CW: Brief mention of sexual assault.
There is a bookshop on this map marked with iridescent ink, it’s really more of a rare gems dealer. I’ve been enforcing a rule upon myself lately when visiting this place: I can only buy books unfamiliar to me. If you ask why I’d say it’s because there is something about being found and I trust this place to facilitate finding. Kind of like how some people believe in religion, I believe in independent bookshops. And when I read—when I read it is like prayer, like that really deep kind of listening and stretching and falling into a soft texture that holds me.
On this humid August day, I leave with Gail Scott’s collection of essays, Permanent Revolution. The copy is signed, her script like a wink—come closer to me. On the back cover, a bolded excerpt reads:
Where there is no emergency, there is likely no real experiment.
I think reading can be an emergency exit and a map, an experiment in emancipation from another’s trace and my own. Like fire distorting coordinates. I think I want a new name. Anyway. I drift down rue Clarke & through Scott’s essay, Excess + The Feminine; my pupils dilate at the sight of Eileen Myles’ words cited: I am the gender of Eileen.[1]
What would a world look like if gender was understood the way we understand a name: singular, subject to change, sounding different depending on through who the sound is made. The sound of your name; the sound of your gender. I’d yell mine atop a canyon, listen to it change through the echo’s ripples, listen to it travel without my body, without a cage.
I return the new gem to my tote beside Myles’ novel, Chelsea Girls; a book I keep on me because it doubles as a switchblade for emergencies, for when I need something that feels like me but is not me to make sense of me. I think you know what I mean.
Intersections I share with Eileen Myles:
poet, ex catholic, they’re sober and I’m trying to be, rape survivor, student debt defector, out lesbian post twenty, dog lover, non-binary, sex and heatbreak sprinkled all over the page, fuser of the sublime and the mundane or the sacred and the profane.
Tracing the realities of my favourite artists is a way of looking at – or for – a reflection with joyful identification, with hopeful recognition. After my ex girlfriend broke up with me, there was this day. This day I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror. Lip shape, hair line, under eye—all obscure. Not in a metaphor for pain kind of way or a failure to take care of myself kind of way. My hair was brushed, teeth clean, glasses on. But all I saw was the feeling of a sinking behind the glass. It was like some other thing had arrived behind the glass and neither of us expected the other.
The cover of Chelsea Girls is a black & white headshot of Eileen in their twenties. Myles recounts the photo in the chapter titled Robert Mapplethorpe Picture:
My eyes are glassy. Shallow. My hair’s dirty too. The jersey was green. Dark green. I had a tan. What kind of frame would make it okay for me to hang it. I could put a vase of white flowers next to it like it was a shrine to the past. You’ve got to come over and see it sometime. It’s kind of scary. I don’t understand who she was at all. But that’s all right. It’s the past.[2]
By representing the writing self with an image of an old self – now obscure – Myles celebrates their own dissonance and nods[3] to the past, creating a sense of resolution with the present; the very kind of synthesis I think I’m seeking. Perhaps it begins with their itemization of the photo.
I don’t have a picture of that (my) reflection but I stand in front of the yellow house where I lived then and something that is not quite time rewinds. My eyes are blurry, sharpening toward the edges. Kind of milky. My hair is shorter than I thought it was. I can’t see the freckles that cover me typically—I’m too pale. There’s a delay when I move, the reflection a beat behind and shrinking in each expression held. I lock the door because I’m afraid someone else will see it, even though I live alone. I see a splinter in the mirror’s corner & peel away the glass, as if I could crunch the past in my palms and forget I am trying to hold it.
—the curtain draws back, the new tenant peers out and they look nothing like me. I leave.
My books & I head East on rue Laurier past rue Saint Denis, arriving at my favourite park to be alone & silent under the sway of maple trees. I open Chelsea Girls at random & sit with a passage underlined previously:
Poet has always meant to me saint or hero, the dancing character on the stained glass window of my soul, the hand lifting slowly through time, the whirr that records my material against strong light, gosh, why I live.[4]
What poet means to me shifts still but some contours abide: fighter or cleric, the Tarot’s fool skipping through glass shards, through time and its sieve, that which is necessary yet a choice like a deep belly breath in, a hand being held in the dark night, the swell of trash gleaned into a vessel with eyes, a map towards light, gosh, why I live.
Back in the park, the clouds split into that cinematic kind of summer shower, humid and wild and interrupting everything. I rush toward my host for the weekend/old lover’s apartment at a quicker than comfortable pace to protect the books—my tote bag, their only protection, at high risk of soaking through. & I have to piss.
There’s only two blocks left when a secondhand bookshop pulls me in. With a new internal oath to only browse the display table selects, I pace through briskly—the need to piss escalating at an unforgiving rate. & there it is, the source of that pull, glowing: an old Paris Review featuring Eileen Myles; their name bolded on the cover.
Hello Eileen, I prayed & you listened. Here you are again.[5]
That evening the old lover confesses love again. I retreat into the spare room, frightened because I love someone else now & I don’t trust myself without her yet. Like a little kid, I get under the sheet & make an A frame—the centre: my head. I pull out my thrifted treasure & listen:
My
intention
was to
[...]
wander
explain
how I
like a mind
like a spaciousness
that hungers
for more
and can
get lost
inside your
there
ness
for days[6]
I read all the poems in the edition, Myles’ work twice & close the light. It’s 3am.
Footnotes, References
[1] Eileen Myles quoted in Gail Scott Permanent Revolution (Book*hug Press, 2021), pp 16.
[2] Myles, Eileen. Chelsea Girls (Harper Collins Publishers, 1994), pp 227.
[3] Joan Didion on communicating with our past selves, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), pp 141:
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
[4] Myles, Eileen. Chelsea Girls (Harper Collins Publishers, 1994), pp, 11.
[5] Rebecca Solnit on such moments, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Viking Penguin, 2005), pp 134:
Such moments seem to mean that you have surrendered to the story being told and are following the storyline rather than trying to tell it yourself, your puny voice interrupting and arguing with fate, nature, the gods.
[6] Myles, Eileen. “To Love.” The Paris Review Vol 61 No. 229 (Summer 2019), pp. 25.
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Michaela Jones is a writer and cinema enthusiast living in Tkaronto. Their work appears in the Veg, F-Word, and the Channel. The architecture of memory, embodiment, queer time, gender and the notion of home are driving forces considered in their work. You can find them online @micoila.