madsviande

It is a gift of mine that I usually understand what people are talking about. This is helpful, as they usually expect as much and it is easy to fall behind if you do not.

But sometimes they do not expect you to understand. Sometimes they do not even know for themselves what they're talking about; their own words are mysteriously unrevealing even to them. And it is there that my gift transcends the prosaic and enters the realm of poetry.

How can you be sure that you have correctly interpreted someone else's words? This is not a trivial question, because if you ask them, they must first interpret your question correctly, and then you must correctly interpret their reply. We are inescapably mired in interpretation once we have begun to interpret.

More practically: how do I check that I have understood someone? I do not hope to eliminate the axiomatic inevitability of doubt in my interpretations, but to identify strategies for navigating interpretation regardless. I have come to call one technique in particular 'altertext'.

'Altertext' puns on the verb 'to alter,' but also on 'alter ego'— the Other-who-is-the-Self. You might say that an altertext is a new text which shares its subtext with the original text.

There are different levels of this. It is meaningful to say that altertext, as I experience it, follows from the autistic habit of echolalia: repeating what someone else has just said, either in full or (more typically) the last part of it. This verifies that the listener has heard what was said. The next step is the paraphrase response, rephrasing what someone else has just said “in one's own words”. This verifies that the listener has grasped the surface meaning of the statement.

And up once more in complexity is the altertext, which swaps out not words, but concepts: the response expresses a larger idea which is appreciably like the original statement, but uses different images, metaphors, scenarios— more broadly, component ideas.

What an altertext encodes, therefore, is a set of assumptions about what parts of the original text are central and essential, and which parts can be replaced, being less important to the original thought. And because altertext is often superficially quite tangential to the text it responds to, it serves as a useful test:

A correctly-formed altertext is a pertinent response. The original speaker says “Yes, exactly,” with a spark of recognition in their eye, and seems excited to be understood. An incorrectly-formed altertext is irrelevant, has mutilated the original thought beyond repair, and annoys or confuses your interlocutor. And a middling altertext elicits “Almost, not quite, well...” and can progress towards a correct text-altertext exchange iteratively from there.

I mentioned before absurd and obscure(d) texts: poems, shitposts, jokes, vagueposts, riddles; statements not even the speaker can puzzle through. Here, too, the altertext can 'test' what hidden insight you think you have gleaned from the text; even without initially 'knowing' what they had meant by the original statement, the speaker hears the echo of their thought in your altertext— or doesn't. You see the spark of recognition in their eye, or it isn't there. Or somewhere in the middle: you trade riddles in stages, and eventually arrive at a perfectly-cryptic understanding.

So far, I have assumed that text and altertext have different authorship and serve to verify the fidelity of communication. But this is not essentially true. You can produce altertext from your own text, and altertext can be creative as well as imitative.

In many ways, writing poetry is a process of creating altertext. I start with a thought or a feeling which is important, but unclear or unassuming, and iteratively I refine it by exchanging its less-central parts for others that illuminate it better, until the structure has been perfected and every part replaced.

And altertext can serve as code, like an argot; innuendo is an altertextual process. I insinuate what it would be imprudent to assert plainly, by talking around the thing I cannot say, evoking the shape of the enigmatic taboo with words and ideas other than those I wish to express. Arguably, when I respond to a cryptic shitpost with an altertext, it was already altertext: an altered, obscured, substituted version of a thought not even its owner can name straight.

What altertext is, then, is a symbolic manipulation, an isomorphism of meaning, a semiotic transform. And, under my theory of magic, this makes altertext potentially a spell.

Indeed, this is how I cast verbal magic. When there is something I want that I do not wish to say plainly, or which there would be no point in naming, I instead speak in altertext; evoke the idea, without saying it; iterate on my own obfuscation, while preserving the submerged idea beneath them all.

Each individual 'surface form' of the subtext is cryptic; only one (like myself) with the Gift of intuiting subtexts might extract it from that text alone. But as they follow each other in sequence, the listener gets 'caught up' in the subliminal patterns they can sense, if not identify, between the texts.

Like a hypnotic suggestion, the listener is lured in unawares and receives the idea without noticing; the idea affects them below their conscious recognition. On a social media platform, the effect can be dramatic; a sudden, 'centerless' swell of emotion, a folie à ménage, a behavior which 'comes out of nowhere'. The contagious idea bubbles out of their subconscious recognition into new altertexts, an idea, an affect, an intention that spreads even beyond your own reach.

I've been struggling to write about this for years: I do not remember a time when I meaningfully was parsed as straight. Even conservative family members who wouldn't willingly have understood me as gay nevertheless knew to treat me as a nelly. Long before I came out as gay, I was visibly-gay enough to be targeted for sexual violence by a gay man, my viola teacher, who won my trust by being 'someone I can talk to about it'. (I never did talk to him about it. He didn't need my confirmation.)

And I came out at eleven, to my entire school (well, to my sixth-grade science class; it was immediately common knowledge). It is easy for people to hear this as an encouraging sign of progress, a touching liberal cliché, rather than the desperate last stand of a cornered child. It made my life harder, to have people Know in my own words, but the writing was on the wall long before I confirmed it.

It is difficult to verbalize how I feel about gay people who came out as adults. Jealousy is not really it. Frustration is part of it. Voyeuristic curiosity makes up an embarrassing portion of it. And, as with all my gay siblings and brothers and sisters who have not specifically invited my scorn, the bulk of my feelings is love and awe and compassion.

Not knowing your sexuality is painful, I hear. I don't really know; the first time I had a sexual feeling, it was the last piece in a thousand-part puzzle, and I knew all at once. Being forced to hide is painful, I hear. I don't really know; when I started hiding, immediately after that first gay desire, it was already far too late to conceal what I was. Nine months later, I conceded the point.

It is very painful to be bullied by peers and abused by teachers for being so rude as to make my faggotry overt. Middle school is hard on gay kids, and it was very hard on me.

I have never been acceptable as a straight person. I have only gotten more clearly-impossible-to-be-straight with time and transsexuality. It is inconceivable to me what it must be like, to have the option to hide and thus be hidden, to not know and thus be unknown. I have always been a lightning rod for homophobia, earlier than anyone else I knew. I cannot be normal, I cannot make being gay marginal to my personality, I cannot fantasize ways of being gay that need no reference to homophobic violence.

Every memory I have is shaped by homophobic violence. It is stamped in me deep. I will not apologize for being warped by it; I will not disown my bitterness.

Caroline Polachek can't keep doing me like this: https://youtu.be/Wcog3a4Hj-0

(Ramona Lisa music video for Izzit True What They Tell Me, from Dance Archive)

Nothing captures my experience of sexuality as a spooky/witchy madwoman like this song

[Ricky’s dad punches Luke in the face when he comes in to take Ricky to sleep over at his house.]

“Get out,” Ricky’s father spat. “Both of you.” Luke took no time at all to oblige. Holding his stinging cheek with one hand and grabbing Ricky’s wrist with the other, he made for the door. When they were out in the yard, Ricky pulled back on his wrist: Wait. Luke let go, and watched Ricky’s black-on-charcoal silhouette fade out of eyeshot. Barely a minute later, Ricky returned, a backpack slung over one shoulder. They got in Luke’s car. Moments unmeasured in uneasy silence later, once he’d put a few blocks between them and Ricky’s father, Luke glanced up at himself in the mirror and swore, pulling over to the side of the road. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Luke chanted, grinding his teeth. “My mother’s gonna kill me when she sees that!” “They’re still at the theater, right?” Ricky asked. “We’ve still got some time.” “Yeah,” Luke said, laughing despite himself, “but I don’t think a bag of ice is gonna clear this up before they get back!” “I can do you one better than that,” Ricky said, half-grinning. Luke shot him a quizzical look. “Just trust me, okay?” And, well, Luke did. So he drove them the rest of the way to the house, as Ricky fidgeted restlessly with the zipper on his purple backpack. “Go ahead and get that bag of ice,” Ricky said, striding through the house. “We need to get the swelling down. And meet me in the bathroom.” In keeping with the night, Luke kept doing as he was told. Baggie, ice, kitchen towel. There was an orderly sort of clatter happening on the sink down the hallway. What was Ricky up to in there? Hand pressed to the freezing bag, bag pressed to the hot bruise forming beneath his left eye, Ricky shuffled half-blinkered down the hallway. Ricky stopped him at the door, looking nervous. “I need you not to tell anyone what I’m about to show you.” “Okay,” said Lucas, bewildered, and Ricky let him into his own bathroom. His sink was covered in makeup products, more tubes and sticks and jars and palettes and brushes than he had any name for. “What...?” Ricky cut him off. “This is in my bugout bag for a couple reasons. One, about once a month, somebody I know takes me to a drag show downtown, and I borrow his wigs and dresses.” He cut his eyes to Luke, waiting fiercely for some reaction. Luke blinked— well, winked anyway— and nodded. ` “And two,” Ricky said on the exhale, “I need it to cover bruises.” Luke’s mouth ran suddenly dry. “I, uh, saw that — he’d been hitting you.” “Guess I didn’t cover well enough, huh?” Ricky said with a sour quirk of the lips “No.” Luke shook his head sharply — how to explain he’d seen Ricky changing for bed and stared, slack-jawed, through the blinds at the layered blotches, of differing ages, that marred Ricky’s lithe torso? — “I’ve never seen it at school, or around the others.” Ricky nodded solemnly. “Dad avoids anything that’ll show, but sometimes he — gets reckless. And onstage —” He stopped. “Little red dresses?” Luke said; clumsy levity. Ricky chuckled. “Believe it, dahling... Sleeveless numbers, y’know, with slits up to here...” “So...” Luke paused, unsure first of what he was going to say, then of whether it should be said at all. “So you are gay.” Ricky laughed again, but this time it didn’t sound funny. “Yeah, I’m gay. Everyone knows I’m gay. I’ve never been allowed to forget it, ever, in my life.” “But your dad lets you...?” “He doesn’t like it,” Ricky said impatiently, busying himself with the brushes, “and he hits me or he yells when he sees makeup left on my eyes still. But he doesn’t want me around anyway, and I don’t want to be there either. Besides, this is what happens to people like me. We get pushed off onto someone else.” Someone else like me? Luke thought, but for once in this conversation he kept his fool mouth shut. “The key to covering a bruise, or redness, or beard shadow, is this right here.” Ricky tapped a palette: Professional Color Correct!... “Translucent tinted makeup. Comes in green, orange, yellow... You use whichever color is opposite the blemish on the color wheel. Yellow covers purple. Orange colors blue. Green covers red. Right now, your bruise is mostly purple and red, so we’re going to need mostly green and yellow...” When Ricky had finished concealing the bruise and blending the edges out, which took a frankly astonishing number of steps to Luke’s way of seeing things, Luke looked... like he needed some sleep, or a drink, or a solid meal. But not like he’d taken a fist to the face barely an hour earlier. “That’s incredible,” Luke said breathlessly. Ricky looked smug. “Simple color theory. I can do it again in the morning.”

[Sleepover stuff. A day and a half passes before the next scene.]

=====

“Look up,” Luke’s mom said sharply, and against his better judgment Luke complied. “Is that a black eye?” Luke kept his mouth shut. It only made his mother angrier. “Who did this to you? Was it Eric’s father?” A chill ran through Luke’s bones. “So you know about him.” “I know he seems very rough,” his mother said, “and if he did that to you then you will not be going back —” Luke snapped. “If you know what he does to Ricky, are you only mad now? Because it happened to me?” “Luke, what —” All at once, he was all the way to angry. Luke pointed below his left eye. “This? This is a fraction of what Ricky goes through living in that house, and I’d willingly take it a dozen times over to give Ricky a fraction of my safety —” ` “Why do you have to be at risk?” Luke’s mother cut in. “If the monster is beating Ricky, then we ought to tell the authorities —” “And what can they do for him?” Luke asked. “Take his father’s side? Or take him away from his friends, his city, his nearly-complete education? Everyone he has here that understands —” Here, Luke stumbled. “Who he is as a person?” His mother’s face crumbled, instantly, into understanding. Ricky’s words echoed in Luke’s mind: Everyone knows... “Ricky doesn’t want to report his dad. He’s been bullied at his old schools; it could happen again. And he’ll be done with school after the coming semester, and —” Luke paused, took a breath. “I’m saving money to move out, right? And I’m gonna need a roommate anyway. I can help him find a job, but I’ve looked up apartments, I’ve done the math, I’m gonna have enough to — to cover him until he contributes rent.” His mother’s face was sliding, still further, into some deeper understanding than Luke could follow this time.

i.

God speaks to you out of the maelstrom and I am the stormcloud and I am the thunder and I am the Word and the Word was with God to say:

Sometimes, for no reason, bad things do not happen. The sky does not fall. The earth does not tremble. Your wife does not leave you. You do not lose your livelihood. You do not lose touch with your adult children.

ii.

Come June's third Sunday I pull out the sackcloth, put on my ashes, gnash my teeth, wail my grief

for a ne'er-do-well's daughter who chastised her own inborn disappointments, chided her own endless failures, sabotaged her own success to punish her own insolence, taught herself to soothe and make scarce on tiptoe, terrified herself with her own senseless aggression,

squeezed her own face in her own vise-like grip, choked herself with her bare hands in her own bed, screamed herself scarlet in her own voice— spittle pelting her own eyes— drove herself recklessly into a wreck— the impact on the passenger side where she sat— riddled her own memory with holes and flimsy fictions—

all this to pretend she had a father to well-meaning strangers, teachers, friends; all this to excuse the beast beneath her bed.

A monster is no-one’s father.

iii.

It is like this: Yes, the blood on the teeth of my house is mine, but who among us has not been fodder to a home? What is a house that does not hunger?

There is only so long you can keep making stock of the same bones. These remains crumble to the touch. It is time to throw them out.

iv.

Does the money trail lead always back into the arms of our father — his straining sinews, creaking floorboards—?

Then this I know of the house that money built: Thither will I not go.

The buttresses burdened by my father's house groan under the weight of so many cells, lightless, divided, multiplied, fit to lyse. The buttress— that is, me— stews, dreams of flight; hollows her belly, stewards her wall with only the most distant, phalangeal tips of her fingers; holds at arms' length, imagines letting go. The buttress, that is, dreams of collapse.

i.

The Adversary has begged me to dismantle your house from foundation to rafters with my bare hands and the knowledge of what you did with yours, and I have not. But I spare you not for mercy, not for you. Were I to bring your life down tumbling around your ears —

what would your wife eat? Where, then, should I live?

iii.

The problem with this house is mostly meals that were not cleaned up in time, blood left unscrubbed to clot and scab, cud chewed for years and decades on end. It is time now to root for fresh blood, and slaughter the truffle-hogs next. Who among us does not make a hollow home? What is a hunger that goes unfilled?

ii.

Oh, but you must not blame the monster! He had his own monster to excuse, his own pain, his own side of your story! If his claws were fearsome, well, you cannot deny he came by them honestly.

Oh, but you must not deny the monster! Carry on his claws, or bear them on your back! Damned if I'd neither, I scratch my own skin to threads.

i.

Sometimes, the Word is tied up in the maelstrom, kept on leash by a world too large and too full and too noisy to be just. A shackle binds my throat to silence now that your hands cannot do it for you, a cord spun in hair from people that love you, the people that I love.