Longing for Embodied Expression: On Cookie Mueller's "Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black"
Cookie Mueller; eds. Hedi El Kholti, Chris Kraus, Amy Scholder | Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black | Semiotext(e) | 1990, 2022 | 432 Pages
Cookie Mueller was a writer and artist of many persuasions. She lived many lives and lived them all with an enviable eschewal of inhibitions. Her resume includes: clothing designer, go-go dancer, underground film actress, theater director, house cleaner, fish packer, credit clerk, high seas cook, herbal therapist, leg model, and bar mitzvah entertainer.
John Waters discovered her acting talent in Baltimore and she starred in one of his most famous films, Female Trouble, the title based on one of Mueller’s catch phrases. On Haight-Ashbury the Manson girls, whom she described as “ducks quacking over corn,” invited her to travel with them in their bus. She met her husband in Italy after a solo trip that she essentially never went home from. She lived in Pennsylvania with a pig farmer she met at a party—until he went to jail for growing weed. After a bout of infected fallopian tubes, a doctor told her she would never have children. She gave birth to her son Max at 22, raising him in Provincetown and New York City.
Mueller’s expressive writing mirrored her adventurous life—full of verve and humor and fresh, loud honesty. With Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, Semiotext(e) presents a collected edition of Mueller’s work—that includes the contents of the original 1990 edition of the book as well as other previously published and unpublished nonfiction stories, columns, and fables. Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black adds Cookie Mueller to a long list of writers from the 60s, 70s, and 80s that have gotten reprints in the last few years, including Eve Babitz, Fran Lebowitz, Andrea Dworkin, and Iris Owens. A stylistic thread runs through the prose of all of these writers. Their writing has a looseness, freedom, wit, playfulness, and spontaneity to it that publishers and readers seem to be yearning for. What does this renewed attention to writers from the period tell us about what the American cultural consciousness is craving?
What these writers also have in common is an unfiltered, pre-internet relationship to the world. Widespread use of social media has created an intensified culture of social mirroring and self-consciousness that these writers didn't experience, and this immediacy with the world is reflected in their prose. While there can be a particular detachment and ambiguity found in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, there is a certain electricity in this work from the late 20th century that perhaps comes from the way the writing itself hews so closely to the intimacy of experience. The quips are brief, the humor is mordant, and the insights are sharp, clarifying flashes of light. There seems to be no distance between the thing which is felt and the crisp articulation of it. In advice to her lonely single girlfriends, Mueller writes:
Get your butt on an airplane. There are millions of hetero men walking around in all parts of the world that would fall to their knees in front of you and lick your toe jam. And they’re great looking, some of them have money, even. Not all men in the world are assholes or married or attached or anal or too career oriented or gay or balding like they are in New York.
This direct-address style of writing capitalizes on a kind of stand-up comedy structure: profusive profession and attention-grabbing declaratives. Fran Lebowitz’s proclamation “I’m not a hostess. I’m the prosecutor,” comes to mind. Contrast this type of persona to someone like the main character of Ottessa Moshfegh’s popular contemporary novel My Year Of Rest and Relaxation, who is inextricably estranged from herself and the world and opts for disengagement with life. When she is fired from her job, she laments all the time she wasted working when she “could have been sleeping and feeling nothing,” and proceeds to try and sleep for an entire year using prescription medications.
In one of her columns for Details Magazine, which appears in this collection, Mueller writes, “A person who doesn't have a sense of humor sees every minute bringing a new insurmountable disaster,” which leads me to believe she would not have enjoyed Twitter very much. The deeply felt joie de vivre or despair in the pages of writers like Cookie Mueller or Eve Babitz—a writer who also spent her time traipsing around with a voracious inclination toward adventure and a blase attitude toward hardship (“We’ll wrap all our troubles in dreams and get in the car (you drive), and I’ll take you on my glorious Weekend in the Wilds”)—suggests a more embodied, less disassociative existence than the one we have now. Social media not only draws us away from the present moment, but also takes shared collective emotions like fear and anxiety and creates accumulations of these feelings that are so immense that they verge on inhuman, or are at least so massive that the body cannot metabolize them. With the potential to be perceived and interpreted by anyone in the world with an internet connection, present-day people—present-day writers—can feel disconnected from themselves as they try to navigate the perils of self-expression in an online panopticon, which may reflect in their writing style or the types of characters they produce in their fiction.
The smaller scale of personal visibility in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even the 90s, produced a kind of alacrity toward the world that isn’t as common in contemporary writing. Mueller's appetite for life was impressive for any decade and her storytelling is as immersive and exciting as her life was. Through her writing, we travel with Mueller as she hitchhikes across the US, tries most of the drugs that come her way, and gallivants to far-flung locales with no plan. On one occasion, recounted in her essay “The Italian Remedy–1983,” she simply stayed with a man who worked at the train station of the train she came in on. Because of her writing style, we get to join Mueller in the way she fully occupied the present. In these moments with her, we get a taste of what it’s like to live in her embodied instant. We get to experience the unrestrained perspective of someone who, when she was a waitress, found the customers so miserable to deal with that she wound up throwing food at them. She looked for thrills and intrigue wherever she could find it, and took on hardship with a sense of grace. In one of her fables she wrote about a woman losing her toe, who after much inner turmoil acquiesces: “There is a great art to handling losses with nonchalance.” Mueller felt it all, processed her experiences, and kept moving.
When life became unbearable, she filtered her experiences through acute expression: “I was so wildly miserable I was projectile vomiting at the very thought of facing another morning… Was there no way other than time to heal a broken heart? Time took too much time. By then I'd be dead.” A confession of love and loss by Lauren Oyler’s autofictional narrator in the contemporary novel Fake Accounts takes a different tack. After learning that her boyfriend died she states: “I didn’t sob, heave, weep, thrash, moan, bawl, or experience the sort of humiliating physical wrenching of face and stomach that I associate with true devastation.” She cried only “the amount of time one might cry after a particularly painful career failure.” Elsewhere in the book she says, “I just can’t stand the thought of seeming irrationally carried away by emotion and unable to freestyle my way back to the calm waters of reason,”—a smothering of feelings, rather than the blend of “que será será” with the fearlessness to feel and express the full range of emotions we see in Mueller’s work.
Recounting the snarling pain of being in labor with no epidural, Mueller grumbles, “Even the usually silent plants on the windowsill, benevolently doing their miraculous carbon monoxide to oxygen exchange, were wheezing with asthmatic photosynthesis… If this was the way it was going to be, then it better be worth it.” (She decides the birth is worthwhile after the nurses give her son an Elvis pompadour in his hospital photos.)
But as much as Mueller and her work may be seen as these examples of embodiment and self-actualization, her writing has its dissociative and escapist tendencies, too. She asks, “How does one forget? How do you empty yourself?” In a fable about a girl who drank only water and never ate anything, “She was convinced that since she would be only water she could disappear at will.” In another fictional story about two people convinced the world is going to end on September 3rd, “the world looked to them like it was going to go on for another few million years. Looking at the lights of Newark, New Jersey through world-weary eyes, Alex and Joanna were incredibly depressed.”
Whether our lives are mediated by the internet or not, we are all eternally fated to yearn and search for meaning and connection. Mueller sought out art and used her own creative expression in this endeavor. She suggests searching for the “forms of divinity in daily life.” On that eternal search, this edict is perhaps the only guiding light we have.