Letters to Gay Poets: On Tobias Wray’s ‘No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man”
Tobias Wray | No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man | Cleveland State University Poetry Center | 2021 | 76 Pages
Tobias Wray,
I forget the way you pulled us in, asked us to make you bigger than you were.
As I pan out, looking back, what mendacious symmetry: I am beyond you now, bigger.
Is poetry an attempt at coherence? At any rate, that’s rhetorical. You show it is. So the question has to become: what is coherent? Ludwig Wittgenstein asks, “When I say what I know, how is what I say what I know?” (1)
Some coherences are so widespread we stabilize them through nominatives, systems; eventually, those become archetypes. Fathers are, as such, “True archetypes,” while we gay men are, “books whose perfect spines have never been cracked.” I hate that we are bound to social structures, atmospheres, quote unquote societies. Without which, there would be no archetypes; the implications of this anthropological assessment are transformative: if there are no social structures (2) et cetera, then if someone rejects/does not associate with any of them—to total autonomy; functional, common sense, seat of the social contract’s pants autonomy—then that person will not manifest archetypically; so what could they be/become? If those structures were done away with, whom could be rendered, if we started at zero, restarted? It’s an interesting question, & it’s one I’ll leave you with. It’s not the one you put forward. Your interest is in this world, made clear by your choice of Turing; as a gay man of enormous stature & tragedy, he symbolizes existence within social bindings; atmospheres don’t just stifle, they kill. In your volume of poems No Doubt I Will Return A Different Man,Alan Turing plays a character of individual, strange, gorgeous coherence (3). Still, today, a (gay) man is, “a feather stuck to the bottom of a truck torn at by the wind,” who makes one wonder, “what the fuck happened to him.” If gay men are, “ruined temples,” it should be argued that it is because of bindings enforcing ruinous temples of masculinity & fatherhood & manhood.
How are these archetypical systems related to the question of a coherent gay poetics? How to make oneself coherent—complete—in a world that at the worst of times fancies itself totally perfected & at the best of times resists inclusion, resists the expansion of its current systems? If there is a such thing as gay poetics—it must be expansive. If these poetics must be burdened, as any human existence must, then they must not be shackled. It is telling that the last image we have is of you & Alan Turing in a dream. That is, the last image we have is of a world that doesn’t exist.
Practical poets, astronomers gave nebulae.
I retain that poetry criticism can and should be fun. Like all art, poetry brings pleasure; so why should writing about a pleasurable topic not also bring pleasure? That said, ceci is a playful venn diagram of phrases (4) in your poem “Turing’s Theories Regarding Homosexuality” (5). The venn diagram is under-appreciated!: it doesn’t just direct us to overlays, the ways things touch; it also shows what, given certain categories, does not touch, cannot, by definition, ever touch.
I ask her… how she thinks the world thinks.
She tells me and I remember.
A system is how we account for things (6). It is not an insult to say that you put forward a simple system in “Each Of Us Chimera.” I like math, for the reason I like poetry: it’s all about the approach. Around the age of Turing, there were questions (7) of how to approach systems: mathematicians found that no quote complex theories unquote emerged without contradiction (8); but simple (sometimes called weak) theories do emerge without contradiction. So what are you accounting for and how does it change our understanding of systems or systemic understanding?
You write in triplets, most lines occurring in different tenses, referring to different time periods, the past when your uncle lived, the past when he died, the present when you first went to his grave, the present when you read this poem to your mother, the present when you retrospect, the perfect past, the present progressive, the conditional, the indicative, and in an especially Gay™ triplet about Carole King’s hoax death, three tenses—the perfect past, the past, and the present occur all in the same line. The varied tenses define chimera not primarily as product of early embryonic biology or mythological creature but as hoped-for/illusory/impossible-to-achieve. One line refuses tense—“Some mirrors have more questions” (9). That is, for all my talk of systems, you have no explicit interest in one. If there’s an interest, it’s in undoing systems.
There is an especially contradictory enjambment (10) that illuminates this point: “know. I like to think of him that way / impossible to know”; is the impossibility of knowing a kind of knowing (11)? is incompleteness a relevant fact? Yes. When we include incompleteness, how does the system change? You say, “I like to think of him that way.” To talk about likes and dislikes is to enter the world of aesthetics: I remain in the unshakably Kantian camp that there is a such thing as an objective subjectivity—that that you know you like a thing could and would be understood by someone else in such a way that they could and would like that thing, too. What you do for poetics is turn notions of logic into questions of aesthetics; this, I believe, is quintessential to gay poetics. To do so creates (or at least endorses) a new how, a new system, one that looks at memories past and moments present—all at once.
Turing and I fling ourselves into a river black as a lake.
We kick, ungrapple, kick, his hand heavier, pulling us down.
Dreams are perfect metaphor for poems. They are systems: they create a world with a self-contained understanding. Say, my dream this morning (12) was about a beautiful pointy rose that brought me pleasure that I grabbed that made me bleed. My long-time therapist says, Ah, Okay, Do you remember you once said beautiful things bring you pleasure—mhm, yes—That you always grasp for the pleasurable—mhm, yes—and That this action often causes you physical hurt—mhm, yes—So the dream is saying you should not keep grabbing the beautiful things that bring you pleasure. I could say, Yes, Yes, That’s it Doc!—But where in my dream is there a should? The bleeding was not fatal; even though it made me bleed, I didn’t disclose any regret at grabbing it; I could retort, Doctor, I believe the dream is only saying that Beautiful things which bring me pleasure will also bring me pain; Doctor, where does this imperative to stop grasping come from; Doctor, why would I, even if it brought me pain, want to stop grabbing the beautiful?—My therapist makes this error: they impose a future where there was only a past. They force out of the facts a point-of-view; they create imperatives where there are only facts.
Before I say anything else, I want to give credit (13) where it’s due: Valéry and Nietzsche; and, as prime example, Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.” In an essay, Valéry writes (14), “Known objects and beings are in a way—if I may be forgiven the expression—musicalized; they have become resonant to each other and as though turned to our own sensibility. Thus defined, the poetic world has great affinities with the state of dreaming, at least with the state produced in certain dreams.” Wherefrom in language—limited by impinging systems of comprehending grammar—the ability to become music? Nietzsche: “For in a dream we look upon that dream as reality, that is, we accept our hypotheses as fully established.” If someone had asked, Why is there a rose, Why are you next to it, Why do you bleed?, I may have said, as if I were an over-worked factory-hand resigned to the conditions of an industrial global capitalism, It Is How It Is. In the same way, someone wouldn’t ask, Why does Osbourne Laugh Ha-ha-ha-ha at the start, Why follow that with Electric Guitar, Why then say Aye-aye-aye, Why break into a mellow beat? Pure poetry creates a kind of logic that cannot be understood outside of itself; it is a perpetually inward process, a slim muse of self-contained connection.
Of a Physical Soul
I held and still hold that the people I hold intimately are of no concern to others. That I have no need to tell anyone about them. So it was for many years. So it will be here on out.
Some time ago, I told my father in an oblique way that I was queer (15). His response, “You’re telling me you’re a faggot.?” Then I said, “That’s not what I said.” Then, he spoke out loud for about a half hour, during which I was almost totally silent (16). I promote this solitary fact as the impetus for my formatting the letter in this way. Likely, many things have been the impetus. The question of, What is coherence, is a question of, What is coherence to me? Which is often at odds with, What is coherence to you? When I say, I am able to fall in love with men and I am able to fall in love with women, I am stating a fact about the nature of love. My father hears, instead, a fact about weakness. Our systems clash. They can’t be, to use a term from computer engineering, integrated (see Addendum II).
So, I bring the letter to a close, by saying and asking the following. Gay men, that is men who fall in love with men—a fact that when demonstrated sexually resulted in the tragedy of Alan Turing, only one among other barely utterable tragedies; a fact that results, still, in abandonment, loneliness, exclusion, hatred and the results of being hated; a fact in communities of fellow gay men that results, of course and Thank God, in acceptance, warmth, closeness, love and the results of being loved—we bare the brunt of incoherence, of a widespread bigotry. Because this and they are not coherent—and poetry is—because they are arbitrary distinguishers—and poetry is not—because they are a tyrannical majority—and poets a most-accepting minority—because they cannot, solely from their past, be redeemed—and poets look forward, if dreamily—while gay men exist in a world that is not free of this and them, can gay poetics exist in that world; is there an imperative for gay poetics to show that freer world, to exist in a freer world?
Sincerely,
Emiliano Gomez, ally & poet
Addendum I: Dick Wits
1.
Wray enjambs “gong”—forcing the reader to open their mouth—following it with “hung”—forcing the reader to close their mouth, the tongue on the palette, creating a kind of blowjob choking sensation. (“The Dusk”)
2.
After explicitly talking blowjobs, Wray enjambs “big rocks”—which is exactly a letter away from big cocks—following it up with the plosive ‘p’ in “piled,” forcing the reader to give the big rocks a kiss, two opened lips, and a tongue flick. (“The Postcards”)
Addendum II: Wittgenstein & Turing on Contradiction; & Its Relevant Implications
I leave this humorously combative conversation (18) between two great thinkers, two awe-inspiring gay men. It becomes, of course, much less humorous when we think of it applied to celà above.
“All the conventional schools of thought on the foundations of mathematics—logicism, formalism and instuitionism—agree that if a system has a hidden contradiction in it, then it is to be rejected on the grounds of being inconsistent… In his lectures, Wittgenstein ridiculed this concern for ‘hidden contradictions’, and it was to this that Turing voiced his most dogged and spirited dissent… Turing tried to explain… ’that one usually uses a contradiction as a criterion for having done something wrong.’ … Turing clearly needed to explain, not only why it was puzzling, but also why it mattered. The real harm of a system that contains a contradiction, he suggested, ‘will not come in unless there is an application, in which case a bridge may fall down or something of the sort.’ [They discuss this] In the following lecture…
Turing: You cannot be confident about applying your calculus until
you know that there is no hidden contradiction in it.
Wittgenstein: There seems to me to be an enormous mistake there.
For your calculus gives certain results, and you want the bridge not
to break down. I’d say certain things can go wrong in only two ways: either
the bridge breaks down or you have made a mistake in your
calculation—for example you muliplied wrongly. but you seem
to think there may be a third thing wrong: the calculus is wrong.
Turing: No. What I object to is the bridge falling down.
Wittgenstein: But how do you know that it will fall down?…when
he gets to a certain point he can go in either of two ways, one of
which leads him all wrong.
‘You seem to be saying,’ suggested Turing, ‘that if one uses a little common sense, one will not get into trouble.’ ‘No,’ thundered Wittgenstein, ‘that is NOT what I mean at all.’ His point was rather that a contradiction cannot lead one astray because it leads nowhere at all. One cannot calculate wrongly with a contradiction, because one simple cannot use it to calculate. One can do nothing with contradictions, except waste time puzzling over them.”
Addendum III: Why I Ended With That Question & A Purposely Crude Answer I Put To It
1.
In “Laniakea, The Immeasurable Heavens,” you apostrophize your father 10 times in as many lines. If you are done with someone—if you have gone past them (as you put it in its sister poem, “Panthalassa, The Universal Sea”), have put them in “The coffin still waiting for its earth”—can they take up this much space? Should they take up this much space? Is that not allowance, a kind of permission for them to continue to exist in your mind, in your life? Should we refuse to be (as in, “How The Shadows Are”) bound to a story that runs as, “a kind of forgiveness”?
To all these questions I imagine you could, and would be right to, respond, “No one knows the origin of the question mark, but it seems obvious that it is born of slipping.” Okay. Okay. But permit me some questions, please. Permit me to put some answers to them without “[choking].” In the very next poem, you again consider the unnegligible presence of the father and what to do with his haunting, “Someday, he will die. When he dies, I will tell stories about islands.”
2.
My father said a very irregular thing, once. He said, I am not without sin. I could not press this. He may have done that thing people are bound to do after being too honest—take it back, explain it away—diminish it, go back to pretending. In a world of faking it, which gay men are bound to do too much and too often for day-to-day survival or for fitting-in which is a kind of survival, not pretending is the only worthwhile thing. Pretending has to go, as steadily as our god-forsaken fathers. I wanted to, but did not, ask my dad, Do you seek penance? His answer would’ve been, No. He always says, I don’t regret anything. Also, Fuck everybody else.
Gay poetics, if it is to thrive, must relieve itself of the father. I believe you give a model for this (not only just but also) in, “In The Name Of The Father” (19). You establish a choice here: the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit: the governor, the growth, the guide; doctrine contains contradiction, alleviated only by faith. What happens when the person we are supposed to have our faith in attacks us, insults us, demeans, and defiles us? We must put our faith elsewhere. The gay poet is the final son. Do ut des does not apply to us; we are not obligated to give back—but to give in another way, elsewhere—that our giving not be founded in the desperation of our deity-faking fathers’ but in faith for our brothers. I sometimes feel bad for my dad. I think he sees a great expanse in his children; he has four. I feel bad because I think he will die an island, a man of land that of his own volition cut himself off from everything and everybody. But he has no regrets, he is totally unbothered. So though it strikes me as too cynical, so though it strikes me as too callous; so though I would not like to say it, but it feels right; fuck everybody, including him.
Notes
(1) And he was about as old as he’d get when he asked it, too; late-fifties, the gay genius kook. Did you know he and Turing overlapped at Cambridge in the late-30s; then, during the war, Tr’ing decoded bombs and such, we know, and Witt ran medicine at a war zone hospital; Tr’ing designed the deciphering methods now known as the enigma machine, Witt contrapted a contraption for measuring body vitals.
(2) Not a question of Marxian or Foucauldian superstructures but whatever tickles your biscuit. Those jive too, loosely.
(3) (As do you/your “I.”)
(4) Any diagram shows how anything could be categorized. Not how they should be—only how it occurs to me at this moment—as it could occur to anyone at any other moment (so this table is one of an infinite number) (so this table is totally unique and negligible). In that way, categorizing is arbitrary, except in one case, which is widespread. When categories are put in a system exacted as a basis for praxis, that system can be called coherent, then spread, and used with the intent of effecting. What is capable of effecting should be given its due consideration; I optimistically hold that poetry has such a capability, still. By inference, the things—adjectives, nouns, narrative structures, allusions, devices—the content of a poem has the same capability.
(5) And here is a list of everything I consider, if not foremost second-most, sexually entendretic or outright dripping: penetrable, opening, brandishing, entryway, top to bottom, sweating, from behind, the word water in French, the swell of morning behind heavy curtains, all those collections of O’s, archipelagos, planetary accretions, we press to spread wide, swallowed, spreading, a blast, helix-like in irony; also, lips tight, clean, hairline, eclipse, and blinking.
(6) This fact is entrenched in English, “I have a system for that,” one might respond to someone asking about dealing with stress or reading the news or brushing their teeth.
(7) The answers to which I don’t pretend to know, except by my gut. I’ve tried to say as little as accurately as possible on this subject. In the aftermath of the Sokal hoax, this seems both obliging and prudent. That said, I am hugely in support of the remeshing of science and philosophy; cf Patricia Churchland, whose ethical, humanist, & philosophical extensions I consider hugely faulty but whose motivation and spirit I consider on the money.
(8) At times like these, we rely on Emerson and Whitman, who basked in bastions of prosaic contradiction, unscathed.
(9) Technically the present tense, I see the word “have” as “is” in its copula. ie some mirrors = more questions.
(10) I love enjambment. It’s beat to death, but a pleasure.
(11) Kant thought so! What are we limited to a priori? Time! Space! Go take it up with that dead philosophical father.
(12) This morning, my dreams were so intense I was relieved that my two to-dos were go for a morning swim and continue this letter. They included, among other things, being shot in the back four times by my cousin, hiding this fact for many days from my immediate family who eventually brought me to the E.R. where the bullets, which were oozing an unplaceable green (like if algae and neon green had a total opposite that neither vibrant nor exactly pastel), were removed, an old friend Diana T. who I aim and fail to impregnate; then, perhaps connected perhaps separate, a crime show I write and star in, a scene where we bus during twilight toward Chicago, arrive, get into a massive scuffle in a supermarket, a scene which includes very subtle facial expressions, they yell Cut!, I seek my lover out, I fall into someone’s arms only to find they are not my lover, then I attack pretty much every one around me trying to find said lover, at one point screaming and throwing pejoratives. I woke up happy to be in this realm.
(13) That is, my choosing your final poem about dreaming as the final poem of interest can be credited to them.
(14) Valéry, Paul. “Pure Poetry,” 187-88. The Collected Works of Pure Poetry, Volume 7. Bollingen: New York, 1958.
(15) Some loves have brought me calm, others gladness. I am more interested in awe. Am I awe-sexual? As it were.
(16) As in your, “All The Grand Deaths.”
(17) If I asked my father, Should people be allowed to love each other?, he would say yes; Should anyone ask about it?, he would say no; Should there be laws that target the private acts of two consenting people?, he would say no. Bigotry twists a system by replacing facts with shoulds; were that same system brought to bare on those who put it forward, those same shoulds would oppress them. Were the roles reversed being the question a bigot never puts forward. This question shows the faultiness of their system; it’s also the perfect litmus test for applying judgments.
(18) Monk, Ray. “The Reluctant Professor,” 420-21. Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Free Press: Detroit, 1990.
(19) You pun the first word of the first line, “Or”; the prayer (did you learn this as a kid? I learned it as a kid. From your mother? I learned it from my mother) continues, “the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.”