The Ends of Pronouns
The ordinary throws itself together out of forms, flows, powers, pleasures, encounters, distractions, drudgery, denials, practical solutions, shape-shifting forms of violence, daydreams, and opportunities lost or found.
Or it falters, fails.
But either way we feel its pull.
—Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects
Garnet is a rock commonly associated with deep, sanguine hues. The colour of old blood, or pomegranate seeds. In fact, the word garnet comes from the Latin granum, meaning seed or grain. Garnet is the birthstone of January and the sign of Aquarius in tropical astrology, and has come to symbolize life-force, vitality, light, community, love, and friendship. Perhaps what is less commonly known about garnet is that it can be used in abrasive blasting.
Garnet is also the name of the first text of Lee Suksi’s debut literary work, The Nerves (Metatron Press, September 2020), in which the possibilities of what garnet can signify effervesce. In this first vignette, we are introduced to the text’s eponymous individual, whose “charisma shines like their sunburn.” Above them and an unnamed speaker, a plane soars “as bright as the evening star.” They enter a building and covet their secrecy by forming a joyfully painful blood bond: “This habit of giving one another tattoos only works in times when you believe the love of the collective has to be offered sadomasochistically first, like an oath, like syncing periods.”
The Nerves contains 48 such texts; each is given a name and details an erotic encounter of some kind. Small gestures and observations are made throughout the book, and our narrative gaze is never quite fully directed; rather, we float from body part to provocation to epiphany to quiet redundancy. What’s more, objects and fixtures, often in the backgrounds of our melodramas, come to the fore: “My asshole is the kitchen drain enjoying some spinach.”
Far from the cliché or pastiche of the romance genre (not that I have anything against said genre), the book shows us how desire isn’t simply a motor, a romantic quest, or an overcoming. In Suksi’s hands, it can also be a lost destination to which we can return. This is a book where the sex of “us” is celebrated and how you, as reader, fit into this community of eros—as witness or voyeur, as role-player or double. As readers, we are being called to intuit, to feel, and to give up a conventional narrative sense of comfort and exposition in order to explore what narrative sense can be as sensual, probing (even incomplete) experience by way of loosening narrative threads.
“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
The Nerves is labyrinthian—a field of associations and relations, of hints and reveries. We cannot ignore the sanguine command of the book’s title—The Nerves. Between the intricate anatomical system responsible for all sorts of sensations, messages, creeping tingles, and cues, and one’s nerves as a sign anxiety, The Nerves is a seductive panacea for proliferating what the fields of sex, pleasure, and intimacy can look like as narrative, as a sprawling network of touching.
Like many of the texts, it is difficult to summarize because experience can be difficult to summarize. How do you narrate an impression? An uncertain thought? Thirst? The texts are fragmentary—and not simply because they are short (they often run just a page or slightly more). They are fragmentary insofar as they bear a resemblance to other genres of writing: to poetry, to prose, to memoir, to the aphoristic, to journaling, to soliloquy. Generically, they slide between our fingers, holding us close but just barely. Reading therefore feels both familiar and alien, just at the edge.
This is our first lesson on the promises of the book. For what is in the space of the promise but limitless potential, rapidly oscillating between pleasure and anticipation, between joy and a slow whirlwind? Much of this book is about searching, about looking, about impressions on the mind that mark the body and impressions on the body that mark the mind. Skirting across the fragrance of dutiful longing, we cannot forget that it is impossible to touch without being touched back, impossible to kiss without being kissed back.
“The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.”
—Marianne Moore, “Snakes, Mongooses, Snake Charmers and the Like”
What lies at the end of a pronoun?: a body, a figure, an object, a destination, a wish. A pronoun is a grammatical promise, a placeholder for a name. A pronoun is a categorical word in which an “I” may choose to appear or recede. A pronoun can distinguish, but it does so within a collective vocabulary. A pronoun can also disappear, and make disappearing happen.
In The Nerves, “they” may slip by you, just as some of the lovers do. The book never calls attention to this universalizing pronouncement in which every character is a they/them/theirs. That is not to say that all the characters are trans, although they could be. Or that all the characters are ungendered, although they could be. Even the speaker(s) gender remains foreclosed. There is no critical self-reflection or explanation. No literary-theoretical discussion.
Each character is a kind of question—but not one that needs answering. Instead, each character becomes a question of imaginative and fervid experience: “I know they/we/you like it too.” Because of this, The Nerves manages to anonymize and particularize sensual experience, offering utopia—not as perfection—but as the not-place of possibility. The impossible dream where your “afterglow” rinses on repeat.
What lies at the end of one pronoun is another’s. Two bodies, two figures, two wishes, linked by displacement. When The Nerves asks, “Is it possible to learn about that us that isn’t the I or you? Is there overlooked truth in the civility of crawling inside the mirror?” what will your answer be? Communion is sticky, unpleasant, riveting—a new subject emerges in and out of that “us.” But often what lies adjacent to that subject of intimacy—the little kisses, the quiet appreciations, the fleeting adorations, the ecstatic shrills, a singular warming glance—are purged in the afterglow or aftershocks of disintegration. The Nerves picks up those remnants and reminds you that at the end of you there is an I.
Lee Suksi is an artist and care worker. I first met them a couple of summers ago when they read my natal chart on a park bench in Toronto. The Nerves is their first book. Read an excerpt of The Nerves here.
Essay
-
November 14,
2020
-
8-minute
read
Prathna Lor
the poetry editor of Shrapnel, is a poet, essayist, and educator currently living in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Their writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, C Magazine, Jacket2, and Canadian Literature, among other places.