I like poetry! I like internet strangers being creepy… not as much.
(I’m very sorry this is the second update about internet strangers being uncomfortable in a row; I swear this will not forever be the Mildly Menacing Strangers Newsletter.)
But first…
Picnic Picnicked
The weekend’s Boston Trans People’s Picnic is in the bag and was a great success! Folks brought picnic staples like cupcakes that consisted of stuffing with mashed potato faux-icing (it actually 100% works and is delicious) and I learned what it means for your Venus to be in Virgo (not a sex thing).
We’ll be doing it again September 23rd; updates here, spread the word, please and thank you!
To Count Them One by One as the Wires Slip By
I sometimes post book reviews to a book website. Because I’m writing more, I want to pay better attention to the craft at work in what I read, and knowing I’m going to write a micro book report helps. I’m also practicing writing faster, releasing writing without being so perfectionist, allowing myself to be opinionated, and using a more conversational voice. The reviews are public for the sake of the exercise, but I don’t expect anybody to read them, really. One other user (who’s probably a bot) follows me, I’m friends with some real-life friends, and I occasionally get some random likes.
Back in February, I read and reviewed a book of anti-trans theory written by someone who had identified as trans, accessed trans health care, and later decided she was cis and had been tricked into thinking she was trans. I… don’t think a lot of other trans people read or posted reviews of this book. Maybe not anybody who has neutral-to-positive feelings about trans people. Every other week or so I get an angry comment on this review, usually some slurs strung together with a claim I didn’t actually read it (or I would also have concluded I wasn’t actually trans or something?). It’s one click to delete them, and as far as being queer on the internet goes it’s not so bad. I figure I’m absorbing anti-trans labor that might otherwise go to something worse.
On Sunday someone (clearly a real person who has been using the site for some years) posted a long comment on this review that mentioned tracking me down elsewhere on the internet, and included some specific details about my life - among other things, the commenter mentioned that she had discovered that I changed my name last summer, which, she said, would mean that I’d been living as trans for less time than the author of this book did, so who was I to talk? She’s wrong that my name change = “living as trans” (I think, I don’t really know what that phrase means), but still: it really seemed like she was attempting some variety of “I know where you live” intimidation.
I’m pseudonymous on this site, with no direct links to the rest of my digital presence. The only place on the internet I talked about my name change was on Facebook, in a post now removed. I’m not sure exactly how this person traced me, or identified the moment of my name change. I’m friends with folks on the site who use their real name, so maybe she did some cross-referencing against LinkedIn or Facebook to identify someone with connections to all those people, and did some sleuthing of archived web pages to pinpoint when I changed my name? Some hate groups keep lists of trans people with an internet presence, and I’d be very surprised if anybody thinks I’m a big enough deal that I’m on one, but maybe one of my Facebook friends or a former coworker is deep into anti-trans stuff, or the lists are bigger than I thought? Or maybe she just found the right thing to Google.
I don’t feel scared about this. Nothing she mentioned is secret, it was just things that must have taken an involved, deliberate effort to find out. The comment was aggressively insulting and offensive, but didn’t include any threats of violence. The worst anyone could do to me with unhindered access to my online life would be to publicize my inexplicable long-term commitment to a chin-strap beard and the fact that I’ve liked-and-subscribed to wayyyyyy too many instructional videos on cute and practical hairstyles relative to the two unflattering ways I ever wear my hair. I’ve made a deliberate choice to stay queer when I’m on the internet, and I’m totally fine.
I’m just genuinely so confused by the effort invested. My therapist reminded me that lots of people get pleasure from feeling like they’ve hurt or frightened someone. (This person didn’t hurt or frighten me, but from her tone it’s easy to imagine her feeling some satisfaction while writing, expecting to.) And yeah, I know that’s true, I’ve seen it over and over, but even when I’ve come to expect cruelty from a person, I can’t say I understand it.
And also, I’m struck by how much a fact can leave out.
This person has done a bunch of detective work and thinks that she has discovered evidence that proves something meaningful about me: a recent moment in time before which I said I was a man, and after which I pretended to be a woman.
I kinda wish this was how it went down, it sounds like an easier life!!!
But here’s what I actually want to talk about. What we’re seeing here isn’t just a weakness of this stranger’s understanding of trans people in general, or my story in particular. It’s also a weakness of a certain kind of prose for conveying certain truths.
Measuring by lifetime effort, I might have written more game design documentation than anything else: thousands of pages. It’s dense technical writing. Its aims are clarity and efficiency. (And sometimes maintainability.) Like journalistic writing, game design docs benefit from a clear lead that tells the whole story in brief, followed by a pyramid of details.
My TERFy book friend is not so very far away from a journalistically correct account of my name change: I really did ask a lot of people in a short span of time to call me something different. It happened roughly when she said it did. It changed a lot of things. To some observers (though maybe not to me) it might make sense to say that was when I began to move through the world as a trans woman, if not as a trans person. But that account obscures a fuller truth. It’s not even true that there was one moment in time when I changed my name. There’s not one singular what, where, when, how, or why. A ton of things from across the years, many of which might seem unrelated, impossible to explain clearly and efficiently, are at work in the story. A mountain in Maine. A tattoo. An ex’s grandparents. My phone flying out of my pocket on a roller coaster. The day of Trump’s inauguration, when I passed strangers openly weeping on the street and I overheard one quote a poem. A hallucination when I was very sick, as a child. Wanting to blend in. Wanting to burn with furious color.
Transition - and even just a name change - doesn’t happen on a day. There are parts that happened as early as I can remember and parts that will be happening for a long time, maybe the rest of my life. Grief, identity, relationships, cultural change, violence, nature, so many things are that way. So much cuts across the whole timeline, the whole multiverse.
Here’s an excerpt from Eileen Myles’ “Twilight Train”.
The girl who chews has fanned her fingers out below the glass and I long to stare at them. To count them one by one as the wires slip by. It's the sultriness, the smokey approach of the loss of light that I love. The homosexual lilac comes & it's ours & everyone like us. The bright compartment of white lights & gleaming flip top & yawns rage on. Outside the Hudson River queerness tools on my brain like a hopeless little wallet of feeling. A clear swipe to night.
There’s something cinematic happening here: a series of sharp cuts that stretch a moment. And something metric: a railroad rhythm cutting across the sentences. A pile of images stack and stack and stack.
I just love this, this is like the poem version of that Michel Gondry Chemical Brothers music video that I also love. All those ‘l’ sounds whipping by like telephone poles and then you go over a bridge and there are no telephone poles! And then it gets dark and you can’t see them. And they’re ‘l’ sounds but also telephone poles but also dollops of emotional sensation but also a cute someone’s cute fingers but also maybe queer solidarity?
Whatever they are, they’re a lot of things, all at the same time.
Earlier this month Myles tornado-ed into the Roxbury Poetry Festival to teach a workshop, as physically slight as a baby chick but with energy like a tiger who has seriously been hitting the gym. I think they only use punctuation when they write. Maybe I heard a few exclamation points, but I don’t think they spoke with any commas or periods.
They said all kinds of sentences where I was like, “Really? I… no, that’s not how that works.” Sentences like “time is a way of agreeing” and “you’re in the river and starting to know things of a different order” and “in a certain way it’s never Tuesday if you fall in love or if you lose somebody” but then I’d sort of mentally review the total effect of the last ten minutes and be like “Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, that is how poetry does that thing.” It was, maybe unsurprisingly, the poetry lecture version of their poetry.
One thing I took home from this ideopointillistic panorama of an hour was that one reason poetry does all kinds of things to look and sound weird—carriage returns in the middle of sentences! uncapitalized ‘i’s! em-dashes as plentiful as stars!—is to shove you out of your habit of reading for easily digestible, journalistic facts. To trick you into facing things that are hard to digest, or barely possible to say, or not a fact but still important, or that the world keeps trying to make you forget. To remind you that no matter how useful our fact sentences can be, they’re little toothpick-and-pea models of a reality so much more gorgeous and strange. We are all so much more gorgeous and strange. We are all so much at once.
And maybe it’s possible to write and read in a way that honors that, at times when that truth matters more than clarity and efficiency.
Check Out This Poem
Speaking of therapy, here’s one of my favorite nature poems, tricking you into seeing beauty again when you’ve forgotten how to see it. It’s 19 lines long and nature doesn’t show up until line 10 and nature is the front yard. It’s Jennifer Espinoza’s “The Sunset and the Purple-Flowered Tree” and here’s where it starts:
I talk to a screen who assures me everything is fine. I am not broken. I am not depressed. I am simply in touch with the material conditions of my life.
And the speaker eventually makes her way into the yard. And sees an ant. And a couple birds. And then, wham:
A garden blooms large in my throat. Color and life conspire against my idea of the world.
Where did that come from? It was always there, happening at the same time as everything else, that’s the point.
May gardens bloom large in all our throats,
~Callie