] couldn’t stop vomiting. With each bout he said, ‘I feel better now. I think

that’s the last of it.’ Then he passed out, neck hooked over the back of the bench, his

face gaping at a sky of newspaper clouds. On my phone there were twelve missed

calls, all Withheld. I kept trying to wake [Rory] up, but when he wouldn’t, I knew I

had to get away from him. There was no way to be sure that he wasn’t the one

surveilling me all this time. When he started snoring, I took off running at full-pelt,

right down the paths, out of the zoo. On the tube my eyelids bit each other. In bed,

I felt the bright world roll beneath me as if I were scrambling up a mountain

rockslide. Of course I couldn’t sleep. I checked my messages and found one from the

married lorry driver from Somerset whom I’d been chatting to on and off for about

a year.

Him: ‘you there Katie?’

Me: ‘Yeah babe I’m here. You wanna play?’

‘was just thinking about you in the shower’

‘I’ve been up all night thinking about you.’

‘what u been thinking bout?’

‘You get my pic I just sent?’

‘wow’

‘Does that answer your question?’

‘fuck me’

‘Took the words right out my mouth.’

‘wish you were coming with me today’

‘Another long haul babe?’

‘yeah. taking our cars parts to germany and bringing theyre parts back’

‘Want to pick me up so I play on your lap?’

‘and somehow theyre getting more for theyre money’

‘Do you pick up other lasses on your trips?’

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‘the gas is going down but I end up with less dosh. you’re smart Katie hows

that work?’

‘I don’t know. It’s unnatural babe.’

…

‘You still there?’

‘look am I gunna meet you one of these days?’

‘One day babe.’

‘that’s what you always say’

‘One day we’ll be close.’

‘at least I have your pictures’

‘And your dreams babe.’

‘eh?’

‘You have me in your dreams.’

Feeling better, I signed into Instagram as one of my avatars and tracked down

that one-legged bitch from the party. I felt my heart beating close to my throat.

‘Here’s what I’m going to do to you,’ was the first message I sent.

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CAMERON STRUTH (C. 2013)

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[SCREENSHOT OF EMAIL FROM ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT, ACCESSED SOLELY FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, 30 SEPTEMBER 2014]

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[SCAN OF LETTER FROM TAMIKA FULLER TO JUDGE ROMILY MERCER, JANUARY 2015]

211

212

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[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – DECEMBER 2016 – PART TWO] My mother’s breasts are bigger than mine

When I was eight or nine I found them shocking. This was in our little yellow

house in Woodford. My mother called it our fortress. We were safe in our

fortress, she’d say. Our landlord was Tesco. One day Mr Tesco wanted to sell

off his assets. He sent a friendly eviction notice. At that age, when no one was

around, I liked to try on my mother’s bras, but in the hostels it was harder

because there was only one room, nowhere else to go. She was always around,

or Hiro was. There was only one room. If one of us was over 18 there would’ve

been two rooms. The only chance to try on the bras was when my mother

locked me in, went with Hiro to wait for a space to cook in the kitchen that was

always down a thin dark corridor of doors. But it wasn’t that fun because Hiro

could come in at any time to check on me. I was listening for his quick, heavy

walk in the corridor. The first time she cooked sabi shioyaki, genmai, miso soup,

sunomono. It was the best meal I had for at least a year because a man scared

her by complaining about the “foreign smell”. After that, we had rice fried with

egg most days. We moved to other hostels many more times. I decided to hold

my feelings in my toes, close enough to keep them, too far for them to come

back to my head. I wasn’t happy about much, but I was happy when my mother

went to cook, when three socks padding became two, when two became one.

I remember once, when my school shirt ripped at the underarm, my mother

tried sewing it together, but it kept opening up. She held the shirt in a tight

grip over her mouth. “I thought I could fix this one, but I cannot.” Now she sits

in the comfy chair with a blanket around her legs. The IV drip stands taller than

her, would stand taller even if she stood. She snips thorns and leaves from a

bunch of flowers. We’re not arguing about the best way to get home. We’re

arguing about the best way to find the best way to get home. “But it’s an app

designed specifically to find the best way to get where you want to go,” I say.

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“I know Citymapper, Corina-chan. Are you working for them?” She laughs in

the way only she can make herself. “I’m not stupid, either,” she says. “So you

know it doesn’t lie to you or anything?” “I’m not saying we ask the man at the

station because he won’t lie. It’s because he knows the best way. Best way to

know the best way.” “But what’s best? What do you mean? Do you mean the

quickest, or what?” “Quickest. Less walking. Best way.” “Well, Citymapper does

all that.” “I know what Citymapper is. I’m not senile. I want to know from

someone who knows.” “But why don’t you trust it? It’s designed to do what we

want it to do.” “You can’t depend on it.” “You can’t depend on something that’s

specifically designed for the thing you want?” “Don’t raise your voice, Corina-

chan.” “I’m not.” “Can you just do what I ask for once, please?” Later, in the

council flat we were allowed to have after four years in the hostels that

landlords want to buy, do up, sell on, when she throws up and it splashes down

the toilet lip, I tut and shake my head.

/

I came early

to The Golden Cross, Stratford, but not early enough. I’d wanted to get here

half-an-hour before Tasha and me had planned to meet so I could have a

steadying drink without her knowing. I’m only 10 minutes early. I find a table

upstairs, where it’s empty but for an old man with military medals on his blue

blazer drinking tea. The Cross is where we often met when we were students.

It’s a Wetherspoons, two floors, high ceilings, a beery light, a library smell. Most

of the time there’s mostly men, alone, two pints each, a newspaper, lots of

space between the tables. Even when it’s full, it feels quiet, kind of intimate, like

bar scenes in films, with the background noise faded out, away, your

conversations the pronounced centre of everything. Tasha lives nearby, in

Clapton. I’d say she runs about 5-10 minutes behind her own life, but this

doesn’t mean there’s time to get a drink. I don’t want to get out my phone. I

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don’t want to be one of those people who can’t stand solitude. I want at least

to look like someone who’s comfortable enough to sit alone without her phone.

So I sit uncomfortably without my phone. The veteran goes down to refill his

mug, I guess. I’m going to give it four drinks, then I’ll tell Tasha about Audrey’s

husband, the choice I’ve got to make. I text her, “I’m early, sat upstairs.” She

texts back, “Do you mind if Louis comes?” Louis is Tasha’s boyfriend. He’s

easygoing, flirty, white, speaks with his hands like an MC, 6’ 7”. Once, after a

druggy night, we ended up in a threesome situation but I left because his dick

is hilariously big. I text back, “Sure!” but I wish he wasn’t coming. He’s no threat,

I don’t think, been good to Tasha, but with him about as well, I feel I have to be

cooler, nicer, funnier than I’d have to be with only Tasha. I will have to tell her

about Audrey in the toilet, or when Louis gets a round. The veteran comes back

with his tea. He has no newspaper. What I imagine he is thinking is either far

too dull, cheesy or monumental. I don’t know if not being able to know what’s

inside his head or suddenly needing a cigarette makes me feel like I’ve

dropped a grenade under my feet. I check the time. It’s the time we meant to

meet, which means I’ve got 5-10 minutes. I’ll go for a smoke, but by the balcony

I see Tasha come through the doors downstairs. I sit back down. She texts,

“What do you fancy? Bubbles? Fuck it?” I text, “Sure!” but really I want a pint,

more liquid, more to drink. I wait. The veteran looks at me. I suppose I’ve been

up here so long without doing anything that it’s noticeable, unusual. He doesn’t

seem to care that I know he’s looking. I suppose he’s been looking so long he’s

staring. Does age give you one-way-mirror courage? Tasha holds up an ice

bucket at the top of the stairs. Louis towers behind her. I stand up, hug Tasha.

“Hi, Louis,” I say. “Alright, girl,” he says, “how are you doing? This is Jamesy.” A

short, hench guy, grinning, steps from behind Louis. “Corina?” “Hello,” I say.

I’m shaking his hand, trying to smile. That grenade is in my throat. I’m nodding.

Jamesy looks at Tasha. I look at Tasha. Her eyebrows lift up. Could my teeth

snap if I bit hard enough? “Were you sat here?” Tasha says. “Yep.” Quieter, in

my ear, ahead of the lads, she says, “You alright?” “Yep.” “You look hot, Cor.”

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“Fuck off.” We sit down. Tasha doesn’t know how to take that. She takes it as a

joke. We are sitting down. Tasha in front of me, Jamesy next to her. I can feel

that my fear has unravelled into a careless anger towed by impulses hell-bent

on total isolation. Tasha sends me little frowns, question marks. Louis makes a

meal of getting comfortable. No one wants to deal with the quiet. The lads take

sips. Tasha pours us both a glass. I drink a mouthful right off. Louis says, “This

place is so shit, man. I love it.” Jamesy laughs a whole lot. It’s actually a lovely

laugh. Deep, warm, crackling out into a chuckle. His arms swell like lungs when

he crosses them, the skin tightens, veins distend. I can’t imagine how those

arms could comfort without some kind of destruction first. Tasha says, “Cor and

me came here bare times at uni.” Jamesy says to her, “Yeah?” then, sweet smile,

to me, “What did you study?” I say, “Nursing.” He nods, trying not to show that

he already knows this. “I love that,” he says. I hate that, I think. I finish my glass,

pour myself another one. Louis says, “I just hope it stays shit.” Tasha says,

“Jamesy was at Kings, too.” I nod. The veteran has gone. Louis is on his phone.

Tasha says, “Do you remember seeing the rugby team play LSE in second year?

Jamesy was playing. So you’ve kind of already met.” Jamesy says, “Are you into

rugby?” I say, “No.” Tasha says, “Cor played badminton.” Jamesy looks

astonished. “You don’t meet many badminton fans,” he says. “I’m not a fan,” I

say. Jamesy’s face collapses, softens. I feel sorry for him. He doesn’t know who

to be. “I just played it,” I say. Jamesy says, “I feel you. I feel you.” I say, “My

mother made me play it.” Louis says, “Asian parents.” Tasha says, “Louis.”

Jamesy tries not to laugh. Louis says, “I’m only fucking joking, man.” His elbow

knocks into mine. “I’m only joking, Cor.” I shrug, say, “I haven’t played for ten

years but she still goes on about it. Thankfully, she’ll be dead soon.” Jamesy

laughs, then he sees Tasha and Louis not laughing, so he stops laughing, nods

solemnly. I look at Tasha. She’s looking at her glass. Jamesy’s rubbing his arms,

kneading knots. Tasha says, “How’s your mum feeling?” I say, “Like she’s got

terminal cancer.” They nod. I finish my glass. “Is it hard,” Jamesy says, looking

like he’s regretting immediately what he’s planned to say but thinks it would be

217

even worse to abort, so says, “being a nurse and your mum’s—” but doesn’t

know how to finish it. “It’s easier when it’s not your mum,” I say. I hear Louis

sigh, see Tasha look at him. I suppose it wasn’t a sympathetic sigh. We sit in

silence for a few seconds. “What did you study, Jamesy?” I say. He looks up like

it’s a trap. “Well,” he says, “nothing like nursing.” “What was it?” “Just sport

sciences.” “That’s a little like nursing.” “But there’s no caring involved.” Tasha

says, “Jamesy teaches football to kids in Tower Hamlets.” Jamesy says, “I wish

I could do more for them.” Louis laughs. “Shut up, man,” Jamesy says,

suppressing a smile. “And you think you’d be doing more as a nurse?” I say,

seeing him think of a way out of this. “Well, I dunno. I know, from talking to

Tasha, and, I dunno. I just think, when I think about it, the NHS is the only thing

that makes me feel patriotic. Do you get me?” Tasha’s on her phone. Louis, too.

I say, “Do you agree, Tasha?” She looks up. “Does the NHS make you feel

patriotic?” Tasha says, “Yeah? Do you?” “No.” Tasha’s on her phone. Louis, too.

Jamesy nods, little smile, smile you give the homeless. “I feel you,” he says. I’m

ready to leave. He says, “But I can only speak from my own experience, you get

me, and I snapped my metatarsal, and I had surgery on it, and it got infected,

but the nurses, man, the nurses, man. I’ve always thought nurses are like

angels.” I say, “Okay. I’m going for a fag.” Outside I light up, walk towards the

overground.

/

A family from Biddenden

I read this today. The husband was a financial advisor in The City, sold his

shares to retire. The wife hadn’t much going on, I suppose. With the money

they bought woodland by their home to make a clearing for a huge

conservatory with a pool in it. Digging up the ground for the pool, they found

a bag with body parts in it. The parts are badly butchered. The head intact, but

beaten, the head that belonged to a woman who’d gone missing a year ago.

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The police had interviewed dozens of people before one woman, who rents a

room in her cottage through Air BnB, she remembered hosting a young man

for one night, about a year ago, who was doing an MSc in Plant and Fungal

Taxonomy Diversity and Conservation at Queen Mary’s. The young man told

her he was hunting a rare species called the Coral Tooth Fungus. The police

asked Queen Mary’s about the young man, but there was no record of him, no

record of the name Elliot Fraser.

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED 14 OCTOBER 2014] Happening Blog Sketch #6 – 13/10/14

‘No [Hiro] yet,’ I wrote on the day of the ambush, yesterday. ‘It will not happen in

the day. It will be night. Should I close the curtains with the lights off? Or leave them

open with the lights off? Which more suggests that I’m not in? There’s no way to

barricade the door with a chair as they do in films because this door has got no handle,

only a kind of eye-level latch. Could I knock around the other flats seeking refuge?

It would be true. Why am I writing this? It was supposed to distract me, writing

something, like mining suicide chat rooms was supposed to distract me, till I got

bored, sleepy, maybe got some sleep, but here we are. You used to be able to disclose

truth through acting, but now you’ve retreated into words. Your mind doesn’t even

work like an actor’s anymore. You’ve lost it. This keyboard is filthy. Stop writing,

dust the keyboard, and wash your hands again. Order new handwash when you get

back here. Order moisturiser for raw, cracked hands. Order Kalm’s Night Tablets.

Contact Blue.’ When night came and the heating turned itself on, high, I stripped

my jumper and t-shirt and decided to shut the lights and leave the curtains open. No

one sleeps with the curtains open, I reasoned. You’d have to be in the middle of a

moor to sleep with the curtains open. So that I could see the street so the street

couldn’t see me, I pressed against the walls right next to the windows, watched

outside at an angle, changing sides every thirty seconds or so. The streetlamp closest

to the window flickered. At first I thought it was my eyes in some sort of paroxysm,

and after checking it online: epilepsy. An article from the IWK Health Centre in

Halifax, Nova Scotia, PO 3070, presented the discovery that paroxysmal eyelid

movements began two to four years before epilepsy was noted in 2/17 of the study’s

subjects. Given the situation, though, I realised it was more likely that [Hiro] had

somehow tampered with the streetlamp to spook me. Sunglasses lessened the

flashing, though the street looked more shadow-soaked. For how long, I don’t know,

but for a while, I deliberated whether to keep the sunglasses on or not. The past week

220

I’ve been struggling to accept the reality of what seem like coded messages from the

police—they appear around London and on TV—and sunglasses made me see them

less. After leaving [Rory] in Regents Park the coke was keeping me up so I watched

Fight Club. When Edward Norton assaulted himself to blackmail his boss and he said,

‘I can do this job from home’, referring to the salary he demanded in exchange for

his silence, I was numbly disappointed it hadn’t come to that with [Freeman]. Using

an avatar I emailed [Matty Doyle] asking, ‘Do you work from home?’ All day without

reply, feeling reassured of my sanity, but then Krishnan Guru-Murthy was on TV

interviewing Pam Duggan about her son’s death, and because Mark Duggan and

[Matty Doyle] shared initials, I asked Pam, on a kind of half-serious whim, ‘Do you

work from home?’ and she said, ‘Well, I’ve been to court every day, every day, every

day—and hospital’ and it seemed as though she were talking directly to me. From

there I followed a series of clues through an elaborate network and it didn’t take long

for me to ascertain its potential meaning. The initials M and D kept cropping up in

numbers plates, followed by or in sequence with the numbers 134, M being the 13th

letter of the alphabet, and D being the 4th. Over the few days I traipsed restlessly

around Camden on the off chance finding Matty Doyle, the 134 bus veered at me

around street corners bearing Royal Borough of Camden signs that connected me,

Cam, with the initials of both Matty Doyle and Mark Duggan. The city is rigged

around you, the code declared, and you are our unwitting agent, our linchpin, just

like Mark was. We’ve been watching you for years, they seemed to say, because you

might be the next one, the one to allow many to lash out in the only way they know

how, despite it playing into our hands, like struggling in quicksand: you might be the

next young lad to set the stage for the support and preservation of our power right

when it looks ready to shatter. Then I noticed that the last two letters of Camden

were the 5th and 14th letters of the alphabet. 5/14, May this year, the month [Sam]

failed to kill himself. We are omniscient, they were telling me, and we are waiting for

you to sacrifice yourself, not to your own death, like your brother, but to death for

us. What made me keep the sunglasses on, as I cowered by my window last night,

was the helicopter that suddenly chomped the sky, swinging its spotlight around the

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buildings. Its arrival brought a call to my phone—Withheld. Was [Hiro] calling me

out? Well, if there’s going to be a confrontation, I thought, I might as well have the

police covering me, since they’re apparently always with me. In which case, I might

as well induce the inevitable, especially if he’s alone, and in this case, I might as well

beat him to the punch. Outside, the estate smelled of my neighbours’ open windows,

of smoked paprika, cinnamon, jerked pork at my building’s ground floor flat, of

lavender ghosts flowing under a narrow bathroom window by the closest chain of

houses, where the spotlight shard caught me across the chest and I heard a lady from

a balcony somewhere cry out, ‘There’s a topless wanker out there!’ before I hunkered

down in a dank skip enclosure. Laid low for a moment I marvelled at the ludicrous

lengths [Hiro] had taken. Getting the police and their helicopter involved can’t have

been easy. If I was going to survive the night I had to evade the spotlight, too. And

this became my mission. With it cutting between rooftops I sprinted towards a

nearby van. It glanced by me along the way, so I dived onto the ground and

commando-crawled under a car, grazing my front, and waited. A group of lads walk

past. Among them, there was [Hiro] in his dark grey hoodie. The spotlight, whose

operator must’ve been relaying recon to [Hiro] by walkie-talkie, complicated my

following them, but I noticed that it moved in figure-eight movements, so once it

sliced by, I had a few seconds to move and find another hideout. This pattern

continued until [Hiro] and his cronies disappeared inside a house. We were on the

far end of the estate now, and frankly, I was impressed that [Hiro] had rented a place

near me for his HQ. I felt important, and confident. With their location fixed, I

could wait, reassess. After some time the helicopter was called off. Stalking towards

the house I heard grime thrashing within. Probably some kind of neo-Samurai ritual,

I thought. There was commotion inside, cheering now and then. Their station was

the last in a row of small two-story houses with scaffold poles for porch bannisters

and bricked-in gardens at the back. The curtains were drawn in the front window, so

in the alley behind, I pulled myself up to peer over the garden wall. Shadows jostled

in the light through the back window. Next to this window was a door, left ajar. The

door opened to a utility room. A washing machine chugged and whirred. The closer

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I crept to that door, the noise inside whetted to human-shaped sounds. Lads

bouncing, rapping along. An old lady laughing. Younger boys. So the whole family

was in on it. So [Corina] was in there. Past the sink and boiler and into the hall I

stopped by the door separating us all, feeling such hatred for each of them. The Jap

mother enfeebled by her coke-head husband bolting. Scared, cold, righteous, proud,

proudly humiliating [Corina]. The music stopped. A woman cried, ‘Play it again!’ A

man said, ‘I’m going to see where Stafford is’ whoever the fuck Stafford is. The door

opened, but just a crack. A hand still held the handle on the other side. ‘Now it’s not

working,’ the woman said. ‘Fix it.’ The music started again. They cheered. As I turned

to leave the music stopped again, stopping me. Then the door opened. And I was

staring into his face. Grey hoodie. But it wasn’t [Hiro]. It wasn’t the [Slate] family.

In this suspended second I saw a different family holding fizz flutes crowded around

a computer. On the screen—a YouTube clip bearing the red London Eye symbol.

Their smiles slackened. A young girl said, ‘The fuck?’ One moment and I would feel

such transcendent pain, I thought, and apparently my body craved it by the way

nausea had stuffed me static, but then the man in the grey hoodie with his gentle face

said, ‘You alright, bruv? You lost?’ I nodded. The man took my hand, led me into the

living room. With one hand on my elbow he steered me among and through his

family. He sat me on the sofa. They bristled and argued over what to do about me.

Young Girl said to kick my batty arse out. I saw the delicious fear beneath her anger.

Dad said he’d get some water. Grey Hoodie kneeled before me, brushing away the

grains of gravel still stuck to my skin. He draped a sunny blue towel around my

shoulders. His compassion was such that he let me keep wearing the sunglasses. Mist

formed in knolls behind the lenses. The tassel from his hood tickled the tiny wound

above my bellybutton. My phone hummed in my pocket, but we ignored it. I loved

him. I hated him.

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[SCREENSHOT OF EMAIL FROM ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT TO ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT, ACCESSED SOLELY FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, 15 OCTOBER 2014]

224

[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – DECEMBER 2016 – PART THREE] I read on break that Muslim refugees have been raping women in the

Norwegian towns that welcome them

The tone of the article is regretful but it’s also kind of unconcerned. I read one

line a few times. “We ought not to condemn the unfortunate before hearing

and understanding their story.” I put the paper down. Their story means

nothing to me now. I remember a patient from back in my Primary Care days.

He came in with his nose bent, eye socket shattered. He told me he’d been

seeing one particular prostitute on and off for a few years. Morphine opens

some people up. Sometimes they see medical professionals like counsellors,

priests. He said he’d wanted her to spread her own shit across her tits. She

declined. Her pimp had brass knuckles. “I have to pay for sex. I want to have

sex once a day. At least. And If I couldn’t get it when I wanted it and how I

wanted it, I’d have to go out and rape a real woman, I reckon, I do, and, you

know, you wouldn’t want that, would you?”

/

No title

Everything is predetermined

everything is permitted

/

I’m waiting in The Junction near Highbury Fields for my poet friend

My cider is nearly finished, vulva burning. It’s 20:20. What are the chances of

that? It’s getting dark. We were supposed to meet twenty minutes ago. She

said her phone might die on her way. She’s coming from Kensal Green. No,

225

Kenning Town. Kennington. She said I should hold tight. No problem. There’s

a couple on a date, I think, in the next booth. He knows too much about

American pop culture. He’s worried about silences between them. She’s

looking around at other people too often. She sips red wine. No, rosé. What’s

the matter with me? I think she wants to drink it faster. Not the rosé, the night.

He reminds me of someone I hope he isn’t, one of your brother’s friends,

another actor. When a bartender comes to take my glass, I look up quickly, too

quickly, maybe. “Sorry. It’s not finished.” By her expression I might as well have

said, “Touch it and I’ll cut off your tits and drink the blood.” I would’ve thought

they were trained for people apparently like me, shifting in their seat like they

haven’t wiped their arse properly. The guy on the date is trying to explain the

relationship between Jimmy Kimmel and Matt Damon, how Sarah Silverman

fits into it all. I wonder if she’s hungry. I wonder how much fruit she eats. I started

eating a lot of fruit after you died. It gave me mouth ulcers. When my mother

dies, I will live in an orchard. I want to go to the toilet. Not necessarily because

I need to piss. My drink won’t still be here when I get back. I should be bold

enough to get another drink. Another drink might make me bold enough,

funnily enough. I check my phone for a message from my poet friend. On

Facebook I avoid your memorial page. Elliot Fraser. I know that name. There

are no Elliot Frasers that I know that can be found by searching. A former Sales

Assistant at Regents Flowers, Leamington Spa, who studied at North

Leamington Sixth Form. A single man, interested in females, reads Truman

Capote, listens to Bing Crosby, lives in Connecticut, Mass. An Electrical

Technician at Aker Solutions. A single man, went to Garstang High School, lives

in Seville, Spain. There are four Elliot Frasers. There’s no Elliot Fraser. I take my

drink to the bar, head for the stairs. “Corina?” “What? Hi! How are you?” “How

are you?” “I’m just leaving.” “Okay. How are you?” I laugh, not knowing what

I’m doing. We step out the way of a group of people, stand to the side of the

room. “Yeah,” I say, “I’m fine. I’m good. Well.” She nods. “I’m really good. Well,”

I say, knowing she’s seen me avert my gaze. “I’m glad to hear it,” she says. I

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make myself smile, look in her eyes. She knows I’m making myself do this. She

nods, says, “How’s the running?” I nod, say, “Yeah. I did a 10k a couple of weeks

ago.” “Great. Good for you.” “Well, I’ve not done it yet, but I’ve signed up to do

it. I’m training for it. Yeah. I did one last month, or a couple of months ago, I

think. Yeah.” “Great. That sounds good.” “Yeah,” I say. She nods. I remember

when she said, “We all rely on people all the time, even you do.” She says,

“Well, it sounds like you’re on top of things.” “I am, I think. Yeah. I am.” “But,

you know, if you do start to feel low again, it’s no failure to start talking to

someone again.” “No. No, I’m really fine, I think, actually. I barely even think

about it.” Her expression doesn’t change. I nod, say, “So, yeah, I think my bus

is coming. Have a nice night.” “Okay. Take care of yourself,” she says. I give her

a thumbs-up, which makes me hot all over. It’s 20:40. What are the chances of

that? Outside it’s been snowing.

/

Energy

Ali has been lying about exercising. She told me she hadn’t, but she came in

extremely faint. She barely spoke, eyelids dipping. I asked her if she’d done

any exercise. “I ate an apple,” she said. “Have you done anything to burn off

the apple?” She nodded. “Star-jumps?” She nodded. I asked her how many

she’d done. She held up two fingers. “Two?” She shook her head. “Twenty?”

She shook her head. “Two-hundred?” She shook her head. “Ali, have you done

two-thousand star-jumps this morning?” She smiled. Proud? Pulse was 38 BPM.

She slipped away, unconscious, cardiac arrest. I called the crash team, got out

the way. Then I had to go back to my own work. I was sick with thinking of her.

At the end of my shift I found her in the acute ward. Her kidneys were failing. I

asked a nurse there about her, but the nurse just shook her head. “What does

that mean?” I said. “I don’t really have time for this,” she said. “Time for what?”

I said. “For her,” she said, “for girls who should just know better.” I went to find

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the Sister to complain. The Sister nodded, tired, said something about

following it up. I found a bed near the kidney unit, slept, went back to the acute

ward. It was 3 in the morning. Ali was asleep, stable. I found another nurse.

“What’s going to happen?” “So her BMI is 19, which is not quite within the

anorexic range. We’ve admitted her here. She’ll be here a couple of nights, we

expect.” “Then what?” “It depends on her organs, if they fail. If an organ fails,

she’ll go to the ward that treats that organ.” “If not?” “The mental health team

know, so, depending, she’ll be with us or them.” After shift I went into the

hospital staff gym. I was alone. I ran on the treadmill for 7 miles. Then I vomited.

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED JUNE 2007]

Rehearsals

by Cam Struth

Inside a small garage. There are boxes, paint cans, and a motorbike covered in a sheet.

Off-stage, car doors slam. The shutters open. A Woman in her mid-twenties, formally

dressed, enters, followed by a Boy, fifteen, in school uniform, who closes the shutters

behind him.

Woman I can’t begin to tell you how fucking stupid you are. Is that closed

properly? Fuck me. You agreed at the beginning never to make a scene,

at the school, in public, never. You agreed to that.

Boy Yeah but—

Woman What?

Boy —why did you do it in your office then?

Woman Fuck me. I thought you were more mature. I was led to believe you were

more mature than that.

Boy What did you expect to happen dumping me like that?

Woman Dumping you? Oh, fuck me. Dumping you? You sound like a fucking

child.

Boy Well that’s because I—

Woman Don’t even fucking say it. Don’t even fucking say that fucking shit to me

right now.

Boy Language.

Woman Don’t. Don’t even. Do you even understand? Do you even understand

what could happen to us?

Boy You.

Woman What?

Boy What could happen to you.

The Woman stares at him.

Woman Fuck me. I can’t actually —

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Boy Gladly.

Woman —believe this. Shut up! Shut the fuck up! Shut up!

Boy Okey dokey.

Woman Shut up! Just shut the fuck up! Okay?

Boy Okey dokey.

Woman Okay. Fine. Now, if you’re not capable of taking it like a man, an adult,

then take it like a child. I’m telling you it’s over. Okay? That’s that. I’m

telling you. Do you understand? I tried to tell you like an adult but

now—

Boy Like a teacher more like, calling—

Woman —it seems you need to be told—

Boy —me into your office like—

Woman —like a stupid little boy.

Boy —you’d caught me cheating homework or something.

Woman You’ve just got to accept it’s over. Okay? I’m not allowing it to

continue.

Boy Well that’s not really up to you.

Woman What?

Boy It’s not really up to you.

Woman It’s not up to me? Yes, it’s up to me. Yes, it is.

Boy No. Not really.

The Woman stares at him.

Woman What do you mean? What are you saying?

The Boy shrugs.

Woman I want to hear you fucking say it.

The Boy shrugs. The Woman stares at him.

Woman Okay. Listen. Do you understand at least why I think we should stop?

Boy Do you want to stop?

Woman Listen to me, please. Do you understand?

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Boy I think so.

Woman Okay. Good.

Boy I think if showed my parents the letters and the pictures and I told them I

’d been coming here instead of rehearsals, they wouldn’t be very happy.

The Woman stares at him, not breathing.

Boy They’d probably tell the school—

Woman Look. Please. Maybe in a few years—

Boy —and I think you would get fired—

Woman —this could work, but now—

Boy —and maybe go to jail—

Woman —it’s just not going to work and—

Boy —and there’d be a newspaper article—

Woman —your grades. Your grades. I’ve—

Boy —probably a few articles and—

Woman —I’ve heard your grades are slipping so—

Boy —your husband would probably leave—

Woman —really that should be your focus now.

Boy —because you’re a kiddy-fiddler—

Woman No. No. You wanted it as much as me. You did.

Boy —or nothing changes, I keep our secret, and now you don’t have to keep

buying me games to shut me up.

The Woman stares at him.

Woman This was a mistake. That’s all it was. We made a silly mistake.

Boy No. You made the mistake. And you’re going to have to live with it. So

we’ll have to be quick this time. My parents are going to wonder where I

am.

The Woman stares at him. She shakes her head. She tries to ask ‘Why?’ but the word

won’t come out, as if she’s confused by her own question.

The Boy moves towards her.

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Blackout.

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED 17 OCTOBER 2014] Happening Blog Sketch #7 – 16/10/14

In the brown afternoon a car alarm went off outside the flat and continued to wail

well after two men came to hammer on my neighbour’s door. As I left they asked me

if I’d seen my neighbour lately and I told them he’d choked to death on his TV

remote and his Alsatian had eaten a significant portion of his face. The one with

tattoos on his forearms strode to grab me by the neck but the other held him back

and slipped away. As far as I knew, that was the truth. The goon shouldn’t have asked

me if he didn’t want my opinion. All way to the docks of Canary Whart I pictured

how I’d fell that man: duck under his grasp, boot the side of his knee, and a left hook

to the corner of the jaw, just below the ear—out—just like Bas Rutten instructs.

Then, leaning over the rail along the water where the wide plaza becomes a

promenade under the rolling announcement strip, I watched the metal plate feature

in the square that made the water look as if it streamed from the trough to the top,

the gulls dipping down for chips and bits of rubbish, before following my phone,

around the river loops, under tracks that shot trains inside the buildings, to LA

Fitness. Lean people wearing suits and trainers flowed out the automatic doors

lighting cigarettes. The woman at the desk looked up at me curiously. ‘I’d like to have

a swim,’ I said. ‘Okay. Well, it’s twelve pound for a one-time visit. You can use

the gym as well. You can use all the facilities.’ ‘I just need the pool,’ I said.

‘It’s twelve pound for a one-time visit, but you can pay 28 for a 14-day trial.’ ‘I

just need the pool,’ I said. ‘Or you could buy a 30-day trial and, if you’re a student

or work in the area, you can get 35% off.’ ‘I just need the pool today.’ ‘Well,

it’s twelve pound for a one-time visit.’ ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘and I’ll need to buy some

trunks.’ ‘They’re £13.99,’ she said. ‘I see.’ ‘But you look like you need a

wash,’ she said. ‘What’s that?’ ‘I said you can’t stay as long as you want,’ she

said. ‘I can’t?’ ‘No. The one-time visit has a three-hour limit.’ ‘That’s

long enough,’ I said, adding inadvertently, ‘Is it clean?’ ‘It’s a pool.’ She frowned.

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‘It’s got chlorine in it.’ ‘Does the chlorine clean it?’ I said. ‘Is that what the

chlorine does?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘For some reason I thought it was for the smell,’ I

said. ‘It’s like an acid that kills bad bacteria.’ ‘Acid!’ ‘Yeah but not

like acid acid. The pH is just above seven. It’s actually the same pH as tears.’

‘Human tears?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘I’ll be swimming in tears’ I said, half to myself.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, sir.’ The trunks I bought were white with a silver streak

down the side. Medium was the only size left so I had to wrap the cord strands around

my waist before tying them bunched at the front. The hem reached past my knees.

In the water, with one other woman soaring back and forth, my trunks ballooned and

I had to dive every now and then to force the air out of them. At the deeper end I

plunged once and for all into the rumble. Pulling myself down, closer to the bottom,

the mounting pressure of breathlessness squeezed and filled my body. With a finger

finally to the cold hard floor I looked back up at wobbly light-shards in the haze,

feeling weightless, unmoored, but entirely enfolded—weighted, and held. I pictured

someone watching me, a mysterious smudge, a UFO, some rare and deadly shark in

the water. Bubbles burbled from my laughing mouth. I was truly alone. For an instant

I couldn’t tell the difference between simulation and reality. Then I drank my

surroundings greedily, awaiting— —coughing, staring down at my lap, trunks

still clinging to the skin. Stooped angels in soggy shorts surrounded me, sat by the

waveless pool, shivering. On the other side of the pool, the woman who’d been

swimming with me was stood wrapped in a towel. An alarm was squawking. ‘—he is.

Here he—’. It was bright. The water gleamed like saliva. I felt so happy I hid my face

and cried. ‘—speak English?’ I heard in a foreign accent. The lifeguard held out a

bottle of water. I smiled. My comeuppance will be long delayed, if ever it comes at

all. ‘Is there anyone we can call?’ he said. No. ‘What should we do with him now?’

The purest ramification is when the wrongdoer can’t be punished. To be a computer

program, autonomous, without traceable source, parasitically living from user to user,

owner to owner, my only object to erase peoples’ photographs—I would feel solid

then, and whole and untouchable. When ramifications go one way, and without

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punishment—yes, but someone will find someone to blame. We are wounds in this

world. Sometimes we gape open, and if you could look inside you’d see this:

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[SCREENSHOTS FROM RETRIEVED 4CHAN.ORG/B THREAD INVOLVING AVATAR ACCESSED THROUGH CAMERON STRUTH’S IP ADDRESS, 20 OCTOBER 2014]

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT, FROM CAMERON’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED FEBRUARY 2011] Holy Saturday by Cameron Struth Scene One A black curtain hides the stage as if the play hasn’t already begun. There’s a glow behind the curtain teasing its edges and even straining through its opaque material. A machine sound, a humming, steadily grows. Ideally, the increase in volume is imperceptible to the audience, as if it was there all along. The smell of smoke strays into the audience. A fire alarm, loud, throughout the theatre, for at least thirty seconds, or at least till the audience stirs, beginning to believe it is real. Curtain drops, alarm still sounding, revealing a council house kitchen. The oven smokes. Kay (56) lies spread-eagle in a pinny on the floor. On a corner of the pinny, there’s a lit cigarette. At her feet, an upturned basket from which dirty green beans have spilled. Farther across the kitchen floor: a whole salmon. Through the kitchen door, Cam (28; wiry; an elegant but practical manner) appears. He stops, taken slightly aback. He shows his palms—at once a conciliatory gesture, and one of mild deliberation. Kay’s pinny catches alight from the cigarette. Cam (one hand pointing at the small new flame) Oh. He considers what to do, then his face goes blank. After several beats, Cam turns to leave, but at that moment Paul (58; a cast on his right hand indicating a break; miner’s build but shrivelled with age) and Sam (25; harelipped; tall and burly, but gentle) come through the kitchen door carrying bags-for-life. At first there’s inaction between these two, an instant of suspended confusion, before a shift into outrage and

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panic. They push past Cam. As Paul stamps out the fire and switches off the oven, Sam grabs his mother’s hand, trying to rouse her. Paul (to Cam) The fuck yeh doing man? Cam watches Sam. Lights out. Music—atonal woodwind, droning brass, tight skittering drums.

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT FROM CAMERON STRUTH’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED 5 DECEMBER 2014] Happening Blog Sketch #8 – 20/11/14

No more happenings. This coincided with other changes: a prescription of quite

intense sleeping pills, which seem to work, allowing me to rest and achieve, if not a

glass-clear clarity, then a dull coherence; moving to a studio flat on Chatsworth Road

in Clapton above an Ethiopian café owned by an Eastenders actor who was inspired,

it says on the website, by overseas charity work; a minor surgery on my eyebrow,

which had bulged to bursting point with infection, threatening blindness, and swelled

over the sight in that eye without my realising it, a more disturbing fact for me

because that means for weeks I haven’t once looked into a mirror; and the play

starting without me. They erased my name from the posters. The reviews are

positive, but I’ve not been to see it. For the past week, except the day in Darlington

for [Sam’s] funeral, I’ve spent my time smoking, pacing, running scenes to muted

movies, and delving deep into the Internet. Nights I watch footage of myself. With

the rest of the [Fig Leaf] severance package, I bought a new overcoat and a few

cameras and arranged the cameras around the flat to record throughout the day. But

what I record won’t go online, not like before. This is just for me. Taking the pills

and watching myself lets me sleep—good full sleep. But no more happenings. Not

after yesterday. It was [Sam’s] birthday, a few days after the funeral, a couple weeks

after my own birthday, which was the day they let [Sam] go. The plan was to drink

through it, but in the morning, I knew I needed more than oblivion, and it wasn’t

quite salvation, either. Maybe conflict is what I needed. Thus, with a bouquet of

flowers, I buzzed for [Gareth’s] flat in Hampstead. For a long time there was no

answer, and I figured they must be on their honeymoon, thinking oblivion was an all

right alternative, when the robotic intercom voice of [Pawel] said, ‘Yes?’ It wasn’t

until we’d rearranged the flowers in a clear vase of water and sat down with a pot of

tea by the bay window, with [Pawel] rubbing his steep forehead and twisting his face

in disapproval and exasperation, that I realised [Gareth] mustn’t have told [Pawel]

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about my arrest, and that [Pawel] told me [Gareth] was dead. He gave me the story.

The night after they were married, [Pawel] said, in a hotel in Whitstable, [Gareth]

woke up convulsing, his throat choked. [Pawel] had tried to give him the Heimlich

but snapped a couple of his ribs. In the ambulance, the paramedics sliced open

[Gareth’s] windpipe, inserted some kind of a snorkel. He was unconscious for most

of the next day. Having rushed out the hotel topless, [Pawel] had to wear [Gareth’s]

T-shirt, which pinched at the armpits and hemmed off just below his bellybutton.

The nurses could’ve given him a larger shirt, [Pawel] said, but he didn’t want to take

it off. Just before midnight, [Gareth] woke up, and it wasn’t long before he could

breathe independently. [Pawel] had told him it was his greatest performance.

[Gareth] chuckled through his embarrassment, his tender midriff, and the scare

seemed to have passed, but in the early morning the nurse woke [Pawel] in the

waiting room: [Gareth] had gone. He’d been texting one minute, she’d said, and the

next—gone. He was probably texting [Thomas], [Pawel] said. After seeing [Gareth’s]

waxwork one last time and kissing his sour lips, [Pawel] left. Two builders saw him

in [Gareth’s] t-shirt and pointed west, saying, ‘Brighton’s that way, Queer Eye!’ The

funeral is at the end of the week, [Pawel] said, and we sat there quiet, letting the tea

g0 cold. Then, for a long time, we chatted practicalities. The money and the flat

would go to [Thomas]—eventually, that is, because [Gareth’s] ex-wife [Donna] would

oversee it until the boy turned eighteen. She plans to evict [Pawel], rent it out. He

isn’t exactly strapped—[Gareth] had gifted some albeit heavily taxed cash to him—

but he can’t afford to live in London on his own, let alone in Hampstead. ‘Funnily

enough,’ he said, ‘I have some friends in Brighton. I will stay with them before

moving somewhere cheaper. Maybe I will move north,’ he said, flattening his

eyebrows. ‘There’s nothing in the will for you?’ I asked. There was a little section,

[Pawel] told me, but most was set aside for [Thomas] so [Donna] said [Pawel] could

take whatever he wanted from the wardrobe. When he told her [Gareth] had

promised him the flat was his as long as he wanted it, all she said was, ‘Oh? I can’t see

anything to that effect.’ ‘Like my mother says,’ I said, ‘she needs shagging with

the raggy end of a pineapple.’ Then we opened a bottle of wine and reminisced about

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the time [Donna] caught [Claire] on stage. ‘It was like [Claire] was looking in a

warped mirror across the bar!’ [Pawel] said, and I replied: ‘I think what upset [Donna]

most was realising her husband was a more beautiful woman that she was.’ Loosened

on the third glass, [Pawel] looked at me like he had before I left [Gareth] the first

time. ‘I forgot how cruel you can be,’ he said, and smiled. ‘That meek Virgin Mary

manner was just an act, wasn’t it?’ ‘It’s all an act,’ I said. Across the room a phone

buzzed. ‘Is that you or me?’ I asked, but it was [Gareth’s] phone. [Pawel] had kept it

in his pocket from the hospital. Each time it buzzed, [Pawel] said, he clamped his

jaw to stop from tearing up, but he couldn’t manage to turn it off either, so for some

reason he’d plugged it in to charge. [what between us opening another bottle, sitting

on their king size, the sun sank? insert sentiment re: what?] [Pawel] put his glass down

like he thought the bedside cabinet was lower that it was. With his finger aimed at

me he asked me why I bothered coming back again. He was caring for [Gareth] just

fine, he said, adding, ‘Which is not supposed to be a dig,’ but then I felt such a pain

that I became myself and had to hold my breath before I got back into [Ben.] Finally,

I could say, ‘[Gareth] had saved me, and maybe I wanted to save him somehow.’

‘It is absolution you want,’ [Pawel] said, ‘not salvation. Not for [Gareth]. There is a

difference, actually. A small one, but there is. And, come on, it was not even salvation

that [Gareth] offered you, like it was not what he offered me when he offered me a

way out of my—what?—my predicaments as a young man. I can tell you what real

salvation is. Do you want to know what real salvation is?’ As [Pawel] paused and drank

slowly from his glass, I turned on my phone’s voice recorder half-out of my pocket

and prepared for another well-rehearsed yarn. ‘I do not believe in sins so we are not

talking about salvation in the Christian sense. Okay? Carrying it out might be almost

impossible, as much as wanting it will make it happen, but salvation, the term itself,

true salvation, I mean, is simple, really. It is saving someone through sacrifice. That

is all. It is about treating your life as insignificant and significant at the same time

because you treat it that way, which is to say, you cannot save someone’s life unless

you are willing to sacrifice your own life. Listen. I have not told this story often, but

it is the one most valuable to me. I keep it to myself, sort of like the way you would

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a stolen locket, or like a locket you might have found in the cranny of a train seat and

felt the need to keep. This is partly because what happens in the story has not

happened to me, and so telling it feels like theft, albeit theft of something no longer

owned, something that happened to people I have never met and of whom I heard

little growing up, even though they are my kin, which is to say, my Polish grandfather

and his two wives, or more properly, that is, my Polish grandmother and the woman

who replaced her, which means, of course, in another way, that this story has in fact

happened to me, or rather has happened to me already and had always have happened

to me, and I have neither felt the urge nor the need to tell it since the time, a few

years ago, on the train from London to Brighton, I saw a young man point and snarl

and blame a headscarfed woman for his misery, but now I know I ought to share it

because you are here and do not know what salvation really is, and because, a few

nights ago, I happened to have a dream about the people in the story, a wonderful

dream where I am walking through the woods and valleys of Karkonosze National

Park with them in spring, only to wake up before my body, unable to move, in my

now-too-fucking-big bed, short of breath, like [Gareth] when it finally reached his

throat, feeling a horror I have likened to the horror that Lazarus must have felt from

having been brought back from paradise to see the dirt of his own grave, and anyway,

there is no one to tell the story now that my father, too, last year, finally died, but

not before making a point of telling it to me for the first time, tucked up in his little

grey bed in the hospice, his death bed, as I suppose you call it here, two days or so

before he actually snuffed it, and over two years after we had last spoken in person,

both times under the same circumstances, with the same miserable, squeamish nurse

whose mouth smelled of over-chewed gum asking me if I was the carer and then

telling me, after I had said, “No, I am the son”, that carers have to sign their name in

the logbook, a huge red leather ring binder this nurse would slam onto the reception

desk before pointing me down the corridor, which was white as a barnacle, as I

remember thinking, towards my father’s room. This was the last time I saw him alive,

[Ben]. I remember the light in there was heavy with summer, but there was also the—

I don’t know—the unfixed—what?—the unfixed, shimmering chill of a house just

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moved into—yes?—and the silence that happens immediately after a glass is

smashed—you know?—but also before someone says, “Oh dear” or “Whoops!” or

“Fuck” or “Mazel Tov!” but neither my father nor I could smash this silence itself,

you see, and so it stayed there between us and it seemed the very air we breathed,

until finally, my father coughed and spat into a handkerchief and asked me if he knew

me, to which I replied, as I had learned it was best to do, not out of compassion or

wanting to avoid confusing or agitating him, but really out of ease for myself, saying,

“No. I am Artur”, which is not my real name, “your friend. Remember.” On this

occasion, however, my father shook his head, not simply accepting the lie as he had

previously, and in a moment of sudden lucidity, he said, “No. You are not. I know

my own son when I see him”, to which he added, a moment later, refilling the silence

that I had filled with my discomfort at having been identified as such, “Now I know

there is not long left. I can feel it coming. It is like the difference between feeling

sick and knowing you are actually going to vomit. So there is something you should

know”, something, I thought at the time, like an apology or an excuse or explanation,

as then I remembered the one and only time I saw him vomit, the one and only time

he got drunk, nearly ten years after my mother first estranged herself from us, and

exactly five years to the day that we heard about her death, the time I returned from

Eerde International Boarding School, in Holland, he had drunk several vodkas, puked

up in his lap, pissed down his trouser leg, and I found him soiled and sprawled naked

on his bathroom floor, at which initially I laughed, from the shock, I suppose, or—

what?—some deep desire to see him undone, but then I knew, even at fifteen, that I

had to rinse him in the tub, and when I held the showerhead over him and his penis

instinctively grew, into a real whopper, I must admit, I closed my eyes and said

nothing, and when I crutched him to bed, he was the gentlest I had known him to

be or would be thereafter, but no, it was not an apology, excuse or explanation, only

a sort of origin story, an attempt to define himself and me before it was too late,

letting this scar over his past unseal by sitting up in the bed to open his lungs and tell

me, with probably quite considerable but nevertheless convincing liberties, of my

grandfather, his father, a renowned photographer living, during the Second World

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War, in Sobótka, Poland, and when, one morning in November, German soldiers

trooped through the town, inspecting homes for Jews, one of whom was sheltered in

my grandfather’s home with my grandmother and their baby boy, my father, and to

repay their kindness, this young Jewish woman served as a maid of sorts, dusting and

cooking and making the beds, all the usual domestic chores except grocery runs, of

course, which my grandmother happened to be doing at the time the soldiers banged

on the door demanding papers from my grandfather and the woman, who hadn’t the

time to hide behind the walls, as was the intended procedure, which thus impelled

my grandfather to hastily redress this lapse of vigilance by calling her his wife, and

probably kissing her to prove it, before the soldiers went on to the town centre,

where my grandmother was leaving the bakery with a packet of pastries, my father

imagined, where she was told to confirm her identity, which she could not do because

her papers, in a correspondingly insouciant oversight, had been left at home in the

grey-doored house on the north side of the town, as she would have told them, upon

the small hill there, where her husband and baby boy were waiting for her to return

with breakfast, where the soldiers had just been, they would have said, and met her

so-called husband and her so-called baby, and met, in fact, herself, if it was true that

she was the woman of the household, which, after looking at the hills around her, I

imagine, feeling the winter sting in her nostrils, trying to hear her husband’s prayers

for her safe return, my grandmother agreed was false, confessing to a religion that

was not hers and bearing the fate of another, knowing that they would drag her

flailing through the streets and away from her life, her husband, her baby, [Ben],

maybe even knowing and accepting that her husband would not two years later marry

the young Jewish woman who then mothered my father and provided my grandfather

with a new family of seven more children, who, with their dark colouring, tormented

my father for his straw hair and his eyes that were grey as gravestones. He grew up

miserably, he said, until, one day in his fourteenth year, while the family celebrated

the second boy’s acceptance into a prestigious school in Switzerland in the dining

room, and my father pouted in the parlour, he found (precisely how, he couldn’t, or

maybe I can’t, remember) a photograph of a woman with bright blonde hair tucked

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between two thin slices of stone behind another photograph in a frame on the

mantle, and when he read, inscribed overleaf, “Ulubiona sukienka Mama”, meaning,

Mum’s new dress, knowing then the truth without remembering its particular

elements, my father confronted his father and the woman he had grown to call his

mother, who, satisfied now with her own kin and sick of what she deemed his

malevolent incongruity, as my father said, corroborated his claims and resigned her

post, her duty of care. His father kept quiet. My father packed a bag. That very night

he stole his father’s camera, taking with him the photograph of his mother, and left

Poland altogether, first in the storage compartment of a freight train, then under the

apparent goodwill of an English diplomat in Amsterdam, from where he travelled

with the diplomat to his London mansion to become his personal messenger and

recordkeeper, a career that lasted only a few years before my father was cast out for

rejecting the diplomat’s indecent propositions—another reconcilable difference

between us—which put my father on the streets and forced him to sell the camera at

Spitalfields Market, where he was passionately convinced against it by a pawnbroker’s

daughter, who thought cameras the most wonderful thing in the world, especially

when these two, my father and my mother, eloped north, but only as far as

Woodbridge on the Suffolk coast, where they stayed and were married some years

later and could photograph it, producing a picture of such posed formality that it

discredits the day’s chattering feeling of true elation, as my father uncharacteristically

put it to me that afternoon last year, dabbing a smear of tears under his eyes and

handing me that very photograph, so browned and frayed it seemed like it was made

of dust, compacted dust, which I imagined whenever I showed it to [Gareth], who

did not want to see it on account of all the stories I had told about my father, or

whenever I showed it to [Thomas] when he was younger, though he was more

interesting in fairy tales of knights and dragons and Vikings and video games, or

whenever I look at it myself, [Ben], at night, always a night, just before falling asleep,

looking at these people, the gone people, gone like they had never been anything else

but gone, my people, who are gone now and nothing else but gone, and whenever I

look at it, I feel a sensation like no other, the glum release of losing something that

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was never there, the dreamy melting melancholy feeling of life appearing—what?—

deflated of meaning, when the question that keeps emerging in my mind emerges

again: can it be that they, and any of us, gone as they are, so long fucking gone, as

[Gareth] will be, as I will be, and you, too, [Ben], despite our courage and suffering

and our acts of salvation and being saved, that we might as well have never been?’

[Pawel] said, leaning close to me now, his breath strangely without smell, before

reaching for a cigarette in the bedside cabinet drawer, handing me one, and lighting

us both. For a moment, we sat there on the bed, said nothing, and smoked. Then he

said, ‘Well,’ and went to the toilet. I took [Gareth’s] phone and wrote out a text to

[Pawel]. It said: ‘I hope what comes next will be a relief like the relief I’ve felt

whenever I looked at you.’ When [Pawel] came back, I told him I had to catch the

last tube. ‘[Gareth] sent me a text that day,’ I said. ‘The day he died. It was just saying

thanks for coming to the wedding. You should check if he tried to send one to you.’

[Pawel] looked at me, perhaps coming to terms with never seeing me again, asking

himself if he would ever want to, and I left. Outside, wind gusts whipped hail against

the car windows. The hail poured off roofs and speckled the hedges below. Before

going underground, someone on Facebook said that they’d seen a huddle of homeless

people rampaging in Elephant and Castle outside the hostel at which I volunteered

a few years ago. Before I was fired I stole and duplicated my supervisor’s keys, like

I’ve done with most of the places I’ve worked, and kept them on what is now a bulky

key ring. The hostel is on the other side of the roundabout from the Electric Razor,

down small bike-racked streets of blocks that looked like student halls. Most of the

homeless lot were already asleep outside the hostel, covered in tatty sleeping bags.

One stepped between the others shaking them in the way you would to check if

someone is still alive. There was no hail here, but the night was sharpened with sleet

and puddles had formed in pavement cracks by the recycle bins. This ringleader

talked to me as soon as I was to close enough to hear. ‘They’ve locked us out. There’s

beds in there. I know there is. They do this when they’re low on staff.’ Never had I

seen a more eccentric bunch—if I can even use that word, bunch, since they didn’t

merge together as one, except maybe in that they all always seemed to be thinking of

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the baffling occasion in which they’d been thrown—not even on a South London bus.

There was what I’ve heard uni kids call a ‘crazy bag lady’, which means her hair looked

like a nest, I couldn’t tell if she was wearing clothes of her own under a bouquet of

bags—Sainsbury’s orange, House-of-Fraser pink, M&S green, Next black—hanging

from her shoulders, stuffed under armpits, holding them in her hands, and she

twitched just like a bird. There was one in a Del-Boy coat, flat cap, and a tartan silk

scarf, who smelt like a leather shop in the summer. A dusty one with dreads down to

the floor, an eyepatch, a sleeping bag wrapped around her waist. One whose face was

so sunburnt the skin looked wooden. One with broken shoes, the left side of his

bottom lip lifting up over the upper and a titled quizzical look. And this last man,

the ringleader, hooked his arms around a woman with dreadlocks, and said: ‘They

lock us out because they don’t like to bed us wet.’ Del Boy said: ‘We don’t want

to cause any trouble for ourselves.’ ‘Okay,’ I said, holding up the keys. ‘But with

a little anarchy, you’ve nothing to lose, and everything to gain.’ They rolled their eyes,

and shook their heads, yes, but I smiled, and the one with the wooden face smiled.

This one let me drink Special with her and a friend, who wore a black bomber jacket

with pink wings on the back, in Newington Gardens by the Playhouse and the

Jobcentre and the Court. It rained heavily, gurgling in the gutters. It was some kind

of miraculous event, last night, because there was a moment in it when I couldn’t feel

myself separately, as if the secret porosity of bodies was revealed to me. In an

underground club on Covent Garden square, though, I bumped into some strong,

young men in suits bearing repulsed expressions. One of them pushed me and I was

in the toilet, yelling, ‘Don’t fuck with me, fellas!’ then, with their brassy laughter

behind them, I watched my piss come out like an old rope. A short bloke with a

square, flat head and a twitchy mouth, who looked at me through the mirror while

washing his hands, was talking to me. ‘Cracking night. Cracking. The lads I’m with

I’ve known for ages, bruv. Their mad. I fucking love them, like proper love. So I’m

seeing this girl, yeah? It’s our third date tonight, right, and she’d got to meet the lads,

yeah? So I thought I’d let her meet them before they go on and we go on, you know

what I mean, yeah? She’s in the loo, like us, like now, yeah? Fuck knows what she

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thinks of them, like. Fuck knows, bruv. But this is mad, like, listen, so these lads are

mad, yeah? When we was younger, like real young, we had this thing, yeah? We’d

pick up girls in Danny’s car. Didn’t matter who, like anyone really, yeah? We had

booze. We had pills. We gave them booze. But they’d never want the pills, like all

wary, yeah? So I’d—oh, it’s fucking mad, like proper mad, but funny, yeah? I’d take a

pill with them, like with the girl, yeah? And they were mad pills, like fucking mad

ones. I’d wake up later, like missed the whole night, yeah? But these guys would take

care of me, no matter what, like they’d be so happy and grateful for me in the

morning, like proper mates, yeah? But fuck knows, man. Fuck knows,’ he said, and

slapped me—‘top lad’—on my back and left. In the smoking area, I asked to borrow

a lighter and cigarette, but each person said it was their last one, so I went out to find

a shop. There was no rain then. A toothless man in an immaculate trilby let me roll

up and smoke with him and his friends. They were asking if I had any booze on me,

holding cans themselves. Laughing at my apologies, Toothless pulled me down to sit

with them by a bench in Jubilee Gardens beneath the static lightless Eye. There were

four of us—Toothless, an old punk with his yapping puppy, a wiry, giggly Asian,

Korean maybe, and me. We drank for a while promising to find and hurt the young

West Country lad who’d stolen Toothless’ spot on an elevated corner by the steel

gates of Waterloo carpark. When we got there the young lad was weeping. It was his

first week on the streets, he said, snotty and apologetic. The punk still threatened

him with a rusty penknife and the lad scurried off with his blankets. He was in such

a rush he left behind a bottle of gin. What luck! The four of us drank it down, tearing

it from each other’s grasps like elixir. The punk was telling us his story and the Asian

giggled—could have been Mongolian, or something like that—till her throat was sore

but the puppy yapped at her, bouncing around. The more the puppy yapped, the

more the Asian giggled (Thai?); the more the Asian giggled—I’m thinking maybe

Vietnamese—the more the puppy yapped. ‘Shut up!’ the punk yelled at the puppy.

‘Shut up!’ he yelled. Toothless asked him why he even got the fucking thing. The

punk ignored him and resumed his story, but the puppy: yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap.

Then the punk snarled, grabbed the puppy and strode off into the dark graffiti-

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covered tunnel of the Vaults under Waterloo. ‘What’s he doing?’ I asked Toothless,

but he just sighed, and the Asian giggled—must’ve been Chinese—till her throat

dried out again and she coughed, shaking her head at whatever the punk was about

to do. ‘What’s he doing?’ I said again, and went towards the tunnel. In there the dog

was still yapping. ‘Hey?’ I said into the dark. ‘Hey?’ Then the dog yelped, and a little

ow. Walking faster with the tunnel’s opening light in my sight, I almost didn’t notice

the punk right there on my left slashing the pup’s throat with his penknife. The

punk’s head snapped towards me, and I said, ‘Oh.’ ‘What?’ said the punk.

‘Nothing,’ I said, and took off running out the other end of the tunnel. How long I

was running, I don’t know, but I remember leaning on a corner on the Strand with

the man in the angel-winged bomber. ‘I know a girl if you want her. She’s not

expensive. She doesn’t mind anything,’ he said. ‘Will she pretend to be someone

else?’ I said. ‘As long as you don’t rough her up, mate, you’re golden.’ ‘Rough

her up?’ ‘You know. Tell her what you want, then let her take over, mate.’

‘Let her take over?’ ‘You know. You’re getting, mate. You’re not giving.’ ‘But

there has to be some kind of dynamic.’ ‘Dynamic?’ ‘I mean, if there’s no

dynamic,’ I said, ‘then we might as well draw up a contract.’ ‘A contract? What

the fuck you on about? You homeless, really?’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, but too late—my

face had already given me away. ‘All right, here’s what’s going to happen,’ he said.

‘We’re going to a cash point.’ Then he grabbed my elbow and led me up towards

Covent Garden. ‘Don’t fucking move, mate,’ he said. ‘Why not? You got a

knife?’ He didn’t answer, then he said, ‘Sure.’ Occasionally he inverted my elbow

to remind of my position, but when I saw a crowd of people by the square, I twisted

my body, pushed the man in the throat, and slipped into the crowd heading for the

queue outside a club. Approaching the bouncer right away, I told him over the

protests of those in the queue that the guy in the bomber jacket had tried to mug

me. ‘He’s following me,’ I said, pointing at him. The bouncer looked and shook his

head in recognition. When the man saw us watching him, his shoulders dropped like

an arsey teenager, and he walked away. The bouncer jerked his head, so I went down

into the noise. By the bar, I stood with a beer, listening to the lyrics of the music,

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which were about how great a night anyone listening to this music would have. It

seemed to work because people were chattering ecstatically and I thought of them

as on the same winning team. Through the crowd I saw the man I met in the toilet.

He was sat in a booth with two drinks on his own. Gingerly he brought the drink

furthest away from him, a dark cocktail, towards his chest, propped his elbow next

to the drink, covering it from the dancefloor, took something from his pocket with

his other hand, and casually dropped it in the drink. His eyes darted about, then the

villainous hand stroked and stretched his beard. He had an immense density in this

room now, and it was amazing to me that nobody else could feel the gravitational pull

of his malevolence. As I waited for him to notice me watching, a slender girl with a

tight blue dress came over and sat in the booth. I watched them cheers. I watched

her drink. I left. Or maybe one of those miraculous moments never came. Writing

this has left no space for what my memory feels. Maybe, like all feelings, it was a

dream—forgotten, but still remaining. On the middle of the Millennium Bridge with

blue lights along each side of the walkway pointing straight to St Pauls, I stopped to

delete every one of my online accounts, resolving—as I am still resolved to do,

sometime soon—to give away my money and join the homeless, or do something else

to untether myself from the world—because I can do anything!—when I saw on

Facebook that [Sam’s] friends still messaged him. His friends? His audience?

Witnesses? Onlookers? Let’s say onlookers. Most of them said how much they miss

him, while others reminisced in spiralling ensemble storytelling, an endless wake. The

first message I read was from [Tom Harbottle], who used to eat his own scabs, if I

remember correctly, and by secondary school, scars covered him like his skin had

grown nails. He used to steal [Sam’s] pencil case and throw it on the school roof. He’s

the one who started [Sam’s] nickname—Gorilla. After school, lads would chase [Sam]

up the trees around Cocker Beck near our estate despite the fact that he could fit

four headlocks in his arms at once. One such time [was it in the tree overlooking our

tiny back yard? wasn’t that where my father built a wobbly treehouse to shut us up,

where we snuck out late one night and found my mother asleep up there already?]

they threw stones and shook the branches. [Sam] tried to transfer from one tree to

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the next, but he fell, directly onto his shoulder, pushing it down and forward forever,

like he was looking around a corner, or like a gorilla. If he’d wanted more time in life,

if he’d stayed a while longer, I hope I would’ve said sorry for calling him that name

myself, for knowing how to hurt him, and hurting him. After [Harbottle] it was

[Heather Davis], the girl with two shrunken arms who lived in a mansion opposite

Broken Scar weir and who I was too ashamed to admit even to myself that I fancied.

She said: ‘It’s been months and I’m still in disbelief. I wish I could’ve done more to

help. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family.’ That’s me; that’s Dad; that’s

Mam. Did I feel her thoughts and prayers? No. I didn’t because she didn’t send us

anything. She only held up a picture of her own face, and inserted it into our open

wound. [Sam], if you’d let Mam become one of your onlookers—not that she didn’t

spy on you in real life—and she could see what they’re saying, she’d walk to the

kitchen sink and snarl ‘acrimonious gobshites’ at the window (meaning

‘sanctimonious’). We haven’t talked since the funeral, our mam and I. We fought.

The priest read a prayer and Dad cried, low and loud, the first time I’d seen him cry.

Mam told him to shut up so I told her to shut up. It was childish. It escalated. Fingers

pointed. It’s all my fault (I’m self-centred, cruel); it’s all her fault (she’s neglectful,

selfish, vindictive). After the funeral we went back to your flat, and cooked tea from

your leftovers. Dad drank too much Smith’s, of course, and bin-bagged your clothes.

Snot dripped from his nose, the second time I’ve seen him cry, and he slumpled

between your bed and the drawers. He stayed there all night and hung your clothes

back up in the morning. The wind was booming on the Millennium Bridge as I

scrolled through your onlookers’ questions. You’d find that funny, wouldn’t you,

[Sam]—them asking questions? The expression you’d make is a kind of feigned

curiosity, slightly camp, and secretly scathing. Often I used your expressions. You’d

snort at that like Mam snorts whenever I mention acting, but you made faces and I

talked, and that’s how we worked—at least before the pills Mam thought you needed

turned your face into a mask. Your face. Your face—I was remembering your face,

with the eyes so black and narrowed by high and round red cheeks, with the forehead

so wide with its perpetual knoll of furrows in the middle above the nose, and with

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the expression so aghast like the time we found Dad’s precautionary MY FUNERAL

spreadsheet—I was remembering your face when you messaged [Heather Davis]

back. ‘Thank you’, you wrote back somehow. Now, listen, there are sights I’ve seen

in London that would make you think you’re dreaming, [Sam]. One night from my

old bedroom window in Newham I saw through the rain a barefoot woman wrapped

in tarpaulin and newspaper shreds beside a skip wolfing down a squirrel. On the DLR

another night, slung along dark yolky yellow office building windows either side, I

watched a welding flash ahead of the bend over Heron Quay, and as I swung in line

with the welder crouched in sparks on the next track, I looked up and saw a man in

the window behind, hanged by his belt from the dim light fixture, which, whenever

I remember it again, will make me picture you. But a dead lad talking takes the award,

[Sam]. I felt then, seeing your words, just like I had before the funeral when we

started boxing up your stuff and I found the Han Solo figurine you mail-ordered from

a magazine after first seeing the film. Han Solo was your hero, though you more

resembled Chewbacca to me. When it arrived all the way from America, the figurine

was unfinished. It had an unpainted face, a belt without its holster. Dad wanted to

send it back, but you kept it, either in spite of him, which was not really your style,

more mine, or because you found it unique—perfectly incomplete. Did you try to

make yourself that way? Tell me, [Sam], is that what you were doing when you

dropped from the treehouse while Dad and Mam were hiding me? Or did you just

drop so they would stop? Did you love me that much? I was close to crying on the

Millennium Bridge late last night, with the air cooler and calmer, the rain lightened

into snow, when I zoomed in on the photo of you that sat beside the rolled-back

stone of your impossible words. I was close to crying because I knew I could’ve saved

you—from falling, from all of it—but no tears would come. No tears, I think, because

bastards’ eyes see clearest. Even when I closed my eyes to listen to the kind of

rumbling chorus one hears at the edge of a sea cliff, I knew it couldn’t have been you

behind these words because your photo was never you. It was a bull goring a matador,

splaying him mid-flight. When St Paul’s bells rang out I ran home grinning, and now

I laugh with my morning alarm, thinking of you saying, ‘Thank you’. As the first pink

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glimmers of daylight grows in the mist outside, laying a tint of rust across my bottom

two wonky blinds, and there, on the edge the gleaming grey street, a fox slinks bendily

under a fence by a bank and into an alley, its white-tipped tail disappearing behind

the bins, I laugh because I know you wouldn’t have said, ‘Thank you’. You would’ve

said, ‘Coming to get you’ or ‘Hitler’s still alive!’ or ‘Boo!’ But me asserting who you

were won’t beat the injustice of your death. Your speaking in spite of where you are—

or where you’re not—does that instead. It isn’t you, [Sam], and it is you, disparate

and oblivious to who were, absolutely new. That is not you, and of course it is you.

Your onlookers liked what you said. They like what you said enormously. This is your

afterlife. This is eternity. [cut/include: and guilt is hell on earth, the dress rehearsal.]

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT, FROM CAMERON’S PERSONAL COMPUTER, LAST SAVED MARCH 2011] Holy Saturday Scene Two Hospital room, Darlington Memorial Hospital, at least two weeks later. Kay, attached to

various bleeping machines by an astonishing amount of tubes, lies in a hospital bed in the

middle of the stage, facing the audience. In a chair beside the bed, Sam holds his mother’s

hand. Paul stands on the other side of the bed. Behind Sam, leaning against the window at

one side of the room with a case and large rucksack at his feet, Cam looks over his shoulder at

his brother. Despite their distance from each other, the three men bristle. Imagine they’re

wearing huge invisible fleeces that fill the space in the room.

Paul She’s turned into a stack of twigs.

Cam Her hair looks like a nest.

Paul Aren’t nurses meant to preserve your dignity?

Cam I think the body takes priority over dignity.

Paul Still about the body

Cam Do you realise what you’re doing?

Paul and that’s all that matters at the end of the day.

Cam You’re prioritising aesthetics over necessity.

Paul Is that what I’m doing?

Cam You are.

Paul I’ve surprised myself.

Cam Well you could always brush her hair and clean the goop from her

eyes yourself.

Paul That’s their job to do.

Cam (feminine voice) Large part of the job.

Paul That’s what she says.

Cam (flatly, himself) That’s what she says.

Paul Help people heal. You know. Help people—

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Cam Preserve dignity.

Paul Aye. Help people heal. Help people preserve their dignity.

Cam Help people die. (He paces from one side of the room to the other, checking

his phone as he does this.)

Paul I should probably have a word.

Cam You could always sue them.

Paul I’m sure there’s grounds for it you know.

Cam I was joking.

Paul Well aren’t they supposed to be seeing to us an all? They’ve done

nowt to make us feel at ease or welcome or you know.

Cam It takes the hospital out of hospitality.

Paul shrugs.

A beat.

Paul (checking his watch) Anyway she’s wasting away.

Cam (on his tiptoes, peering at Kay) She looks like even more like a bird now.

Paul They’ll be trying to wake her up this afternoon but

Cam Her whole face is sharp like a beak.

Paul it’s been so long I hope she doesn’t wake up incomplete and

Cam Like a fucking heron.

Paul I’m not sure there’s much point if she’s not herself.

Cam Maybe she’ll morph into her true bird form.

Paul Will you stop it man?

Cam (going back to the first position by the window) She can’t hear us.

Paul Can’t you see how that’s worse?

Cam I’m getting it in while I can.

Paul Well stop it anyway. Alright? They’re coming to wake her soon so—

Cam How soon?

Paul (looking up at the clock on the wall, which reads two-thirty-three) He said

he’d talk with us at half-past so I don’t know. Soon.

Cam There’s a train at five.

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Paul You booked a seat on it?

Cam Is that what I said?

Paul Got somewhere to be like?

Cam I’m just saying.

Paul Got an early morning or something?

Cam Well I have a job.

A beat.

Paul (wiggling a finger down his cast) What job you work on a Sunday?

Cam Rehearsals.

Paul I understand trying to find work on a Sunday.

Cam It’s with the Almeida actually.

Paul If I didn’t have to be here probably

Cam The director has worked on Game of Thrones

Paul I’d be down the agency demanding something

Cam so if rehearsals go well

Paul or other.

Cam I could be looking at a TV job so—

Paul TV? Bit ambitious, isn’t it?

Cam Well I’m just saying I don’t want to get home late.

Paul You might as well set off then.

Cam You don’t know how long it takes from King’s Cross.

Paul You might as well set off then.

A beat.

Paul No?

Cam (pacing from one side to the other, checking his phone) There’s enough time

to get the five.

Paul Enough time for what?

A beat.

Cam (back in first position) To see what happens.

Paul See if she dies?

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Cam shrugs as if to say, ‘What’s the difference?’

Paul Well you’ve done your bit son. (He snorts, then abruptly with underlying

menace) You’ve done more in this situation than we could’ve expected.

Cam (turning to look out the window) I’m just saying I haven’t got much time.

Paul nods.

Paul (flatly) Well they’re coming soon to wake her up.

A beat.

Cam Doesn’t she have to wake herself up?

Paul looks at him, savouring the notion that he’s said something stupid. Cam looks over his

shoulder. Paul points at her.

Paul Have you seen her?

Cam I mean wake up herself.

Paul considers it.

Cam Will she even actually wake up? Isn’t it more that she’ll just get off the

machines? Breathe on her own?

A beat. Cam looks over his shoulder.

Paul (looking at him) I dunno.

A beat. They look at Sam for an answer, but he’s staring at his mother. Paul looks at Cam

and shakes his head as if to say ‘leave him be’.

Cam (turning around to first position) Haven’t they told you this?

Paul (rubbing the back of his neck) Nope.

Cam They will have told you this.

Paul (tired, uninterested) Yeah?

Cam So you don’t know?

Paul (suddenly irritated) Well do you know?

Cam looks at him. Paul breathes slowly, eyes closed, some kind of composing technique.

Paul I reckon the thing is—

But, not knowing what the thing is, he shrugs off the idea.

Cam What?

Paul (shaking his head) Well if she can’t do it this time, she can’t do it.

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Cam Then what?

Paul (after a short pause) Then she’ll have to die you div.

They both glance at Sam.

Cam (quieter, mindful of Sam) Then what?

Paul (quieter, too) I just told you.

Cam After that I mean.

Paul shrugs like it’s a futile question, then accepts the pressing reality.

Paul A loan.

Cam (disparagingly) A loan.

Paul (rubbing the back of his beck) No. No. Might just have to be the 9.30 slot like

your nana. I don’t know. All going well I should be coming into a bit of money

today.

Cam Is that right?

Paul glances at Sam, then nods. Cam goes to the other side, but stays this time by the door.

Cam (half-heartedly) I could help with it.

Paul (looking down his cast, then with energy) No need. There’s a Newcastle bloke

I’m meant to meet

Cam I mean, if you end up needing it.

Paul on Sunday maybe. He’s noticed a mismatch in

Cam They’ve given me an advance wage so

Paul the election odds on different sites or

Cam I’ve got some to spare actually

Paul or something. Cheeky bit of arbitrage. It’s riskless.

Cam because, if you take out a loan again—

Paul Well it’s none of your business, all that.

Cam It will be.

Paul It’s not your responsibility is what I’m saying.

Cam Yeah it is.

Paul Aye, well, aye, it should be. That’s the theory. But we want nowt begrudged.

Cam Is it you who don’t

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Paul I said we. (looking at the door) Maybe I should say—

Cam or her?

Paul Well… More her, your mother, aye. But if she doesn’t, I don’t.

Cam You think she’d do the same for you if you were there?

Paul Would I be in her position like?

A beat.

Cam (shrugs) Hypothetically.

Paul Well she’s said as much.

Cam (going back to first position) Gospel then.

Paul Listen here. Did she ever lie to you?

Cam (after pausing against the incontestability of this question) Yes.

Paul Aye. Fair enough. But did she ever tell you something you wanted to hear if

it wasn’t true?

Pause. Cam’s face is blank—completely still.

Paul Aye. That’s right. Sometimes her honesty was refreshing, you know, and

sometimes it wasn’t exactly entertaining, but you knew—well, you know where you

stand. I reckon I know she’d want nowt that wasn’t given willing, and what I want

isn’t in it now, because I’ve got to—well, I might have to, you know…

Cam What?

Paul (embarrassed a little) Do right by her.

Cam (looking out the window) How noble.

Paul Noble’s not in it man. Fuck me. You lot seem to act only once you know

what you’re doing’s got a good name or if you feel good about what you’re doing. To

me, you know, something’s only called noble or generous or what-have-you after

you do it.

Cam (looking over his shoulder) So you just do things without thinking?

Paul Aye. But not thoughtlessly.

Cam (shaking his head) The pleasures of not being present.

Paul Your problem is you have to try to be present.

Cam (pointing at the cast) And you’ve gotten so far by having no control.

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Paul You don’t need control for what we’re talking about. It’s reflex man. You

just do the right thing because you know without thinking that it’s what ought to

be done.

Cam And that also works for things that you shouldn’t do?

Paul No.

Cam (turning back around) You mean yes.

Paul thinks on it, then goes to the door and looks out into the corridor. Having seen nothing,

he comes back in. In this time, Cameron has taken out his phone.

Paul checks his watch, then checks the clock. He changes the time on his watch. He takes out

his phone. It emits the sound of a football match, which he quickly mutes. Cam looks across at

him.

Cam This money coming in. What is it?

Paul What money?

Cam The money you said was coming in.

Paul It’s this Newcastle investor—

Cam You haven’t met him, you said.

Paul What?

Cam You said you haven’t

Paul You mean coming

Cam met him yet

Paul in now?

Cam yeah.

Paul It’s a shift somewhere. The agency’s put me on to something.

Cam Building job?

Paul Block in Darlo.

Cam In Darlo?

Paul I meant Boro. In

Cam Right.

Paul Boro. Building trade’s picking up there, they say.

Cam Who says?

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Paul The agency.

Cam Do you not wonder whether they’re just saying that?

Paul Nah. No way.

Cam No?

Paul The boss is one of Georgie Pauk’s lads. He wouldn’t do over a man from the

same trade.

Cam And what’s Georgie Pauk doing these days?

Paul He just bought another nightclub in Hartlepool.

Cam (to Sam) Oh. Hear that? If cooking school isn’t demeaning enough for you,

you can always bouncer for Georgie Pauk.

Sam doesn’t react.

Paul (half to himself) I don’t know man. Where’s the money coming from anyway?

Cam (pacing to the other side and back again) Where do you think?

Paul Well I’d like to meet his accountant, me.

Cam ‘Accountant’ might be stretching it.

Paul Well what would you say? What do they say daaaan saaaaf? (affecting a

southern accent) A ‘money manager’?

Cam Nope. They have accountants down there too.

Paul I’m sure they do.

Cam There’s people who can’t afford them either, just like you.

Paul I did have one once. In ’83 I had a money manager. (A beat.) He was my

greatest expense.

Cam But you could afford it.

Paul Aye. Now we can’t afford nowt.

Cam (aping) Nowt. You think because she can’t talk you have to start speaking for

her?

Paul You think she’s wrong?

Cam Haven’t you thought of downsizing?

Paul To a shed?

Cam I don’t believe there’s nothing you can do.

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Paul You haven’t got a clue.

Cam Well like I said, I can—

Paul Absolutely not.

Cam Then it’s your own doing.

Paul Let’s just wait for—

Cam It’s like you like this way of living.

Paul Had worse.

Cam Ambitious as always.

Paul You haven’t got a clue.

Cam All I know is you say you can’t afford anything but you’ll buy yourself a new

TV.

Paul It’s not the same.

Cam It’s not?

Paul When you owe so much, you can buy stuff, aye, but you can’t afford any of

it. You can keep smoking with cancer an all. Debt’s a disease just the same.

Cam Oh. (He taps Sam’s shoulder) What’s that from, professor? Kant?

Paul Fuck you say?

Cam (slowly, emphasising the vowel, but also putting on an East-End accent) Kant.

Paul raises his hand quickly—but not to strike Cam, as we see, after he clatters his cast on

the side of the bed and bites his jaw in pain, because he then slowly raises the hand to aim a

shaky finger at Cam.

Paul Now listen here. I won’t let you get a rise out of me sunshine. Not today.

Cam It’s not my problem you don’t understand what I’m saying.

Paul What a clever boy you are. No you’re right. Course I don’t know that, but

that’s because I’ve not been told it. Think of all the things you don’t understand

that you’ve been told.

Cam What don’t I understand?

Paul You don’t understand what’s even happening here.

Cam And you do?

Paul More than you think.

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Cam Enlighten me.

Paul Well. Well, there’s a lot of necessary sacrifices you haven’t had to make.

You come up here in your working-class outfit to pick up your books, barely saying

a word to any of us. You opted out of our tough times for the luxury of wearing

your heart on your sleeve, so far as I’m concerned you opted out of us. You’re not

kin. You’re an impostor in our kin. And if I’m honest, I dread you coming up. Just

another fuckin chicken to buy.

A beat. The proceeding dialogue overlaps, but not precisely in previous intersections. The

moments of alternation only indicate moments in which the characters collect their thoughts,

restarts, gathers steam. Paul should speak belligerently, without much pause. Cam should

speak blackly, with charged suspensions.

Cam (to Sam) This how you feel? This true for you, Sam?

Paul Because if she does have to go, God fucking forbid it, and if you’re too busy

prancing about like a faggot, then I wouldn’t bother coming up.

Cam (to Sam) You fancy weighing in here? I know you’re listening. I know you’ve

got something to say.

Paul She’d never expect you to come and neither would I. We want nowt

begrudged, not even that.

Cam (to Sam) What is it Sam? You’re afraid she’ll hear you? Will you hold her

hand when she’s dead Sam?

Paul And you know what, I don’t think you should be here when she wakes up.

She’ll know why you’re here. Lingering like a fox on fucking bin day. If you’ve got

no warmth for any of us, you can’t expect any back.

Cam (to Sam) What’s the matter Sam?

Paul What were you doing anyway, just stood there?

Cam (to Sam) Who’s got your tongue Sam?

Paul What were you waiting for?

Cam Who’s got your tongue?

A power cut. Only dim, flickering emergency lights and the gentle sound of alarms.

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Kay chokes on the tubes. The men are silent, stunned. Two nurses rush into the room to attend

to Kay. Sam steps back and, without taking his eyes off Kay, he clutches Cam by the back

of his neck and pushes him towards the bed as if to make him watch. As the lights come back

on, Kay awakens suddenly with a monstrous, gargling gasp. She leans up and lies back, leans

up and lies back, over and again.

Kay (in a raspy, babbling, breaking voice, very fast, with abrupt changes in register, her

eyes at once wide and half-lidded, swivelling, occasionally recognising the people in the room)

They they almost they they born broke oh well blend it didn’t you they they the

roof isn’t on oh well it was almost oh on the treehouse it it knew it was a mongrel a

missing piece it was it was it will rain they they oh well call him down yet almost till

morning they they and the wood’s rot through and oh Lord my hands were tied he’s

drunk they they screw’s loose they they not even in the bed bastard oh! I was only

ever two so he’s yours he’s yours plant me prick there I’ve grown and yet I was

alone then Sam oh well where’s my little girl? Good riddance oh comeuppance oh

well oh well he loved that bloody cat they they they they they they…

Kay’s voice fades out, but her lips keep mouthing soundless words. Eventually, her gaze

alights on Cam. Clarity. Pause. Staring at her eldest son, Kay laughs contemptuously.

Lights out.

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279

[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – JANUARY 2017] It was Ali’s heart

so they took her to cardiology after two nights in acute. Cardiology has been

cut massively. I’d heard about a girl like Ali who’d ended up in cardiology.

She’d gotten sick of being in bed, tried to get up. A nurse had restrained her,

broke her arm. She avoided legal repercussions because the girl had

osteoporosis. I visited Ali in the evening. She was crying, trying to pull herself

out the bed. “What’s the matter? Are you hurt?” She pointed at the bed,

hanging off the side of it. I expected to find piss or shit. “I can’t see anything,” I

said. She slapped the bed. I heard the sound of the metal frame. The mattress

had deflated. “How long has it been like this?” I said, but she didn’t say. Hours,

I supposed, by how she cried, the marks. I found the cardiology Sister. “How

has she been?” “Non-compliant.” “What do you mean?” “We talk to her but she

just cries.” “Crying isn’t non-compliance.” “It is.” “How long does she have to

be here?” “Look, it’s not like we want to have to have her here.” “Has anyone

contacted St George’s?” “Of course. That’s who we want to have her.” “What

do they say?” “They want us to have her.” “When will they decide?” “I don’t

know. Depends if they have a bed for her. Depends if someone there gains

weight.” “Are they equipped to care for her there?” “Not in the current state

she’s in.” “When will she be ready?” “Tomorrow morning. If she gets through

the night okay.” I sit with her. The mattress has been inflated. We don’t say very

much. She looks pissed off. “Do you know what’s going to happen next?” I say.

She shakes her head. “Someone from the Eating Disorders unit will come to

assess you.” “Assess me how?” “They’ll take your weight, ask you some pretty

invasive questions.” She nods. “Do you want me to prepare you on the kind of

questions they’ll ask?” She smiles, mouth open. Has her mouth always been so

big, so many big teeth? “I know what they’ll ask me, mate. When did this start?

What’s your relationship with your mother? Has your BMI ever been over 20?

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They want to know if I’m mad or sick enough to treat me.” I nodded, tried to

smile, hot in the face remembering the questions I’ve asked her. She sees this,

smiles. The nurse comes to tell me to leave. Ali needs to sleep.

/

A small family of refugees

have set up a kind of camp on the steps by the hospital exit. They crowd the

nurses that come out. They’re not asking for money, I don’t think, though they

probably need it. What they’re asking for is help. They don’t bother the male

nurses, the male doctors. It’s the eldest man who does the talking. His mother

and sisters, I suppose that’s who they are, just stand there. They stare. “My

mother is very sick. We cannot travel anymore until she is better.” One nurse,

while we were outside smoking, she told me she changes out of her uniform

before leaving. “It’s got enough problems without trying to be an International

Health Service,” she said, laughing at herself. “I went into this to help people,

but fuck me.” I went into medicine, primarily, I think, because I was good at

science at school. Why I chose nursing specifically, I still don’t exactly know. But

often I remember one time in primary school. There was this girl, Kelly

MacNamara. She used to shove me, jerk her fists up at me when I passed her.

She’d pull the corners of her eyelids and grab at huge imaginary boobs.

“Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these.” She was doing this one day to

another girl, Maria Lee. Maria pushed her down the steps outside school. Kelly

cracked her head open. She saw the blood on her hand, her face turned chalk

white. She sort of screamed in reverse, with deep gasps. I pulled off my scarf,

pressed it to her head, crutched her to reception. Mrs Malik created a new row

on the stars board for care and compassion because of it. I’m still proud of this,

if you can’t tell. And there was another time. I rescued a baby bird that had

fallen from its nest onto the playground. A group of boys were prodding it with

sticks, tossing stones at it, just being little shit boys. I scooped it up, put it in my

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lunch box. Mrs Malik gave me two stars, but the bird died by the end of the

day. “It needed its mother, Corina, and we’re just not as good for baby birds as

mother birds are.” I got As in GCSE Biology, Chemistry, Physics, told my mother

I wanted to be a nurse. It was night, after dinner. My mother was filling the

clotheshorse. She frowned. “Why not a doctor? Doctors make enough to rely

on themselves.” It’s painful to me to think she’s right. I do, sometimes. I can

hide behind the women who blame the system, it’s gratifying, easy, but I know

I did have a choice. I did choose. But sometimes I don’t know what I’ve chosen,

out of those stiff two-way choices, family or career, success or assistance, let

alone why. One time a girl wearing John Lennon glasses and a leather jacket

that looked older than her, this was at the end of a long argument I wish I hadn’t

joined in a pub where two friendship groups collided, she said my choices in

work, and women’s choices generally, are implanted by society. It’s less a

choice and more like following an order, she said. What wisdom she

possessed. And only at nineteen! Until then, I truly did not know that women

are so brain-dead that we’re not capable of making our own decisions. It might

be because I’m tired, or my head is full of grim scenes, of Ali, scratching at her

fistula, nicking it, and blood, lots of blood, streaming down her arm, but it’s not

my voice I hear when the family crowd me, leaving the hospital grounds. It’s my

mother’s voice, saying, You ask yourself how bad these people really look. How

good is their English? How much they mean it? Are they asking you like asking

for the time? You don’t want to get tricked for no reason. The eldest man wears

a black tracksuit with scuffed elbows. The zip has ripped loose over the chest.

He points to who I suppose is the eldest sister stood by the steps in a dusty

shawl. “My sister is surgeon. She needs job. How?” I usually lower my head as

a go by them, but this time I glance across, mouth sorry. The girls sit back down

on the steps with the mother. The man still stands. “Fucking you. Fucking your

mother.” I look back, see his sagged face. He knows someone will make them

move on soon. He says something to himself in his own language. I speed up

out the gates. An ambulance drives up to some pigeons. When they fly off, it’s

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like an explosion of bone. Even I can forget sometimes that we all start off as

dependent on others as anyone still is or isn’t.

/

“Learn How to Fall”

Is the tagline of the class my poet friend sent to me. It’s a beginner’s class of

PopAction dance and acrobatics. A video of PopAction classes showed people

slapping on crash mats in the foetal position, dodging bricks that swing on

wires. “What do you think?” I thought, I don’t care. Really, I couldn’t be

bothered. I watched another video. Two people in red unitards swan dived off

silver scaffolding, bellyflopped on thick mats. They sprang up, sprinted off

around the back of the scaffolding, which stood like two giant staples crossed

over each other so that a bird’s eye view would give you a +. Elizabeth Streb,

an American choreographer, creator of PopAction, said, “In the background,

you hear impact sounds. We’re talking about, you know, a 160-pound body,

landing, and for me, there’s something profound about it.” I couldn’t see it.

There’s enough risk of suffering in life as it is. This seemed like the chosen

activity of people who’ve never been really hurt. Then a ladder, connected at

its middle point to one of the top beams of the scaffolding, revolved like a

propeller, just missing the mats. “I believe humans can fly, and I believe

PopAction is a methodology, a pretty complex technique, even though, from

a distance, we look like wilding crazy people.” Along the ladder, as it spun,

more people in red unitards jumped on, off, climbed up, down. “It annoys me

and it’s unforgivable, in a lot of ways, that people keep choreographing the

music and not exploring, therefore, by default, the idea of action and extreme

action and the notion of landing and the failure of flight. These things don’t lie,

like, what you see is what is true about movement on earth based on Newton’s

laws.” At the height of one end of the ladder’s ascent, one person, holding on

by his hands, let go, like leaping off a swing. He leaned forward in the air,

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towards the floor, straightening himself like a pencil before slapping down.

“We haven’t yet been able to access quantum mechanics, but I wish we could

go fast enough to disappear. I wish we could figure out to go through each

other’s bodies or skip a spot in space.” Most of the people in red unitards held

on to the ladder as one person on the floor pushed it around faster. “Each one

of these action heroes have to agree to come into this room and take the hit.

You feel the gravity. You are out of control. So it’s really an acclamation, it’s an

assessment, deciding to love being out of control.” They screamed, laughed,

cheered. “Streb has been accused of being brutal and masochistic and sadist

and all that, and all I’m trying to demonstrate is there’s an enormous distance

between death and something ethereal, and the difference between those two

points is, perhaps, where the drama of action resides.” One by one, as the

ladder revolved, getting slower with each revolution, each person in a red

unitard leapt from the top beam, smacked the mat, jumped up, dashing off,

stood up straight, one next to the other. “That feeling of falling, or fear of falling,

or however you want to quantify it, if you’re paying attention, you’re feeling

those forces as you’re falling, and they can’t disappear because it’s a present

tense technique, Streb PopAction is a present tense technique, and you’re in

that millisecond at all times.”

/

“There were tips today, in the paper, about how to avoid inheritance tax”

My mother and I are in Walthamstow Holland & Barrett buying foods her cancer

team recommend to relieve possible constipation after the fasting period

before and after chemotherapy. It’s 17:28. I’m supposed to visit Ali at 18:15.

“Because you haven’t got much of it left, Corina-chan.” “I haven’t got any of it.

It’s your money.” She frowns at the nutritional content of a packet of protein

bars. “I’ve got no use for it. It’s just sitting there, Corina-chan. Waiting.” I go

around the other side of the aisle. Hiro would pull me back around, tell me to

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man up. But it’s not like he’s here. He’s quick to criticise, quick to find other

plans. “There are gift allowances, Corina-chan. People can give away £3,000 a

year. And it’s not taxed.” I look over the soaps for the most unscented, the

cleanest. More disturbing than the vulvodynia pain is how it’s become the basic

bodily feeling, that I half-forget sometimes how constant it is, that it’s made me

basically tetchy, on top of everything else, tetchy partly because I’ve just

resigned myself to being tetchy and I’m not strong enough not to be. “There’s

a seven year rule. Do you know about this, Corina-chan? I don’t want to keep

you if you would like to go.” “No. It’s fine. The seven year rule?” “The seven year

rule is unlimited sums of money given to someone who will be free of the tax if

the donor lives for seven years after making the gift. That is what it said in the

paper.” “Are you an organ donor?” “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about

your money, Corina-chan.” “It’s not my money.” “Soon it will be.” I have to

whisper, “Don’t do that”, even if she doesn’t hear it. I find myself walking away

from her again, towards the freezer at the back of the shop, but I manage to

stop, look at her, listen to her plans that won’t involve her. That’s all she wants,

I suppose. “I am not thinking about other peoples’ organs. I am thinking about

what the paper says.” “Okay.” “Because it says taxes will have to go up.” “Of

course.” “Why of course?” “You’d be dead already if they never went up,” I say,

pretend not to realise how horrible that is. She tells me how horrible it is by

tutting. I pretend not to hear her, read the label of Dr Bronner Organic

Unscented BabyMild Soap. Packed in small boxes on the label are Dr Bronner’s

Moral ABC’s. “1st: If I’m not for me, who am I? Nobody! 2nd: Yet, if I’m only for

me, what am I? Nothing! 3: If not now, when? Once More: Unless constructive-

selfish I work hard perfecting first me, absolute nothing can help me!” I put the

bottle in our basket. My mother picks it up. “What’s the matter?” she says. “Did

the eczema come back?” She holds out a bottle of suncream. “Your skin is so

pale, Corina-chan. You need to check your skin daily. No one else will.” The

suncream goes in the basket. “It won’t be hot for a long time, but you can still

get burnt. You will.” We pay. She gets annoyed counting out coins, pushes her

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purse at me, stands outside. It’s 17:47. I’ll carry her bags home, then I’ll go

home. The loud grey wind will mess up my hair.

/

“On!”

I spent the day watching YouTube. Streb, on a screen, behind a hollow, semi-

sphere placed on its curve, said, “There’s a quote from the Wright brothers,

which says, ‘First we learn how to walk. Then we learn how to fall. Then we

mount a machine and learn how to fly. And for everyone who wants to be safe,

they can sit on a fence and watch the birds go by. But if you really want to live,

you have to mount a machine and learn its tricks.’” A violin plays one long note.

Two people stand on each side of the flat platform on the semi-sphere,

watching. The person on the left side of the platform bends their knees, making

themselves heavier, tilting the semi-sphere, making it a half-wheel, lifting the

other person in the air. The wheel rocks back. The other person bends. The

wheel rocks back. Another person, inside the wheel, rocks with it, side to side,

keeping the seesaw equal. The people on the platform both inch towards the

middle till they’re touching shoulders, then, shouting, “Up!” they swan dive in

opposite directions onto the mats below. When the wheel rolls one way, the

end of the platform almost touching the floor, one person from the side walks

up onto to it. As it rolls back, the person walks down off the other end, caught

by the people waiting for them there. Each person does this, turning to smile

at the crowd, who laugh back. One person, getting ready to climb up on the

platform, shouts, “Alright, Sarah, come and get me!” This person climbs up, is

followed by another. Both stand as the platform rolls away from where they’re

facing, turn, and slam their bodies facedown as the platform rolls back towards

them. Someone shouts what sounds like, “Open city!” as they swan dive off,

into the air, then another says, “On!” climbing on. Another person shouts their

name, then, “On!” climbing on. Each shouts their name, then, “On!” climbing

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on. The last one shouts, “Don’t forget about me!” then shouts their name, then,

“On!” climbing on. All are on the platform, shifting themselves among

themselves as the wheel rolls side to side. A row of three people lie facedown

along the edge of the platform. Someone shouts, “Inside out!” Then the other

three lie in a row facedown facing the other way. Someone shouts, “Everybody

hold on!” The crowd behind the camera laugh. I notice that I’ve been smiling

as I feel myself begin to cry as one row swan dive one by one and the three

remaining stand, holding hands, let the rocking make their arms look like their

soaring.

/

Ali is an inpatient

on Avalon ward, South West London and St George’s mental health trust. She’s

been there a week. I’ve come every day for her dialysis, some days twice for

visiting hours, when she is more awake. We’re in her room. The walls are bare.

A window looks out onto a lawn. Two girls are stood outside not moving. Since

being here, Ali’s weight has increased just above the limit where she’s allowed

to go outside once a day, for 15 minutes, when a nurse has time to take her,

but she has been refusing. She weighs enough to have physiotherapy, but she

has been refusing. She has given the therapists silence. She has been resisting

every meal. She has spent most of her time alone. The skin around her eyes is

flaking, sore. She stares at her hands, a nest between her knees. A little

horizontal crease forms at the top of her nose. I feel like she’s gearing up to tell

me some secret of her misery, but instead, she starts to cry. I feel like her nurse

now, feel uncomfortable in this. I can’t just accept her crying. I wonder if she

cries because she can’t tell me or so she doesn’t have to tell me. She’s starving,

but what for? Attention? Then she looks at me. Her tear ducts are pale pink,

plump, eyes bloodshot. I force myself to look at her. Then at once I know this

has nothing to do with her mother, like I thought before. I know this has nothing

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to do with disappearing. She knows she is starving herself, but not for anything.

Her starvation isn’t for anything, but of things. Of time, of friends, of a life that

others have without worry. She just wants not to worry about eating, about

meals. She just wishes she could sustain herself on light, by looking. She is

indignant about how complex our body is, with all its complex needs. Her body

feels more like it belongs to ideas about bodies than to her. She wants to live

outside her body. I don’t know what to say. I say I’m sorry I missed the past two

visits. I tell her I’ll visit her tomorrow. “Don’t just say that if you’re not going to.”

“I will.” “You better.” We smile.

/

“You don’t have to be here.”

But Hiro doesn’t say anything back. He sits there next to our mother, who sits

between us on the sofa. Arms folded, he prods his biceps. “I mean, if you’ve

got somewhere else to be,” I say. He doesn’t smile but I can tell he has a smug

smile behind his expressionless face. The smile says, “You can’t say a fucking

thing to me.” If I could say sorry to him, with our mother here, he would accept

it, maybe. We’d be civil at first, cooperate next, a laugh might come. But I can’t.

I say, “So what do you think of her, Ka-san?” My mother’s head bobs from side

to side. I say, “She’s certainly qualified.” Hiro says, “She’s too young.” I say,

“What do you mean?” “I mean her age is too low.” “Yes. I know what young

means.” “Then why you asking?” “I asked why she’s too young.” “You asked

what I meant.” “How do you think her low age, and I’m not even sure she is

actually that young, disqualifies her?” “She doesn’t look strong enough.”

“Strong enough?” “She doesn’t look like she could handle it.” “But she’s fully

qualified.” “So she has a certificate saying she can look after people. Doesn’t

mean she actually can.” “Yes it actually does.” “It doesn’t.” “What did you think

of her, Ka-san?” “And she’s too young with the age gap.” “What?” “What’s her

and Mum going to even talk about?” Our mother says, “She is too happy, I

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think.” “Too happy?” I say. “See,” Hiro says. “She’s too happy, I think. Not

serious.” “See,” Hiro says. “Okay,” I say, making a note of it, “though I’m not sure

what that has to do with her age.” Our mother says, “I would like someone

serious.” Hiro says to me, “You trying to say being young doesn’t mean she’s

not naïve or whatever.” Our mother says to us, “Serious people are

dependable.” I say to Hiro, “I’m just saying we should consider the fact that she

has all the requisite qualifications.” Our mother says to us, “I would like to have

more variety.” Hiro says to me, “Just because you’ve passed shit doesn’t mean

you’re actually any good at it.” Our mother says, “I would like to see someone

not African.” I say to Hiro, “If you want to pay the extra for more experience then

you can.” Our mother says, “I know there are lots of European carers.” Hiro says

to me, “But you told us we’re getting that allowance.” Our mother says, “I am

interested in seeing the difference.” Hiro says to me, “I just think maybe, just

maybe, we shouldn’t cut corners or whatever on the person looking after our

mum.” Our mother says, “Or maybe it doesn’t matter what I think.” I say, before

he can say, “Mum’s right. There’s no use in arguing.” He says, “I’m not arguing.”

I say, “Good. Do you want to go put the kettle on?” “What?” “We have one more

to see.” “Why can’t you put the fucking kettle on?” “Hiro.” “Because I’m the one

taking notes.” “That’s bullshit.” “Hiro!” “I don’t understand why can’t you just do

it.” He stands up abruptly. Our mother and I don’t flinch, but we do move in

response. He looks at us. “Why you doing that?” We shrug. “I was going to the

toilet.” We nod. He tries hard to seem calm. “I would like tea, Hiro-kan,” our

mother says. I look at the notes, knowing he’s glaring at me. He goes to the

kitchen. I pull the next CV out my folder. I say, “Her name is Marjorie. She’s

older than the last one.” My mother says, “He’s been such a help recently.”

“Who?” “Your brother.” I look at her. She looks at me. I say, “Yeah?” She says,

“Oh, yes. He has been wonderful.” I nod. “Great,” I say. I write a text to my poet

friend. “Hey, I’m really sorry but I don’t think I can make that class next week.”

The buzzer goes before I can send it. It’s Marjorie. I let her in the building, tell

her where we are. Hiro comes back. We sit in silence, watching the door. The

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kettle gurgles, gets louder. A bee bumps against the window, flies off. That’s

the first I’ve seen this year. I say, for Hiro’s sake, “This one is” but there’s a knock

at the door. I let Marjorie in the flat, shake her hand. She is at least a foot taller

than me, a wide calm smile, deep calm voice. “Take a seat,” I say. “Thank you,”

she says. The kettle clicks. “Would you like a cup of tea?” I say. “That would be

lovely,” she says. My mother and I look at Hiro. Marjorie looks at Hiro. He glares

at me, then smiles at them. “Anyone else?” he says. “Please,” our mother says.

“Thanks,” I say. His eyes flicker. He heads for the kitchen. “How do you take it,

Marjorie?” I say. “Just milk,” she says. “Just milk for Marjorie,” I say to Hiro.

“Right,” he calls back from the kitchen. Marjorie and I smile at each other. I look

at her CV. “So,” I say, but stop because we hear a clatter, a slam, in the kitchen.

We wait for another sound, confirmation of a break. It is silent. “That’s my

brother,” I say, “Hiro. I’m Corina. This is my mother.” Marjorie bows

appropriately. My mother, a little surprised, reciprocates. Then Marjorie bows

to me. I reciprocate. “Okay,” I say. We start again. “So did you have to come far

today, Marjorie?” I say. She shakes her head gently. “I live on Wellesley Road.”

“Oh,” I say, “I don’t know it.” “It’s behind Thomas Gamuel, the primary school.”

“Okay.” “That’s where my son goes. We can walk there in five minutes, but he

still wants me to drive us.” I nod, mentally ticking off my next question about

transportation. Hiro comes back with two teas, gives one to Marjorie, our

mother, sits down. I don’t appear to be getting one. He asks Marjorie, “Have

you had a CRB check?” “Hiro,” I say. “What?” he says. Marjorie says, “Yes. I’m

fully checked.” I say, “That’s all on the CV, Hiro.” “Give it here,” he says. I smile

at Marjorie. She blinks slowly in place of a nod. I pass Hiro her CV. I say, “So you

walk your son to school every morning?” “Yes,” Marjorie says. “It’s the most

reliable time I get to spend with him. I pick him up whenever I can, but if I have

to be at work, my sister or husband are available.” “Great,” I say, checking off

more questions I haven’t asked. Hiro says, “Do you have a driving licence?” I

say, “We’ve already established that, Hiro.” He looks at Marjorie, then back at

the CV. He looks at it like a page of Where’s Wally?, says quietly, “I didn’t know,

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did I?” I smile at Marjorie, want to tell her he’s actually 27 years old. Hiro says,

“Why did you leave your last job?” Marjorie nods solemnly. Hiro studies at her.

“Unfortunately, the mother of my last employer died.” Hiro looks back at the

CV. I see him swallow. “Were you with that family for long?” I say. “Six years,”

Marjorie says, smiling, saying, “That was a wonderful experience. She had been

an emergency nurse and I trained as an oncology nurse so there was a lot of

common ground between us.” Hiro says, “What’s this gap here?” Marjorie lifts

her head as if to see where he means. Hiro says, “2004 to 2006. There’s a gap

here.” Marjorie draws in a lot of air. “I went back to Ghana.” “Why’s that?” “I

went back to Ghana to convince my mother to move to England so I could care

for her. She did. She had been given a six-month life expectancy. She lived for

two years more. I would say thankfully, but in fact she lived in a lot of pain.”

Marjorie smiles to let us know we should not feel uncomfortable, embarrassed.

My mother says, “That is very noble of you.” Marjorie says, “Oh”, waves her

hand. “My husband was willing to work a little more so I could work a little, or

quite a lot, less. She is my mother.” My mother nods, says, “I have noticed in

this country, people are just too quick to let others take care of their family.”

“Yes,” Marjorie says, “it is a luxury that sometimes does more harm than good.

But sometimes it is necessary, when it is not possible financially, and especially

when specialised care is needed.” My mother smiles, takes Marjorie’s CV from

Hiro, looks over it. She makes quiet sounds of approval. She hands the CV to

me, stands. Marjorie stands. My mother bows deeply. Marjorie reciprocates.

Hiro and I stand tentatively. Marjorie bows to us. We reciprocate. I’ve not

bowed since I was a child. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Hiro bow. I don’t know

what to say. My mother sees Marjorie to the door. I say, “Thank you,” as she

leaves. Hiro and I look at our mother. “There you go,” she says. “If you are

certain I will need someone, then I would like it to be Marjorie.” “Great,” I say.

“Hold on,” Hiro says. “We barely asked her anything.” “Ka-san seems happy

with Marjorie,” I say. “But we didn’t even ask if she smokes or anything.” “I think

she is the best candidate,” I say. “But mum,” Hiro says, “what if she smokes? Do

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you really want a smoker coming in here stinking the place out?” My mother

considers this. “Do you really want a smoker cooking meals for you?” “I will

cook my own meals, Hiro-kun.” “But when you can’t, do you want a smoker

cooking your meals for you?” “We don’t even know if she’s a smoker,” I say.

“And that’s why we can’t just green light her, man.” “If Ka-san is happy with

Marjorie—” “But she’s less qualified than the last one and you were banging on

about that.” “I just think we should accept what Ka-san wants.” “You’re not

thinking of what she wants.” “I’m not?” “No, man. You’re just shooting

everything I say down.” Our mother says, “I’m going to have a nap.” I say, “I’ll

call Marjorie tomorrow to iron out some details.” But she doesn’t respond as

she heads for her room. I sit on the sofa, start to order the folder, pack my bag.

By the window, Hiro watches me. “Why are you rushing this?” he says. “Why are

you nit-picking?” I say. “Nit-picking!” “You need to get it together, man.” “The

fuck you talking about, get it together?” “It’s going to have to happen, Hiro.” “I

know that.” “Do you?” “The fuck you talking about?” I zip up my rucksack. “All

right,” I say. “I’ll ask you. Do you think we need to get a carer for Mum?” Hiro

looks at me. He looks towards her room. “Exactly,” I say, standing. He walks

from the window towards me, stops by the door. I sigh, wait for him to speak.

He doesn’t. I take out my phone to send that text to my poet friend, but he says,

“It’s just fucking classic, man.” I shouldn’t say anything, should leave. “What do

you mean?” I say. He walks across the room to the dining table, sits down.

“What would you have done if Madeline was shit?” “Who the fuck is Madeline?”

He points his thumb at the door, says, “Madeline. Fucking Madeline.”

“Marjorie.” “Yeah. Marjorie. Whatever.” “What would I have what?” “What

would you have done if Marjorie was shit? What if she had a fucking ‘Fuck Japs’

tattoo on her neck?” “Well, I’d have taken that into account, Hiro.” “And what if

Mum still liked her?” I don’t know what to say. “Exactly,” he says. I put my

rucksack on my back. He stands, goes back to where he was standing, in front

of the door. I stand in front of him, say, “I need to go.” He says, “Going to choose

the coffin?” I push him hard in the chest. He slaps me in the face. We stare at

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each other. Then I start smacking him. I smack him into a ball on the ground.

He grabs my legs, pulls me over. He tries to grab my arms, pin me, but I keep

smacking him. I hear our mother say, “What is going on?” We stop. Hiro sits

back. His face is red. There are scratch marks starting to bleed. I stand up, grab

my bag. I stand over him, leave.

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[SCREENSHOTS OF EMAIL CHAIN BETWEEN KAY DEEDS AND CAMERON TRUTH, 18-21 APRIL 2014]

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[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2017] After a week on Avalon ward

“How are you doing?” “Great, mate. I’ve made up my mind.” Her voice sounds

like she’s about to laugh. It’s not as reassuring as you might think. “Yeah?” “I’m

going to gain two pounds by the end of the week.” I know my face isn’t

matching up to her enthusiasm. “What?” she says. “Nothing.” “You think I’ve

lost it.” “I didn’t say that.” “You didn’t have to, mate.” “What does your therapist

say about it?” She bites her fingernails. I say, “It just seems a bit sudden.” “It

hasn’t felt sudden for me.” She spits a curl of nail on the floor. I say, “I can

imagine.” “No, you can’t.” “Don’t do that, Ali.” “It’s true.” “Why do you keeping

saying that, anyway? I can’t imagine. I don’t get it. Of course I can. Of course I

can imagine.” “Because you don’t know me. Why are you here? Why are you

here? You don’t know me, mate. We don’t know each other.” I pick up my bag,

put it on my lap, but don’t stand up. We don’t say anything, don’t look at each

other. I breathe through what feels like poison, feel it settle. I look at her to see

if she meant what she said. She stares out the window. “Do you want me to

go?” I say. She shrugs. “Do what you want,” she says. “I don’t want to go,” I say.

She shrugs, watches a girl in a wheelchair outside. I watch her. I don’t want to

think too much about why I’m here. It’s just better to be here, I tell myself,

whatever the reason. I see her bite the insides of her cheek. I take out today’s

Metro from my bag. “I’ll read the paper, then,” I say. She shrugs again, eyes

widening, as if to say she doesn’t care. “Listen to this,” I say. She doesn’t react.

“A former Thames Water worker was removed from a sewer under Whitehall

last night at 1 a.m. after spending three days romancing a 130-tonne, 250-

metre fatberg.” Ali frowns. “CCTV footage showed the woman sliding down a

drain late on Tuesday night, three days ago. The police were notified last night

by tourists who had heard cries of passion coming from a manhole near Big

Benn at 11 p.m.” She slowly shakes her head. “Officers pursued the unnamed

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woman, who was fired by Thames Water in December last year, to a tunnel

underneath The Cenotaph.” Her lips tighten. “She was found there at midnight

embracing the congealed mass of fat, wet wipes and nappies, which is

estimated to stretch the length of Tower Bridge and weigh approximately two

Airbuses or nineteen African elephants.” Ali makes a snorting sound, shakes

her head. “It took over an hour to prise the woman loose. A spokesperson for

the Metropolitan Police said: ‘She had started to fuse with the fatberg.’” Ali lets

out a wheezy laugh. “‘It is our understanding that she was attempting to

consummate an illegal marriage to the fatberg and live outside civilised

society. She is currently in a critical condition, being treated for botulism,

norovirus, E. coli, salmonella, septicaemia, hypothermia, pneumonia,

conjunctivitis, gangrene, plague, mad cow disease, and the flu.’” Ali caws. “The

woman’s husband had reported her missing four days before the incident. In a

public statement today, he said: ‘Since losing her job she’s not quite been

herself. This whole fatberg thing was the last straw. I will be filing for divorce.”

Ali is coughing. I’m laughing so hard it hurts my spine. I blot tears with my

sleeve. I say, “Poor woman.” Ali says, “You’re an idiot.”

/

They can put a man on the moon

but they can’t make an app that figures out a quiet, completely safe route

through my life. They can put a man on the moon, but they can’t make glasses

that colour people I shouldn’t trust in red. They can put a man on the moon,

but they can’t treat vulvodynia. “They can put a man on the moon,” I said,

talking about my mother’s failing treatment. Mr Datta smiled. I can’t imagine

Mr Datta laughing. I wouldn’t have thought he shopped at Lidl. He swapped

his bags from one hand to the next. “I wondered if fasting might not help,” I

said, “or something.” Mr Datta’s head got weighed down on one side with what

I’ve said. He said, “There has been some evidence of positive effects certainly.”

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“I’ve just been trying to find something that will help. I don’t think she’s beyond

help. I hope not.” “How much time do you spend with your mother?” “I take her

to her treatments. I do the shop with her. I help her with errands.” “Do you have

meals together?” “Meals?” “Meals.” “I’m often at work. By the time I get home

she’ll have already eaten.” “I myself feel very happy when my son comes around

for supper,” Mr Datta said. Then he stepped on the 123. I waited for the next

123 towards my mother’s. I looked out the window. I saw rough sleepers

begging outside the Lord Palmerston on Forest Road. I saw a billboard for

McDonald’s. It had a picture of fries, the slogan, “Beware of pickpackets.” My

mother asks what we should make. She looks into the fridge. I look in the

cupboards. I ask her what she fancies. I do not look at her fluffy tufts of hair.

“Nothing.” “Aren’t you hungry?” “Yes. I’m not very hungry.” “Okay.” “But I can

make you something.” “When did you last eat?” “This morning.” “You should

eat something, Ka-san.” “If you had given me longer notice I could have made

anything for you.” “Sorry.” “When did you last eat, Corina-chan?” “Lunchtime.”

“How long ago?” “Three o’clock.” “And you’re hungry already?” “How old is this

okonomiyaki sauce?” “What does the label say?” “2012.” “That’s okay.” “Do you

have cabbage?” “Of course.” “Mayonnaise?” “I can make some.” “How do you

feel about okonomiyaki?” “My mother taught me to make mayonnaise and it is

as thick as Kewpie.” “How do you feel about okonomiyaki, Ka-san?” “We can if

you want to, Corina-chan.” “I haven’t had okonomiyaki for ages.” “You haven’t?”

“Why’s that a surprise?” “It is not a surprise.” “You seem surprised.” “I am just

remembering how much you like fried food, Corina-chan.” “I’ll grate a potato.”

“Can you pass me the flour, Corina-chan, and the stock, not the cubes, the

packet there, please?” We stand on opposite sides of the kitchen. I grate a

potato in a bowl. I hear her tap an egg over the counter. “Be careful with that

Corina-chan.” “I’m thirty-one years old.” “You still need to be careful, Corina-

chan.” “I will.” “Your brother cut himself.” “Cut himself?” “He had a cut on his

cheek.” “What from?” “Shaving.” “Shaving?” “He does not do it often enough.

He needs to be careful.” “When did you see him?” “Just before you came over.”

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“He wasn’t staying for dinner?” “He just left.” “He didn’t say why?” “He said

something about selling his car.” “He has a car?” “Or buying a car. I think he is

impossible sometimes.” “Where did he get the mummy?” “I don’t know.” “I

meant money.” “I heard you, Corina-chan. Is that ready?” “Yeah.” “Combine

those and I will heat the oil.” I tip the potato into the pancake mix. As I stir it

together, I see a hair swirl. I move in front of the bowl, stir slowly to find it, but

it seems to have vanished. “Sometimes,” my mother says, lowering her voice to

speak her mind, “I think it is impossible to be a mother to that young man.”

“Yeah.” “Sometimes he finds his own way, be his own man. Other times he

seems like little apprentice wanting a master.” “Yeah.” “But then I read on the

computer that in Japan people are calling their child Marin when really their

name is Kai. This is a puzzle to me.” “Yeah.” “I know he lies to me. I could never

get him to tell the truth. He does not respect me enough. Now he will never be

able. Are you finished? Is there shell in there?” “No.” “Let me see.” “No. It is

shell. Don’t worry. I’ve got it.” “Do you know you have to use the shell to get the

shell?” “It’s fine, Ka-san,” I say, but she comes over, sees me pluck out the hair,

flick it into the bin. She stares at the bin. “It’s fine, Ka-san,” I say, but she stands

stiffly, hangs her head. “Ka-san,” I say, “it’s fine.” If she registers what I say it’s

only in her blinking. I put my hand on her shoulder. She scratches her head.

She pulls out another bowl from the cupboard, tips flour into it. She scratches

her head. She taps another egg over the counter, cracks it into the flour. She

scratches her head. She scratches her head with both hands. She scratches her

head, scratching fast, hard. “Ka-san,” I say. I grab her hands, but they still move

as if they’re scratching. Her eyes are closed. “Ka-san,” I say. “It is so itchy. It is

very, very itchy.” “Okay,” I say, keeping her hands together in the crux of my

elbow so I can wet my hand under the tap, stroking the water over her hair.

“Okay,” I say. The tension in her arms starts to melt. She doesn’t open her eyes.

She says, “Do you think I need my hair, Corina-chan?” “Need it?” She nods. “No,

you don’t need it, Ka-san.” She nods. “Would you like to shave it?” I say. She

frowns. “Would you like me to shave it?” Her eyelids twitch. Tinily, she nods.

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“Okay,” I say, lead her to the toilet. Her eyes are still closed. I sit her down on

the toilet, run the tap warm. It fills the sink. I lather my hands, her head with

soap. I take the razor I keep here from the shower. “Are you sure, Ka-san?” She

nods. I shave at her temple. The soft hairs gather in the razor. I wash them off,

draw the razor over the same place, picking off hairs the razor missed. She

doesn’t open her eyes, breathes slowly. “Okay,” I say, “take a look.” Slowly, she

stands. She faces the mirror for a moment before opening her eyes. She covers

her mouth, laughs. I’ve left her with a downy mohawk. I cannot remember that

last time I saw my mother laughing. I cannot remember the last time we

laughed together. But we are laughing together! When I start to shave it off she

stops me. “No,” she says, “You don’t want me to look silly do you?” She giggles.

My mother has a little giggle! Apparently I do too! She sits back down. I text

my poet friend saying I can make the class, lather my hand. “I am glad you are

doing this, Corina-chan.” “Why’s that?” “So I don’t have to worry about what

you will think.”

/

“Before you learn how to fly, you need to learn how to fall.

But before you learn how to fall, you need to learn how to land.” In a studio in

a warehouse under the overground tracks by London Fields, my poet friend

and I glanced at eat other, lifted our eyebrows. I made a wary face, half-joking.

She looked at me with that dark snide mistrustful look I’d forgotten about, so

much sclera up from under a sharp frown. There were six of us on the mats. We

stood in rows of three. Our teacher Cali had a purple Mohawk, tattoos on her

arms, her legs. She smiled all teeth. I think one of them is gold. First she showed

us how she wanted us to make a ball with our bodies. Our shins, our hands, flat

on the mats. That’s a seated saikeirei bow. She showed us how to push up off

the mat, extend our body, “feel that foot of air under you”, land flat on our

stomachs, our thighs. “Good!” she screamed, clapped her hands. One of the

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men and one of the women had clearly taken the class many times before. My

poet friend was impressive, moved precisely, mechanically, shrugged off Cali’s

praise. I felt clumsy. This annoyed me. We stood up on our rows again. Cali

called out, “Head!” We jumped, spinning 90°, bowed our heads, eshaku. “High

bend!” Another 90° spin, bowing shoulder height, keirei. “Low bend!” A spin,

standing saikeirei. “Fold! Crouch! Ball! Stomach! Ball! Stomach!” We stood up,

panting. “Isn’t this fun?” Cali screamed, arms outstretched. She looked insane.

I half-shouted, “Yeah!” with everyone else. Cali told us to get in single file. I

stood at the back behind my poet friend. She turned around, whispered, “This

is ridiculous. I love it.” I managed to smile. “Do you like it?” she said. “Yeah,” I

said, “I’m just a bit out of breath.” I smiled. She smiled, turned around. I stopped

smiling, made myself smile. Cali said now we’d each learn to fall on our backs

from standing, fall like a tree. One by one they turned to face the next person

in the queue, stretch their arrowed arms up into the air, leap backwards,

blindly, land. Cali guides them at first so they can feel what it feels like to land

flat on your back without bending. Each time they did it solo, Cali cheered,

handed out high-fives. My poet friend did it second try. I remember once she

signed up to do a charity fun-run in university, but asked a lacrosse friend of

ours to do it for her, went to a rooftop bar. It was my turn. I turned to face the

empty room, stretched my arms up. “Okay?” Cali said. I nodded. “Go!” she

screamed. I tried, but I suppose my back didn’t want to be horizontal. It jolted

up when I sensed the mat coming, my hand shot out to brace. Cali said, “That’s

okay. That’s okay.” I felt the others watching. “Let’s try it again,” Cali said. I

wanted so much to say no. “Okay,” I said, turned around again, but my body

said, “Fuck that.” I said, “I’m sorry.” Cali pulled me up. “Okay! That’s okay!” She

shouted, “Mag, Level 3!” One woman peeled off, ran up the scaffolding at the

back of the studio. The rest of the class stepped back off the mats, looked up.

I stood feeling wooden. Mag stepped up to the platform edge. She stood there

for a moment looking straight out ahead of her like there was no space below.

She lifted her arms above her head. Then she lowered her arms. I wondered if

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she couldn’t do it, felt bad for feeling better about this, then she sprung off.

The bottoms of my feet tingled. I stopped breathing. The air seemed to grab

her, hold her, as her arms swung in unison from her hips to over her head. Then

she was completely still in the emptiness, so gracefully helpless now, plunging

so fast, gravity remembering to act. I remember thinking she couldn’t stop, she

would just vanish through the mat, through the world, but whack! She hit the

mat, spinning immediately onto her back, sitting up. We cheered, clapped,

whooped, whistled, high-fives all around. We compensated for the exhilaration

that Mag didn’t seemed to have. The next exercise, roly-polying to leaping into

a ball, then onto our stomachs, we did exacting, ferocious, desperate even. I

treated my body with the harsh, fearless intimacy that siblings treat each other’s

bodies with. I felt happy that my body seemed happy for the labour I put it

through, for putting it through the slightly painful intersecting space in the

Venn Diagram of risk and safety. Cali stopped us. “Great job, guys!” she

shouted, then said, “Corina. Do you want to try that fall again?” I said, yes, felt

no fear as I leapt back, my back smacking the mat. After, my poet friend and I

went for a pint. I felt like I could crawl up walls.

/

Control

“I’m not off it.” “I didn’t say that.” “All I’m saying is I’m going to gain as much as

I can.” “And I think that’s good.” “Yeah.” “So therapy is good?” “It’s a fucking

mare, mate.” “How come?” “Some of the people working here, it’s like they’ve

been made to work here.” “I know what you mean.” “Like, I know it’s because

there’s not enough of them, but I feel like they know I’m relying on them not to

die and so they make it so much fucking worse than it has to be that I’ve got no

choice but to make myself better so I don’t have to rely on them anymore. You

know what I mean?” “I do.” “They butter my fucking bread for me. Like, I’ve

never slashed myself. They know that, but they don’t trust me with a plastic

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fucking knife because I look like someone else who has.” I nod. “What’s the

matter with you now?” “No. Well, I’m not being funny, I’m not starting anything,

Ali, but I’m just a little confused by it all.” “What’s confusing?” “Well, you say, or

you’re saying you’re basically in control now.” “I am.” “And no one trusts you,

because they just see the outside.” “They do.” “But you’re saying you’re going

to gain weight.” “Yeah.” “So you know you should gain weight.” “Yeah.” “But

you’re not.” “I will.” “But you haven’t. You’re not.” She bit down her nail,

frowning, eyes blinking. “I don’t want to start anything, Ali. I’m not having a go.

I’m just wondering whether it’s you or it that’s in control of the situation.” She

looked at me, at her nail, at me. “Sometimes the illness is in control. Sometimes

I’m in control. Sometimes I’m in control of the illness.” I nodded, said, “What

about now?” She took a moment, then said, quietly, “I am.” I nodded. She said,

“I just need them to give me a bit of fucking space, mate.” I nodded. I left

thinking, But there is no space! After rounds I thought about her drinking warm

water with lemon or apple cider vinegar before breakfast to boost her

metabolism. Making porridge I thought about CBT to rewire her instinct to

overvalue shape and weight. Three weeks later, on Google Scholar, “anorexia

nervosa” “treatment”, I get a call from Ali. “They say I can leave now,” she says.

“You want to help me with my bags?” I say, “Yeah.” I will never stop obsessing

over how best to endure pain. Is that because it’s all there is?

/

Mottainai

An old Buddhist word. It’s about regretting waste, more or less. My mother

would snap at me, most days, “Mottainai!” So I ate every last grain of rice. We

had to honour, not misuse, each grain, because each grain has value, dignity,

deserves gratitude. In English, people might say, “Waste not, want not”, but

that’s not quite right. Every so often I went around a friend’s house for dinner.

Their parents would say, “Waste not, want not.” They’d say, “Corina’s a good

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little eater, a good working-class girl.” Humiliating. I felt fat, ugly. I’d thought of

myself as a mottainai child, but I saw our family differently after that, couldn’t

decide whether we followed the mottainai spirit or whether they just didn’t

want to see their money rot away in a bin. So then I thought of myself as my

parents’ living bin. This way, the wastefulness of buying too much was invisible.

In English, people might say “out of sight, out of mind.” You notice it even more

when you live alone. There are no children, no dogs, no living bins. My solution

is to recycle, religiously. On Tuesday mornings, bags and bags of waste food

are picked up by trucks. I think of myself as following the mottainai spirit. It’s a

fundamentally human way to think, I suppose, but then it’s not a fundamentally

human thing to do. The longest time you spent with me, two weeks in summer,

when I’d told your brother I was in Japan for a wedding, we ordered our food

online, from a supermarket, got it delivered. I saved about £50 that week. I felt

clean. But there was one morning, in the second week, we were stood in the

kitchen in our underwear. I sniffed into a carton of milk. I passed it to you. You

sniffed into the carton of milk. We passed it between us to decide if it was off. I

tasted it. “It’s a little sweet,” I said. You tasted it. “It’s minging. I’d chuck it out,”

you said. I drank a cup of tea speckled with curds in the living room. You

napped in the bedroom. I felt afraid.

/

I bought two bottles of beer after work,

drank them watching YouTube. Now there’s no more beer, no new videos, the

same recommended videos no matter how many times I refresh the page. I

stand up, go to the kitchen side of the room for some reason. I start to wash up

the dishes, but can’t be arsed. I wash my hands. I go back to the sofa. I think

about doing some sit-ups. I lie face down. I scream into the cushion. I sit up,

pull the blanket over me, make a tent. Elliot Fraser. The name nags me now

and then. I feel like I know Elliot Fraser. I Google “Elliot Fraser”. I'm looking for

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someone relatively young. The Elliot Fraser I know, if I know him, will live in

England, probably South. There are six Elliot Frasers on 192.com. None live

outside Scotland, only one is 25-29. I click his name, but I don’t have access to

any more information. Back on Google, the first two pages are about Elliot K.

Fraser, a Canadian lawyer. On one Elliot Fraser’s Vimeo there’s an old video of

a little boy skateboarding in a carpark. It’s blurry, his back to the camera. On

the Daily Record, Fraser Elliot, who assaulted a black busker in Glasgow has

been convicted of kicking a nurse who was treating him. On the Springfield

Daily Record, an Australian MP called Justine Elliot has accused her opponent,

Matthew Fraser, of supporting coal, gas and steam mining. “Elliot Fraser”

hangs unconnected in the description under a link for a summer school run by

a theatre in Stockton. On the website I search the name, follow the link to the

2001 summer camp. It has a kind of cast list. Director: Tamika Fuller. Cast:

Callum Read, Holly Bartle, Rose Appleby, Helen Dobbs, Elliot Fraser, Rebecca

Robinson. There’s a link to a photo gallery. I click it. The link is broken. I open

YouTube. There’s a video of a couple of boys breaking in, climbing up, sitting

off the edge of the roof of one of the skyscrapers on Bishopgate at night.

London gleams, flares in the camera. I think about masturbating. I think of the

word masturbate. It goes nowhere.

/

Frayed end

I ducked into the toilet when I saw The General Manager of the Kidney Service

Team on my way out. I sat on the toilet. The door opened. I lifted my feet.

“Corina?” said Tasha. I breathed through my mouth because my nose was a

little blocked, wheezed. “Corina?” she said again. I heard her grumble, the

door open, close. I counted to 30, then left the cubicle. Tasha was stood by the

sinks, an eyebrow raised. “Hi,” I said. “Hi,” she said. I washed my hands, long

enough to sing Happy Birthday, said, “Did you call my name?” “I did.” “Thought

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I heard something.” “What’s up, man?” “Sorry?” “What’s the matter with you?”

“I just went for a piss.” “That’s not what I’m on about.” “Then I don’t know what

you’re on about.” “I know that was maybe a bit shitty of me to blindside you the

other night and I’m sorry for that, but I didn’t expect you to ghost us. I really

didn’t expect that.” I shrug. “So what’s the matter?” “Nothing.” “Yeah there is.

Something’s happened. What?” I hold my hands under the dryer, which sounds

so loud now. “Nothing’s happened, Tasha.” “What?” “I said nothing’s

happened.” “You wouldn’t have acted like that if something wasn’t wrong

though.” “How do you know how I would’ve acted?” “Because I know how you

would’ve acted.” “Apparently you don’t, though.” “I know something’s

happened, Cor. What is it?” “It’s nothing.” “You mean nothing’s happened or it

doesn’t matter?” “Nothing’s happened.” “You can tell me man. Obviously.”

“Okay.” “Well?” “Well, what?” “Are you taking the piss?” “No.” “You’re telling

me nothing’s wrong, that nothing’s happened?” “Yeah.” Then she stared at me.

I couldn’t meet her eyes with mine. She nodded. She shook her head. It felt like

the end of something, an irreversible change. “Cool,” she said, sounding like

she was going to leave, but didn’t leave. She stayed looking at me to let me

know it was the end of something, an irreversible change. Then she left. I

looked in the mirror. I couldn’t meet my eyes with mine.

/

Ali’s room

Bed, microwave, kettle, fridge, stove oven, sink, shower, toilet, chair, chest of

drawers. The ceiling is the roof. The window is a skylight. Where the bed can

fit is between two walls right under the skylight, but one of the walls has a

slanted ledge at the bottom so the mattress is propped up on bricks so it can

fit. Ali told me to put her bags by the toilet door. She doesn’t look around like

I’d expect someone to look around their place after a long time away. She

pulled out the chair for me, sat herself on the bed. “How hard are you trying to

308

act like this is normal?” she said. “I love a skylight,” I said. “You want a tea?” she

said. “I’ll make it,” I said. Crackers, Frosties, bruised weepy apples, coffee, tea

bags, nine large bars of dairy milk. “Have you got any chocolate?” I said. Ali

was lying on her back. “I love chocolate,” she said. “I can see that.” “I’m a

chocoholic.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. I’m hopelessly addicted to chocohol.” “I’ve never

seen you eat chocolate.” “That’s because I don’t.” The kettle has boiled, tea

steeped. I pour the milk, two sugars for Ali. I tell her about Audrey. There’s no

build up to this. I find it easy. But I don’t tell her about Tasha. “Did you go to

her funeral?” “No.” “Why not?” “I don’t know. Her husband wouldn’t have

wanted me there.” “You should visit her.” I laugh. “What?” she says. I shrug. Ali

says, “You don’t think there’s any point now?” “I don’t know.” “You’re scared of

it, are you?” “You think I could do all this being scared of that?” “I reckon you

could if you kept making up stories about it.” “Stories about it?” “Like, reasons,

causes, a story, things that distract you from it, mate.” “I don’t know what you

mean.” “You do. The reports, the causes, the time of death, all that stuff.” “I

don’t know. I just think there’s not much to do with a box of bones.” “A box of

bones, mate. Fuck.” “What do you think happens, then?” “Me?” “Yeah.” “I think

you just become an alien someplace else.” “You become an alien?” “Yes,

mate.” “What part of the bible is that from?” “Mine.” “So you believe in aliens?”

“Don’t you?” “I don’t know.” “Don’t you at least wish there were aliens, mate?”

“I suppose. I don’t really care.” “What!” “What difference does it make?” “Well,

for one thing, believing in aliens means you believe you are an alien.” “Then

that means, right now, you’re someone else after they’ve died.” Ali laughs.

“Yeah,” she says, “Why not!” “I’m happy being worm meat.” “Fuck me.” “I

wouldn’t mind it if you stuffed me.” “Fuck me.” “I’m serious.” “You’re not.” “I am.

Use me as a hat rack, a coat hanger. Paint me in make-up with beautiful clothes.

Put me in a plant pot in the garden. What’s the difference between a dead body

and a flower?” “Well, it’s different if you’re only turned to worm meat or turned

to something more than that as well, isn’t it?” “What do you mean, more?”

“Well, if you mean something, if you matter.” “I’m happy just being matter.”

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“No, you’re not.” “I am.” Ali laughs. I ask if she wants some chocolate. She says,

“No.” I go to top us up with water, start to tell her about Tasha.

/

Kintsugi

My mother walks, little steps, to her kitchen. I think she’s gone to make us tea.

She’s irritable. I don’t press her much to speak. She just does things. I just

watch, listen. It’s early afternoon, still chilly, quite dark. There’s a crack, a scatter,

from the kitchen. My mother dropped a bowl. It’s in two. “It fell out of my hand,”

she says. “It’s fixable. Have you got glue here?” I say. “Yes. I need to go and get

gold.” “Did you say gold?” “To make gold glue. Yes.” “Just use glue.” “Don’t

step over there, Corina-chan.” She opens the coat cupboard. “Where are you

going?” I say. “To get the gold,” she says. “Just use the glue,” I say. “I’m able to

go to the shop, Corina-chan.” “What shop?” “I’ll find one.” “Please, just use the

glue, Ka-san.” “Corina-chan. You might think it is silly, but I do not. Please do

not question me. I mean to kintsugi, it is the proper thing to do, and so I will

kintsugi” meaning, with gold glue, it will be more beautiful than just a crack,

meaning, a crack filled with gold is more beautiful than just a crack, meaning,

it’s gold that makes the crack seem beautiful, meaning, a crack is just a crack.

When I get back from Wilko’s on the high street, a vehicle repair on Brunner St,

the DIY centre on Lea Bridge Rd, God’s Own Junkyard on Sternhall, in the

industrial estate, caught in a constant draught, with brass powder to mix in the

glue, the cut she got on her palm from picking up the pieces will not stop

bleeding, meaning, possibly, the cancer has spread to the liver.

/

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“Are you related?”

Ali and I look at each other, don’t feel the need to answer the question. “You

can only accompany her in if you’re related.” “I’ll be out here,” I say. “Thanks a

lot,” Ali says to the Jobcentre security guard. “It’s the policy,” he says.

“Otherwise you’ve got a community centre up there.” “God forbid,” I hear Ali

say, walking in the building. I light a cigarette on a corner of Mare Street. Across

the junction a woman strides out the William Hill, looks about, antsy. She

speaks to a passer-by who shakes his head. She doesn’t seem bothered, steps

into the road. A car halts by her, beeps. The driver knifes his hand at her. She

shrugs, crosses the road. She sees me watching. I shift my eyes so I’m looking

down the road, feel bad for this, then look at her. She nods to me. I smile

minimally, look away again. “Excuse me, darling,” she says. “You all right?” I

say. “I don’t spose you have any spare change, do you?” “I’ve got nothing on

me. I’m sorry.” “Do you reckon I can borrow your phone, then?” I nearly say I

haven’t got one, but then what have I become? This has happened before. I

chased a schoolboy for five minutes then lost him near Lee Valley Park.

“Please,” she says. “Yeah, okay,” I say, getting out my phone. She says, “Thank

you, darling. Thank you.” I watch her type the numbers, watching for a burst of

energy. She holds the phone up to her ear. I could’ve said I haven’t got any

credit. “Hello,” she says. “It’s me. Me. Yeah. I’m going to be a little bit late. All

right? Yeah. Like five minutes. Fifteen minutes. Yeah. Yeah. There. Still there.

All right. No. No. I’m not. I had to go back. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Bye.

Love you. Bye.” She hangs up, hands back the phone. “Thanks, darling,” she

says, walks back towards the William Hill. Then Ali comes out. “That was quick,”

I say. “Bunch of cunts,” she says, walking up the road. “What happened?”

“Bunch of cunts, mate.” “What happened, Ali?” “Sanctioned.” “What for?”

“Bunch of cunts.” “Ali, stop for a minute, will you?” She stops. I wait. “How am I

supposed to apply for jobs when I’m allowed outside once a fucking day?” “Did

you tell them about that?” “Fucking obviously, mate.” “And it didn’t make a

difference?” “The Decision Maker made his fucking decision.” We don’t say

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anything for a moment. Ali looks down the road. “How long for?” I say. “Eight

weeks.” “What are you going to do?” “Lay fucking low, mate.” “You’ll get

sanctioned again.” “Then I’ll get fucking sanctioned again.” Ali takes out a

cigarette. She scrapes the lighter. “I can help you out,” I say. She spits out

smoke. I light a cigarette myself. Ali doesn’t say anything. “No?” I say, notice

how her shoulders are jacked up around her ears. “Suit yourself,” I say. “I’ve

owed people before,” she says. “You don’t have to ‘owe me’ owe me,” I say.

She snorts. I don’t react. “Maybe I won’t owe you the money,” she says. “You

won’t owe me anything,” I say. She eyes me. “And what if I end up fucking off

to Monaco?” “Then you’ll fuck off to Monaco.” She nods. I want to say, “But I’d

like a postcard” but I don’t. “Thanks,” she says. I shrug. We walk across the road

towards a cash machine.

/

The mother is going to die

Of course she knows this, generally. She knows she’s losing, will lose. This is

why she’s irritable. She’s irritable because the loss is inevitable. But she doesn’t

know she’s dying. There are four things the daughter needs to know. Does the

mother know her prognosis? What is she afraid of? What are her goals for how

she wants to die? How much suffering is she willing to endure for the sake of

added time? The mother called an ambulance for herself early one morning.

All she told the daughter when the daughter got to the hospital was that she

felt “great, great pain”. Her oncologist asked the mother what she planned to

do once she left the hospital. The mother told him that she wanted to go to

Kew in the spring with her daughter. The oncologist asked her if she’d thought

about hospice care, or home care. She said no, of course not. He told the

daughter that he didn’t think her mother knew what was coming. He told the

daughter what he was seeing that he thought the mother didn’t know. “I just

spoke to Mr Datta,” the daughter says. “He is a strange man,” the mother says.

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“Yes. Well, he told me you said we’re going to Kew.” There are pauses between

hearing and speaking. “Yes.” “I talked to him about how you’re doing,” the

daughter says. The mother faces the ceiling. Her eyes slide from the ceiling to

the daughter, dreamily. She says, “Yes.” “I looked into it as well,” says the

daughter. “Do you want to know what I found out?” Silence. About tens of

seconds of it. The daughter knows it’s important to let there be quiet. In quiet,

the mother will understand what she wants to know, or not to know. She looks

up at the ceiling. It’s February. To the daughter, every night feels like Bonfire

Night. “Not right now,” the mother says.

313

[SCAN OF INDICTMENT]

314

[SCANS OF DEFENDANT’S APPLICATION FOR PROSECUTION DISCLOSURE]

315

316

[TRANSCRIPT OF TEXT MESSAGE CHAIN DELETED FROM CORINA SLATE’S MOBILE PHONE, 21 AUGUST 2014] 14:31 Chidinma Anyaegbuna to Corina Slate: How are you feeling then? I’ve just got back on it… We’re at the Mitre if you feel up to it. 17:50 Chidinma Anyaegbuna to Corina Slate: Cor! What you saying? Mitre? I WILL keep ringing you. 17:58 Corina Slate to Chidinma Anyaegbuna: Sorry, no, I’m fine, just can’t face getting out of bed. 18:12 Chidinma Anyaegbuna to Corina Slate: Oh no! Fair. You had a good time last night though? 18:56 Corina Slate to Chidinma Anyaegbuna: Yeah it was fun. You?

317

[SCANS OF APPLICATION FOR SPECIAL MEASURES FOR WITNESS]

318

319

[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – FEBRUARY 2017] Special measures

“In recent years, across a number of jurisdictions, the position of the crime

victim in the criminal justice process has achieved unprecedented prominence

in the minds of scholars and policy-makers. In England and Wales, this has led

to the Labour government pledging to put victims ‘at the heart’ of the criminal

justice system” (Hall, 2007, p. 33). “As a consequence of such moves, victims in

England and Wales are now promised high levels of support, facilities, and

information from many criminal justice agencies and voluntary organizations.

These include a Witness Service at every court, explanations from prosecutors

on various aspects of the process, the possibility of making a statement as to

the impact of the crime, and the potential to give evidence during criminal trials

via ‘special measures’” (Ibid, p. 33). “The reforms under the Youth Justice and

Criminal Evidence Act 1999 are limited because they reflect an

‘accommodation approach’ preserving the traditional adversarial model and

the orality principle” (Ibid, p. 35). “Criminal trials are structured as a contest

between victim and defendant. The adversarial nature of this arrangement can

be particularly traumatic for victims of violent crime. Rape victims often have to

provide graphic details of an assault and endure detailed and highly personal

questions about their sexual history” (Parsons & Bergin, 2010, p.3). “Live oral

testimony by witnesses is the preferred means of presenting evidence at trial”

(Ainsworth, 2015, p. 2). “Measures which deviate least from this traditional

model are also least effective in alleviating witness stress and securing the best

evidence” (Ibid, p. 35). “A greater percentage of the witnesses giving evidence

through special measures demonstrated fewer negative reactions (such as

anger, fear, tearfulness, etc.) compared with those that did not.” (Ibid, p. 44).

“There have been tragic examples of the need to find ways to reduce the

distress that victims can suffer from cross-examination. Ms Frances Andrade

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(an adult complainant of ‘historic’ abuse) took her own life after giving evidence

at the trial of her alleged abuser; three days before her death she texted her

friend to say that after appearing in the witness box, she felt ‘raped all over

again’” (Ministry of Justice (MoJ), March 2014, p. 7). “Figures published by the

MoJ show that, in recent years, there were around 1,000 Crown Court trial

hearings annually that were delayed due to the absence of a prosecution

witness. It should be noted that this annual figure covers all offences tried in

the Crown Court and the reasons for witness non-attendance are not recorded.

However, it is possible that a proportion of these trial witnesses would have

been victims in a sexual offences case and they failed to attend the trial hearing

out of fear of the cross-examination or the criminal justice process as a whole”

(Ibid, p. 7). “A factor said to contribute to the trauma for victims is the manner

in which cross-examination is conducted. In trials of sexual violence offences

victims are required to recount their ordeal and be challenged about personal

and sensitive experiences and information” (Ibid, p. 9). “On the stand,

complainants report feeling as though they are the ones put on trial”

(McManamon, 2014, p. 72). “There have been examples of cases, reported by

the press and media, where it is said that cross-examination was aggressive,

with victims, for example, repeatedly being called a liar” (MoJ, p. 9). “In

essence, the defence’s overall questioning approach was to use a sequence of

questions, in parts, to build a foundation of facts which was then used to

expose inconsistencies in, and make accusations against, the complainant”

(McManamon, p. 73). “The defence scrutinised the complainant by noticing

inconsistencies which were built using contrastive devices. For example, the

defence contrasted statements such as ‘being happy’ with ‘a terrible man’.

Together the statements created a puzzle inference as to why the complainant

expressed happiness towards her alleged rapist… The discrepancies were

created over the complainant’s general credibility – not to the facts related to

the offending itself” (Ibid, p. 73). “At present, section 41 of the Youth Justice

and Criminal evidence Act 1999 limits the potential to question a victim about

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their sexual behaviour outside of the specific incident” (MoJ, p. 9). “Witnesses

using special measures were less likely than those not using them to

experience anxiety (63% compared with 73%). Use of special measures was

also associated with the impact of cross-examination, with 41 per cent of those

using measures saying they had been upset a lot compared with 56 per cent

not using measures (not significant)” (Hamlyn et al, 2004, p. xiv). “It is relevant

to note that those who used special measures were slightly less likely to have

been upset ‘a lot’ compared to all prosecution witnesses (38% and 48%

respectively), although this was not statistically significant” (Ibid, p. 53). “Video-

link is one of the most widely used special measures” (Hall, p. 42). “Here, the

witness is presented with a video screen showing only the face of the person

talking, and can only hear that person’s speech. Hence, the witness is spared

the intimidating experience of the court environment and the presence of the

defendant and his family in the public gallery” (Ibid, p. 42). “This meant that

although the defendant and counsel could see and hear the witness, witnesses

did not have to see the defendant only the lawyer questioning him/her. This

was thought to be less intimidating for the witness than giving live evidence in

the courtroom” (Hamlyn et al, p. 70). “Concerns have been expressed

regarding the potential impact of the complainant’s credibility” (Ellison &

Munro, p. 17.) “Video transmission or the use of other forms of special

measures may imbue witness testimony with undeserved credibility, whilst

others have argued, to the contrary, that the removal of a witness from the

courtroom may somehow undermine her perceived reliability or

trustworthiness in the eyes of jurors” (Ibid, p. 17). “‘She’s giving evidence from

a separate room, which, when she first came in, that’s swayed me straightaway

because I thought, “Bless her. She can’t even face him”’” (Quoted in Ibid, p. 18).

“When a male juror confided that he had been affected by seeing the

complainant ‘distraught on the screen’, another juror immediately retorted that

women can easily get themselves into a distressed state, implying that the

complainant could simply be a good actress, and resisting any temptation to

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afford her additional credibility on account of her performance via the live-link”

(Quoted in Ibid, p. 18). “‘You didn’t get any sense of her physicality’” (Quoted

in Ibid, p. 19). “’You can’t get a presence of somebody’” (Quoted in Ibid, p. 19).

“The ‘vividness’ of video-mediated testimony may be diminished relative to in-

court testimony” (Quoted in Ibid, p. 15). “‘To me, the video link took away that

reality. And I’m not saying it’s right to bring a rape victim into a court… where

they wouldn’t be able to give evidence properly, but it just lacks a little bit of

reality for me’” (Quoted in Ibid, p. 15). “‘I think it would have helped if she’d

gone to court rather than do the video link, to see what the interaction was

between them” (Quoted in Ibid, p. 16). “One female juror was vociferous in

expressing her dislike of the live-link. She asserted that the complainant would

have ‘come across a lot better’ and her testimony would have had more of an

emotional impact had she appeared in court. As she put it, ‘if you saw her face

to face crying you’d think, “Oh my god,” and you’d get more upset’. Expressing

a slightly different, although related, concern, moreover, another female in the

same group complained that it has been impossible to assess the

complainant’s “true emotions” during her testimony due to her physical

absence from the courtroom” (Ibid, p. 16). “The difficulty revealed through

observations is that this distancing of the witness from the court-room can also

be confusing and frustrating [for them]. In particular, because witnesses only

see and hear one person at a time through video-link, they were often puzzled

when someone else in the court-room asked the presently viewed

lawyer/magistrate a question or vice versa. Thus, the witness sees the person

on screen looking ‘off camera’ and speaking to an unseen unheard other” (Hall,

p. 42).

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[TRANSCRIPT OF NEW ARTICLE FROM BROKEN SCAR GAZETTE, FRIDAY 6 JANUARY 2015] Mother Testifies Against Son Charged With Rape

The mother of a man on trial for allegedly raping his ex-girlfriend at a party in

Fulham, London, gave witness today at Inner London Crown Court.

One of five witnesses for the prosecution on the second day of trial, Kay

Deeds, 58, of Branksome estate, in Darlington, revealed that Cameron Struth,

30, an actor, has a history of illicit sexual behaviour.

When asked by Prosecutor Meagan Greene whether there was anything

she knew about the defendant relevant to the charges against him, Mrs Deeds,

a district nurse for Darlington Primary Care Trust, stated that the defendant had

abused his younger brother, Samuel Struth, who attempted suicide on May 21st

this year, three months prior to the alleged offence, and died on November 5th

2014.

The witness added: ‘They played dress-up. They played husband and

wife. It was always Cameron’s idea. He was always making Sam do it.

‘Cameron would put my knickers on and my bra. Sam never seemed to

like all of that. He didn’t. But he looked up to Cameron so much he didn’t have

much choice.’

Mrs Deeds told the court of one specific incident in which she had come

home from work and that, ‘from the bathroom window at the back, I saw at the

end of the garden Sam naked but for my bra and knickers hanging all baggy from

his little body.’

She added: ‘So I run downstairs and ask him where his brother is and he

tells me Cameron ran away after playing dress-up.’

At this point Struth stood up in the court and protested his mother’s story.

For the entire trial, Struth remained silent and unmoving. The only instance in

which he exhibited emotion was when excerpts from his journals were read out

to the court, and he cried.

Mrs Deeds covered her face with her hands before she was asked to step

down.

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Mrs Deeds’s husband, Paul Struth, the defendant’s father, has been

contacted for comment.

Cross-examination of the witnesses will begin tomorrow morning.

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[COPIED WORD DOCUMENT ATTACHED TO EMAIL FROM KAY DEEDS TO CORINA SLATE, 11 MARCH 2015] DearCorinaIknowitmustbeashocktoseemyname.Igotyouremailfromanoldemail

Cameronsenttoallofusaboutoneofhisplays.Iknowitmustbepainfultoseehis

nameheretoo.I’msorry.Iam.Idoknowwhatyouaregoingthrough.

YouareprobablywonderingwhyIamwritingtoyou.Iwanttosaysorryonbehalf

ofCameronwhowon’tgiveyoutheapologyyoudeserve.Iwrotetohimjustbefore

theverdicttellinghimwhyIwentagainsthiminthetrial.IsaideverythingI

neededtosaytohimaboutwhyhehasturnedoutthewayhehasandwhyIfind

thefactthatIamhismothersopainful.IamdisgustedbyhimandbelievemeIwas

evenbeforehedidwhathedidtoyou.Iwasonlysurprisedhedidnotdo

somethinglikethatsooner.

Idonotwanttomakethisallaboutme.IamonlysayingthissoyouknowIamnot

tryingtohurtyouordredgeitallupagain.IamonyoursideCorina.

Ihavebeenthinkingaboutyoulately.Mylifehaschangedalotsincethetrial.Paul

myhusbandhasleft.Idon’tknowwherehehasgone.TobesureIoftenwanted

himgonebutIadmitIwasnotactuallypreparedforhimtogo.Alotofmypatients

areoldbiddieslivinginlittleflatsandhonestlythereweretimeswhereIwas

gettingjealousofwidows.ButIdidnotexpecthimtogo.Iwouldn’tsayhewasall

barkandnobitebecauseofcoursehedidbitebuthemadealotofemptythreats

overtheyears.SoI’vehadtosellupandmoveon.IwentbacktoHartlepoolmy

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hometownandIrentalittleflatandIdon’treallyfeelaloneherebecausethereis

loadsoffolkaroundmeintheirownlittleflats.Lorditisgoodjustkeepingto

myselfinmylittleflatwithonlywhatIneedandnoonetoworryaboutbutmyself

feelingsafeandsecureandstablefinally.Igoswimmingintheseabeforeeating

myporridge.Ithasclearedupmypsoriasis.IjustgotbackfromaswimwhenI

startedwritingthis.Somethingaboutcomingbacktomylittleflatandsittingdown

withsometoastmademethinkaboutyou.OfcourseIamsureyourlifehas

changedalottoo.Idonotwanttomakethisallaboutme.

IwanttosayIamsorrybutIalsowantgiveyouanexplanation.Ireckonitcould

helpyou.Ido.Youmustbebeyondconfusedaboutwhyhedidthatandwhythat

happenedtoyou.Ireckonifyouknewwhatmadehimwhoheisyoumightnotbe

soconfusedandyoumightnothurtasmuch.ItmightbegoodifyouforgetthatI

amhismam.Ihavetriedit.ItrieditwiththeletterIsenthimandcuttingtieslike

thatdidmakemefeelbetteraboutthewholething.Somaybejustthinkofmeas

someonewhoknowsandsomeonewhocares.

Imightaswellcomeoutandsayit.IwasrapedandthenCameronwasborn.

Ididnotchoosetobehismother.Ididnotwanttobehismother.Istilldon’t.Heis

hisownpersonandalotofhimhasnothingtodowithmeoranyoneelse.Iknow

weareallmadeofthepeoplewhomakeusandmakeussufferandthisismostly

whyIfelttheneedtowritetoyoubutLordwhatislifeexceptchoosinghowyou

actinspiteofallofthat?

Iwantedtotellyouwhatmadehimthatwayandwhathechosenottoavoid.

327

Firstoffthereisthemanwhomadehim.IhadleftPaulforthismanacoupleof

yearsbeforeCameronwasborn.ThereasonIleftPaulwashe’dbeendupedintoa

doomedconstructionprojectandthathadweakenedhim.Heisamanalwayson

thewant.Helovesadealandespeciallyifitisanunderhanddeal.Itgivesthepoor

bastardathrill.Soheputina50grandloanandabout10grand’sworthofsavings.

Theproblemwastheotherpartnerontheprojectdidnotliftafingerandthere

wasn’taprojectmanagersoofcoursenothinggotdone.Thebankforecloseditand

wewereskint.Thatreallyknockedthewindoutofhim.Hecouldn’tfindwork.This

hadhappenedtomydadaftertheshipyardsclosedandthenhisdadbeforehimin

IrelandwhenhiswifespenthertimefightingintheRebellionandthenlefthimand

mydadtogofightalongsidetheTurkish.Paulwasjustthesameandhesatonthe

sofamostdayswatchingtele.Funnyhowwatchingsomeoneloserespectfor

themselvesmakesyouloserespectforthemtoo.

IfeltveryalonewithallofthatCorina.ButthenImetsomeonewhocouldgiveme

awayoutofitIthought.AmarriageismostofallaboutloveandIdidn’tlovePaul

anymoresoasfarasIwasconcerneditwasn’tapropermarriage.Iknowmanyof

mychurchwoulddisagreeofcoursebecauseitdoesnotgowithwhatwehave

beentaughtbutwhatwehavebeentaughtwasnotwrittenbyawomaninashit

marriagewasit?SorrytohavetoswearCorinabutmyfathermadeapointof

tellingmethedifferencebetweenthechurchandyourownspirituality.I’monly

gladhewasnotalivetoseethescandal.Thepointisyouenduphavingtolookout

foryourselffirstandforemost.That’swhatIwasdoingwhenImetthisotherman.

Iwasstillonthewards.Hewasananaesthetistthere.Hewasaboutasclosetothe

oppositeofPaulasyoucouldget.Youcouldcuddlehimwithoutgettingabruise.

328

Helaughedatallmyjokes.Paulwasnonethewiser.Hewastoowrappedupin

feelingsorryforhimself.

MeandtheanaesthetistplannedtorunawaytoLanzarotewherehehadavilla.I

rememberveryclearlythemomentithappened.Iwasdrivinghomefromthe

hospitalandIgotstoppedbyapeacockintheroadthatjustwouldn’tbudge.I

remembertryingtobeepitawayandedgetowardsanditjuststandingthere

lookingatme.SoIhadtoturnaroundandturningputmetowardthe

anaesthetist’shouse.WhenIgotthereandItoldhimIwasreadytogoIfoundthat

Ihadbeengraduallymovingallmyclothestohiswithoutreallyrealisingit.

ItwasinLanzarotethatithappened.Wehadbeenthereclosetoayearandlivingit

uplikeaholiday.Ididn’thavetoworkandhegothimselfamanagerialjobthata

friendhadlinedupforhiminthehospitalthere.Wereallyhadtheripbutsoon

enoughIstartedtosuspecthewassleepingaround.Ijustknew.Youjustknow

don’tyou?

Ifweweren’tdrinkingaswedidmostnightsthenthingswereveryquietbetween

us.IwasgettingveryfrustratedwithgardeningalldaybecausethatisallIhadto

do.EachdayIstarteddrinkingearlier.Thenhestartedgettingcalledintothe

hospitalonSaturdaysforemergencysurgeries.Thatbackedupmyhunchsothe

lasttimehewascalledinIwentthroughhisofficetoseewhatIcouldfind.Firstall

Ifoundwerefilesandfilesofmedicalpapersandbankstatementsandcopiesof

reports.IthinkIwashopingforsomekeytoasecretdoororhisoldweddingring

oraletterfromhisex.HonestlyIwasannoyedwithmyselfforhavingtoput

everythingbackwhereIfounditsoIthoughtImightaswellgothroughitallagain

329

andinthefirstboxIlookedthroughIfoundablankenvelopeImusthavemissed.

Insideittherewerepolaroidshehadbeentakingsincewemoved.Theywereofus

havingalovelytimeandIputthembackfeelingreallystupid.Hehadbeentaking

picturessincewegotthereandIdecidedtolookthroughtherest.Iknewthere

wereloadsinhisbedsidecabinetandhewouldaskifIwantedtoseethembutI

wasnotreallyfussedaboutthemandhonestlyitembarrassedmeenoughthathe

tooktheminthefirstplace.IlayonthebedflickingthroughthemandthenIsaw

picturesofhimwithotherwomeninthatverybed.ThenIsawpicturesofme.

Therewerepicturesofmeasleep.Itwasmeasleepwithnoexpressiononmyface

andhewashavingsexwithme.

EvennowIdon’tknowhowIfeelaboutit.OfcourseIamdisgustedbyitwhenI

thinkaboutitbutthenitisalsolikeitdidn’thappenbecauseIneverfeltit

happening.Itislikeithappenedtosomeoneelse.Itislikeithappenedtosomeone

IamveryclosetoandIfeelsorryforherbutIalsoknowitwasmeandIfeellikeI

wasastrangertomyself.

AtfirstIthoughtitwasbetterthatIhadnotfeltithappening.ButthenIcouldn’t

helpimaginingwhathappenedandwhatIimaginedwouldgetworseandworse.I

amnotsayingthatnotknowinghowithappenedendsuphurtingworseCorina.

I’mjustsayingthatishowthiswayhurts.BeforeheleftIcouldn’tsleepifPaulwas

notalreadyasleep.

SoItookoneoftheanaesthetist’screditcardsandboughtmyselfaflightback.I

rememberbeingsickinthetoiletintheairport.AtfirstIthoughtIwassickwith

themiseryofitall.Thenitwastheworstfeelingofdread.Iboughtapregnancy

330

testanduseditinthestallIthrewupin.That’swhenImetCameron.Imethim

thenbecauseIknewalreadywhohewas.Bytheirfruitsyeshallknowthemasmy

mothersaid.IwantedtogetridofhimbutIthoughtitmustbetoolateanditwas.

ThesecondthingthatmadehimwashavingPaulasafather.Therewastroubleas

soonashewasborn.Iwassatwithhiminmyarmslookingathimlikehewasa

lancedwartandPaulhadbeenarrestedforfightingwithamalenursewhileIwas

inlabour.

Paulwasactuallyokayinthefirstfewyears.Hewasactuallyquitefatherly.Heheld

himmostofthetimeandhefedhimbecausehewouldn’tlatchandquitehonestlyI

washappyforthat.Butitiseasyforthemanatthebeginning.Thebairnarrives

andtheman’sonlyjobisstickingaround.Ifhedoesafewthingsnowandthenlike

changeanappyheisconsideredfatheroftheyear.Ifyouarealittleshakyasa

motherandcan’tquiteholdthebairnrighttheycallyouanunfitmother.Thatis

alwaysthecaseforthemambutwhenthebairnstartstotalkandhastobearound

otherbairnsthisiswhenthedadneedstostepup.Asifthisisn’tthemam’sjobas

well!

ItwaswhenCameronwenttoschoolthatPaulstartedtoreallyfailhim.Iwas

workingasadistrictnurseatthattimeandPaulhadstartedfindingworkcashin

hand.Hewasaroundmorebecauseofthissohewascalledintotheschool

wheneverCameronhadthrownadeadbirdatalassorsetoffthefireextinguisher

inthetoiletorsomesuchprank.Irememberwhenhestartedfakingepilepticfits.

ThiswastoomuchforPaul.HewouldaskthemifCameronwasputtingitonand

alltheycouldsaywasthatonlyCameroncantellus.Ofcoursehecouldn’tlievery

331

wellthenbutPauldidnotknowhowhandleit.Hecan’thandlewhatisnotona

level.HeisnotslylikeCameronis.Hechosetobelievehisson.Ireckonhemust

havethoughtitwasaboutstickingwithyourown.OfcourseIneverbelievedhim.I

wouldaskPaulifhefoamedatthemouthorlostcontrolofhisfaculties.Paulwould

getfuriouswithnotknowingwhattodo.Onetimewewerefightingaboutitand

weheardathudinthelivingroom.Cameronwastherefloppingaroundlikeafish.

Paulactuallygotexcitedaboutbeingrightforonce.Soasyouwillknowthewayto

testitistopushapencilupintothecuticle.IdidthatandCameronpulledhishand

back.Paulsawthisandthatwasthatasfarashimbeingagoodfatherwas

concerned.IdobelieveinwhoeversparestherodbutgoodLorddidhegive

Cameronagoingovernowandthen.OfcourseImustadmitIdidmyselfbutitwas

alwaysforgoodreason.InevertookanythingoutonCameronlikePauldid.When

IclatteredCameronitwasbecausehehaddonesomethingworthaclattering.Paul

wouldgooverhimifNewcastlelostorheburnthistoast.Sometimesinthose

occasionshewouldcomeaftermebutnotasoftenbecauseheknewhecouldn’t

comeoutofitwithoutaclatterhimselfandpartlyIreckonhecouldn’tbesureI

wouldn’ttakeoffagainifhedidwhichIsometimesdidfeellikedoing.

FolkthinkmarriageisasortofsecurityandIreckonitcanbeaslongasyouare

willingtobestuckandfeeluncertainabouteverythingthewholetime.Thatis

somethingforyoutothinkaboutCorina.OfcourseIamnotyourmamanditisnot

myplacetotellyouwhat’swhatinthatrespect.Thatisyourownmam’sjob.But

whatIcansayisyoushouldabsolutelysteerclearofmenwithshorttempers.

Steerclearnomatterhowsweetandlovelytheymightbewhenthetimesaregood.

Itwillruinthebairnsyouhave.Itwill.

332

Cameronactslikehecouldn’tcarelessaboutuslikewearejustasillyquirkofhis

amazinglifebutithasleftitsmarkonhimtobesure.EvenasabairnandwithSam

heactedlikeourfightswerenothingbuttosmirkabout.Butitrattledhim.Itdid.I

rememberoncewhenhewasaboutfivejustbeforeSamwasborn.ItwasPaul’s

birthdayandCameronwantedtomakebreakfastforhim.Itwasalsotheday

beforePaul’smam’sfuneralbutIamnotsosureCameronwasthinkingabout

makingagestureofcondolenceorthelike.HebeattheeggsandImadescrambled

eggsontoast.HewaspropergigglingwhenPaulcamedownstairs.ButPaulsaid

nothingandhepickedandpoked.Ikepttryingtogethimtomakeamealoutof

howproudandgratefulhewasbuthewasnothavinganyofit.Allhedidwaslean

closetoCameron’sfaceandsayWelldone.Hewashungover.Weendedupfighting

abouthowtogettothefuneral.ThenCameronstartedtocry.Paulneverlikedhim

crying.Ididn’teitherImustadmitbutIwouldn’ttellhimoffforit.Iwouldjust

leavehimtillhestopped.PaulsaidstopitoverandoverbutCameroncouldn’tstop

thistimeandIdon’tthinkthistimewasforshow.ThenPaulstoppedtellinghimto

stopandhewasslowlyscrunchinguptheeggsinhisfist.ThatmadeCameron

quietdown.Bitsofeggwereslidingoutfrombetweenhisfingers.ThenCameron

stoppedaltogetherandIwon’trepeatwhatPaulcalledhimbutIamsureyoucan

imagineCorina.

IamnotsureifhewaslikethatwithSam.Lordhemusthavebeen.Doyou

rememberSam?Didyoutwomeet?Ialwayswishedhewouldendupwith

someonelikeyou.Maybethatwouldhavesavedhim.

ItwassodifferentwithSam.ThatjustshowswhatIhavebeensayingabout

Cameron.HegotsojealousofSam.HecouldnotstandtheideathatSamwouldget

333

somethinghewouldn’t.IrememberweweretakingSamtogethisjabsand

Cameronsaidhewantedonetoo!ImaginewhathappenedwhenIwouldgiveSam

aminimilk!OfcourseIwouldhavegivenCamerontreatslikeIdidSamifheasked

oractednicelybutheneverdid.SamneverseemedtowantorexpectanythingsoI

thoughthedeservedit.Ireckonitisbettertoreininagreedybairnthankeepit

equal.

SamneededpushingGodblesshimandIdidtry.IadmitItriedharderwithSam

thanIcouldhavewithCameron.Samwasjusthappysittinginthegrassplaying

withladybirdsorreadingordrawingpicturesinthemud.Ofcoursethatwasuntil

wefoundouthowbrighthewas.DidyouknowaboutthisCorina?Hewasgifted

theysaid.HonestlyIwisheditwasnottrue.Idid.Iwantedhimtobeabigdopey

ladwithasteadylittlejobwhowouldnotdwelltoomuchonitall.Theproblem

withsmartfolkisthattheykeeptryingtofigureoutwhateverythingisallabout.I

reckonthewholeideaoftryingtogetsomewherewithyourlifeormaybetheidea

ofnotbeinganywherecomeswhenyouworryaboutit.Andofcoursesmartfolk

thinksmartsareallthatmatter.Whentheworlddoesnotlayitselfatthefeetof

smartfolktheywillfeelletdownbytheworldandbythemselvesandthenthereis

nothingthatisnotbeneaththem.Lordthereisnowayoutofthatone.

Whatdoyoudoasthemotherofaladlikethat?Ithinkyouhavetoprotecthim.

Youmakesurethefirsttimehepunchesamirroritisthelast.Youtellhimyou

hurtmorethanhecaneverhurtwhenhehurts.Youhavetomakesuretheworld

doesnotswallowhimup.

334

OfcoursePaulsaidtheheaviertheweighthebearsthestrongerhegetsandof

courseIknewhewasright.ButIjustthoughthewouldnotgettoknowthereal

worldifhewenttooneoftheschoolsthatacceptedhim.Thatwasmybigmistake

withSam.Icanadmitthatnow.Hehadahardtimeofitatschool.Ijustwishhe

couldhavestoodupforhimselfonceinawhile.

OfcourseCameronmadeitworse.Camerondidn’tneedtheattentionhecraved.

Samdid.IrememberthefirsttimeSamgotreallyhurtitwasCameron’sfault.This

wasaSaturdaynightandwhilewewereeatingourteaalettercamethroughthe

door.BothmeandCameronstooduptogetit.Forsomereasonhewassokeento

gethishandsonitbutIgottoitfirst.Ithadhisnameonitwithoutanaddressand

ithadbeenrippedinhalfandtapedbacktogether.Thehandwritingwasloopyand

fancyandIthoughtitwastheanaesthetist’shandwriting.Hemusthavebeen

tryingtomakecontactwithCameronthoughIhavenoideahowheknewI’dhada

bairnnevermindhisname..Cameronseemedtoknowwhoitwasfromandhe

triedtogetitoffme.Samwatchedusargueoverwhoshouldopenit.Hewas

alwayswatchinguslikeareferee.ThenPauljoineditbuthecouldn’tkeepup.Of

courseitwasaddressedtoCameronandheknewthissohesaidheshouldgetit

butIcouldn’tletthathappen.ThestrangethingwasCameronstoppedmefrom

openingitmyself.ThenCameronexplodedwithallkindsofnastywordsandPaul

couldneverstandforthat.Theproblemisheneverknewhowtodisciplinethe

bairnswithoutthreateningtoclatterthemorjustclatteringthem.ThenCameron

talkedbacktoPaulandIcouldseethatrattledPaul.IdonotthinkPaulwouldhave

laidintoCameronthatmuchifhehadnothavebeensoembarrassedthathewas

rattledbyit.AllIremembernextisCameronlyingonthekitchenfloorandSam

stoodtherewatchinghim.Weallwenttodifferentroomsinthehousethenthe

335

boyswentuptothetreehousetogether.WhenIwenttotellthemitwastimefor

bedIsawSamlyingonthegrassunderneaththetreehouse.Iranovertohimbut

hewasunconscious.ThewayhislittlebodywasfoldedoveritselfIthoughthewas

dead.IlookedbackandcalledforPaultocallanambulanceandIsawCameron

stoodthereatthekitchendoorjustlookingatus.HesaidhehadleftSamupthere.

Samcouldn’trememberanything.Ialwayshadmysuspicions.Thingsseemedto

addupthatIdidnotwanttoeventhinkabout.MaybeyouknowSamcuthimself

whenhewasveryyoung.Ithoughthewastooyoungtoevenconsiderdoinga

thinglikethat.ThenIrememberednotlongbeforehedidthatSamwaschasing

CamerondownourbackalleyandCamerontrippedontoapileofglass.Lordit

doesnotbearthinkingabout.

ButthatiswhyIsaidwhatIsaidinthetrial.Thatiswhatconvincedmehewas

capableofthatandthatiswhyIhadtohelpyouCorina.Itoldhimthisaswell.

LordIhopemylettertohimwasnotusedtomakewhatIsaidinthetriallooklike

apackoflies.WhatIsaidinthelettertohimandinthecourtwastrue!Some

thingsImighthavenotrememberedcompletelyrightbutwhatitallmeanswas

true.Itwas.Youknowthat.Iamsosorryyouknowthatbutitwasnecessaryfor

everyonetoknowwasn’tit?

AnywayIamsorrythetrialwentthewayitdid.Ihopeyouhavefoundawayto

livewithit.Ihopethisletterhelps.

IhaveprayedforyouCorina.

KayDeeds

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[COPIED POSTS FROM CORINA SLATE’S BLOG – MARCH-APRIL 2017]

Piña colada

Yellow blasts through the blue ward, four in the morning. Emergency sends a

woman who’s vomiting severely. Fever of 39.3°. Hypertension. She admits to

ingesting approximately 3,000mg of ibruprofen and 0.5l of vodka. A renal

biopsy shows acute interstitial nephritis, glomerulonephritis, 30% fall in eGFR

since admittance. Her husband and new-born son visit. The husband nods

bluntly. He holds the baby so its face looks over his shoulder. I see the back of

its fluffy head. I go to the mother, say, “Your family is here. Are you ready to see

them?” She tries not to cry. I tell the husband that she’s sleeping. “We need to

keep her overnight.” He makes no effort to pretend to be concerned. Like

hearing an announcement over the tannoy that’s not for him, he turns, walks

away. I see the baby’s face now. Down’s syndrome. My shift ends. I stare at the

notice board in the break room. Today is the St Patrick’s Day brunch I signed

up for. I made sure I had tomorrow off so I could go to the brunch as soon as

my shift ended, then sleep through the night from this afternoon to early next

morning. The flyer is bright green. It’s also mildly racist. I turn from the board,

look slowly about the room. I turn the kettle on, go to the fridge for milk. I find

the stack of The General Manager of the Kidney Service Team’s yogurt pots.

They fill half a shelf. I count them. The kettle clicks. I pick up one of the pots.

Cereal. I scratch a little indentation in the foil lid. Then I open the lid, drink the

yogurt in a few gulps. I take another pot, pineapple, drink it down. I take a

coconut. I drink it. I take another peach, start to swallow, but it struggles at my

throat. I rush to the toilet with the empty pots in my hands. They fall rattling to

the floor as I vomit it all up. I shudder at the rank puke cocktail that’s flooded

my pharynx, put the pots in the bin by the toilet, cover them with paper towels.

I blow my nose. I rinse my mouth. I get my things, make my way to the brunch.

337

On the bus, I catch that smell in my nose. I have to get off. Crouching by a bin,

I decide to go home.

/

Fasting

Studies in cell culture (see Longo, 2009) indicate that short-term fasting

reduces chemotherapy side effects by selectively protecting normal cells.

Challenging conditions like fasting stimulate organisms to suppress growth,

reproduction, diverting energy towards cellular maintenance, cellular repair. In

yeast, for example, resistance to oxidants and chemotherapy drugs can be

increased up to 10-fold in response to fasting. Similar if less conclusive

outcomes have been observed in mammals, but what’s responsible for the

protective effect of fasting against chemotherapy-induced toxic side-effects is

not completely understood. With the body in a protective mode during fasting

chemotherapy, it may be that normal cells arrest, go into a kind of hibernation

mode, while transformed cells, their genetic pathways stuck in an on mode,

continue to proliferate, remaining vulnerable to anticancer drugs. In theory, the

cancer cell, by continuing to try to multiply, commits cellular suicide. It tries to

compensate for the effect of fasting in blood, but can’t. Take a 66-year-old

Japanese woman diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer and widespread

metastatic disease to liver, spleen, pancreas. After two mastectomy

procedures, she received adjuvant chemotherapy consisting of docetaxel,

cyclophosphamide. During all four treatment cycles, the patient fasted prior to

a chemotherapy administration. The fasting regimen consisted of a complete

caloric deprivation for 140 hours prior chemotherapy, 40 hours after, during

which she only consumed water, vitamins. The patient completed this

prolonged fasting without major inconvenience, lost 8lbs. After the first fasting-

chemotherapy cycle, the patient experienced mild fatigue, dry mouth, hiccups.

She was able to carry out daily activities, working up to 22 hours a week. In the

338

subsequent treatments, she received chemotherapy accompanied by a regular

diet, complained of moderate to severe fatigue, weakness, nausea, abdominal

cramps, diarrhoea. The effects forced her to withdraw from her regular work

schedule. She opted to fast again for the fourth cycle. Self-reported side effects

were lower despite the expected cumulative toxicity from previous cycles.

Total white blood cells and absolute neutrophil counts were slightly better

when chemotherapy was preceded by fasting. Platelets level decreased by 7-

19% during cycles 2 and 3, but didn’t drop during cycles 1 and 4. After the

fourth chemotherapy cycle, an 180-hour fast, her neutrophil counts and white

blood cells and platelet counts reached their highest level since the start of

chemotherapy. By this time, however, a PET scan documented further

metastatic disease to the bones. So, while fasting simulates the cellular system

into a protective mode, and has thus been shown to alleviate adverse

chemotherapy side effects, the procedure cannot completely prevent tumour

growth or metastasis. Complete prevention is impossible. Complete

prevention is impossible. Life can be devastating and devastated at any point,

yes, but this is exactly why it can be beautiful. When you’re vulnerable you’re

close to death, but you’re even closer to another, more painful kind of death if

you’re immune to life. If you’re not vulnerable, you won’t need care, and if you

don’t need care, or someone else, can you ever really be in love? Can you? This

is not a rhetorical question.

/

Bravery

After work I walked along the river. The sky looked like it had been washed too

many times on a high heat. The light was chilly. I felt myself frowning from the

last hours redrafting care plans, reviewing dosages, recalculating dosages. I’d

supervised a student making her calculations. She said, “Fuck my life.” I said,

339

“I’ll trade you.” She laughed. She struggles with this, maybe, because she hasn’t

had to calculate her life yet. She doesn’t live her life like she does her job yet.

I’ve forgotten this. Knowing more doesn’t mean fearing less. I know this

because knowing this doesn’t make me fear any less. I’d asked her how she

was finding it all. “Okay,” she’d said in a singing way. “I know there’s a lot to

think about,” I’d said. She’d smiled shyly. I’d said, “It is hard. You’ll have your

lowest moments here. If you have any lower anywhere else that’s just tragic.

And the thing is, if you take on any more responsibility here, it doesn’t get any

more satisfying. It just gets worse. And you’ll end up taking the brunt of other

peoples’ fuck-ups. You can be the best, but it won’t matter. There’ll be

someone responsible for caring for someone who isn’t up to it and you’ll have

to clear up the mess. Basically, some people can care for people and some

people can’t and the people who can’t should just not even fucking bother.”

The student was chewing on the corner of her lip. “Yeah,” she’d said, looked at

the floor. I avoided her for the rest of the shift. Then I walked till the Southbank

skate park. I leant on the railings. There was a wiry topless guy screaming into

his board. He threw the board clattering in front of him. A little girl near me

asked her mother what’s the matter with him. “He’s upset he can’t do what he

wants to do,” she said. Other lax, skinny guys sat along the back wall looking at

their phones. The skater ran onto his board, pushed hard off the ground,

swerved towards the ledge that ran beside a set of stairs. He popped up onto

the very edge of the ledge, slid along balancing only on his front two wheels,

but the board stopped sliding, he kept going, flailed in the air, I closed my

eyes, heard gasps, “Oooooooo”, then I saw him in a bundle on the concrete at

the bottom of the stairs. He lay there for a moment, slammed his fist on the

floor. Then he got up. He hobbled a little. His anger had turned to a kind of

blinkered determination. He rode back to where he started, stretched his back.

He leaned on his board, stared at the path he’d just taken. Then he ran again,

scraped the board under his feet. He tried again, managing to pop off the

ledge, flip the board mid-air, land on it, but it shot out from under him, sending

340

him back on his arse. He shouted, turning passers-by’s heads. He tried it over

and over, each time failing in different and similar ways. He was exhausted. The

seat of his trousers were dark with dust, sweat. After one attempt an older man

wearing a bum-bag, polo shirt, shorts, muttered something about stupidity. I

glared at his miserable face. He saw me glaring, walked on. The skater broke

skin, grazed his shoulder, his elbows. He kept trying. He popped up, slid, fell,

popped up, slid, popped off, flipped, fell, popped up, slid, fell, popped up,

slid, fell, popped up, slid, fell, popped up, slid, popped off, fell, popped up,

slid, fell, popped up, slid, fell, popped up, slid, popped off, flipped, fell,

popped up, slid, popped off, flipped, landed, rode on. The group of other

skaters erupted. They applauded, smacking their own boards on the floor.

Three or four of them chased after the skater, cheering. When they reached

him, he had his arms stretched up. They grabbed him off his board, hugged

him, jumped with him. I clapped from where I stood. He nodded to me, rode

back to the group, fist-bumped each one. Then he put on his t-shirt, his

backpack, rode off along the river. When he wasn’t pushing off the ground, he

rested with his hands on his knees. He shook his head in relief, disbelief, pride,

gratitude. That night I went to PopAction, managed to fall off Level 1, a 10-foot

drop. Now my body knows when it is horizontal, can land horizontal

instinctively. On my third week I fell from Level 2, even if that’s into a deeper

mat. This week we are working in groups of three. Ours is Mag, my poet friend,

me. Cali wants two of us to stand in a kind of lunge position, facing each other

at the end of a mat. The third person will stand on one thigh of each person,

back to the mat, holding onto the supporting persons’ shoulders. This third

person will bend their knees slowly. The other two will make a chair of

themselves, putting one hand on the third person’s back, one hand on their

arse. Then the third person will push down on the thighs, not that forcefully,

just enough to get a foot up in the air, leap backwards towards the mat. When

the third person does this, the other two will give a gentle guiding push on the

third person’s arse, sending them topsy-turvy. Then the aim is for the third

341

person to land flat on her front. “Who wants to flip?” Cali says. I remember once

my mother and father had been arguing and sometime later that night he said

to me, “Never volunteer for anything.” I volunteer. “What if I land on my head?”

I say. “It will really hurt,” she says.

/

What I call my territory isn’t just a place

What’s safe for me to do with a day off and the weather surprisingly sunny,

warm? I’ll go to Hyde Park, watch people paddle plastic swans on the lake. I’ll

take the 29. It’s bright enough for sunglasses. Sunglasses will make me feel

unseen, not fully there. So on the top deck of the 29 past Camden a family of

tourists look through every space of windows with cameras. One little boy

gawks at me. The other children play games with their hands over the chairs. I

rub my hands with antibacterial gel. Soot congeals in the creases. Kill the

germs, but keep the dirt. Traffic stops the bus on Hampstead Road, at the head

of Drummond Street. A woman stands in the middle of this road, in the shadow

of an old white pub. She’s wearing baggy cargo trousers and a raincoat that’s

open. Underneath there’s only a bra. She’s dancing, partly tribal, partly go-go.

I take off my sunglasses to see her better. She looks up at me, stops dancing.

She points at me, screams something. I look up, away, like I wasn’t looking at

her, just in her direction. The bus starts moving again, past the road, towards a

nearby stop. I swoop my eyes over her. She’s hurtling after the bus. She’s

running after me. She gets so close to the bus that she disappears under the

window. I’ll run to the back of the bus. The other people will stop her before

she gets to me, slashes my face with dirty unclipped nails, spits at me, shouting

her private language. No, I’ll try to calm her down. Stabilise. Tell her it was a

mistake. Or I’ll just turn my back against the window, kick at her, hoping

someone steps in. I wish so much that Hiro were here. Or you. The doors close

below. The engine starts. I put on my sunglasses, watch the top of the stairs.

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The trees and houses outside move around the stairs. The bus beeps its horn.

The woman must be coming up. When she gets here I’ll have my head facing

away. She won’t be able to tell I’m looking. But no one is coming. I look out the

window back at the bus stop. There she is, already halfway through a café’s

door. A man in a white apron pushes the door closed, the woman out. The

woman turns, a cigarette about to fall from her lip. She looks across the road,

mutters to herself. The driver mustn’t have let her on. Little boys at the back of

the bus would’ve laughed at her. I’m shaken with the weird relief that my life

will carry on with nothing having actually happened.

/

List #5

Restlessness. Fatigue. Less Eating. Less drinking. Pauses between breaths.

More frequent breathing, followed by almost no breathing at all. A rattle in the

breath, caused by increased secretions. Darkened urine, if any urine at all.

Mottled legs, arms. Cyanotic extremities, bluish, cold. The mouth agape. These

are things that mean a life is ending.

/

“Will I be here for your birthday?”

“I don’t think so.” “Will I be here to go to Kew?” “I don’t think we can get you to

Kew.” “I knew that. Is there something else you want to ask me?” “Do you want

to talk more about this now?” “Of course.” “Okay. Where would you like to go

when we leave the hospital?” “Home.” “Okay. And how would you want that to

go, once we’re home?” “Can I look after myself?” “I don’t think so. It will have

to be me or one of the carers we interviewed. I can call Marjorie.” “No, no.” “I

thought you liked her the best.” “I did.” The daughter looks at the mother

waiting for her to correct herself. Then mother reaches over to the daughter,

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grabs her thumb. The daughter looks away. She realises she hasn’t felt acid on

her vulva for a while now, maybe even a month, more. She hopes it isn’t just a

phase, but is happy for it anyway. “Okay.”

/

Whatever it is

I meet Ali in The Victoria, Dalston. The pub is dim even though there’s

enormous windows. It’s got wooden walls, a wooden horseshoe bar. Two old

blokes stand at the bar where I imagine there used to be seats before a

refurbishment. One of them is rolling a cigarette, spilling tobacco down his

jacket. The other frowns across the bar at a group of spiky, colourful students.

The band from Ali’s church is playing downstairs. I have had one pint, feel

pissed. Ali sips a ginger beer, has made a few comments already about ginger

beer being an insufficient substitute. She eyes up my pint. “Fancy going for a

fag?” she says. “Too soon after for me,” I say, “but I’ll come out with you.” “No,

it’s all right, mate. I just thought you might before we go down.” I say, “I’m

good.” She nods, smiling, a brief surprised face. I see myself through her eyes,

know that she expected me to need a cigarette before going into the gig. What

would she say if I asked her whether she thought that I was shy? What would I

say? I say, “Let’s go down.” She says, “Give me a sip of your beer, then.” I hold

my hands up to let her take it. She sips slowly, shallowly. “I’ll be pissed now,”

she says. We go down. The crowd sound expands around us. We join it. I

wouldn’t be happy to say I’m shy but I’d admit I’m not the one to push through

a crowd, speak up if someone barges. Ali is. I’ve not seen her in a crowd before.

I smile at how I thought she’d flinch at people pressing into her. The band come

out, three singers, keyboard, drum, bass, guitar. They smash out two

caffeinated gospel songs. Then one singer stands by the keyboard. The

keyboard plays alone. It sounds like an upbeat song he’s trying to tame. Then

she sings. She sings, low, steady, like her voice is getting pulled out by a rope,

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“What is this that I feel deep inside?” Her face scrunches up. Is that sweat or

tears? “That keeps setting my soul on fire?” She squeezes her fist so tightly it

shakes. “Whatever it is,” she sings, “whatever it is,” she sings, her voice trying

to go higher but collapsing, “it won’t let me,” she sings, inhaling deeply now,

resolving to go higher, then singing, slightly higher, “hold my peace.” I feel my

throat thicken. “What is this that makes folks say I’m mad and strange?” I feel

myself starting to cry. It goes when she sings, “What is this that makes me run

on Jesus’ name?” But then she sings again, “Whatever it is,” she sings,

“whatever it is,” she sings, snapping her voice off, shaking her head, then

singing, quickly, trailing off, like an apology that shame won’t let you own,

singing, “it won’t let me hold my peace.” I can’t not cry. I turn away from Ali. I

look up at the ceiling, hoping the tears won’t spill. Ali taps me on the shoulder.

Close to my ear she says, “All right, mate?” I glance back, hoping she didn’t see

enough of me to see my eyes but enough of me to see a smile. She asks again,

“Corina? You okay?” I feel silly. I can’t control it. I turn to her, facing the ground,

mumble something about the toilet. I push through the crowd. Crying girls get

wide berths. I realise at a tight knot in the crowd that Ali is following me. I

breathe deep, hold my breath, try to steady broken breathing. Ali says,

“Corina?” There are two girls in the toilet. I say to Ali, “I just need the toilet.”

One of the girls says, “Number 1 or 2?” They both laugh. I get in a cubicle. Ali

says, “Shut up.” They leave laughing. Something about the close walls, the

closed door gives my body permission to stop trying not to cry, but I hold my

hand over my mouth to stifle the sounds. “Corina?” I manage to say, “Yeah?”

“Can I come in, mate?” “I’m pissing.” “I’ll wait.” “Okay. I’m not pissing.” “Can I

come in?” “Okay.” I let her in. It’s smaller than I thought it would be. Our feet

nearly touch. She watches me cry, watches it peter out to snivelling. She doesn’t

say anything. I sniff, blow my nose. “You okay?” she says. I think of what to say.

I think of saying yes, but then what am I going to say? I think of shrugging, but

then I’ll just think of what to say. I think of saying no. I say, “No.” I look at Ali. She

knows. Her eyes are getting shiny. “You don’t have to say it, mate.” “I do,” I say.

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“I should.” “You really don’t,” she says. I sniff, blow my nose. I look at Ali, smile.

I sort of growl. “Fuck,” I say, dry my face with my palms. We stay there for a

moment. I clear my throat. “I can feel myself blushing,” I say. “It suits you,” Ali

says. I laugh. “I’m sorry, mate,” she says. I nod. “Yeah,” I say. “You know?” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “Is it obvious?” I say. She shakes her head, but shrugs too.

“Found your little blog,” she says. I laugh snottily. “Don’t worry, mate,” she says.

“I didn’t read past my own name.”

/

I loved you properly

because I didn’t pity you. There have been times when I’ve watched my mother

on the bus bowed over a puzzle book, seen the sagged skin between her chin

and throat bloating in a way that, if I took a picture of her like this, she would

make me delete it, and I’ve felt a surge of what I thought was love, in the urge

to hug her. I loved you, properly, or would have, or think I did. I loved you

properly, I think, because I would’ve pulled the life support myself. You’d made

your decision. You needed complete protection from whatever it was that

made life in the world unbearable. The only option was death. It seemed like

the most devastating negative to me, but to you it was the only positive. I

should be happy for you. I’m only sad for myself. I’m selfishly sad. Some might

say you’re selfishly dead, but I think the last thing a selfish person wants is

death. Selfish people want themselves first and foremost. That’s exactly what

you didn’t want. But the decision to do it. I think of reasons. I imagine asking

you why you did it. We’re in a beer garden. It is hot. I squint. You don’t say

anything. You shrug. I know it would make you sad to know I’m sad, selfishly or

not, but you must have known it would make me sad. Sometimes I’m angry

when I remember that you knew it would make me sad, but I shouldn’t be so

selfish. I don’t have to be. Maybe when you’re the most selfless you come full

circle into selfishness. Or maybe it takes that one last selfish, self-regarding

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decision, or no, maybe it’s actually one last moment of self-respect. Maybe it

takes one last moment of self-respect to be properly selfless. Maybe not. Was

there a reason why you did it? I expect you to say, “There was no reason not

to.” You shrug.

/

The last time we saw each other

was over Skype. It was just your head I saw. Eye contact is impossible on Skype.

We both just see the other person seeing the other person. I felt close, faraway.

I kept glancing at myself, rearranging my hair, tilting the screen for a more

flattering angle. You told me you couldn’t come down the week after, as we’d

planned. “Low on funds,” you said. “Sorry,” you said. I said it was okay, that

there were other things I could do instead. That wasn’t true, and even if there

were other things, I knew I wouldn’t do them anyway. It wasn’t a special talk.

There’s not much to say about what we were saying. It was just the simple,

beautiful, humdrum act of touching base. There was a look on your face,

though, the way your expressions came and went, the slowness of it, the

struggle of it. I don’t know if I’ve added that in because that’s what I imagine

you did because that’s what I remember happening in a film I can’t remember

now. There was a little silence right before I said I had to go off to see my

mother. “Fair enough,” you said. “Say hi from me,” you said. I said goodbye,

but I didn’t go. Neither of us went. We looked at each other in our screens,

each of us slightly looking down, as if at each other’s chins, smiling, kind of

embarrassed, kind of glad, then I saw your eyes look into mine. I saw you look

at me, even though I know you didn’t. You gave up the sight of me so I could

see your eyes look into mine, even though they didn’t. You knew the last of me

you’d see was the webcam’s dark eye, and what you were going off to do, you

let me see you. You didn’t see me, but I hope you were seeing me. I saw you

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look at me, even though you didn’t, even if you were seeing me, then you left,

hung up. It surprised me, made me laugh. That’s why you did it.

/

Logic

People say it’s irrational to kill yourself. It didn’t make sense to me, I’ll admit. I

thought it was just a mystery why you did it, a mistake, a glitch. I still don’t know

if there are things no one will ever know, real mysteries, or whether mysteries

are just things we don’t know yet. I don’t think it’s a mystery why your brother

did what he did. But I don’t want to know that now. I think it will be too terrible

to know that. I thought it would be terrible if it wasn’t a mystery why you did

what you did. I have a hunch I like to go to when the mystery of what you did

gets too terrible. When you failed an exam, you quit the subject.

/

I am still in love with you

All this love really is is relief. And knowing I’ll be irreversibly heavier and

rougher than before.

/

Dating

I do think about it. I know I must have given the impression that I’m a committed

widow, but despite the fact that I love you, want only you, I refuse to accept that

I’m faulty, obsolete. I know there must be someone kind that I can have a drink

with. I’ll still watch him with my drink. I’ll still want him to be you. But maybe I

can trust him enough that I’ll forget to monitor him. Maybe then I can enjoy

him. Maybe he’ll turn me on. Maybe I’ll want to fuck him. I tried very hard just

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then not to say “Maybe I’ll let myself want to fuck him.” I’m not sure if that is

something you can let yourself do, but I know I can smother desires I can’t stop

myself from having, even if they’re desires I want to be able to act on. I know

there must be someone kind that I can have a drink with. I just hope he will be

kind enough, after a handful of great dates, to stop himself from asking why I

start to cry when we get in bed. I hope he’ll just lie there silently, still, then be

gone when I wake up.

/

On-call

At the nurses’ station I sip coffee waiting for a patient to come out of theatre. I

see Tasha talking to a patient on the ward. I go to the staff room. I scroll through

the Facebook posts I scrolled through five minutes ago. I put it down, try to sit,

just sit, enjoy my coffee, just wait. Why should I? My nose itches. I put one sugar

in the coffee, but it tastes like two, like nasogastric intubation of glucose, like

blindfolded tightrope walking in, I don’t know, December. I scroll through

Facebook. Would someone upload pictures from 2001, from a summer school

in 2001? Would someone who uploads pictures from 2001, from a summer

school in 2001, have a public account? I find the cast for the acting summer

school Elliot Fraser went to. Callum Read, Holly Bartle, Rose Appleby, Helen

Dobbs, Elliot Fraser, Rebecca Robinson. I find Callum Read from

Middlesbrough. I can only see his profile picture. I find Holly Bartle from

Darlington. There are 62 profile pictures, all selfies, eyebrows increasingly

getting thicker, hair darker. I find Rose Appleby from Darlington. There’s one

picture of her, from some kind of ball, one picture of a Jack Russell. I find Helen

Dobbs from Appleton Whiske. There are pictures of a little boy in school

uniform, on holiday, an old man playing the piano, Helen’s wedding. Scrolling

down the little boy gets littler, more formless, less capable of standing. There’s

a trip to an aquarium. There’s the little boy’s first Christmas, a trip to a farm,

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Grandma going down a slide, Granddad with the little boy on his knee. There’s

a tropical holiday, Helen glowing tanned, large white wine, her husband

making a sandcastle, burnt pink shoulders. There’s Helen even younger, a

prom photo, last days of school photos, rows of grinning friends, dodgy

haircuts, short thick ties, skirts rolled up at the waist, Helen and her husband on

a football pitch looking embarrassed, the husband has hair. There’s a picture

of six teenagers linking arms on a stage. I recognise Helen, Holly Bartle, your

brother. I open the picture. There are no tags, no names. I get paged. The

patient is out of surgery. I have to go to treat him. I will see the picture in my

mind as I do it.

/

Audrey’s husband

with baby bird hair, a checked shirt tucked in sweat pants, pours our teas down

the sink. “I never drank it much,” he says. “Me neither,” I say, glad the milk is

bad because I’ve had two teas today already. “It usually sends me scatty, even

one. You can have it without milk, of course, but I can’t hack it, myself. Which

doesn’t mean I’m interested in milk all that much. No. It’s always quite

perplexed me why we drink another animal’s milk. Quite perplexing. Even

more with their eggs. Very perplexing, when you think about it. I have it in for

people coming round, really. I never get through a pint myself. I keep meaning

to get a bundle of those little tubs they have in hotels. But people are funny

about that sort of thing. I can tell you I wouldn’t be bothered about getting one

of them. I think it would be fair enough, if you don’t want to waste anything. But

I wouldn’t be having one, of course.” “Yeah,” I say. He nods, taps his hand on

the sink. “Better just sit down, then, I suppose.” “Okay,” I say, following him to

the living room. He sits in an armchair, me on the sofa. I realise the room is set

up exactly like it is on The Royle Family. “Is this kind of thing standard?” “Sorry?”

“Coming around like this. Is this standard procedure?” “No. It’s not.” He looks

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at me emboldened, impressed. Is he waiting for an apology, for grovelling? I

must neither cave in nor plead. I will take it as it comes. I can. I say, “They’ve put

me in a lose-lose situation.” He looks at the floor. “So I wondered if I couldn’t

find a third option.” “I’m not going through with it,” he says. I wait for him to

speak again, then I say, “You’re not going through with it?” He looks irritated

now, says, “No. I’m not.” I wait again. He taps his hand on the chair’s arm,

strokes it. “Oh,” I say. I look at Audrey, her husband, their grandchildren, on the

mantle. The husband looks there too, then at the floor. “I’m sorry,” he says

stiffly. “Me too,” I say. He nods. “Thank you,” I say. He doesn’t say anything, but

he seems to become gentler on a cellular level. The air in the room seems to

loosen. “Could you do me a favour before you go?” he says. “Sure,” I say. “What

do you need?” “Well, there’s all this bird dirt out front. No doubt you noticed

it. Michael, our son, he set up a rack in the shed for my brooms and brushes

and whathaveyou. Normally I can just about reach but my shoulders are acting

up and I can’t reach it. I just need someone to pull it down for me.” “I can do

that,” I say. He pushes himself off the chair with a groan, a sigh. I follow him

back through the kitchen. “Of course the boy set it up for giants like him and

his mother,” he says.

/

Tea

I slept sat up at the head of the bed, legs crossed. She slept foetal. Her head

lay in the crook at my pelvis. The table fan hummed in the dark. You are

stroking my thigh. I pretend not to notice so you won’t stop. You’re wearing a

bobble hat with leafless trees on it. You smile with one eye open. I understand

that we’ve been to a dog shelter. The dog stands there at the bookcase in my

bedroom pulling out plays with both paws, snickering at the blurbs. The dog

is Mutley. I understand that you’d been fucking the girl at the dog shelter. She

has wet yellow hair. I stand with the dogs barking in their cages while she pokes

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and flicks her tongue in your ear. “You only care about yourself, Corina.” But

no, it’s night still in my mother’s single bed. I feel her stirring before she wakes.

She’ll need to piss. “Corina-chan?” “I’m awake. Do you need the commode?”

We whisper, I suppose, because we don’t want to wake the light up. “Maybe a

little.” She shuffles forward. I hoist her upright. The light by us, by the window,

is dark green. There’s a shadow on the floor streaked dark and light, looks like

a Guylian seashell. My mother sits at the end of the bed. She’s breathing

heavily. Often the things we try hardest at are things we have no choice but to

do. I pull her pyjama bottoms down. There’s a point, even if you’ve spent your

whole life led by shame, when the rules and values of the outside world just

don’t seem so important. Morphine helps. I kneel down. Even in the dark I can

see the crest of black pubic hair, its silver whiskers, pressed down to one side

from sleep, smelling tangy and sweet in the way a plant can smell sweet. I think

of leaves, of soil, of mushrooms. I think of chutney. I take the bottoms off over

the end of her feet. Her toes are curled in, the tiny toenails hiding. I see all these

bits of her body, from a million memories throughout my life, the parts I love

that are beautiful, her slender fingers that never seem at rest, always bent or

tensed in some position, her stubby thumbs, her big sleepy breasts, dark

knobbly nipples, the green needle-point freckle below her collarbone, the

patch of skin on her overactive sternocleidomastoid region that’s permanently

goosebumped, her wide jaw and wide small-toothed smile, the little sacks of

skin that grew year by year where her cheeks meet her lips, her earlobes that

join straight to the jaw that I used to nip and stroke when we slept together

when I was spooked or sad or lonely, her earlobes, the parts I’ve heard her call

too big, too small, misshapen, old, fish-like, knobbly, and I don’t know what I’ll

do when they’re still here and she’s not, when they’re no more of her voice, no

more of her thinking, or loving. I hold her hands. She wobbles at each joint

onto her feet. With my arms hooked under her underarms, I crutch her around

to the commode by the door. I know that lowering her down, my hands holding

her tightly at the top of her ribs, will pinch, but she’ll know the only other way

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is a sling. There is no dignity, she’d say, in a swing, or less dignity, anyway. She

slumps, relieved. The piss comes down in heavy drips. When it seems to stop I

ask if she’s finished. “I don’t know.” “Does it feel like there’s more?” “Do I feel

like there’s more?” “Yes.” “Yes.” “But it won’t come?” “Yes.” “There’s probably

no more. It’ll go when you lie back down.” “It will?” “Yeah.” “You are not just

saying that?” “No.” “Okay.” She lifts her hands. I duck my head under them. She

hangs them on my shoulders. I pull up her bottoms as far as they’ll go with her

still sitting, then I lift her with one arm around her waist, and with my other hand,

I pull up the bottoms all the way. Slowly, I get her back in bed. Sometimes it’s

hard to lift a body, but if it’s a body you love it’s as easy as lifting yourself. I draw

the duvet up to her chin. She settles. Every little calorie comes out in long

exhalations. She holds her chin up, as if to tauten the skin around her throat.

Where there’s no shame there’s also so much elegance. Suddenly she sucks in

air. I lean closer, adrenaline spikes, hoping she gathered this breath to speak.

“For a second,” she says, “I forgot you were here.” “Charming.” “Oh, I did not

mean it in that way”. She turns her head away. “Are you comfortable?” I say.

“Am I comfortable?” “Yes.” “Yes. Very.” “Good.” “What time is it?” “It’s just past

four.” “It’s late. You don’t have to stay here.” “It’s fine.” “Not on my account.”

“It’s fine, Ka-san.” She frowns a little. “Do you want me to leave you for a while?”

I say. She doesn’t say anything. “If it wasn’t so late,” she says, “you could take a

taxi.” “They still run this late.” “I know that.” Her eyes glint in the dark. The front

of them, the cornea, and so, to me, the pupil, look silver. “Well, I don’t know

what to do, then,” I say. “What should I do?” “What should you do?” “Yeah.” “I

can’t tell you that.” “Why?” “You need to decide for yourself.” “But I don’t want

to do anything you don’t want me to do. What do you want me to do? Do you

want me to be here, or do you want to be alone?” “Just don’t worry about what

I want.” “Of course I’m going to worry. Why not?” “Because it can’t be helped.”

“What can’t?” “I’ll always want both.” “Both?” “Yes.” “Both what?” “Both ways.”

She steadies her breath. “You don’t understand,” she says. “You’re right. What

do you mean?” She scratches her elbow. “You don’t know what you want. You

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don’t know. I was young and I didn’t know. Then you want so much. It’s

wonderful,” she says, “to want so much. But all that wanting is very painful. But

it is wonderful to want so much and want that pain.” She sighs. “I’m quite tired,”

she says. “I might try and sleep now. Until morning.” “Okay,” I say. “Will you be

here when I wake up?” “Yes.” “And you won’t mind if I sleep until morning?”

“No.” “You’ll be okay on your own?” “I’ll be okay.” “Okay.” She swallows. “I think

I feel better in the morning. I think I’ll be hungry in the morning,” she says.

“Yeah? What would you like?” “Scrambled eggs,” she says. “Scrambled eggs?”

“Yes.” “Really?” “Yes. Why not?” “No reason. Okay. Scrambled eggs.” “And you

will be here in the morning?” “Yes.” “You’re very kind.” “It’s nothing.” “No, it is

not.” She sighs, eyes close. I watch her breathe. Her mouth opens like she’s

yawning. She isn’t. It just hangs open. “Ka-san?” She makes a little noise. “When

you said I couldn’t get a taxi because it was late, did you mean—what did you

mean?” Her teeth tap together. “I said that? When?” “Just now.” “I said that? I

can’t remember.” “Well, you mentioned—” “I would remember if I said it,

wouldn’t I?” She tilts her head to me. “Yeah,” I say. “Yes. You would. Don’t

worry, Ka-san.” “No?” “No. It’s okay. Don’t worry.” “Don’t worry?” “Don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry.” “Yeah. Don’t worry now.” “Okay.” “Okay.” “Okay.” She sighs, out

of breath. I watch her breathe. There’s a smell I notice. I wonder if I took out the

recycling. I can smell the water at the bottom of a vase, water that’s cloudy and

needs to be changed. Yes, I know that smell. I don’t know when it will be, but it

will be very soon. I don’t imagine she will talk much now. Not much at all. Her

body will slow down even more, impossibly down. Won’t move. Blunt, shallow

inhalations. Her body will die. She will stop. There’ll be no more her, Ka-san,

Mao Hashimoto. I’ll hold her head, press my mouth to her head. I might ask her

to come back. I’ve seen many dead bodies, understood it. Over the years I’ve

come to feel that they’re beautiful. I think my mother’s will come to be the most

awful and the most beautiful thing. I will feel alone, less, proud, in love with her,

and it. Soon I’ll brew another pot of tea. Neither of us will drink from it. She just

likes the smell.

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/

Do the seats on a tube face each other for a reason besides the sensible

use of space?

There are five people opposite me. To the right, a bucktoothed man with his

dark-haired daughter reading a kindle. To the left, a wiry woman with no

makeup and her blonde daughter crying, “Poo-poo, mamma! Poo-poo!” on

the left. Another woman in a suit, flicking through the Standard, tsunami

headline, between the two girls. The man on the right rests his arm behind his

daughter’s back. He was reading over her shoulder a second ago, but now he’s

looking at the bow on her blue hairband, probably because he’s finished the

page before her. The girl smirks at what she’s reading. The women with the

paper keeps glancing to her right at the other, littler girl, stood up now on the

seat, whining, squirming in her mother’s arms. Her mother tries to sit her down,

tells her daughter it’s not long now, to hold on. They don’t seem to know I’m

watching them, on the way home from a night shift, feeling actually sorry for

myself now, the hardest-working woman in the world apparently, the only

woman to lose her mother apparently, partly hoping they’ll see my cloudy eyes,

sympathise. I could've changed out of my uniform before going home, but

maybe then I'd feel like it had all been for nothing, the slowing night shift pace,

new dressings, medication titrations, redrafting care plans, then travelling

home flimsily, floating, feeling transparent, like now, but in my own clothes, like

I had the day off or no job at all, no one knowing at least a little bit about who

they’re sitting with, though I know that’s just how it is. So maybe it’s because I’d

like them to see my uniform and be impressed, but that’s not all that matters to

me, I hope, wanting suddenly so much to be home where someone gentle is

waiting for me, as the carriage window fills with the light of a platform and the

little blonde girl looks at me, snotty and desperate. She pushes her mother’s

hanky away. She looks up to find the voice calling the station's name, looks at

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her mother to see if it’s her voice. The other girl looks up at the map, her mouth

ajar. The woman in the suit between them stands, leaves the paper on her seat.

The man picks up the paper, but not to read it. No, he folds it against the

window, prompts his daughter to sit beside the other girl. The two girls’

shoulders touch, and when the man leans behind them both to whisper

something to the woman and she smiles beautifully back, I see they’re all

wearing blue parkas.

/

Fermentation

I was clearing out her bedroom. Hiro was clearing out her kitchen. We didn’t

speak at the funeral. He let me arrange it, register her death, talk with the

solicitor, etc. He didn’t feel the need to defend himself for not helping out or

accuse me of doing it all to make myself look good. He had a black eye, hadn’t

cleaned his shoes. I didn’t feel the need to interrogate him. We started on the

flat a few days later. That morning I’d texted him saying I’d be there if he wanted

me to keep anything. He didn’t reply, just came, got going on the kitchen. I

wanted to tell him what and what not to throw away, but I knew I’d go over what

he’d done anyway so I left him to it. In the bedroom I had four designated

spaces. I’d pushed the bed right up against the back wall to make room for one

corner by the door for stuff to bin, the other corner for stuff to keep, the

doorway for donations, the bed from stuff I’ll decide on another day. For an

hour I just touched things. At first, once I’d designated spaces, I worked quickly,

jostling around the room, making piles, yes, no, maybe. Then I had one of her

shoes in my hand. I sat on the floor. I traced my fingers along the laces, the

creases in the leather where her feet bent. I must have been there for ten

minutes before I decided to go through each item I’d moved, get to know it.

These things told me facts about my mother that I knew but hadn’t really

realised. Knowing something before realising that you knew it is a weird kind

356

of remembering. It’s like revision. You knew it, but only vaguely, then it’s there

in your mind, clear, distinct. I remembered how narrow her waist was, how

small she was, I remembered how little jewellery she wore, two pairs of

earrings, studs, gold, silver. I remembered her silly jokes. In a shoebox of

receipts, photos, deeds, forms, handmade birthday cards from Hiro and me,

an old diary written in Japanese, I found about twenty brass 5yen coins. When

we lost teeth, this is what the tooth fairy brought us. We’d complain because

we couldn’t spend it. She’d laugh, say, “Show some gratitude. She flew all the

way from Japan!” Squeezing the coins in my hand, I laughed. Tears came too.

Then I heard Hiro from the kitchen say, “What the fuck.” I wiped my face, went

to see what the fuck. He was kneeling into the cupboard under the sink. He

noticed me, stood, jerked his head toward the cupboard. “What is it?” I said.

He jerked his head again, told me to look for myself. I knelt down. In there I saw

about a dozen jars filled with dark frothy liquid. I pulled one out. “Is it piss?” he

said. “Piss?” “Yeah.” “I don’t think so.” “I thought she was collecting her piss,

man.” I shook the jar to see what was inside. Hiro cringed. “Because I’ve heard

about people collecting their piss,” he said. “They’re eggs,” I said. “Eggs?”

“She’s pickling eggs,” I said. “Do you think all those jars are eggs?” “I don’t

know.” “Maybe one of them’s piss.” “Do you want there to be a piss one?” “First

I thought they were thumbs and dicks and shit.” “Piss is better.” “I did feel better

thinking it was piss. Then I thought about her collecting jars of her piss. Then I

felt bad again.” I took out another jar. “She’s brewing Guinness, man!” Hiro

said. “Can you imagine?” I said. “That would be fucking beast, man,” he said. “I

think it’s soy sauce,” I said. “How old do you think it is?” I shook my head. “Shall

I open it?” “I don’t know, man.” I twisted the lid. There was a loud pop, a hiss, a

fizz. We gasped like watching fireworks, laugh at ourselves. I felt tears come. I

clenched them down. I took off the lid, lifted the jar to Hiro’s face. “Allow it,

man!” he said. I smelled it. “It doesn’t smell too bad.” “Will it make you puke?”

“Don’t think so.” “Man, I’m hungry. When did you last eat?” “Yesterday. I think.

You want to order something?” “I’ve been waiting to ask that for ages.” “I can’t

357

be fucked with cooking.” “Fuck cooking, man.” “What you fancy?” “I dunno.

Pizza?” “What about something that’ll go with what’s in the jars?” “I’ll eat

anything, man.” “All right. Pass me my phone.” “I haven’t got any cash on me.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, adding, out of a shit habit, “My treat.” Hiro nodded, his

head staying low, as if he felt me holding this over him. I looked at my phone

pretending not to notice, feeling the slightly mended ties between us fray

again. If I defended myself it would not have reassured him otherwise that I’m

not holding it over him. “I’m going to wash my hands,” he said. “Okay.” “Can

we get Thai.” I looked at him. “Sure,” I said. He nodded. “Cool,” he said. When

he went I put down my phone, stared out the window.

/

“It’s better to show your love with words,”

Ali told me once. I can’t remember how we got onto it. We might have been

talking about our mothers. I might have been talking about you. Her eyes were

closed. She traced the AV fistula with her finger. “I thought actions spoke

louder than words,” I said. “They do, but think about it, mate. If you’re some

tight-lipped arsehole showing your love through actions only, then the farther

away another person is from the people you love, the worse you’ll treat them.

Show your love with words and you’ll treat everyone the same.”

/

Love,

I think, is where two open wounds press against each other so one wound

becomes a kind of gauze for the other wound. Each wound protects the other

wound from the world. But the wounds are still wounds. A wound can’t heal a

wound by covering it. Only time away, apart, some air, can allow the wound to

heal, even if this exposes the wound to the world. I could be wrong.

358

/

“Isn’t this going to hurt, mate?”

“Maybe.” “Maybe?” “I don’t want to lie to you.” “Did it hurt when you did it?” I

shake my head. “It did!” she says. “Fuck this, man.” “No,” I say, “it doesn’t hurt.

Not really.” “Not really.” “You’ll be fine.” “Fuck. Can’t I just fall from standing like

the last times?” “You are standing.” “You know what I mean.” “You’ll be fine,

Ali.” “And even if you’re not!” Cali shouts. I widen my eyes at Ali. She nods as if

to say, “You were right about her.” “Just don’t look down,” I say. “Oh, that’s

great fucking advice. Did you come up with that yourself?” “I mean when you’re

falling.” “What am I supposed to look at?” “Look right at that back wall! Let your

eyes keep you straight!” Cali shouts. I nod, smile as if to say, “She’s not wrong.”

Ali frowns. “This is bullshit,” she says. She lifts her arms above her head, but she

stays there like that. “Do I actually fucking jump or am I just falling?” “It’s a bit

of both,” I say. “Fuck sake,” she says. She purses her lips. “Fuck it.” Then she

just does it. She springs slightly off her toes. I hear her gasp. I see her jaws

clench as she falls. I see the moment her body feels it’s too much fall. A quiet,

compact sound! The landing looks good. We all cheer. Cali shouts, “Yeah!”

Then Ali groans. Cali and I run to her. I go to lift her up, but she shakes her head

violently. I lower her down. She’s winded. Cali shouts, “Relax!” Slowly Ali’s

breath comes back. I ask if she’s okay. She laughs. She winces. She tries to push

herself upright, laughing, but winces, lies flat on her back. I press her side, ask

her if that hurts. She gasps, then laughs, wincing. “She might have broken a

rib,” I say. “That was amazing,” Ali says, laughing, wincing.

/

359

A fire in a homeless shelter

just before my shift ended. I’d planned to go to the police with information

about Elliot Fraser but they needed nurses to make up numbers in the A&E

night team. I came through with two other nurses, two psychiatrists, a chaplain.

“Expect smoke inhalation, chest pains, burns, fractures, confusion, trauma. You

know.” Every patient had carbon monoxide poisoning to some extent. We gave

them oxygen through facemasks. “What about Mark? Is Mark here?” Every

patient wheezed. We gave them steroids, salbutamol. Every patient had

pneumonitis to some extent. Panic made them breathe even more rapidly.

“Breath in, and breathe out on 3. 1, 2…” “Ahhhhhhh!” It was my job at first to

provide each bed with cyano kits in case of cyanide poisoning. “Can someone

get someone to turn off that siren, please?” I took the tests. “La ‘astatie

altanafus. La ‘astatie altanafus.” A second wave of 5 casualties came through.

“Are you still in pain?” We checked a patient for soot in his mouth, singed nasal

hairs, listened for hoarseness in his voice. Another patient had burns on his

upper airways. We gave him general anaesthetic. I heard one man moaning

with what looked like very bad burns. It was a shame that he was still conscious.

He would die soon. In ten minutes he did die. In three hours I noticed the

barbeque smell. I went on break to smoke, but of course I haven’t smoked. I

don’t know whether the smell is on my clothes or up my nose. I go back to the

ward. It is quiet. Now the nurses move carefully, calmly. A consultant asks me

to change a patient’s dressings. I pull on new gloves. I’m glad for an easy task

to end my shift. It’s good to concentrate on an easy task, do it perfectly, to end

the day. He’s still grubby, grimey, sits with his hands in his laps. “Hello, I’m

Corina,” I say, picking up his chart. “How are you?” He doesn’t say anything. I

read his chart. “So you’ve got yourself a burn on your arm, have you? I’m going

to change your dressing now. But it would be good if you had a wash first,

wouldn’t it?” I say. “It would,” he says, then I look at him closely. It’s him.

Someone’s started a chainsaw in my gut. I remember the advice, breathe in

deeply, hold it, but I’m not in control of that. He stares past my shoulder. It is

360

him. I feel like he is on fire. He is blazing, hot, bright. But he glances up at me

from under his eyebrows. He looks up like a rough sleeper asking for help. He

is. So now he’s extinguished. The terror turns into anger. I say, “You were in that

fire?” He nods. “What?” I say. “Aye,” he says. “You’re staying in that hostel?”

“Aye.” Fuck I can hear your voice. I hate him so much for sounding like you, for

hearing you now. He looks behind me as if for someone to replace me. I try to

imagine how I’ll feel if I left. I’d feel dissatisfied, somehow, like not being able

to leave an argument, not being able to not make the other person break down

in forgiveness. I put down his chart, go to his arm. I stare at his arm for a few

seconds trying to forget it’s his arm. He says, “You don’t have—” “Shut up,” I say.

He nods, looks down, away. I touch his arm. The muscles in my arm are primed

to twist his arm till it snaps. I take my hands off him. His arm lies there

completely still. He must be trying to separate himself from this arm like I’m

trying to separate this arm from him. I stare at the white dressing. My mind

won’t let me forget the dressing is on him for more than half a second. Still, I

douse the dressing in saline. I add the idea that this is my own arm to the mental

activities of trying to concentrate so much that it becomes no one’s arm and

knowing that it’s his arm. The burn looks like a dog bite. The skin that stretched

to form a blister lies in a collapsed bundle over the wound. I hear him breathe.

“I don’t even want to hear you breathe,” I say. “Sorry,” he says. “Or talk,” I say.

He nods. “Or move,” I say. He doesn’t say anything. I say, “Is it painful?” He

doesn’t say anything. “Just nod or shake your head,” I say. He shakes his head.

I peel off the dressing. It comes of easily. With more saline, a soft wipe, I

debride the wound. With the exudate, the slough gone, the wound shines pink.

I pat it dry with gauze, prepare the dressing. In the work we both chose to do,

we both, in our own ways, try to make people better. We both perform a kind

of healing. I think he failed because he didn’t know this. If he did know this, all

he knew was that he was a healer, but didn’t care if he actually healed. He was

not in service of healing. He was in service of himself. That’s why I can heal him.

It’s not because I’m in service of myself. I’m in service of healing. At least, I try

361

to be. I try to heal. That’s all I have to do. So I don’t have to write these anymore?

No. I won’t, then, soon. “Cor?” he says. The soot in his voice clogs up my ears.

This must show on my face. He doesn’t say anything else. I look up at him. He

frowns. This isn’t an angry frown. This is a permanent frown. It is new. I smell,

within the smoked smell, the dank genital reek of unwashed clothes. “How long

were you staying in the hostel?” He glances at me out the corner of his eye. I

say, “How long were you staying there?” to let him know he can speak. “Couple

nights,” he says. “How long have you been in this situation?” “Couple years.” I

remember Elliot Fraser. “You’re not Elliot Fraser?” “Who?” “There was a man

who killed a woman and it might have been someone called Elliot Fraser.” He

looks actually worried with confusion. I try to see on his face the familiar

manoeuvres of his lies, but there’s just a sad see-through mask. “You’ve been

on the street.” “Every day.” “Since?” “Not long after.” “The trial?” “Then I lost

everything.” He bares his teeth, pushes his tongue through the holes. “Lost a

couple teeth, did you?” I say. He looks down, away. “And Elliott Fraser?” He

shrugs, shakes his head. “I’ve not been particularly active these past couple of

years,” he says. “I’ve been busy growing my beard out.” He smiles, but its

joyless. As much as he makes me sick with hatred, it makes me sick to think I’ve

been thinking like anyone who doubted me, who thought the worst of me. A

long time roughing it has left its marks. As much as I want to, I don’t believe he

is Elliot Fraser. He is only the monster I knew he was. But he is not the same

person I knew. Neither am I. “I’m sorry about Sam,” I say. He fills himself with

air. He breathes it out all at once, says, “I’m sorry you didn’t go to the funeral.”

I nod. “I didn’t kill him either,” he says. I sigh. “He was deep in debt,” he says. “I

don’t need to know,” I say. “He was waiting for some miracle bet.” “I don’t need

to know.” “He was waiting for some miracle.” “I don’t need to know.” I go

around to the end of the bed, amend his chart. I think about what miracle you

were waiting for. I think about medical miracles, inexplicable occurrences we

don’t have the knowledge to explain yet. I think about what miracle you were

waiting for. I suppose you were waiting for optimism. I glance at your brother.

362

A smirk comes into his mouth. He looks at me, says, “As a matter of fact, I

thought you were having a thing with him.” “I was,” I say, looking at him. His

smile goes. He stares at me blankly. “Sorry,” I say, “did that ruin your apology?”

He looks down, away, doesn’t say anything. I say, “Is that not how you wanted

this to end?” He shakes his head, but not to say no. “You didn’t know?” I say.

He shrugs. “Is that why?” I say. He rubs the dirt in the creases of his knuckles.

He shakes his head, but not to say no. He shrugs, but not to say he doesn’t

know. He says, “Maybe I wanted—” “Shut up,” I say. He nods, looks down, away.

I look at him. A tear tears cleanly through the grime on his cheek. “I don’t feel

sorry for you,” I say. He looks up. His eyes are full of uncried tears. “Okay,” he

says. “I don’t,” I say. He nods. “I don’t,” I say. “I don’t.”

/

Serving

“When I found this I was beside myself. I’m never out of it, rain or shine.” “Tea

or coffee?” “It’s only Lucozade. Honestly.” “I’m taking my time because it’s hot!”

“But it gets so cold by the Embankment, by the river.” “There’s salt over there.

Butter there. And milk.” “Bread?” “Is it too hot?” “It’s just my tooth.” “Thank you,

love.” “Take off your gloves.” “I found a watch the other day, but it has stopped.”

“I’m stark raving hungry.” “So you’re on your own for Christmas? You’ve got

nobody to be with?” “Got a paracetamol?” “This man here gave us my first job.

Of course he fired us as well, but there’s no hard feelings. Can’t afford hard

feelings. It’s same boat these days. Same boat.” “But can you not film me

please?” “There’s leftovers round Trafalgar Square. Leftovers galore.” “And are

you local?” “I can say it tastes much better knowing I owe nobody for it.” “Yes.

Same boat. Same boat.” “I’m sorry. I’ve lost my voice.” “Can you get yourself

there by nine?” “They think I’m some sort of idiot. Sometimes, if they want us to

move out the way or something, I just talk all kinds poppycock to them and

then they’ll just let me be.” “You’ve got to be entrepreneurial about yourself.”

363

“I’d rather drink my own piss than milk.” “Yes. It’s free. It’s free.” “I can.” “You

should.” “I can.” “I’m in your hands.”

/

Undestroyed

If I set my alarm to sound just after dawn, before Hiro comes with a van to take

me and my stuff to my mother’s flat, I can get up right away, still completely

naked, still full from last night’s dinner with Ali, still guilty for using whole milk

instead of semi-skimmed. I can make this bed for the last time, open these

curtains for the last time, press my cheek against the window, cleaned now for

the next tenant, still cold with night, to wait for the sun to rise into the gap

between empty billboard and a townhouse over there behind the used cars

showroom, slowly coming across then suddenly bouncing off the mirror across

the room, filling the room, eventually warming the window, my cheek,

brightening the condensation from my breath. If I’m really lucky, there’ll be a

delivery to the pub across the road because it’s amazing to hear a lorry thunder

past on the quiet misty street and when the sound fades away a robin flies into

ther air but then you lose it blinking and instead you see that fox down on the

ground going through the bins. I think my mother would like to be a fox, an

urban fox, hunting, unhunted. But what would I be? How could I love to live

with vulnerability? I think I’d like to be a windy summer day. Yes. People could

hang out their clothes to dry. I’d love the clouds. I’d love the uneven earth. I’d

fuck the grass on Wanstead Flats. And no one would mind too much if I cry.

Maybe. I only hope the likelihood of cruelty is the price we have to pay to love,

as I hear Hiro park the van outside, go down to meet him at my door. He looks

tempted to ask if I’m okay. I look at him, tempted to say, Yes, often I am okay.

Instead we hug, don’t speak.

364

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The Poetics of Coexistence

Frank O’Hara, Assemblage, and the Case for Relational Poetics

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If there’s fortuity in the exact peril / at this moment it’s in the love we bear each other’s differences

—‘ODE: SALUTE TO THE FRENCH NEGRO

POETS’/’CHEZ JANE’, FRANK O’HARA

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INTRODUCTION Approaching the Assemblage-Poem

No matter where I send you remember

you’re still working for me. Get him a job in Tombstone Gulch.

He needs a job. He’s a jerk but he can ride

herd on the Senate. Need any help?

The young Joel McCrea has just ridden into the gulch on a bicycle.

It’s taxes, the Sheriff says. Those fellows will never pay taxes without a fight, you can’t tax rustlers.

Why do they want all that cattle? Joel says reasonably

because they weren’t in World War I. Well who was?

We’re not our grandfathers, are we? Maybe we are,

we have old saddles and old horses and old loves.

I think it’s disgusting in this saloon which is so much like the rest of America.

You go first. And let’s see who hits the dust.

I just got eaten by a saddled horse. But the sunset is still beautiful over the Grand Canyon.

—‘At the Bottom of the Dump There’s Some Sort of Bugle’,

Frank O’Hara How do we read a poem like this? Who is speaking to us? Is anyone, in the poem,

or even through the poem, speaking to us, a reader? Is the speech this poem

contains directed out beyond its textual realm, whether rhetorically or targeted,

across the virtual threshold that Walt Whitman acknowledges when he asks, “why

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should you not speak to me? / And why should I not speak to you?” in the poem

‘To You’?”1 Does it conform to Paul Celan’s conception of the poem “as a

manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue,” “a message in a bottle,

sent out”, “making [its way] toward something”?2 There are many poems whose

addressee is elsewhere, and whose form is, if not explicitly, then implicitly,

dedicatory. In this case, the poem speaks to, and for, another.3 For Frank O’Hara,

the catalyst and linchpin of this study, a poem most often provides the means by

which meaningful human connection, that “marvelous experience”, won’t “go

wasted”.4 Looking at “you”, his beloved, is infinitely more affecting than looking

at “all the portraits in the world”. Poems can communicate and thus preserve

this, “which is why I am telling you about it”.5

For Eileen Myles, O’Hara’s approach constitutes a radical reconceptualisation of

the ontology of the poem. In an interview with Ben Lerner, Myles pinpoints “a

transitional moment in the history of poetry” when O’Hara realises, in his half-

serious manifesto ‘Personism’, “that instead of writing a poem [for a person] he

could just call the person” on the telephone.6 For Oren Izenberg, the crucial point

here is that “the realization that the poet could simply call his beloved on the

1 Walt Whitman, ‘To You’ in The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. Michael Warner (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 227. 2 Paul Celan, The Selected Poems and Prose, trans. John Felstiner (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), p. 396; emphasis added. 3 For a comprehensive examination of apostrophe and address, which relates to but exceeds the scope of my concerns (since I aim specifically to read O’Hara’s poems through the novel lens of an assemblage analysis, arguing basically that internal address of the assemblage-poem serves a kind of immersive world/scene-building or –disclosing function), see William Waters’ Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address. It is worth noting, moreover, the large number of O’Hara’s poems, like Whitman’s, titled ‘To [insert dedicatory thing here]’. 4 ‘Having a Coke with You’, CP, p. 360. 5 Ibid. 6 Ben Lerner, ‘Eileen Myles, The Art of Poetry, No. 99’, The Paris Review, 214 (Fall, 2015) <https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6401/eileen-myles-the-art-of-poetry-no-99-eileen-myles>.

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telephone does not lead him in fact to call his beloved on the telephone.”7 On

Izenberg’s account, this amounts to a “rejection of communication (rather than

the literary emulation of it)”.8 Indeed, as O’Hara clarifies, “[Personism] does not

have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it!”9 And yet, regardless of

whether this confirms the notion that the poem is, in Izenberg’s words, not “a

communicative act directed at a single love person”, as ‘Having a Coke With You’

seems to suggest, the articulated relevance between poetry and the telephone,

“a technology that’s in the world and doesn’t have anything to do with poems

and writing,” as Myles says, “suddenly does [relate to poems and writing].

Suddenly the poem is the phone call.”10 Suddenly, in other words, both readers

and poets must conceive the poem “not in letter time, [but] in telephone time”;

to call a poem strictly literary, then, is to limit its affect and function.11 O’Hara

continues to write the poem instead of picking up the phone simply because he

might as well; whether this formal relation denotes directed communicative acts

or a mode of locating the poem, and himself, and the value of both “between

two persons”, the poem and phone call are essentially analogous.12

Even so, this rethinking of the poem does not alter the condition of the addressee,

who is still elsewhere. In light of this, ‘At the Bottom…’ seems to offer a further

reconceptualization of the poem for it does neither seem to “address itself to one

person”, nor “the poet himself”, but rather its addressee(s) seem(s) to exist

7 Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 136. 8 Ibid, p. 136. 9 ‘Personism’, CP, p. 498. 10 Lerner, ‘Eileen Myles, The Art of Poetry, No. 99’. 11 Ibid. 12 ‘Personism’, CP, p. 499.

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within the poem itself; its speech is ostensibly directed, like a playtext, within its

own textual confines, and the textual space of dialogic interaction constitutes the

poem itself. Conventionally, the poem serves as a mode of transmission from

speaker to reader, but ‘At the Bottom…’ seems less to provide a communicative

link of immediate address, as with Myles’ conception of the poem-qua-call, than

to envelop the reader in a scene of conversation. Similarly, for many poets, the

form has served as a textual microphone, and as such, many readers have

encountered a poem as they encounter someone using a microphone. Recall

William Blake introducing the Songs of Experience: “Hear the voice of the Bard!”13

But this denotes a mode contrary to an unwonted one that treats the poem as,

say, a Dictaphone—a used Dictaphone, more specifically—and thus, fewer

readers have encountered a poem as if finding a used Dictaphone and pressing

play. Many poems talk to us, in short, but fewer serve to simulate whatever space

it is that contains talk.

Immediately one might think of Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America (1965-1971)

and David Antin’s ‘talk poems’, which both used tape recorders in their

compositional practices, and one might thus disregard the idiosyncrasy of the

poem quoted above. But the voice we hear in both Ginsberg and Antin is, in a

literal sense, the poet’s voice. In both instances, the tape recorder ultimately

functions analogously to voicemail—an intimate, embodied materialising of lyric

performance. In ‘At the Bottom of the Dump There’s Some Sort of Bugle’, on the

other hand, it seems the talk is not conducted by a poet at all, but by those in

13 William Blake, ‘Introduction’, from Collected Poems, ed. W. B. Yeats (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 47.

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earshot of the poet, and by extension, in earshot of the reader. To elongate this

metaphor shy of breaking point, this Dictaphone was not used personally, it

seems, but publicly, and not to record a performance, but rather the contents of

a place.

So what kind of poem is ‘At the Bottom…’? How does it work? How are its

preoccupations—immanent in its images, phrases, and their interaction and

sequence—made manifest to the reader? What is its ontology? How does the

poem reflect the ontology of the world it represents—or is it discloses? To what

end does the poem do this? And how, finally, or indeed primarily, should we

approach it? In the first three chapters of this study, I hope to address these

questions by analysing ‘At the Bottom…’ and its constituent set of ten poems,

provisionally entitled The New York-Amsterdam Set or The End of the Far West,

which O’Hara wrote between 1963 and 1964 for an intermedial collaboration with

Dutch illustrator Jan Cremer that was not completed until 1974, almost ten years

after the poet’s death. Indeed, the history of this collaboration—specifically, its

belatedness—should be emphasized first, since this permits a reading of the

poems at all.

In his previous intermedial collaborative undertakings, O’Hara’s texts are bound

up with their visual counterparts precisely because of their reciprocal, coextensive

creation. In the making of Stones (a series of lithographs with Larry Rivers,

between 1957 and 1959) and Poem-Paintings (with Norman Bluhm, in 1960), for

instance, O’Hara’s poetic gestures variously respond to and precipitate his

counterparts’ pictorial gestures in immediate reciprocity. Conversely, the poems

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that form The New York-Amsterdam Set or The End of the Far West (henceforth

denoted by the latter title option, for reasons that will become apparent) were

written with only the knowledge of the kind of work Cremer was likely to produce.

They seem, as Brad Gooch suggests, “predominantly Pop”, perhaps pre-

emptively complementing Cremer’s own iconographic Beat-Pop aesthetic.14 The

result is a sense of incompletion. In the first place, they constitute one side of a

conversation; they are intrinsically open to creative interaction. Second, this

conversation was fulfilled posthumously; the collaborative act is thus transmuted

to one of commemoration (as opposed to proximate complementarity). This has

effectively short-circuited their capacity to invite critical contact. In all of O’Hara

scholarship, the poems of The End of the Far West are comprehensively

overlooked as a willed, bounded set and equally on a singular basis—that is, if

we discount Geoff Ward’s passing description of the third poem in the set, ‘Enemy

Planes Approaching’, as having a “cartoon-like two-dimensionality”.15 Indeed,

O’Hara himself characteristically cast doubt on the value of the poems, anxiously

anticipating Cremer’s dislike in the letter that contained them, and in stark

contrast to the effusive admiration for many seminal poems by members of

O’Hara’s coterie, that which constitutes Homage to Frank O’Hara, the 1978

compendium of essays, memoir and elegies edited by friends Bill Berkson and

Joe LeSueur, the only biographical note to any one of the poems from The End

14 Freddy De Vree, ‘The New York Period of Jan Cremer’ from <http://www.jancremer.com/article-the-new-york-period-of-Jan-cremer.php>; Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York, NY: Knopf, 1993), p. 410. 15 Geoff Ward, ‘“Housing Deliberations”: New York, War, and Frank O’Hara’ in Frank O’Hara Now, ed. Hampson, Robert & Montgomery, Will (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2010), p. 14.

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of the Far West is from Joe Brainard’s memoir I Remember: “I don’t remember

the poem”, Brainard remembers, “except it had some cowboy dialect in it.”16

And yet we should not assume an absence of attention or interest indicates

devaluation; it might simply signify idiosyncrasy or inscrutability. To speculate,

moreover, on the extent to which the poems prompt Cremer’s specific

interaction—the spaces the lineation leaves, the spotlighting of imagery

particularly amenable to visual mimesis—and how the poems are made to match

Cremer’s style, would be to explain away, if at all account for, their own particular

thematic and formal accordance: their frontier imagery, Hollywood dialect, and

wrangling atmosphere; their confabulatory networks, and the spaces of social

interaction thereby enacted. While the anachronism of the collaboration made

the poems appear deficient or at least in abeyance, deterring critics and friends,

it also affords the poems a particularity that allows for them to be analysed

independently.

Certainly the poems sit uncomfortably in O’Hara’s present oeuvre (who knows

what else might be found in friends’ desk drawers?). Another way to account for

the critical neglect, then, is on aesthetic grounds: sketchy, slippery, chaotic,

scatter-brained, often inane, a kind of esoteric satire at first glance, the poems

16 CP, 556: “Dear Jan,

Forgive me for the long delay in sending you these poems. I hope you like them, but if you don’t let me know and I will send you ten older ones which you may like better. But my first idea was to give you new poems which have never been printed before, since you will be doing new drawings. However, don’t hesitate to let me know if you don’t like them, & I’ll send the others. There is no reason for you to do drawings for poems you don’t like”;

Joe Brainard, ‘Frank O’Hara’ in Homage to Frank O’Hara, eds., Bill Berkson & Joe LeSeuer, (Bolinas: Big Sky, 1988), p. 168.

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fail against the high modernist standard set by the demanding, energetic coterie

collages of poems like ‘Biotherm’ (1962), and they equally lack the inviting,

intimate, personable, manifestly personified propulsion of his earlier diaristic ‘I

do this, I do that’ poems (beginning approximately in 1956, with ‘Cambridge’ and

‘A Step Away From Them’), which compose the bulk of his legacy-defining

collection Lunch Poems (1964). It is reasonable, moreover, to justify the

avoidance of the poems of The End of the Far West for their incongruity with

what have been supposed to be the poet’s preoccupations—art, love, value,

anxiety, selfhood, urban life. Given the fact that ‘Fantasy’ (1964), a poem written

in the same year as those sent to Cremer, was included in Lunch Poems, it is

equally reasonable to claim therefore that the former set neither contains the

defining, celebrated characteristics critics have thus established, nor does it

adequately concern itself with the sort of “ruminations” that have come to

distinguish O’Hara’s core poetic project.

Nevertheless, the poems were written months before O’Hara submitted a blurb

for Lunch Poems to City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and announcing

the key preoccupations of such a project—that is, “coexistence, and depth”.17 For

this reason, automatic subscription to the enumerated causes for the disregard

of these poems, aside from merely deeming them substandard, forgettable, or

trifling, would be an oversight. It seems no coincidence that his facetious and yet

(in an exemplary O’Hara combination) honest blurb summary of the “computed

misunderstandings” of his distinctive Lunch Poems are contemporaneous with

17 Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2014).

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the hitherto-dismissed poems proposed for The End of the Far West.18 Indeed,

my contention here, which forms the underlying argument of this study, is that

the poems of the latter, posthumously publicised set, written amidst a series of

personal “crises” backdropped by the apotheosis of the Cold War and the

overhang of regressive, jingoistic ideologies, do in fact address the question of

“coexistence”—a mode of sociality whose bonds extend beyond coterie, the

grounding of relations of difference—more decidedly than elsewhere in O’Hara’s

work. It is their formal configuration of disparate verbal components, the

ostensibly frivolously congregated fragments of confabulatory speech, which

explains their dismissal and constitutes the formal category this study aims to

theorise—the assemblage-poem.

Before doing so, I should note that the problem with theorising O’Hara’s poetry

is that it is made specifically to resist the fixity of interpretive moulds. “Theory

and experience had to jell,” Bill Berkson observes about O’Hara’s attitude toward

critical judgements. Experience always precedes idea and creative act, even if,

as Allen Ginsberg notes, “any gesture [O’Hara] made was the poetic gesture

because he was the poet, so therefore anything he did was poetry.”19 In his own

words, O’Hara is “mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it.”20 In light

of this, O’Hara warns critics against “mak[ing] up a lot of prose about something

that is perfectly clear in the poems. If you cover someone with earth and grass

grows, you don’t know what they looked like anymore. Critical prose makes too

18 Ibid. 19 ‘“Early Poetic Community”” discussion at Kent State April 7, 1971 in ALLEN VERBATIM’ in Homage, p. 63; Frank O’Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York, (San Francisco, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1983), p. 112. 20 ‘Statement for The New American Poetry’ in CP, p. 500.

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much grass grow”. 21 For many of O’Hara’s most acclaimed, influential and

examined poems, especially the ‘I do this, I do that’ poems, the experience and

its occasion contained within the text is made “perfectly clear” in the first lines:

“It’s my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk among the hum-colored / cabs”; “It is

[Rachmaninoff’s] 86th birthday / and I am sitting crying at the corner / of Ninth

Street and Avenue A”; “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday”.22 In these poems, both

the subject and the achievement are “Light clarity”, a brief illumination of, say,

“avocado salad in the morning”.23

Even so—and this is typical of O’Hara—as soon as we make an assertion, a

contradiction follows. Here is O’Hara on “clarity”:

What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else; they are just in whatever form I can find them. What is clear to me in my work is probably obscure to others, and vice versa. […]

It may be the poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.24

The one assertion we can make, then, is not to make a general assertion.

Specifically, this precludes the assertion of a “‘poetics’”, O’Hara says, “based on

one of my poems which any other poem of mine would contradict.”25 This bears

out in reading his enormously diverse Collected Poems and it leaves the critic

either thematically cobbling together estranged semblances or merely affirming

21 Ibid, p. 114. 22 ‘A Step Away from Them’, CP, p. 257; ‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday’, ibid, p. 321; ‘The Day Lady Died’, ibid, p. 325. 23 Ibid, p. 350. 24 Standing Still, p. 112. 25 Ibid, p. 113.

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O’Hara’s famous lines, “Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible”,

which are themselves, variously, a pronouncement, a description, and a wish.26

But while, as Oren Izenberg states, “There is no O’Hara concordance”, there are

certainly concordances—phases of engagement that momentarily reveal what

can be called an ad hoc poetics in keeping with his famously ad hoc composition

process of “dashing the poems off at odd moments”, as John Ashbery

remarked.27 This sort of poetics not need be an oeuvre-defining system externally

imposed, but rather a distinct artistic effort made in a definable context and

retrospectively apparent within what becomes an oeuvre. 28 Phases of

engagement aggregate, allowing the critic to isolate and postulate facets of those

phases, which can restructure the appeal, function and significance of an entire

body of work. For now, it might be enough to say that the poems of The End of

the Far West constitute a distinct phase at odds with previous phases and their

facets. Clarity, for instance, commensurate with indexicality, is one such facet.

If theory must be postponed, I will start with an experience—the reading

experience. In ‘At the Bottom…’, there is no deictic indication, no description; a

scenario is not narrated—it is, instead, enacted, mimetically. The poem begins

with an injunction from an unknown speaker tonally different from the ‘Frank

O’Hara’ persona we have come to expect to vocalise a poem by Frank O’Hara.

Unaware of the specific circumstance or its actors, only that the speaker is

asserting authority over an employee—“No matter where I send you remember

/ you’re still working for me”—the reader occupies the hybridised role of

26 ‘In the Memory of My Feelings’, CP, p. 256. 27 John Ashbery, ‘Introduction’ in ibid, p. vii; Izenberg, Being Numerous, p. 130. 28 Ibid, p. 130.

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eavesdropper and interlocutor. At a remove from the particulars of this exchange,

but affected by the emotional content, the reader thus feels a share of the

pressure directed at this employee. Another speaker then suggests employment

in the Far West, in Tombstone, Arizona, one of the last boomtowns of the

American frontier. Another speaker still (or is it one heard before?) insults the

jobseeker—he calls him a “jerk”—but then recasts the insult as a compliment,

admiring his ability to “ride herd on the Senate” no less, simultaneously invoking

the generic American ideal of gumption, the reverence of macho enterprise and

determination embodied by the cowboy or frontiersman, as well as the Senate,

the “Living Symbol”, or rather the synecdoche, of American democracy. As a

result of this latter invocation, the poem reiterates the paternalistic mastery

immanent in the etymological undercurrent of the Senate as a “counsel of elders”,

from the Latin senex, meaning: “old man”.29

Without a demarcated location—a “muggy” or “dirty” or “blinding” street in New

York, for instance, which applies to many of O’Hara’s most recognised poems—

and instead with the nebulous place implied when/wherever one person speaks

to another, the reader is disoriented, but precisely because they look for

orientation via narration.30 Without this, we must enter the “space” of literature,

to invoke Maurice Blanchot, by affective means.31 Cast in an interlocutory role,

the reader’s auditory capacities are required to transmit the dramatic content

directly, as if the reader were there. The interlocutor, a silent participant, the

29 “Below the new building’s west wing pediment is the inscription: ‘The Senate is the Living Symbol of Our United States’” from <https://www.senate.gov/visiting/common/generic/dirksen_building_description.htm>. 30 CP, p. 324; ibid, p. 327; ibid, p. 340. 31 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 192.

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interface between selves and others—itself both self and other—is the basis of

social and ethical encounters. Consider, for instance, the relation between

Blanchot’s conception of writing poetry as approaching “the point at which here

coincides with nowhere” and Søren Overgaard’s postulation that “Ethics

essentially has to do with the way discourse places us before an interlocutor,

rather than anything we might state in discourse”, which is to say, it comprises

an “unsaying of the philosophical said—an unsaying that lets us catch a glimpse

of the saying, the face to face of discourse.”32 In light of this, it seems possible

to conceive the dialogic poem as that which constructs the condition in which

ethics is made possible, and as such, the reader becomes the generative source

of ethics itself.33 The reader, in other words, lets ethics become ethics in the

same way “to read”, for Blanchot, “is not to write the book again, but to allow

the book to be.”34 In doing so, the poem reciprocally lets the reader experience

a kind of ethical freedom—“not the freedom that produces being or grasps it,” as

Blanchot conceives it, “but freedom that welcomes, consents, says yes, can only

say yes, and, in the space opened by this yes, lets the work’s overwhelming

decisiveness affirm itself, lets be its affirmation that it is”.35

As Blanchot remarks, the poet’s task is “to make present those very words”—“It

is.”36 This affirmative register in relation to life’s contingency is what O’Hara

struggles to fully adopt, in an earlier poem ‘Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan

and Jean-Paul’ (1959), where he asks “René Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel

32 Søren Overgaard, ‘The ethical residue of language in Levinas and Early Wittgenstein’ in Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 33, no.2, p. 24 (223-249). 33 Ibid; Blanchot,The Space of Literature, p. 48. 34 Ibid, p. 194. 35 Ibid, p. 194. 36 Ibid, p. 43.

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Beckett it is possible isn’t it” and answers with his own scepticism: “I love Reverdy

for saying yes, though” the speaker admits, “I don’t believe it.”37 In ‘At the

Bottom…’, the affirmative, while not explicitly stated, like the poet’s presence,

forms the very means by which the poem functions. In staging and spotlighting

the conditions whereby the reader realises the poem through the paradoxical

presence of the poet’s disappearance that is, for Blanchot, “the life of words,

which draws light from their dimming, clarity from their dark.”38 The mode of this

poem, then, seems to solve—or, at least, make solvable—O’Hara’s ambivalence

toward both affirmation and clarity in poetry in general. Engaged with this

playtext without stage directions, the reader/interlocutor of ‘At the Bottom…’

must enter the indeterminate scene blindly, through their ears, in order to

receive, allow, clarify, and ethically consider the tension performed and produced

in the sequence of its exchanges, which shift from the assertion of legitimate

authority, to the esteem of masculine mastery, to paternalistic assistance—“Need

any help?”—and which exhibits the formation of a dominance hierarchy re labour

exchanges.

To this end, the second stanza of ‘At the Bottom…’ further expands and modifies

the motifs established in the first. The frontiersman figure becomes its own

simulacrum as “Joel McCrea”, a young Hollywood Western actor, “rides” a

“bicycle”, not a horse, and neither “herd on the Senate” nor necessarily in the

“Tombstone Gulch”, but rather into an actual “gulch”. A cinematic dissolve—“now

owning a black-and-white television set,” Gooch notes, “[O’Hara] was writing

37 ‘Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul’, CP, p. 328. 38 Blanchot, p. 43.

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these days while watching his favourite TV shows”—reveals an antagonistic

relation (“Sheriff”/“rustler”) inverting the necessitation of employment previously

considered: the dependence on superiors for a job becomes the self-appointment

of superiority despite the dependence on a supposed inferior for the existence of

the job itself.39 The inversion of roles continues with a paradoxically simultaneous

coalescence and detachment of generations (“We’re not our own grandfathers,

are we?”) recalling the patriarchal origin of the republic and restating the circular

relation of action and responsibility in the democratic process as the ‘by the

people, for the people’ formula, which final codifies in the transferal and

continuation of tradition as one generation lower in the patriarchy replaces the

higher, progenitor generation while preserving its “old saddles and old horses /

and old loves.”

Reeling from shifting synecdochic relations and asyndetic jumps, the reader hears

a new speaker (or is it a recurring speaker?) audibly “think it’s disgusting in this

saloon”. Here we are granted orientation. Curiously, we notice that it has always

felt this way, in a saloon, overhearing the conversational flotsam around us. It is

only in retrospect, then, that we notice its themes. Even more curiously, it seems

briefly as though we were not reading a poem written by Frank O’Hara, an

intended artistic construct from 1963 or ‘64, but rather noticing only what we

were already prepared to notice, as if we were in fact in a saloon and it was

ourselves who picked out salient phrases and exchanges as they appealed to us;

as if, in other words, we formed the utterances that became the very poem we’ve

been reading. If writing poetry approaches “the point at which here coincides

39 Gooch, City Poet, p. 410.

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with nowhere”, to repeat Blanchot, then the poem itself, like Gregory J. Seigworth

and Melissa Gregg’s conception of affect, “arises in the midst of in-between-

ness.” Indeed, consider their elaboration of this idea in light of the reading

process I have described:

Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability. Indeed, affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations.40

To repurpose the terms of this conception, then, it is the very refusal of discrete

placeholders within the poem’s concrete parts—the snippets of relayed speech—

which conjure an intensive aesthetic state that drives the reader toward

imaginative immersion within the reassembled realm of those concrete parts.

The very same process operates in ‘The Green Hornet’, the eighth poem of The

End of the Far West. To appreciate how the poem’s immanent properties

materialise through the interaction and sequence of its component fragments of

conversation, it is again necessary first to experience the poem in its entirety.

I couldn’t kill a man when he was drunk or shoot him

when he’s unarmed, could I? You sure couldn’t, kid.

Well give me the money. More of your funny business!

Talk fast, kid. You’ve got just one minute more. Yipe!

40 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Gregory J. Seigworth, Melissa Gregg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 1.

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Turn that stage team loose. Do you mind waiting for me

in my office? I’ve got some papers for Judge Hawkins to sign, You look mighty pretty.

So Wyatt Earp wrote you a letter? Told you a lot of things about me?

A girl wants a man worth sticking to.

I’m sorry you came all the way from Emporia for nothing.

You’re the same Johnny I forgot about: Arrogant, stupid and bull-headed.

Well, I got stuck on this cowboy, baby, and as far as I can see it depends on what you want to ride.

Lock him up, boys, I’ll press charges tomorrow.

“She is more to be pitied than censured, she is more to be helped than despised…”

A man was the cause of it all. An unarmed man with a weapon.

Again, there is no narration, but enaction through clips of speech. The first

exchange involves an inexperienced hitman, goon, or agent of revenge—the

“kid”?—receiving counsel from a laconic, wiser elder. Again, a relation predicated

on labour is established: “Well give me the money,” the kid requests, after which

the elder, perhaps the kid’s employer, tells him to “Talk fast” because he’s “got

just one minute more” before he “turn[s] that stage team loose.” We are aware,

at this point, of a general temporality or locale, one in which a horse and carriage

is in use—perhaps the old west, or perhaps a poor, contemporary rural

community. Another speaker, after asking someone to wait in his office, where

“Judge Hawkins” will presumably sign “some papers”—indicating our location is

some kind of business establishment straddling the boundaries of the law,

facilitated by corruption—tells a woman, presumably (both poems employ a

queer ambiguity), “You look mighty pretty.” Are we in a brothel like that depicted

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in Hollywood Westerns? Perhaps: the introduction of the female character in a

relation of sexual subjection shifts the focus of the scenario to a sequence of

ripostes that reverse the balance of power. One speaker queries the validity of

Wyatt Earp’s judgement of character, recalling the inversion of the sheriff/rustler

relation in ‘At the Bottom...’ and locating this poem, by association, to Earp’s

gunfight at the O.K. Coral, which took place in Tombstone, Arizona, in the same

psycho-geographical world, the Far West. Are we, then, in the Bird Cage Theatre,

a theatre-cum-saloon-cum-gambling-parlour-cum-brothel operative in

Tombstone during the nineteenth-century silver mining boom? Probably: each

aspect thus far considered suggests such a place, and, for that matter, the

preceding poem in The End of the Far West bears the same title of the

establishment. With a prospective location coming further into focus, another

speaker asserts the desire for a dependable partner—paradoxically expressing

the power of choice and the inferiority and powerlessness immanent in the ideal

outcome of exercising it—which only constitutes “a man worth sticking to.”

Another disappoints a patron or traveller on his journey from Emporia (a town in

either Florida, Indiana, Kansas or Virginia), enriching through connotation the

sense that our affective experience of the poem’s space is situated in a place of

unlawful commerce, an emporium of disrepute. Another conveys the

disappointing reunion with an unreformed ex-lover, whose distasteful, “bull-

headed” manner reveals, via pun, his cowboy occupation, anticipating and

subsequently harmonising with both an earlier speaker and the next speaker,

who “got stuck on this cowboy”, thus reiterating the zero-sum game of choosing

a partner within a system of inequality and subjugation. To end the sequence,

there is an encapsulation of this self-defeating power dynamic: in the line “Lock

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him up, boys, I’ll press charges tomorrow”, this speaker has the power to order

an arrest and to receive compensation for the injustice acted out against them,

but the habits of their time only suggest inevitable recurrence.

Altogether, the component parts of the poem have conspired, through an

interrelation of associations, to affectively situate the reader in an establishment

of the American frontier that plays fast and loose with the law. Indeed, by

invoking the eponymous comic book vigilante, great-nephew of the Lone Ranger,

the title orients the poem with the wider American cultural tradition of the

necessary outlaw, whose morally questionable and illegal means of action justify

speciously virtuous, exemplary ends of ensuring justice against an ostensibly evil

foe—the popular culture embodiment of imperialist projects. But what is more,

when the reader hears two lines from ‘She is More to be Pitied Than Censured’,

an 1894 song by William Benson Grey, in relation to the components preceding

them, the scenario, the social condition, and the implicit critique of the poem

emerge. Immanent in the poem, and communicated affectively through its

enaction (or, as Gregg and Seigworth put it, by means of an awareness “other

than conscious knowing”), is that which is included in the assemblage-poem in a

truncated form—that is, the contents and import of the song:

At the old concert hall on the Boweryf, Round a table were seated one night, A crowd of young fellows carousing. With them life seemed cheerful and bright. At the next table someone was seated, A girl who had fallen to shame. All the young fellows jeered at her weakness Till they heard an old woman exclaim: She is more to be pitied than censured. She is more to helped than despised.

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She is only a lassie who ventured On life’s stormy path, ill-advised. Do not scorn her with words fierce and bitter. Do not laugh at her shame and downfall. For a moment just stop and consider That a man was the cause of it all.41

Once communicated implicitly, as one speaker in ‘The Green Hornet’ reiterates,

“A man was the cause of it all”—a man, while “unarmed” (a description that

brings the reader full-circle to the beginning of the poem), who possesses the

“weapon” of subjugation from a position of either ruinous or patronisingly

paternalistic superiority. In supralinguistically conjuring the saloon, the concert

hall, the brothel, the Bird Cage Theatre, the poems disclose the socioeconomic

tensions operative in and sustained by such spaces.

In ‘At the Bottom…’, our location, the saloon, “which is so much like the rest of

America”, replaces and retroactively identifies the Senate as synecdochic of

America. This substitution reveals the non-linear associative network of the poem

I’ve demonstrated in tracking my reading, which continues with the avuncular

“old saddles and old horses” converging into a distorted myth of destructively

absorptive proportions as one speaker is “eaten by a saddled horse”. As this

mode of transport replaces Joel McCrea’s bicycle (reversing the Western Frontier-

Hollywood Western chronology) and retaliates, becoming a predatory force, the

logics of mastery, of the food chain, of the dominance hierarchy in democracy

are all likewise reversed, thus revealing their latent perniciousness. The Western

trope of “regeneration through violence”, as observed by Richard Slotkin in his

41 William Benson Gray, ‘She is more to be pitied than censured’ from <https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-f242-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99#/?uuid=7c834d1c-9a23-1b44-e040-e00a18063f5b>.

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monumental thesis on the mythology of the frontier as central to the American

identity and its military venture to Vietnam for the cause of “making our power

credible”, as Kennedy himself put it, is fulfilled as one speaker, after the moment

of nightmarish slaughter, remarks how “beautiful the sunset is over the Grand

Canyon”. In relation to the preceding reversals of naturalised myths and

processes, this sentiment rings falsely, feebly, as unconvincingly optimistic as

Kennedy’s own invocation of the frontier in American progress into “the

uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war,

unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of

poverty and surplus” after the near-miss of nuclear war and the escalation of

conflict overseas during intensified struggles for civil rights.42 Indeed, writing in

1963, no doubt mindful of the social reality of what Kennedy called the United

States’ “moral crisis”, referring in part to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s anti-

segregation demonstrates a month prior, which had been met with police

brutality, attacking police dogs, and firemen’s hoses, O’Hara’s spotlighting the

Senate as the thematic nexus of ‘At the Bottom…’ reveals a more politicised (or

at least politically conscious) attention fomenting his practice, one that responds

critically to the civic failure of Congress stalling Kennedy’s civil rights act

throughout the summer of this year and that anticipates the filibustering of the

act in the Senate the following year.43

42 John F. Kennedy, ‘Acceptance of Democratic Nomination for President’ from <https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/AS08q5oYz0SFUZg9uOi4iw.aspx>; quoted in Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983), p. 247. 43 Juan Williams, ‘The 1964 Civil Rights Act: Then and Now’ in Human Rights, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 7-8.

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The immanent properties of these poems—that is, the potential meanings,

affects, the political/cultural implications—emerge precisely in the interaction of

its component speech acts and via the reader’s immersion in the ‘environment’

or ‘space’ of their interaction; the poem functions as a voicescape that

incorporates the reader into its specifically peopled textual realm, constructing

and mediating the relations between speakers and between speaker and listener,

disclosing to the reader the social condition by which the voicescape is

produced.44 This, in short, is the foundational claim about the function of the

assemblage-poem, which this study aims to conceive. Its conception emerges

from, and often in spite of, the omission of The End of the Far West poems from

all criticism on O’Hara. There is a clearly traceable progression of the

preoccupations that critics have explored through O’Hara, listed above, and

hence, the primary texts for their criticism. The outlying poems of The End of the

Far West have been ignored because they seem to agitate, and even flout, the

coherence of O’Hara’s reception history. On the contrary, in the subsequent

chapter, I show that, by neglecting The End of the Far West, critics have missed

an opportunity to make good on their own claims about his poetry. In situating

my claims against theirs, I hope, in turn, to resituate O’Hara’s poetry in relation

to established understandings about its workings and relevance. In doing so,

O’Hara’s standing as a poet of surface, fragmented selfhood and coterie

44 I take the term ‘voicescape’ from Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, ‘Voicescapes and Sonic Structures in the Creation of Sound Technodrama’ in Performance Research, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2003). I use it generically to mean a soundscape of voices, what Smith and Dean term “multidimensional and multidirectional projections of the voice into space … [that] create their own kinds of cultural geographies” (p. 113), but wish specifically to stress, in terms of poetry and functionally analogous art practices, their immersive aesthetic function and thus how, as Smith elsewhere remarks, in light of the relation between voicescape and “postmodern geographers such as Steve Pile, David Harvey, and Doreen Massey, “[a]ny place is traversed by shifting economic social relationships between people” (Hazel Smith, ‘The erotics of gossip, fictocriticism, performativity, technology’ in Textual Practice, Vol. 23, No. 1, p. 1010).

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formation becomes less evident when his celebrated lyric poems are juxtaposed

with the assemblage-poems of The End of the Far West.

I use the term assemblage-poem because it operates on the same aesthetic

continuum as, and amounts to the literary counterpart of, the plastic

assemblage—a three-dimensional collage sculpture, usually comprised of

materially disparate found objects. As a recognised practitioner of plastic

assemblage, which historically and aesthetically bridges the practices of

European/American modernist collage and 1960s performance art projects from

Allan Kaprow’s happenings to Fluxus to conceptual art, Robert Rauschenberg’s

work will serve as a comparative aid to my analysis, and specifically his painted

bricolage sculptures, the Combines (1954-1964). O’Hara’s personal, professional

and aesthetic association with the visual art of his day has concerned the majority

of his critics. Marjorie Perloff inaugurated the trend highlighting O’Hara’s

employment of “painterly”, surrealist, Abstract Expressionist techniques, and

since then, to name a few, Jacques Debrot similarly addressed O’Hara’s

collaborations with Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns, Hazel Smith

has explored O’Hara’s mixed-media works to situate him as a postmodern

precursor, Paul R. Cappucci has triangulated O’Hara’s poetry with William Carlos

Williams’ and the contemporaneous New York art scene, and Rona Cran has

theorised the utilisation of collage techniques in O’Hara’s poetry.45 Far fewer

45 Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara: A Poet Among Painters (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 141; Jacques Debrot, ‘Present, The Scene of My Selves, The Occasion of These Ruses: Frank O’Hara’s collaborations with Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns’ in Arshile II (1999); Hazel Smith, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: Difference, Homosexuality, Topography (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2000); Paul R. Cappucci William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, and the New York Art Scene (Madison, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010). I concern myself directly with the connection between

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critics (if any), however, have extensively considered The End of the Far West as

a willed poetic effort, and neither in the specific context of the transitions

between certain artistic media occurring in his lifetime—that is, from painting and

collage to assemblage as a precursor of conceptual and performance art. Thus,

Chapter Two is dedicated to the delineation of these mediums as a means to

more thoroughly elucidate the analogous machinery of assemblage-poems,

following in the common but useful vein of understanding O’Hara’s poetry

through its conscious association with contemporaneous art practices.

My invocation of Rauschenberg’s assemblages is not only for the consonance of

his and O’Hara’s conceptual approaches and the manner in which their works

function, but also for their thematic concerns and the targets of their critique.

Both O’Hara and Rauschenberg use the assemblage mode to address the

legitimising myths of American authority and exceptionalism, the waste-profit

logic of consumerism and its regulation of social life, the rigidly hierarchising

political strategies and social conventions of the Cold War scenario in America,

and the possibility of pluralist coexistence at large. Significantly, I claim, such

preoccupations are enacted and made manifest affectively by situating the

reader/viewer in what O’Hara terms, in an earlier poem, ‘Chez Jane’ (1957), “the

exact peril / at this moment.”.46 Due to its fundamentally dialogic form, the

assemblage-poem specifically serves not as “a curio of intimate experience”, to

borrow Sandeep Parmar’s recent term, but as an affective site of social interaction

and thus a portal to its constitutive social condition. The reader of the

O’Hara’s poetry and contemporaneous art practices in Chapter Two, situating the poetry in relation to assemblage art and hopefully plugging a gap in such scholarship. 46 ‘Chez Jane’, CP, p. 102.

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assemblage-poem is thus immersed in the dialogic voicescape via a kind of

auditory relocation. For this reason, interpretation of the assemblage-poem

requires a phenomenological model of reading, encompassing its affective

dimension.

Besides a reading of the poems as affective sites, I find it pertinent to read them

through Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of assemblages as relational entities of

polyvalent becoming, which apply, in their Spinozan metaphysics of continuity,

to all concrete things, bodies and spaces.47 In Chapter Three, I respectively

employ an “assemblage analysis” as conceived by social geographer and

philosopher Manuel DeLanda, whose “neo-assemblage theory” describes an

ontological framework whereby the properties of social entities emerge through

the interaction of their heterogeneous components on multiple intermediate

levels between the micro (individual choice) and the macro (societal order).48

The premise of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking, from A Thousand Plateaus chiefly

but also the former’s Difference and Repetition, is that “[t]he identity of an

assemblage at any level of scale is always the product of a process

(territorialisation and, in some cases, coding), and it always precarious, since

other processes deterritorialisation and decoding can stabilise it”. 49 A social

assemblage, in other words, is in a state of continuous flux between poles of total

fixity, stability and cohesion on one hand, and volatility and fragmentation on the

other. The more territorialised the configuration of the assemblages, the more its

47 Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Mussumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987). 48 Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum Books, 2006), p. 4. 49 Ibid, p. 28.

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borders and composition, its demography, is defined (often against a similarly

territorialised other). Deterritorialisation occurs when the social assemblage is

reformed (often by an increase in diverse social relations). This idea serves as a

theoretical point of departure for both DeLanda and myself.

As a consequence, this study proposes that this assembled approach—of affect

theory, Blanchot’s literary theory and DeLanda’s repurposing of Deleuze and

Guattari’s thinking—is the most appropriate mode of criticism for elucidating this

compelling, complex form and the social context with which it is concerned and

from which it is constructed. Poems such as those in The End of the Far West

are best elucidated, in other words, through a collaboration of the

phenomenological model of reading (mentioned and demonstrated above, and

elaborated on in the next chapter) with a sociological model, engaging with terms

common to the social sciences—community, society, space, relation, etc.—as well

as political philosophy, whose abstract considerations account for the allegorical

function of society and art, which a strictly positivist sociological approach would

overlook. As my illustrative readings of ‘At the Bottom…’ and ‘The Green Hornet’

have hoped to show, a phenomenological attention to how the poems mobilise a

textual space that incorporates the reader in order to communicate the poem’s

immanent socioeconomic critiques, themselves legible by way of sociological

concepts per se (i.e. without verifying case studies), comes closest to articulating

the machinery of the assemblage-poem.

This methodology ensures that the poems are read as assemblages, whose

heteroglot component parts—injunctions, questions, insults, compliments,

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promises, jokes, exaggerations, (that is, in summary, units of

enacted/uttered/performed speech)—serve to engender a means by which the

reader is immersed into the social site to which these fragments of conversation

refer. Through heteroglossia—the condition whereby, as Mikhail Bakhtin terms it,

“[l]anguages do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other”

and “cohabit with one another”, which is also the literary equivalent to the

material heterogeneity of plastic assemblages—assemblage-poems engage with

systems of social complexity that tend towards inclusive, rhizomatic structures of

relation.50 The assemblage-poem functions, then, as a deterritorialising agent in

reference to the concrete social assemblage to which it responds. Crucially, the

mobilisation of differential relations in the assemblage-poem imagines an ethical

space in which difference can be borne. As a result, assemblage-poems

encompass what Nicolas Bourriaud calls the “coexistence criterion”, whereby “the

most pressing thing is no longer the emancipation of individuals, but the freeing

up of inter-human communications, the dimensional emancipation of

existence.” 51 Suffice it to say, O’Hara’s assemblage-poems serve to

deterritorialise, expose and potentially emancipate the reader from the discursive

modes and affective realities of social exclusion and regulation, of coerced

consensus and inimical division, and of imperial territorialisation, which define

the era in which they were written—Cold War condition in America from

McCarthyism up to Kennedy’s New Frontier initiative and the Vietnam War. The

first two chapters of this study only passingly attend to the historical context with

which O’Hara’s poems engage. I do this not because O’Hara’s attention to matters

50 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist & Caryl Emerson (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1982) p. 291; emphasis in original. 51 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presse Du Reel, 1998) p. 60.

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historical and political is perfunctory, or that such matters are incidental to

readings of the poem. On the contrary, the poems’ ultimate engagement, I claim,

is precisely their context—that is, the social reality of the apotheosis of the Cold

War in America. For this reason, my extended analysis of the poems in their

proper context will be delayed until Chapter Three.

In addressing the poems of The End of the Far West as textual portals through

which the reader qua eavesdropper/interlocutor engages in a heteroglot textual

space, my reading hopes to open up questions about O’Hara’s preoccupation with

expansive, inclusive forms of sociality. This encounter, I claim, produces the

means by which the reader experiences, ahead of meaning, a social relation. In

so doing, my reading simultaneously constitutes an ontological exploration of the

relation between poetry and forms of social life. By incorporating heteroglossia,

O’Hara announces himself as a poet preoccupied with forms of sociality whose

interactions reach beyond those with which he has been thus far associated. The

poems of End of the Far West show O’Hara as a poet not only concerned with

the alterity of that which is shared by kith and the formation of tight kinship

groups as a tactic of protection against social vulnerability (i.e. coterie), but with

the shared, relational differentness of persons altogether, thus manifesting for

readers the social conditions of perilous moments in history. In doing so, finally,

O’Hara constitutes a crucial steppingstone toward a poetics not just thematically

but formally predicated on enactments of relationality and social interaction. How

the overlooked poems of The End of the Far West enact and engage with social

structures exercising pluralist coexistence is precisely where the first three

chapters intend to add to O’Hara scholarship.

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At this point, I should provide some expository remarks about the terminology I

have employed thus far and will continue to employ throughout this study. First,

in using pluralist in conjunction with coexistence, I’m risking tautology to

emphasize the precarious contingency of social fabrics in accordance with what

Doreen Massey calls a “throwntogetherness” of cultural trajectories.52 This is

where the possibility of mutually constructive integration, of shareable space,

requires a politics of negotiation (as opposed, for instance, to one of division and

rule, a separatist mode of coexistence). In ‘The Shoe Shine Boy’, the last poem

of The End of the Far West, for instance, the very heteroglot form undermines

one of its speaker’s embittered advice to “Never love a stranger / for strangers

always part”: the poem enacts the very “throwntogetherness” from which this

speaker feels the need to protect themselves.53 Thus, in satirizing the speaker’s

aversion to collective responsibility, and by ending with another speaker’s

subversive warning that “My Red friends / will pass among you”, the poem

implicitly demonstrates the notion that coexistence is both the instigator and

product of the political.

By collective responsibility, moreover, I mean neither to suggest that the

conception of selfhood at play here is reducible to group identity (collectivism),

nor do I mean to indicate the espousal of group culpability or guilt in response

to individual action.54 All the same, in offering these qualifications, I do not mean

52 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 177. 53 CP, p. 486. 54 After all, in the north-western world, hasn’t the group identity of marginalised members of societies (black Americans, say) more generally been foisted upon such members by members of a self-legitimised dominant group (white Americans, say) in order to instantiate marginalisation vis-à-vis hierarchies of group identity (i.e. American white supremacism)?

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conversely to affirm the primacy of an innately rational, autonomous, liberalist

self in which individual rights have primacy over an obligation to the maintenance

of a just society (individualism qua egoism). I mean to clarify the simple notion

that, in the social reality the poems consider, an individual’s ethical choice must

always function in relation to the social fabric of individuals with which they are

interdependent; I mean, in short, to suggest that the poems regard (often the

failure of) a mobilized, motivated kind of social duty, the intricate process of

collective intentions envisioned and enacted by individual selves. As one speaker

says in ‘Here We Are Having a Lot of Trouble With the World’s Fair’, one must

act in a way that “squares me with both of you.”55

The pluralist coexistence grounded in such a view of social action, then, refers

merely to a conception of social reality whose very recognition makes possible

the mitigation of socio-political hegemony; it describes an openly democratic

coexistence. Accordingly, my usage of the term is not to affirm a state of radical,

theoretically productive dissensus.56 This is perhaps the social “detonation” that

results in the reactionary construction of “the Walled City” of separatism in the

second poem ‘Chicago’.57 Instead, my invocations of both pluralism and collective

responsibility simply identify an imbricated plurality of assemblages—from

55 CP, p. 480. This view of social reality largely refers to Raimo Tuomela’s distinction of an individual’s “I-mode” and a “we-mode”, a person’s “personal goals” and their “collective goals”, the latter of which involves an individual’s understanding of the action necessary to “satisfy a certain collectivity condition” in order to consolidate “collective commitment”. This is not, however, as it may seem, a modality of consensus, of shoring up a homogenous “we-belief”; rather, it describes the machinery of how different assemblages coexistence—that is, produce a sharable space through interaction. See Raimo Tuomela, ‘The We-Mode and the I-Mode’ in Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social Reality, ed. Frederick F. Schmitt (Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003). 56 See Jacques Ranciere, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 57 CP, p. 479.

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individuals to larger social bodies—whose coexistence is constantly negotiated,

oscillating in configuration from modes of fixity and revision but tending towards

egalitarian revision. In an era when the actuality of such an idea (as opposed to

its disingenuous glorification in national ideology) came up against consumerist

atomization, struggles of racial segregation, the totalizing, naturalizing ideal of

consensus, and the schismatic logic of containment, the poems of The End of the

Far West provide an affective encounter with the fraught interstices of U.S.

domestic social life and geopolitical strategy. In doing so, the poems elucidate

the necessity of a politics born of, and affirmatively attendant to, the possibilities

of social consonance despite the inevitability of conflict in multiplicities. The

poems enact what the collaged epigraph of this study attempts to convey—the

“poetic ground”, as O’Hara writes in ‘Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets’,

upon which we “rear our smiles” and “bear each other’s differences”.58 But this

is no Whitmanic idealism: what O’Hara envisions in this poem, but doesn’t

address formally until The End of the Far West, is “categorically the most difficult

relationship”—coexistence.59

The preoccupation with this relationship is what aligns O’Hara with the

assemblage art practices of his day—and this alignment in turn reveals that

preoccupation. Illustrating and employing this point is a consistent critical move

but one that has thus far consistently missed the opportunity to extend these

comparative parallels to incorporate, and thus incorporate O’Hara into, art

practices that emerged out of those in which he was immediately engaged—that

58 Ibid, p. 305. 59 Ibid, p. 305.

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is, the environment/happenings of the 1960s up to the predominantly

participatory, interactive ‘relational’ practices of the past three decades.

Regarding the later poems as assemblage-poems opens a way for this. Indeed,

if Rauschenberg serves as a forebear of relational or participatory performance

art and installation as well as what Suzanne Lacy terms “new genre public art”,

which practices relational art outside “museums for a specialized art audience”

to involve “marginalized populations”, and if O’Hara’s assemblage-poems

correspond historically and aesthetically with Rauschenberg’s plastic

assemblages, as I claim in Chapter Two, then it might follow that O’Hara, in his

field, serves as a corresponding forebear of—what?60 By tracing the lineage from

1950s assemblage aesthetics and 1960s interactive performance art to 1990s and

contemporary relational aesthetics, collaborative socially-oriented projects and

new genre public art, from Oiticica to Rirkrit Tirvanija, Chapter Four thus attempts

to determine what we might correspondingly call relational poetry, a heteroglot

literary practice that is fundamentally interactional but also in some ways

participatory, collaborative, ephemeral, precarious and affective. So-called

relational poetry would serve as an extension of O’Hara’s assemblage-poem,

which produces and takes place in what Hannah Arendt calls a “space of

appearance”, a potentially emancipatory interstice of contemporary capitalism

that “comes into being” when humans congregate, correspond and co-create.61

This is also to be read as an extension of the performative poetics addressed in

Peter Middleton’s examination of the poetry reading in Distant Reading:

60 Anna Dezeuze, Thomas Hirschhorn: Deleuze Monument (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), p. 60. 61 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 199.

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Performance, Readership and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (2005). In

my estimation, the poetry reading, by comparison, seems too uni-directional and

belated as an artistic event to capture the collaborative potentialities of the

projects that denote the participatory art of the past three decades. With the

possible exception of Antin’s improvisational ‘talk poems’, mentioned above, the

completed art object in poetry readings is only communicated and at best

enhanced or transformed, as Middleton argues, in a social setting; relational

poetry itself, as I envision it in relation to relational aesthetics, constitutes a social

event.

In this regard, Anna Dezeuze’s study of the “precarious beauty” of Thomas

Hirschhorn’s monuments, incorporating Deleuze’s philosophy of assemblage and

Arendt’s political thought into its vantage point of 1960s and 1990s installation

art, informs my conceptual framework considerably and arms my analysis of

works by Tirvanija and Felix Gonzalez-Lopez in Chapter Four.62 In her monograph

on Hirschhorn’s Deleuze Monument, for instance, she notes how “the affective

dimension of human exchanges, dialogues and misunderstandings seems to have

been as important in Deleuze Monument as the information about the

philosopher”, which was provided in the library unit of the installation, where

visitors could watch videos about Deleuze.63 Thus, Chapter Four expands upon

the observations Dezeuze makes in order to argue that any such aesthetics—

artistic or literary—ultimately involves itself with the galvanisation (or inhibition)

of the potency of the Arendtian “public realm” or “common world” as an arena

62 Dezeuze, Hirschhorn, p. 84. 63 Ibid, p. 44.

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that tangibly provides the means for the “social realm” of relation, of pluralist

coexistence, of meaningful interaction. This operates against (or regarding)

discursive modes of social exclusion, segregation and regulation in conjunction

with individual self-interest and collective indifference engendered by the socio-

economic regimes of the day, whether it be a liberal consumer economy and its

Foucauldian biopolitics or a neoliberal debt economy and what Byung-Chul Han

calls “psychopolitics”.64

In a formal sense, finally, relational poetry is not just poetry about social relations

in the way that, say, Juliana Spahr’s Fuck-You-Aloha-I-Love-You concerns the

contours and conditions of human interrelation; on the contrary, relational poetry

would be the very textual manifestation of a social event. If this seems too vague

a description of a form poetry that is because this form does not, as far as I am

aware, exist. For this reason, the final chapter of this study is at best

investigative, at worse speculative, but fundamentally derived by my conception

of O’Hara’s assemblage-poem as a nascent expression of such a form. This

chapter is, in short, experimental—an epilogue that hopes to bring the potential

of O’Hara’s assemblage-poems to fruition. Without a definitive example of what

I envision to have possibly materialized from O’Hara’s blueprints, my

investigative/speculative criticism in Chapter Four uses participatory art practices

of the 1960s and 1990s as well as Fuck-You-Aloha-I-Love-You as a springboard

from which I can define relational poetry and, in doing so, gives rise to and

64 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 49; ibid, p. 55; ibid, p. 49; Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (London: Verso Books, 2017), p. 36.

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subsequently respond to my own creative attempt at, and critical justification of,

what such a mode of poetry might be.

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CHAPTER ONE O’Hara: “in the seeing / hands of others”? 1.1 Introduction: Approaching O’Hara 1.2 Everyday Art, Everyday Living: Surface and Presence 1.3 A Person in a Poem: Selfhood 1.4 A Person Reading a Poem: Orality and Reception Theory 1.5 A Person Reading a Person: Who is Frank O’Hara, and What Does He Want? 1.6 Poems for People, Poems of People: Coterie and Coexistence

1.1 Introduction: Approaching O’Hara

To a significant extent, all criticism on O’Hara owes a debt to Marjorie Perloff.

This is the case not only because the now-quintessential themes of O’Hara

criticism—the relationship with the avant-garde art of his day, the gestural

technique, the fragmented, protean self, the everydayness, the attention and

immediacy, the daringly open queerness, the anti-symbolist, anti-academic

stance, the sociability and sociality—are present in her book Frank O’Hara: Poet

Among Painters (1977), but because the book inaugurated O’Hara studies itself.

When it was first published, Perloff notes,

O’Hara was a coterie figure—adopted by New York School friends and acolytes, especially by the painters whose work he exhibited and wrote about, but otherwise regarded (when regarded at all) as a charming minor poet.65

The literary landscape into which O’Hara subversively entered was one

dominated by “the New Critical demand for precision and complexity”, by a

65 Perloff, Frank O’Hara, p. xi.

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“demand for the tightly structured lyric, distinguished by its complex network of

symbols, its metaphysical wit, and its adaptation of traditional meters”.66 These

“stupid ideas”, as O’Hara called them in an interview with Edward Lucie-Smith,

constitute “an awful lot of dicta laid down by everybody about what was good

and what was bad without any consideration of what was valuable.” 67 The

primacy of “saying the important utterance” in New Critical thinking, aside from

being “not particularly desirable most of the time”, for O’Hara, in fact indicates

the “dishonesty” of aesthetic “confections”: in ‘Personism’, a mock-manifesto

whose hyperbole intends not to refute its declarations but rather to satirise the

very act of declaring, O’Hara “clarifies” that he “doesn’t believe in god”—i.e. some

transcendent truth smuggled in via symbolism—so he “doesn’t have to make

elaborately sounded structures.” Indeed, “I don’t even like rhythm, assonance,

all that stuff,” he claims disingenuously, again more ridiculing any such claim

than the gist of the claim itself: “You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing

you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout,

‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’”68

For O’Hara, then, “truthful” poetry—poetry of the world as it is experienced—

does not involve the poet “making themselves more elegant, more stupid, more

appealing, more affectionate or more sincere than the words will allow them to

be.”69 As O’Hara claims, the limitation of so-called Projectivist poets—Robert

Creeley and Denise Levertov, for instance, who followed Charles Olson’s “epic

ambitions” to consolidate what could be called a movement—is “making control

66 Ibid, pp. 10-11. 67 Standing Still, p. 12. 68 Ibid, p. 13-14; ‘Personism’, CP, p. 498. 69 Standing Still, p. 14.

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practically the subject matter of the poem. That is your control of the language,

your control of the experience and your control of your thought.”70 In light of this

observation, Perloff set in motion a thrust of O’Hara criticism that considers the

poet’s “aesthetics of attention.”71 As O’Hara says in the Lucie-Smith interview,

this is not, of course, a New Critical attention to poetic construction necessarily,

but rather “to the world of process in which [the artist] finds himself.”72 In

O’Hara’s poetry, attention is a kind of willed alertness constantly (and often

productively) vying with processes of fear, anxiety, anger and desire. In

‘Meditation in an Emergency’ (1957), for instance, the poet is “always looking

away. Or again at something after it has given me up.” 73 He is “restless”, “cannot

keep them [his eyes] still.” In short, he says, “it’s my duty to be attentive, I am

needed by things as the sky must be above the earth.” 74 Accordingly, a

preoccupation with attention—being attentive, attending to the world, to oneself,

to others—requires poetry of “openness, quickening, immediacy”, one that

mimics or approximates lived, conscious experience.75 Of his exuberantly wakeful

surrealist poem ‘Second Avenue’ (1953), O’Hara wrote “I hope the poem to be

the subject, not just about it.”76 The poem, then, is not only the enaction of the

poet’s alert consciousness, but also that to which the reader must direct an alert

consciousness, which is to say: how the poet engages with the world, the reader

must likewise engage with the poem.

70 Standing Still, p. 23; original emphasis. 71 Perloff, p. 1. 72 Ibid, p. 20. 73 ‘Meditations in an Emergency’, CP, p. 197. 74 Ibid, p. 197. 75 Perloff, p. 22. 76 ‘Notes on Second Avenue’, CP, p. 497.

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The phenomenological bent of this conception of how poems come to be,

function, and are read has been the most fertile of critical approaches when it

comes to O’Hara’s poetry, and it is crucial to my reading of the assemblage-poem.

More generally, these central remarks about O’Hara’s poetry form a baseline of

criticism from where two major themes arise—the everydayness of the poetry,

and its employment of painterly (specifically gestural) and collage techniques,

both of which give primacy to surface over depth, and factor considerably into

my own readings. In the case of the former theme, everydayness, O’Hara’s

project first involves an effort to “defamiliarise objects”, in keeping with his

surrealist, cubist and Dada forbears, but also, curiously, “to open our eyes so

that the taken-for-granted features of the quotidian can become legible”, as

Andrew Epstein argues.77 In his recent book Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of

the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (2016), Epstein introduces his

conception of an “everyday-life poetics” with O’Hara’s poem ‘Today’ (1950), “an

exuberant celebration of the mundane, of seemingly ‘unpoetic,’ everyday

objects”.78 The objects that O’Hara includes in his poem—“kangaroos, sequins,

chocolate sodas!”—“do having meaning”, Epstein elaborates, because they

“ironically undermine the heroic, the spectacular, and the monumental”; they

“are with us even in the midst of historical catastrophe and personal tragedy.”79

Here Epstein positions O’Hara directly in relation to his chief precursor William

Carlos Williams, for whom “so much depends” on the “banal” object (the famous

“red wheelbarrow”), and who O’Hara praised for being, of all “the American

77 Perloff, p. 19; Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 278. 78 Ibid, p. 69; ibid, p. 1. 79 Ibid, p. 1-2.

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poets, […] better than the movies.” 80 Indeed, O’Hara consciously extends

Williams’ famous maxim, “no ideas but in things”: to reiterate, O’Hara is “needed

by things”.81

While I support Epstein’s study for writing O’Hara farther into the aesthetic of

everydayness, my instinct is such criticism needs to catch up in considering the

affective quality of such objects in O’Hara’s poetry. To what extent, for instance,

is ‘Today’ not as much about the treasured objects of daily life as about the very

encounter with objects that, for whatever reason, attract us? Attention must now

turn on affect. After all, the poem begins with an ejaculatory ‘Oh!’82 The bodily,

supra-cognitive, supra-linguistic experience of encountering the objects

precedes, perhaps even inspirits, their manifestation in cognitive attention and,

thus, the communicative effort—the poem. “Meaning” to an object is what

strength is to “rocks”: it is the configuration of physical forces that engenders the

material capacities with which it exerts itself in the world and the phenomenal

properties with which it affects. In this way, O’Hara’s finding value in everyday

objects produces of a poetry of affect(ion), of being affected. Such a poetry

functions, then, by virtue of its attempts to indicate to the reader the

idiosyncratic, incommunicable sensations of perception itself. If the assemblage-

poems of The End of the Far West fundamentally oblige this conception of

affective reading, one that hinges on the immediate reading experience and how

the reader’s sense of place is exercised, and if the poems have been ignored for

80 Ibid, p. 1; William Carlos Williams, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ in Selected Poems, ed. Charles Tomlinson (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 57; ‘Personism’, CP, p. 498. 81 William Carlos Williams, ‘Patterson: Book One, The Delineaments of the Giants,’ in Selected Poems, p. 231; ‘Meditations in an Emergency,’ CP, p. 197. 82 ‘Today’, CP, p. 15.

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their ostensible incomparability to O’Hara’s earlier, lionised poems in both quality

and content, then the critical neglect of the former group constitutes a missed

opportunity to engage with O’Hara’s work in its all capacities. In what follows, I

will trace the critical heritage containing these missed opportunities in order to

read the assemblage-poems of The End of the Far West into and often against

it. This will, in turn, elucidate the structures and functions of the assemblage-

poem in preparation for the extended analysis I conduct in the subsequent

chapter.

1.2 Everyday Art, Everyday Living: Surface and Presence In his essay ‘Stepping Out with Frank O’Hara’, from Frank O’Hara Now: New

Essays on the New York Poet (2010), David Herd’s attempt to “track […] how the

poet thinks” comes closer to addressing this affective quality of everyday life.83

Again, William Carlos Williams is employed as a comparative aid, but here

“prosody”—the means by which the object is sensed and perceived—constitutes

the very process from affect to “cognition” in poetry. As Williams observes an

aesthetic experience:

The reason people marvel at works of art and say: How in Christ’s name did he do it? – is that they know nothing of the physiology of the nervous system and have never in their experience witnessed the larger processes of the imagination. It is a step over from the profitless engagements of the arithmetical.84

83 David Herd, ‘Stepping out with Frank O’Hara’ in Frank O’Hara Now (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), p. 70. 84 William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (New York, NY: New Directions, 2011), p. 54

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Herd invokes this observation in order to indicate how the poetic “step”,

approximating the incremental process of cognition, “is the measure of the

passage of a body through time into space.”85 For O’Hara, Herd reminds us,

“measure and other technical apparatus” functions affectively: “As for measure

and other technical apparatus,” O’Hara writes in ‘Personism’, “that’s just common

sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants, you want them to be tight enough

so everyone will want to go to bed with you.”86 For Herd, in light of this, formal

configuration of the poem constitutes not so much a poetics as an erotics of lived

experience.

This is perhaps a step beyond the claims I’m prepared to make, though it tends

in the same direction. For its being formed of conversational snippets, the reader

of ‘At the Bottom…’ initially asks who is talking, and to whom? Williams himself

anticipates this line of questioning in Spring and All: “To whom then am I

addressed?” His answer: “To the imagination.”87 But in presuming himself as the

speaker, William’s answer does not quite apply to ‘At the Bottom…’. Addressing

the imagination for Williams amounts to Celan’s sending out a message in a bottle

in hope of reception: the imagination here serves as a conduit for a presupposed

source, the identifiable poet himself; the bottle bears a sender’s name.

Conversely, since ‘At the Bottom…’ lacks the ostensible lucidity of a lyric address,

of a poet/persona addressing imagination in the hope that the mutable message

is eventually received in whatever form, the process whereby this occurs, and

thus the function of the imagination, are both inverted. I use inverted here

85 Herd, ‘Stepping Out with Frank O’Hara’, p. 77. 86 ‘Personism’, CP, p. 498. 87 Williams, Spring and All, p. 3.

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advisedly: by presenting the absence of poet’s own embodied experience, the

formal configuration of ‘At the Bottom…’ opens a space into which the reader

must imaginatively enter; in order to discover who is talking, and to whom, the

reader must also ask where the talking is taking place. Thus, the

phenomenological scaffolding of the reader’s imagination is activated in the

process of hearing indeterminate conversation. In this way, recalling the fact that

conversation etymologically implies the spatiotemporal space within which it

occurs (from the Latin conversari, “to live, dwell, live with, keep company with”),

the poem functions as an affective conduit to a quasi-concrete and -social

event.88

Accompanying this conception of the everydayness of embodied experience in

O’Hara’s poetry is its surface, anti-symbolic quality. Perloff (again) ascribed

significance to the notion of surface in her early reading of the relation between

O’Hara’s poetics and contemporaneous abstract painting. Citing his annotative

key to ‘Second Avenue’ (1953), in which O’Hara says he wants “to keep the

surface high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious”, Perloff corresponds

O’Hara’s aesthetic with “the terms ‘push’ and ‘pull’ [which] derive from theoretical

discussion of Abstract Expressionism, specifically to Hans Hofmann’s discussion

of the successful relationship of planes in Cubist and abstract art.”89 Perloff

elaborates on this with regards to ‘A Step Away From Them’ (1956), possibly

O’Hara’s first ‘I do this, I do that’ Lunch poem, which functions as both a vivid

portrayal of the poet’s stepping (recall Williams) around New York and an elegy

88 ‘conversation’ from Online Etymology Dictionary, <https://www.etymonline.com/word/conversation>. 89 ‘Notes on Second Avenue’, p. 497; Perloff, p. 22.

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for friends Bunny Lang and John Latouche, and for Jackson Pollock, who are all

ontologically a step away, in death. She writes:

The surface of the painting, and by analogy the surface of the poem, must, then, be regarded as a field upon which the physical energies of the artist can operate, without mediation of metaphor or symbol. […] Rather, their positioning in the poet’s field, their push and pull interaction, function metonymically to create a microcosm of the poet’s New York world.90

Indeed, as Bill Berkson observes, in an interview with Hazel Smith: “A few years

ago I hit on this sort of rule about the New York School. […] Surface is the great

revealer.”91 With this insight, following Perloff, Smith formulates what she calls

the “hyperscape” of O’Hara’s poetry, theorising how the network of

metonymic/synecdochical exchanges in the poetry make them amenable to

intermedial collaboration, “in which verbal and non-verbal semiotic systems

become intertwined in a non-hierarchical relationship.”92 Focusing on the series

of lithographs Larry Rivers and O’Hara made between 1957 and 1959, which

O’Hara considers to be “the only thing I really did collaborate on”, Smith claims

that their “shared subjectivity” allows for the subversion of “hierarchical and fixed

relationships between text and image in which image illustrates text, or text

explains image.”93 Consequently, Smith puts forward the distinctly 1990s cyber-

conscious conclusion that the collaborations constitute a “hypermedia” predicated

on “hypertextual links between the visual and verbal.”94

90 Ibid, p. 23. 91 Hazel Smith, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: Difference/Homosexuality/Topography (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), p. 29. 92 Ibid, pp. 166-67. 93 O’Hara, Standing Still, p. 4; Smith, Hyperscapes, p. 192. 94 Ibid, p. 166; Ibid, p. 193.

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While the notions of surface and the meaning-making process of associative

interactions are as essential to my conception of the assemblage-poem as to

Perloff and Smith’s readings, I agree with Brian Reed when he finds Smith’s thesis

“designedly reductive.” 95 As Reed sees it, “describing intermedial art as

‘hypermedia’” allows “Smith to treat images and texts indiscriminately as nodes

and to lump all forms of association into the category of links.”96 For the concerns

of this study, the persuasive factor in Reed’s position is his adherence to a

“phenomenological model” of “how media function”.97 Citing David Ciccorico’s

survey of so-called “new media theory”, Reed argues that

[a]ctual bodies, as people inhabit and experience them, do not move through a ‘fixed landscape’ mappable with a Cartesian ‘coordinate grid’. Indeed, there exists no unobstructed ‘celestial viewpoint’ that would enable a ‘disembodied’ subject, that is, one ‘wholly detached from what it sees’, to provide an objective cartography of space. Bodies are caught up in, cannot be extricated from, ‘the movement of points in a dynamic field’.98

Reed, as well as I, support Brian Massumi—Deleuze and Guattari’s assiduous

translator—when he maintains that “‘cognitive functions’ including sign-making

and sign-attribution arise from a prior ‘multi-dimensioned, shifting surface of

experience’.”99 Art, on this account, communicates initially “in a pre-rational

manner”, by means of what media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen terns “tacticality”,

a “general term for the interface between self and world” whereby “the viewer

takes in an artwork in many different ways—sensually, emotively,

kinaesthetically, and semiotically.”100 The “philosophical reduction of reality to a

95 Brian Reed, ‘“Footprints of a Wild Ballet”: The Poem-Paintings of Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm’ in Frank O’Hara Now, p. 217. 96 Ibid, p. 217. 97 Ibid, p. 218 98 Ibid, p. 218. 99 Ibid, p. 218. 100 Quoted in ibid, pp. 218-19.

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dealable-with system”, as O’Hara puts it, which Smith seeks to initiate, against

the poet’s wishes, cannot avoid diagnosing a poem like ‘Second Avenue’ with

“‘unreadability’”, but for O’Hara, such an analytical, formalist approach “distorts

life” itself.101 Appreciation of ‘Second Avenue’, for instance, derives not from the

acquisition of “meaning” through the multiple “possibilities of interpretation”, but

in the way a phenomenologically oriented reaction is enticed over an analytically

or cognitively oriented reaction; that is, in the way it provides a phenomenological

space for interaction and “consciously” frustrates exegetical scrutiny.102

In the ‘Notes on Second Avenue’, O’Hara takes an excerpt to exemplify this

stance:

Candidly. The past, the sensations of the past. Now! in cuneiform, of umbrella satrap square-carts with hotdogs and onions of red syrup blended, of sand bejewling the prepuce in tank suits, of Majestic Camera Stores and Schuster’s, of Kenneth in an abandoned storeway on Sunday cutting ever more insinuating lobotomies of a yet-to-be-more-yielding world of ears…103

The passage, indicative of the poem, is both mobilised by and seeks to enact the

very “sensations” of what O’Hara calls “a true description of not being able to

continue this poem and meeting Kenneth Koch for a sandwich while waiting for

the poem to start again.”104 The surface details serve as symbolic decoys in the

experience of urban interaction. Because the world is “yet-to-be-more-yielding”

to artistic use, the poet is satisfied with the events and sensations of “Now!”—

whatever they happen to be—because, simply, they exist. As such, the

101 ‘Notes on Second Avenue’, CP, p. 495; Smith, Hyperscapes, p. 180; ‘Notes on Second Avenue’, CP, p. 495. 102 Smith, Hyperscapes, p. 180; ‘Notes on Second Avenue,’ CP, p. 497. 103 ‘Second Avenue’, CP, p. 146. 104 ‘Notes’, CP, p, 496.

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deconstructive “thoroughness” of Smith’s reading, “whose traditions have

become so reflective,” as O’Hara puts it, has as much substance with this poetry

as “a quill at the bottom of the sea”.105

I agree with Reed in relation to the surface quality of O’Hara’s poetry and its

relation to the enacting of embodied experience, not to meaning in a symbolic

sense. For him, the Poem-Paintings that O’Hara made with Norman Bluhm in

1960 function as “trace[s] of embodied performance” wherein “the whole human

sensorium becomes open for artistic inquiry.”106 At the core of this reading is the

notion of “gesture”, a crucial term in all discussions of Abstract Expressionist

modus operandi—“a point of contact”, “a link between the artist’s hand and the

canvas” that evinces the artificiality of artefact and, in doing so, “assert[s] tactile

space around it”.107 Likewise, gesture has become a perennial term in discussions

about O’Hara’s aesthetic relationship to the art of his day-to-day.108 For Lytle

Shaw (to whom I will return shortly and throughout in a different capacity),

O’Hara saw the “gesturalism” of de Kooning or Pollock as “a kind of camp

spectacle: tortured subjectivity (mostly masculine) inventing and reinventing

itself, through painterly gestures, within a flimsy Hollywood set: ‘Richard Burton

/ waves through de Kooning the / Wild West rides up out of the Pollock’

(‘Favourite Painting at the Metropolitan’ [CP, 423]).”109 By the end of the 1950s,

105 ‘Second Avenue’, CP, p. 139. 106 Reed, p. 224; ibid, p. 228. 107 Ibid, p. 226. 108 Rachel S. Chamberlain Deurden, ‘Dancing in the Imagined Space of Music,’ in Dance Research 25.1 (Summer, 2007), p. 74; Radka Zaforoff Donnell, ‘Space in Abstract Expressionism,’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter, 1964), pp. 240-41; Philip Yenawine, How To Look At Modern Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991), p. 153. 109 Lytle Shaw, ‘Gesture in 1960: Toward Literal Solutions’ in Frank O’Hara Now, p. 31.

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though, as happenings, “Pop Art, Minimalism, Earthworks, Conceptualism” and

“situational” art dawned, O’Hara began to see “Action painting’s gesture” as a

practice worth “debasing”.110 In looking, like Reed, at the O’Hara-Bluhm Poem-

Paintings, Shaw notices a conscious effort, on O’Hara’s part,

to assert the poem’s graphic embodiment as a large-scale gestural even on bar with Bluhm’s swirls and splashes of black and white gouache and ink – the writer’s lyric interior scrawled out in quadruple calligraphic scale against a blotchy Ab-Ex background.111

For Shaw, “this is less an attempt by O’Hara to make his own writing like a

gestural painting than, as in his art writing, a way of concretising and

contextualising gesture, of grounding it in immediate circumstance.”112

If it is presumptuous to surmise from this that Abstract Expressionist gesture was

boring O’Hara at the turn of the decade (though, of course, any shift in attention

is, by his own measure, an indication of boredom, of getting turned off), then it

might be safer to say that O’Hara was keen to keep up creatively and critically

with a shifting scene. For the purposes of this study, then, gesture is not as

central as, say, “presence”, which Perloff (again) identifies in relation to O’Hara’s

praise for the sculpture of David Smith and its “esthetic [sic] of culmination rather

than examination”, as O’Hara reviewed Smith’s work.113 Both the act of gesture

and a sense of presence serve to stress the indexicality of the (creative) act—a

corporeal testament to the poet’s experience of being in the world, which is by

turns heroic and in some sense suffering—but presence particularly articulates a

literalness that bears patent affective qualities. As I will explore in Chapter Two,

110 Ibid, p. 47. 111 Ibid, p. 38. 112 Ibid, p. 38. 113 Standing Still, p. 123.

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the quality of three-dimensional presence, of topological reach, marks a shift

from collage to assemblage practices—a shift that repeats in greater extents from

assemblage onwards. Rona Cran’s recent book, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art,

Literature and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob

Dylan (2014) offers a comprehensive exploration of the employment of collage,

arguing that its “catalytic effect” enabled each of her subjects “to overcome a

potentially destabilising crisis in representation.”114 This book will act as a crucial

springboard for my delineations of the discrepancies between collage and

assemblage, and as such, I won’t delay the present section with what I’ll

undertake later, only to reiterate the shift in critical attention toward works that,

in Cran’s words, turn on “the impression of being in a place.”115

1.3 A Person in a Poem: Selfhood

With the prevalence and significance of collage to twentieth-century art, and with

O’Hara as a poet keenly involved with mid-century collage/assemblage

practitioners from Rauschenberg to Cornell to Joe Brainard, Cran’s book might

seem belated or unnecessary, but this is not the case, and the only other critic

to address the centrality of collage in O’Hara’s work specifically is Nick Selby. In

his essay, ‘Memory Pieces: Collage, Memorial and the Poetics of Intimacy in Joe

Brainard, Jasper Johns and Frank O’Hara’, Selby alights on the presence of

absence in “the space of memory” in “O’Hara’s poetics of collage” and Jasper

Johns’ Memory Piece (Frank O’Hara) (1961-1970), which “consists of a box,

114 Rona Cran, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature and Culture: Joseph Cornall, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan (London: Routledge, 2014), p. i. 115 Cran, Collage, p. 29.

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containing three drawers of sand” and “on the inside lid of the box is a cast of

O’Hara’s left foot, made in rubber from an impression of his foot in the sand” of

the top drawer.”116 For Selby, this piece is central to what he calls “an aesthetics

of intimacy” where “touch and bodiliness depends on the physical absence of

O’Hara’s actual body.”117 Much like gesture, which palpably attests to the person

responsible for it, “the impression of O’Hara’s foot in the sand (and by extension

the very act of memory and the art of memorial) depends upon a substitution of

the poet’s actual body by that which it is not, the artwork itself.”118 The crucial

difference between the graphic gesture and sculptural presence (albeit of an

absence) is the employment and exposure of “feelingness.” 119 As Selby

demonstrates, the “collage technique” of ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ (notice how

the title serves as a thematic nexus) enables O’Hara to execute “a disruption of

notions of individual identity.”120

As might be already apparent, critical consideration of presence invariably gives

way to contemplation on selfhood and identity. In Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays

on the New York Poet, selected and edited by Robert Hampson and Will

Montgomery, a section of four essays live under the heading “Selves”.121 One

phrase in particular—“the scene of my selves, the occasion of these ruses”, from

‘In Memory of My Feelings’ (1956)—has served for many critics as a kind of

thematic hat stand upon which they have hung their readings. Naturally Perloff

116 Nick Selby, ‘Memory Pieces: Collage, Memorial and the Poetics of Intimacy in Joe Brainrd, Jasper Johns and Frank O’Hara’ in Frank O’Hara Now, p. 242. 117 Ibid, pp. 242-243. 118 Ibid, p. 243. 119 Ibid, p. 240. 120 Ibid, p. 232. 121 ‘Contents’, Frank O’Hara Now, p. v.

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led the pack in determining that the “central theme” of this poem is “the

fragmentation and reintegration of the inner self.”122 Since then, few readings

have eschewed O’Hara’s “fragmented, dispersed subjectivity”, his “fragmented

self”, his “splintered self-hoods”, his “protean self”, his “multiple experience of

selfhood”, or his “poetic self-elaboration”.123 This study won’t buck the trend

altogether—but will conform for reasons different to those quoted above. I

address selfhood in O’Hara’s poetry in order to reverse focus from the poet to

the reader whose immersive encounter with the assemblage casts them in a role

that hybridises eavesdropper and interlocutor. In such a position, the boundary

between self and other dissolves—a dissolution that serves as the ground of

ethics.

But the ethics at work in the poems of The End of the Far West do not hinge on

grounding the idea that persons are universally worthy of moral regard like in

O’Hara’s earlier poetry, as Oren Izenberg persuasively argues in Being Numerous:

Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (2011), a position and set of readings that

I unpack later in this chapter and that will recur throughout this study.124 In other

words, the poems do not predominantly concern themselves with an ethics of

selfhood, with what constitutes and makes valuable a person, but rather with an

ethics of community and relationality, though of course these categories are

interdependent. For Izenberg, poetry is, generally speaking, concerned with

122 CP, p. 252; Perloff, p. 141. 123 Smith, p. 13; Caleb Crain, ‘Frank O’Hara’s “Fired” Self’ in American Literary History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), p. 290; Cran, p. 39; Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 93; Todd Tietchen, ‘Frank O’Hara and the Poetics of the Digital’ in Criticism, Col. 56, No. 1 (Winter, 2014), p. 48. 124 Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground for Social Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 37.

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negotiating the act of determining the bounds of sense with the act of grounding

a value of human experience that lacks bounds, a negotiation between making

the world distinct and making personhood in the world universal. And yet, O’Hara

is, in his own words, “mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it”.125

Not only does this attention to perceptive particularity problematise what

Izenberg sees as the effort to communicate the all-inclusive commonality

required for the notion of universal personhood, but the poems in The End of the

Far West forfeit this particularity altogether in replacing the lyric persona, the

perceptive site, with a subjective vacancy that the reader, through auditory

immersion, occupies. The function of the assemblage-poem aims not to construct

a self whose perceptive capacities and contouring of sense serves to mobilise the

terms by which we may comprehend a person or a particular person’s experience,

but rather to engender a means, through a heteroglossia, through a dialogic

encounter, whereby the reader experiences social relationality itself, which, in

turn, makes conceivable an ethics of shared, relational difference (in apposition

with the inalienable sovereignty of the individual) and the mechanisms of

community.

1.4 A Person Reading a Poem: Orality and Reception Theory In their fairly recent studies on post-war Anglo-American poetry, both Peter

Middleton and David Bergman take the event of reading poetry publicly as their

focus, and in a sense, both theses, as Hannah Lavery notes in a review of the

125 ‘Statement for The New American Poetry’, CP, p. 500.

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former’s book, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in

Contemporary Poetry (2005), “can be usefully seen as development[s] in the area

of reception theory.”126 Bergman’s The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts

of Postwar American Poetry (2015), for instance, is a “book involved in the

pragmatic reading of poems, which for him means the examination of what the

poem is doing to the reader, to the author, to its subject, to the page.”127

Similarly, Middleton’s development of the notion that “[p]oems have to be

realized, rendered, performed, or as we ordinarily say, read, for their meaning to

be produced” consists in the assertion that certain

poems produce their meanings across networks of readers, performance, intertexts, and visual presentation, meanings that are not usually locatable in the singular solitary encounter between one printed manifestation of the text and one sensitive reader.128

Central to both studies, whether it is what Bergman finds “disturbing” in certain

poems or whereby “poetry fulfils more of its potentialities” for Middleton, is

orality—the performative function of poetry.129 In the context of the stultification

of the New Critical conception of the poem as a textual object, a verbal icon, and

the resultant attendance to the poem as an aural-oral event in post-1940s

American poetry and scholarship, Bergman notes the emergence of a poetry that,

owing to its emphasis on oral performance, firstly eschews accentuations of “the

poet’s interiority” in favour of “a feeling of communitas”, secondly allows for a

heightened legibility of class, race, ethnicity and the performativity of identity,

126 Hannah Lavery, ‘Reviewed Work(s): Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry by Peter Middleton’ in Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 59, No.2 (2005), p. 142. 127 David Bergman, The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Postwar American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. x 128 Ibid, pp. xi-xii 129 Ibid, p. xi; Peter Middleton, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), p. 59.

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and finally celebrates “copia”, the force of articulated copiousness.130 In fact

Bergman cites O’Hara’s ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ (1956) to illustrate the “additive

property of copia”: even with the accumulation of “pages” and “words” about the

colour “orange”, “There should be / much more.”131 The discomfort of copius

orality, for Bergman, is its “fecundity”, its campy, promiscuous excess, its

susceptibility “to error, to discrepancy.”132 The shift toward poetry as a copious

aural-oral event is bound up with 1) an incentive for the experience of a social

relation that is intrinsic “live communication” and 2) the increased availability and

employment of recording technologies to preserve poetry performances, which

no doubt, in turn, encouraged a practice of poetry amenable to performance.133

Hence my use of the Dictaphone metaphor at the outset of the previous chapter:

to the reader, ‘At the Bottom…’ appears less scriptural, and than oral; its status

as an “expression”, in Shelley’s sense, is predicated on a spoken, not textual,

performance.134

From similar considerations on the oral quality of poems, Middleton explores the

poetry reading itself, arguing that, aside from “its importance for financing and

fostering [poets’] careers”, the poem’s “meaning is extended, complicated, and

sometimes transformed by performance.”135 In particular, sound

provides a resource for poets to extend the semantic range of their poems. It can add another level of conceptual complexity by creating complex networks of association via sound and iconicity, a layering of even fainter echoes and distant meanings. It can also open into the sense through

130 Bergman, p. 56; ibid, p. 58. 131 CP, p. 261; Bergman, p. 60. 132 Ibid, p. 62. 133 Bergman, p. 66. 134 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Selected Poems and Prose, eds. Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy (London: Penguin Classics, 2016), p. 655 135 Middleton, p, 25; ibid, p. 28.

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the material experience of sound waves themselves and the bodily knowledge of their production.136

The performance affords the individual poem the opening of a new line of sight

by which we may understand the function of poetry itself. “Instead of thinking of

the poem as something that moves around being variously interpreted, read

aloud, published in different forms, and generally provoking distinct

interpretations,” Middleton writes, “we might better think of it all as a large

heteroclite entity that mixes texts, people, performances, memories, and other

possible affines in a process that engages many people”.137 What fundamentally

concerns both Middleton and Bergman, then, is the interplay of oral/performed

and textual/disembodied voice in public and private readings. For Middleton, the

performed voice can extend or alter the possibilities immanent in encountering

the textual voice alone. For Bergman, the very discrepancy between the voice

that speaks and the voice that reads, the interchanging of speaker and

interlocutor in both reading scenarios, is what makes reading poetry disturbing.

In this sense, ‘At the Bottom…’ is a profoundly disturbing poem. Could this

account for the disregard of it and its bedfellows, the other poems in The End of

the Far West? Is the disturbing factor the blatant absence of the ostensibly

136 Ibid, p. 58. 137 Middleton, p. 102. While my impending analysis of ‘At the Bottom…’ is informed by the notion that, as Middleton remarks, recalling Maurice Blanchot (as indeed I myself will), the “field of interaction, of intersubjectivity, in which the performance occurs, is the work, not some meaning or assertion the uttered text might contain”, neither this kind of poem or the poetry reading, with its “drama of authorship”, produces work that is “relational”. I mean this precisely in the way that, say, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 1990 installation pad thai (Figure 1), in which the artist converted a gallery into a kitchen where he served visitors the titular dish, or in the way that Thomas Hirschhorn’s Deleuze Monument (Figure 2), constructed with the assistance, maintenance and material provided by the community that accommodated it, are both “relational” (28; 39). The search for, and postulation of, a practice of poetry that is correspondingly relational—i.e. heteroglot, participatory, interactive, co-created, and requires maintenance—constitutes the fourth chapter of this thesis.

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identifiable presence of O’Hara himself, the absence of his distinctive voice?

Countless commentators and critics have indeed emphasised this quality in

considering his poetry. When reading his poems, Hampson and Montgomery

comment, we might “find in the work an unfriendly O’Hara, a bored O’Hara, a

melancholic O’Hara, a politicized O’Hara—perhaps even a disturbingly sober

O’Hara”.138 Indeed, the sense that O’Hara inhabits the core of the poem, as if the

words emanated directly from him to the reader, as if on the phone to a friend,

is the basis of John Cage’s mesostic elegy:

hurtFully Rolls

footmArk reduciNg

negative feedbacK

kOlomna hart’s tongue

Ho chi minh huelvA

francieRs eusbio frAncisco kino139

The vital presence of poet in the poem is, indeed, a quality O’Hara himself valued.

The formalism of a New Critical lens, O’Hara observed, overlooked the extent to

which formal notions of “measure”—as already mentioned in relation to

Williams—in fact comes “from the breath of the person just as a stroke of paint

comes from the wrist and hand and arm and shoulder and all that of that

painter.” 140 Accordingly, he continues, echoing Olson’s Projective Verse

manifesto and Ginsburg’s meditative methodology, both extensions of Williams’s

principles, “the point is really more to establish one’s own measure and breath in

138 Robert Hampson & Will Montgomery, ‘Introduction’ in Frank O’Hara Now, p. 3. 139 John Cage, ‘2 Mesostics’, Homage to Frank O’Hara (Bolinas, CA: Big Sky, 1988), p. 182. 140 Standing Still, p. 17.

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poetry […] rather than fitting your ideas into an established order, syllabically

and phonetically and so on.”141 Language respires through the poem like the air

the poet uses to speak; the poet breathes through the poem; the poem breathes

the poet’s voice; the poem and the poet interdependently inspire. In poetry,

O’Hara’s writes in ‘A Quiet Poem’ (>1950), “the heart breathes to music”.142

Similarly, the aesthetic dimension of corporal experience converges with the

bodily dimension of aesthetic acts: the poet’s “very life”, O’Hara states in ‘River’

(1953), “became the inhalation of its weedy ponderings.”143

But The End of the Far West stands apart from this convention. Take ‘The Bird

Cage Theatre’, the seventh poem:

What did she give you for your

birthday? I’ve given up smoking.

You know she has to reject them twice a month.

How extraordinary. Is this what you’re looking for?

He’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

I’m a bung-hole bandit, baby.

A wandering man is too old for almost everybody.

What do we care if we’re rich or poor?

Ain’t it the truth, taste like an expensive spread but it’s important.

Marriage! It’s something They slipped over on us while we were in the trenches.

You can’t have much of a revolution on three dollars.

141 Ibid, p. 17. 142 CP, p. 20. 143 CP, p. 123.

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I quote the poem in full not to analyse it, but to showcase its formal machinery.

Indeed, its use for my argument here is not based on the thematic concerns,

whatever they may be (this is certainly one of the most abstruse, erratic poems

in The End of the Far West). Rather, I am only concerned in this instant with how

the reader interacts with the text and the function of orality in this interaction.

The poem can serve, then, as a point of reference for my claims that, in the

assemblage-poem, the poet is, at best, a phantom; the poet’s body, their agent

of perception, is absent; the poet functions more like the anonymous architect of

an experience the reader has in their place. In this poem, without the poet

persona as a kind of experiential surrogate in the textual space, the reader hears

the voices of others (heteroglossia) and thus, for their orality, intuits the presence

of other bodies. In doing so, the reader may feel themselves present within the

space these voices occupy—a pub, a café, a park? In any case, finally, it is not

the poet’s body and experience that is aestheticized in the poem; it is the reader’s

in the very act of reading it.

1.5 A Person Reading a Person: Who is Frank O’Hara, and What Does He Want? For Caleb Crain, “O’Hara was aggressively present in his poems”144. The poet

“undercuts the authority of aggression” he experiences “under a regime of

homophobia” by “trivialising it and by redirecting it at himself”, which causes a

“fragmented self.”145 And yet, his fierceness, “the forthrightness of his anger”,

144 Crain, ‘“Fired” Self’, p. 287. 145 Ibid, p. 289.

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his violence, which “runs through O’Hara’s work like a spring river under thin ice”,

serves for Crain as a “tool” for “self-making.”146 The process involves, as Crain

all too neatly identifies, “what the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott called the

transitional object”—a “soft but sturdy object that they fiercely own” which is

“essential to a child’s developing sense of reality, an important step on the path

from the infant’s indulged fantasy of omnipotence to the adult’s resigned

acceptance of an object world beyond his control.”147 As Crain is willing to accept,

“Winnicott’s development theory may seem out of place in the grown-up world

of critical theory”, but I think the impropriety of using Winnicott’s terminology

consists, not only in its incongruity or even its procrustean application, but also

in the invocation of the homophobic gay-man-as-psychologically-undeveloped

trope. O’Hara’s self, integrated “through free-moving and disorganised play”

around “false selves in the process of rupture”, is nevertheless “infant”: “Like a

child playing with her dolls,” Crain writes, “O’Hara while writing a poem gains

access to his inner life” but “sometimes O’Hara acts like a child who is afraid to

play with his toys for fear he will break them.”148 Overseeing O’Hara’s play is a

“person” who “must stand as a goal toward which the poem points, giving vitality

to O’Hara’s interaction with the poem” allowing him, in ‘Personal Poem’ (1959),

to bob “along on a buoyant gush of detail.” 149 Without this supervisory

presence—indeed, without the lens of Winnicott’s object-relations psychology,

apparently—which leads O’Hara to discover and reveal “[t]he happiness that

surfaces at the close of the poem”, “[a]n outsider might not ‘get’ the story behind

this glib, chatty, undirected monologue”, or that it is in fact a love poem:

146 Ibid, p. 290; ibid, p. 289; ibid, p. 292 ibid, p. 293; ibid, p. 294. 147 Ibid, p. 293. 148 Ibid, p. 300; ibid, p. 303; ibid, p. 301. 149 Ibid, p. 301.

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I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go back to work happy at the thought possibly so150

Perloff does better, I think, in noting how “[t]his reading smooths [sic] out the

poem’s tensions, missing the force of the poignantly tentative ‘possibly so’ of the

last line.”151 For her,

[t]o suggest that O’Hara’s ‘laundry list’ is made meaningful only by the oblique reference to the poet’s putative lover in the final lines is, I think, to posit closure where O’Hara explicitly denies its possibility. ‘Personal Poem’ doesn’t make a point; it presents what it feels like, at a fairly bad time, to go to lunch with a friend (who is not a lover), and, in the face of a persistent sense of anxiety, to draw on one’s basic reserve of humour and optimism.152

As with ‘Today’, with its exclamatory list of cherished objects, O’Hara is concerned

with the affective dimension of interfacing with the world, not with presenting

lines between which one must read. Indeed, as Oren Izenberg has more recently

remarked, “[t]he most common critical response to a poem like this one” is “the

effort to recuperate its seeming triviality of choices by finding evidence of

O’Hara’s ability to inflect a catalogue with consequence”.153

For Izenberg, though, both Crain and Perloff are guilty of this tendency. Instead

of “finding ‘terror’ in this poem” as justification to “praise O’Hara for his alertness

to the concerns of identity politics”, as Perloff does, or “to give O’Hara’s

judgements a provenance, in the hopes that telling the story of how they came

about might reveal them to be more than merely arbitrary”, as Crain does, the

150 Ibid, p. 301; CP, p. 336. 151 Perloff, p. xv. 152 Perloff, pp. xvi-xviii; emphasis in original. 153 Izenberg, p. 122.

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“poem” for Izenberg “seems to revolve around the statement of preference or

value judgements” in “mildly affective terms.”154 If this seems to lapse into the

depreciation levelled by “O’Hara’s early detractors”, emphasising the frivolity of

the poetry as something that resists literary critical solutions, it is because it does,

partly. 155 Since the criteria by which we may explain the ostensibly trivial

preferences “made in the poem are withheld by the poem”, and since “the

preferences in ‘Personal Poem’ are not actually presented as personal preferences

at all, but rather as collective preferences—not as statements of what ‘I like’ but

of what ‘we like’—” the “dogged” attempts to “decode the meaning of the poet’s

preferences” seems “potentially misguided (or at least oversimplified) from the

outset.”156 The point I take Perloff and Izenberg to share is one with which I

agree: using the preferences recounted in an O’Hara poem to posit a view of

O’Hara himself, or conversely, using biographical details of O’Hara and his coterie

to explain the preferences recounted in the poem, equally misses the more basic

point of what it means to value anything at all and how values are formed

intersubjectively or, in some way, collectively.

Indeed, Izenberg reckons the failure to read O’Hara’s personal self successfully

into his poems against the failure to consider the interdependent enmeshment of

this self within what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “literary field”—“‘a space of

possibilities’” in which “aesthetic positions (formalism, realism, ‘engaged art,’ or

‘art-for-art’s-sake’) that correlate with social locations (the academy, the fireside,

or ‘bohemia’) and, through various complex mediates, with economic

154 Crain, p. 300; Izenberg, p. 123. 155 Perloff, p. xv. 156 Izenberg, p. 124.

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interests.”157 On this account, ‘Personal Poem’ is personal—that is, concerning

attachment, fondness, not as a synonym for private or idiosyncratic—because

the poet’s “singular determination to act without reflecting upon anything”

reveals “the field that determines him” and, indeed, his actions, which is to say,

his (literary) preferences. 158 The problem with this interpretation, Izenberg

claims, is that the principle of personal judgement or valuation that O’Hara brings

to bear applies to everything, literary or otherwise. O’Hara’s literary preferences,

indicative of “the positions available in the literary field” in which he participates,

work in kind to the preferences of non-literary objects. Izenberg considers the

lines:

a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible disease but we don’t give her one we don’t like terrible diseases, then we go eat some fish and some ale it’s cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling

“For what O’Hara displays in his totalizations of liking and disliking and in his

conflation of different categories of liked and disliked things”, Izenberg argues,

“is his refusal to allow the field to ‘refract,’ or even to remain a field.”159 What

makes ‘Personal Poem’ personal, then, “is not the correlation of literary

preferences, which is premised on making decisions in a literary way, but rather

the act of having preferences of whatever kind.”160 In the way that Deleuze and

Guattari theorise difference by degree rather than in kind (a notion I explain and

use in Chapter Three), O’Hara’s poetry hopes, as Izenberg sees it, to ensure that

“the various things that one values—whether they are literary critics, authors of

literary works, literary works themselves, or even terrible diseases—are valued in

157 Ibid, p. 125. 158 Ibid, p. 125. 159 Ibid, p. 128 160 Ibid, p. 128.

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the same way.”161 In Izenberg’s estimation, what this means for the formation of

a literary field, or a coterie, for O’Hara, is not the project of establishing and

preserving “a place where everyone who is the same values the same things but

where everyone is the same insofar as they have made the commitment to find

value.”162 Returning to the poem itself, to its final line and O’Hara’s hope that

“one person out of the 8,000,000” people in Manhattan “is thinking of him”,

Izenberg affirms O’Hara’s use of poetry “as a medium in which persons, things,

or actions can appear” and that “his capacity to make choices and for choosing

actions are evidence that he is also susceptible to being perceived and chosen.”163

In doing so, his poems enact the very valuing process from which kinship is

formed. Question: What is “even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún,

Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne”?164 Answer: ‘Having a Coke with You.’

1.6 Poems for People, Poems of People: Coterie and Coexistence

The recent decade or so has seen an upswing in critical attention to the fraught

relation between selfhood and close-quarters sociality in O’Hara’s poetry,

especially in the context of “a Cold War culture obsessed with conformity, and a

counterculture obsessed with both alternative communities and a nonconformist

ethic” during what Andrew Epstein calls the “tranquilized fifties”. In his 2006

book, Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry, Epstein aims

to debunk the “O’Hara myth” that he is “a poet of ‘sociability’ whose work simply

161 Ibid, p. 129. 162 Ibid, p. 133. 163 Ibid, p. 137. 164 CP, p. 360; emphasis added.

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‘celebrates’ his friends and his coterie”.165 He does this by emphasising the extent

to which “O’Hara’s work”, indebted to Emersonian pragmatic individualism,

“contains a philosophically complex, deeply ambivalent, and much darker

conception of friendship that is shadowed by what he sees as its destructive

impact on personal autonomy”—an idea to which I will return in Chapter Three.166

Roel van den Oever has tackled the same “dichotomous tension between

selfhood and friendship” by focusing the relationship “between Allen Ginsberg

and Frank O’Hara” and the often “oppositional” mechanisms of “similarity and

disparity” in constructions of the self and aesthetics.167 But by far the most

sustained and elaborate effort to consider O’Hara in this regard has been made

by Lytle Shaw, whose 2006 book Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie proposes

a “model of coterie” by which the “social possibilities of affinity”, as well as

“O’Hara’s often-celebrated lyrical self”, are made “legible.”168 As “a figure, an

idea, a mode of thinking, rather than a binding imperative governing our relation

to a real historical context”, coterie registers a “meta-communal concern” for the

relation between “forms of sociality, of social linkage” and “the performative

power of canonisation.” 169 The fundamental literary device for a poetics of

coterie, its basic unit, is the proper name, but, far from acting “as secure markers

of property and identity”, names in O’Hara’s poems possess a “phantom

immanence”—he “cast[s] them as fluid and overdetermined cultural signs whose

165 Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies, p. 89. 166 Ibid, p. 89. 167 Roel van den Oever, ‘“A common ear / for our deep gossip”: Selfhood and Friendship in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara’ in Amerikastudien/American Studies, Vol. 53, No. 4 (2008), p. 522. 168 Shaw, p. 235. 169 Ibid, p. 29.

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coding and overcoding provide a way to imagine experimental kinship structures,

both social and literary.”170

Shaw and I are equally concerned with social organization, social and literary

endurance, and the instructive and copulative roles that literature and art play

therein; as such, my own reading in this regard is more expansive than

combative; the process by which exclusive, coded coterie formulations serve

notions of extensive, inclusive coexistence is indeed a concern of this study. For

it is not O’Hara, the poet persona, who refers to the names contained within the

poems of The End of the Far West; in these poems, this persona is not the

organizing principle of an empirical, literary or conjured coterie, and coterie is not

the means with which sociality is engaged. When Shaw suggests that “coterie

could be used to recode kinship structures”, the model of sociality invoked here

involves some rubric of circumscribed commonality: O’Hara “recodes alliances by

replacing the organic and fixed social model of the family with a contingent and

shifting association of friends”—friendship and similarity, not difference, is the

foundation.171 In raising this point of divergence I am not attempting to reject

Shaw’s reading per se. Of course I agree that coterie-formation serves O’Hara in

assembling networks of kinship alternative to the heteronormative family.172 But

such a framework does not so easily apply to the poems of The End of the Far

West. The order of sociality and forms of social relation operative in these poems

existentially precedes that upon which friendship is grounded. This order, I claim,

170 Ibid, p. 233; ibid, p. 19. 171 Ibid, p. 29. 172 Indeed, we can read much of O’Hara’s poetry as contributing to a process of social cartography, of mapping and engendering queer space and the codes of queer navigation. By adopting and employing “models of coterie”, queer art can thus provide a queer parental source.

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pertains to modes of coexistence, and the literary devices integral to a

corresponding poetics of coexistence—as opposed to the intimate, if mediatory,

use of proper names—are the metonymic, synecdochic, asyndetic, and

associative interrelations between excerpts of conversation, what Bakhtin calls

“living utterance[s]”.173 More generally, the poems of The End of the Far West

function through the incorporation of social heteroglossia so that a “diversity of

voices” allows “the concrete social context of discourse”—that is, the America of

Cold War exceptionalism, jingoism and consumerism—“to be exposed.”174

Scholarship similarly intending to historicize O’Hara as a Cold War poet has

typically done so by correlating a theme or concern of his poetry with a

deleterious facet of Cold War culture. In Michael Davidson’s Guys Like Us: Citing

Masculinity in Cold War Poetics, O’Hara makes “cameo appearances” throughout

as “a kind of docent on 1950s culture”, a formative “allegory of late-twentieth-

century America”, whose “ironizing of an important historical event” like Nikita

Krushchev’s state visit to the U.S. in September 1959, in ‘Poem (Krushchev is

coming on the right day!)’, “provides an alternative register—insouciant, queer,

celebratory—to contrast the instrumentalized voices” of Cold War discourse.175

Davidson’s focus is on “the intersection of cold war geopolitical issues and

gender”, and specifically marginal, alternative “poetic communities organized

around masculinity”.176 Similarly, Anne Hartman addresses the radical potential

of O’Hara’s confessional poetic mode in a time of “increased repression to

173 Bakhtin, p. 276. 174 Bakhtin, p. 300. 175 Michael Davidson, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 24; ibid, p. 70. 176 Ibid, p. 21; ibid, p. 18.

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homosexuals, who were considered analogous to communists”, enemies of the

state.177 For Hartman, “it is Cold War politics and queer identity that present

themselves as key contexts for situating confession in the late fifties and early

sixties” and the “political debate around the sanctity of the private sphere.” While

“privacy” in these debates “is not a sphere of autonomy and freedom for

everyone, since it is frequently elite and patriarchal” and involves “increased

repression to homosexuals, who were considered analogous to communists”,

O’Hara’s poems “problematize the form of confession and its claims to reveal an

authentic interior subject.”178 In “insisting that a poem happens between people,

their confessional poems simultaneously address and construct an intimate,

particular community.”179

In both cases, O’Hara’s “cold war poetics” revolve around “creating community”

against concerted efforts in contemporaneous discourse to regulate the kinds of

communities formed.180 Like Shaw, the systems of social relation that Davidson

and Hartman read in O’Hara exceed alliances formed by virtue of intimate

commonality only in the invocation of potentially antipathetic cultural others like

Krushchev as “sign[s] around whom the quotidian is constructed.”181 In my

readings of the poems of The End of the Far West, however, these systems

operate peripherally; the poems seem more concerned with the less comforting,

precarious relations against which communities of close-knit commonality are

built. While I similarly want to challenge the notion that, as Davidson points out,

177 Anne Hartman, ‘Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg’ in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer, 2005), p. 47. 178 Ibid, p. 47. 179 Ibid, p. 53. 180 Davidson, Guys Like Us, p. 227. 181 Ibid, p. 67.

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“O’Hara is the last poet one might associate with cold war subjects”, my intention

is to draw attention to O’Hara’s shift in focus from the personal-as-political as a

response to regulatory, repressive Cold War culture to the political per se. In

other words, the poems of The End of the Far West enact and engage with that

which politics involves—the processes by which social and cultural interaction

itself becomes possible in conditions of increased social and cultural

turbulence.182 This shift in focus performs the conceptual shift between coterie

formation to questions of coexistence. Before turning to this shift, however,

which I do in Chapter Three, it is necessary to explore the formal shift

undergirding it—that is, the transition from collage to assemblage practices,

which constitutes a crucial dimension in the genesis of the assemblage-poem,

and thus, its proper mode of function.

182 Ibid, p. 66.

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CHAPTER TWO Assemblage: Insider Art 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Affective Immersion 2.3 Collage and Assemblage: Shifts and Slippages 2.4 Bricolage: Interacting with the World 2.1 Introduction

Historically and aesthetically, the assemblage-poem produced by O’Hara in The

End of the Far West denotes a form and method of usually plastic composition

that bridges the gap between the juxtapositional, confrontational, graphic, two-

dimensional, presentational (from “mettre une chose en présent à quelqu'un / to

put a thing in presence of a person”) plane of modernist collage—i.e. Picasso’s

cubist, Marinetti’s futurist, and Höch’s Dadaist collages—and the performance art

of late-1950s Environment-Happenings. For Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh,

assemblage “does what the futurists wished to do and the abstract-expressionists

talked of doing: they forced people to enter the work of art, sit, walk around, live

in it.”183 In the commonplace but very often felicitous vein of situating O’Hara’s

poetry with corresponding contemporaneous plastic art—felicitous not least

because O’Hara himself continually made and in fact found inspiration in such

comparisons—the assemblage-poems of The End of the Far West have a

counterpart in Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines (1954-1964), part-painting,

183 Quoted in Lawrence D. Steefel Jr., ‘Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesch, College, Personalities, Concepts, Techniques’ in Art Journal, Vol. 22, No. 3 (1963), p. 213.

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part-sculpture bricolage assemblages. Take Charlene (1954) (Figure 5). This

huge piece of wooden boards, variously covered in painted collaged newspaper

and fabric, a painted shirt, a painted umbrella, contains within it a mirror by which

the viewer can see themselves and an opening by which they can see the wall

behind the work, the walls of the space containing both viewer and work. To

repurpose O’Hara’s own words from one of the earliest reviews of the wall-hung

works leading up to the free-standing Combines, Charlene provide “a means by

which you, as well as he, can get ‘in’” them.184

But if the paintings seem to O’Hara “practically room-size”, the fully relieved

sculptural Combines, like Minutiae (1954) (Figure 6), would seem practically

room-like for their upstanding off the exhibition wall and thus mapping three-

184 Frank O’Hara, Art News, Vol. 53, No. 9 (January 1955), p. 47.

Fig. 5: Robert Rauschenberg, Charlene, 1954; combine: oil, charcoal, paper, fabric, wood, plastic, mirror, and metal on four Homasote panels, mounted on wood with electric light, 89 x 112 x 3 ½ in. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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dimensionally the space containing and constructed by them.185 The title for

Rauschenberg’s most recognisable Combine, Monogram (1955-59)—a

taxidermied Angora goat, bought by Rauschenberg from a New York flea market,

with its face slapped with paint, stood on a wooden board covered in a collage

of newspaper prints, a tennis ball, a shoe heel, with a tyre around the goat’s

torso—indicates its particular mode of operation. The term itself denotes an

instance whereby disparate signs are interwoven to create a heterogeneous

(neither seamless or totalised, nor utterly fragmentary) whole—an assemblage

inviting bodily, inhabiting, topological, not merely visual (i.e. topographical)

interaction. Examining the relations and formal slippages between assemblage

185 Ibid, p. 47.

Fig. 6: Robert Rauschenberg, Minutiae, 1954; combine: oil, paper, fabric, newspaper, wood, metal, and plastic with mirror on braided wire on wood structure, 84 ½ x 81 x 30 ½ in. Private collection. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

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and collage in this way will shed light on the inner workings of the lesser-

celebrated form, assemblage, and in doing so, O’Hara’s assemblage-poems. This

chapter uses the formal delineation of assemblage against collage in the works

of Rauschenberg and Hélio Oiticica primarily to posit a particular feature of the

former, which constitutes the central concern in the subsequent chapter: that is,

its affective diagramming of the social condition from which its interacting

components have been gleaned, which produces an immersive portal into that

very social condition, thus providing openings for critique.

2.2 Affective Immersion

In 1968, when assemblage had been, to quote Anna Dezeuze, “superseded […]

by new terms such as environment, performance, and Conceptual art, and this

moment in the history of twentieth century art remains to this day largely eclipsed

by these subsequent movements”, Jack Burnham considered the emergence of

a “systems aesthetics”, that which marked a “transition from an object-oriented

culture to a systems-oriented culture”—a culture oriented on “a complex of

components in interaction”.186 Though upstaged, the assemblage form practiced

by Rauschenberg a decade earlier designates the conceptual and methodological

ignition for a kind of art predicated on heterogeneous networked entities

asserting their three-dimensional materiality in a space affectively coextensive

with the viewer: a kind of art predicated on a dissolution—or, paradoxically, an

affective engorgement—of the distance separating the work and the viewer. This

186 Anna Dezeuze, ‘Assemblage, Bricolage, and the Practice of Everyday Life’ in Art Journal, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), p. 31; Jack Burnham, ‘Systems Aesthetics’ in Open Systems: Rethinking Art, exh. cat., ed. Donna de Salvo (London: Tate Modern, 2005), pp. 165-166.

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simultaneous disintegration and dilation constitutes the construction of a

mutually inclusive aesthetic space where the viewer is among the space

designated to the work and the work is among the space designated to the

viewer. Began in the very same year as the poems for The End of the Far West

were finished, 1964, Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés took this mode to its logical

conclusion. The “multi-coloured capes, flags, banners and tents made from layers

of painted fabric, plastics, mats, screens, ropes and other materials” were

“designed to be worn or carried while dancing to the rhythm of samba”, and were

thus “literally inhabitable”: here the viewer is also a participant, in the artist’s

own words—a “participator”.187

187 Tate Modern, ‘Room 9’ in Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour, exh. guide. from <http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/helio-oiticica/helio-oiticica-exhibition-guide/helio-oiticica-5>; Hélio Oiticica, “Notes on the Parangolé”, in Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat. (Rio je Janeiro: Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, 1997), p. 93.

Fig. 7: Hélio Oiticica, Parangolé p15 Cape 11 – Incorporo a revolta (I embody revolt), 1967; leather, plastic, cotton fabric, straw matting, 90 x 60 x 10cm, worn by Nildo of Mangueira. © and courtesy César and Claudio Oiticica. Photograph: Claudio Oiticica.

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On the same aesthetic continuum, the assemblage-poem operates via the

virtually/mentally inhabitable (from Latin habitare/to dwell in), affective,

immersive, interactive space of the intersubjective environment produced and

constructed by the auditory bricolage of disparate but interdependent enunciated

speech. 188 With speech, the emphasis on audition in the process of

engagement—which is to say, the mobilising of a mode of spatial perception by

physiological means—serves to immerse the reader in the imaginative space

configured by and immanent in the poem’s constitutive elements. This process

of situating the reader within the space of phenomenological attention, not just

in sight of it (a rearticulation of the distinction between soundscape and

landscape), functions in opposition to the kind of engagement occasioned by

graphic collage, which establishes a solid, analytical distance between the reader

and the dynamic surface of the work itself, employing only visual perception and

the tactility thereby conveyed.

While sound itself is intrinsically aspatial, sound sources and audition are

intrinsically spatial.189 When heard, even imaginatively through reading, speech

communicates spatial content. Vision retains spatial directness and acuity, but

that which, along with three-dimensional tangibility, makes sculpture an

immersive, assimilative perceptual experience, audition, in the reading of speech,

produces a similar perceptive experience by phenomenologically locating the

188 ‘present’ definition from <http://www.diclib.com/present/show/en/coed/51696#.WRWo6RPyuYU>. 189 Matthew Nudds & Casey O’Callaghan, ‘Introduction’ in Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays, ed. Matthew Nudds & Casey O’Callahgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 9-11.

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reader within the environment containing that which is being heard—that is,

within earshot—even if this perceptual encounter occurs through imagination.

Though auditory perception lacks spatial directness and thus requires imaginative

support from the reader/listener, the aesthetic experience of reading speech is

more affective for its being more manifestly ‘inbetween’ bodily sensation and

conscious knowing. Similarly, what visual perception affords in spatial acuity—

information about the particulars of a space—the engagement of auditory

perception, like smell, achieves in affective awareness, an experience of what it

is like to be in an environment. As interlocutor, not beholder, the reader’s

experience itself is aestheticized. Contrary, then, to Simon O’Sullivan’s notion that

the aesthetic realm is in some way “apart” from being in the world, the

assemblage-poem represents an art that evinces an aesthetic constituent

undergirding embodied experience and the bodily experience of encountering the

aesthetic.190

Michel de Certeau’s conception of textual processes and reading relates well to

this function of the assemblage-poem, and can help elucidate it. As indicated in

the previous chapters, central to the assemblage-poem is “the act of speaking”,

or more precisely, “enunciation”, which, in de Certeau’s words, “establishes a

present relative to a time and place; and it posits a contract with the other (the

interlocutor) in a network of places and relations.” 191 With the reader qua

interlocutor, immersed in overheard conversation, the separation of self and

other begins to dissolve, as does the separation of the virtual place of the text

190 Simon O’Sullivan, ‘The Aesthetics of Affect’ in Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 28 (2001), p. 125. 191 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 2011), p. xiii.

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and the actual place of the reader into voicescape: “conversation”, de Certeau

claims, “is a provisional and collective effect of competence in the art of

manipulating ‘commonplaces’ and the inevitability of events in such a way as to

make them ‘habitable’.”192 This is because speech enunciates a moment in a

place; it “cannot be parted from its circumstances.”193 In this way, the speech

act functions as a sensory conduit to its occasion; it articulates a material-

temporal moment that is organised spatially in the reader’s sensory immersion in

the textual record of that speech, in the “auditory space” of the text.194 The

surface of the text, a notion central to the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionists,

Pop Artists, and the painters and poets of the New York School alike, functions

not merely as the plane of dynamically juxtaposed elements, as in the collage

canvas, but as a stage, a city pavement, the walls of a pub, a government

building, against or within which an affective space of intersubjectivity and thus

ethical possibility emerges. The assemblage-poem, in short, becomes “a stage

for voices” in much the same way that a sculptural assemblage by Rauschenberg

succeeds, in O’Hara’s own words, in “creating its own occasions as a stage

does.”195

In ‘Should We Legalize Abortion’, the sixth poem in the set, the reader silently

participates in a fruitless debate on the titular subject. In ‘The Bird Cage Theatre’,

the seventh poem, the reader silently participates in a conversation on the sexual

politics of personal value and wealth paralleled by the transactions and

obligations of “Marriage!” In ‘The Jade Madonna’, the tenth poem: a discussion

192 Ibid, p. xxii. 193 Ibid, p. 20. 194 Ibid, p. 162. 195 de Certeau, 162: O’Hara, Art News, p. 47.

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on the merits of possession over assets, of funds over property. In each, the

reader is present, and thus privy, to an enunciated exchange that comments on

and discloses a contemporaneous social condition or issue through the dynamic

interaction of the assembled parts of the exchange. Both assemblage-poems and

plastic assemblage, in de Certeau’s terms, constitute an art “characterised more

by a way of exercising” (the structure of the conversation, or the arrangement of

objects, respectively) “than by the thing it indicates” (the subject of the

conversation, or the objects themselves, respectively). In other words (still de

Certeau’s), both plastic assemblage and assemblage-poem constitutes an art that

“produces effects, not objects.”196 This is precisely the shift away from the

graphic materiality of collage toward the immersive interactive spaces generated

by assemblage—a sociological shift in methodology that incorporates the

reader/viewer in the production of meaning and the legibility of critique.

2.3 Collage and Assemblage: Shifts and Slippages

In a press release for the 1961 MoMA exhibition, The Art of Assemblage, curated

by William C. Seitz, an assistant curator working alongside O’Hara, the author

describes plastic assemblage as a “more inclusive term than the familiar

‘collage’”.197 On one hand, this is accurate: assemblages, such as the Combines,

can, for instance, include collage, which is, after all, the structural basis of their

shared aesthetic genus. But on the other hand, that term “inclusive” fails to

196 de Certeau, p. 79. 197 William Seitz, ‘Press Release’ from <https://www.moma.org/d/c/press_releases/W1siZiIsIjMyNjI1MiJdXQ.pdf?sha=298d53c50a974027>.

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indicate the distinct effects of assemblage in contrast to collage. There is an

excellent wealth of work on the history of collage and its significance as a method

and technique, and there is not enough space in this study to engage fully with

it; my concern is rather with how assemblage specifically has—or, for that matter,

has not—been conceived and documented amidst and in parallel with collage in

order to demonstrate its unique properties and thus particularise it against its

received conception as an umbrella term. This will consequently allow me to

properly delineate the assemblage-poem even more specifically.

For Seitz, the origins of assemblage lie in the emphasis on “the arrangement of

ordinary objects” which can be traced “from ancient times to those of the Dutch

still-life painters, Chardin, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Harnett, Cézanne, and

Picasso”.198 Integral here is the “activity” of the “placement, juxtaposition, and

removal of objects within the space immediately accessible to the exploration of

the eye”.199 With focus on process and visual perception, so far so collage. The

distinction, however, is what kind of object is arranged. For Picasso, a heightened

sense of “texture” is that which upsets previous efforts toward “the compression

of form and space toward two-dimensionality” and, as Jochen Schulte-Sasse

comments in Theory of the Avant-Garde, to “reintegrate themselves and their art

into life”.200 Looking at the collages of Picasso and Schwitters, working almost a

decade apart, we can see what Apollinaire—one of the central “accumulators of

avant-garde ideas”, to borrow Steiz’s appellation—calls “the poetry of our

198 William C. Seitz, The Art of the Assemblage (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1961), p. 14. 199 Ibid, p. 14. 200 Rona Cran, Collage, p. 7; Seitz, p. 15; Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xxxvi.

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epoch.” 201 Picasso’s Guitar (1913), for instance, epitomises the papier collé

technique: blue paper is layered with brown, gold, white wallpaper, and

newspaper print. Likewise, Schwitters’ Merz Picture 32A (1921) comprises

scavenged fragments of paper, newspaper clippings, and sweet wrappers.202

With both examples, the works incorporate samples of the artists’ everyday lives,

which serves to both document their personal historical moment—one

distinguished by bourgeois capitalism (‘Merz’ signifies the rupture of “Kommerz”,

meaning commerce), alongside the radically increased proliferation of print media

and mechanical reproduction—and to formally embody the experience of life after

World War I. In Schwitters’ words, “Everything had broken down in any case and

new things had to be made out of the fragments.”203 Thus, as a response to what

Max Ernst called a “culture of systematic displacement and its effects”, the early

collages of cubism and Dadaism attempt to embody the artist’s experience of

alienation and dislocation. 204 Hence Francoise Gilot recalling that Picasso’s

inclusion of newsprint was “never used literally but as an element displaced from

its habitual meaning into another meaning to produce a shock between the usual

definition at the point of departure and its new definition at the point of

arrival.”205

The collage fragment, then, serves as a testament to a violent dispersal. For

being primarily two-dimensional, the import of these scraps is internal: the

201 Quoted in Seitz, p. 16. 202 For Schwitter’s, incidentally, the term “Merz” was synonymous with collage and derived from a fragment of an advertisement for the Hanover Kommerz und Privatbank that was used in an early collage. 203 Quoted in Seitz, p. 57; Leah Dickerman, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (Landover, Maryland: The National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 159. 204 Quoted in Cran, p. 22. 205 Quoted in ibid, p. 15.

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viewer’s attention is drawn beyond the art to the artist’s activity and the “absent

origin” of the collage’s fractured parts.206 Lawrence Steefel, in his review of Seiz’s

introduction to The Art of Assemblage exhibition, makes a similar claim about

assemblage: “The transmutation of assemblage from brute physicality into an

intuitive psychological field does not obliterate the harsh reality of the mutilated,

eroded, and fragmented things from the ‘collage environment’ with which one

begins.”207 The distinction, however, is in the dimensionality of the fragments.

When Seitz says an “assemblage occupies real space”, he is not simply recalling

Picasso’s want of “texture”, but rather identifying a moment of full relief, a

definite shift from painting, whose space and form is “physically false” and which

operates on the level, frontal plane of a window—indeed like collage—to

sculpture, whose space and form operates topographically, allowing for parallax,

and is “physically real”.208 The “wave of assemblage” Steiz considers in 1961

“marks a change from a subjective, fluidly abstract art toward a revised

association with environment.”209

From here, then, a further distinction can be made, one that forms the crux of

how assemblage functions: with the space and form of the art in full relief, the

viewer is not only confronted with fragments of the artist’s life, but rather finds

themselves included in the life of the art itself, incorporated “into the fabric and

structure of the work”.210 After the ‘Merz’ collages, for instance, Schwitters

206 Rosalind Krauss, ‘In the Name of Picasso’ October, Vol. 16 (1981), p. 20. 207 Lawrence Steefel Jr., ‘Reviewed Works: The Art of Assemblage by William C. Seitz; College: Personalities, Concepts, Techniques by Harriet Janis, Rude Blesch’ in Art Journal, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Spring, 1963), p. 212. 208 Seitz, p. 30. 209 Seitz, p 94. 210 Seitz, p. 94.

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created Merzbau (1920-43) (Fig. 8), “literally a living installation, occupied by

Schwitters, his wife, and his children” which transfigures eight rooms of his

Hannover house into grottoed cubist assemblages, thus exemplifying what Erika

Sunderburg terms the “mutation of object into environment” and literalising what

O’Hara called the room-like quality of Rauschenberg’s Combines.211 Here, and

with assemblage in general, the aesthetic and the everyday—the art and the non-

art—realms converge in an affective encounter. The spectator inhabits the space

of the work; the spectator is of the same material order as the work, feeling

materially akin (or, rather, metaphysically continuous, as my exploration of

Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in the next chapter will illustrate). Indeed, in

211 Erika Sunderburg, Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 11.

Fig. 8: Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1933; paper, cardboard, plaster, glass, mirrors, metal, wood, stone, various painted material, electric lighting, approx. 393 x 580 x460cm; view of the work in 1933. Courtesy of bpk and Sprengler Museum, Hannover. Photograph: Wilhelm Redemann.

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a 1961 review of David Smith for Art News, O’Hara expresses this very

convergence when he says that the sculptures “didn’t make me feel I wanted to

have one, they made me feel I wanted to be one.”212

Rona Cran, in her recent book, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature and

Culture, cites Steitz’s introduction to the exhibition to describe the act of collage

and how such a praxis may itself be useful to an artist or writer’s creative

intention. For the subjects of Cran’s study—Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs,

Bob Dylan, and O’Hara—collage serves as a technical solution, a “creative

catalyst, employed cathartically, aggressively, and experimentally”, which

“enabled each [subject] to overcome a potentially destabilising crisis in

representation.”213 For O’Hara specifically, she argues (and rightly, I think) that

collage “was primarily a conceptual method for ensuring that his poetry was

experienced rather than interpreted, by his readers.”214 Indeed, it is not my

intention to challenge Cran on her insightful discussion on collage. Rather, I want

to exploit the conceptual slippage between collage and assemblage already

indicated and used in Cran’s discussion as a springboard for properly conceiving

the latter category in allowing an understanding of the poems of The End of the

Far West—none of which appear in Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature,

and Culture, despite their quintessential collaged form—precisely because these

poems do not serve O’Hara’s supposed “larger poetic exploration of the nature

of self-definition” and his perennially discussed “splintered self-hoods”.215 As

indicated in the previous chapter, the central self of O’Hara’s “most-anthologised

212 Standing Still, p. 125; emphasis added. 213 Cran, p. i. 214 Ibid, p. 39. 215 Idid, p. 39.

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works” is absent in ‘At the Bottom…’ and the set of poems of which it is

representative. When O’Hara frantically asks, in ‘October 25 1952 10:30 O’Clock’

(1952, of course), “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” this fixation

on O’Hara’s selfhood and the fragmented substantiation of his “selves” leads

readers to find a possible answer in another October day eight years later, in the

Lunch poem ‘How to Get There’ (1960): “where are you?” the speaker asks once

again, but managing this time to reply, “here I am on the sidewalk.” To the

contrary, the poems of The End of the Far West are inconvenient for this critical

position(ing), and without the prospect of locating and thus studying the poet’s

presence, the question is directed toward to the reader: where are you?

This shift in perspective in fact corresponds to the primary shift from collage to

assemblage. In her discussion on O’Hara, Cran stresses the “strongly

autobiographical” thrust of his work and as such explores “the role collage played

in the dialogue between materiality and self-definition in O’Hara’s poetry.”216 As

I have claimed, however, while both collage and assemblage begin with

materiality, the “dialogue” materiality has within each medium is distinct. In

assemblage, it is not so much self-definition as it is affect: rather than enable

self-definition or reveal the artist’s self, like the collage conceived by Cran,

assemblage enables the (re)construction of, and thus makes possible, an

affective occasion between the work itself and the viewer or reader.

Cran is right, for instance, when she argues that O’Hara “define[s] himself in

relation to his environment”, that “the collation of [‘comparisons, resemblances,

216 Cran, p. 10.

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rather than identities’] produces a real yet endlessly protean identity, wherein

lies artistic freedom.” 217 In the same way that “the ‘several likenesses’ of

[O’Hara’s] transparent self are presumably designed to protect it from the fixity

of a singular identity”, as Mutlu Konuk Blasing observes, quoting the great verbal

collage ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ (1956), this, for Cran, “operates

anagrammatically, in that the fixity of a singular identity is equally designed to

protect the self from fragmentation beyond function”.218 Thus, she concludes,

“the self can remain free but rooted nonetheless, choosing where and when to

manifest itself, invisible but present”.219 This indeterminacy of the self relates to

the “absent origin” notion of collage and how collage “originates in a cut”,

implying but simultaneously precluding access to a whole from which a fragment

had been picked. But what is not accounted for in Cran’s discussion is how collage

functions in such a way that “O’Hara[‘s poetry] invites the reader to share his

world of flânerie”.220 With “share” suggesting the provision of a coextensive

experience of an occasion, it does not seem to follow that the “verbal collages”

Cran considered—wherein the filter between what the poem depicts and the

poem itself is coloured thoroughly by O’Hara’s compelling perspective—manifest

anything besides “the scene of [O’Hara’s] selves”.221 What the reader experiences

in O’Hara’s “verbal collage”—which is the engine and subject of these poems—is

his experience, or at least the experience of his various selves.222 The occasion

that his self regards, and to which it relates, is effectively enclosed from the

217 Ibid, p. 156. 218 Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrilll (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 57; Cran, p. 156. 219 Ibid, p. 158. 220 Ibid, p. 158. 221 ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, CP, p. 252. 222 Cran, p. 20.

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reader within O’Hara’s frame of mind. With ‘At the Bottom…’, however, and the

other poems of The End of the Far West set, each functioning as an assemblage

and not a collage as thus conceived, the engine and subject of the poem is the

very encounter produced by the reader’s encountering of it.

While it is true that, as Cran puts it, “the collage turn brought about the

dissolution of perceived impediments between art and life, demanding the

viewer, reader, or listener increasingly play their own role in the landscape of a

work of art of literature”, the limit of such a role vis-à-vis collage is the given

forecondition of the necessary role vis-à-vis assemblage.223 If “collage is about

encounters” of, presumably, the artist’s “ideas” or her shifting selves, withdrawn

from the viewer or reader in the ways outlined above, then assemblage is about

encounters manifest in and dependent on the encounters with its audience; if

the act of decoding [collage] subsequently required from the viewer or reader constitutes an intellectual and emotional challenge whose rules of engagement necessitate not necessarily the discovery of any specific message, but, rather, the gradual discernment that each artwork, novel, poem, or song is uniquely and subjectively regulated by the viewers or readers themselves

with the viewer or reader nevertheless at a critical remove, the decoding or

encoding of assemblages constitutes the incorporation of the reader and viewer

into the affective occasions immanent and produced by the porous matrix of its

components.224 If a context reveals the significant content of collage—if, “in order

to understand the language of collage, the viewer must also understand the

223 Ibid, p. 10. 224 Ibid, p. 32.

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context in which, and indeed out of which, it has been created”—then

assemblage reveals the significant content of a context.225

For Cran, collagists, like assemblers, use “physical fragments of their quotidian

experience, such as newspaper articles and ticket stubs, to dismantle the time-

honoured conception that a painting is a mere porthole through [which] reality

might be viewed”, but assemblers, employing methods similar to collage for

distinct effects, arrange material fragments to engender a network whose

permeability includes an affective porthole through which the meaningful content

of an occasion can be intuited and experienced.226 While collage attempts, in

Françoise Gilot’s words, quoted by Cran, to “‘become’ reality, rather than merely

recording it”, assemblage attempts to manifest reality affectively.227 With respect

to O’Hara, Cran posits that

O’Hara’s satisfaction with collage relates partly to its potential for expressing ‘the relation between the surface and the meaning’ (CP [Collected Poems], 497), a particular facet of his early poetry which he felt was important, writing in his ‘Notes on “Second Avenue”’ that ‘the one is the other (you have to use words) and I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it’ (CP, 497).

The later poems, of The End of the Far West, however, problematize this notion,

since the poem here is indeed the subject, but the subject is not necessarily the

poem—the poem simultaneously becomes something else, a sensory conduit to

an occasion and, supralinguistically, the occasion itself. When O’Hara talks about

making poems that are “high and dry, not wet, reflective”, it is not, as Andrea

Brady maintains, in ‘Distraction and Absorption on Second Avenue’, because of

225 Ibid, p. 32. 226 Ibid, p. 5. 227 Ibid, p. 7.

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an “anxiety to avoid interpretation”—this misses the point.228 The meaning of the

material that constitutes an O’Hara poem, as made clear in reading his later

works, is not primarily understood through interpretation at all, but rather

through the affective presence of that material in the reading experience. To

return to ‘Today’: “kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas” all “do have meaning”,

not because they symbolise, but because they exist and insist, in the poem and

in life, “strong as rocks.” It is like asking what a city means—this misses the point.

Not being able to interpret material—or determining that material lacks meaning

in any metaphorical sense—does not mean we cannot experience it meaningfully.

2.4 Bricolage: Interacting with the World

If the objects of the everyday are integral to assemblage, then so is bricolage.

This incorporation of material scavenged and repurposed from non-art spheres

of social life, whether debris or members of the public, constitutes the common

principle of successive European and American art practices termed by Allen

Karpow as “new concrete art”, whose inception and apotheosis spanned the

Combines and Joseph Cornell’s boxes in the mid-1950s to the Conceptual art of

the late-1960s. 229 Bricolage extends the Abstract Expressionist tenet John

Ashbery observes in O’Hara’s poetry—namely, “the poem as the chronicle of the

creative act that produces it”—while seceding, as Dezeuze notes, from the

“autonomy of Abstract Expressionist” painting and its comprising of the heroically

228 Andrea Brady, ‘Distraction and Absorption on Second Avenue’ in Frank O’Hara Now, p. 59. 229 Allan Kaprow, ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’ in Essays on the Blurring on Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 9

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individualised creative self.230 Predicated on bricolage, the assemblage “effected

a temporialisation of the object that articulated new forms of late capitalist

subjectivity”—that is, the consumer subjectivity “defined through an increasingly

articulated cycle of acquisition and disposal of objects.” 231 As such, the

assemblage operates ambivalently: firstly, for its ostensible privileging of the act

of gathering and assembling (concerning plurality, disorder, chance,

heterogeneity) over the finished product (as total, whole, autonomous),

maintaining nevertheless a preoccupation with the already-finished product in

the repurposing of the commodity as an object that is convenient, suitable, useful

and valuable for a primarily aesthetic function; and secondly (indeed,

consequently), for its testimony to an act of both production and consumption.

The amateurish act of bricolage and the construction of the assemblage,

exemplified in the Combines, contains the dynamic vacillation between these two

modes. Gold Standard (1964) (Fig. 9), for instance, comprises a folding Japanese

screen, painted gold, affixed with a clock, Coca-Cola bottles, leather boots, a tie,

a black and yellow traffic sign, to which a ceramic dog is tied by its collar and sits

on a bicycle seat and a wire-mesh base. The cultural and economic hegemony

America experienced after WWII, epitomised by the 1944 specification of Bretton

Woods Agreement that “currencies were pegged to the price of gold, and the

U.S. dollar was seen as a reserve currency linked to the price of gold”, is exhibited

here by interrelated significations of that which contributed to this hegemony,

especially with regards to commercialism, scavenged from everyday life.232 In the

230 John Ashbery, ‘Introduction’ in CP, p. viii; Dezeuze, ‘Assemblage’, p. 31. 231 Ibid, p. 32. 232 ‘Breton Woods Agreement’ on <http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brettonwoodsagreement.asp>.

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context of the haemorrhaging of resources precipitated by America’s Vietnam

enterprise, Gold Standard becomes a satirical social critique. Crucially, the

assemblage was created live onstage during a visit to Tokyo: in this performance,

both modes of production and consumption are activated, not just by

Rauschenberg’s creation, but by the inclusion of an audience, who consume the

assemblage as it is being made and contribute to its production as constitutive

components of the occasion of its production.

Take Niki de Saint Phalle’s performance-assemblage Khrushchev et Kennedy. In

1963, during the perilous climax of the Cold War, while O’Hara was writing The

End of the Far West, Khrushchev et Kennedy was enacted by firing a gun in front

of a live audience at bags of paint hung from a white canvas upon which

Fig. 9: Robert Rauschenberg creating Gold Standard during ‘Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg’ at Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo, November 29, 1964. Courtesy of Sogetsu Foundation Archives, Tokyo. Photograph: Masaaki Sekiya.

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sculptures of the warring presidents of America and Russia are themselves

assembled in a two-headed hermaphrodite form holding toy guns. Here bricolage

is employed to construct a stage upon which her action and the spectators’

experience of that action collude to form a passionate, violent critique of the

international hostility of the time. The act is thus invested with and critically

reflects the social sphere of its emergence. Forward again to 1964 and Oiticica

begins work on his Parangolés. With the “participators” wearing the assemblages

and often dancing in large groups to samba, the Parangolés simultaneously

reflect and produce an affective experience of the social implications intrinsic to

their etymological origin as “a slang term from Rio de Janeiro that refers to a

range of events including idleness, a sudden agitation, and unexpected situation,

or a dance party”. 233 The performance-assemblage is created—produced,

mobilised—precisely when the receiver—the viewer, spectator, participant—

inhabit it.

This literalises what the assemblage-poem achieves virtually. The wearing of one

of the Parangolés operates continuously with the hearing of speech in ‘At the

Bottom…’ and the other poems of The End of the Far West: both serve to

affectively incorporate the participant (in this case, the reader) into the social

occasion that is at once the source of the artwork, the subject of the artwork,

and the artwork itself. Just as Rauschenberg, Saint Phalle and Oiticica left the

self-reflective, self-investigative interiority of the studio and into the streets of

their social milieu, unbolting their art from the wall and placing it in the affective

233 Anna Dezeuze, ‘Tactile Dematerialisation, Sensory Politics: Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés’ in Art Journal, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), p. 58.

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space of its audience, O’Hara uses (apparently) scavenged remains of a social

occasion to make his poem. As a consequence, the reader is affectively

incorporated into this social occasion through virtually embodied speech

experienced as a heterogeneous chorus.234 What Cran, in relation to O’Hara’s

verbal collages, calls his “democracy of vision and his notion of ‘life held

precariously in the seeing / hands of others’ (CP, 245)” can be reformulated much

less pithily in relation to the assemblage-poem as a democracy of experience

predicated on a notion of social life heard variously in the affective ears of others

coextensively integrated and interrelated though respectfully heterogeneous.235

Through bricolage, plastic assemblage incorporates everyday social and cultural

experience into its process and thus its affects; the very form of assemblage

encompasses the heterogeneous social, cultural and economic forces of its origin,

composition and the immediate interactive experience it necessarily occasions.

The process of encompassing the viewer within the aesthetic parameters of the

work produces a means by which the viewer, acting as the mobilising agent in

interactive machinery of the assemblage, co-creates it; indeed, the art is itself

this interaction, and as such, it is social, containing insights into the socio-

economic condition it reflects and to which it responds. Besides a formal and

methodological correspondence between plastic and assemblage-poem, then, a

socio-economic bearing is similarly shared: by gathering social “remainders of

modernity”, to borrow again from Dezeuze, and thus producing a virtual

aestheticized occasion of encounters from often fraught socio-economic

234 I say virtually, and not partially, because the latter term seems to preclude access to a reality deferred and the former term nevertheless implies or transmits reality in its virtuality. 235 Cran, p. 181.

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circumstance, bricolage, in its resultant assemblage form, serves as “the

privileged site for the exploration of wider issues of materiality, commodification,

and consumerism in capitalist—and increasingly globalised—societies.”236 While

Dezeuze is right to highlight the crucial economic implications of assemblage, as

I have correspondingly done, she leaves rooms from an examination of the socio-

political via affect (i.e. the incorporative mechanisms by which aesthetic

encounters with materiality are experienced physically and in relation to others).

In fact, Dezeuze concludes her 2008 essay on assemblage, bricolage and

everyday life precisely where, in the next chapter, I set out—namely, the

“resistance” that is situated “in an accumulated mass of collective activities rather

than in individual agency”, a model of sociality that I have been calling

coexistence.237 In this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate in art historical terms

the formal mechanisms underpinning the sociological bearing on coexistence in

both plastic and assemblage-poem. As such, an extensive examination of

coexistence in the assemblage-poem of The End of the Far West is that to which

I now turn.

236 Dezeuze, ‘Assemblage’, p. 35. 237 Ibid, p. 37.

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CHAPTER THREE Coexistence in The End of the Far West 3.1 Introduction: The Plateau of Coexistence 3.2 The Continuity of Assemblages

3.2.1 “Being speaks with ‘one voice’”: Kerouac’s Idealism, O’Hara’s Continuous Materialism

3.3 Kennedy’s United States: a “vast assemblage” 3.3.1 Territorialisation 3.3.1 Deterritorialisation

3.4 The Frontier Story 3.5 The Gulch 3.6 From Coterie to Coexistence 3.7 Pragmatic Ethics 3.8 “My red friends / will pass among you”: Bearing Each Other’s Difference 3.1 Introduction: The Plateau of Coexistence If we accept now that the assemblage-poem functions by virtue of a network of

heterogeneous parts shifting in metonymic, synecdochical and asyndetic

interactions, and of the temporally material nature of those parts as speech, then

a poem of the kind constituting The End of the Far West functions in stark

contrast to “models of coterie” Lytle Shaw posits in relation to O’Hara, which

hinge on coded bonds of differentiated concordance and the exclusive, territorial,

contained social interactions between friends and comrades. For Shaw, the

poetry is “bound up with O’Hara’s concern with small collectives, circles, or, in

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the pejorative sense, coteries”, which, in their manifestation in the poetry through

the use of proper names, “helped [O’Hara] to explore alternative models of

kinship, both social and literary.”238 On this account, “social linkage” operates

under the rubric of “affinity”, of similarity.239 The assemblage-poem, meanwhile,

expresses the converse. Rather than seeking the “possibilities of affinity”, the

assemblage exercises a poetics of coexistence and its systems of integrated,

negotiated difference.240 For The End of the Far West specifically, these poems

simultaneously respond to and make affectively available a social context shaped

by discourses and ideologies of the preceding decade—namely, containment, and

American exceptionalism and idealism—that intrinsically oppose relations of

difference. 241 By affectively positioning the reader as interlocutor in what

Theodore R. Schatzki terms “the social site”—that is, “the site specific to human

coexistence: the context, or wider expanse of phenomena, in as part of which

humans coexist”—the assemblage-poem both approximates and reflects this site,

wherein “lives hang together”, and thus engages with “coexistence” as “relations

that link entities in arrangements”.242 By immersing oneself (or, rather, being

immersed in) the assemblage-poem, and mobilising the interaction of its

component speech acts precisely in the encountering of them, the reader affects

an emergence of the assemblage-poem’s immanent properties.

238 Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), p. 6. 239 Ibid, p. 11; ibid, p. 50. 240 Ibid, p. 6. 241 Ibid, p. 234. 242 Theodore Schatski, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (State College, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p. 147; ibid, p. 149.

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For its being made up of conversational fragments (social encounters), what

emerges from the poems are the social functions of subjectivity and the

necessary condition of the social as “that class of events which occurs during co-

presence and by virtue of co-presence”, to cite Erving Goffman’s landmark

sociological research in the “face-to-face interaction”, published, perhaps not

incidentally, in 1964.243 Likewise, in his self-styled “neo-assemblage theory”, an

expansion of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “a wide variety of wholes

constructed from heterogeneous parts”, Manel DeLanda also cites Goffman in his

similar conception of conversations as “ephemeral assemblages” in which “the

main material component is co-presence: human bodies correctly assembled in

space, close enough to hear each other and physically oriented towards one

another.” 244 The assemblage is what constitutes DeLanda’s “realist” social

ontology, positing that “entities ranging from atoms and molecules to biological

species and ecosystems may be usefully treated as assemblages and therefore

as entities that are products of historical processes.” 245 For DeLanda, the

assemblage concept reveals “the synthesis of the properties of a whole not

reducible to its parts” and “the reason why the properties of a whole cannot be

reduced to those of its parts is that they are the result not of an aggregation of

the components’ own properties but of the actual exercise of their capacities” in

their very interaction.246 Co-presence is only the foundational condition of the

assemblage; the mobilisation of the capacities of the assemblage arises from the

interaction of that which is primarily co-present.

243 Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-To-Face Behavior (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2005), p. 1. 244 DeLanda, p. 3; ibid, pp. 53-54. 245 Ibid, p. 1; ibid, p. 3. 246 Ibid, p. 4; ibid, p. 4.

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In the interfacing of the modes of address and the images of The End of the Far

West, an immanent critique of a social condition emerges for the reader. Analysis

of the poem, then, is based on the mechanisms of interaction it enacts. This is

what Hazel Smith observes in O’Hara poetry as “the breakdown of metaphorical

cohesion result[ing] in the release of huge metonymic/synecdochical network of

associations.”247 The internal interactions of the poem’s distinct parts, its distinct

speech acts, gives rise to the emergence of its immanent properties. These

properties are intrinsically social, and thus, framed by the political, but they

manifest by means of processes comprehensible through an interpretive

framework that comprises metaphysical, aesthetic, sociological and ethical

lenses, which I will now demonstrate in roughly that order.

3.2 The Continuity of Assemblages

The conceptual foundation of this analysis is what Brent Adkins terms Deleuze

and Guattari’s metaphysics of “‘continuity’”. 248 This is explained initially in

contrast to “the dominant trend in Western metaphysics”—“discontinuity”—“most

clearly seen in the work of Plato, who is at great pains to show the

incommensurable distance between virtue and virtuous acts, between beauty and

beautiful things, between the good and particular goods”, between, in other

247 Hazel Smith, Hyperscapes, p. 95. 248 Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p 1. Since Adkins’ book is predominantly illustrative, guided by an interpretation that is far more lucid than its subject and with which I happen to agree, and because the scope of this study would not accommodate a particularized reading of A Thousand Plateaus by me, I will most often employ his explanations in favor of the dauntingly dense original text, which would involve getting bogged down in a quagmire of explication.

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words, “different orders of being.”249 For Deleuze and Guattari, conversely, in

keeping with the Spinozan notion of continuity between mode and substance,

the discontinuity between “the sensible and the intelligible”, between “content

and form”, as a kind of “homomorphism”, identifies a unaccountable ontological

gap, an insoluble “issue of relation” predicated on a “doctrine of analogy or

resemblance.”250 To illustrate, Adkins considers a statue, which one might claim

to be beautiful. In the framework of discontinuity, “the statue is not beautiful in

the same way that beauty is beautiful”—that is, “as a sensible object it cannot in

principle be identical to the intelligible form of beauty, so must be in some

respects not beautiful.”251 Whereas the discontinuity of the sensible and the

intelligible “entails both affirmation and negation”, the “continuity of the sensible

and the intelligible instead entails the univocity of being.”252 Thus Adkins posits

a kind of “hylozoism”—“a term coined by Ralph Cudworth in his The True

Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) to describe any position that held that

matter is alive”—because it “avoids anchoring life in a transcendent principle [an

essentialism dependent on an groundless analogy between form and content]

and instead seeks purely immanent principles” conceiving entities in a constant

state of becoming.253 This is the metaphysics supporting the ontological relation

O’Hara intuits when he wants to become a David Smith sculpture. The difference

between O’Hara and the sculpture is comprehensible, arousing and meaningful

precisely in the moment wherein their being appears to him as continuous.

249 Ibid, p. 1. 250 Ibid, p. 2 251 Ibid, p. 2. 252 Ibid, p. 2. 253 Ibid, p. 2.

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Adkin’s explication of this radical re-conception of Being is, while impressively

deft, still far too vastly complex for this study to accommodate comprehensively,

but three general claims are integral to understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s

metaphysics, DeLanda’s theory of social complexity and, consequently, my theory

of the assemblage-poem:

1) “Being is said everywhere in the same way. Being speaks

with ‘one voice.’”254

2) Assemblages are “a response to the paradox of the thing

as possessing in some respect both status and change.”255

3) “Affects are becomings.”256

I will take the first claim separately in a kind of case study, then fold the second

and third claim into a properly historicised discussion on the poems of The End

of the Far West.

3.2.1 “Being speaks with ‘one voice’”: Jack Kerouac’s Idealism, O’Hara’s Continuous Materialism

This first claim constitutes the necessary metaphysical point of departure from

essences and the realms of universality, the transcendental and the intelligible

(verses the sensible), towards questions “of becoming about which essence is

not seen as the ground” but the temporary result of a continuous process.”257

For instance, rather than asking what a thing is, in essence, we might ask: “what

are the forces which take hold of a given thing?”258 In Deleuze’s early work, this

254 Ibid, p. 2 255 Ibid, p. 13. 256 Giles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 256. 257 Adkins, p. 4. 258 Ibid, p. 4.

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shift is exemplified in the differentiation between Euclidean mathematics, which

“deals with the properties of static geometrical figures” and Archimedean

mathematics, which “concerns the construction of actual geometric figures.”259

This differentiation describes “the preference for the discrete over the

continuous” respectively.260 “Life is not discrete” but rather “presents constant

and continuous variability”—what O’Hara might call “grace”. For this reason,

Deleuze favours a metaphysics of differential calculus, arguing “that thought itself

is composed of differential relations”, and as such, “all images of thought that

attempt to ground difference in the unity of a representation (e.g., Spirit,

Religion, Subject, etc.) thereby institute a discontinuity between the

representation and what it governs” in the “antinomy of the infinite and the

finite.”261 What is identified is an insoluble “dualism of form and content that

must be related by allegory.”262 But how can Deleuze affirm both difference and

continuity? If the contents of Being are continuous, how can they be also

different? More importantly, how can we rightly claim that O’Hara’s poetry, which

is often deliberately fragmentary, reflecting a view of reality as lacking unifying

truth, in fact adheres to the notion of Being speaking in one voice?

My solution to this entanglement arises out of a poetry reading at the Living

Theatre, in New York, in 1959. Recapping the event in a letter to John Ashbery,

O’Hara writes: “It was a disaster… So I read a few things, ending with ‘Ode to

Mike Goldberg.’ Gregory [Corso] said, ‘That’s beautiful’ and everyone seemed to

be impressed, when Jack K[erouac] said, ‘You’re ruining American poetry,

259 Ibid, p. 5. 260 Ibid, p. 5. 261 Ibid, pp. 5-6. 262 Ibid, p. 31.

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O’Hara.’ Me: ‘That’s more than you ever did for it.’”263 In this exchange Kerouac

and O’Hara are cast in specific roles—the self-appointed guardian of American

poetry, and the crusading revisionist respectively. I say self-appointed because

the former’s preservationist condemnation recalls the very last line of Kerouac’s

book-length cycle of ‘choruses’ from the same year as the altercation, Mexico City

Blues: “I am the Guard.”264 Indeed, in a letter to Allen Ginsberg a year later,

Kerouac excused the denunciation of “Butch O’Hara” as “just a gag”, but with its

jingoistic tenor, in an era of cultural reification and persecution, it seems

particularly indicative of what Kerouac himself called a “paranoia lapse”.265 Of

course this exchange was brief, most likely the effect of some significant drinking,

but it nevertheless raises two important questions. First: to what does Kerouac

refer in this surveillance of the American body poetic? Second: how and to what

extent was O’Hara attempting to ruin American poetry as Kerouac conceived it

and as O’Hara himself conceived it?

Perhaps the most emphatic indication of what Kerouac sees as definitively

American is in his introduction to Robert Frank’s photography book, The

Americans, for which Kerouac praised its ‘American-ness!”.266 Even the opening

contextual statement Kerouac makes about the book—it was composed as Frank

“travelled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car”—

263 Frank O’Hara, ‘Frank O’Hara to John Ashbery and Pierre Martory, March 16, 1959’ in New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight, ed. Allison Power (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 2014), p. 129. 264 Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1959), p. 244. 265 Jack Kerouac, ‘Jack Kerouac [Northport, New York] to Allen Ginsberg [Patterson, New Jersey], June 20, 1960, in Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, eds. Bill Morgan, Dan Stanford (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2010), p. 453; Jack Kerouac, ‘Jack Kerouac [New York, New York] to Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France], December 28, 1957, in ibid, p. 379. 266 Jack Kerouac, ‘Introduction to The Americans: Photographs by Robert Frank’ in Jack Kerouac: Good Blonde & Others, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1998), p. 19.

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contains the kernel of Kerouac’s vision: a merging of geography and iconography,

of the commonplace with the momentous. Take a couple of selected (but typical)

descriptions of Frank’s photographs: a “Tall thin cowboy tolling butt outside

Madison Square Garden New York for rodeo season, sad, spindly, unbelievable”;

“Long shot of night road arrowing forlorn into immensities and flat our

impossible-to-believe America.”267 Frank’s photos are “as American a picture” can

be, all bearing motifs of hard-bitten masculinity, folkish tradition, and the

magnificence and transcendence of specified, textured landscape. For O’Hara this

is the landscape in which the cowboy topples over into a gulch. For Kerouac and

his equally reverent On the Road alter ego, Sal Paradise, the cowboy manifests

the sublimity of America: “Then Omaha, and, by God, the first cowboy I saw,

walking along the bleak walls of the wholesale meat warehouses in a ten-gallon

hat and Texas boots.”268 The America depicted by Frank’s photographs that so

resonates with Kerouac is what he calls in his Book of Dreams, the “Divine

Ground.”269

Indeed, such visions of America are ingrained in Kerouac’s psyche to such an

extent that it returns—literally or literarily—in his dreams: its security is a matter

of psychic insecurity. Indeed, reading the Book of Dreams, which overflows with

images of railroads, boxcars, baseball, cowboys, native Americans, the Stars and

Stripes, a recurring narrative emerges. Initially the dreamer—I won’t presume

that these are Kerouac’s own dreams, but I have my suspicions—encounters a

conflict of national scope: “A great hegira of mankind in American has crossed

267 Ibid, p. 19. 268 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 17. 269 Jack Kerouac, Book of Dreams (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1981), p. 163.

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the wilderness”.270 Enemies of the state are immediately established, threatening

to infiltrate the domestic space: “revengeful Indians are close by and coming”,

who “suddenly” (horrifically?) become “ordinary people”, meaning, probably,

white Americans.271 Repeatedly, the conflict dissolves into “a new peaceful life”

of domestic and commercial harmony, like owning “a little grocery store on a

drowsy street” with one’s mother. What is noteworthy, for this particular dream,

is that it was “dreamed and written July 26 1953 Korea Truce Day”.272

In a later dream, the initial conflict is “hanging a political traitor”, reminiscent of

the Rosenberg execution a month before the Korean Armistice Agreement, but

the horrific turn, which has in other dreams preceded domestic resolution,

involves the domestic itself. As the dreamer observes: “it’s my father I’m talking

about, my father was hanged”.273 The dreamer is alienated from the soothing

maternal figure, who doesn’t “recognise him”. The domestic stronghold is

infiltrated by the public conflict as the dreamer is left with “the coffin that’s never

been removed from the parlour of the Kerouacs”. The faith in endurance out of

disaster and the continuation of the family unit is perverted. The ideal of an

American life based upon these qualities implodes. As the dreamer writes

elsewhere: “Nightmares are paranoia”.274

Throughout the 1950s, Kerouac’s notion of Americanness would be increasingly

inscribed with nationalist discourse. Consider this list from a letter to Ginsberg,

270 Ibid, p. 71. 271 Ibid, p. 71. 272 Ibid, p. 72. 273 Ibid, pp. 88-89. 274 Ibid, p. 17.

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December 1957: “The greatest Italian poet is Corso”, he writes. “The greatest

Israeli poet is Ginsberg […] The greatest American poet is Kerouac.”275 His

reasoning, he explains later in the letter, relies on a devotion to a self-defined

and iconographic notion of “Americana”:

Allen, you know why I said I was greatest American poet and you greatest Israeli poet? Because you didn’t pick up on Americana till you read Visions of Neal [Cassidy], before that you were big Burroughsian putter-downer of Americana. […] Burroughs’ own Americana is effortless, it’s Brad coming on the red leather seat, so he is intrinsically Americana, like me (with teenage poems to Americana).276

Reverence as certification aside, the implicit rationale here is that ethnic, national

and cultural credentials are paramount factors in construction of selfhood: it may

be that Ginsberg revered Israeli culture in his adolescence, but it seems more

likely that his Jewish heritage designates him as an Israeli for Kerouac. Indeed,

the pseudonyms used throughout Kerouac’s work retain their ethnic character—

Ginsberg becomes Alvah Goldbrook; Lawrence Ferlinghetti becomes Lorenzo

Monsato—showing that, for Kerouac, as people are predominantly identifiable by

their national or ethnic category, the validity of sectarian categorisation itself is

worth sustaining.

Though Kerouac was aware of his “paranoia lapses”, his ultimate belief in a

cohesive, redemptive idea of America would blind him to their prevalence. In a

letter to Ginsberg, he attempts to instil his own patriotic zeal in his friend, who

had, in the previous letter to Kerouac, condemned American culture and

envisioned an apocalyptic fall of the nation. Kerouac writes: “You underestimate

275 Jack Kerouac, ‘Jack Kerouac [Orlando, Floria] to Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gegory Corso [Paris, France]’ in The Letters, p. 377. 276 Ibid, p. 378.

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the compassion of Uncle Sam, look at the record. I know it will all come raining

down in our paranoiac minds but maybe not in nature.”277 Paradoxically, the

idealistic icon of American grandeur and virtue is invoked to assuage animosity

toward the ideology that icon represents. Here Kerouac is subject to the

triumphalist propaganda of the 1950s, with Eisenhower’s calls for “a groundswell

of patriotism” and forming a national consensus not only of what America is and

should be, but against its ostensible enemies who threaten that ideal.

As this national crisis intensified, Kerouac turned to a nostalgic idea of an

American past with increased attention to the literary voices that represent this

idea. In response to Ginsberg’s lamenting this “evil” country and allying himself

with “nice” Whitman in a later letter, Kerouac correspondingly hopes “the calm

hearts of Melville, Thoreau, Whitman do sustain us.”278 To escape Cold War

tensions (around the time O’Hara was working on The End of the Far West

poems) and mounting psychological “pressure that fame imposed on him”, as Bill

Morgan claims, Kerouac seeks comfort in the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance

and austerity. It is illustrated in the opening of Big Sur (1963), when Jack Dulouz,

Kerouac’s alter ego, notes “the handsome words of Emerson, […] Words from

277 Jack Kerouac, ‘Jack Kerouac [Northport, New York] to Allen Ginsberg [Paris, France], July 2, 1958, in Ibid, p. 400. 278 Ginsburg wrote:

Obviously Kennedy is more liberal and for more foreign wheat aid type and less tied up with phony military patriotic grandeur and less an FBI type, in intention. Not that it makes much difference /America is sunk either way because it’s just plain selfish. The more extremely nasty we get the worse the communists get and anybody who doesn’t want to give a shit gets caught in the middle.

[…] You don’t think anybody’s starving in the world. Nobody in America thinks so. This country is evil and Whitman and I now spit on it and tell it to be nice or die, because that’s what’s coming. I HATE AMERICA! (Allen Ginsberg, ‘Allen Ginsberg [New York, New York] to Jack Kerouac [ n.p., Northport, New York?]. ca. October 13, 1960 in ibid, pp. 460-61);

Ibid, p. 472.

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the trumpet of the morning in American, Emerson, who announced Whitman and

also said Infancy conforms to nobody – Infancy of the simplicity of just being

happy in the woods, conforming to nobody’s idea about what to do, what should

be done.”279 The subjective position described here is deeply entrenched in an

ideology of the self as cohesive, self-aware, and as such, it values autonomous

self-mastery (a position I will return to later in this chapter). In the ideological

mode of Emerson’s libertarian self-reliance, and in Whitman’s call for the

democratic individual, threats to those ideals will be met with paradoxical

hostility. Kerouac’s post as “Guard” of these ideals is at once receptive and

protective, but only of one’s own kind. In the Cold War climate of jingoism, the

nostalgic turn to American ideals of liberty, democracy and fraternity, as

expressed by Emerson and Whitman, that which drives Kerouac’s protective

outburst against O’Hara, is fundamentally self-subverting. The inclusiveness

supposed in liberty, democracy and fraternity is extended, in the paranoid,

defensive, McCarthyite mode, only to those already welcomed or deemed

unthreatening to it, thus undermining that appeal or its very claims to inclusivity.

For Ginsberg, “The whole thrust of Kerouac’s work was toward individualism and

freedom”.280 The individualism Ginsberg discerns (or would like to be the case)

refers to the Whitmanic democrat, a constitutive agent of an expansive collective,

rooted in the pursuit of equality, fraternity and the politics of rights. The other

side of the individualist coin, however, accommodates the tyrannically egoistic,

acquisitive, and exclusionary economic individualist, whose case for liberty is

279 Bill Morgan, ‘Editor’s Note’, ibid, p. 399; Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), p. 29. 280 Allen Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1966, ed. David Carter (New York, New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), p. 289.

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conceived against an obscene, iniquitous, threatening body of others, but which

manifests, in U.S. lore and culture, as the independent, enterprising, masculine

Emersonian—an American Crusoe. Indeed, as William Spanos observes in his

study of Moby Dick, inhering in the privileged principle of self-reliance is the

totalitarianism itself latent in the logic of self-preservation.281

In this vein, and in light of increasingly pervasive Cold War discourse of his time,

Kerouac’s combative invocation of such a principle indicates a latent desire to

form a bounded consensus of American poetry and synecdochically American life.

The effort to establish a consensus on what constitutes Americanness in culture,

then, complicity subscribes to the monomaniacally imperial hegemonic structure

erected in the Cold War scenario. Kerouac’s gesture of coercing literary and ethnic

difference to an enclosed canon of specifically naturalised national tenets betrays

On the Road’s self-ironising wild goose chase for “IT”, a unifying instance of

connecting with the transcendent, which leaves Dean, the tragically idealised

frontiersman, alienated and incapable of cogent speech. 282 It betrays Sal’s

poignant sense of futility at the novel’s end, recalling Melville’s Ismael in his

radically fraternal, egalitarian assertion “that everybody else is one way or other

served in much the same way.”283 As such, Kerouac’s “paranoia lapse” reveals a

fleeting descent into the Ahabic totalitarianism blinkered by, enclosed within, and

promulgating a hegemonic paradigm of retributive monomaniacal sovereignty

281 William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 226. 282 Kerouac, On the Road, p. 207. 283 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Tom Quirk (London: Penguin Classics, 2003) p. 6.

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locked in the self-defeating binary construction—us/them—that constitutes the

Cold War scenario.284

To Kerouac, during a “paranoia lapse”, O’Hara’s poetry threatens to corrupt that

which is purportedly encapsulated in the adjectival form, American. The defensive

employment of the term evinces an implicit support for the notion that there is

in fact a cohesive referent, America, to which certain phenomena could point,

and if there is an essential, ideal America, then consensus is not only possible

but potentially the norm, which certain activities and inclinations either jeopardise

or bastardise. The logic is, of course, in keeping with the contemporaneous

ideology of containment. As Andrew Epstein notes, it was a time in which

“personal identities are pinned down for the purposes of persecution in the

interests of shoring up a unified, secure, monolithic identity.”285 Hence, by asking

“What land is this so free?” in ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ (1956), and by declaring

“I know what I love and know what must be trodden underfoot to be vindicated

and glorified and praised: Belle of Old New York”, directly invoking Whitman by

his “grey hairs” in ‘Commercial Variations’ (1952), O’Hara challenges the apparent

aporia at the very heart of Whitman’s vision of America—namely, the

irreconcilable disagreement between integrationist democracy and libertarian

individualism, to the union of social adhesiveness in “one common orbic

language, one common indivisible destiny and Union” in ‘Song of the Exposition’,

and to the ‘Song of Myself’, with its affiliations to Emersonian self-mastery.286

284 Spanos, p. 226. 285 Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Friends, p. 17. 286 ‘Commercial Variations’, CP, p. 85; Walt Whitman, ‘Song of the Exposition’ in The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 228.

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The path to suffering which Kerouac sees in O’Hara, then, must be by virtue of

his rejection of any kind of bedrock of cohesive ontological unity (which is to be

contrasted, as I will show momentarily, with differential being or univocity), the

“Simple golden eternity” Dulouz finally envisions out of the paranoiac nightmares

of Big Sur—a rejection, moreover, which precludes any kind of transcendental

unifier, whether national or cosmic.287 Rather, O’Hara seems to insist upon the

contingent surface of lived experience that signifies nothing beyond its own

reality and social frame. Consider ‘Flag Day’ (1960). Written on the occasion of

his lover Vincent Warren’s birthday, the title also wryly gestures to the day itself,

established in 1916 as a patriotic biproduct of WW1, and restated combatively in

1941 as a call for faith in American ideals “when the principles of unity and

freedom symbolized by the old glory are under attack”, and in 1954 to coincide

with the addition of ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance, thus “reaffirming the

transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future”, as President

Eisenhower conceived the motion.288 Toward the end of ‘Flag Day’, the poem,

after listing the impossible gifts that would match the magnitude of the poet’s

affection, like “open-faced Rome”, he finds that nothing can equal what he

himself has already received—that his lover shared the first year of his manhood

with him—and from here, “everything’s merely a token of some vast inexplicable

feeling”.289 Whether it is “your face on a postage stamp”, or “your body carved

out of Mount Rushmore”, the symbolic edifice is razed and the surface of the

debris is inscribed with the personal. In the final stanza, when the poet concludes

287 Kerouac, Big Sur, p. 165. 288 David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 43; Dwight Eisenhower, quoted in ‘The Pledge of Allegiance’ from <https://providenceforum.org/story/pledge-allegiance/>. 289 CP, p. 368.

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that “our life’s like a better flag”, it is because there is nothing for which this

glorified surface signifies beyond itself—which is to say, there is nothing greater

or more real; it is its own referent.

If O’Hara’s poetry departs from literary tradition, it is by means of a repudiation

of symbolism, and as such, a rejection of idealism—first, in the philosophical

sense of reality emanating from, and in service to, an immaterial transcendental

source, and second, in the sense of pursuing skewed archetypes and values in

an effort to shore up certainty and legitimacy. O’Hara’s preoccupation, he states,

is with the idea that “poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and

restores their detail”.290 Anticipating Deleuze and Guattari, then, he takes an anti-

Platonic stance, challenging Plato’s argument from imperfection. For a thing to

be considered imperfect, the argument states, we must have in mind some idea

of perfection, and thus there must exist a realm of perfection that this idea is an

idea of. Imperfection, it follows, presupposes, perfection—incompletion

presupposes completion, the part presupposes the whole—and the latter is the

forecondition of the former. The problem as to how O’Hara and Deleuze and

Guattari can maintain an opposing position returns when we follow its

argumentation. For, if it is the lack of perfection and unity that produces the

illusion of perfection and unity, and those ideals are intrinsically inscribed with

imperfection and fragmentation, thus rendering them incomplete, how can both

O’Hara and Deleuze and Guattari invoke a metaphysics of continuity, which holds

that reality expresses itself on one plane of Being? Is this not a form of unifying

idealism?

290 ‘Statement for the New American Poetry’, CP, p. 500.

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The answer lies in Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between univocity and unity.

We can only arrive at real, perceptual difference, Deleuze and Guattari argue,

through univocity, since, in Adkins words, it “ensures that things differ in exactly

the same respect.”291 In a Platonic idealism, by contrast, difference is merely

analogical: it “can never describe real difference because [it] seeks to compare

objects that are thought to differ in ontological kind.”292 As a consequence, their

difference is epistemologically inaccessible, reliant on a transcendental realm. On

the other hand, “if continuous variation is continuous variation of one and the

same being”, then “the real difference between any two points on the continuum

arise.”293 The diagram below should illustrate this distinction:

Thus, both things in Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysics and meaning in O’Hara’s

poetry are not discretely ascribed by transcendental forms; rather, things are

perceptually generated, immanently, from their very configuration along a plane

of continuous being in much the same way that meaning is generated, for

instance, by the configuration of images upon the poetic surface. In other words,

finally, O’Hara’s poems function laterally, generating meaning by virtue of their

interaction, not for what they symbolically stand for.

291 Adkins, p. 6. 292 Ibid, p. 6 293 Ibid, p. 7.

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3.3 Kennedy’s United States of America: a “vast assemblage”

If things exist on a continuous plane of Being, differing similarly, not in kind but

in degree, and if their existence describes a state of constant becoming, then it

follows that the Aristotelian notions of essence and telos do not apply in Deleuze

and Guattari’s metaphysics. No—things are not reducible to their essential

tendencies, they argue, but rather, paradoxically, tend in opposite directions

simultaneously; things are caught at various points along a continuum of

opposing poles. As Adkins puts it, things “seem to combine two contradictory

properties: stability and change.”294 For Deleuze and Guattari this is merely a re-

articulation of the ostensible discontinuity between the intelligible and sensible

respectively, and his conception of a continuous Being behoves a conception of

the kind of thing that can exist in a continuous Being. Following Spinoza, who

claimed that things do not differ substantially but rather “possess a different ratio

of motion and rest among their parts”, composing and decomposing continually,

Deleuze and Guattari conceive things as assemblages whose various parts

possess tendencies toward both stasis and change.295 There are no essential

properties; rather, there are immanent, intensive tendencies. The ontological

shift in focus, then, is from the thing itself to the process of the thing’s becoming.

The thing has not culminated; it is only in a mutable state of stability.

See, then, how DeLanda’s assemblage theory recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s

metaphysics in contesting Hegel’s conception of “totalities”: the “fact that a whole

possesses synthetic or emergent properties”, DeLanda writes, “does not preclude

294 Ibid, p. 10. 295 Ibid, p. 344.

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the possibility of analysis. In other words, unlike organic totalities, the parts of

an assemblage do not form a seamless whole.”296 Because “historical processes

are used to explain the synthesis of inorganic, organic and social assemblages,

there is no need for essentialism to account for their enduring identities”. This

“allows assemblage theory to avoid one of the main shortcomings of other forms

of social realism: an ontological commitment to the existence of essences.”297

Forming the central tenets of DeLanda’s assemblage theory, then, are the

interdependent synecdochical, “part-to-whole relation[s] that all assemblages

[including assemblage-poems] exhibit”, and for the reason that “assemblages,

being wholes whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts,” can

be used as models for networked intermediate levels of social reality.298

These principles mean that the assemblage analyst can avoid framing “the

problem of the link between the micro- and the macro-levels” in both “micro-

reductionist” and “macro-reductionist” terms.299 In the latter case, assemblage

theory contests the notion that “social structure is what really exists”, making the

“micro-level a mere epiphenomenon.”300 In the case of the former position, of

the “methodological individualism characteristic of micro-economics, in which all

that matters are rational decisions made by individual persons in isolation from

one another” and of “the phenomenological individualism of social

constructivism”, assemblage theory rejects the implicit conception of society “as

a mere aggregate, that is, a whole without properties that are more than the sum

296 DeLanda, p. 4. 297 Ibid, p. 4. 298 Ibid, p. 15; ibid, p. 5. 299 Ibid, pp. 4-5. 300 Ibid, p. 5.

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of its parts.”301 Indeed, DeLanda argues, with social constructivism “coupling the

idea that perception is intrinsically linguistic with the ontological assumption that

only the contents of experience really exist,” the social scientist of this position is

lead “directly to a form of social essentialism.”302 Simultaneously, the realist social

ontology of assemblage theory and its inherently empiricist model of subjectivity

can reveal this flaw via its contrasting function and can itself provide a mode of

analysis that bypasses the deleterious consequences of essentialist social

categorisation by rejecting idealism, fixity and transcendental unifiers.

Assemblage theory thus refutes social and ontological essentialisms in its

proposal of an ontology that regards capacity—as opposed to legitimacy—as not

exclusively dependent on reified, pre-existing categories. It does this by,

conversely, locating what would be called the ‘nature’ of an event in its conditions

of emergence via a method of analysis that nevertheless heeds the forces that

shape an event and its ultimate structure and representation. By way of a formal

enaction of meaning emerging from the emergence of capacities through

interaction, then, the reader of ‘At the Bottom…’ experiences a satirical parody

of the allegorical mode and a resistance to ideological legitimation, particularly

with regards to national mythology and its often-pernicious orientation toward a

totalitarian regulation of social composition and character.

Conceived as a large assemblage comprising multiple intermediate assemblages,

the United States of 1963-64 was, in DeLanda’s words, employing Deleuze and

Guattari’s terminology, “highly territorialized”.303 In DeLanda’s formulation,

301 Ibid, pp. 4-5. 302 Ibid, pp. 45-46; emphasis in original. 303 Ibid, p. 15.

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the assemblage is defined along two dimensions. One dimension or axis defines the variable roles which an assemblage’s components may play, from a purely material role at one extreme of the axis, to a purely expressive role at the other extreme. […] The other dimension defines variable processes in which these components become involved and that either stabilize the identity of an assemblage, by increasing its degree of internal homogeneity or the degree of sharpness of its boundaries, or destabilize it. The former are referred to as a processes of territorialization and the latter as processes of deterritorialization.304

The material role of the components of a social assemblage describes how “a set

of bodies [are] properly oriented (physically or psychologically) toward each

other.” 305 In the social assemblage approximated by ‘At the Bottom…’, the

material constitution of its social site operates via the person-to-person

conversations, the “interpersonal networks that structure communities” like

labour exchange and leisure activities “as well as the hierarchical organizations

that govern cities or nation-states” like legislative assemblies or a particular

jurisprudence.306 While “expressivity” can be “nonlinguistic”, the expressive role

of the assemblage-poem is exercised, in conversation, by “the content of the

talk”.307

For DeLanda, “an important component of an interpersonal network is the

expressions of solidarity of its members”, as in ‘Here in New York We Are Having

A Lot of Trouble With the World’s Fair’, where the object of interaction between

three speakers is to “square me / with both of you.”308 But, DeLanda notes,

“these can be either linguistic (promises, vows) or behavioural, the solidarity

304 Ibid, p. 12. 305 Ibid, p. 12. 306 Ibid, p. 12. 307 Ibid, p. 12. 308 Ibid, p. 12.

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expressed by shared sacrifice or mutual help.”309 This appears multiple times

throughout The End of the Far West: in ‘At the Bottom…’ (“Need any help?”),

‘Here in New York’ (“Something went wrong / but I think we’re on the right /

track”), the sixth poem in the set, ‘Should We Legalize Abortion?’ (“You can / do

something about all this and I’m here to help / you do it!”), and in the pivotal

refrain of the eighth poem, ‘The Green Hornet’ (“‘She is more to be pitied than

censured, / she is more to be helped than despised…’”). Conversely, DeLanda

continues, “Hierarchical organizations, in turn, depend on expressions of

legitimacy, which may be embodied linguistically (in the form of beliefs about the

sources of authority)”.310 In fact, this verbal procedure initiates the entire set of

poems, in the first lines of ‘At the Bottom’—“No matter where I send you

remember / you’re still working for me”—but rematerialises in the beginning of

the tenth poem, ‘The Shoe Shine Boy’ (“Jimmy I got an errand for you to do”)

and the final lines of ‘Here in New York…’ (“All right, / roll over”). Additionally,

legitimacy is expressed non-verbally, DeLanda observes, “in the behaviour of

their members, in the sense that the very act of obeying commands in public, in

the absence of physical coercion, expresses acceptance of legitimate

authority.”311 In light of this, consider the implicit exercise of power in the lines,

“I’m sorry you came all the way from / Emporia for nothing” from ‘The Green

Hornet’.

In the assemblage-poem, then, its material and expressive roles function

simultaneously, undifferentiated: the content and arrangement of the speech is

309 Ibid, p. 12. 310 Ibid, p. 12. 311 Ibid, p. 12.

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that which expresses the social circumstance in which it takes place; the poem

itself is the event of its very communication. It functions not as a strictly concrete

assemblage, like an actual, corporeal conversation, but as the aesthetic, affective

“diagram of an assemblage”.312 In Deleuze’s words, the diagram is a “spatio-

temporal multiplicity”; in DeLanda’s interpretation, it is “a display of relations of

force, or of a distribution of capacities to affect and be affected.”313

Here the relevance of the third claim listed above—“Affects are becomings”—

becomes apparent. To borrow Adkin’s words (if only now for the sake of

terminological consistency), Spinoza maintained that

humans are different [from each other] not because they possess a different kind of being (e.g., soul or mind), but because they are composed differently. That is, humans possess a different ratio of motion and rest among their parts than other things and are thus capable of affecting and being affected differently than other things.314

Similarly, for Deleuze and Guattari, differences between entities are “grounded

in different ways of affecting and being affected, different ways of being

composed.”315 Their metaphysics corresponds to an immensely complex topology

wherein, following Spinoza, “stasis is amenable to change”.316 The extensive

properties of any given assemblage arise from an intensive process of becoming.

As Deleuze and Guattari write:

To every relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping together an infinity of parts, there corresponds a degree of power. To the relations composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there

312 DeLanda, p. 126. 313 Giles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 34; DeLanda, p. 126. 314 Adkins, p. 244 315 Ibid, p. 153. 316 Ibid, p. 245.

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correspond intensities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act.317

This “power to act” is precisely that upon which affect mobilises: “for Deleuze

and Guattari,” Adkins explains, “one understands a thing by understanding what

it’s capable of, by counting its ways of affecting and being affected”.318 The

associative refrains in ‘At the Bottom..’, for instance, structure affective forces,

via reading, into what Guattari called “existential Territories” (there is more on

this term specifically below), in which the reader is imaginatively absorbed.319

Reading the assemblage-poem amounts to an intensive encounter with the

process of its very becoming, which simultaneously is the process of its very

becoming. In other words, the assemblage-poem simultaneously is the intensive

interaction of its parts and the reader’s affect, both of which constitute its

materialisation, and the function of assemblage-poem is predicated on the event

of its becoming assembled with the reader. While O’Hara wants to get in the

Combine, wants to be a David Smith sculpture, an aesthetic ideal precisely

predicated on a notion of continuous being, he wants also to make poems of

similar assimilative power. Thus, as the diagram of a concrete (social)

assemblage serving to affectively display the latter, the assemblage-poem has

“an abstract structure in which the expressive and the material are not

differentiated, a differentiation that emerges only when the diagram is

divergently actualised in concrete assemblages”—or, for our purposes, in an

immersive encounter with the concrete assemblages in the reading of its poetic

317 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 256. 318 Adkins, p. 154. 319 Felix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andre Goffey (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 3.

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diagram, whose levels of codification (as either territorialized or deterritorialised)

can be analysed.320

3.3.1 Territorialisation…

must first be understood literally. Face-to-face conversations always occur in particular place (a street, a pub, a church), and once the particulars have ratified one another a conversation acquires well-defined spatial boundaries. Similarly, many interpersonal networks define communities inhabiting spatial territories, whether ethnic neighbourhoods or small towns, or well defined borders. Organisations, in turn, usually operate in particular buildings, and the jurisdiction of their legitimate authority usually coincides with the physical boundaries of those buildings. The exceptions are governmental organisations, but in this case too their jurisdictional boundaries tend to be geographical: the borders of a town, a province or a whole country. So, in the first place, processes of territorialization are processes that define or sharpen the spatial boundaries of actual territories. Territorialization, on the other hand, also refers to non-spatial processes which increase the internal homogeneity of an assemblage, such as the sorting processes which exclude a certain category of people from membership of an organisation, or the segregation processes which increase the ethnic or racial homogeneity of a neighbourhood.321

With what ‘At the Bottom…’ diagrams, the factors contributing to territorialisation

are the specific geographical and demographic aspects of the saloon, the

insistence on subservience regardless of location, the pervasiveness of

hierarchical chains of labour. In the social reality the poem discloses—the United

States of renewed exceptionalism and idealism amidst international tensions and

domestic upheaval, of impending peril and the metonymic assassination of the

New Frontier myth—it is the insistence on social and political consensus, unity

320 DeLanda, p. 126. 321 Ibid, p. 13.

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and stability, and resistance to the loosening of social hierarchies based on class,

race, gender and sexuality. In this sense, then, the U.S. diagrammed (that is,

depicted (and satirised)) in ‘At the Bottom…’ is a “vast assemblage”, to use

Kennedy’s own term, whose expressivity through the propagation of national

myths of exceptionalism serves as a coding agent in the territorialisation

process. 322 This is precisely that which constitutes what DeLanda calls “the

processes behind the original emergence of [the assemblage’s] identity […] at

each social scale” and which maintains that identity “in the presence of

destabilizing processes of deterritorialization.”323 This is the core underpinning

aim of Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric, made clear in his speech at the 1960

Democratic National Convention, excerpted here:

Too many Americans have lost their way, their will and their sense of historic purpose.

It is a time, in short, for a new generation of leadership—new men to cope with new problems and new opportunities.

[…] But I believe the times demand new invention, innovation, imagination, decision. I am asking each of you to be pioneers on that New Frontier. My call is to the young in heart, regardless of age—to all who respond to the Scriptural call: “Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.”

For courage—not complacency—is our need today—leadership—not salesmanship. And the only valid test of leadership is the ability to lead, and lead vigorously.

[…] Can we carry through in an age where we will witness not only the breakthroughs in weapons of destruction—but also a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the far side of space and inside of men’s minds?

[…] As we face the coming challenge, we too, shall wait upon the Lord and ask that he renew our strength. Then shell we be equal to the test. Then we shall not be weary. And then we shall prevail.324

322 John F. Kennedy, ‘Acceptance of Democratic Nomination for President’. 323 DeLanda, pp. 38-39. 324 Kennedy, ‘Acceptance’.

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Indeed, as DeLanda notes, “the stability of the identity of territorial states

depends in part on the degree of uniformity (ethnic, religious, linguistic,

monetary, legal) that its organisations and cities manage to create within its

borders.”325 To the forms of social life of which territorial states seek to affirm

uniformity, with regards specifically to America in the early 1960s, I would add

ideology and teleology, affirming nonetheless that, “in addition to internal

uniformity, territorialisation at this scale has more direct spatial meaning: the

stability of the defining frontiers of a country.”326

3.3.2 Deterritorialisation

Converse to the territorialisation process, “any process which either destabilises

spatial boundaries or increases internal heterogeneity is considered

deterritorializing.” 327 The more stable the assemblage the more it is

territorialized. By contrast, an assemblage-poem, as the affective diagram of a

concrete assemblage, has the status of “a full deterritorialization of a concrete

assemblage, since it is the opposite process (territorialisation or actualisation)

that differentiates the material from the expressive”, while displaying the

territorialisation process of that which it diagrams.328 Thus, by displaying or

revealing the highly regulated composition of the American assemblage as

propagated in the political sphere and exercised in the public sphere while

functioning itself as a purely deterritorialised approximation of that assemblage,

‘At the Bottom…’ enacts, via synecdochical, metonymic and associative

325 DeLanda, p. 116. 326 Ibid, p. 117. 327 Ibid, p. 13. 328 Ibid, p. 126.

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inversions, refrains, distortions and substitutions, a decrypting and thus a

destabilization of the composition it parodically diagrams. In this way, the poem

argues for a deterritorialisation of that composition and a questioning of its claims

for legitimacy.

At the centre of these claims, the poem indicates, is the Senate. Encompassing

both material and expressive roles in the United States assemblage and its

“sources of legitimacy, […] the constitution and the electoral process”, the very

existence of the Senate increases the legitimacy of American democracy through

its ceremonial value.329 The Senate, in other words, is the means by which the

United States assemblage expresses its “rational-legal” form of legitimacy, as

conceived by Max Weber. 330 Of this expression of legitimacy, DeLanda

comments, “it is the very fact that procedures work [or, I would add, proclaim

themselves functional and beneficial through politicised media] in a technical

sense: that is, that they regularly produce the desired outcome that expresses

their legitimacy.”331 All the same, “even in the most technical organisations the

conception of ‘rationality’ may be used in a purely ceremonial way.”332 Disrupting

various American ideals—of rationality with surrealism, self-mastery with

subservience, liberty with control, unified cohesion with heterogeneous

coexistence—and making spatial boundaries porous through associative

dissolves, ‘At the Bottom…’ explodes the monolithic notion of the consensus

state, disputing its claims to existence and the attempts for governmental bodies

to legitimize coercive authority. The poem demonstrates how mythic structures,

329 Ibid, p. 88. 330 Ibid, p. 71. 331 Ibid, p. 71. 332 Ibid, p. 71.

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espoused contemporaneously as Kennedy’s New Frontier objective and exercised

in the political domain for economic purposes (specifically via the nature of labour

relations), appropriate and employ the lawless, insubordinate outlaw figure—the

frontiersman, the “rustler” refusing to pay taxes—in order to engender an

ideology of patriotic zeal expressed in reverence of that figure and of

synecdochical placeholders—the Grand Canyon—which, in turn, reinforce tactics

to retain legitimacy of the coercive authority of governmental organisations. In

the idealised name of expanding so-called frontiers, for instance, such tactics

entail the amendment of fiscal policy to fund illegitimate wars abroad.

3.4 The Frontier Story

Through an assemblage analysis of ‘At the Bottom…’ and the social condition it

concerns, it becomes clearer how a naturalised myth of aggressively adventurous

deterritorialisation is employed politically to generate the ideological means by

which a governmental organisation can initiate and perpetuate imperialist

territorialisation. In The End of the Far West as a whole, the continual invocations

and inversions of popular culture tropes—from Hollywood Westerns specifically—

serves to subvert the self-legitimizing national mythology fortified (inadvertently

or otherwise) by contemporaneous popular culture and thus to question

contemporaneous foreign policy itself fortified by a self-legitimizing national

mythology. In satirising the New Frontier ideology, the poem prophetically

challenges cultural phenomena launched in the succeeding years that function to

these ends. In Star Trek, for instance, first aired in 1966, the USS Enterprise, “a

military ship,” is “on a peaceful ‘five year mission: to explore strange new worlds

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and seek out new life and new civilizations’”.333 For the Enterprise’s “main

adversary”, the Klingon Empire, producer Gene Coon explains that the show’s

creators had “always played them very much like the Russians”.334 The ship’s

captain, James T. Kirk, whose initials and handsome, collegiate portrayal by

William Shatner echoes John F Kennedy, has a similarly resonant catchphrase:

“to boldly go where no man has gone before.” As Kirk soliloquises before the

opening credits of each episode of the original series: “Space: the final frontier.”

The expressivity of the territorialized assemblage is correlated with the “story”

told about it, which maintains and validates its claims for legitimacy. For Michel

de Certeau, this “story’s first function is to authorise, or more exactly to found.”335

The connotations of this idea led de Certeau to the “Latin noun ‘fas’”—a

procession ritual “with three centrifugal stages, the first within Roman territory

but near the frontier, the second on the frontier, the third in foreign territory.”336

To amalgamate critical vocabularies, the fas ritual is the engendering of a

foundational story about a social assemblage’s legitimacy of authority: “it opens

a legitimate theatre from practical actions. It creates a field that authorises

dangerous and contingent social actions.”337 Just as, in American politics of the

early 1960s (and, of course, in countless other times and in other countries in

other forms), the idealised embodiment of deterritorialisation—the

333 Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, ‘Cold War Pop Culture and the Image of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Perspective of the Orinal Star Trek Series’ in Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Fall, 2005), p. 78. 334 Gene Coon to Don Ingalls, 21 August 1967, in Arts Library Special Collections, University of California at Los Angeles, Papers of Gene Roddeberry, Box 15, Folder 9, quoted in Sarantakes, ‘Cold War Pop Culture…’, p. 78. 335 de Certeau, p. 124; emphasis in original. 336 Ibid, p. 124. 337 Ibid, p. 125.

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frontiersman—is exploited to advance territorialising strategies, the national

myths used to cultivate consensus operate ostensibly on the level of localised

fragmentation, as ‘At the Bottom…’ formally demonstrates:

the story founds fas in a form that is fragmented (not unique and whole), miniaturised (not on a national scale), and polyvalent (not specialised). It is fragmented, not only because of the diversification of social milieus, but especially because of the increasing heterogeneity (or because of a heterogeneity that is increasingly obvious).338

Precisely for the fact that the social expansion of difference is pronounced—in

the growing Civil Rights movements, for instance—the language of “the extension

of neutral areas deprived of legitimacy” must be incorporated in “narrations that

organised frontiers and appropriations”.339 These stories, de Certeau argues, “are

accentuated by a contradiction that is represented in them by the relationship

between the frontier and the bridge, that is, between a legitimate space and its

(alien) exteriority.” 340 As an entity predicated on “the space created by an

interaction”, as de Certeau puts in, ‘At the Bottom…’ serves simultaneously to

reveal the paradox of the frontier and its connection to the problematic nature of

social coexistence: “created by contacts,” to use de Certeau’s words, “the points

of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points. Conjunction

and disjunction are inseparable in them.”341

Prior to political manipulation, the frontier functions as “a middle placed,

composed of interactions and inter-views.”342 As “a sort of void, a narrative sym-

bol [sic] of exchanges and encounters”, the frontier can be used for ulterior

338 Ibid, p. 125. 339 Ibid, p. 125. 340 Ibid, p. 126. 341 Ibid, p. 127. 342 Ibid, p. 127.

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purposes to ensure these exchanges and encounters are asymmetrical. In

political mechanisms, this “transformation of the void into a plenitude, of the in-

between into an established place” means that “the Senate ‘takes on’ the

monument—the Law establishes itself”.343 The frontier is turned “into a crossing,

and the river into a bridge”; as “a transgression of the limit, a disobedience of

the law of the place”, the bridge represents, for de Certeau, “a departure, an

attack on a state, the ambition of a conquering power”.344 This pioneering, a

deterritorialising tactic, becomes invasion, a territorializing strategy.

In ‘At the Bottom…’, the frontier is not explicit; it is conveyed formally. Instead

of the analogical signifier, O’Hara employs the associative refrain, what Lone

Bertelsen and Andrew Murpine call “affects ‘cycled back’”, in order to “break up

the logic of discursive frameworks.”345 Crucially, however, this semiotic rupture

bears the trace of that which has been ruptured—the frontier sign—as an

affective intensity “capable of overthrowing”, as Guattari claims, the order of

discourse that created it.346 The assemblage-poem functions, then, by means of

a double refrain. First, like sculptural assemblage, it re-appropriates an image-

object from an established discursive order. For Rauschenberg, as in Gold

Standard, this might be, heavy-handedly, the Coca Cola can. For O’Hara, in ‘At

the Bottom…’, it could be the cowboy, or the horse. Secondly, though, across

this poem, this initial refrain returns metonymically transfigured as Joel McRea,

or a bicycle. A fundamental device of the assemblage-poem is this “gathering of

343 Ibid, pp. 127-128. 344 Ibid, p. 128. 345 Brian Massumi, quoted in Lone Bertlesen & Andrew Murphie, ‘An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain’ in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg & Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 139. 346 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, p. 5.

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forces” that serves “as a challenge to established forms.”347 As Bertelson and

Murphie state, the refrain is not

a stable distribution of ‘formed’ affects. It is an erratic and evolving distribution of both coming into being and the power to affect and be affected. This is its power. The refrain is a particularly useful way of negotiating the relations between everyday infinities of virtual potentials and the real (that is, not just theorized) operations of power. Refrains enable modes of living in time, not in ‘states.’348

Indeed, if “affects are transitions between states”, then the assemblage facilitates

and, reciprocally, is mobilised by such transitions. 349 As such, the affective

territory it engenders serves to deterritorialise the discursive territory from which

its associative refrains are appropriated.

3.5 The Gulch

While there is no patent frontier in ‘At the Bottom…’, no bridge, there is the

“gulch”. Embodying the sequence of inversions the poem enacts, the prominence

of the gulch serves a similar function as the spotlighting of the “everyday”,

embodied in its extreme form as “garbage”, which Andrew Epstein observes to

be central to a “reversal of hierarchies” employed by certain “pragmatist,

materialist, and skeptical” poets whose “work is horizontal rather than vertical,

deeply committed to the inexhaustibility of the here and now rather than the

metaphysical and sublime”.350 Conside the moment, in ‘At the Bottom…’, when

Western actor Joel McCrea “has just ridden / into the gulch on a bicycle”. On

347 Bertelson & Murpine, p. 145; emphasis in original. 348 Ibid, p. 145; emphasis in original. 349 Ibid, p. 145. 350 Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life, p. 26.

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Epstein’s account, this serves to “ironically undermine the heroic, the spectacular,

and the monumental, preferring to create an effect of inconsequence,

nonchalance, and casualness.” 351 The outcome of what Epstein terms the

“everyday-life poetics and philosophy” is “the notion that what we usually

consider to be waste and garbage, the detritus of everyday life, can be

recuperated through acts of attention and aesthetic reframing, leading to a

reversal of hierarchies of value.”352

Indeed, for both Epstein and Rona Cran, collage and more specifically bricolage

is the mode by which artists can invest the “cast off and overlooked” with value

through acts of preservation and presentation, and how the artist, and “by

extension any individual, might respond creatively to the multiform, contingent,

messy fragmented, and ephemeral nature of contemporary daily life.” 353

Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss notably theorized bricolage as a “science of

the concrete” whereby the bricoleur “‘speaks,’ not only with things… but also

through things”, a methodological slippage akin to de Certeau’s art that produces

effects of over objects, as mentioned above, and as Anna Dezeuze notes, this

“challenged the hierarchies between bricolage and scientific thought.”354 After all,

it is at the bottom of the dump that O’Hara finds an object either of value or

simply of interest.

351 Ibid, p. 27. 352 Ibid, p. 239. 353 Ibid, pp. 91-92 354 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Science of the Concrete,” in The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1966), p. 21; Dezeuze, p. 33.

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However, while I agree with Epstein in that the “reversal of hierarchies of value”

through the emphasis on and employment of garbage “can be seen as a sly

response to a culture of consumption and materialism” and as the function of an

“art of collecting, arranging, and repurposing of leftover waste”, this observation

does not tell the whole story.355 A directed reversal of waste-profit logic of

consumption, for instance, overlooks the continuation of the repackaging function

of consumption. In this way, Epstein’s focus on the reversal fails to fully critique

the reciprocal process of consumption. An inversion, conversely, as embodied by

the gulch, emphasises, in its subversive function, that which is being subverted,

casting the subverted condition in a clearer light. As O’Hara writes in ‘Chicago’,

the second poem in The End of the Far West:

I’ll go out tomorrow morning

with the garbage it won’t be an explosion

I’ll just be a package. The half-rhyme that O’Hara exploits between the two terms in their end-line

positions enacts their thematic and functional entanglement. A conceptual

“explosion” of the consumptive condition through a reversal of its primary

function serves to miss the way in which the reversal simultaneously creates a

product of consumption. In doing so, it participates in that which it attempts to

undermine: believing they are disconnected from the object of critique, Epstein’s

poets of the reversal, as opposed to the inversion, remain within and impacted

by its enveloping process. As O’Hara says in the same poem: “there’s always the

alienation of distance / at least from / detonation.”

355 Epstein, Attention Equals Life, p. 95.

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Of course, in 1964, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest approach

to nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, these words

carried weight. The “alienation of distance”, historically contextualised, refers, it

seems, to the Cold War scenario itself, whereby conflict is carried out

ideologically, culturally; indeed, the war is predicated on the assertion and

continuation of such distance. Bruce Russell illustrated precisely this in his 1945

political cartoon, ‘Time to Bridge the Gulch’ (Fig. 10), in which a bear branded

with the hammer and sickle squares off with a star-spangled bald eagle across a

ravine into which two pieces of paper, inscribed with “IRRESPONSIBLE

STATEMENTS” and “DEEPENING SUSPICIONS”, descend.356 The cartoon was

awarded a Pulitzer Prize for, I presume, its perspicacity and intuition of the gulch

as emblematic of a war of confrontational, impassable distance. As Lytle Shaw

356 Bruce Russel, ‘Time to Bridge the Gulch’ from <http://www.cbr.com/a-month-of-pulitzer-prize-winning-cartoons-day-30/>.

Fig. 10: Bruce Russell, 'Time to Bridge the Gulch', 1945. © Bruce Russell.

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observes, O’Hara addresses this distance directly in ‘A Snapshot for Boris

Pasternak’ (1952): re: the lines,

Dear Master, as time pushes us toward the abyss that’s sharp as a sledge hammer, let always your prayer be perverse and gratuitous, a volcano in the lengthening bandyleg of truth

As Shaw claims, the stanza

figures a trans-Cold War ‘truth’ as a body stretched, bandylegged (or bowlegged), between the Soviet Union and the United States, one leg in each country—the distance between the two ‘lengthening.’ The anal or penile ‘volcano’ thus becomes an inversion of the atomic bomb, a bodily explosion that prises writing loose from its instrumental grasp by institutional legs on both sides.357

But if the volcano is the affirmative, progressive, receptive/ejaculatory inversion

of the negative, destructive atomic bomb, the gulch both graphically outlines a

lack of the positive, life-affirming inversion and shows the topographical

consequence of that which the volcano inverts—nuclear engagement. In this

light, when the gulch is named and reified as a national symbol—the Grand

Canyon—the implicit critique of a catastrophic patriotism becomes clear. The

gulch does not simply embody the “reversal of hierarchies of value” that ‘At the

Bottom…’ presents politically, but also practically, of resources: the gulch

embodies the lack of inhabitable space. For this reason, the first poem of The

End of the Far West—“west meaning western civilisation,” as O’Hara tells us—

serves to construct an affective experience that reveals the latent potential of

that condition, which is to say, the production of inhabitable space and patriotic,

self-legitimation through the underlying imperialism of the United States’ pursuit

of new frontiers. In 1964, for the cause of arresting communist expansion and

357 Lytle Shaw, The Poetics of Coterie, p. 125.

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thus consolidating legitimate global authority for the U.S., President Kennedy’s

new frontier was the hills and forests of Vietnam.

To Shaw, though, the volcano designates an erotic vehicle enabling a bond with

Pasternak across enemy lines—a lyric “intimacy” theatricalised by way of

apostrophe, which is comprehensible “under the rubric of coterie.” 358 In

employing “community’s evil twin”, Shaw theorises, O’Hara’s “model of coterie

operates as an experimental kinship structure” for “actively anatomizing [the

coterie’s] social moment” and as “a form of sociality, a logic that allows for actual

(if shifting) group formations.”359 Crucially, however, “coterie writing” serves as

“a critique of assumptions about the securely public sphere and its various

opposites”; it serves as a “violent negation” of the notion that “the family, the

school, the job, the political party, and the nation persist as the given frames for

both an understanding of the self and for social activity”.360 But, if the volcano of

‘A Snapshot For Boris Pasternak’ functions within this coterie framework, in which

framework does the gulch of ‘At the Bottom…’ function? For sure it is not the

same framework; to accept the conception of the gulch I have made thus far is

to accept that notions of personal, voluntary, decisive bonds, wherein “someone

needs to take notice – and take exception”, are beside the point.361 The gulch

does not offer an opportunity but rather articulates a lack. To consider the gulch

is to consider social relations at their potentially primitive pre-civilised and post-

cataclysmic extremes, in which humans struggle to secure inhabitable space. In

358 Ibid, p. 145 359 Ibid, p. 234. 360 Ibid, pp. 234-35. 361 Ibid, p. 234.

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the latter poem, the degree of social relations engaged with is more elemental

and encompassing than that of coterie; it is rather of the order of coexistence.

3.6 From Coterie to Coexistence

Toward the end of the ten years that separates the ‘A Snapshot for Boris

Pasternak’ and ‘At the Bottom…’, O’Hara had encountered a frightening approach

to mutually assured destruction and a presidential assassination, “an event”, in

his own words, from a letter to Donald Allen dated November 23, 1963, “apart

from the personal aspects, of the direst significance for ‘our country’ and creates

a complete political abyss, as well as re-establishing the old cultural one, that is

too appalling to go into.”362 The vocabulary of his response is particularly telling:

uncharacteristically, the personal is side-lined for the political; a social scope

wider than coterie is considered—namely, thrown into question by the inverted

commas, “‘our country’”; and a gulch-like abyss dominates the conceptual

horizon.363 In ‘A Snapshot for Boris Pasternak’, “time pushes us toward the

abyss”; ten years later, in the mid-1960s, the abyss looms.

The formation of a transgressive social bond with Pasternak through the earlier

poem, which serves to “forge links to the other side of the Cold War” and

“disassociate the Pasternak of Doctor Zhivago from the American right”, is

nevertheless predicated on “exception”: with poetic apostrophe, critical praise

and a personal cable congratulating Pasternak on his Nobel Prize award, what is

362 Gooch, p. 412. 363 Ibid, p. 412.

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asserted is “an international connection among writers [my italics]”.364 As Shaw

argues, O’Hara’s coterie does indeed serve as a “background to make his

contours visible” and as a necessary means by which a subversive sexual and

ideological freedom can be guarded against a subjugation based on “myths of a

wholesale, homogenous, heterosexual America justified in its post-WWII world

domination.”365 In ‘Blue Territory’ (1957), “to Helen Frankenthaler”, for instance,

the poet imagines gulls “swooping and gulping and filling” a bulwark of “Big bags

of sand” to “end / the world” so that the poet and his friend “could be alone

together at last, one by one.”366 But, in a technical sense, the exceptionalist

principles of coterie construction and continuation operate analogously in national

construction and continuation. Though the former category enables safety and

solidarity among marginalised groups and the latter justifies imperialist hostility,

the principle of exclusivity and territorialisation binds both: the foundational

condition is that “alienation of distance” O’Hara considers in ‘Chicago’—it is the

tribalism of “the Walled City” that precludes the possibility of genuine

interactional coexistence of social and ideological differences.

One of the prevalent solutions to the Cold War scenario was “peaceful

coexistence”: Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev framed the struggle toward

resolution of the capitalism/socialism antinomy with this term in his famous

denunciation of Stalin—famous not least because “he had served the dictator

faithfully and fiercely, and during the Great Terror of the 1930s he was personally

involved in organizing the murder of thousands of innocent people”—at the

364 Shaw, p. 142. 365 Ibid, p. 142 366 CP, p. 270.

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Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February

1956.367 “Peaceful coexistence”: it designated the Soviet Union’s new foreign

policy to engage the “capitalist world in peaceful economic competition”.368 Part

and parcel of Khrushchev’s olive branch was the organisation of inevitably tense

state visits by himself and Vice President Richard Nixon in September and July

1959 respectively. O’Hara registered the former’s visit in his breezy ‘Poem

(Khrushchev is coming on the right day!)’ (September, 1959) expecting the

premier to be “carped at / in Washington”. His anticipation holds water as

Raymond L. Garthoff, a CIA Office of National Estimates analyst and special

adviser at the time, indicates in a memorandum ahead of the visit:

In general, the program of Khrushchev’s visit should seek to impress upon him the viability and underlying strength of the American nation, people and economy, rather than to be focussed on specifics of industrial or military power. The freedom of political and personal expression and choice, and the basic and complete popular support of our essential political and economic system, are one major aspect of this strength. Another is the flexibility in our economic system and the many ways large and small that it differs from the nineteenth-century capitalism which, through Marx and Lenin, colors [sic] so much the false image held by Khrushchev of the Western world and especially of the United States.369

What is striking in Garthoff’s objective is the conflation of an attempt to positively

disabuse Khrushchev of his critical impressions while maintaining a hard-line

rhetoric of American capitalist mastery. Unsurprisingly, O’Hara’s assumption

bears out: “Regrettably,” Garthoff notes, “Khrushchev did face considerable

heckling and hostile reception in many quarters on his visit.”370

367 Justin Quinn, Between Two Fires: Transnationalism & Cold War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 172. 368 Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 25. 369 Raymond, L. Garthoff, A Journey Through the Cold War (Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution Press, 2001), p. 87. 370 Ibid, p. 88.

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A month later, the Russian Premier reiterated the rigidly dichotomous

predicament facing both states in an article for Foreign Affairs: “either war—and

war in the rocket and H-bomb age is fraught with the most dire consequences

for all nations—or peaceful coexistence.”371 He reflects, with resignation, that,

“Whether you like your neighbor [sic] or not, nothing can be done about it, you

have to find some way of getting on with him, for you both live on one and the

same planet.”372 Central to the problem of “peaceful coexistence”, Khrushchev

continues, is “the problem of peaceful competition” which is committed to a policy

of “non-aggression” “for the purpose of satisfying man’s needs in the best

possible way” and “keep[ing] the positions of ideological struggle, without

resorting to arms in order to prove that one is right.”373 Alongside a commitment

to pacifism, moreover, is the promise to avoid “interfering in the internal affairs

of capitalist countries”.374 Such sentiments seem reasonable, and yet, in the same

way Garthoff undercuts his own attempt at reasonable disillusion with

antagonistic self-grandeur, Khrushchev’s Cold War rhetoric soon studs his olive

branch with undercutting thorns: “Just as in its time capitalism, as the more

progressive system, took the place of feudalism,” Khrushchev writes, “so will

capitalism be inevitably superseded by communism—the more progressive

system than the capitalist system.”375

371 Nikita S. Khrushchev, ‘On Peaceful Coexistence’ in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Oct., 1959), p. 1. 372 Ibid, p. 2. 373 Ibid, p.2; ibid, p 4; emphasis in original. 374 Ibid, p. 5. 375 Ibid, p. 7.

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Three years later, in the same journal, Philip E. Mosely condemned the Soviet

notion “of serving as a mere instrument of History” since it “justifies, in the minds

of its champions and supporters, a vast arrogance of self-righteousness.”376

Latent in the ostensibly equable call for coexistence, Mosely observes, is the

“flinty dogma of Communist fundamentalism” which hypocritically accuses its

“non-Communist partners-in-dialogue” of imperialism and preparing for (and thus

hastening) thermonuclear war: “the Soviet Union”, he argues,

has also been hard at work constructing horrendous weapons systems. Its leaders have, indeed, addressed blackmail notes to more than 30 governments, in which it has threatened their peoples specifically with nuclear destruction unless they abandon certain policies and postures of which Moscow disapproves.377

As such, for Mosely, “the pursuit of ‘peaceful coexistence’, in Moscow’s view,

must not lead to any slackening in the effort to reshape the rest of the world to

the Communist pattern”—it is, from the American perspective, the smiling face

of socialist world domination. 378 Throughout the 1950s and early-1960s,

American Cold War domestic policy sought to produce a consensus among its

citizens of the greatness of America against an incompatible foreign foe, like that

which constituted Garthoff’s tack. Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, there

persisted, in Mosely’s words, “a fierce patriotism, a defensive resentment of any

condescension on the part of foreigners, a strong pride in Soviet strength and

achievement”. 379 In 1960, President-elect Kennedy envisioned “national

greatness” across the “New Frontier” and pledged, in his 1961 inaugural address,

to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend,

376 Philip E. Mosely, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Oct., 1962), p. 36. 377 Ibid, p. 37. 378 Ibid, p. 38. 379 Ibid, p. 45.

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oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and success of liberty”. 380

Meanwhile, the Soviets, Mosely argues, were accepting their “messianic ideology

of Russia’s unique mission”.381 By the early 1960s, it appeared as though the

enduring standoff of suspicion, deception and mutually exclusive self-

aggrandisement could only devolve into a complete rejection of the pursuit of

peaceful coexistence.

In the middle of Khrushchev’s article, he repeats the dichotomy: “In our day there

are only two ways: peaceful coexistence or the most destructive war in history.

There is no third choice.”382 With hindsight, while there was no alternative choice,

there was an alternative outcome—the unexpected fall of the Soviet Union some

thirty years later. But to those living within the terms of this dichotomy, in the

early- to mid-1960s, the pressing actuality of the situation the term describes

would have been palpable. In general, peaceful coexistence was considered

ideally preferable to all-out thermonuclear warfare, but was it even possible when

both sides mistrusted and reneged on its very principles for the continuation of

self-preservation and global ascension, thus pushing that possibility farther away

in a vicious cycle? Is peaceful coexistence possible between two moralities that

are, in David Felix’s words, offering a nuanced, even-handed perspective in 1963,

“closed systems, unable to communicate with each other” since any “pragmatic

accommodation—coexistence—is an evil by definition”? 383 Is peaceful

coexistence not simply the oxymoronic continuation of an ideological struggle? Is

380 John F. Kennedy, ‘Inaugural Address’ from <https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations/Inaugural-Address.aspx>. 381 Mosely, p. 45. 382 Khrushchev, p. 7. 383 David Felix, ‘The Sense of Coexistence’ in The American Scholar, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter 1962-63), p. 76.

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peaceful coexistence possible between two highly territorialized, coded, and thus

antagonistic, assemblages? If there was no alternative choice outside

Khrushchev’s dichotomy, and if the less-evil choice is a self-defeating

impossibility, then would there be a different way of conceptualising the less-evil

choice, making it possible? What about a morally pragmatic deterritorialization of

combatively territorialized social assemblages that is predicated on the

conception of coexistence as an obligatory ontological fact?

3.7 Pragmatic Ethics

In Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (2006), Andrew

Epstein has written indispensably about the eclipsed, undervalued presence and

necessity of pragmatism in the mid-century American avant-garde as an

ingrained philosophical mode that “challenges foundationalism and absolutism,

emphasizes contingency, pluralism, and action, and espouses a version of

individualism that is both anti-essentialist and highly attuned to the social

dimension of selfhood.”384 It is a mode that both contrasts “the bleak creed of

existentialism” and bypasses the “rigid ideological positions, dogmatic certainty,

and unreflective partisanship” of the Cold War era.385 As pragmatists engaging

with (but not necessarily adhering to) Emersonian thought, as opposed to “die-

hard partisans, the New York School poets prefer[ed] to stay ‘aloof from all

mooring and afloat’, independent and non-committed.”386 By extension, their

“program”, to quote John Ashbery, recalling Oren Izenberg’s remark about an

384 Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies, p. 60. 385 Ibid, p. 60. 386 Ibid, p. 76.

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O’Hara “concordance”, “is the absence of any program.” 387 It amounts, in

Epstein’s words, to “an openness to chance and contingency, an unwillingness to

see any position as final or to settle into fixed patterns and responses, and an

independence from programs and systems.”388

The same goes for conceptions of the self. Epstein goes on to make a convincing

case for O’Hara’s early imbibition of “the heritage of Emerson” and Whitman (his

“great predecessor”) as the linchpin of his view of the self as essential protean in

a kind of “experimental individualism.”389 A single reading of one of his most

seminal poems, ‘In Memory of my Feelings’, in which the lyrical self transfigures

continually into “a number of naked selves”, substantiates this initial claim. But

what is more, and more in keeping with the lyrical self-less-ness of the poems of

The End of the Far West, Epstein stresses the conception of pragmatism that is

“predicated on the belief that the human self is thoroughly, crucially imbedded in

a matrix of interrelationships with other selves” and not consistent with the self-

reliant, strictly Emersonian individual.390 Restated in the parlance of assemblage

theory, the self constitutes an assemblage constituted by social assemblages

constituted, in turn, by historical processes. As a pragmatist, then, O’Hara’s

assemblage-poems function by virtue of what DeLanda, quoting Deleuze, calls

“relations of exteriority”—which “guarantee that assemblages may be taken apart

while at the same time allowing that interaction between parts may result in a

true synthesis”—and on the consequential premise that mutability of entities is

387 John Ashbery, quoted in Epstein, Beautiful Enemies, p. 78. 388 Ibid, p. 78. 389 Ibid, p. 63; ibid, p. 67; ‘Personism’, CP, p. 498. 390 Beautiful Enemies, p. 73.

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intrinsically possible.391 Thus, the conception of coexistence upon which they

operate makes deterritorialisation possible. (Not quite) in short, this model of

coexistence rejects commitment to Cold War America’s idealistic, execptionalist,

hegemonic, monomaniacally imperial doctrine of asserting a speciously

democratic individualism whose conception of the self is entrenched in an

ideology of cohesion and mastery, whose supposed inclusiveness is extended

only to those already welcomed or compliant, and whose privileged principle of

self-reliance operates analogously to the self-defeating Ahabic totalitarianism

latent in the logic of competitive, retributive self-preservation. In light of this, we

might add pragmatic, as Epstein conceives it, to pluralist in or formulation of

coexistence, giving us a mode of ethics that mobilizes what Adrienne Rich, in

reference to antiabortion rhetoric, calls the “scope and richness of moral choice”;

a mode of ethics, that is, in which the self is vulnerable, open to revision, self-

determined as much as socially-determined, but not ideologically coerced or

possessed.392

Take the sixth poem of The End of the Far West, ‘Should We Legalize Abortion?’,

in which O’Hara presents a discussion on the titular issue by a “group” of

legislators. In matters of bodily sovereignty, the satire suggests, notions of

legality and ostensibly “unscrupulous” moral decisions intersect at economic self-

mastery:

Now (again) at the present time

a rich person can always get an abortion

391 DeLanda, p. 11. 392 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, (1996), p. 5.

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In foreign policy and body politics alike, if re-territorialisation is desired (in the

eradication of an adverse ideology or the termination of a foetus), the primary

strategy requires an international venture: the economically able “can fly to Japan

/ or Sweden” regardless of whether the destination “like / the idea that an

American / would visit their country / just for an abortion!” But “what about the

patient?” one speaker interjects, signalling a distinction between the affluent,

who, etymologically, move freely, and the real subjects of discussion, the

patients, who, etymologically, suffer, bear and who, in the logic of self-reliance,

depend, rely. As for the latter, another speaker replies, “I think in the case where

/ a person has been raped or is insane / it definitely should be allowed”—if, in

other words, one’s self-reliance is so lacking because they are victim to another’s

self-mastery mutating into other-mastery or because self-reliance is

psychologically irrelevant, then the exercise of bodily sovereignty may be

sanctioned (if such a thing can be sanctioned without effecting its negation).

Indeed, one of these guardians of “the penal code”, who thus unwittingly reveals,

like in ‘The Green Hornet’, their patriarchal complicity via pun, divests the

hypothetical patient—is she no longer sexed, gendered, or is her womanhood

dependent precisely on her sexual availability?—of sovereignty altogether: “the

decision is not up / to the patient”. Thus, the patient should relinquish their

sovereignty to others—infallible lawmakers and the immaculate child—while,

paradoxically, practicing masculinized self-reliance by overcoming the

inevitabilities of corporeal vulnerability: “stop thinking about how / badly you’re

hurt… Stop coddling yourself”. In this vein, Rich observes that,

Typically, under patriarchy, the mother’s life is exchanged for the child; her autonomy as a separate being seems fated to conflict with the infant she will bear. The self-

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denying, self-annihilative role of the Good Mother (linked implicitly with suffering and the repression of anger) will spell “death” of the woman or girl who once had hopes, expectations, fantasies for herself—especially when those hopes and fantasies have never been acted-on. For a poor woman, or one who has only herself to depend on economically, the birth of the infant can imply another kind of death—a new liability in the struggle merely to survive.393

“You can do something about all this and I’m here to help / you do it!” one

speaker offers the woman afflicted with this apparently necessary crisis of self-

reliance. But the solution results in further subjugation: this self-appointed

saviour will start assistance by “getting your clothes off…”

Isabell Lorey’s critique of neoliberal governmental strategies as perpetuating

socio-economic precarity helps clarify this paradoxical process.

“Individualization,” Lorey writes, referring to the attendance to “one’s ‘own’ body,

life and self, and thus also one’s ‘own’ [existential] precariousness”, “is the

precondition for the Western liberal governing of everyone’s body and self:”

“Imaginary self-relations of this kind means that one’s own body is imagined as

the property of the self”, and as such, “the modern ‘free’ individual is forced to

participate in reproducing him or herself through powerful self-relations […] in

order to reduce precariousness.” 394 What Michel Foucault called

“governmentality” does not “consist”, for Lorey, “in being repressive, but rather

in an ‘internalized’ self-discipline, a mode of self-control that always serves to

regulate ‘one’s own’ precariousness.”395 It is precisely “in this simultaneity of

subjugation and freedom, of regulation and empowerment, that the

393 Rich, p. 116. 394 Isabel Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, trans. Aileen Derieg (London: Verso, 2015), p. 26; p. 27. 395 Ibid, p. 27.

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governmentality or self-governability of sovereign bourgeois subjects is

achieved.” 396 The poem fittingly ends, then, by enacting its own satirical

elucidation of the coercive trappings of an underhand chauvinist ideology of self-

reliance and… “What the… THERE’S NOBODY AT THE CONTROLS! Forget / we

ever met.” This very capsizing of authority (which I dramatize in that momentary

derailment of my own argument) constitutes a potent feminist critique of

masculine independence, but the discomfort affected by reading the poem, along

with the irony of the title, is not simply because the question—should we legalize

abortion?—remains unanswered; it is more likely because of the reader’s

encounter with the “we” who ask the question and who have the power to provide

a socio-politically actionable answer.

3.7.1 “My red friends / will pass among you”: Bearing Each Other’s Differences

As the above analysis hopes to have shown, O’Hara’s assemblage-poems

question notions of subjective “self-sufficiency, nonrelationality, and autonomy”,

to incorporate Louiza Odysseos’s thinking.397 For the fact that these concepts are

“instrumental in determining coexistence as the presence of units, in other words,

as a composition of otherwise nonrelational subjects” merely, the poems turn on

considerations of socio-political configuration in order to rethink coexistence.398

As Odysseos correspondingly argues,

coexistence can only be articulated through what might be called the ‘logic of composition.’ When being-with-others is

396 Ibid, pp. 32-33. 397 Louiza Odysseos, The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. xiii. 398 Ibid, p. xiii.

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understood solely as a composition of previously unrelated entities, the constitutive role of otherness in coexistence, and for self-hood itself, is obscured.399

Just as territorialisation tactics attempt to obscure the intrinsic heterogeneity of

an assemblage, this self-reliant individualism conceals the “heteronomous

constitution of selfhood.”400 Without this fundamental conception of selfhood and

social reality, the “logic of composition” leads the praxis of international relations

to exclude the constitutive element of the exterior—the other. In the Cold War

scenario specifically, “the notion of coexistence revolved exclusively around the

nexus of survival”, and as such, the international condition is one wherein “state

interaction allows for a sustained ideological struggle” and proxy wars.401

Thus, nonrelational coexistence persists through a combination of generalized

affinity and the immunisation and thus prevention of difference. “In a world in

which individuals who are naturally at risk confront one another in a competition

whose stakes are power and prestige,” Roberto Esposito argues,

the only way to avoid a catastrophic outcome is to institute among them sufficient distance so as to immunize each from everyone else. Against every communitarian temptation, the public sphere is where men and women enter into relation in the form of their disassociation.402

Of course, Esposito ultimately questions whether “immunization may also be

propelled to immunize itself from itself in order to breach, or the time, of

community”, but this question remains emphatically open—a utopian horizon.403

399 Ibid, p. xiii. 400 Ibid, p. xiii. 401 Ibid, p. xvi. 402 Roberto Esposito, ‘Immunitary Democracy’ in Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, trans. Riannon Noel Welch (New York, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), p. 40. 403 Ibid, p. 46.

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Throughout the first half of the Cold War in America, the logic of immunisation

was pronounced, manifesting as McCarthyite containment. Espionage loomed in

the national discourse in the late 1940s, a virus that enabled the pervasive

decontamination of ostensibly threatening difference—communism. Since

espionage functions covertly, communist allegiance materialised culturally, most

often ethnically: the virus expresses itself externally. For the House of Un-

American Activities Committees, for instance, radicalism and Jewishness

intersected on account of an ostensibly shared eastern-European extraction. Anti-

Semitic conspiracies over Jewish monopolising of banks and press control

extended to the debasing of national consciousness and morality through

entertainment. Blacklisting expunged Hollywood of suspected communists and

radicals by way of Jews. To quote ‘The Shoe Shine Boy’, the final poem of The

End of the Far West, the credo here is: “Never love a stranger.”

The clearest indicator that the central concern of this poem is precisely the

immunological deterrent of difference comprising nonrelational coexistence is its

dedication to the memory of John Garfield, the Jewish actor whose death in 1952

proceeded his blacklisting a year earlier. If so, the assemblage-poem immerses

the reader into a scene of interaction composed by the very condition persecuting

Garfield. As in ‘At the Bottom…’ the reader enters the voicescape via the

appointment of an assignment—“Jimmy I got an errand for you”—and then

vicariously partakes in anti-Semitic gossip (“Being a Jew turned him bitter / before

his time”), bosses’ orders (“I just don’t want one of my boys looking / like a

bum”) and what appears to be a mistress’ (or possibly a prostitute’s) declaration

of loyalty (“I’ve never been anyone’s girl but yours, Frankie! / and though we

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kissed a thousand times we were strangers still”). Each interaction hinges on the

fraught power dynamics of a dominance hierarchy, of an obligation, in the

contexts of romance or labour. Awareness of our location is delayed until one

speaker asks, “why did you take me to this restaurant?” This orientating device,

which disclosed the saloon in ‘At the Bottom…’, configures the site of the

preceding interactions: a restaurant for dealings, rendezvous, machinations,

which most probably, because of the dedication, revolve around the film industry.

But what’s more, in much the same way that orientation in ‘At the Bottom…’ gave

way to a kind of thematic trigger (“I think it’s disgusting in this saloon which / is

so much like the rest of America”), our emplacement in this showbiz haunt is

followed by a question that unveils the poem’s thematic crux and that, like the

tripartite synecdochical saloon-senate-nation relation, casts the restaurant as a

synecdoche of the film industry. Thus, once located from one speaker asking the

reason for another’s choosing this restaurant for their conference, another asks,

“Is it because / you’re a Jew?”

This othering forms the organising principle of the social assemblage that the

assemblage-poem discloses; the processes of territorialisation via political

affiliation and, by prejudicial extension, Jewishness, as in Hollywood during the

Red Scare, operate within and against the poem, but the poem itself, in its very

dialogic, relational form, which incorporates the reader as eavesdropper and

interlocutor, constructs and enacts a deterritorialised diagram of the social

condition to which it responds. The poem does this by repurposing the logic used

to sustain immunisation of the other in nonrelational coexistence. Promptly the

restaurant becomes a coterie space, territorialised, conversely, by coalitions of

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the persecuted seeking preservation, as one speaker supports “Moishe

Moscowitz” who “never squealed on anyone in his whole life”. Injecting the

territorialised social assemblage with the difference against which the social

assemblage is territorialised, through coterie formations, paradoxically produces

an assemblage-poem whereby relational coexistence becomes possible.

Employing coterie for the sake of coexistence exercises the kind of pragmatic

ethics mentioned above. Recognising, by way of the assemblage-poem, that “My

Red friends will / pass among you” serves to open up an ethical space through

which difference can be borne, in all possible senses—displayed, communicated,

supported, sustained, brought forth.

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CHAPTER FOUR Towards Relational Poetics 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Participatory Art and Biopolitics 4.3 Relational Aesthetics and Psychopolitics 4.4 Relational Poetics

4.1 Introduction The transition from assemblage to environment performance art practices in the

late 1950s and early 1960s hinged on the everydayness of the junk art aesthetic

and bricolage process of the former practice. In 1962, anthropologist Claude

Lévis-Strauss defined bricolage as a “science of the concrete”; the bricoleur, he

theorized, “‘speaks,’ not only with things […] but also through things.” 404

Following Duchamp’s readymades and Dada collage, the act of gleaning and

assembling everyday materials from the extra-studio world produced what

performance art practitioner and theorist Alan Kaprow called a “new concrete

art”, which, through its repurposing of used, discarded “junk”, critically engaged

with the daily deeds of the “new consumer subjects” and the accelerated

commodification of late-capitalist life. 405 Thus, as Anna Dezeuze notes,

assemblage is best conceived “as a model of engagement with the world rather

404 Lévis-Strauss, p. 21. 405 Allan Kaprow, ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, p. 9; Anna Dezeuze, ‘Assemblage’, p. 32. The contrast between the gathering and assembling of assemblage and junk art and the cutting and pasting of collage is worth highlighting here if only to stresses the distinct connotations of each act of recuperation. Where collage proper effectively performed the violent dispersal occasioned by WW1 within its recuperative and reorganizing act, the similarly mordant practices involved in assemblage and junk art seems, to my mind, less traumatic or at least galvanized by anguish; to me, assemblage connotes nostalgia and is more motivated by convalescence, by the momentary victory over precariousness in the inversion of hierarchies of value.

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than as a formal category.”406 While the resident aesthetic barometer for this

study Frank O’Hara primarily attended to the Abstract Expressionism that

occupied his curatorial work at MoMA in the 1950s and 1960s, his belief that the

closer art got to “life-giving vulgarity” the better, and his “hope [for] the poem

to be the subject, not just about it”, does still articulate the contemporaneous

“dematerialization of the art object” and the growing preponderance of event-

art.407

In the seismic wake of Abstract Expressionist action painting, plastic assemblage

correspondingly employed methodologies emphasising process over product,

much like O’Hara and other poets related to The New York School, but

assemblage, as Lucy L. Lippard remarks, introduced more interactive modes “in

which new relations between art and the everyday could be articulated.”408 The

everyday, in this case, emphasised materiality, corporeality; as a result, the

distinction between art object and raw thing, between aesthetic experience and

daily life, dissolved. Indeed, around the time Robert Rauschenberg made the last

of his Combines, in 1964, Paul Thek and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s plaster and

wax moulds of their own faces, arms and legs—in Meat Pieces (1964) and

Breathing Machine (1965) respectively—(quite literally) recast the body itself as

constituting an art object, simultaneously highlighting the crude thingness of

bodies and (quite literally) incorporating the body itself (as opposed to its inert

replication in sculptural and pictorial mimesis) into art practice. Thek and

Hershman Lesson marked a reconceptualization of the body, not as a subject for

406 Dezeuze, ‘Assemblage’, p. 31. 407 O’Hara, CP, p. 499; ibid, p. 497. Lucy L. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. iii. 408 Dezeuze, ‘Assemblage’, p. 33.

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representation or the given constituent in the mechanics of art production, but

as a material potentially constituting art itself.

Of course, art practices had been using bodies as a medium and persons as form

since the Italian Futurists, through Bauhaus in the 1920s to the Happenings and

Fluxus performance pieces in the late 1950s, but the 1960s saw a shift from

conceiving the active body as a performative agent for the artists themselves,

who were defined by their distinction from a non-artistic audience, to a kind of

raw material found in the non-art environment. In 1966, a year before Roland

Barthes declared “the death of the Author”, Kaprow envisioned the elimination of

audiences.409 Reflecting on the emergence and development of Happenings and

Environment works in New York, he wrote:

When a work is performed on a busy avenue, passers-by will ordinarily stop and watch, just as they might watch the demolition of a building. These are not theatre-goers and their attention is only temporarily caught in the course of their normal affairs. They might stay, perhaps become involved in some unexpected way, or they will more likely move on after a few minutes. Such persons are authentic parts of the environment.410

In the same year, Hélio Oiticica, whose bricolage-caped samba dances were

erupting in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, conceived his own definition of

“‘environment art’: the eternally mobile, the transformable, which is structured

by both the action of the spectator and that which is static.” The “structural

spaces” in which these Parangolés take place is “free both to the participation

409 Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London, UK: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 148. 410 Allan Kaprow, ‘Notes on the Elimination of the Audience’ in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (London: Whitechapel & MIT Press, 2006), p. 104.

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and to the creative inventions of spectators.”411 Thus, for Oiticica, his practice

constituted a “‘total participatory creation’ – to which would be added works

created through the anonymous participation of the spectators, who actually

would be better described as ‘participants’.” In such work, the deliquescence of

the boundaries separating creator and beholder, object and event, even art and

everyday life, effectively recalibrates zones of public place, with their regulations

and exclusivities, as shareable spaces where, through mutual interaction, the

boundaries separating self and other become similarly unstuck and the act of

entering a moment of radically non-agonistic sociality of persons becomes

possible. Indeed, for Guy Debord, “the point” of replacing the “spectacle” of the

static mimetic work with a “constructed situation” is precisely “to discover

others.”412

By 1968, as Claire Bishop notes, the participatory art practices of Kaprow,

Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and of the Situationist Internationale, to name a few

practitioners and theorists, became intensely “politicized […] in many

countries.”413 Debord’s venerated critique of the consumer-capitalist “spectacle”,

which is “by definition immune from human activity” and amounts to “the

opposite of dialogue” in an “empire of modern passivity”, provided the theoretical

underpinnings for ambush or trick Happenings that rejected Kaprow’s rule for

“mutual respect” between both informed and unwitting participants and even

411 Hélio Oiticica, ‘Dance in my Experience (Diary Entries)’ in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (London: Whitechapel & MIT Press, 2006), p. 108. 412 Guy Debord, ‘Towards a Situationist Internationale’ in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (London: Whitechapel & MIT Press, 2006), p. 101. 413 Claire Bishop, Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (London: Whitechapel & MIT Press, 2006), p. 117.

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enacted the “latent sadism” he deemed “destructive to the work”. 414 Take

Graciela Carnevale’s project in The Experimental Art Cycle series, based in

Rosario, Argentina:

The work consists of first preparing a totally empty room, with totally empty walls; one of the walls, which was made of glass, had to be covered in order to achieve a suitably neutral space for the work to take place. In this room the participating audience, which has come together by chance for the opening, has been locked in. The door has been hermetically closed without the audience being aware of it. I have taken prisoners. The point is to allow people to enter and to prevent them from leaving. Here the work comes into being and these people are the actors. There is no possibility of escape, in fact the spectators have no choice; they are obliged, violently, to participate.415

The point in this case is less to engender and promote sociality in spite of the

alienating and passive-making processes of consumer capitalism than to

disillusion participants cruelly (in the Artaudian sense) about the extent of their

agency vis-à-vis the coercive and subjugating facets of such processes in order

to “provoke” (or, perhaps hypocritically, oxymoronically, coerce) “resistance”.416

This “social turn” in the art of the 1960s, which participatory practices both

engendered and enacted, has been inevitably associated with and served as a

vehicle, agent and representative for the contemporaneous movements of radical

left, utopian politics.417 Bishop employs this framework in her contextualisation

of 1960s participatory art and the resurgence of participatory practices and

curatorial theory in the 1990s, which reflect, in her words, “the last heroic stand”

414 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1994), p. 17; ibid, p. 15. 415 Graciela Carnevale, ‘Project for the Experimental Art Series, Rosario’ in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (London: Whitechapel & MIT Press, 2006), p. 117. 416 Ibid, pp. 117-8. 417 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells (London: Verso, 2012), p. 3.

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and “collapse of a collectivist vision of society” respectively. 418 Somewhat

misleadingly, Bishop seems to imply some kind of allegiance in these works to

collectivism, or at least the notion that collectivism is speaking through the works,

which ultimately serves to homogenise their political preoccupations. Suffice it to

say, for art to critique or even blatantly oppose capitalist alienation and a society

of the spectacle with a social turn is not necessarily to affirm collectivism. If

participatory art extends from plastic assemblage and operates analogously with

the assemblage configurations that Manuel DeLanda conceives, as I have

suggested in Chapter Two, then the relation and structure between individual

and collective is various at any given point within a performance, its conception

and its consequences, and as such, the most that can be said of such works is

that they tend toward enacting a collectivist ideal sometimes. When Kaprow says,

“I think it is a mark of mutual respect that all persons involved in a Happening

be willing and committed participants who have a clear idea of what they do”

which “is accomplished by writing out the scenario or score for all and discussing

it thoroughly with them beforehand” and resembles “the preparations for a

parade, a football match, a wedding or religious service”, there is an inclination

toward a democratic ideal, and this immediately problematizes the all-too-neat

mapping of participatory works onto the history of collectivist thought.419

For this reason, Bishop’s contextualisation yields a skeletal narrative. An

alternative narrative might integrate the concomitance of shifts in the state of

collectivist visions with the development of what Foucault calls “technologies of

418 Ibid, p. 3. 419 Kaprow, ‘Notes’ in Participation, p. 103.

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power” in relation to the dominant modes of production, consumption and

governance, from the biopolitics and “disciplinary”, oppositional power of 1960s

liberalist regimes to the “psychopolitics” and “psycho-power” of post-1980s

neoliberalism, and thus one’s participation in society, one’s freedom, and the

conditions and processes of sociality itself—which may or may not extend a

collectivist ideology.420 The most conclusive statement I would make about what

connects these works across a three-decade interlude is not so much their

political commitments than what Nicolas Bourriaud terms the “coexistence

criterion”—that is, they “induce models of sociability” within “the sphere of inter-

human relations” by giving “the viewer a chance to complement them.”421 From

this common conceptual baseline, concretised by the shared hypothesis that

takes “the sphere of human relations as site for the artwork”, what participation

signifies in each period is substantially dissimilar, despite their correspondingly

“democratic” forms.422

With that in mind, this final chapter will take up these practices in more detail to

construct a springboard from which I can formulate a corresponding poetics that

itself extends from O’Hara’s assemblage-poems. If O’Hara is present in this

chapter, it is mostly spectral, but this should not detract from the implicit effort

this chapter makes to situate O’Hara within a lineage of aesthetics and a history

of economics which nevertheless postdate him. In many respects, then, let this

chapter serve as a kind of epilogue appending (with an additional sight to fulfilling

the potential immanent in) the assemblage-poems of The End of the Far West,

420 Michael C. Behrent, ‘Foucault and Technology’ in History and Technology: An International Journal, Vol. 29 (2013), p. 57. 421 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p. 43; ibid, p. 109. 422 Ibid, p. 109.

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in much the same way that plastic assemblage gave way to participatory art as

postwar liberal economics began to give way to neoliberal regimes in the latter

half the twentieth century.

4.2 Participatory Art and Biopolitics

In the north-western hemisphere, crises of geopolitical enmity defined the mid-

twentieth century. This precipitated oppositional governmental assertions of

sovereignty and exceptionalism with regimes of disciplinary regulation to

preserve and legitimise these assertions. The ideological struggles of the Cold

War served both as backdrop and framework for a pervasive condition of what

Byung-Chul Han calls an “immunological defence against the Other, or the

Enemy”.423 As Foucault proposed in his lectures on “biopolitics”, the “technologies

of power” employed by industrialist, liberalist regimes were designed to ensure

consensus about demography and ideological affiliation, and to yoke the body

“into a system of norms” comprising reproductive cycles, miscegenation,

consumption and labour.424 In the United States, for instance, McCarthyism

manifested this condition most explicitly by efforts to decontaminate and

conserve institutions of confinement—“the family, schools, prisons, barracks,

hospitals” and the workplace—with doctrines of surveillance, vigilantism, and

containment. 425 As discussed in Chapter Three, O’Hara’s assemblage-poems

were writing against this condition.

423 Han, p. 36. 424 Ibid, p. 20. 425 Ibid, p. 17.

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For Foucault, though, technology referred to “methods and procedures for

governing human beings”; he said little, as Michael C. Behrent observes, “about

technology in its broadest and most conventional sense.” 426 Conversely, for

Marshal McLuhan, technology was very much the point. In Understanding Media

(1964, the ubiquitous year in this study, the year O’Hara finished The End of the

Far West), McLuhan argues that the emergence and expansion of electrical

technology, which induced more immediate and pervasive modes of media and

information dissemination that “create a passive communicative situation”, as

Boris Groys interprets, functions in tandem with the processes of governmental

power.427 During “the cold war of information exchange”, in which “electrical

persuasion works […] by dunking entire populations into new imagery”, John F.

Kennedy, “an excellent TV image”, emblematized the glamour and sophistication

a mass consumer economy offered its citizens while broadcasting exceptionalist

rhetoric ahead of a combative expansion of armament.428 With the form of the

medium itself constituting its cultural impact—i.e. “the medium is the message”—

and with TV constituting a passive, “cold” mode of communicative interaction—

as opposed to a “hot”, attention-demanding medium, like print—the citizen is

compelled to passively participate in that which the TV broadcasts.429 In the

1960s in America, this amounts to global transmissions of Kennedy’s speeches

on “national prestige” and opportunities for interventionist democracy abroad,

myth-making replays of his assassination and the moon landing, as well as

426 Behrent, p. 55. 427 Boris Groys, ‘A Genealogy of Participatory Art’ in The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, eds. Rudolf Frieling, Boris, Groys, Robert Atkins, Lev Manovich (San Francisco, CA: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008), p. 30. 428 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 370; ibid, p. 367; Allen J. Matusow, The Unravelling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1984), p. 18. 429 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 7.

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pervasive advertisements.430 Thus: a consumer economy and an execptionalist

ideology that exacerbates social inequality and condones international conflict in

the name of national prosperity.

As Lizbeth Cohen observes in ‘A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass

Consumption in Postwar America’, the “postwar order deemed, then, that the

good customer devoted to ‘more, newer, and better’ was in fact the good citizen,

responsible for making the United States a more desirable place for all its

people.”431 Housing construction

provided the bedrock of the postwar mass consumption economy, both through turning ‘home’ into an expensive commodity for purchase by many more consumers than ever before and by stimulating demanded for related commodities, such as cars, appliances, and furnishings. […] This explosion of the private real estate market was made possible by a mixed economy of private enterprise bolstered by government subsidy—in the form of mortgage guarantees with low interest rates. […] The federal government assisted as well through granting mortgage interest deductions on income taxes, a mass tax since World War II, and constructing highways from cities out to the farmland that overnight was being transformed into vast suburban tract developments.432

Home ownership enhanced “the status of suburbanites over urbanites” but, more

specifically,

through their greater access to home mortgages, credit, and tax advantages, men benefitted over women, whites over blacks, and middle-class Americans over working-class ones. Men, for example, secured low VA mortgages, and the additional credit that home ownership made available as a result of their veteran status in World War II and the Korean War, while women generally did not. White

430 ‘Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, “The New Dimensions of American Foreign Policy,” November 1, 1957’ from <https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/university-of-pennsylvania-19571101>. 431 Lizabeth Cohen, ‘A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America’, in Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 31 (June, 2004), p. 237. 432 Ibid, p. 237.

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Americans more easily qualified for mortgages, including those dispensed through the GI Bill, which worked through existing—and consistently discriminatory—banking institutions, and more readily found suburban houses to buy than African Americans could.433

Marketers and advertisers in the 1950s reinforced this “economic and social

stratification” by “segmenting the market into distinctive submarkets based on

gender, class, age, race, ethnicity, and lifestyle.” 434 In the 1960s, then,

“politicians and campaign managers began to apply the techniques of market

segmentation to the political sphere”. 435 Thus, the technologies of power

operative in this time underwrote and relied on both commodity acquisition and

interaction with media.

O’Hara tackles the resultant social tensions of this situation in ‘Here in New York

We Are Having a Lot of Trouble with the World’s Fair’, the fourth poem in The

End of the Far West. The “trouble” here most likely refers, as Lawrence R. Samuel

reports in The End of Innocence: The 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, to the

fact that “Groups of demonstrators—chanting slogans, singing songs, and sitting

in front of pavilion entrances—had gathered at dozens of different locations on

the grounds” of the fair protesting two points: first, what O’Hara himself, in a

letter to Larry Rivers, called “a horrible cleanup [sic]” of “All the queer bars” in

preparation for the fair; and second, as National Director of the Congress of Racial

Equality James Farmer, who “stopped at the Louisiana Pavilion, to which he

carried a three-foot electric cattle prod and a sign saying that such a device was

used on Negroes in that state”, affirms, “the melancholy contrast between the

433 Ibid, p. 237. 434 Ibid, p. 238. 435 Ibid, p. 238.

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idealized, fantasy world of the Fair and the real world of brutality, prejudice, and

violence in which the American Negro is forced to live.”436 Of course this depends

upon who speaks the title—attendee, or organiser—since “the Fair was officially

about ‘peace through understanding’ [my italics]”.437 Indeed, Samuel notes, “This

new Fair, [as] executives believed, represented an unprecedented opportunity to

build goodwill among tens of millions of consumers from all around the world”

and that, more generally, the “world’s fairs were assigned the grander cultural

role to shore up Americans’ faith in a consumer-based society” where, the

argument went, all consumers were born equally.438 However, from the converse

perspective, as one speaker in ‘Here we Are…’ contends, “If every Negro in New

York / cruised over the Fair / in his fan-jet plane / and ran out of fuel”—

presumably because of its asymmetrical scarcity—“the World / would really learn

something about the affluent / society.” Here, the economic inequality of the

social stratification of market segmentation underpinning the fair has dystopian

potential as “The Shakespeare Gardens in / Central Park / glisten with blood”,

but it nevertheless sustains itself, as ‘Here we are…’ ultimately suggests, through

the self-interested logics of consumption and the pacifying spectacle of its media

apparatuses: despite this “trouble”, the perspectives find a passive consensus in

an agglomerated plural as

We are happy here

facing the multiscreens of the IBM Pavilion. We pay a lot for our entertainment.

436 Lawrence R. Samuel, The End of Innocence: The 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2007), p. 34; quoted in Gooch p. 424; quoted in Samuel, The End of Innocence, p. 34. 437 Ibid, p. 11. 438 Ibid, p. xx; ibid, p. 92.

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Such tensions resonated across generic lines. In 1969, Boston’s public television

station WGBH invited six artists—Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright,

Thomas Tadlock, Aldo Tambellini, and Allan Kaprow—to contribute experimental

video pieces for the thirty-minute compilation program The Medium is the

Medium; the artists were asked, as cultural executive producer David Oppenheim

says at the beginning of the program, to “explore television”. 439 Kaprow’s

segment, Hello, connected five cameras and twenty-seven TV monitors in remote

locations across the Boston area, from studios at WGBH to MIT to a hospital to

Boston airport to an children’s school library. Kaprow described Hello for Art-Rite

magazine four years later:

A group of participants at each place watched their monitors and when anyone saw someone they knew they called out Hello! (speaking the name of the person) I see you! The engineers in the control room at WGBH, which was also one of the sites, had the additional job of randomly switching the sound and picture signals to all four sites. Thus one of the monitors at site A might get audio but no video image, two monitors at site B might have video but no audio, while C and D got normal transmission for a few minutes on all monitors. Audio and video might be divided between sites so that friends might hear but not see each other and vice-versa.440

But this is Hello the action, not Hello the video from The Medium is the Medium,

which was edited down to a six-minute documentation of the action comprising

various participants announcing the sight of another participation—“I see you!”—

or failing therein—“I hear you bud I don’t see you now! Bob! Bob?”441 As Kaprow

recounts, the action itself contained both instances of one-way observation and

interaction amidst the cacophony of aleatory transmissions:

439 Quoted in, James A. Nadeau, The Medium is the Medium: the Convergence of Video, Art and Television at WGBH (1969), MSc thesis, from <https://cmsw.mit.edu/the-medium-is-the-medium/>. 440 Allan Kaprow, Art-Rite (Autumn, 1974), p. 17. 441 Quoted in The Art of Participation, p. 102.

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a father cried out deploringly to his child to take notice and like everyone else who was able to connect for a moment was overjoyed when the girl’s thin voice called out Daddy. The child seemed more interested in the blocks she was playing with. One woman tried to tell her friend she liked her own face on TV. It was all very human and very silly.442

For Kristine Stiles and Edward A. Shanken, this conflation of connection and

disconnection drives the impact of Hello: the experiment “offered a critique of

the disruptive manner by which technology mediates interaction”; it

“metaphorically short-circuited the television network, thereby calling attention

to the connections made between actual people.”443 Indeed, Hello attempts, as

it were, in McLuhan’s parlance, to warm up the medium—to recalibrate the social

awareness that the medium shapes. In keeping with the program’s title, which

loops McLuhan’s locution into a tautology laying ground for new potential, Hello

attempts to repurpose the medium itself as facilitating, in Kaprow’s words, the

situation of “oneself in connection with someone else”—a social relation.444

While Hello the video fails to capture the sociological complexities involved in

Hello the action, the video does visually elaborate on the action by ending with a

curious gesture to geopolitical events. One of the final shots of the video is of

Earth as seen from Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to leave Earth’s gravity

and orbit the moon, which took place four months before Hello the action. In the

penultimate shot, the last letter of the title, “Hello”, overlaps with an image of

the moon. As James Nadeau points out, “[w]ithin the timeframe of Hellos [sic]

442 Kaprow, Art-Rite, p. 18. 443 Kristine Stiles & Edward A. Shanken, ‘Missing in Action: Agency and Meaning in Interactive Art’ in Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, eds. Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), p. 39. 444 Quoted in Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (1970), p. 344 from <http://www.vasulka.org/Kitchen/PDF_ExpandedCinema/book.pdf>.

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creation and its broadcast NASA conducted two Apollo missions,” the latter

mission serving as a test for “the lunar module in preparation for the actual moon

landing”, which would take place four months after Hello was broadcast.445

Though Nadeau is right to contextualise Hello in relation to televised NASA

events, reading the post-production inclusion of the moon in Hello as an

optimistic belief on Kaprow’s part that “technology would bring people together”

renders the reading itself naively optimistic. The notion that “Kaprow envisioned

Hello as doing the same” because “television brought people together for

significant events like NASA missions” doesn’t follow if we accept that Hello in

fact stages a critique of the medium as an apparatus for forming ideological

consensus and contributing through its centrality in a consumer economy, as

described above, to demographic stasis and socioeconomic inequality.446

Regardless, if Kaprow did indeed envisage some emancipatory potential in TV,

this potential isn’t predicated on contemporaneous functions of the medium—

that is, to passively participate in the acceleration of a mass consumer economy

and the institution of national myths of supremacy—but rather on the radically

repurposed function that Hello actually enacts. In fact, by situating the action in

sites of institutional regulation, discipline and confinement—a school, a hospital,

a workplace, and that which contains the very borders of the nation state, the

airport—Hello necessitates a bodily participation in social relations that operates

in contravention of the biopolitics that such institutions sustain.

445 Nadeau, The Medium is the Medium, p. 61. 446 Ibid, p. 61.

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4.3 Relational Aesthetics and Psychopolitics

Participation in the performance and installation art of the post-1980s, on the

other hand, deals with distinct technologies of power altogether. Where, as Han

argues, the disciplinary regimes of liberalism “discovered ‘population’ as a

productive and reproductive mass to be administered carefully” via media and

institutional norms (“disciplinary power is normative power” for it “subjects the

subject to a set of rules—norms, commandments and prohibitions—and

eliminates deviations and anomalies”), neoliberalism coerces through liberation:

“[t]he neoliberal technology of power does not prohibit, protect or repress;

instead, it prospects, permits and projects.”447 Indeed, under neoliberalism, “we

do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always

refashioning and reinventing ourselves.” 448 As a consequence, this project,

“deeming itself free of external and alien limitations,” subjugates “itself to internal

limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive

achievement and optimization.” 449 The processes of free market capitalism

operate concurrently with doctrines of the liberated individual “responsible for

their lot”, who, confronted with failure, redundancy, dismissal, poverty, etc., will

“feel shame instead of questioning society”.450 Thus, neoliberal power works not

on the body, but rather on the psyche: “[m]otivation, projects, competition,

optimization and initiative represent the features of the psychopolitical

technology of domination that constitutes the neoliberal regime.”451 Such power

447 Han, p. 21; ibid, p. 20; ibid, p. 38. 448 Ibid, p. 1. 449 Ibid, p. 1. 450 Ibid, p. 6. 451 Ibid, p. 18.

534

organizes itself in the individual as feelings of guilt, anxiety and inadequacy

against the axiom of self-optimisation.

This constitutes what Foucault, in the early 1980s, termed “the technology of the

self”: neoliberalism “ensures that individuals act on themselves so that power

relations are interiorized—and then interpreted as freedom.”452 The correlative

economic paradigm is predicated on the notion of the deregulated, self-regulating

market that Friedrich von Hayek reinvigorated, Milton Friedman developed as

well as substantiated, and, in the United States, President Reagan embraced and

implemented as trickle-down economics, which operated under the assumption

that economic growth depends upon the thesis that reduced taxation on private

income and business frees up capital for private investment and thus tax revenue

surpluses.453 However, as we have since learned from the 2008 crash, financial

deregulation of this magnitude only produces an escalation of financial risks

whose “unwinding”, as Manfred B Steger and Ravi K. Roy note, serves to push

“the global economy into debt deflation that, ultimately, could only be countered

by government debt inflation.”454 Thus, in “the absence of a cooperative financial

and monetary system”, the “illusion of risk-free profits and licenced profligacy

through speculative finance” leads to tremendous economic volatility and,

eventually, crisis, resulting in the necessities of widespread debt economies and

the initiation of the creditor-debtor relation from government to government,

452 Ibid, pp. 27-28. 453 Manfred B. Steger & Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 24. 454 Ibid, p. 133.

535

government to business, government to citizen, business to citizen, and finally

citizen to citizen.455

In this system, Deleuze observed, after Foucault, the liberated entrepreneurial

self is no longer “a [wo/]man enclosed but a [wo/]man in debt.”456 Indeed, as

Maurizio Lazzarato has argued in his formulation of the “indebted” subject, “[t]he

dedication, subjective motivation, and the work on the self preached by

management since the 1980s becomes an injunction to take upon oneself the

costs and risks of economic and financial disaster.”457 For Lazzarato, neoliberal

subjectivation hinges on a logic of debt and that, under neoliberalism, “the

paradigm of the social lies not in exchange (economic and/or symbolic) but in

credit.”458 Debt unites the political, the social, and the economic “within a single

apparatus” built upon and galvanising asymmetric power relations and moralities

of guilt, obligation and entitlement.459 With the indebted subject at “the heart of

neoliberal strategy”, participation in neoliberal society transforms individuals into

debtors—“indebted consumers, indebted welfare users, and, finally, in the case

with Greece [today], indebted citizens”—who are divested of the capacity to

effect genuinely emancipatory change in society and both the working and social

conditions of their lives.460

455 UNCTAD Secretariat Task Force on Systemic Issues and Economic Cooperation, Report on The Global Economic Crisis: Systemic Failures and Multilateral Remedies (New York: United Nations, 2009), p. iii. 456 Giles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ in October, Vol. 59 (Winter, 1992), p. 4. 457 Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (South Pasadena, CA: semiotext(e), 2012), p. 9; emphasis in original. 458 Ibid, p. 11. 459 Ibid, p. 162. 460 Ibid, p. 38.

536

It is precisely against the logic and modalities of debt as a neoliberal technology

of power that Rirkrit Tiravanija and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ participatory,

“relational” art operates. Take, firstly, Tiravanija’s untitled (free) (first staged

1992), in which Tiravanija converted the exhibition space of 303 Gallery in New

York into a kitchen/restaurant where he cooked and served Thai curry with

jasmine rice for free. For Tiravanija, untitled (free), replicates the dissolution of

category distinctions between art and everyday life that participatory practice

retains from bricolage and assemblage: as he considers it,

the work is a platform for people to interact with the work itself but also with each other. A lot of it is about a kind of experiential relationship, so you actually are not really looking at something but you are within it. You are a part of it. The distance between the artist, the art, and the audience gets a bit blurred.461

But what is indeed more, the model of sociality constructed by untitled (free)

employs a kind of affective nonreciprocal gift economy that inverts the

asymmetrical power relations comprising the logic of debt intrinsic to commodity

consumption. This transaction is completed by sustenance alone (if a transaction

per se ever commences at all), not exchange or remuneration, which short

circuits transactional debt relations and their undergirding threat of violence via

forms of punishment or exile, and thus, in a general sense, this pseudo-

transaction reconfigures future time with energised possibility instead of

restricted obligation. In other words, the physically consumptive gift momentarily

divests sustenance of expense and returns possession of the immediate future to

the recipients of sustenance without interest. The only currency untitled (free)

allows—I would not even go as far as to say the work accepts, even less expects,

461 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Audio about untitled (free/still) in <https://www.moma.org/collection/works/147206>.

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any kind of payment—defies the physic cost of guilt in debt relations and

bypasses the necessity of transferable, exchangeable value, instead employing

socio-emotional value. This currency, in a word, is gratitude.

Gonzalez-Torres’ candy piece Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) (Fig. 11),

which consists of a spill of candies individually wrapped in multicoloured

cellophane in the corner of a given room, similarly requires a participants’

consumptive interaction to mobilise the work. In approximating the healthy

weight (175lb) of Gonzalez-Torres’ lover Ross Laycock before he died of AIDS-

related complications in the same year, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)

conceives bodily presence itself as a momentary gift. As it transpires over a day,

with participants consuming the work, the weight of the abstraction reduces,

replaying the deterioration of Laycock and foregrounding the realities of

mortality, finitude and entropy that oppose the self-reproductive properties of

Fig. 11: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA), 1991; candies individually wrapped in multicolour cellophane, endless supply, dimensions vary with installation, ideal weight 175 lbs.; view of the work. © and courtesy of The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

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capital via debt. On one hand, in receiving the gift via consumption, the

participant willingly engages in an approximation of the process that brought

about Laycock’s diminishment and performs an act of complicity in

contemporaneous crises of representation of gay sexuality and the Reagan

government’s neglect to recognise and attend to the AIDS epidemic. On the other

hand, the consumptive act allows the work to regenerate through an assimilative,

incorporative transubstantiation that, in turn, allows it to escape its aesthetic

property, to dispossess its commodification as an art object/event (the spill is

shaped by but ultimately reshapes the exhibition space corner as a potent

lacuna), and, with recuperative irony, to perpetuate virally through a communion

predicated not on cannibalistic exploitation or guilt (a modality of debt qua

obligation) but rather on a commemorative gesture of solidarity.

To come full circle, finally, the problematisation of the creditor-debtor relation

integral to the neoliberal program, via refusal or frustration in the cases of

Tiravanija and Gonzalez-Torres respectively, operates incipiently in O’Hara’s

assemblage-poems. The relation recurs throughout The End of the Far West.

Indeed, it is the very first relation presented, in the first line of ‘At the Bottom of

the Dump There’s Some Sort of Bugle’: “No matter where I send you remember

/ you’re still working for me.” In ‘The Jade Madonna’, the penultimate poem, the

asymmetrical relation between owner and non-owner of capital, which forms debt

economies, intermixes with the commodification of property and the

disproportionate access to financial assistance between classes, races and

genders of the liberal postwar consumer economy. A brief dialogue that forms

the poem’s turn dramatizes a shift from the predominance of current to fixed

539

assets: “I got $820. $820? Yeah dollars. I kind of like having property.” The

typographic give-away of the “$”, which allows the reader knowledge of what the

number refers to before the property owner is told, serves to position the reader

outside the central processes of this economy, and thus, in relation to those who

occupy the same position—women, racial and sexual minorities, and non-

veterans. Again, the immersive process of the assemblage-poem incorporates

the reader in a social relation with specific socio-economic implications in order

to disclose the contemporaneous reality of those implications. “Possession is

better than / a ranch” one speaker then claims, contradicting the previous

property owner. Consumer accumulation—the collection of “all these things that

have nothing to do / with cows with dollars or with the great open range”—forms

an illusory circumvention of indebtedness, of being possessed. Similarly, its

converse, tangible asset ownership, produces an indebtedness to capital that

possesses both bodily and psychic functions:

Smell that? That’s my cows thinking about my money.

I think too. Here the central theme of possession in ‘The Jade Madonna’ forms a conceptual

nexus that connects modalities of ownership between consumer and debt

economies. In precisely this way, O’Hara’s prophetic figure of the indebted

subject, together with the formal and methodological correspondence of his

assemblage-poems with plastic assemblage and bricolage, corroborates his

significance as a proto-relational poet.

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4.4 Relational Poetics

I have been trying to pave the way toward a form of poetry we might call

relational. Before I approach it directly, though, a distinction should be made. Of

course there has been a great deal of poetry, especially in the America canon

(perhaps because of perennial assertions of democracy in the national discourse),

about social relations and sociality. Whitman’s poetry epitomises this inclination

in his attendance to and substantiation of the notion of America epitomising

egalitarian democracy. Hence, from ‘Song of the Universal’:

And thou America, For the scheme’s culmination, its thought and its reality, For these (not for thyself) thou has arrived. Thou too surroundest all, Embracing carrying welcoming all, thou too by pathways

broad and new, To the ideal tendest.462

Indeed, it is Whitman’s “pronominal poetics”, to borrow Bonnie Costello’s term,

that conveys his belief in and hope for pluralist community, for conditions of

collectivity.463 The first-person plural in ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, for instance,

emblematises this social condition. For Costello and Oren Izenberg alike,

Whitman saying “we” constitutes an exclamation of a kind of civic fulfilment. For

Izenberg, saying “we” achieves “the real satisfaction of having met the conditions

for a form of collective intentionality within the single self”; for Costello, it builds

“toward more satisfying modes of togetherness.”464 The coincidence of both

critics employing the same concept in their assertions of the function of the first-

462 Walt Whitman, ‘Song of the Universal’ in On the Beach at Night Alone (London, Penguin, 2015), p. 3. 463 Bonnie Costello, The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 2. 464 Izenberg, p. 179; ibid, p. 225.

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person plural—satisfaction—reveals through semantic connotation the underlying

attitude toward sociality via democracy in both Whitman’s poetry and American

discourse from national ideology and politics to literary criticism. The attitude

underpinning the impact of saying “we” involves, firstly, a kind of triumphant self-

appeasement—one is satisfied, for instance, with the democratic deal of

conceding final say to the majority—which paradoxically vitalises individual

agency, and secondly, a sense of the copulative pleasure of union, of joining.

To this end, the poems in Juliana Spahr’s aptly ambivalent assemblage-titled

collection Fuck-You-Aloha-I-Love-You (2001) operate via the employment of

socio-linguistic parallaxes—most often “we”—which transform through shifting

perspectives and communicative contexts. These poems understand and

primarily attempt to communicate how, in social melange, “[w]e are lost there

and here” simultaneously.465 In this context, here and there aren’t so much

antithetical as appositional, and opposition can thus be parsed, like the title of

the opening poem, as ‘localism or t/here’. The conceptual juxtaposition of here

and there provides a means by which Spahr can convey the ambivalence of “we”

and indeed ambivalence itself. In discovering “you and you and you are here and

there and you are here and there”, instigating divergent but synchronised rhyme

routes from both here and there, the poem ends indeterminately on the

homonymic “tear” parallax. 466 Depending on whether “here” or “there”

predominates metrically in a given reading, the “you” in “we” is simultaneously

separated, detached, and emotionally open, vulnerable, affected, affective:

465 Juliana Spahr, Fuck-You-Aloha-I-Love-You (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. 4. 466 Ibid, p. 4.

542

And we are arrows of loving lostness gliding, gliding, off, and off, and off, gliding, And arrows of unloving lostness getting stuck even while never hitting the mark.467

Constituting “the mark” here (that to which we glide) is what both intersects but

connects “unloving” (“Fuck-You”) and “loving” (“I-Love-You”)—that is, the event

of sociality itself (“Aloha”), which, in turn, risks rupture, a “tear”, by the

constitutive pull of opposing forces or potential outcomes. For Spahr, then,

sociality is both our experience as arrows of “lostness gliding” and the horizon

toward which we, in our assembly, glide, always substantially affected by the

perspectives that the environments of our assembly serve to frame.

Along with this elaboration of the purposively and eagerly lost, “gliding, gliding”

self in the Whitmanic we, Costello is right to notice the “bodily”, “sensuous and

even erotic” aspect of Spahr’s coital incarnation of we, but visualising this social

assemblage as a “knot” affords the conception an internal coherence that

overlooks the “thrashing”, rhizomatic ambivalence in Spahr’s idea of “gathering”

and its shifting significances in various contexts.468 While each poem is heralded

by a stick-figure depiction from Otto Ryser’s A Manual for Tumbling and

Apparatus Stunts, illustrating the functional, knot-like manifestation of body-to-

body assemblage, heteroglossia linguistically approximates the other, fraught

manifestation of “gathering”: in a hard-core gig, for instance, as the singer

screams “fuck-you-aloha-I-love-you”, “everyone is connected in the trash,

467 Ibid, p. 3. 468 Costello, p. 220.

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everyone taped together in the fuck-you-aloha-I-love-you.”469 This paradoxical

sense of undoing and agglomeration, this “thrash”, is later refigured as a sub-

condition of gathering, “switching”, which reiterates the parallactic potential for

transformation of gathering itself. In a conference room,

We gather to discuss. We gather to pass and shuffle papers. We gather to use words like ethical responsibility.470

Whereas, in a hotel room,

we are different. One of us is lighter, one is darker, one is paunchy, one is thin, one is wrinkled, one is resilient, one is hairy, one is smooth. These characteristics are combined on each of us in a way.471

In the former room, we “is thinking in exchange”; in the later, it is “interaction.”472

Thus, the parallax produced by switching contexts reconceives we as something

not reducible to its composition, but rather to its context and capacities. In this

conceptual framework, we is not so much a knot, preformed, but, more

abstractly, the very portion of the material whose immanent potential

encompasses knots.

Regardless of its mutability under the process of parallactic “switching”, a “certain

of everyone”, who might say “we”, speak together, and in their own

communicative contexts, however momentary, concede (or at least alter)

469 Spahr, p. 13. 470 Ibid, p. 41. 471 Ibid, p. 43. 472 Ibid, p. 42

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individuation. By the end of Fuck-You-Aloha-I-Love-You, the first-person plural

almost completely replaces the recurring lyric subject, and it is from this assembly

that declarations of politicised sociality can be made. As a result, discursive

sources of centralised, institutionalised legitimacy are destabilised. Given voice

and thus made legible, thinkable, perceivable and, in turn, politically empowered,

is the “we, who are I, we who want to claim / an independence and superiority

of our / we, who live in a certain place in a / certain time and are confused about

history.”473 It is in this way that Fuck-You-Aloha-I-Love-You revises the traditional

lyric self and communicates sociality by way of an indeterminate, often pluralised

dramatic personae whose subjectivity is “thin” enough, to borrow Charles Altieri’s

conception, to incorporate the reader in its speech—but its form is not relational

in the way that I mean to explore.474 This is to say that social relationality and

pluralist coexistence are the poems’ subject matters, but do not constitute their

very formal condition. The reader is not affectively immersed in the “social site”

of the poem, to reiterate Theodore Schatski’s term; they are only in sight of it.475

Again, we reach a version of the distinction I offered in Chapter Two between

collage and assemblage. Relational poetry, on the other hand, serves, like

O’Hara’s assemblage-poem, as an affective portal to a socio-economic condition

through dialogic interaction, but operates, crucially, in some participatory,

relational dimension. It is (or rather, would be) formed like Thomas Hirschhorn’s

community-constructed monuments, and thus made “open”, in Umberto Eco’s

notion of interactive, participatory works, by the author’s paratextual concession

473 Ibid, p. 82. 474 Charles Altieri, ‘The Place of Rhetoric in Contemporary American Poetics: Jennifer Moxley and Juliana Spahr’ in Chicago Review, Vol. 56, No. 2/3 (Autumn, 2011), p. 131. 475 Theodore Schatski, The Site of the Social, p. 147.

545

of their own authority.476 The crucial development that relational poetry makes

in its analogy to Hirschhorn over Tiravanija, Gonzalez-Torres, and other

proponents of Bouriaud’s relational aesthetics or Lacy’s new genre public art, is

the extent to which it operates outside institutions for a specialised art/literary

audience and is as concerned with participation as what Hirschhorn calls

“presence and production”.477 As a consequence, these works would involve,

alongside a fundamentally relational basis, an emotional and physical

commitment and thus enact a degree of precariousness either in the process of

its creation or in the very work itself. This trace of precariousness in the work

would then speak to the immediately contemporaneous social precariousness it

aimed to disclose in its constituting what Hannah Arendt calls a “space of

appearance”—i.e. “where I appear to others as others appear to me”, the ground

of politics, or the condition of what I have been calling coexistence.478 To fully

distinguish relational poetry from poetry about social relationality, finally, the

former does not merely perform a lyric we speaking, but rather is itself the speech

of a certain social assemblage. We do not speak in a relational poem; the

relational poem is we speaking.

But relational poetry does not exist. I have made it up. I have imagined a poetics

that extends from O’Hara’s assemblage-poems beside the history of subsequent

corresponding art practices. I have, however, attempted to validate relational

poetics by occasioning what I might call a relational poem. To risk self-indulgence

or gerrymandering an argument, I will now use this poem as a prototype, a

476 Umberto Eco, ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’ in Participation, p. 20. 477 Thomas Hirschhorn, quoted in Anna Dezeuze, Thomas Hirschhorn: Deleuze Monument (London: Afterall books, 2014), p. 68. 478 Arendt, p. 198.

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yardstick, and a point of reference for the remainder of my exploration of poetry

as means to express and understand coexistence today. Here is the poem in full.

4.4.1 ‘Walking Past Rough Sleepers’: A Relational Poetry Prototype

12/03/17 11:15 Euston Rd/Judd St Camden Town Hall

I’m just trying to make I’m just

For fucks I’m just

[inaudible] 12/03/17 11:28 Southampton Row The Imperial Hotel

Spare any change plea

12/03/17 11:30 Southampton Row/ Cosmo Pl Dean’s Brassiere

Spare any [inaudible]

12/03/17 11:30 Southampton Row/ High Holborn TSB

Spare any change

14/03/17 10:47 Camden High St Lidl

Hello Please please please

Please Madame plea

14/03/17 10:39 Camden High St Sainsbury’s

Excuse me sir I’m homeless Can you spare some change

16/03/17 11:49 Pentonville Rd/ York Way McDonald’s

Spare any change please

16/03/17 12:02 Bernard St Pret A Manger

[mother tongue]

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16/03/17 12:21 St Martin’s Lane Pret A Manger

I am homeless and £1 would buy me a hot drink or a new book Thank you

17/03/17 14:45 Marylebone Rd The London Clinic

[mother tongue]

17/03/17 14:49 Marylebone Rd Westminster Business School

[mother tongue]

17/03/17 22:45 Goodge St Tesco

Change please love

19/03/17 14:07 Bankside Globe Theatre

Please [mother tongue]

Please

21/03/17 09:14 Holloway Rd Costa

Nice day to ye gov

21/03/17 09:42 Upper St Costa

[inaudible]

21/03/17 10:05 Beech St Barbican Car Park

[inaudible]

21/03/17 13:37 Finsbury Pavement Gap

R U stressed? Slap me for your rel ief! £5 Today only

21/03/17 17:10 Embankment Pl Embankment Station

[inaudible]

21/03/17 17:11 Villiers St Cravings Express

Sorry mate [inaudible]

21/03/17 17:14 Strand NatWest

Big issue

548

21/03/17 17:18 Strand The Colour Company

I WOULD

A HOT DRINK OR A

LITTLE DONATION THANK YOU SO MUCH!

21/03/17 17:41 Bernard St HSBC

Spare any change please

21/03/17 17:42 Bernard St Pret A Manger

Homeless

22/03/17 13:58 Pentonville Rd Sainsbury’s

Excuse me mate You couldn’t spare any change

22/03/17 14:28 Fleet St Barclays

[inaudible]

22/03/17 16:55 Strand Boots

Spare any change please

22/03/17 19:45 Charing Cross Rd National Portrait Gallery

Have you got a pound please

24/03/17 13:19 Upper St Post Office

Hi Big issue please

24/03/17 14:02 Lincoln’s Inn Fields Church of St Anselm & St Cecilia

Hello darlin [inaudible]

24/03/17 14:17 Strand McDonald’s

homeless please help if you can thank you

you

24/03/17 14:19 Villiers St Herman Ze German

[inaudible] Oh

549

24/03/17 14:22 Hungerford Bridge

DONT LET HATE WIN!

PEACE

PLEASE HELP IF YOU CAN I NEED TO RAISE £17.50 FOR A NIGHT IN A HOSTEL THANK YOU

AND GODBLESS

24/03/17 16:43 Hungerford Bridge Please boss

Please

24/03/17 16:53 Charing Cross Rd National Portrait Gallery

would a hot drink

24/03/17 17:02 Dean St NatWest

Spare change so I can get a shelter please

24/03/17 23:49 Stoke Newington High St NatWest

Can you spare any change please

27/03/17 16:19 Euston Rd Euston Videos & CDs

Spare some change for the homeless please

27/02/17 18:20 Tottenham Court Rd Heal’s

ANY CHANGE PLEASE HELP

THANK YOU

27/03/17 20:00 Shaftesbury Ave Golden Nugget Casino

Please

KEEP YOUR HEADS UP DONT LET THEM WIN! PEACE

550

28/03/17 12:09 Liverpool St Station Issue

28/03/17 16:56 Hungerford Bridge Buy a big issue please

28/03/17 17:00 Villiers St Wasabi

Change please Change please

28/03/17 17:55 Charing Cross Rd Building site

I’M ACTUALLY A MILLIONAIRE J

have a nice day

spare any change If you can

can

29/03/17 09:39 North End Rd Co-Op

Spare some Spare [inaudible]

29/03/17 13:52 Victoria St NatWest

[mother tongue]

29/03/17 13:53 Victoria St McDonald’s

Hello Big issue plea

29/03/17 13:58 Victoria St Pret A Manger

[inaudible]

29/03/17 14:00 Victoria St Starbucks

Any spare change

29/03/17 20:02 Upper St William Hill

[inaudible]

29/03/17 21:22 Holloway Rd Station

Anything

30/03/17 08:06 Holloway Rd Costa

[inaudible]

30/03/17 17:02 Strand Waterstones

[inaudible]

30/03/17 20:59 Holloway Rd Costa

Any money please

551

01/04/17 14:37 Leicester Sq Station

EXCUSE ME LADIES AND GENTLEMAN CAN YOU SPARE SOME CHANGE FOR A CUP OF TEA OR A NEW SLEEPING BAG. 50p OR A £1.

01/04/17 16:31 Southwark St NatWest

HOMELESS PLEASE HELP WOULD LIKE TO RAISE £18 FOR A HOTEL (I NEED A SHOWER AND

SLEEP) THANK YOU

01/04/17 17:07 Bankside Room to Read UK

HUNGRY & HOMELESS PLEASE HELP THANK YOU HAVE A NICE DAY

01/04/17 22:38 Camden Rd St Michael Church

[inaudible]

03/04/17 11:54 Camden High St Sainsbury’s

[inaudible] change please

03/04/17 12:04 Eversholt Rd Royal George

Excuse me boss Sorry to bother [inaudible]

Could you spare eighty odd pounds [inaudible]

03/04/17 12:09 Euston Rd Euston Coffee Kiosk

[inaudible]

03/04/17 12:17 Tottenham Court Rd Highly Sprung

[inaudible] Please

Food [mother tongue]

03/04/17 21:27 St-Martins-in-the- Fields

[inaudible]

552

03/04/17 21:39 Leicester Sq Station [inaudible] near

Just [inaudible] To [inaudible] you

[inaudible] do stars479

04/04/17 16:31 Praed St Aberdeen Steak House

[inaudible]

05/04/17 10:15 Fortress Rd Sainsbury’s

[inaudible] morning

05/04/17 ? Chapel St M&S

[inaudible]

05/04/17 17:45 Praed St Paddington Quarter

Change please

05/04/17 17:47 Praed St Paddington Station

[inaudible]

06/04/17 19:16 The Cut Evans Cycles

[inaudible]

07/04/17 14:38 St Thomas St Barclays

UNA AYUDA

POR FAVOR

GRACIAS THANK YOU

10/04/17 17:51 Holloway Rd Morrison’s

Got ten pence?

12/04/17 12:07 Caledonian Rd Station

Big issue sir [inaudible]

You have a good day yeah

12/04/17 19:23 Upper St Café Nero

Excuse me Can you spare any change please

479 Sang through a traffic cone to the melody of ‘(They Long to Be) Close to You’ by The Carpenters.

553

13/04/17 11:46 Euston Rd Pret A Manger

[inaudible]

13/04/17 11:46 Southampton Row Marco’s New York Italian London Bloomsbury

[inaudible]

13/04/17 12:03 High Holborn Barclays

[mother tongue]

13/04/17 12:04 High Holborn Holborn Hall

[mother tongue]

13/04/17 12:12 Long Acre Gap

Big issue

13/04/17 18:45 Holloway Rd Costa

Any money [inaudible]

Please [inaudible]

Breakfast

14/04/17 15:43 Camden High St Costa

Spare any change [inaudible]

14/04/17 16:14 Parkway Strada

[mother tongue] [mother tongue]

14/04/17 16:15 Parkway Wholefoods

Excuse me [inaudible] change

17/04/17 12:41 Charing Cross Rd Garrick Theatre

Spare some change please

17/04/17 21:18 Cahring Cross Rd Gaby’s Deli

JUST £1 GETS ME A HOT DRINK

18/04/17 17:50 Camden High St Argos

[inaudible] Please

18/04/17 18:15 Tottenham Court Rd Sicilyamo

And spare change pleeeeeeeeeaasssssssse

554

18/04/17 18:26 Charing Cross Rd William Hill

ANY CHANGE PLEASE HELP

THANK YOU

18/04/17 19:20 Charing Cross Rd Leicester Sq Station

H i ! C an Y o u H e l p M e P lease? I ’m Hungry W ith MANY OTHER NEEDS, PROBLEMS HOPES AND PROMISES…

ANY HUMAN HELP ACCEPTED!

THANK YOU!

18/04/17 22:15 Holborn Station Platform 4

PLEASE H E L P

19/04/17 17:43 Bernard St Tesco Express

[inaudible]

19/04/17 19:14 Spafield St Exmouth Arms

So what magazine did you guys bounce out of [inaudible] looking so hot I’m living on the street

20/04/17 08:24 Charing Cross Rd Leicester Sq Station

PLEASE FOLKS Help me RAISE Approx £10 for NIGHT IN CHEAP

HOSTEL SO I CAN SHOWER

PLEASE HELP

555

20/04/17 08:27 Charing Cross Rd Garrick Theatre

HOMELeSS. HAPPY BIRthDay To me AND I am AshameD oF MYSeLF IM SO DIRTY & [illegible] PLeaSE FoLKS REaLLY, NEED Some people To Take A Chance & Help ME Raise The MONeY FoR A Cheap hostel So I CaN Shower N ShavE, aLSo Desparate FoR [illegible] CAT, Really Need To Feel Like A MaN AgaiN. Please [illegible] Help Raise £20

21/04/17 16:13 Euston Rd M&S

Spare any change please Or coffee

Or food

21/04/17 16:18 Euston Rd Origin Coffee

HOMELESS [illegible] [illegible]

21/04/17 22:13 Kings Cross Plaza [inaudible]

21/04/17 22:14 York Way Tanning Shop

Hello guys Any spare change please

Don’t worry guys Have a lovely night

4.4.2 ‘Walking Past Rough Sleepers’: Discussion

Does the intentional fallacy apply when the critic is simultaneously the producer

of that which is the subject of criticism? When the intender and the interpreter

are one and the same person, is the intentional fallacy cancelled out? My hope is

that this fraudulent relation to the above text in fact partially relieves it of its

status as a literary object awaiting interpretation and instead recasts it as a critical

tool. Hence, my principal creative intention, treated as an introductory statement:

556

I wanted to convey the feelings elicited by the act of walking past those in

desperate need—horror, indignity, shame and, especially, indifference. In line

with, but suspicious of, some examples of collaborative art whose criteria is

ethical over aesthetic (i.e. the more ethical the work, the more successful,

regardless of its aesthetic properties), I wanted the morally questionable aspects

of the text to be very much the point. In this sense, then, my analysis of the text

is not so much predicated on ethical statements but on the affective responses I

hoped or intended the text to elicit in relation to its critical and socio-economic

contexts.

A brief history of the text might further qualify my intentions as data amenable

to analysis and thus constituting evidence. At first, I tried to write a lyric, then I

tried to plan and write a short story, but both efforts yielded patronising, limp

texts more about myself than the subject I was attempting to confront. I

wondered if it was credible or even possible to work earnestly and considerately

at conveying instances of spontaneous indifference engendered by a hierarchy

of privilege. In the end, I decided that I myself had no place in whatever it was

I wanted to produce: passively attentive to those people at its core, I fulfilled the

role of the voyeur, an archetypal narrative position, of course, but one which, in

this case, poisoned the narrative with dishonour; I was, put differently, a clerk of

an experience I could not fully claim as my own, and the dramatic narrative and

lyric poem forms merely glossed over this fact. Left only, then, with the

experience itself, and repelled now by the lofty, self-serving affectation of my

conventional creative responses, I leaned into that elementary role of indifference

in order to incorporate into the form of the text the very feelings constitutive of

557

a passively attentive act. Thus, over a forty-day period, began a week or so after

Ash Wednesday and stopped a week or so after Holy Saturday, I simply recorded

everything that every person on the street communicated with their voices or

their signs. Aside from editorial substitutions—replacing misheard speech with

“inaudible”, illegible text with “illegible”, and utterances of a language foreign to

me with “mother tongue”—I have not written—that is, originated—a word of this

text. The experience of turning a deaf ear to the disadvantaged, that which I’d

wanted initially to make unique to me in an active, personal creative act, was

replicated by the text itself. Thus, in limiting my creative input to the formal

configuration of verbal data, the text belongs to me only inasmuch as any of my

encounters belong to me: of course, they don’t—they are shared. By merely

gathering, transcribing and collating others’ speech, I hope to be able to

approach and regard the text with a level of objectivity that might permit my

analysis of it.

Indeed, if it is unethical to disregard the desperate, not to mention to record their

speech without permission, as well as forcing the reader to into a concentrated

simulation of my own morally questionable act, at least the plight to which I was

passively attentive is not aestheticized—or, at the very least, its status as an

aesthetic object is minimal, partial. To be sure, I would hesitate to call this text

a poem. It is, in point of fact, a log and a transcription. It is also an historical

record taken from the ground: the gleaning period passed over March 22nd 2017,

the day a man drove into pedestrians on the pavement along Westminster Bridge

and fatally stabbed a policeman in New Palace Yard, which one rough sleeper felt

compelled to respond to with hopeful encouragement on his cardboard panels,

558

replacing his own appeals with one for a much broader benevolence. The text’s

aesthetic status is thus realised simply in its being read as such, a commonplace

observation made decades ago by Duchamp, but one worth repeating if only to

highlight the distinction between what counts as aesthetic in a thing itself and in

the very impulse of making anything at all.

This is the distinction Shelley makes between poetry “in a more restricted sense”

and poetry “in a general sense”.480 For Shelley, the former corresponds to the

object of “metrical language” that we commonly call poems—verbal artefacts that

engender charged distinctions and relations between perception, emotion and

the world through language.481 Poetry in the restricted sense is thus concerned

with distinguishing and negotiating the boundaries of sense itself as it interacts

with the world. Conversely, poetry in the general sense is, Shelley states,

“connate with the origin of man” insofar as it denotes the generative impulse for

imagination and creation which is tantamount to being a person in the world.482

On this account, my intention for this text is aesthetic only insofar as it

corresponds to this definition of poetry in the general sense.

Oren Izenberg has likewise taken up this distinction to background his

consideration of Paul Celan’s neologism, “Genicht”, from the poem ‘Weggebeizt’

(1967), which Michael Hamburger has usefully translated as “noem”.483 For

480 Shelley, Selected Poems and Prose, p. 655; ibid, p. 652. 481 Ibid, p. 655. 482 Ibid, p. 652. 483 Izenberg, p. 26.

559

Izenberg, a “noem” is the poetic negation of the poem as an aesthetic literary

object. Like the “Atemkristall” (or, literally, “breathcrystal”) construct that

appears toward the end of the poem, which Izenberg takes to mean a snow

penitent, the noem is neither “a brute object”, nor “an art object” but rather an

“expression”, “indication” or “projection” of a “relation” experienced by a person

in the world.484 The “noem” is “the sort of object that motivates belief in the

fundamental forces of attraction that structure and bind human lives”; as such,

the “noem” offers a “relation” not only with “an object one must interpret” but

also, principally, an “encounter” with “the person[s] behind” it.485 As ‘Weggebeizt’

indicates in its final lines, the “noem” is “dein unumstößliches / Zuegnis”—"your

irreversible / testimonial”, a kind of pure, unalterable testimony to an experience

of coexistence. 486 I intended for ‘Walking Past Rough Sleepers’ to operate

precisely, quite literally, in this way. In a purely formal sense, then, these

analogous texts, these “noems”, with their collaborative (if not properly

participatory) and interactive dimension, amount in my estimation to relational

poems.

I argued in the preceding section of this chapter that participatory practices

principally confront contemporaneous technologies of power and their effects on

social relations. Specifically, I argued that relational aesthetics of the 1990s, to

invoke it in the most inclusive sense, which endures today in the work of

Hirschhorn, Superflex, Monster Chetwynd, Tania Bruguera, and Sol Calero, to

484 Ibid, p. 28. 485 Ibid, p. 31. 486 Quoted in ibid, p. 27.

560

name a few, engage with neoliberal techniques of restructuring social relations

with the logic of debt economies and an ideology of the entrepreneurial,

optimised and atomised self. Relational poetics is named in accordance with these

concerns. A little more specifically, relational poetry works against the neoliberal

“economization of the social, the coincidence of work and life, the demand for

the whole person to be involved in performative-cognitive, affective labour” as

Isabell Lorey observes.487 This means a critical engagement with what Lorey calls

“precarization”—an instrument of neoliberal governmentality which compels life

into a state of perpetual instability (“precarity”) through cultural othering, wage

deflation, precarious work, cuts in public spending and principles of self-

sovereignty and self-regulation against failures of self-optimisation and becoming

other by relying financially and socially on others via welfare.488 Even more

specifically, in light of this, ‘Walking Past Rough Sleepers’ attends to the

extremities of neoliberal order, to the social condition produced and perpetuated

by its doctrine. If the logic of debt extends to social relationality, and thus

morality (the debtor is untrustworthy; insolvency equates to degeneracy, and

solvency to virtue), if the neoliberal subject is in fact an entrepreneurial project,

and if social atomisation and minimal social security is the law of the land, then

rough sleepers embody the antithesis and inevitable ramification of neoliberalism.

Indeed, the last decade has seen an 169% increase in officially estimated rough

sleepers across the United Kingdom.489 Of course this is not a perfect indication

of the scale of national homelessness, but it serves as a kind of litmus test for

487 Lorey, p. 103. 488 Ibid, p. 1. 489 Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Hal Pawson, Glen Bramley, Steve Wilcox, Beth Watts & Jenny Wood, The homelessness monitor: England 2018 (London: Crisis, 2018), p. xi.

561

general trends. In September 2017, for instance, the National Audit Office

published a report on the connection between Conservative policies and climbing

rates of homelessness. The report highlighted caps and freezes in Local Housing

Allowance rates as “likely to have contributed to the affordability of tenancies for

those on benefits, and are an element of the increase in homelessness.”490 Since

the 2008 financial crisis, moreover, policy schemes of deficit reduction through

austerity measures have increased throughout the Eurozone, but specifically,

“[f]rom 2009, the UK embarked on cuts in public spending per person at levels

deeper than those of Portugal and Italy, countries that were adversely hit by the

Eurozone crisis.”491 In conjunction with socially crippling economic policy, in

typical neoliberal fashion, is the call for sociality: “We’re all in this together”,

David Cameron proclaimed in his 2009 Conservative conference address, but who

is we here, what is this, and what are the conditions of this togetherness?492 In

light of entrenched austerity measures targeting public spending, this declaration

of sociality seems rather to veil an ulterior inducement of the acquiescence to

inequality that enables economies of debt.

What does it mean, then, to walk past rough sleepers in London and, in turn, to

read ‘Walking Past Rough Sleepers’? Maybe the latter act can illuminate the

former. Take the most immediate mechanism of the text—repetition. There are

three motifs that structure the text in this regard: the appeal, the object of the

appeal (“change”), and instances of miscommunication (mishearing, misreading).

490 National Audit Office, Homelessness: A Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (London: National Audit Office, 2017), p. 7. 491 Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 176. 492 David Cameron, ‘Conservative conference 2009: Full text of David Cameron’s speech’ in The Guardian <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/oct/08/david-cameron-speech-in-full>.

562

If my account of how the dialogic system of O’Hara’s assemblage-poems can

immerse the reader into the social scene of its assembly in turn extends to

describe a formal mechanism of relational poetry, then reading the unabating

solicitations in ‘Walking Past Rough Sleepers’ envelops the reader in the affects

of deprivation at the perimeters of what Judith Butler calls “survivability”.493 As a

foundational constituent of coexistence, “survivability depends on a relation to

others, to a ‘you’ or set of ‘yous’ without whom I cannot exist.”494 Appeals, then,

serve as efforts to “establish a social connection to the world” in order to

engender and sustain survivability “even when there is no concrete reason to

think that any such connection is possible.”495 The discomfort intended in unduly

positioning the reader on the other side of a clear divide in degrees of survivability

should serve to illuminate and define this very divide, which extends to the

“boundaries” between persons per se. If we survive fundamentally through

relationality, as Butler argues, “then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be

found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the

boundaries of who I am.”496 The degree to which we are separate from each

other bodily and psychically only provides the means by which we can relate at

all. “So the boundary is a function of the relation,” Butler writes, “a brokering of

difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness.”497

Thus, “if I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my

own, but because who ‘I’ am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be

rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of

493 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso Press, 2016), p. 59. 494 Ibid, p. 44. 495 Ibid, p. 28. 496 Ibid, p. 44. 497 Ibid, p. 44.

563

relations to others.”498 The very audio-immersive function of relational poetry—

of both casting the reader as interlocutor with those who speak, who appeal,

while also obliging the reader to speak those words themselves in their reading—

enacts this very consolidation of separateness and relationality, of self and other.

In other words, the discomfort of this unrelenting re-petition is produced by the

conflux of its paradoxically desensitising and incentivising functions. The

frustration of reading ‘Walking Past Rough Sleepers’ is borne out of the frustration

of walking past rough sleepers which is, in turn, borne out of the inevitability of

inaction. The corresponding confluence (neoliberalism is a system of often

paradoxical convergences, the central one being that of subjugation and liberty)

of increasingly atomised selves and increasing rates of homelessness conspires

to create an ostensibly insurmountable problem no individual action can

satisfactorily allay, despite the fact that “change”, through re-petition, transforms

from base tender to an opportunity to alter (change) the conditions of the

pleader’s circumstances: "change” refers to shelter (“a night in a hostel”, “a new

sleeping bag”), hygiene (“a shower”), sustenance (“a hot drink”, “food”),

entertainment (“a new book”), and companionship (a “cat”)—anything but capital

itself. Pervasive precarity compels the passer-by subjects to sequester

themselves within the immediate concerns of their own precarious lives, their

own preservation. If the entrenched creditor-debtor relation reconfigures sociality

as transactional, the relation between rough sleeper and passer-by as well as the

potential for change is a non-starter precisely because no debt as large as survival

can be repaid, no feasible amount of credit can be offered as permanent change,

498 Ibid, p. 44.

564

and this relation pre-emptively occludes the viability of gifts. The appeal for mere

preservation is at once concealed and revealed by the appeal for this homonymic

“change”—a parallax, like Spahr’s “tear”, whose intrinsic ambivalence discloses

the socio-economic factors causing the asymmetry in the relation.

‘Walking Past Rough Sleepers’ deals in the affects of this encounter, this

predicament; reading it forms gristles of guilt, the predominant affect produced

by coexistence comprised of creditor-debtor relations. Guilt is inscribed in each

petition, is extricated by each encounter. “[O]nly as an animal who can live or

die do any of us feel guilt,” Butler determines;

only for one whose life is bound up with other lives and who must negotiate the power to injure, to kill, and to sustain life, does guilt become an issue. Paradoxically, guilt—which is so often seen as a paradigmatically human emotion, generally understood to engage self-reflective powers and so to separate human from animal life—is driven less by rational reflection than by the fear of death and the will to live. Guilt thus disputes the anthropocentrism that so often underwrites accounts of the moral sentiments and instead establishes the anthropos as an animal seeking survival, but one whose survivability is a function of a frail and brokered sociality. Life is sustained not by a self-preserving drive, conceived as an internal impulse of the organism, but by a condition of dependency without which survival proves impossible, but which can also imperil survival depending on the form that dependency takes.499

In enacting rather representing the encounters of a social relation, the relation

in question is communicated to the reader of ‘Walking Past Rough Sleepers’, via

guilt, even as communicative failures obfuscate the person to whom the reader

relates.

499 Ibid, p. 46.

565

Indeed, this obfuscation of persons as practically “inaudible” and “intelligible” or

culturally distant—(m)other-“tongued”—illuminates this “frail and brokered

sociality” as it approaches the point of annulment. The text attempts to delay the

inevitability of titular action by reincarnating those objectified and subjugated by

it. As a proponent of the relational poetics I’ve been trying to formulate, the poem

hopes to draw, in Lorey’s words,

a line of flight out of the dispositive of care […] away from the dominant model of being limited and threatened by others, and from preventative care focused on what is one’s own, in the direction of a cuidadania, [a Spanish neologism conjoining ciudadania (citizenship) with cuidado (care),] a care community in which our relationality with others is not interrupted but is regarded as fundamental.500

This “line of flight”, this mechanism of productive, collective fleeing, informs and

undergirds the conception of coexistence I developed in relation to O’Hara’s

engagements with contemporaneous crises of community and technologies of

power. If “[p]recariousness as precarious ‘being-with’”, to borrow again from

Lorey, “is a condition of everyday life”, then both O’Hara’s proto-relational

assemblage-poems and my experiment in relational poetry seem to signal the

“beginning of an entry into the process of becoming-common” not through taste

(coterie functions), begrudgingly tolerated co-presence, or even political

affiliation, but by extensive, fundamental acknowledgements of “relational

difference” that look towards a political freedom of “constituting”, of “joining with

others, exchanging with others, acting together with others”, which implicitly

conceives a “potentiality of exodus” from “neoliberal forms of domination” and

modes of individuation.501 The tentatively hopeful destination of this line of flight

500 Lorey, p. 99. “Precarization” is defined by Lorey as the process whereby governmental “instruments of domination” engender individuated, unprotected, othered precarious life; ibid, p. 7. 501 Ibid, p. 12; ibid, p. 15; ibid, p. 100; ibid, p. 106.

566

consists, finally, in cuidadania, a citizenship predicated on care, the vexed state

of which O’Hara dreams in ‘Poem (Instant coffee with slightly sour cream)’

(1956)—that is, in a “life held precariously in the seeing / hands of others”.502

502 CP, p. 244.

567

CONCLUSION Kindred Difference Having postulated relational poetics and Frank O’Hara as its progenitor, I am now

in the position to reiterate in full the Sandeep Parmar quote I partially used in

the introduction of this study: “[P]oetry must rise to the collective challenges of

our time, not merely be a curio of intimate experience.”503 Despite his reputation

as a poet “of intimate experience”, the unsung poems of The End of the Far West

show an O’Hara preoccupied, conversely, with “the collective challenges of [his]

time”—the state of social relations in light of the technologies of power in force

in 1960s America. As I have argued, this is evident in the poems functioning as

the expressions and enactments of a more expansive mode of sociality than that

with which O’Hara is commonly associated. I call this mode of sociality

coexistence, the fundamental condition of shared, relational differentness of

persons, which is itself the expression and enactment of a particular

metaphysics—univocal, differential being—directly at odds with the idealism

undergirding the unifying signifiers of the nationalist exceptionalism of O’Hara’s

(and, disturbingly, my own) time. Considering this shift in O’Hara’s

preoccupations in his later work, and his aesthetic procedure as a result, has

entailed, in the previous chapter, a shift in—or expansion of—the historical scope

of this study. This aimed to resituate O’Hara’s relevance in contemporary poetics

and politics vis-à-vis art practices emerging from those in which he was personally

503 Sandeep Parmar, ‘Why the TS Eliot prize shortlist hails a return to the status quo’, The Guardian (20 October, 2017) <https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/oct/20/why-the-ts-eliot-prize-shortlist-hails-a-return-to-the-status-quo>.

568

and professionally invested. But what effect does this have on re-reading O’Hara’s

earlier work? Does this hijacking of his present consequence effectively

disassociate him from his recognised value as a queer poet, as a postmodern

precursor, as a poet wrestling with selfhood, as a poet fixated with social anxiety,

or even as a scene or coterie poet? Does this study merely serve to separate an

earlier and later O’Hara, or can it affect a reverse illumination bringing to light

the kind of “O’Hara concordance” that Oren Izenberg spontaneously doubts?504

The lines which most encapsulate the concerns of this study—“if there is fortuity”

“in the exact peril / at this moment” “it’s in the love / we bear each other’s

differences” and “life held precariously in the seeing / hands of others”—are not

from the poems this thesis has used to explore those concerns. Certainly this

questions the credibility of the shift in O’Hara’s attention for which I have been

arguing in relation to the idiosyncratic poems of The End of the Far West. But

does it not also suggest a concordance that cuts across methodological lines?

Indeed, where O’Hara seems spontaneously to vocalise his “ruminations” on

loving and not-so-loving encounters with other people and even inanimate

objects with poems like ‘Chez Jane’ (1952), ‘Poem (Instant coffee with slight sour

cream)’ (1956), or ‘Ode to the French Negro Poets’ (1958), in those of The End

of the Far West, these “ruminations” are dramatized as encounters themselves.

Rather than engage with encounters of difference through representation,

reflection or pronouncement, the latter poems conversely enact these

encounters—but this is not to say the line of inquiry is altered in any significant

sense. As Aristotle first observed in the Poetics, some poets use diegesis,

504 Izenberg, p. 130.

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narrative, and others use mimesis, imitation through action, drama; poets of

tragedy, specifically, Aristotle notes, “imitate agents and people doing things”

vis-à-vis speech.505 Mikhail Bakhtin further explored the distinction in relation to

the novel and its incorporation of “heteroglossia” through the dialogism

enunciated “speech” as a means to regard the differential processes of social

life.506 For O’Hara, then, the shift in poetic practice marked by The End of the Far

West is best expressed by the poet himself—that is, if we recast the roles that

poet and painter occupy in ‘To Larry Rivers’ (1952) with lyric poet and

assemblage-poem poet respectively, where the former self-deprecatingly

encourages the latter: “Don’t complain, my dear, / You do what I can only

name.”507

“Differences” and “others” are the operative words in this potential concordance,

but, in relation to the arguments I have made throughout this study, what I think

fundamentally characterises O’Hara’s poetry in general (and also, not so

incidentally, the process of coexistence) is the knotty problem of making

difference legible through poetic negotiation, to decipher, and thus make

difference familiar—i.e. less different—while still encountering difference and

otherness per se. With a metaphysics and view of social reality that posits

differential being, where the relation between things determines their identity,

as opposed to the essential identity of a thing determining the difference in its

relation to other things, the identity, or otherness, of things disperses into

multiplicity and its being apprehensible becomes, while philosophically possible,

505 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 6. 506 Bakhtin, p. 260. 507 CP, p. 128.

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enveloped in infinity. For O’Hara, difference can constitute, as Izenberg finds, the

affirmation of value through preference—“it is hard to believe when I’m with you

that there can be anything as still / as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as

statuary” (‘Having a Coke With You’)—but the epistemological imbrication of

difference in the relation between self and other, the conjunctive interlocking of

first and second person, induces, for instance, the poetic “answer” to “the waves

which have kept me from reaching you” in ‘To the Harbourmaster’ (1954).508

Indeed, coursing through O’Hara’s work are the “waves” that constitute the

agonisingly infinite and elusive forces of a sea of differential being, on which

many of his poems cannot but end. In ‘Renaissance’ (1951), to take a few early

examples, the poet, “[i]n the midst of all these / mad cholers where love becomes

/ all that’s serious”, hopes that “we’ll / cling like hunks of voluptuous driftwood,

/ our heart for a sail”.509 At the end of the second section of ‘On Looking at La

Grande Jatte, the Czar Wept Anew’ (1951), the protagonist impossibly “steps into

a mirror, refusing to be anyone else, / and his guests observe the waves

break.”510 “O my coevals!” the poet exclaims, desperate for connection with

nearby others and otherness itself, in ‘Night Thoughts in Greenwich Village’

(1950/51), before finally asking, “Can we thumb / our nose at the very sea?”511

In the conclusion of his book on O’Hara’s employment of models of coterie, Lytle

Shaw conversely attempts to consolidate a concordance around a “rhetoric of

immediacy” by way of O’Hara’s use of proper names, but this unwittingly gives

508 CP, p. 217. 509 CP, p. 55. 510 Ibid, p. 63. 511 Ibid, p. 38. Interestingly, in O’Hara’s manuscripts, Donald Allen notes, “‘sea’ was substituted for ‘song’ in the last line” (CP, p. 521).

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way to the negotiation of difference to which I am referring: “what appears” in

O’Hara’s poetry “to be the visual proof of a self and its history in collage,” Shaw

writes, “keeps turning in on the syntactical codes by which such a self has been

educed, mingling with other selves and culture more broadly.” 512 As Shaw

maintains, this immediacy affects a “vanishing of secured immanence”; it

functions, for Shaw, as a mode of interaction that needs not to uncover a field of

otherness—other people, other animals, inanimate things, the peculiar otherness

of selfhood—precisely because of the celebration of its surface. In the work of

O’Hara and his “coevals”, this nevertheless comes up against the paradoxical

impulse to comprehend otherness, or, as O’Hara’s dear friend and fellow New

York School poet James Schuyler put it in ‘Dec. 28, 1974’, “merely to say, to see

and say, things / as they are”.513 Immediacy presupposes surface, the common

theme of New York School poets, but the surface is always haunted with meaning

mobilised in the affective encounters of/with difference and the poetic

negotiation of those encounters.

Indeed, another dear friend and fellow New York School poet John Ashbery

announces this very preoccupation in the titular poem of his debut collection

Some Trees. “To meet” is “amazing” for Ashbery, an event both a part of the

world and as far “[f]rom the world as agreeing with it”.514 Here “agreeing” with

the world, while being within it, constitutes a view of differential being that

accepts the decomposition of identity brought about by universal relationality,

but manages to establish a particularity to relations with others which, in turn,

512 Shaw, p. 233. 513 Ibid, p. 233; James Schuyler, ‘Dec. 28, 1974’ in Poetry (February, 1976), p. 251. 514 John Ashbery, ‘Some Trees’ in Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 19.

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brings the objects of affection into focus. The encounters of otherness are at

once intimate and vexed, negotiated finally in their affects; the trees, “each /

Joining a neighbour”, can “tell us what we are [my italics]”, if not themselves or

ourselves, since

[…] their merely being there means something; that soon We may touch, love, explain.

The surface of the world, then, by which the poet is “surrounded”, is

simultaneously more like “A silence already filled with noises, / A canvas on which

emerges // A chorus of smiles”. As O’Hara affectionately puts it in his review of

Some Trees:

Everywhere in the poems there is the difficult attention to calling things and events by their true qualities. He establishes a relation between perception and articulateness which is non-rhetorical and specific; this relation is consciously desired by the poet, beyond bitterness and fatigue, and he even generously attributes it to others.515

For Shaw, on the other hand, the Lunch poem ‘Cornkind’ (1960) clearly exhibits

his understanding of the immediacy concordance as “a fluid and experimental

way of conceptualizing literary and social linkage”.516 Examining the relation

between “fertility!”, procreation and kinship—that is, how filiation “can happen

casually” through gay sex—‘Corinkind’ comes to ask

but what of William Morris what of Million Worries what of Bette Davis in AN EVENING WITH WILLIAM MORRIS OF THE WORLD OF SAMUEL GREENBERG what of Hart Crane what of phonograph records and gin

515 Standing Still, p. 77. 516 Shaw, p. 37.

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what of “what of”517

On Shaw’s account, this “denaturalizing of the name” in O’Hara’s “rhetoric of

immediacy” enacts “social linkage” by virtue of “fertility’s ‘of’”—not “‘of’ as

heterosexual reproduction or filiation” but “‘of’” as something like inhabitation,

coexistence, or alliance.”518 Here, finally, is where Shaw’s and my arguments

converge—but even so, much like the relation between coterie and coexistence,

the intersection is momentary, our lines of thinking aimed in different directions.

Where Shaw affords primacy to the parsing of the copulative potential of

immediate encounters with others in O’Hara’s preoccupation with social relations,

I afford primacy, and have throughout this study, to the enquiry into the very

machinery of encounters with others and the possibility of a kinship with

difference. When O’Hara asks, “what of Hart Crane / what of phonograph records

and gin”, O’Hara, like Ashbery in ‘Some Trees’, is questioning two orders of

relationality—to other people, and to inanimate things—increasing in their degree

of ontological difference, in their epistemological “distance”. Indeed, going a step

farther, when he asks “what of ‘what of’”, O’Hara reveals the self-reflexive crux

of his own poetry—that is, the enquiry, through poetry, into whether poetry can

produce an understanding of the infinitely complex processes of differential being

configuring our relationships with others, with the world, with ourselves.

Underlying and informing his performance and standing as a queer poet, a

postmodern forebear, a poet reckoning with social anxiety, with selfhood, with

sociality, is this perennial concern with the complexities of differential being and

the possibility of an intimate, identifiable encounter with others within the

517 CP, p. 387. 518 Shaw, p. 36.

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conditions of fundamental difference—the possibility, in other words, of

specifically (but not exclusively) queer intimacy in the fraught existential

condition that Henri Cole calls “aparthood” and that I call kindred difference.519

That is the O’Hara concordance this study has aimed to establish.

And yet, this should not detract from the peculiarity of The End of the Far West

in terms of its form. It is remarkable, for instance, how strikingly well Bakhtin’s

examination of novelistic discourse and its “prerequisite” of an “internal

stratification of language, of its social heteroglossia and the variety of individual

voices” applies to my delineation of O’Hara’s assemblage-poems.520 For both the

novel and the assemblage-poem alike, the rub of difference intrinsic to

heteroglossia provides an opening for ethics: “As a living socio-ideological

concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness,

lies on the borderline between oneself and the other.”521 There is similarity, too,

in the “sociological stylistics” operative throughout the texts of this study, which

serve to disclose a social condition to readers via their interactive incorporation

within it as an interlocutor:

The internal social dialogism of novelistic discourse requires the concrete social context of discourse to be exposed requires the concrete social context of discourse to be exposed, to be revealed as the force that determines its entire stylistic structure, its form and content, determining it not from without, but from within.522

519 I do not use Cole’s term in conjunction with mine to suggest an opposition but rather to imply the spectrum of permutations through which the figure of difference can arise, from Cole’s feeling of exile to my vision of encounter. 520 Bakhtin, p. 264. 521 Ibid, p. 291. 522 Ibid, p. 291.

575

If Bakhtin reserved these features as unique to the novel, and if the poems of

The End of the Far West accomplish these features as I have been arguing in this

study, then these poems do indeed mark a shift not only in O’Hara’s practice but

in poetic practices since pre-war modernism.

Coordinated in this way, these distinctions bring to light a trajectory of artistic

procedures based in a poetics, aesthetics and philosophy of differential sociality—

coexistence—that cuts across generic and formal lines. The conception of the

assemblage-poem, to which this study has been principally dedicated, by virtue

of a reading of The End of the Far West as such, paves the way for the inclusion

of poetry into the potential attainments of drama and prose, blurring the

distinctions between each. In doing so, this makes the additional case for a

literary tradition based not on formal category but, to borrow Anna Dezeuze’s

term again, “a model of engagement with the world”—the notion upon which

relational poetics is founded.523 Rendering the assemblage-poem through O’Hara

has provided the methodological and aesthetic blueprint for relational poetics in

much the same way that plastic assemblage gave way to the relational aesthetics

and participatory art that succeeded it; both partake in an analogous line of flight

from the contemporaneous technologies of power that co-opt social relationality

in their respective modalities of hegemony.

523 Dezeuze, Anna, ‘Assemblage’, p. 31. Contenders for an assemblage analysis of this kind might be George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) and Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly (2014). The former mixes a cento of passages regarding the death of Abraham Lincoln’s young son, Willie, and a assemblage-poem of the voices of the spirits that usher Willie through the bardo, the liminal state between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism. In the latter text, Lamar employs a ventriloquial rap, paralleled by the heterogeneous production that incorporates jazz, funk, soul, grime, and spoken word, to construct an assemblage-poem that enacts the socioeconomic inequalities, the tribalism, consumerism, addiction, and the choice between individual success and community maintenance affecting the black communities in southern Los Angeles and America at large.

576

The majority of this study, finally, has been in service of identifying the socio-

economic and political provocations propelling this flight. At the end of the last

chapter, I could only gesture to that which this flight pursues—cuidadania—

invoking Isabel Lorey’s “care community” notion. For both Lorey and Precarias a

la deriva, a group of feminist theorists and activists, cuidadania aims at

“breaching existing logics of security and insecurity” predicated on

the modern figure of the autonomous, independent individual; the ideal male-bourgeois subject of a nation-state, who stabilizes his superior position by outsourcing his own precariousness and shifting it as a deficit to the precarity of the devalued, subordinated, excluded, and invisible ‘others’.524

The relational poetics I have devised as a response to the potentialities immanent

in O’Hara’s assemblage-poems participates in this conceptual secession—or, at

least, it hopes to. This is perhaps more simply to say that relational poetics as an

artistic procedure shares the same horizon of possibility. In general, one ought

to be careful about positively correlating artistic procedure and political

objectives, but with relational poetics, each imbricates the other. The very form

of my conception of a relational poem, what could have been previously called a

noem in the context of Izenberg’s reading of Celan’s neologism and its function

of producing a social encounter rather than an art object, enacts its political

objective of mobilising the means by which community (at the most) or (at the

least) relationality is borne. This overlapping of procedure and project denotes a

concretisation of O’Hara’s “ruminations” and his attempts to “limn” his “computed

524 Isabel Lorey, ‘Labour, (in-)dependence, care: Conceptualising the precarious’, trans., Aileen Derieg, in Mapping Precariousness, Labour Insecurity and Uncertain Livelihoods, eds. Emiliana Armano, Arianna Bove, Analisa Murgia (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), p. 208.

577

misunderstanding” about “coexistence” as he waggishly describes his practice in

the Lunch Poems blurb. The very formation and function of a relational poem

requires, however partial, momentary or vexed, a participatory culture. As an

emergent (inter)discipline, the extent of the emancipatory and empowering

possibilities of participatory cultures are yet to be fully determined, but the

production of a participatory culture intrinsic to relational poetics nevertheless

contains the conceptual and practical means by which conditions of exacerbated

precarity via ideologies of individuation and asymmetrical social relations are

mitigated through the acceptance of shared precariousness and the existential

dependency on others—that is, the differential structure of reality and the

relationality of social life. The task for relational poetry is to ensure that ensuing

participatory cultures are not territorialised by norms and values or, in other

words, that they do not enact models of coterie. Instead, it must invite and

necessitate participation as a mode of relationality possessing the capacity to

deterritorialise or otherwise transform the terms of sociality itself. This is the

route towards cuidadania that relational poetry, thanks to O’Hara, can map out.

It is also the very process of coexistence.

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