a terrifying feminine intellect
Cohen in order to think about
You for literary purposes
ariana reines doesn't understand men. but she's got a pair of eyes, her wits about her, a mountain of insecurity, an intimidating intellectual foundation, bouts of sexual confidence, and a way with line breaks. and so she might be the most terrifying thing in the world to a man. she writes: "when you read this, you will probably hate me." she's probably right. her book coeur de lion takes the form of a letter to a former lover. its principle motif, in my own 'insecurely masculine' reading, is an inversion of masculinity and femininity: reines fully embodies her 'female-ness' as a poet, though she's writing in a form generally dominated by men. and so something very interesting happens: where a man's 'love poem' is meant to allure, seduce, and melt, reines' 'love poem' is almost sexually repulsive - everybody involved knows the entire time that should the addressee of her poem be real, he will no doubt ask her to 'never contact me again.' but why? i can anticipate a response that calls on patriarchal gender norms to explain that a woman in a masculine role comes across as vulgar to the unenlightened (and indeed the poem is vulgar too), or perhaps a response that calls my own character into question: but no, there is something inherently terrifying in this book.
of course, by inverting the gender dynamic reines also to an extent inverts the relationship between the subject and the object. contrary to literary expectations, the male is suddenly the bizarre sex object with a range of expected and occasionally surprising responses:
When I finally got away
From Alain Badiou, who was
Explaining something
About set theory and making his obscene laugh
That strange ejaculation that comes out of his mouth
When he speaks as a man who is sure that he is right
And he sticks his long tongue out and nearly gasps
My heart was beating.
We went into the stall
And you slammed me against the wall
And everything was possible
Your cock grew in my hand
And I sucked it
And you came
or perhaps:
Her), you and Sinan have nothing
In common at all, nothing except
For me. Up in the mountains I
Wrote about loving your body
And the way you moan when
You fuck, about loving the way
You say Oh my god Oh my god,
And your face goes limp and your eyes
Shine. About being a little jealous
And scared you might be more perverse
Than me. While I was writing what I
Wrote about your and my perversion Slavoj
Zizek paraphrased Freud: "The melancholic
Loses the object of desire while the object
Is still there."
there's a lot going on here. i made sure to choose passages that were heavily and obviously allusive even as they do that scary thing reines does so well and repeatedly in her book. as a male reader it feels a little bit like you're being manipulated with tools, lightly hammered here or there, unable to escape at the same time, so you're not actually being hammered but you're stuck in a vise that's tightened a little more with every weird little line. reines' "you," like the male reader, is also stuck: an object who can 'slam the writer against the wall' but do nothing else but sit and be analyzed, whose cock grows, whose face goes limp, whose eyes shine, but in the end is little more than the literary 'object' in a mangled zizek quote that is meant to be deep and against the odds actually is.
reines is a woman. but she's also a male writer. when she writes 'I' the word sits snugly in a masculine literary narrative tradition; when she refers to her male 'you' the word doesn't reflect any sort of tradition, but is quite simply the female object that mopes around and glides through all of those thousands of books written by men, the object of desire, sucker of affections, the irrational monster of whimsy and caprice. even though that 'you' is a man, is the male reader, and is in fact wholly masculine:
I don't know why
You sat down next to me
And grabbed me
In the first place.
I don't know why the next night
I looked at you and said something
About accepting your psychic powers
And when you were strangling
Me and kissing me
I thought it:
I accept.
I accept.
i quote this only to demonstrate that reines knows exactly what she's doing: her gender binaries swirl around each other in a disorienting flurry. there's never a moment in the 90 pages of the short book that you doubt it's a woman writing this, but all the same the narration is unsettlingly masculine. perhaps reines' insecurities are infectious, or perhaps universal: a man is happy if he's remembered by the women in his life, but he's terrified if they take the further step of analysis. but what can the writer do except for analyse? do we ask simply to be recounted? even then the writer's subjectivity will tell more than enough to get the neurotic impulses ticking. maybe, when it comes to relationships, it'd be better if nobody wrote anything at all, especially not women. unluckily for me, reines seems to anticipate this train of thought:
I guess there is no point saying
These things we did. We know
What we did. But stating them
Is like reinstating them
Inside me. It causes me some pain.
I want to feel this pain
Cos it helps me remember
Things. I am trying to decide
If the things humans emit
Between themselves
Have any reason. I am trying to decide
If the state of thought
Knows anything about
The intensity I felt
With you. Maybe these poems
Are an excess of certain
Fleeting sensations, and I should
Just, I don't know, get high or go
Out dancing; try to make
Something of myself. Even now
As I look at them, and it hasn't even
Been a week, you aren't very clear
In my mind at all and I have no idea
What I miss or what I want, if
Anything. It is so over
Between us, I guess. I see your face
receding into coffee-colored
Light. I see ochres
And resins in a richness that I can only
Imagine tonight. I am writing this
In order to lose you
damn. this is a good book, you should read it. some more ancillary notes:
-reines' brilliance and accuracy in describing 'relationship moments' - disturbing
-check out badiou's recounting of 'ariane' in being and event
-accomplished writing
-self-pubbed
-i am now more scared of jewish women
in reines' own words:
I am such a shitty
Woman.
actually i feel a lot better today
