VULGAR ERRORS/ FERAL SUBJECTS #7: SNAKES ON A PLAINT

 

Hello again everyone and welcome to our seventh posting for Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, an informal poetry workshop with a particular focus on writing (and writing through) the abject animal other. This week we’re going to talk a little bit more about feral performativity, attempt to define feraltern “style”, and take a brief look at the complex and disturbing world of medieval snake lore. All of which may sound unrelated, but trust me, there is a connection (shout up when you spot it).

Here is today's talk in video form, for those who can't wade through the blog (or have missed my enormous moony face):

https://youtu.be/a7HV05_grkk

Okay, so last session we talked about some of the ways that the feral or that feralness might be performed on page and stage, and I was thinking about that over the weekend, when I read the following in the brilliant The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life by Anahid Nersessian (University of Chicago Press, 2020), talking about Keats’ use of catachresis:

Now, Keats’s catachreses are inescapably poetic, and no one would recommend them to any kind of far-reaching anticapitalist analysis. As Keats himself so often insists, he begins from the assumption that art is a palliative and not a diagnostic tool. The questions he wants to ask of the world— about pain, about death, about grief and cruelty and distress and waste on an unimaginable scale— are not questions he deems soluble by poems. His purpose seems rather to acclaim life’s capacity to defy its forcible metamorphosis, and to do so by pitting rhetorical misuse against economic abuse […] Catachresis cuts at least three ways. It is a positive dereliction, a winning effort at going against the grain; it is a mistake; and in any case it is a disturbance, even, as some commentators suggest, an act of violence or an offering of injury (pp.96-97)

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/10.7208_9780226701455-005.pdf

I was really struck by that, and by how well it chimes with the notion we are trying to develop of a feral practice. It recalled simultaneously Halberstam’s notion of queer failure or stupidity in The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011) as productive of:

a certain kind of absence—the absence of memory or the absence of wisdom— [that] leads to a new form of knowing. Stupidity conventionally means different things in relation to different subject positions; for example, stupidity in white men can signify new modes of domination, but stupidity in women of all ethnicities inevitably symbolizes their status as, in psychoanalytic terms, “castrated” or impaired. In relation to the theme of productive failure, stupidity and forgetfulness work hand in hand to open up new and different ways of being in relation to time, truth, being, living, and dying. […] Stupidity is as profoundly gendered as knowledge formations in general; thus while unknowing in a man is sometimes rendered as part of masculine charm, unknowing in a woman indicates a lack and a justification of a social order that anyway privileges men (pp.54-55).

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/9780822394358-003.pdf

So “stupidity” is far from being an innate characteristic. It is, rather, a construct that society both punishes and naturalizes in women, and denies (or recuperate as charming vulnerability) in straight white men. Halberstam suggests that male stupidity is the goofy grin that masks the will to power; that it masquerades as the fulfilment of feminist critique (clueless male requires omni-competent female badass to educate and civilise him), which in turn conceals the inequality that structures male-female relationships. But can stupidity and failure also offer a means of resistance? And by embracing feral can we escape our limited destinies as productive workers, model citizens, or ideal consumer subjects? Can we meaningfully reject that statically perfected individual self as our highest form of cultural aspiration, move towards a hyenic grammar of irrational possibility, articulate a radical salvation that escapes the toxic logics of competition and success?

It might also be useful to think back to our session on the necropastoral and negative capability; to feral opening up a place of discomfort and doubt that allows us to sidestep both cynical acceptance and saccharine naivety, to dodge the prescriptive pressures of Instagram optimism, or the despairing resignation to – in Halberstam’s immortal words – the ‘menu or the gift shop’. Here’s my hot-take from the on-going research, which I offer as provocation for general discussion:

what does it mean to embrace feral, to be embraced by feral? – doggy pong, hot breath, rough tongue – are you afraid? face to face with the wealth of her negative affects – the disappointments, the rage, the isolation and anxiety – do you run a mile? or do you see the opportunity to puncture and to interrupt the malign functionality, the manufactured consent of contemporary life? for example: heterosex as the trite condition of limit that produces womanhood. to fail this framework is to be unwoman, animal, thing. feral is the thingness that haunts both her acceptable form, and the acceptable forms of her feminism, organised around accommodation and concession as opposed to rejection, mutation and militant refusal.

All of which might usefully bring us back to poetry, and to Nersessian’s reading of Keats, in all his hyperbolic excess. Her argument is that for Keats inelegance and misuse (of language, syntax and grammar) become a kind of method, and it’s a method predicated on a poetics of failure. That’s really interesting to me because I’ve been wondering to what extent all poetry is a form of failure, and I’ve been thinking about something Aimé Césaire writes in ‘Poésie et Connaissance’ (1945): ‘La connaissance poétique naît dans la grand silence de la connaissance scientifique’ (poetic knowledge is born in the silence of scientific knowledge), which is to say poetry can access ways of knowing otherwise unavailable to instrumental rationality. There’s a specific anticolonial context here, with poetry aligned with the desires, expressions and possibilities of a free humanity, and science as an agent of conquest and control. In this formulation there’s a promise that poetry might wrest or wrestle language away from dominant meaning systems, that it might open up new forms of perception and social relation. What do we think about that? Can a poem achieve this by jamming, by mangling? By failing at the aims of instrumental eloquence and mastery? By spiting the notion of cultural cache or status contained within the practice of arts and culture?

To return to our earlier sessions on representation, perhaps we’re not trying to reconstruct what we see/ hear/ experience/ think in some kind of – to quote Robert Smithson – ‘ideal language’ but to ‘reconstruct one’s inability to see’. Or, is the doing of poetry an endless disruption of any smooth, coherent display of identity?

https://www.artforum.com/print/196907/incidents-of-mirror-travel-in-the-yucatan-36477

We’re leaving that thought there a moment because I want to briefly share something I’ve been working on as an elegant segue from misuse, incompetence, failure and stupidity into snakes and snakiness. This elegant segue begins with a video or two Watch as much or as little as you feel you can stand of these in your own time. The cringe factor is HIGH!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p04t5m5YyuM&t=7s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAq639wsjZM&t=316s

Okay, that’s quite enough of that. I made a couple of these wee things with Zak Ferguson, an author, artist and videographer at Sweat Drenched Press, and as you can see there’s quite a lot about it that’s “wrong”. It’s badly framed, aesthetically unappealing, incompetent, amateurish, “cringeworthy”, cobbled, glitchy, silly… But what you may be more surprised to know is that we did that on purpose. The janky materiality of the production is, in fact, an intentional and constitutive part of its feral performance. But why would someone make something that’s deliberately shoddy, and what’s with all the snakes?

So, last question first: snakes have quite a starring role in the collection of poems I’m writing inspired by the Cambridge University Library bestiary, not just because I think they’re fascinating (which they are) but because they are so variously and disproportionately represented. That very compulsion to itemise, catalogue, name and nail down bespeaks a real discomfort. And no wonder, I don’t think there’s any other animal that carries such connotations of deceit, temptation and sin as snakes and serpents. In the bestiary they are aligned with death and bodily corruption, with “unnatural” sexual and reproductive practices, and of course they are explicitly linked to Satan through scripture. The CUL bestiary records and reproduces some incredible snake lore, one of my favourites being from Ovid: ‘the spine rotting, Marrows of humankind do turn themselves into serpents.’ Which speaks not only to a horror of physical decay, but to this idea of original sin: of a corruption that is inborn, ingrained and never fully assuaged in human beings. Another fun snake “fact”: that certain serpents are ‘brought forth in violence’ and ‘bring forth violence […] both parents perish, the male when he copulates, the female when she gives birth.’ This story in particular is one of many used to allegorise the faithless, deceiving nature of women, a misogynist logic in which the CUL bestiary is by no means unique. While there are a few hybrid serpentine women in this twelfth century Latin text I really became fascinated with their representation in a much earlier work, the Liber Monstrorum, which is an eighth century compendium of fantastic beasts. And it’s a book that begins with this surprising opening gambit:

Let each judge for himself the following material, because throughout I shall paint a little picture of a sea-girl or siren, which if it has the head of reason is followed by all kinds of shaggy and scaly tales.

As Frederika Bain notes in ‘The Tail of Melusine: Hybridity, Mutability, and the Accessible Other’ (2017):

this relatively straightforward description [of the siren] is coupled […] with ambiguous descriptors that associate the siren with both “shaggy and scaly” [hispidae squamosaque] characteristics, as though she were potentially mammalian or reptilian as well as or instead of piscine. In this passage the narrator figures the siren’s biformity as a metaphor for his own work, which he promises will combine reason— that which is clearly visible and comprehensible, like the human half above the water— with the strange and phantasmal—that which mysteriously hides in the deep, like the fish’s tail (pp.17-18).

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/melusine.pdf

As Bain notes, monstrous hybridity is primarily the realm of the female in medieval bestiary texts: there are many more animal–women than animal–men, and:

hybridity is frequently used in the medieval misogynist tradition to figure human women’s negative traits: duplicity, mutability, and the unequal yoking of rationality or control to the lack there-of. […] the lower bodily stratum of women, be they fully human or part animal, is figured as bestial and infernal, at the same time that the upper portion may be reasonable and amenable to virtue. This metaphorizing movement points to a common conception of woman as Other—yet not wholly other. (p.18)

Which leads me to my favourite medieval snake-woman: Melusine/ Mélusine (pictured above). For those of you not familiar with the legend, here’s a brief outline of the tale as popularised during the 14^th and 15^th centuries by the Jean d’Arras’ romance, and elaborated in multiple subsequent traditions:

Melusine is the daughter of the King of Scotland and his fairy wife. In her youth Mélusine entombed her father in a mountain (for ambiguous reasons) leaving her mother both heartbroken and pissed off. She cursed Mélusine, and as a result she was condemned to transform into a serpent from the waist down every Saturday.

Mélusine leaves her home and settles by a stream in the woods where, one day, she meets the nobleman Raymondin. Raymondin is distraught because he has just killed his uncle in a hunting accident. She consoles and advises him, and he falls in love with her. When he asks her to marry him, she agrees, making miraculous promises of prosperity and happiness for their family and his kingdom (which she fulfils). Her one stipulation is that he must promise to leave her alone every Saturday, a condition he swears he will abide by.

The couple is married for over ten years during which Mélusine provides Raymondin with land, wealth and power. As well as heirs. Depending on the version of the legend, all or most of the children are deformed in some way, but crucially, are still accepted and loved by their parents. One day, however, Raymondin’s family begins questioning why Melusine must have Saturdays to herself and why she never attends Mass with the rest of the family. Raymondin asks himself if Mélusine is unfaithful to him. He gives into his insecurities, spies on Melusine one Saturday while she is bathing and learns her secret. In a fit of rank ingratitude, he then denounces her as a “false serpent” publicly. His betrayal means there is no hope of her living a normal life again.

So, she flies out the window in the form of a dragon (or, in another version, leaps into a river and swims away) only returning to visit her children. In some versions of the legend her departure brings blight, famine and destruction to the land.

What fascinates me is the ambiguity of the legend is in terms of how we read the figure of Mélusine. Is she a victim? A hero? An evil enchanter? Her story also reminds me a little of the legend of Medusa, who is treated less ambiguously by art and literature, and often emerges across visual representations as either weirdly sexualised (as in Luciano Garbati’s still pukesome cod-feminsist ‘inversion’ of the myth) or as a deformed cautionary grotesque (Caravaggio, Reubens, etc. ad infinitum). Medusa, lest we forget, was a rape victim who was punished (by another female, Minerva) for being raped. Because her rape defiled a holy site, Minerva transformed Medusa’s formerly beautiful hair into a nest of snakes, and any man who looked upon Medusa would be turned to stone. Medusa’s assailant, Neptune, who was Minerva’s uncle and the god of the sea, escaped unharmed (yay, patriarchy!)

What I love about Mélusine is that despite her abjection (and rejection) she maintains a level of autonomy. Her feral snake-like properties – as the CUL bestiary reports ‘always angular and never straight’ – allow her to negotiate the mortal human world and ensure her survival despite her ‘cursed’ condition. Her serpentine form, in fact, is the instrument of her escape after she is denounced and ejected by the kingdom she helped to prosper. Mélusine is, I think, a complex and powerful figure. She is a supernatural founding mother, and her resistance to normative ideologies and forms enables her to both accumulate power and maintain independence. Furthermore, her preservation of agency and influence turns upon her ability to manage degrees of visual access, her continuous movement between disclosure and concealment. We spoke in the last session about performativity and masking, and I think those discussions are really relevant to the story of Mélusine, not only as an abject animal hybrid, but as a non-normative body whose otherness is accessible and invisible – invisiblised – by turns.

So… my ‘snake’ video and the poems that produced it are about performativity and masking. They’re also – crucially – about what happens what the mask slips, the performance stutters, or is refused altogether. We asked ourselves if incompetence, glitch, ugliness, tonal inconsistency, cringeworthiness, all of that Keatsian ‘misuse’ could be deployed as a tool to destabilize and reinvigorate poetic method. After all, as working-class, queer, neurodiverse and disabled artists, our ability to inhabit elite literary and intellectual space is often predicated upon “passing”: on concealing or minimising the aspects of ourselves that impede the smooth functioning of culture, the confirmation of status, and the transfer of knowledge. Something we talked a lot about is the way in which the space of the page within print and publication cultures often works to irradicate difference through standardised typography, lineation, and an insistence on “correct” spelling or “good” prosody. We became interested in how other forms of the work, including its performative and aural/oral iterations can undercut or complicate that kind of homogeneity, so we advocate for a kind of art and poetry that is both hyenic (more of that anon) and snaky.

In the next session we’re going to talk about embodiment and look at visual and sculptural forms from the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, poetry and portraiture from the queer surrealist resistance fighter Claude Cahun. We might also get into a discussion on weasels. As a little taster I leave you with these images, and the following prompt:

Write a poem that in some way ‘fails’, perhaps by exceeding the bounds of taste and style, or by wilfully glitching rules of syntax and grammar. A useful place to start might be a ‘do not’ list for poets, or a list of words that are seen as “inappropriate” or “cliched”. Google abounds in these. What does it feel like to use language “wrong”? Is it harder than it looks?

Or, you can write a poem that responds in some way to a snake legend of your own.

Ana Mendieta, from her Silueta series (1973-1980)

Claude Cahun, “Que me veux-tu?” (1928)