A Toast to the Space In-between Them
Inspired by Leo, The Eleventh House, and the Sun in Scorpio
The Art Teacher
by Rufus Wainwright (Singer-Songwriter)
There I was in uniform / Looking at the art teacher / I was just a girl then; / Never have I loved since then / He was not that much older than I was / He had taken our class to the Metropolitan Museum / He asked us what our favorite work of art was, / But never could I tell it was him / Oh, I wish I could tell him -- / Oh, I wish I could have told him / I looked at the Rubens and Rembrandts / I liked the John Singer Sargents / He told me he liked Turner / Never have I turned since then / No, never have I turned to any other man / All this having been said, / I married an executive company head / All this having been done, a Turner - I own one / Here I am in this uniformish, pant-suit sort of thing,/ Thinking of the art teacher / I was just a girl then; / Never have I loved since then / No, never have I loved any other man
Notes: As fate would have it, I came across Wainwright’s Art Teacher while crushing on an English teacher in high school. Unlike Wainwright’s student, I do not own a Turner. I do, however, own a heavily annotated copy of Melville’s classic1.
Eros Is
Like every college-educated actor, I hated scene study class. “You‘ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” the professor barked. We stared at him in shock. “So goddamn predictable. It makes me sick,” he choked. We had finished performing a scene and thought we were excellent. Apparently, we were mistaken. “You can’t play good and evil,” he snapped, “it doesn’t fucking work.” He waved us off the stage dismissively. “It turns living breath characters into caricatures,” he said in exasperation. I raised my hand. “What do you fucking want!?” he roared. It took me a minute to realize he wasn’t referring to me. I put my hand down slowly. “These characters don’t give a shit about morality. They are motivated by their desires. And they’ll do anything to get them,” he spat. I opened my textbook and wrote that down in the margins. He was extreme, but spot on.
Desire makes theatre (and, to some extent, film and television) tricky. Unlike a novel and its players, the actor doesn’t have the luxury of exposing their character’s internal world. They are bound to the reality of the wicked stage and its limiting rules of engagement: body, space, time, energy, and relationship2 are all required to convey desire. On stage, and in life, any given action indicates a deliberate choice but not the nature of desire itself. What then propels us to act? My professor insisted that love and power guided a character’s actions. I respectfully disagree; a myriad of other abstract passions influence human behavior. At present, eros——a passion that shouldn’t be conflated with true love——holds my undivided attention.
“Where eros is lack,” Anne Carson delivered, “its activation calls for three structural components——lover, beloved, and that which comes between them.”3 An erotic triangle, so to speak: three sides, three angles, three vertices. Run with her idea and eros transcends numeral logic, becoming a verb. By amorously connecting the subject and the object, eros sets sentences into motion. Take a line from Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazal “Even the Rain”: “How did the Enemy love you——with earth? air? fire? / He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.”4 In the first stanza, the Enemy is introduced, in a question, as the subject. You, the lover, are introduced, in a question, as the direct object pronoun (or, for simplicity's sake, the second subject). Earth, air, and fire are not the object of your desire. Water is. In the second stanza, the narrator (Ali or Allah?) references the past——the Enemy withheld water until he could enact vengeance. A lack of rain beckons eros: a lack of eros beckons rain. This, of course, is just one example.
Time Is
Even though “The Art Teacher” isn’t a play, Rufus Wainwright’s ballad achieves a playful feat. It delivers a touching story with a moving plot: thrown into deep contemplation, a married woman looks upon a painting and recalls an unrequited love from her youth. As Wainwright croons through the tune, the listener ricochets from one tense to the next: past continuous (“I was just a girl then”) to present perfect (“But never have I loved since then”), simple past (“He asked us what our favorite work of art was”) to the conditional (“Never could I tell him, it was him . . . Oh, I wish I could’ve told him”). The singer-songwriter’s choice——deliberate and narrative——refuses Time and its orderliness. Why? To make her longing, and its consistency, vivid and common (meaning, shared by all).
While serenaded, her plight becomes mine: we are the lover, momentarily unmoored from Time, reaching out longingly for our beloved.
For José Esteban Muñoz, a groundbreaking writer and queer theorist, the present was a prison. He implored his readership to “strive, in the face of here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.”5 Wainwright’s musical treatment subscribes to Muñoz’s sentiments deliciously. The married woman’s queer and backward gaze vivifies her connection to the Art Teacher and to the Turner: another erotic triangulation. Truthfully, there is no difference, for me, between her Turner and my tattered copy of Moby Dick. Both objects are a window and a boundary, the space between now and then.
“The experience of eros,” Anne Carson mused, “is the study of the ambiguities of time.”6 Maybe that’s what queerness is: the progression of events———past, present, and future———collapsing into a sudden, suspended experience.
Consider the following passage from John Berger’s novel G.
When Zeus, in order to approach a woman he had fallen in love with, disguised himself as a bull, a satyr, an eagle, a swan, it was not only to gain the advantage of surprise: it was to encounter her (within the terms of those strange mths) as a stranger. The stranger who desires you and convinces you that it is truly you in all your particularlity whom he desires, brings a message from all that you might be, to you as you actually are . . . The desire to know oneself surpasses curiousity. But he must be a stranger, for the better you, as you actually are, know him, and likewise the better he knows you, the less he can reveal to you of your unkonwn but possible self . . . From this contradiction in terms, this dream, is born the great erotic god which every woman in her imagination either feeds or straves to death.
When the lover and beloved gesture toward one another at a distance, imagination runs wild: maybe, just maybe, the lover’s imagination is an example of the space in between them and the beloved. Was Zeus ever really a bull or satyr, eagle or swan? Yes, no, maybe: I doubt it matters. “I don’t know” is a sensual invitation for the imagination to flood in and soothe uncertainty, among other things. Or, instead of a deluge——thunderous and rushing, it builds an ambitious bridge: the possible and impossible running toward one another on a live wire. What happens, I wonder, when the factual and counterfactual meet? “Union,” Anne Carson warned, “would be annihilation.”7 Either the myth holds up or it doesn’t. When the space between them no longer exists, the triangle flattens into a straight line which then folds into a single point. Think about it. If safety and danger were walking away from each other, how would you measure their distance? Start with eight letters and end with a period. I-n-t-i-m-a-c-y. It burns through space like candles burn through wax. Greek gods don’t reveal themselves until after they’ve taken what they wanted.
Days and Days and Days, That’s How It Happens
Monday: As an eleven-year-old writer-to-be, I frequented a myriad of websites I shouldn’t have: Livejournal.com, my favorite among them. I read scores and scores of entries, peered into adult lives, and dreamed of having them. It was there that I first encountered the word dildo (which I earnestly pronounced dill-uh-doo). Thanks to usage and context clues, I gathered it was a noun used by adults. No one my age had ever said the word . . . at least, not around me. So, with a mysterious new phrase and insatiable curiosity, I returned to school to tell my only friend.
Tuesday: A what? Jamie asked. I stared at him, thoroughly confused. Dill-uh-doo, I repeated slowly. He chuckled and scratched his head. Try spelling it, he suggested. I reached into my backpack, took out a teal-colored pencil, and etched d-i-l-d-o into the top of the lunch table. Jaime’s eyes widened. Sorry, I said quickly, I didn’t have an extra piece of scratch paper. A mob of first graders ran past us and he covered the word with his hand. Who said this to you? he asked. I shrugged my shoulders. The mob of brats descended onto the swings; they were empty and alluring. Some middle schoolers, I answered pushing his hands away. He uncovered the scrawlings and asked for their names. I just hope it wasn’t my brother, Jaime said. I couldn’t remember because they didn’t exist. I lied and he refused to tell me what it was.
Wednesday: I stood on the other side of the wall and pressed my ear against it. What child wouldn’t listen to their mother’s side of a pertinent conversation? Most married couples split up because of sex or money or their kids, she chimed matter-of-factly. I tried to envision her Blackberry pinned between her ear and raised shoulder. A chatty voice pattered unintelligibly against the air. My mother laughed. No, no . . . the sex was good; the money consistent enough’ and the kids . . . good, she replied. I stopped eavesdropping and sat down next to my little brother on the bed. He was snoring after a tiring temper tantrum. Good, I thought. I was anything but.
Thursday: A janitor had scrubbed the word dildo from the lunch table. In its stead, a bone-white blot stained my youthful blemish. The ashy smudge curved into the shape of a wide crescent mouth. I sat down and stared at Jaime approaching me. He sat down across from me. He looked at the tabletop, I looked at the tabletop, and the stain smiled up at us both. We looked at one another and started to laugh. Let’s take a walk, he said trying to clear the air. I put my backpack back on and sauntered over to the soccer field beside him. Other kids were there too———doing cartwheels, playing tag, running in circles until they puked. It’s pronounced dill-doh, he said. I kicked a dirt clod as we walked and it burst into a cloud of golden dust. Dill-doh, I said, an erect artificial penis used for sexual aid. I looked over to see his reaction. He was looking ahead. So, he muttered, you looked it up. I sighed impatiently. Well . . . you wouldn’t tell me what it was, I replied. He turned to look at me. I don’t think we should be talking about sex toys, he said. And yet, here we are, I shouted and sprinted to the field to the nearest bathroom.
Friday: I stopped going to the after-school program after the janitor erased the word from the table. It’s too expensive, my mother explained, besides you’re old enough to stay home by yourself. So, left to my own dial-up devices, I logged onto AskJeeves and looked up the definition again: an erect artificial penis, used for sexual aid. No wonder he looked so shocked, I thought. My mom tried her best to pick me up from school on time. She did great Monday through Thursday, but Fridays were impossible. I have to travel to Ontario and won’t be back in time to pick you up, my mother groaned. So, I went to the after-school program on Fridays. She was pissed and I was the happiest fourth grader alive.
Saturday: Remember when I used the word lackluster three times in a sentence? I was trying to describe my school, its playground, and its rambunctious students. They were nearly successful in giving me an asthma attack via a playfully gathering dust cloud. Rewarded with a teal-colored metaphor, I maintained a content respiratory system and heartwarming memory. I neglected to mention the other reason I sat so far from everyone else. At the furthest burnt orange lunch table, I sat and spoke with Jaime, the twenty-something after-school aide. He was——and remains to be——my enigma.
Sunday: He followed me into the bathroom with a panicked look. I wasn’t panicked, I was smiling. There’s more I’d like to talk about, I said. His chest stopped heaving. I approached him and reached out my hand. My fingers pressed into his royal blue shirt and traced a line up to his neck. A tuft of chest hair reached out from his collar. Show me, I said taking a few steps back. He smiled and pulled off his top. Like this? Jaime asked. I nodded at him, at the contrast between his marbly skin, and coiled curls. A brambly path led from his sternum to his pelvis. His jeans seemed to hang off his hips like they didn’t want to be there. I looked at his belt and couldn’t see the waistband of his underwear peaking out from the top. I’m not wearing any, he admitted. I walked up to him and wrapped my arms around his waist. He reeked of regret. Jaime wrapped his arms around my body. I felt how hard and warm he was and I began to cry. Are you okay? he asked. I looked up at him, whispered no, and left him alone in the bathroom.
Cara sposa
by George Frideric Handel, performed by Philippe Jaroussky
Rinaldo: Cara sposa, amante cara, / Dove sei? / Deh! Ritorna a' pianti miei! / Del vostro Erebo sull'ara, / Colla face dello sdegno / Io vi sfido, o spirti rei!
Notes: Return to him who weeps.
Honor the Slash
Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. “Eros,” Anne Carson avowed, “is an issue of boundaries.”8 The same can be said of sound. Or, to be more specific, words. Ask a phonologist to define the word “word” and listen carefully. Is there a difference between the beginning and the end? you might ask. Yes, they might cry out, the answer is space. Without it, your last question probably would have read: isthereadifferencebewteenthebeginningandtheend. Silent and invisible, the empty space between words (a word boundary, the phonologist might chime9) is taken for granted by everyone except singers and poets.
Let’s look at the poet Sappho first. “Come to me now,” she cried, “loose me from hard / care and all my heart longs to accomplish, accomplish.”10
When quoting poetry, a forward slash represents a line break in the source text: a metrical pause, or caesura, if you will11. Unlike prose writers, most poets do not rely heavily on punctuation (word separators, the phonologist might cluck) to pace the reader. By implementing lineation, poets emphasize vowels and consonants to guide the reader's voice12. Look at Sappho’s line again and read it aloud. I’ll wait. Which word sounds called out to you? I was especially drawn to the word accomplish. Can you hear the rushing woosh it makes? We can. It seems to suggest, at least to me and the phonologist, that the heart's longings are a breathy and incessant infinity. Notice I didn't say good or true.
If poets mark the beginning and the end of a line with a metrical pause, singers use a physical one: the breath. Si canta come si parla (one sings as one speaks) should have been si canta come si respira (one sings as one . . . oh, the cleverness of you)13. An indisputable connection exists between the quality of the singer’s sound and the reliability of their breath. Listen to the first fifty seconds of “Cara sposa”. Like Sappho, Jaroussky is seamless. He spins the breath and sound until they reach the end of each heart-wrenching erotic triangular phrase: “Cara sposa, amante cara // dove sei?” (“Beloved spouse, dearest heart / Where art thou?”)14. Now, to indicate a breath mark in a musical score, a comma15 is written above the lyric. A double slash, however, indicates a caesura (or, a silent pause)16. The latter interrupts the sound without having to forfeit the breath: a spatial ruse of sorts. Such tricks demand the listener to lend their attention to a particular part of the phrase. Honor the slash and everything around it feels immediate.
Consider the following paragraph from “Small Bright Things,” a short story by E.J. Levy.
And it comes to her. What she must do. It’s not destruction she’s after, but an opening, to let something out or in. / It will be hours and hours before her mother and the new man rise; June has lots and lots of time. As she steps into the living room and passes the couch, she wonders if the dowry rug maker ever married, or if she wove to fill her waiting. Waiting that became a way of life. / June goes into the kitchen and selects the sharpest pairing knife, then she settles herself on the living room couch, beside the costly glorious rug. She gathers the dowry rug into her lap as if it were a child, storkes its rough surface with the palm of her smooth hand. She pushes up the sleeve of her nightgown and draws the knife across her forearm, as a lover might draw a fingertip, testing the sharpness of the blade, giving in to the painful pressure, which is almost like pleasure, before she raises the tip and drives it in. At first it is difficult to fit the blade under the tightly woven yarn, the weave is close and holds on. Clinging to what it has always been. But bit by bit, it gives. She begins to unravel the tiny knots at the back, letting them pull free of the strain they have been under for so long, and as June cuts, it seems to her that she can hear each knot give way beneath the blade with a sound like a relieved sigh.
Eros is a caesura, waiting for attention and infinity to come flooding.
Born or Made?
When I was twenty-six, I came out to my mother at a nude beach. Her first question broke my heart in two: did your father molest you as a child? No, I responded. We were having a conversation via text. I could hear the wheels turning in her head one hundred miles away. You made a MeToo post and I figured it was him, she replied. I looked up from my phone and started at the ocean crashing into the shore: foamy double lines marked sand. That wasn’t dad, I told her flatly. The ellipsis grew and shrank and grew. I waited patiently for her response. Then who was it, she asked, and why didn’t you tell me when it happened? My scoff was swallowed by the deafening ocean. I wasn’t hiding it from you; I didn’t tell anyone, I said. It happened two years ago while doing a contract abroad. Some asshole slipped his finger up my ass while we were changing backstage, I said. She didn’t respond for an indiscernible amount of time.
A seagull landed near my feet and pecked its way through an abandoned bag of potato chips. I tried shooing it away and it squawked back menacingly. A naked man walked out of the ocean flecked with sand dripping with sex and saltwater. He walked past me and tossed over a warm smile. I sighed to myself and smiled back. Well, she wrote, I love you no matter what; love the sinner hate the sin. My thumb menacingly floated above the call now button. The squawking seagull flew away with the chip bag. Mom, I achingly wrote, my assault had no bearing on my sexuality . . . that’s not how gay people come into the world. Her ellipsis grew and shrank and grew // then stopped.
Infinity
by Hohnen Ford (Singer-Songwriter)
I know there must be a place / Inside of me / where time stands still / an infinity / I haven't found it yet, maybe I never will / but I'll tretcher on, It's a lifetime skill / It's lonely being young / because I choose it so / and I'll take your hand
/ just to let it go / and sometimes it feels free / sometimes it's all about myself / and i wish i could be somebody else / am I running out of time / to find infinity? / Will I be left with / cold anonymity / and I'm searching for a light / or a weather sign / that's been seen by many travellers eyes / where snow / never settles and dreams don't end / that's where I'll meet you my friend
Notes: If you can find me, I’m here.
If I hadn’t read “Chapter 94: A Squeeze of the Hand” back in high school, I would’ve never found Hawthorne’s Melville-blow-my-back-out letters which eventually led me to Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire which led me to F@g Lit at large in college. Thanks, Mel :)
Body, Space, Time, Energy, and Relationship have been canonically termed the Elements of Dance. I have reason to believe every performing art (singing, dancing, acting, the other ones) adheres to the same elements in different ways.
Carson, Anne (2022). “Ruse”. Eros the Bittersweet. Dalkey Archive Press. pg. 19
When Agha Shahid Ali made it onto the poetry scene, he cleaned house as any good faggot would. Previously, the American Lords and Ladies of Free Verse had butchered the ghazal and demanded to be recognized for it. Ali laughed in their faces and restored his nation’s form to its proper glory.
While I have an undying respect for Munoz, the bitch’s book tried to murder me. Headaches, night sweats, delusions of grandeur, diarrhea. I finished the damn thing and thought I’d passed on to the afterlife. Sadly, I’m still here, delightfully in his debt.
Carson, Anne (2022). “Now Then”. Eros the Bittersweet. Dalkey Archive Press. pg. 131
Carson, Anne (2022). “What Does The Lover Want From Love”. Eros the Bittersweet. Dalkey Archive Press. pg. 69
Carson, Anne (2022). “Finding the Edge”. Eros the Bittersweet. Dalkey Archive Press. pg. 33
Dear Mrs. Haag (my 7th Grade World History Teacher), fuck you. Wikipedia is more reliable than your private Christian school pedagogy ever was. The phrase “I hope you choke” is climbing up my throat to throw itself at you. I will do you this last kindness, let the phrase sit on the edge of my lips, and leer at you. It’s a shame you could not afford me (a 12-year-old with an undiagnosed learning disability) such kindness, you evil evil bitch.
In addition to being an all-around badass, Carson casually translated Sappho’s fragments. The first fragment opens with “Deathless Aphrodite” and ends with “accomplish” and I can’t help but think of infinity.
Some things are difficult to cite because of a fuzzy memory. I can’t recall who taught me about the musical or poetic caesura. Sorry to this man (or woman or gender non-conforming individual).
A fuzzy memory strikes again! The poet’s relationship to line may have come to me from Mary Oliver’s The Poetry Handbook or a literary fever dream. Regardless, more poetic minds speak on it here.
Richard Miller, a renowned vocal pedagogue, famously wrote an academic article in the Journal of Singing demanding singers and their teachers let the Bel Canto phrase go. While the breath sustains the sound, articulation greatly affects its quality. Miller’s protege, Stephen W. Smith——author of The Naked Voice——introduced me to breathy hot takes such as these.
“Cara sposa,” an aria from the opera Rinaldo, was intended to be performed by castrati (or, boys without balls). Such severing practices, now illegal, maintained a hooty pre-pubescent sound. Think slightly creepy boy choirs. Castrati like Nicolini, the first to perform the aria, was known for having exceptional breath management. How astounding it must’ve been, to see a 38-year-old man, sing of excruciating loss, with the grace and gentility of a child.
As I advance in age, I see words in pictures. If you suffer from a similar blessing and affliction, here’s a picture and definition of a breath mark.
The phrase “silent pause” may seem redundant. I assure you it’s not. In music, there is a difference between a pause and a rest. A rest is the absence of tone. I can hear Maestro Elan McMahan, passionately instructing us to “ARREST THE SOUND!” A pause, on the other hand, interrupts the sound. Here’s a picture of the caesura and its infamous train tracks.