chris at 12:55 AM |

 

segment 2. Escape Hatches Available to the Wily.

Long pause. In which I must observe that apparently my audience is not prepared for the considerations of bodily matters that this poem plainly makes explicit. What to do with that? Well, fortunately the writer knew what to do. Mr. Johnson has used two very reasonable escape hatches available to the wily (certainly wilier than Plato, I am starting to think) writer: one is the use of Alexandra as authoritative presence (if not exactly voice). The other is that old bugbear of poets and book planners everywhere: strategic placement (eg., as clichéd from Aristotle: save the best for last). Each of these elements is a well documented matter of rhetorical knowledge or awareness: the one considers positions of enunciation in terms of performative voicing. Plato invented and took liberties with his voice of Socrates, which of course extended to all manner of imagined play. And for his part, Socrates had done something similar with Diotima (browse: several essays cover this well in Before Sexuality: Constructions of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, David Halperin, John Winkler, Froma Zeitlin, eds., Princeton UP, 1990). Alternatively, Mr. Johnson here very modestly proposes (for all textuality is a matter of proposing, of creating propositions to place under consideration) Alexandra, thereby assuaging a fervent complaint of feminists who track developments in classical studies (see “Why is Diotima a Woman?” by David Halperin, in Before Sexuality), thereby also restoring in proper revisionist portion, a specialness to the indeterminacy of literally, sexual/textual femaleness.

But to the practical problem of my students: they will not know this. They will be saying who the heck is this Alexandra Papaditsas, anyway? They will be saying, Umm... Mr. Johnson?--is everything okay up there, man? So they will have to be led to this realization: there could not be a more ingenious way to take aim at and deftly slingshot several early twenty-first century cultural squirrels (hi Kasey!) than to discover your own Alexandra P on a Greek Isle (where can we all find one of these?--I’m calling Travelocity today, yes!). She is tradition, history, gender (female), martyrly, and nun-like yet motherly all in one. Not since the Virgin Mary has textuality had such a compactly singular gender synechdoche. Appropriately, she is such a sultry culture-martyr, a learned figure of mystique and a monumental, terrible, sentimental grief for the (apparently) lost essence of femaleness--whatever that was, or so the logic must go which will certainly one day lead us all to understanding what it (femaleness) is now. YaY!

But I do have to say this: Mr. Johnson, as a feminist, I am offended. Here is why: Alexandra, although certainly more of a pastoral woman than a civic one, should not have been associated with a “billy goat.” (iii) This is a problem not of superficial representation but of quality in deepest proportion. Rather than the billy goat, known for its stubbornness, the more appropriate comparison would have been to the Grand Canyon Big Horn Sheep, known not only for stubbornness, sure, but also even more notably for its wile, its sure footed-ness, and its longevity--this animal, unlike the billy goat, can last well over 100 years in conditions of the steepest build-up of petrified bat guano. And, if all these characteristics were not enough to recommend this fine animal to you as more proper source for comparison, then consider this: the “keras” of the Grand Canyon Big Horn Sheep necessarily winds and curls luxuriantly into several layers of whorls over the animal’s long life time (Pantene is rumored to be distilling a life prolonging substance from this animal’s horn). Simple syllogism, Mr. Johnson: if Alexandra is as remarkable as Mr. Slavoj Zizak is quoted as saying in the book’s “Introduction” (1), and if, as you yourself claim when you write,

“her textual eruptions should be seen as bony knobs sprouting from the heads of such minotaurish translations as these--weird but extrinsic appendages of the ravaged body in which they root... projections of love’s ultimate excrescence,” (iv)

then the only way to find, as you also, more wistfully write, “ her curling horn... within the layered strata of the asteroidal debris,” (iv) is to compare this magical woman to the Grand Canyon Big Horn Sheep. In this I think I have made my point.