The Generativity of Shulamith Firestone's Airless Spaces

Overness. Or also throwns. Throne. to sit down in. What is also a mercy, but relentless. Thrown away from her for the sake of. These distances. What happens inside and out of Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces shielding and creating in a reckoning that calls but does not allow in. Perhaps a consideration. For years, I carried this with me everywhere I went. felt and thought it was a protection of sorts. as a hex against invasions. Dialectical Verse protector. Admittedly, after she passed, I had fallen all the way into airless spaces. Perhaps plunged with a vengeance. part cold and calculating, part dissociative, embarking...her writing develops a focused and undulating band of intensity. To me, the only texts that come close to this are Adorno’s Minima Moralia and Rimbaud’s Illuminations. . no expansive sentence. terse form prose verse. the horror of institutional thinking imprinted into human flesh. making and remaking of. “The mind, the fucking mind” (Duncan). For once, I didn’t feel alone—not really. ambivalences about asylum. “Going mental”. Or the tundra of Firestone’s “Emotional Paralysis.”
This left a huge gap in her time once filled by reading, writing, cinema....Her old habits of seclusion and screening out distraction remained, but there was nothing to be secluded for.

Once in a while she prodded herself to write, but the old excitement of creation did not return, or if it did, it fizzled by morning after her nightly medication. It was a dry fuck, every word painful and laborious. But like sex itself, even masturbation, it was the initiative that was most lacking. ((emphasis mine) Airless Spaces 58)

Often, forms of depression and other invisible disabilities function socially as identity tags and worse, total and extreme discrimination. To some extent, in capitalist societies, every body is commodified. However, there is as Marx calls it a “secret” to the “fetishism of the commodity” that sometimes even attains a quasi-mystical form. the seer, “the gifted class,” prodigies, The Idiot.. One can undoubtedly find this in the uncanny (unheimlich) discrimatory celebrations and condemnations of the differently abled and becomes a “secret” as Marx said of a table in capitalist exchange:

It changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. The mystical character of the commodity does not therefore arise from its use-value...The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves....at the same time suprasensible or social (Marx 163-165, “The Fetishization of the Commodity and its Secret“ in Capital Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes).

To Marx, humans in capitalist production are then both producers and produced. Both Subjects and Objects. Small wonder then that there are suprasensible meanings attached to each of us as commodity-being (s-in-the-world). However, while Marx explains to some extent the production of the socio-economic function of the suprasensible, Firestone is one to quickly admit the consequence and impact of dependency (The Dialectic of Sex). This reaches beyond the “material” realm and directly into the psychosexual dynamic of adjusting to dependencies upon the Man, quite literally. For this, a strictly “materialist” poetics that refuses the psychosexual realm of relations is fraught with peril (perhaps later, dear reader I will venture into the problematics of William Carlos Williams’s work in relation to class, gender, race.

the secret of we imbeciles, our antics and circus. The “mad” poet, her/his great sufferings. For whatever it’s worth, such has been my experience as a person with a disability. and a “poet”.. the epileptic. the addict. the “bipolar.” Factor V Leiden (something in his blood). These ailments. They simply are. No romance. At best, hypergraphia (or Geschwind’s Syndrome). Or worse, and far more commonly, a medicated drooling abolition of all that relates, re-calls, of what is often thought of as waking life. Anything creative- erase function. The experiences themselves and their treatments: I cannot pretend to know, but I find the fascicle version of Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral” to be enormously relieving in that it re-cognizes that state. “I felt a Funeral in my Brain”

As all the Heavens were
a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and silence, some
strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here-
And then a Plank in
Reason . broke .
And I dropped down, and
down -
And hit a World, at Every
+Plunge,
And +finished knowing – then -
Crash - +Got through -
(Fascicle 16 (H 53))

For me, all sense of reason breaks—and with a frequency. What I’ve derived from Firestone, Dickinson and others is this doesn’t designate one as either this or that. Either talent or its abolition (Talent: Talente, Talenta—“A denomination of weight used by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and other ancient nations” (Oxford English Dictionary). Usually about 30 kilos as depicted in “The altar of the holocaust” in Exodus 38:21-31 (as my mother and father had emphatically drilled into me thankfully). No. Rather, the talent lies within the “both/and” as Patricia Hill-Collins notes. Firestone’s poems throw a stark clarity into relief against a barren background and transform the “secrets” of “disability” into lived, corporeal beings with names and herstories, shot through with no extra baggage. And, in each case, the beings are the poems. Thing is about institutions, if you’ve ever been locked up in one or not, going in and out is the purest form of “instrumental rationality” (Weber, Economy and Society); however, on a day to day basis, lived lives—reside the people you will meet and remember. We cease to be “specialists without spirit” (Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) despite all efforts to the contrary. Or do we?

Passable, Not Presentable

She remembered the time before she had gotten sick. When it was a challenge to dress, how good it felt to look just right and be certain of one’s appearance. Then came losing her looks in the hospital, and the ghastly difference it made in the way she was received; the way people turned away from her after once glance in the street. And the slow climb back, trying to disguise the stiffness in her gait, and the drooling moronic look on her face that came from the medication. Perhaps this is why the mentally disabled always seemed so bland-looking as a group: they had to strive to look ordinary, to “pass”. That little bit of extra aplomb that made one stand out of the crowd was beyond them. (Firestone 55)

The characters that populate these spaces, sometimes horrific, but always real to me, real to me. In Firestone, “There is another loneliness” as Emily Dickinson wrote (1138, The Poems of Emily Dickinson Varorium Edition, Ed. Franklin, 988-989 A 461—written on “discarded leaf of stationery”). Firestone explodes within these airless, discarded spaces. Even with a sense of profound alienation and irony. In a text that features five section titles that hardly seem to be bringing Joyous New Beginnings (Hospital, Post-Hospital, Losers, Obits, and Suicides I Have Known—Semiotext, 1998), there are unfoldings and abilities to reckon with death through living. Her writing’s refuses Thanatos. Abolished. Not down to Sheol. As in the “satire” on the King of Babylon:

On your account Sheol beneath us
is astir to greet your arrival.
To honor you he rouses ghosts
of all the rulers of the world....
underneath you a bed of maggots,
and over you a blanket of worms.

(Isaiah 14:9-13, The Jerusalem Bible)

For years, I’d end up in the same hospital, usually at the same times of year and a few times with the same roommate even. For art therapy, my roommate Rob created an exacting replica of Scooby Doo telling the reader, “Actually, it is your parents’ fault!” How many trips has it been now? Ten? Twenty? However, these airless spaces. There is no away. Rejection of it (R.D. Laing, Foucault, Reagan), or celebration of the madness a la Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus), the institutional incarceral and its remains trace out to the very structure of contemporary society.

No surprise then to find a death-trip in much of contemporary culture (Allyssa Wolf and Tim Rutilli have both thoughtfully noted this in multiple ways), including poetics and poetries. It’s a mortal trip that forecloses initiative. Unwittingly, the very text I thought was protection was also a death-hex. Altamont in a jar.

Having said that, I wrote most of a book under its spell. It begs the question of acquiescence. It refuses our assigned positionalities, and gives birth to openings in the worst of conditions and remembrance of those who did not make it along the way.

Why can’t I be a Delegate to the great Whig Convention?—don’t I know all about Daniel Webster, and the Tariff, and the Laws? Then, Susie, I could see you, during a pause in the session - but I dont like this country at all, and I shant stay here any longer! “Delenda est” America, Massachussetts and all open me carefully—
June 11, 1852
Delenda Est – blot out, obliterate, “erase”

(Letter from Emily Dickinson to Susan H. Dickinson, Open Me Carefully, Ed. Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith 34-35)

To turn and transform the explosiveness of contained abilities and re-member them—in this real sense, Shulamith Firestone’s work continues to possibly be a grim beacon for all who suffer, which is to say, the living among us. For me, for now, I am dedicated to unfolding the poetries that converse with these obliterations. America.