Dear Reader.
If you are new here, welcome to my substack. For the next few weeks, every Friday I’ll be publishing an excerpt from the book I’m working on about grief, trauma, childbirth, singing and the erotic. It’s cheery stuff. Thanks for being here…
“Liberation paves the way for new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of freedom” (Foucault).
While I was pregnant, navigating the gauntlet of advice was mortal combat. Beloved, we were freedom fighters, you and I. As my autonomy gradually contracted from view everyone and their mother-wound seemed to know what’s best.
Eat Organic Food. Don’t dye your hair. Don’t give up your work before you absolutely have to. Take your vitamins. Exercise. Don’t exercise. Chill out, go to the sauna. Which trimester are you in? Get a massage. Massage is dangerous. Do breath work. Go to work. But don’t go moving that pelvic floor too much. Oh you’re an opera singer. Cool. Get enough sleep. Don’t go anywhere around smokers. Don’t tell me not to smoke in my workplace just because you decided to have a baby! Don’t give up your freedom. Sex is good for pregnancy. But not your pregnancy. You can have sex, but no penetration. As soon as you stop bleeding you can go back to your normal life. You wanted this baby, I’m sick of hearing about problems you caused to yourself. The most important thing you can do is reduce stress. Don’t be a martyr! If you want your baby to live, you have to cancel that performance. Don’t forget to be a person. Actually, orgasms are out of the question. Just relax. Were you just singing? Don’t breathe too deep. Lay down. The benefits of bedrest are outweighed by the risks. Don’t sacrifice yourself. What’s happening to you is more normal than you’d think. Your case is too complex for us to make predictions. Keep still, with your pelvis angled higher than your chest. Laying flat for weeks is a major risk for blood clots. Go for a walk, it’s totally safe. But don’t get up unless you absolutely have to. See how she’s all curled up? Your baby’s spine is being crushed. Her lungs are in the 6th percentile. Your child is dehydrated. You know you have the option of an abortion right? Her bladder is full! Your cervix is long! I think your baby is going to be fine. Here, listen to my podcast. Babies born at this gestational week have a 30-40% chance of living but those that do live have an 70% chance of Bronchopulmonary dysplasia or intracranial hemorrhage. I can only authorize an abortion if there had been a rape, or domestic violence, that’s obviously not the case for you. Follow your mother’s intuition. Do you want this baby or not?
The path to liberation is fenced-in by biological power relations. Nonetheless the guilt is, as they say, “killing me”.
“Freedom is not a given: it is something for the subject to conquer. Freedom is not static; it expresses itself through projects. It is a transcendence in the sense that it consists in going toward indetermination. To be free is to project oneself into the world. Therefore freedom comprises risks; it demands the courage and the self-confidence that are necessary to determine a project for oneself and to throw oneself into an undetermined world in which the success of the project is not guaranteed” (Manon Garcia)
I have been projecting myself into the world as long as I can remember. Maybe that’s why I could not hold you inside me?
At the end of the first trimester I was relieved to have gotten past the official pregnancy “danger zone”. Those early weeks where miscarriages are common and the general advice is not to tell your loved ones in case you might later have to tell them you had failed. At 12 weeks, all scans and tests showed good results. You were a perfectly average specimen. It feels funny to be celebrating having achieved the 50% percentile in every measurable parameter.
I was shocked at how fast and how dramatically my body was changing. A professional mover, my well disciplined form had become unpredictable. I had the sense of moving away from the field of known inhabitance and towards indeterminacy. I raged. I slept. I wept. I suddenly could not bear what had before felt bearable. I took an unexpected trip to Switzerland so I could walk in the rain doused mountains and stand in front of wet train tracks contemplating the choices before me. Sometimes I felt like I was on MDMA. I only wanted to eat foods typically consumed by 4 year olds. My orgasms had become more like LSD trips. When I came, I howled like a tortured animal. Then in the 16th week. Blood. It was scary. But the doctors told me not to worry. You were fine. I would be fine too so long as I rested, reduced stress, kept an eye to make sure the blood was slowing. Then go about my business. There was nothing they could do until the 22nd week anyway.
A week after I started bleeding, the flow had slowed to a trickle, and then stopped. I had a show scheduled that week with performance artist Ania Nowak. She never got tired of listening to my ventilations during rehearsals and tear-filled tea breaks. There was no back up performer. I made the choice to go on stage. Actually, we put the audience on the stage. We performers were mostly on the ground. In the actual earth of the garden outside the theatre. The performance was called “Lay me low”. I wore a g-string, my just-visibly pregnant belly and an open fronted faux-baroque cloak. Our creation that day was a semipornographic lesbian fantasia on Dido and Aeneas (without Aeneas), as part of a festival called “Leisure and Pleasure”. A neighbour whose apartment looked into the garden, threatened to call the cops. It had no effect given we were not breaking any laws. He was angry because he’d felt he had to keep his precious children away from the windows and our singing and naked breasts. He even tried to disrupt the dress rehearsal as Ania and I prowled around the garden, cruising one another. We sang into each others necks and faces. She even sang into my belly and pussy. Did you like that? I imagined it would have been nice. To be serenaded so beautifully just as your ears were waking. The finale was an endless passacaglia of descending chromatic tones while, ass in the earth, I cradled Ania like the Pieta. We sang Dido’s Lament: “when I am laid in earth…remember me, but forget my fate”.
Hindsight is 20/20.
I dont remember if it was the night of the last performance or the day after that I started bleeding again. Ah yes, it must have been the next day because I was at the organic supermarket. Now it comes to me. I was standing next to the tinned beans. I felt the warm wet flow. I started looking for a bathroom. I could not find one. I could not decide whether to pay for my groceries or to flee. I paid for my groceries. The pain was building. I did not know how I was going to carry the groceries I’d just paid for. I managed to get them outside. I stood on the street corner and cried. Suddenly an acquaintance appeared on his bike. I was embarrassed to be found crying on a street corner covered in blood. He offered to help get me to hospital but I declined. Instead he loaded me and my groceries into a taxi. I called your Dad. I wanted to go straight to hospital. He was hosting a conference about Hegel. Another argument ensued while I dropped the groceries in the entryway to the apartment. Did I really need the hospital? He hates hospitals. Yes, I did. I went. I did not leave there for 3 days.
The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed the idea that we engage with culture in order to transcend ourselves, in the hopes of holding off the fear of death. That in the absence of older methods like religion we try to entangle the meaning of our existence with a wider relational field. The “projects” we create are the facilitators of this transcendence. We might come to our project by practices of reaching for artistic productivity, or wealth, or children.
Beloved, I am reaching. My desire is reflected in this repeated pressing of the wound. I refuse to allow it to scab over and recede into the backwards facing field of the automatic. I kid myself it’s an act of rebellion against canonicity. I try to stay focused on how I do repetition. That way I wont get stuck in this land of the dead. The wound still breathes. I palpate the injury as a whole trying to make out its constitutive parts. I repeat the gesture until I’ve squeezed the juices from it. Feeling my system relax as I twist out pus and milk, every stroke a re-orientation of my bid for staying alive, what some might call transcendence. Without this work I am lost. I can not stop trying to stay with you.
“The work of inhabitance involves orientation devices; ways of extending bodies into spaces that create new folds, or new contours of what we would call livable or inhabitable space. If orientation is about making the strange familiar through the extension of bodies into space, then disorientation occurs when that extension fails. Or we could say that some spaces extend certain bodies and simply do not leave room for others. Now in living a queer life, the act of going home to the place I was brought up, has a certain disorienting effect. “ (Sarah Ahmed)
When I was a kid your grandfather used to take your uncle Tom and I to an Austrian smorgasboard restaurant in the Dandenong ranges outside Melbourne. It was called “the Cuckoo”. For some reason I had already pictured you there. It had fun activities for the kids included in the price of the meal. My Dad had good memories of Austrian food dating from a brief stay there as a child refugee en route to his new home in Australia. The restaurant employed a woman in a Dirndl to go around and collect kids from the tables and teach us songs and dances that we would later be expected to perform for tables of parents. I wonder if you would feel the same, full of songs and glad to have an audience?
“You put your whole self in, you put your whole self out, you put your whole self in - and you shake it all about. You do the hokey pokey, and you turn around. That’s what its all abouuuuut!”
(The Hokey Pokey - participation dance)
I have always had this sense that voices have the power to penetrate in powerful and seemingly erotic ways. This can extend into all sorts of situations, sometimes resulting in unfortunate and unintentional violations. I’ve left restaurants undone by the sound of a stranger slurping soup at the table behind me. I once had a panic attack while overcome by the audible tension I heard in the throat of someone giving a lecture.
Loosening ones languageless voice is kind of a proposition. A chance to express our fleshy selves in a vulnerable bid for connection. It can hurt to get turned down.
For years I fucked in silence. I would hold my breath when I came and refused to release any utterance that might make myself vulnerable to being read. Paralysed by fear that my hunger for connection, my out-of-control-incompleteness, might become legible. This extended way beyond the bedroom. I walked out of yoga class if I happened upon a yogi enjoying sighs of relief. I was both awestruck and terrified of anyone whose voice seemed to know what they wanted and was able to express it.
The vocal apparatus and the sexual apparatus are systems at the beginning and the end of human expressivity. They’re unruly portals to the beyond. We focus too much on their domesticated manners. The larynx’s principal evolutionary function was not singing, or speech or even a baby’s cry for food. There are animals with glottises that have no voice at all. The same could be said of our sex organs.
The evolution of the forms and purpose of sex is a wild thing. Slippery, fluid and explosive. From the moment we are born society is preoccupied with containing the uncontainable expressivities of the sphincters of our pelvic floors. They will not listen. Some cocks can’t stop themselves. Some lay inert against the will of their owners. Some folks are vegetarian. No two vulvas look or behave in quite the same way, and their variety of skills can be a shock. The female spotted hyena gives birth through a giant clitorus that looks so much like a cock the ancient Greeks took it as evidence of bisexuality and Hemingway called them “hermaphroditic self-eating devourer(s) of the dead”.
The root of our collective shame is entangled with the instinctive understanding that our sex organs are incapable of being truly polite. Attempts to domesticate them are just that. Their beauty and their terror is in their irrepressible multivalent expressions: pleasure, reproduction, waste.