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CONTRIBUTOR:

ANNE BOYER
THE
ONLINE
E XC L U S I V E
MISERABLIS
T
November 2016

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This vision was strongly nebulous, an indeterminate
but bold reaction only because it was so much like one
of my poems. There I was one weekday night starring
    in a work of literature about gentlemen’s anarchy and
artists and rapists and masculinity, and there I was
later with my innocent questions, and then I was
facing, yet again, an entire interrogative oeuvre about
the self-suppression of undeserved esprit de coeur .

This whole scene was like Picasso’s Blue Period, but

the colour I was exploring was ‘wretched with
indefinite longing’. I had grown tired of the auto-
destruction of literature. I didn’t want to erase my face
from the coinage. I had grown tired of all the
metaphysical rumours and wanted to be away from the
clatter of interiority, to be — in a new form — alone.

I dreamed of a category containing those who are more

beautiful, intelligent and virtuous than anyone else I
had known. This was a category into which I kept
inserting the names of my friends. I did not gaze
admiringly or touch this category too much, and when
I was out of its radius I became sick with a mysterious
illness: I was tired, sad, my chest ached, I didn’t want
to get out of bed. I could think only of this category’s
face, and was struck with the most intoxicating
loneliness, like the loneliness of a person who has lost
an organ.

Later, on the phone, I said ‘This is so curious — it is

like I have lovesickness without being in love with
anyone,’ and the voice on the other end said, ‘Of course
you are in love.’ But how and with whom? It was
painful to be lovesick without love, like a person who
has quit her job but still stocks shelves in her dreams.
That’s when my suffering became an art project. I was
no longer a self-suppressioner, I had become a
miserablist.

Later I realised the state of lovesickness for a love that

isn’t love and for no one in a fixed particular had lasted
for some time. I began to think its only antidote was to
go back to the work of love — but to cross the picket
line made for ragged events, returns which were wrong
returns, starts which were terrible starts: what did it
mean that each attempt to break my own strike ended
in greater and greater reason to uphold it? Then a
definitive catastrophe, like a rotten boss doing the most
rotten bosslike thing, gave me a firmer conviction. I
could be in the proximity of the lovely and not stare
into their eyes. I abandoned every strategy of
seduction. I had become so practiced at ‘no’ but not at
eradicating the lovesickness that wasn’t for a love, as if
romantic pain hangs in the air like the stench of a body
after a corpse is removed.

There I was without love, sick with love, and suffering

from the definitive something that had made the
objects of this entire world say their distressing
everythings: mostly about the wreck of politics and
capital and the total wreck of gender and available
forms. This was the entire world as a stage-set of
antagonistic signs — Rousseau’s articulate trauma in
S O L I T A R Y W A L K E R : ‘If I recognise anything
around me, it is only objects which distress me.’ At this
I looked out from myself for the kind of love which was
not romantic but longer lasting. I thought, ‘In the past
I have only disappeared inside myself during a crisis
and now I will do a better thing which is to see myself
recognised as human in the human world.’ But where I
went to be seen as human was a place in which I
should have known I could never be: a discourse which
exists precisely to exclude a wounded person from the
human realm, so I asked for but was refused human
things like a place for mutual thinking-out or the
dialectics of the new ways from the places of difference,
like a human reflection back to me that allowed that I
could have a human rationality. I was given just more
of the total catastrophe and the catastrophe of what
was said to me was another nightmare, or like my
literature which was the very thing I had reached out
to undo.

I was envious of those who weren’t refused, but I never

made this envy reproductive. I kept producing a
defanged version of what I couldn’t and never with the
blissful sense of unphilosophical self-satisfaction the
ones I envied displayed. I stared at those who appeared
not to suffer as the rest did and asked ‘How do you feel
you deserve this?’ but they never answered back or if
they did, they answered ‘How can you feel you don’t?’
The power of the powerful people was part of that
general category in which I kept installing my urges. If
I was going to be attracted to the powerful, I only
wanted to be so in the manner of Valerie Solanas.

Then on Facebook I was told I ‘travestied’. At first I

believed that one couldn’t travesty anything, that a
thing which is a travesty is a travesty in itself without
an actor upon it. I wanted to say, no, the property of
travesty is inherent in a thing. A travesty is not a thing
you do to another thing: it just is a travesty like
everything else. I was wrong: I looked it up in the
dictionary. Like most people, this person had a
superior and more expensive education. And I had, in
fact, travestied his words and then doubted his
vocabulary. He said something like ‘There are many
people who will talk to you about these things, but I
won’t talk to you because you appear to understand
nothing.’ In all of my life I had been told many terrible
things about myself, many of them true, but if they
pertained to my ability to understand it was my ‘too
muchness’ of it, the inappropriate intensity of my
interpretation, which caused so much discomfort in
others, the mania of too-much-understanding, that I
was too idiosyncratic and accumulating and insisting
and pathologically hermeneutic and anti-disciplinary
and unpleasant in my overwhelmingness of
interpretation and needed to really chill out with all the
thinking and trying to get it, but never just that: that I
could not understand at all. There is actually nothing
— a bizarre and repressive slipping of the human
terrible into the therapeutic and private modes of
discourse, the failure of friendship entirely as a
philosophical form leaving no other form of
philosophy, and also the failure of politics which
everyone else had already known but which I was
always too optimistic to pick up on before.

I reacted so strongly, creating from this pain an entire

genre, then from that at least a dozen subgenres, all in
the form of crying, but in this strong reaction lies the
way that one can come back to ‘the catastrophe of form’
then, which is the other catastrophe — I come back in
this kind of wound which is fascinating in its
discomfort, which is like a natural disaster, which
seems like it couldn’t even exist for its magnitude, a
kind of aching and math-y and somatic sublime. I had
always felt more wounded by the wounds of friendship
than the wounds of love. And the wound I felt was
bigger than my body, at least by fourteen inches or a
thousand feet all around but mostly coming from my
heart (and how is that possible, to sense a physical pain
which expands beyond the body’s own boundaries at
all?) (and how does one live then in a pain which
radiates from one’s heart and exceeds one’s bounds?).
And then, as a miserablist, I began to finally write from
inside the wound which proves the human body itself is
the limit of nothing. It became a type of conceptual
literature to tell you that the social pain can multiply
any event or injury beyond any kind of illusory physical
sovereignty and that this is the pain which disproves
stoicism, existentialism, and Europe.

This was a song for the soundtrack. It had nothing to

do with the minor fiction of the prior event, but the
larger event about which I have had no visions. Great
numbers of people sat at picnic tables in screened
cabanas built on docks in a chlorinated lake. The
people of various races, ages, and bodies were often
eating, naked, in the heat in the cabana, or walking, or
floating on rafts, and I was riding in a golf cart among
them looking for the concession line. What I wrote in
that cart was a literature as an assemblage of smaller
parts into a new form from the crying, and then my life
assembled itself precisely along the lines of that
literature. It became an event first in the form of a
vision and then in the form of a nightmare and later
along the lines of an experimental prose poetry style
popular in the early twenty-first century which became,
for the purpose of the marketplace, a novel, and that
was T H E M I S E R A B L I S T , aka D E A T H A N D
T H E M A I D E N , aka this .

Then the critics said I had brought real blood to the

communion ceremony. Again, I’d missed the point.
The presence of real blood made imagined blood look
like a plaything. The blood of the wine has to always
appear to be more blood than blood. I was told to leave
then: sorry, go away, fuck off, get out of here: wine is
the only blood which is relevant here. if you are going
to have real blood, Anne, you should be at a hospital
with the others, not in our church. Still, I was grateful
to learn I could travesty. Everything was a transitive
verb. If I could travesty a man’s words with my newly
discovered inability to understand, what else could I
travesty? Was every potential power and new form to
be made there now in that verb? Then I was propelled
forward not by hope of ever being human again but by
more of my inhuman questions: how could I make a
new form from the object world as evidence of our
catastrophe? How could I bring to ruin ruin? How
could I now that I see my allegiances to inherent things
eviscerating become transitive mostly? And what we
this new form of life when one will not be human, not
be talked to, when one can finally not understand or be
understood?
 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

ANNE BOYER 's latest book is G A R M E N T S

A G A I N S T W O M E N . She lives in Kansas City.

THIS ARTICLE IS AN ONLINE EXCLUSIVE FROM NOVEMBER

2016.

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