Rainer Diana Hamilton
& Violet Spurlock
Proposal
We should say in public whatever we say
in private, Rainer assumed the stomach
sleeper’s form on the made bed to say, white cotton
hiding the weighted blanket, which hid
the also-white backing of the variegated gray
quilt they’d begun laying upside
down (charles’s innovation), which hid the green
striped matelassé (we’ve reached the layer
containing blankets old enough they were included
in their 2017 itemization), which hid blue
polka dot sheets, bottom and top in the American
tree, and they felt so close to their teenage
phone posture that they tried to twirl the non-existent
cord, then the missing hair, then settled for pulling
out green strings from the third layer, as if
preparing to play cat’s cradle, while they listened to Violet
describe her reluctance to speak publicly
about the body, hers and our control over our own, such as
it is, for fear of implicating others, who might be incapable
of distinguishing “this is how I feel” from “this is
what you and I should do,” both speakers understanding
they shared a rather California, if one imagined
50 years later, ideal of personal beauty, potentially hostile
to the efforts they were both making towards bringing
the self they presented to the world in line
with the world’s minimal needs for that self’s
presentation in order for, say, gender to be apprehended
felicitously. Rainer had been going off
about their intolerance of recent poems
and essays and, honestly, dinner conversations
that put beauty, as it is recognizable by the most boring
possible set of authoritative onlookers, above
all else, whereas they thought people should aspire
to the model of Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She
Wrote, to be the object of constant implied desire,
presumably because no one can resist her independent
means and mind, a woman indifferent to the constant
flirtation of others, or of late Orson Welles, to seduce
by gravity, or at least agree that we don’t need
to invent hotness anew, but now they were going on
about their unwillingness to go on publicly, that
sheepishness had taken over. “I should say nothing
in confidence I could not say without it,”
they apologized, and not as opsec, where you only
say on Signal what you can imagine a cop reading
off your friend’s phone later that night when
the state decides to allocate its substantial resources
to the project of discouraging even the more pathetic
attempts at registering one’s opposition to its evil,
or only say in DM what you’d stand by if, the friendship
faded, ex friend circulated your bitter estimations
of those in common, or follow some stupid protocol
for public sector employees, taking care to sign petitions
that, though so watered-down by consensus
they barely named what we ought not do
unto others, still somehow constituted fireable
offenses, only from private emails, but just
the inverse, the strategy of the man
preventing his own blackmail, they wanted to say
anything—they’d entered the age of sidebars,
of I would never say this in public, buts,
a time when a few dozen young would-be communists
were always ready to hit the wrong target, to try
converting their private situations into ones
with social weight, but getting so stuck on hating
their own rich parents they forgot to welcome
class traitors and wish for a local Engels,
and Rainer was always having some such harmless
opinion in public and then getting mad at messages
from those who agreed but whose fear
of critical tweets from 24-year-olds
prevented them from saying so publicly,
if also the years certain straight friends
(who had so far survived the decades’ shrinking
patience) began to complain about a hallucinated
constraint, that they believed a prohibition
on describing the workings of their uteri
had been decreed by some gay tribunal, or
even queer ones, stressing that “heterosexual”
sex might mar their reputation and thus
must be kept hush, all of this fretting
occurring against a backdrop of imagined
(to the extent that the lambs of the Seven Sisters
had become newly sensitive—though Rainer
would argue that had always been true—
wilting teens could hardly be accused
of having power) and terrifyingly real
(so long, Berlin) crackdowns, which made it
all make sense, but also made them unwilling
to pretend that difficulties were prohibitions,
they wanted to instead enjoy articulation,
which is not a burden imposed by some
censorious other—and not worry too much
about it, with the trust, even, that others understood
that people are wrong one moment and right
the next, that nothing great was risked
recording the former.
Violet, reasonably, knew
that they were wrong, and this knowledge glided smoothly
with her along the blocks which formed vague links
between Woolsey Heights and UC Berkeley, neither busy
place harboring a proper corner in which Rainer (cast
as a reporter covering all of NYC, or more
specifically a veteran partisan of its way of speaking,
one Violet usually found to be correct, partially because
they sought answers more likely to outlive
institutions poetry sometimes charmed
with mythic tales of weedlike resilience) could
relaxedly lay out their unrest, a pleasure
neither wished to keep reserved
for speakers to whom rooms were assigned
by curators, departments, and landlords,
and so it turned out that the curiously empty space
(this emptiness resulting both from Californians’ love
of evenings spent in backyards and the phone call
offering an absorbing plenitude which did not invite
the eyes) between the two institutions,
Violet’s various homes, was exactly where
enough room could be found, keeping moving, to consult
with the night-blooming jasmine and the distant
bridge about why Rainer was wrong. The cool
breeze suggested that Rainer sounded
like they were about to move to Texas and reinvent
a university putting the abstract love of free
speech above critical judgment of whatever
the fuck one was actually trying to say,
making rigid maxims out of thought’s bendy reeds,
which liked to lean when one listened, but the wind
also encouraged patience with Rainer, and Violet liked
the affordances of conversation enough to like even
when it veered toward unpersuasive monologues.
And if all manner of people appeared
to be accusing undifferentiated, made up crowds
of having violated their freedom to speak
when nothing prevented them but their
self-defeating fear of being frowned at
by strangers, that didn’t mean two friends
couldn’t spend the final fourth of a Tuesday
going on talking, believing that with sufficient
reason, applied collaboratively and in good
faith, they’d figure out who should stay
in what relationship, how so and so’s writing
had gotten even stupider, how to live, whether
to keep making an effort within crumbling
institutions, which criticisms of others’ looks
are harmless, how anxiety strips the body down to parts
now poorly reassembled, so that food turns
immediately to liquid, expelled from the gut, how mind
refuses one or more of the senses, how to place
friendship among the ways of loving, etc.
This reasonable habit of conversation was their way
of letting other people do the living, Violet
worried, before, converting worry into dream,
she chose to be vicarious on purpose, playing
with rhetorical dolls or friendly projections who
would happily cooperate in answering her
questions, so far unsatisfied by talking
one-to-one—how many would they need?
Three, a baker’s dozen, a fancy class
capped at 18, the attendees of a weekday reading? All
their friends, all living poets? Add in the dead, a country
too small to do much in the way of war—no, the small
being prone enough to empire—no—just enough
to have a conversation. These questions, as
pressing as their answers were for our pair’s
hearts and stomachs, emerged not only to prompt
that specially didactic form of caregiving in which people
share remedies and strategies for navigating
similar but invisible structures of bodily experience,
where one must hope friendship’s warmth melts the icy
moral frameworks accidentally prescribed alongside
the probiotic supplement or rule of thumb for good love—
these questions also introduced a third-person discourse
that people, perhaps especially writers, use
to feel closer to each other by abandoning the concrete
intimacy of two and speaking in general of what “one”
does, could do, should do, and even more deliciously
what one shouldn’t, thus allowing gossip to condescend
to philosophy that a rapport might finally be brokered
between normativity and pleasure, one which could
allow for and moderate the extreme release
one paradoxically felt when legislating with a strict tongue,
a looseness Rainer and Violet enjoyed rediscovering,
which seemed to pollute or season a broth
that put the inner child down nicely, combined with a fairy
tale about how rigor could support life
and not merely argument. Indeed,
their questions often emerged in Violet’s
evenings, when sleep first suggested itself, and
Rainer’s nights, when its pleas had been muffled
by the bed’s being put to other uses, and they both wondered
how much the conspiracy of time zones and formal
employment prevented their answers reaching the light
of day, or whether such questions simply belonged
to the hypnagogic lull in which two blurrily
became one, who sort of stood for all,
not by a logical proof but a libidinal fudging
which let desire swallow more
than it could conceive, taking in a whole person
with whom the mind could fantasize about
soothing, cajoling, flattering, or teasing
an entire social scene with a single remark.
No, Rainer—I think our privacy makes a public.
Program
