Binding UnboundAn Introduction to Unbound: A Book of AIDS
Preface from The Skin of Meaning:Collected Literary Essays and Talks, 2016
Among the literary texts and talks collected here that arose alongside my poetry in a heady period of theory and critique—flowering in particular after my studies in poetics at New College of California—Unbound is at the heart of the matter. The penetrating sorrow of AIDS, the shock, the depth-charge, the limitlessness (“unbound”), the arc of inquiry, the angels, the call to order, the call to death, the call to life: all these passions of the epidemic pulled at my essay writing as of some primal eros or anti-eros. They demanded the figure of a mortal body to house their contending forces. As the human body was the form in which the meaning of the virus found agency, so my writing about the epidemic would shape itself towards bodies as a formal principle. In other words, the analysis—the poetic analysis—would be channeled through people in time and space—in history—and the essays in Unbound would structure themselves as a new (to me) kind of poetic narrative, where revelations were attached to actual names, and the viral ink documented its transit in the stories and speeches of my friends who were its actual hosts.
My poetry had already engaged the form of the prose-poem to unwind mini-narratives, queered by radical ellipsis and mysteriously free-floating subjectivity, but Unbound, with its urgent figures and voices, led me toward a critical writing also housed in narrative. I’d previously committed myself to the first-person voice in both prose and poetry, as a means of destabilizing authority and undermining the fiction of objectivity. No high-floating blind statements of supposed facts, or pseudo-neutral, “One could say that …” Bent along the informing angles of gender, queerness, and identity formation, the speaking subject with a house of skin and bones would be my petitioner. Mine was not going be a disembodied poetics! But with its information inextricably linked to the lives of my friends, AIDS raised the stakes to make neutrality impossible and subjectivity comprehensive.
And yet, as much as “body” absorbed “theory” into its membranes, theory demanded that body also be symbolic, polymorphous, historicized, and self-analytical (or should I say self-diagnostic?) Skin would be informed by meaning, and meaning by skin. From the beginning the essays in Unbound were viewed as part of my work in poetics, exactly as the guiding impulse at the root of my inquest was a search through the bones of the epidemic for poetic meaning. I wanted information subtler than statistics, deeper than diagnosis, more pitched than mourning, rawer than memory and richer than fact, grander than benedictions … ignited by a mortal fire but outlasting it. I wanted to wrest a poem’s meaning from the epidemic’s prose—the quotidian facts, the journalism, the indexed obituaries. And I wanted to use prose to dissect the epidemic, and lay bare its poetic heart: the quoted language of transcendence, the angelic clarity and sorrowful wisdom. Almost to the end, in fact, Unbound’s subtitle was, “A Poetics of AIDS.” (Its actual working title was a resonant but unfortunate phrase taken from one of the essays: Mortal Purposes. Alas I kept saying to myself, “Myrtle Porpoises,” and had to send both purpose and porpoise back to the blue wild …) Unbound took shape in the grip of personal narrative—balancing daily fact and daily awe—and the flare of poetic attention—fusing the familiar and the extraordinary.
The circumstances were overripe with emotion, and easily overwhelming, and I didn’t have scientific distance—medical or social. Poetics also meant the angle in. I had in mind a passage from Claude Lanzmann’s holocaust documentary Shoah, in which Polish townsfolk accept culpability for a particularly brutal and efficient extermination process because Lanzmann asks them questions of such specificity that they get lost in the details and forget the larger guilt—details, for example, about the carpentry and measurements of what is essentially an execution platform. AIDS cut such a wide and jagged swath across our lives (I want to say its scythe did) that I sought to enter at an angle or an edge, often arriving on the associative vibrations of literature and art: the reverberations of a pictorial image or a quoted line. Unbound is replete with citations from my contributing heroes Shakespeare, Chaucer, Whitman, Proust, Stein and Cocteau; with evocations of the music of Chopin and Verdi, of the golden throats of Monserratt Caballe and Aprile Millo, or the violet eyes of Elizabeth Taylor; with examinations of photographs in single and in sequence, and articulations of the dancer and the dance. The pieces partook of my life in letters and art because they partook of my life in letters and art. The impulse was holistic. The subtitle ultimately became “A Book of AIDS” much as if it had been a day book or a book of hours, where AIDS was equal to the day or the hour.
Almost all of the writing in Unbound appeared in the same journals and presses that were publishing my poetry. I was aggressively determined that this writing be seen as central to my literary work; I was uniformly insistent that I lacked the luxury to frame another discourse; and I was achingly aware that those not inside the circle of fire had very little idea of the intensity and the enormity of the flames. And so Unbound was published in book form by the fine literary press, Sun & Moon, which had already published my poetry collection Into Distances. The essays appeared in Poetics Journal, Talisman, Temblor and ACTS. I should say with respect that though I came armed for battle, the editors of these publications met me with high interest and regard. Nevertheless, there was very little other writing related to AIDS appearing in these journals, and if I sometimes felt ferociously isolated, the isolated circumstances fueled my ferocity. I had already published and read a fair amount of homo-centric work in the same or similar venues, behind an imaginary “I know what I’m talking about so shut up and listen” guard, and I used to joke admiringly that the largely hetero audiences actually did. In truth, many of the barriers I blew down were internal, but in any event they were downed.
Unbound formed in the clearing as a series of inquiries and interjections, a rising arc inside a descending spiral, a way out that was a way in. And if I have given the impression that my endeavors were somehow heroic, it is a fiction of the shorthand of my telling. I agonized over how to write; I was late to the task; I trembled nervously over the transcendental gifts my friends had given me. But I was surrounded by what I might properly call a sense of duty, even if it at times it felt like nowhere to run: AIDS chased me down, cornered me, and stuck a pen in my hand.
(2016)