Taigas, Sunflowers, Eyelids, Swans
The Taiga Syndrome / El mal de la taiga by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana
The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang
The Eyelid by S.D. Chrostowska
A drawing by M.C. Escher of a flock of stylized swans, arranged as a Möbius strip. One side of the swans is white, but the other side is black. The white swans intersect with the black swans in the center in the form of a tesselation.
“What do you think of to fall asleep? Do you shuffle cards, count sheep…?’
‘Neither,’ I answered without conviction. ‘I always picture two swans, a black and a white one, just like those in front of us, gliding toward each other and then, very slowly, entwining together their long necks. I never reach the point when they strangle themselves, or each other. I seem to drop off just in time to avoid seeing it. Imagining this scene has never once failed to anaesthetize me.’ The idea, invented on the spot, pleased me, and I made a mental note to give it a try.”
—from S. D. Chrostowska’s The Eyelid
Since writing a LOT in November, I’ve been feeling a little depleted, so I’m trying to get back into practice by dusting off some entries that I never finished or posted. This is one of them.
I’ve been wandering in the woods for a while, but I don’t feel lost. That’s because I’m proceeding by the light of the ax, as Cixous says, in reference to Kafka’s opinion that, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” What’s more, I’m following Emily Dickinson’s dictum, “Success in circuit lies,” confirmed by Cixous’s, “This is how we get to the School of Dreams, by making a vast detour.” A detour on my way to what location?
The Book (and by extension, Books) as a kind of hyper-object like what Peter O’Leary makes of Finnish mythology’s sampo, coextensive in myth and consensus reality. Books with stronger thematic centers of gravity. Total world-systems whose constant play of forces work like master craftspeople by turns smoothing and texturing phrases. No intelligence at work but complexity—but is intelligence anything other than thickly-woven complexity?
As close to the above ideal is what I want for my book manuscripts (my wanting-to-become-books): Summer Arcana, The Book of Bella, Personal Mythology (which Amy named)… An autofictional novel about growing up in Texas that won’t be complete until I can go walk around Dallas and Richardson and Austin and San Antonio with a camera and a notebook. I had a dream that Rilke was a trans woman, and started writing a book in the academic genre, replete with endnotes and a long works cited, around this antifactual core. A critical fiction in the style of one of my masters, Wendy Walker.
I’ve leaned hard on my daily poem-writing practice throughout much of the pandemic. My friend Emily Brown has these monthly shared google docs. This month is sestets, and I wrote one before realizing I needed to take a short break from writing poems and fill myself up with reading. As if in answer, the universe, in the form of chance, friends and my own curiosity, supplied me with rich reading material. Emily lent me a copy of Robert Glück’s steamy, spiritual, New Narrative classic, Margery Kempe. I finally finished Cristina Rivera Garza’s El mal de la taiga in Spanish (way above my level, I’ve been inching my way through) and then again in English. On an outing with Ell to South Hadley, we ended up at Odyssey Bookshop, where I picked up Jackie Wang’s new The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void, which I quickly followed with S.D. Chrostowska’s The Eyelid. I’ve had The Eyelid for a while—savoring the wait or waiting for the right moment.
The Sunflower… is a dream book, composed via a process of active dreaming. After I read it, I listened to the LARB Radio Hour interview with Jackie Wang, in which she discusses having engaged in traditional psychoanalysis for the past few years. Her sense that we are all repressing a lot about the apocalyptic climate reality we are living through. That this collective repression makes its return in dream life, making dream life a site of important scrutiny, even for the “ardent materialist.” This rhymes with the conversation that happens between S.D. Chrostowska and Tamara Faith Berger on the Full Stop podcast, in which Chrostowska refers to the necessity for the ship of dreams to drop anchor in material reality from time to time. Dreams need material grounding because we are material creatures, but if we keep the ship at anchor, we keep ourselves anchored in the current regime of reality.
The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang (Nightboat Books 2021) begins with the poem, “LIFE IS A PLACE WHERE IT’S FORBIDDEN TO LIVE.” Here’s the first stanza:
All I remember is the coppiced terrain I crossed to find a house to rest in. Who is the woman lurking in the woods? A fellow traveler. I’m not used to seeing others. She is lost and I am lost but the difference is she is a novice at being lost, whereas I have always been without country. Without planet. When we happen upon a cabin I ask the house for shelter on her behalf. I’m aware that we come off as oogles but want to prove we are different by washing dishes. To concretize my gratitude.
The woman lurking, the cabin, the lostness, the woods. These all come from the symbolic vocabulary of fairy tales, but there is a way in which deep, old symbols, seem to be connected at the root to dreams as well as fairy tales. Does the word oogle, crustily connecting us to the present, belie this connection? I think not. Dream and text are commodious, and temporally (or otherwise) disparate symbols produce an uncanny feeling (it feels apt to invoke the unheimlich in its Freudian incarnation for Jackie Wang).
Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome / El mal de la taiga proceeds from the center of wakefulness to the periphery of dreams, where city logic gives way to fairy tale logic (although the client who sends the detective-narrator into the taiga insists, “This is not a fairy tale…”) and where the detective-narrator and her translator companion journey to the edge of the axe: where the boreal forests are being chopped down. Without putting too fine a point on it, Garza illustrates how the crisis of reason, and the crisis of extraction and environmental degradation are inextricably entangled. I said that dreams, in their uncommodifiable character, only lead back to dreams, but they can lead elsewhere, if you let them lead. The tangle to which Garza leads her readers is one that I believe she arrived at by letting dreams lead.
“In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy,” writes Jenny Holzer. Does this mean dreams are a survival technique? “DEATH AS A SURVIVAL TECHNIQUE,” the second piece in Jackie Wang’s new collection names the stakes very directly in its first sentence, “The world is warming, and we humans are to blame,” before immediately subverting the reader’s expectations of some recognizable climate change genre (didacticism, alarmism, nihilism, etc.) in its second, “In the future the world will only hold one person, therefore everyone else must die.” That second sentence functions as a kind of foyer or antechamber, mediating our transition between the diurnal logic of a screed and the nocturnal anti(or ante)logic of a dream.
Here’s the piece in full:
The world is warming, and we humans are to blame. In the future the world will only hold one person, therefore everyone else must die. It is for this reason that I find myself in a Hunger Games caused by global warming. Everyone knows there can only be one survivor. The people are febrile with murderous rage. Though I do not intend to kill anyone I still must persuade everyone not to kill me. I have to get them to empathize with me. But I don’t plead. Sometimes I hide by lying prone atop a pole pretending to be dead. By making myself visible I remove the anxiety of being found. My fake death becomes an orchestration that involves as many people as Tupac’s pseudo death.
In the distance I hear Maxine eulogize me. He knows I’m not dead but to stop people from killing me he must convince them I have died. Feigning death makes me privy to how I will be remembered. I think, How said that people are not alive to experience their funerals because it’s the most love they’ll ever get. Maxine memorializes people in a way that only a queer who has lived through the AIDS crisis can.
Ah, but I’m alive!
The threat of death calms me.
On the shore there is a crumbling beach house culled from the iconography of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Everything is crumbling as we wait for intermittent waves to hit.
Where, in this house, will I find air to breath?
The walls won’t hold. The safety I feel in this structure is false.
I am crouched in a corner waiting to die
Until Elijah comes and asks me to participate in a fashion show to “lighten the apocalyptic mood.”
Elijah takes me to a warehouse, dresses me in skimpy clothes and pushes me on stage.
Ashamed of my body, I try to cover myself with my hands and arms.
From the audience he yells, “Show more belly!”
And then to celebrate my performance he takes me into an empty crumbling house to play me a song on the piano while the house fills with water.
Imminent apocalyptic obliteration has brough out everyone’s repressed desires. All over the shore people are having BDSM sex in the ruins.
Where did all these leather belts come from, I think.
I see my friend all tied up, blissed-out, her eyes rolling back in her head.
It is a way to prepare for death.
The sadists believe they will be the ones who will survive.
The masochists embrace their powerlessness in the situation.
Freakish weather makes us all non-sovereign.
In this sense the sadists will be punished for their hubris: their belief that through sheer muscular will they can beat Mother Nature. The story becomes an epic showdown between sadists and masochists.
But I know that the situation calls for total passivity.
Maybe that doesn’t make sense?
Maybe it’s a pact with the gods.
The secret is to not try.
In giving yourself over to the inevitability of death, nothing can hurt you.
Nature no longer wants to kill you.
You have put yourself at the center of the battle of cosmic forces and lowered your sword.
Because you were willing to die, you will be spared.
But…
But.
I am sad that all my friends will die even if this situation has turned them against me.
Why must only one survive this environmental catastrophe?
To submit.
To take the passive road to heaven.
Survival of the fittest?
No. Survival of the best at playing dead.
This is where my first pass at this post started crumbling like Jackie Wang’s Eternal Sunshine beach house. I tried to sketch out the steps while I held them in my head: Apocalypse and dreaming: anxiety of frequent mode, collective repression of climate apocalypse, return of the repressed in dreams about it, a poem about this, “DEATH AS A SURVIVAL TECHNIQUE” You were able to step across those steppingstones, right? And here’s my pivot: Sleep as a survival technique.
What was I thinking here? Yes, in Greek mythology, Thanatos (Death) is the son of Nyx (Night) and the brother of Hypnos (sleep). Could this have been far from the mind of S.D. Chrostowska when she creates a literally sepulchral entrance to the sleep estate in The Eyelid? Orgasm may be the “little death” but sleep is a little death, too, in that it is a situation of, to use Wang’s phrase, “total passivity.” Sleep is a survival technique, but dreaming can be a technology and a site of resistance. This is the conjecture of Chrostowska in The Eyelid.
In The Eyelid, Chrostowska describes a unemployed protagonist with such a pronounced talent for dreaming, that it attracts the notice of Chevauchet, ambassador of the Free Republic of Onirica—that is, Dreamland. And Onirica is in crisis. Why? One of the defining features of the economics of this era has been the precaritisation of labour, one aspect of which is the imperative for individuals to monetize any aspect of their lives that they can. In times like these, sleep and dreams have a peculiar character. Why do we need sleep? Is it scientifically possible to obviate this physical need? If it were, why, that opens up more labouring hours.
Fortunately, this is not yet possible in our world (although capital is nipping at the edges of sleep in the form of devices that monitor and promise to help optimize it), but its sovereignty in “Greater America” (the diurnal setting of The Eyelid). The extent to which sleep, and by extension, dreaming, are suppressed in Greater America in favor of Comprehensive Intelligence:
“Empire of the Mind’ was the latest experiment in the field of Comprehensive Illusion (ci), aiming to institutionalize daydreaming. The program already interfaced with reality, allowing subscribers – which would soon mean every registered household – to realize their dreams by constructing virtual environments deceptively close to the actual. (The first to be granted free basic access were displaced peoples, eco-refugees, to divert their attention from life in the camps.) In this pluralistic daydream, everything was possible. Individual fantasies became mutually reconcilable. The new dispensation did away with the unity of time and space, and gave citizens leave to stretch reality as far as it would go.
The free-for-all engendered by this ostensible loosening of laws had no bearing on the real world, where social bonds were disintegrating. The fantasies entrusted to ci were contained by it, centrally monitored, analyzed, and disarmed. With a mere tweak of the algorithm, all potential threats to the new order were nipped in the bud.
Reality, meanwhile, was run ultra-rationally, with galloping and uncompromising efficiency. In it, all were about to become slaves to their own sanitized fancies. In the most recent upgrade to security, everything was encrypted, tamper- and foolproof. Whatever facilitated policing was sold as just one more step to ensure privacy. But the fact of the matter was that, as part of an effort to thwart terrorism and other political activities in ci, individual daydreams, though they remained interactive, became immune to peer influence and criticism. This would soon apply across the board – to all reveries – since everyone who hadn’t yet done so wanted to transition to ci’s flashier, more stimulating and rewarding, less fatiguing environment. Natural reveries were work – work that, being merely ‘creative,’ got in the way of true, profitable productivity. Daydreaming in cyberspace was assisted and augmented; it was easier. (The more data ci gathered on its users, the faster it relieved them of inputting new material.) As a result, it took up much less time. The mediated experiences it enabled were richer and exponentially more concentrated. There needed no better incentive. Addiction to ci could not but bring forth a more docile and impotent public.
I’ve always aspired to have great conversance with my dreams, and to become skilled at entering a trance state (daydreaming, reverie). I’ve always identified as a partisan of dreams, and sought out others: Gaston Bachelard, Hayao Miyazaki, etc., but I appreciate the way that Chrostowska, as serious scholar of the utopian tradition (see her: Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives) as well as a talented fiction writer, makes the stakes of dreaming clear and urgent.
Early in the pandemic, before I encountered any of these texts, I perused K. Prevallet’s Trance Poetics, attended Alana Siegel’s dream group and contributed to the anonymous shared pool of dreams. My partner sometimes dreams of a cold version of me, which makes me scared that there’s a truth to it. I sometimes dream of a city that’s a kind of amalgam of the cities I’ve lived in. I have ordinary dreams, though: wispy cloud-castle revelations that disintegrate under scrutiny, ambiguous erotic adventures, chilling presences that wake me up with goosebumps and my mouth shaped into a “no.”
Although Chrostowska reassures listeners to the podcast that we needn’t, part of me still aspires to loftier dreams: visions, encounters on the astral plane, utopian revelations lucidly received and durably recorded. With this in mind, I leave the realm of my literal dreams for the literary dreams of others. The hope that they will lead me back to bigger dreams of my own creates a schema like: personal dreams>literary dreams of others>bigger personal dreams>my own literary dreams. The circuit doesn’t end here, but it does fork, because my literary aspirations have multiple valences. There’re dreams pressed into service through representation and interpretation into product, productivity, career, credibility, cause. Chrostowska is aware that her characters (and readers) live in a world in which, “To charge for sleep was also the only way to signal its value” and in which her narrator succeeds his mentor, the Ambassador of Dreams, but rather than being called Ambassador, he acquires the sobriquet, “Merchant of Sleep.”
Then there’s the uncommodifiable aspect of dreams, which makes them a potential site of communal resistance to be arrived at by way of individual dreams. This is the case in The Eyelid in which dreams provide a shared portal into the utopian imaginary, but a portal that has a (meta)physical presence in the consensus reality of aggressive exploitation and debased value. As such Chrostowska meets us where we are, so to speak. Like the “Merchant of Dreams,” our efflorescences of organised resistance might be temporary, only to be repressed as the technology of resistance (in this case, dreaming) is stripped away. But as Chrostowska ends, “Upon lidless eyes flies soon come to rest. But the corpse in whose orbits they will lay their eggs has seen happiness.” And this instance of having resisted—in the form of unproductive reverie—is irrevocable for those who have experienced it, and it stands as inspiration: a blueprint for rebuilding Onirica if we need to.
Dreaming by the book (to purloin a phrase from Elaine Scarry), that is, other blog posts about dream books and literary dreaming:
The Dirty Text / El texto sucio by Soleida Ríos
Partisan of Dreams: Reading Poupeh Missaghi's trans(re)lating house one
in the bold imagery of poets the authorization to dream more expansively
4 November 2019: their jangling I esteem a sport
The Go! Team, Crossroads, Book Magic, Gods of Jade and Shadow, Hail Mary, Astra Taylor