Hilary Plum
1 I was the wife of a law student. One night I was surprised to find myself alone in the kitchen with the wife of another law student. The students were in the living room discussing some group project. The other wife was a Mormon, and I'd thought that we were such different wives our difference, not our shared status, would define us. But there we were, in the kitchen. We'd both married young, early twenties. She and her husband had started a family right away. She had an easy warmth and told me that she didn't expect to work outside the home ever in her life again. We were both English majors.
In the living room something familiar had happened and would happen again whenever you went back there. Law students were talking and you couldn't join in. You, a writer and editor at a leftist press, thought a lot about the First Amendment, you tried to ask a question, add an idea. About how the stakes of the case under discussion might shape society, the political world that this living room sat in. No. You weren't in the class; you didn't know the law; you had no role here. Somehow you'd assumed that what people want from a profession—the rigorous development of a skill set to be applied—was to connect that professional role and its modes to the world, realize its public potential. No. People wanted the professionalization. Its meaning required its insularity, its specialization was exclusion. It could be that this work was less meaningful if you, lurking wife, could join in the interpretation of its meaning. It could be that the institutional apparatus that trained people in this work just neglected the value of connection. You went to the kitchen, carrying dishes, where the other wife joined you, carrying dishes. Like you she was working as an editor, around parenting her young children, she'd picked up some editing work from members of her congregation. You felt a hard desire to distinguish yourself from her—how much more expert and important your editing work must be; how many years of experience you had; how good could she even be—then felt ashamed of that desire, I hope not too late, I hope before you let it be seen. If there are two wives in the kitchen, which one is the best? The living room might recognize one wife's potential, but surely not both. Is it recognition if anyone can get it?
2 Later I wrote a book about the Boston Marathon bombing. About how metaphors of illness get used in the rhetoric of the so-called global war on terror. The Boston Marathon bombing serves as a case study because it presented itself (to me, to everyone) one day as my husband (different husband) was getting his first cancer surgery. I was trying to relate the body to the body politic. We all have to live in both, intimately and collectively. The book draws on my own experience of illness and indeterminate diagnosis as a lens, means to examine how the radiating violence of the GWOT is represented in news media and felt by readers. How we encounter—and can intervene in—the ideologies sustaining that violence. After the book was published, when I was invited to do events or class visits, people asked me questions about the Boston Marathon bombing. This made sense. Yet I felt myself in an argument, some state of minor alienation or non-recognition. I was an expert in form, not content. The book is a work of literature, not journalism or history. It's about structures of thinking and feeling and remembering and reading and imagining. Moving through it means encountering a range of subjects—anorexia; cancer; gun violence; veteran suicide; the Arab Spring—rendered with literary not historiographical or journalistic intensity. I don't know one thing about the Boston Marathon bombing that isn't in that book. I had built some possibilities for thinking about the bombing and using the bombing to think. This isn't the same as expert knowledge. I should answer questions about writing essays. What can literature be a cause of? This question appears in the book and so seemed like the sort of question that it might be right or useful to ask me, since it's the sort of question I had publicly, professionally asked. In classrooms people treated the form as a means to get at the content. I thought the form was a means to get at the possibilities of form, how form may allow for other new contents. I was trying to show how content is form. I believed this recognition could create new possibilities. But often people asked me about the book's content as if it was formless between us. I know about writing essays, I wanted to say, that's the main thing I know about. I really believe in the work of reading and writing and what it can do for all of us. If we're talking about any subject, if we're talking about what something means, we're talking about reading and writing and feeling and thinking and imagining, so that's what I'd like to talk about.
3 I'm often listening to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks every day. I mean my life has seasons like this. Once I was completely sober—it was morning—when I walked into the quiet kitchen and told my husband that the reason it's so beautiful, toward the end of the first track, when Van sings about being born again in another time, in another place—it's so beautiful because you know, from how he sings the line, that he knows there is no other time, no other place. He offers the idea of a time and place beyond this one because the idea is what we may offer each other. If there were another time, if there were another place… Sometimes—I often think, as I put the album on again—you have to get back to basics. You always have to get back to basics. Death is coming. All this complexity has the simplest end. There is no other time, there is no other place. Here you are.
4 Here you are, just you, stuck with yourself. Your work is never done. I find myself short on time. A feature of chronic illness and regular mortality. When will I read Foucault? I wondered for years. I had read Foucault, I think, when I was still young, but it must not count because I didn't seem like an expert, someone who knew. Around me in the city people seemed to know things. They had PhDs and wrote for n+1. I loved talking to everyone, even when I bitched about it after. I realized the solution to not having read Foucault was just to read him. An excerpt works. It didn't take long and then I dropped out of the program. I had been gathering context. Everything everyone had read made it into the soil of the air between us and everywhere, our jokes and backyard discussions, though I always went to bed before 1 am, though the two of you were still deep in a passage by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I was nervous to talk about anything I might not know enough about. I didn't want to be a fool, but then I couldn't help it. When I heard academics speak publicly in that couching narrowing way of theirs—well, that's not my field, so I can't really speak to it, and here are some people you could read on that—I wanted to say to them: you're here. You're the one here. Be useful. (And you know essayists do this when we write I've been thinking a lot about… and then just virtuously mention a subject, not saying one thing of substance about it, moving on before we have to do any work.)
A fool is useful. A fool sacrifices herself. She'll give you something no matter her own expense. In Velázquez's painting Las Meninas (well, Foucault wrote about it), there's a perfect sly surprise: the portrait of the king and queen appears only in a small mirror centered on the far wall within the painting, while the face of the painter at work, the canvas of the painting within the painting, these are vividly near to the viewer, right up here. The artist shows us his own face, at work observing and rendering the king and queen who rule over him and everyone—and who are looking right at us, the painting's viewers, from their bright distant mirror. Anyone can see the painting on the internet, though some files are too low-res and the king and queen are blurred out. Anyone looking can see there's a game at play here, a serious game. Though the painting is from 1656, and we often treat history as simple and sincere (and a bit stupid, since they all lacked the internet). Most people know something about games and their seriousness, how you have to play to get at the real thing. For example, you can bring some experimental literature into any room, and people can and will read it and get what it's for. In the prison one day we read aloud together a couple very short stories by Lydia Davis. At the end of one story—about how a character needs to feel superior to her friend without admitting she feels that need, since admitting it would mean exposing an inferior motive—E threw the paper in the air with a hoot. He shook his head. Well, that's it, he said, she said everything there is to say on that, that's how it is. I was happy because he was happy. A few years later the prison shut down our writing group. I had to write E a note (by this time he'd been transferred to a new prison he didn't want to go to and where he knew no one) to tell him I couldn't write him any more notes, which is what I'd been told. The reason the prison gave didn't make sense but prisons don't have to explain themselves to you. A problem Velázquez would recognize. Velázquez created a form of recognition you can still use. At the prison everything is painted a childish purple they claim keeps grown men calm. And where do you see yourself in 365 years?
5 Around this time we started listening to a podcast. Whenever we caught up with old friends we learned they too were deep into supporting Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign. The podcast was at the center of what was getting called the dirtbag left. The New York Times called it "rowdy, vulgar," "anti-establishment." One point of the podcast was not to respect the New York Times. The dirtbag left did not ally itself with the Democratic Party, mainstream media, respectability, incrementalist liberal institutions. The dirtbags had a form but they weren't formal; they had wide influence and reach but they were supported by individual subscribers, not institutions or corporations. They were called "Bernie bros," a category of supposedly toxic online young men (this podcast, Chapo Trap House, was in fact mostly staffed by very online youngish men). At the same time—for instance in 2020, as the Sanders campaign out-fundraised all other Democratic candidates, with millions of small grassroots donations and without corporate cash—you might learn that "'teacher' was the most common profession of donors [to the Sanders campaign], and Starbucks, Amazon, and Walmart were the most common employers of donors." It wasn't clear how all these teachers and low-wage workers were actually toxic online misogynist "Bernie bros," but anyway that worked to insult and dismiss them. The Bernie supporters I knew were poets, high-school and community college and college teachers, retail workers, editors and publishers in indie media, physician assistants, local reporters, emergency room doctors, psychologists who treated addiction in the unhoused, grad students, food servers, public-interest lawyers, undergrads, a guy wearing scrubs I talked to on the street, writers and activists against gun violence, writers on climate crisis, guitar teachers, freelancers, veterans, translators, education software workers, composers, potters, bartenders, unemployed, workers in nonprofits that served refugees, playwrights, parents, grandparents…
Toxic? Divisive? Unrealistic?
Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, a living wage, an end to endless war, free college, student loan debt cancellation, taxes on corporations and the wealthy, massive wealth redistribution, campaign finance reform, gender pay equity, legalize marijuana and end cash bail, a livable future for Palestine.
A podcast succeeds because of form, not just content. Aesthetics make politics: dirtbag plus left, left as dirtbag. On Chapo there's a bro vibe, sure. Three to five friends chew through the news, analyze, insult the powers-that-be, heated, fast-paced, always time for dick jokes, always plenty of interviews with leftist journalists, democratic socialist politicians, activists. In these forms of media, expertise is self-appointed, crowd-affirmed. No one hired you. Either people listen or they don't. They subscribe for $5 a month or they don't. There's no imprimatur, no masthead, no blue check, no way to prove you should be here, no credential, no CV gets you the job. In the last hopeful days of the Bernie campaign, February 2020, the podcast hosted an event in Iowa, gathering hundreds of people to canvass for Bernie in advance of the first big electoral test. Just before the caucus, at the end of a live show, they broke into song. At the risk, as they said, of being cringe. "Solidarity Forever," the union anthem, from 1915. The room sang with them. Listening to the recording you hear a cacophony of shouty off-key, out-of-sync, unpracticed singing. One host is yelling the song in a ferocious metal kind of way that sounds ironic but doesn't feel ironic. His co-hosts muddle the wordy verses then lean into the chorus, whose melody they can't carry. To hear familiar unbeautiful voices usually driven by fury, irony, despair, Weird Twitter, near-nihilism, desperate hope, relentless vulgarity, suddenly form a shambolic sincerity, a sincerity you might not recognize as such if you didn't know the usual mode, dirtbag context, was—as friends said who were there that weekend, canvassing and in the audience—shockingly moving. Listening, it doesn't sound serious. It doesn't sound like serious things sound. But it might make you cry. But Bernie won the caucus with the help of that room, its hours of phone-banking, door-knocking, leafleting, and conversations with strangers. Then, of course, we all lost.
Around this time I stopped citing. I lost some respect. I didn't need to show I'd done the reading. If I did it right you'd show me. I wanted to point to everything and everyone I partially, incompletely, inexpertly knew. I was writing something new to me, a new form, whether I knew it or not. I opened my mouth and kept writing. Most people who've ever sung that song are dead. You can only hear them if you sing.