This is an amazing week for our Infoxicated Corner. The pieces I’m blessed to share with y’all fit together by their own fortuitous kismet, in a whirling conversation about the intersection of danger and desire — the things that simultaneously attract us and threaten us.
Patty Hyland, an NYC-based illustrator and comic artist, sent me a gorgeous monster with the title Hesperides. The Hesperides, in ancient Greek myth, are a golden-lit sisterhood of nymphs that tend an Eden-like garden. When I asked Hyland about her choice of title for a piece of visual art that depicts a Leviathan-like creature, she replied that she prefers to let readers create their own inferences. For me, this piece is not only about the pitfalls of idealization or unrealistic definitions of beauty — it’s about the danger of being consumed by attraction or desire.
This theme is furthered by Jessica Suzanne Reidy’s amazing essay on Romani literature, which focuses on a midnight, flower-filled lesbian encounter between a mortal and a witch. Reidy explores the ways in which the poem navigates this love story, which is taboo in traditional Romani culture — and yet finds means of expression in a love poem based upon characters from culturally traditional stories. She also explains a great deal about how the history of the Romani people have affected their literary tradition, as well as their ideas about romantic love and family. On one level, this essay is about the excitement of forbidden love, and characters who decide that danger must not be allowed to extinguish romantic desire; however, it’s just as much a meditation on the dangers of an idealized kind of attraction that most of us, at one point or another in our lives, fall into without realizing it. As Reidy’s essay explains (and my own curator’s foreword supplements, with contextualizing information), there is a contemporary attraction to the idea of “The Gypsy” that is dangerous in an entirely different way — mainstream and popular cultures worldwide have ‘idealized’ a whimsical, sexualized representation of an entire race of people that has no bearing on reality, and actually ignores a lot of the awful things this group has suffered. This danger, then, springs from an understandable but very destructive desire to enjoy the pleasant sensation of secular myths that, although they are perhaps more inviting than the harsh truths they mask, will render us ignorant and unable to improve the world we live in, should we allow ourselves to be lost in their romance.
Finally, Margaret Bashaar has sent me three absolutely fantastic poems from her longer series, “I Am a Problematic Feminist Narrative” — and I loved one of them so much (“There Is Really No Such Thing As Winning”) that I read it five times in the first day I received it. The intersection of attraction and threat here doesn’t seem, to me, to exist between or among genders. It’s between this speaker and the feminist mode of thinking that attracts her. Don’t we all want to be “right,” or more enlightened, on some level? Don’t we gravitate towards systems of thought and belief that seem like they might offer us more (or greater) truth? And yet systems of ideology, no matter how comforting or inviting, no matter how much redemption or grace they may offer, simultaneously exist as a threat to the way we see ourselves. They promise challenges to our identities — Am I a feminist? Am I not a feminist? Am I bad feminist? What do any of those mean? — but they also offer the potential for proscriptions of failure, of external evaluations that we internalize and use police ourselves — sometimes constructively, sometimes not. This tension is fascinating to me. I’m about to go read these poems — and this essay, and this beautiful art — another five times. Hope you’ll join me, Infoxicators (Infoxicateds?) –
Beatitudes,
Fox Frazier-Foley
