Contributor’s Marginalia: Will Cordeiro responding to Zoe Mays’s “More Human”

“It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.”
—Wallace Stevens, “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit”

Zoe Mays’s “More Human” called out me for its sheer nerve. The poem pinballs from one topic to another in such a compact space, its deft and assured voice carrying it off and carrying me away. It took me, however, many readings to tease out just where all these vivacious swervings had led. It appears to build a tacit argument which holds the strands of its different conceits together, but an argument that is often made through gaps and hints and subtexts and overtones and outright paradox. Each time I read it, I would arrive at some place unexpected by the end—at every ending, that is, since its bottom kept dropping out like the mechanism of a theatrical trap. “With horror,” Eugenio Montale quips, “poetry rejects the commentators’ notes.” I felt such rejection more acutely than usual in the case of Mays’s work.

The poem would never give up its essential, its rigorous enigma. Still, the poem consistently repaid the attention I paid it. It trusts its reader. This essay, then, is my chance to return that compliment. Yes, it is an exercise in close reading-for-close reading’s sake. But it’s also my personal investigation—line by line and sometimes word by word—to consolidate the associational logic at work in its web, where everything proved pattern rather than patter. So, it’s I who’ve been caught, tripping over its silk, lost in its tropes, a little out of sync. And the poem’s mystery, of course, remains.

0. More Human

The title suggests a question about what constitutes the human. It implies gradations and scales, not absolutes. The “human” may even be an unobtainable ideal, an asymptote toward which one moves. Perhaps a stepping stone along some evolutionary process. Then again, to be “more human” might be to accommodate a more capacious viewpoint of diverse cultures, lifestyles, genders, embodiments, and identities. “I consider nothing that is human alien to me,” wrote Terrance; to which Wallace Stevens offers the riposte “It is the human that is the alien.” The human has no cousin in the moon because it is human culture that has been self-alienated and sterilized from nature, making nature itself appear as an airless foreign moonscape unfit for habitation.

At the same time, “humanity” can be a mushy, mealymouthed term that gets bandied about for partisan causes. It is embedded in colonialist logic: we are human and they are the savages. One’s definition of the human can arbitrarily turn on facts such as whether someone worships a cross, has white skin, eats pig tripe, or wears breeches.

In his essay “The Great Family of Man” in Mythologies, Roland Barthes declares, “This myth of the human ‘condition’ rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History.” There is no such thing as the human condition for Barthes. The myth rests, he claims, on showing a surface-level diversity of skin tones and morphologies first and then draping a sentimentalizing unity over this welter of variousness from a supposedly god’s-eye point of view. (Barthes’s critique of the famous photo exhibit called “The Family of Man” circa 1955 sounds a lot like a deconstruction of today’s ubiquitous “three and a tree” college brochures: we’re perfectly diverse, but we all show the old college spirit.) In what this unity or spirit consists remains a vague, false lyricism dissociated from the histories and institutions of which anyone partakes. The meaning and function of birth, sex, work, food, death, kinship, and corporeality remain distinctive to different cultures and times. To posit a single human condition rides roughshod over the important ways that communities have developed practices and rites to give their actions significance within unique social systems. Like the existentialists, Barthes here asserts that whatever is human has no essence. Each human being must be defined by one’s own choices within the specific cultural and political milieu in which one finds oneself.

1. How relieving to realize a word can mean itself

A word that means itself is called “autological.” The class of things the word refers to includes that very word, such as pentasyllabic which happens to have five syllables. The word word is autological, too. Douglas Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach has a riff on the paradoxes arising from such systems of self-reference which often result, he claims, in “strange loops.” The liar’s paradox—”I am lying”—appears to make a truth-claim about itself, for example. On the one hand, if the speaker really is lying then the statement is true; and, on the other hand, if the statement is true, then the speaker is not actually lying. Neither option really works: we go around in a circle that gets nowhere. Yet, the initial sentence, “I am lying,” seems, on its face, a reasonable declaration in everyday language that it appears we should have been able to parse and evaluate. Nevertheless, it turns out to be empty, meaningless, or undecidable.

Of course, the destabilizing sense of “mean itself” explicated above is probably not what you first thought of. The line could be taken to indicate a logical correspondence (“A” → A) between signified and signifier. That is, the letters in “C-A-T” mean, and only mean, a domesticated feline. If we take just this line alone, the relief the poem’s narrator evokes is for a tidy grid of signification in precise lockstep—world and language dovetailing conveniently. For once, ah, to be without any clouds of vagueness or indeterminacy!

Nevertheless, the two senses of “mean itself” are at odds, overlapping and interfering, one gesturing toward a logical architecture of one-to-one correspondence and the other a quagmire of self-referential paradox. Indeterminacy already abounds.

2. and its opposite. That sanction can both approve

The first line break presents us with a bait-and-switch, alerting the reader that we’re on shifty, iffy ground. Instead of any self-assured certainties, we are handed contradictions. Language can be a perpetual opposite day. William Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity denotes this phenomenon as the seventh type, an ambiguity that depends on a word, sentence, or even whole poem meaning both one sense and its antithesis. Irony, sarcasm, subtext, apophasis, and oxymoron can frequently function in this way. So, too, certain words can be contradictory in their definitions. Empson says, “You might think such a case [of contradiction] could never occur and, if it occurred, could not be poetry, but as a matter of fact it is, in one sense or another, very frequent, and admits of many degrees.” This poem provides us with several examples, notably: “sanction,” “homely,” and “cleave.” Such words destabilize our readymade and univocal understanding, forcing us to ponder how to reconcile divergent grasps of a text or whether to shuffle off our inherited categories as inadequate.

3. and penalize. That homely is both ugly and cozy,

For me, “homely” also sounds its relative unheimlich—the uncanny—that means unhomelike as much as something hitting too-close-to-home. For a robot to inhabit the “uncanny valley,” say, it must both resemble a human too closely and not quite enough. We need to be able to discern its difference from us while nonetheless being disturbed by how similar its behavior replicates our own.

In Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny,” he recognizes that what appears strange or foreign can often provoke fear. Still, the power of the uncanny is that we sense it’s not entirely foreign or other—whatever’s uncanny, in fact, inhabits an intimate part of ourselves. Freud notes, “What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich.” In “Self Reliance” Emerson famously said, “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” Like Freud’s uncanny, Emerson’s alienated majesty is a re-cognition of something we have cast out which boomerangs back to smack us on the nose, terrifying and sublime in a closeness we have hitherto overlooked.

Freud sees the alienation of things that are uncanny as often utilizing the figure of the double, an identification with something (or someone) that simultaneously is and is not oneself, harkening back, in his psychoanalytic perspective, to a time when the self or ego was not clearly differentiated from the external world. The uncanny is often aroused when we view newly dead bodies at a funeral viewing—a fresh or made-up corpse appears as if it should be alive but is not. We are surprised by its missing animation, despite the body’s corporeal sameness, whereas in the case of humanoid robots there is an animation and responsiveness that seems unwarranted given their mechanical status. We confront a thing that is at once estranging and too near to us. We are in the presence of a fatal, omnipotent power that we can’t explain. This power haunts us since it portends the secret power that animates ourselves, as well. What is most within is also beyond us.

4. as it’s not beauty that comforts us but unsightliness—

True beauty must be ravishing, threatening, almost monstrous rather than comfortable and domesticated. A beauty that was literally “unsightly,” though, could not be seen. Ironically, one needs to behold the ugly thing to see that it’s unsightly. It’s not that what’s unsightly literally can’t be seen; it’s that we don’t want to see it. And yet, and yet. We rubberneck anyway. We do want a peek at what’s forbidden and obscene. Like the gaze of Medusa reflected from Perseus’s shield, we find ourselves awestruck and almost paralyzed.

5. clunky passes made on rotten couches, wiping

“Passes” is a sneaky little word that can upend everything. It, too, has contradictory definitions, which operate simultaneously. It means both a come-on (“hey, cutie, what’s up?”) and no thanks, next (“Uh, byeee”). One can imagine the boys making one type of passes and the girls making the other type of passes, for example. However, I’d note that the passive grammar means we don’t know exactly who makes the passes to whom. The rotten couches could imply the party as a whole is dull, dead, or slightly dangerous.

“Passes” insinuates “passing,” too, a concept that looms large a little later in the poem. Most people have probably experienced the sense of being imposters at a party, trying to pass oneself off as cooler or having more savoir faire than one feels is true. Of course, where does passing end and reality begin? There’s the mantra: fake it till you make it, after all. Ultimately, the concept of passing relies on a bedrock authenticity the poem subverts.

6. the sweat that sticks beneath our tits, flipping off

The innocuous-seeming word “our” stands out as the one that drew my attention in this line, indeed, drew my attention to the entire poem. The reader seems drawn in as part of the collective persona of the speaker using the first-person plural pronoun. Our tits: does that imply that the poem’s speaker is feminine or female (with, I might add, no necessary relation to the author’s gender); and does it likewise indicate that the implied reader is female or feminine, too? Does the poem thereby offer a co-sororal discourse? What does it mean when a poem deliberately genders its reader? And does this strategy purposefully exclude other-gendered readers?

In my view of the poem, the use of “our” imaginatively transitions the actual reader into the subject position of a fellow female addressee for the duration of one’s suspension of disbelief. Readers not only inhabit the minds of other characters, who can have identities different than theirs, but they may partake as well in the gender and identity of an imaginative consciousness developed by a text’s implied reader who acts as their surrogate or proxy. It encourages the actual reader, whatever their gender may be in real life, to take a feminine perspective in terms of their positionality vis-à-vis the text. It’s perhaps similar to the by-now-common use of the second person in poems which often operates by projecting a persona for the implied if not actual reader to inhabit. While implied readers may be ironic textual constructions that the actual reader can reject, perceive as naïve, or find incongruous, I doubt that’s going on here.

Then again, perhaps the “our” is not referring to the speaker and the reader as the “we,” but merely another person at this seedy house party or frat shindig? For me, it both refers to a friend at the party with the speaker and reaches across the textual gap to include the reader in its address.

Or, taking a different tact maybe we should understand “tits” as not exclusively female? Not everyone with tits identifies as traditionally female, after all. Fat butch daggers and elderly men, drag queens and post-humanists with copious plastic surgery, twinks and transmasculine folk on T who bind, and many more besides might have tits of one variety or another. Such an agendering and desexualizing of tits underlies the “free the nipple” campaign which aims to stop the body-shaming of nipples based on the male/female binary.

We could also question the definition of “tits,” as well. There are decades-old flame wars on the internet about whether “tits” refers to the whole breasts (like the word “boobs”) or only the nipple (since etymologically the word derives from “teat”). The fallacy in such flame wars, surely, is that there doesn’t have to be only one meaning for a word.

7. cars that nearly kill us as we try to cross the street.

I imagine here the cars pulling out of the lot at the party the speaker is leaving. The drivers, presumably male, make catcalls at the girls. They’re “hitting on them,” a phrase already implicit with brutality. The male seduction is a decoy for harassment and any seeming attraction to the girls is belied by the violence of their drunken driving. The male revelers deliberately rev their engines and veer at the girls to provoke them, nearly killing the speaker and her friend. But maybe the “us” also includes the reader, too, and not only a specific addressee? Toxic (and intoxicated) male violence is killing us all.

The situation reminds me of Paul Theroux who writes that when he jogs along the margin of a road in his native Massachusetts the cars deliberately swerve at him. There is a jealous road rage of commuters against sensible, fresh-air exercise. But in this case, Theroux’s words in his essay “Being a Man” may be more apropos:

I have always hated being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful…. It is very hard to imagine any concept of manliness that does not belittle women…. the quest for manliness [is] essentially right-wing, puritanical, cowardly, neurotic, and fueled largely by a fear of women.

Cars embody, at once, masculine power and freedom as well as a kind of claustrophobic metal coffin. A deeply rooted misogyny informs the expression of masculine insecurity. The male gaze is titillated by the frisson of what it rejects, odi et amo.

In the poem, some fragile male ego, feeling rejected since the girls are not leaving the party with him, reasserts his physical power by a prankish, juvenile threat.

8. Who wants a straight meaning. More human

Notice the period: it’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a bit of sass or joshing. A thrown elbow. A rejection of whatever’s deemed “straight.” Because straight’s not even straight. Straight can mean hetero, normal, obvious, linear, upright, honest, immediate, clear, or respectable. No, the speaker says, we prefer meanings that are slant, queer, and devious; protracted, ambivalent, delayed, associative, insinuating, sensual, and plural. We intuit there must be something besides what we perceive at face value: we search beneath the surface for “internal difference – / Where the Meanings, are” as Emily Dickinson puts it. We don’t look to what a person says so much as to their bent.

To achieve meaningfulness, one must trace a circuitous path inside a textual labyrinth. The twists and turns of tropes and innuendo are what give import to a poem especially. To give it plain, straight, and unvarnished is a falsification: it is to fail to comprehend that we live in an already imbricated world. Thus, a straight meaning is no meaning at all.

Interpretation is a dubious form of knowledge, but it’s the only kind of knowledge that we have.

9. that cleave both clings and sunders. And what

We can begin to see how the choice of the examples used in the poem—”sanction,” “homely,” “cleave”—are not arbitrary. Each word with its opposed definitions connects back in some way to the larger argument, to use a somewhat antiquated term most often applied to Metaphysical poems. But perhaps the poem can be described as Metaphysical since it investigates the ontology of language and identity in a way akin to Donne, Marvell, and other 17th century poets. They constructed elaborate extended metaphors that took a conceit as far as it could go and oftentimes further into the realm of absurdity or self-contradiction, playfully bantering us with wit, sophisms, and subtleties that at times defied commonsense.

“Sanction” indicates how entities—such as gender and identity—are constituted by norms, norms which can themselves be subject to cavils and quibbles. “Homely” helps us see the relativity and paradoxes of beauty standards. And “cleave” (besides hinting at cleavage in proximity to the mention of “tits” above) suggests how two objects might be joined and rift apart, representing both a unity and a division. The words are not just contradictions in their own right; they point out the larger cultural contradictions surrounding us.

10. of the oldest woman who ever lived—how some

Is this fourteen-line poem a sonnet? If so, then this line is likely the volta. This is the third major turn in the text. The poem begins with a linguistic disquisition about words with contradictory definitions and then locates us at a seedy house party. Now, the poem slingshots us around another hairpin curve to proffer the case of the oldest woman who ever lived, a controversial record-holder. We might even say, it introduces the concept of the eternal feminine.

I attempted to find the women referred to in the poem; it’s likely Jeanne Calment (and/or her daughter Yvonne). There is an internet rabbithole of contradictory information and disputed claims that surrounds not only Calment, nicknamed La doyenne de l’humanité in France, but many others who vie for longevity records. It’s not always clear-cut when they’re imposters.

There is, in fact, a more basic problem: when we’re talking 120 years, give or take, the changes in archival documentation methods during such a timespan have undergone profound variance, especially considering perturbations of war and technology as well as a lack of reliable eyewitness accounts. A century is longer than most institutional memory lasts, let alone individual human memory. If, as some allege, the daughter Yvonne had taken on her mother’s identity, she successfully perpetrated the hoax for decades. She could conceivably believe herself to be Jeanne by the time she reached her elderly years in a nursing home. In fact, she would have lived longer as Jeanne than Jeanne did. And there may be no ultimate standard to determine who is who.

What should count as evidence? It’s a fundamental epistemological quandary.

11. claim she’s a fraud, that her daughter assumed

“Assumed” is another word with contradictory definitions. In the primary sense used here, it means deliberately pretended or feigned. It’s used largely in the sense of faking an identity. In other words, it is unequivocally false.

But the “assumed” also means “supposed to be the case without proof” or “taken for granted.” It is the endoxa, in Aristotelean terms, the consensus of the culture and those deemed wise. It’s the values so basic they aren’t debated; the facts that are not subject to dispute; or the background theory that goes unquestioned. In this way, it’s what’s true beyond any argument or evidence. That which we do not doubt because it’s axiomatic.

Furthermore, one can be “assumed”—that is, absorbed—into another: the word also means a blurring of boundaries. This is Whitman’s pun when he says, “What I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” in the first stanza of “Song of Myself.” Both reader and writer breathe the common air and are subsumed into it.

If one “assumes an identity,” it indicates one tricks others into believing an impersonation. In doing so, one also assumes that one’s own identity is more or less stable and self-evident—not an impersonation. Yet, how much are we the mask of our own making? Or rather, how much are we not absorbed into the codes and codices with which we interface?

12. her identity after her death. Imagine that

What is human identity based on, anyway? The cells of our bodies constantly change. Memories are routinely fabricated and unreliable. Psychological continuity does not appear to be necessary, given that someone may awaken from a coma, for instance, and be recognized as the same person despite their spotty or nonexistent recollection of the past. And let’s not even get into hypothetical scenarios where a mind is uploaded to a computer, thus dividing one’s sense of self. Few philosophers today believe in immortal souls or Platonic forms. The more one thinks about the problem of identity, the thornier it becomes.

A skeptic might entertain the idea that personal identity is merely an illusion. Maybe each “one” of us is many selves who tell stories about a singular if largely phantasmatic self, which cements the belief that the person one consciously is now has a narrative investment in certain past selves and future selves. Charles Taylor has proposed something like this idea. But a historicized view of identity would raise the specter that “interiority” is not necessarily a universal human quality but only a sociological artifact arising in the West sometime between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It’s a modern occurrence that depends on norms of individual agency, reflection, commitment, and narrativization. Yet, what happens when one decommits or re-narrativizes their experience? What happens when those sociological forces undergo a paradigm shift?

13. disqualifying. As if one woman can’t be two

The sense of a collective identity—one woman being two—could recall pregnancy, where two organisms inhabit one body. Or the case of conjoined twins, multiple personality disorder, or those who are said to live double lives. Some counterfeit their lived experiences on the downlow; others splice to lead parallel careers. Or, it may allude to reinventing oneself anew. The myth of one’s self, after all, is ever a persona composed by a process of severance and reassembly.

By contrast, perhaps the collective identity broached here asks us to consider the solidarity within the body politic where a singular Leviathan is formed from the individual wills of different people. If personal identity is more fraught than is often suspected, relying on higher-order concepts such as commitment and narrative and context, then collective identities may be no less real since they likewise depend on these same sources.

The term “disqualifying” in the line points to the fact that criteria have been set up: whether someone is one person or multiple persons is a social construct. Analogously, Paisely Currah, a transgender theorist, shows how gender attribution for nonbinary people depends on a muddle of myriad criteria that change willy-nilly between states, jurisdictions, departments, agencies, and who happens to be deciding or presiding that day at the office or court. The classification scheme imposed is a technology of governance contrived to codify bodies and behaviors that maybe should remain unsettling, but that the state apparatus renders coherent and intelligible for its own ends. Which authority, methodology, ideological viewpoint gets to decide? How are differences negotiated? To what purpose are these criteria put in a larger politicized environment?

Most of those who want a straight meaning—who want to unkink and straighten out the meanings that they perceive as athwart and askew their own worldview—have some ulterior motives.

14. women, or that two women can’t live one life.

This is a poem invested in challenging any straight, simpleminded notions. Words can have contradictory definitions. Our commonplace understanding of personal identity becomes troubled the more consideration we give it. A hermeneutic exegesis—of both texts and persons—is at once necessary and necessarily entangled, depending on competing claims and contingent points of view.

The three parts of the poem—a linguistic analysis of words, a brief account of a house party, and the controversial case of the world’s oldest woman—link up in the end. The poem seems to project an identity onto its implied reader with the attribution “our tits.” The actual reader, regardless of gender, assumes a feminine embodiment in the (re)positional act of reading the poem. The two constructs, implied and actual reader, become united through imaginative identification. If the gender ascribed to the implied reader is fictive or performative, so, too, perhaps is the gender one masquerades in everyday life. Many persons must bear the burden of gender’s misogynistic if often apparitional concepts.

The reader bivouacs in the place of both/and/between just as Jeanne and Yvonne supposedly resided in an ambivalent state of being accorded status as both one and two persons. The reader and speaker become one “we” just like Jeanne and Yvonne merged their identities.

As the feminist ethnographer Dorothy Smith writes, the everyday world is “problematic.” We must navigate our particular experience within, among, and sometimes against the generalized concepts and institutional norms that hold sway around us. Only certain aspects of a situation are rendered observable according to the given and sanctioned discourses. Other aspects remain overlooked, “beneath which a subterranean life continues.”

Can I be both male and female through the act of readerly imagination? Does that seem contradictory? Very well, I contradict myself, Mays goads me into saying, ventriloquizing Whitman, zigzagging ever deeper down a mazing warren of words. Is a many-gendered many-mindedness not only the condition of mythological figures like Woolf’s Orlando and Ovid’s Tiresias, but also a more human condition?

“To enter the flow-state of reading is to swim,” Will Self says, “into other psyches with great ease, whatever their age, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, class, or ethnicity.” The body is suspended and the reader is subsumed into another consciousness while reading. This is one of the great mysterious powers of literature. For, if we have learned to ascribe our identities through narrative, then this fluidity of scripts for ourselves we discover while engaged with literary narratives should not surprising.

Furthermore, as Marquis Bey writes in Black Trans Feminism, the body:

has come to be the site that suffers oppressive forces because that is precisely how oppressive forces wish to construct our subjectivities—to form to them and understand themselves as formed, in toto, by them. What we have come to name our bodies, though, is not the only way we can or should think ourselves possible in the world. Our subjectivity… indexes the amalgam of the various ways that we engage sociality, an engagement that is not determined wholly by or confined to the surface of corporeality.

We need not think that the body is the privileged site of identity; our subjectivity, more commodious than a centered and singularly indexed physical flesh, may be more fundamental. The imaginative identities a reader dwells upon in xenophilic ecstasy may be valued more than the banal conditioning that remands them into the narrow confines of their so-called lived experience and bodily surface. At least, it’s often so for me.

But who am I? There’s no end to interpretation, which remains as pervasive as it is perverse.