Orange and its rind:

On Naming, Trans Becomings, and Holes

By

Magdalena Poost

A senior thesis submitted to the Program in Creative Writing in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts

(an excerpt)

...

I mean, at first I was neither sperm nor egg.

I was wiggling!

Chapter One: The Beginning, or In Defense of Ambiguity

I am going to write to you about my body. This feels very wrong to me, as to be a body seems ineffable and to be language seems only f-able. Mostly, people use language like an incisor. They are chewing chewing chewing, and I am eschewing eschewing. I like the spaces between what I say and what I mean and what is heard by you. (Space between an orange and its rind). I read in a book that language always has two characteristics: exuberance and deficiency.1 Deficiency is what words can’t quite get to. Exuberance is the secret thing that words add, that you’ll never quite know, and also can’t get to. My friend has a theory that every time you try to explain something about yourself with words, you take a physical chunk from your stomach.

BILLY RAY BELCOURT

When I write, it feels as though I’m clawing at a ceiling

lined with dandelions. The spores and dirt shower onto

me, their velocity diametrically opposed to my writer’s

block. I eat and eat until I’m more dandelion than anything

else. The work of art festers inside me.

A girl in my class recently told me about a device used in horror literature. As the trope goes, the more a monster is described, the less the reader is able to picture it. Constantly shifting, the monster’s materiality seems obstinately unrecognizable, defiant of cohesion.

The longer you take to describe it, the more convoluted it becomes–

We had been reading an apocalyptic book about an animal-like creature made from biotechnology who was described as a smooth, pulsating, green squid. The squid grew and grew, multiplying fingers which covered its surface, able to flatten into a disk or fashion itself to look like a bear, covered in a belt of blinking eyes.

She clicked her pen decisively at the end of the thought, a punctuation.

Slippery.

Before my first encounter with a therapist, I was sent a long questionnaire to fill out to give her a sketch of me – why I was seeking professional help. It was pages and pages of multiple questions, none shocking or particularly uncomfortable. I’ll admit, their language made my troubles feel more legitimate, a bit weightier perhaps, or just marked down. On the day of our call, she opened our conversation, saying

So. It says that you are a white nonbinary pansexual with anxiety and depressive concerns. Is that correct?

I laughed.

She look up and very earnestly asked,

Was that incorrect?

I sat uncomfortably. I had a hard time pinning down where my unease was coming from– it wasn’t that anything she said was strictly untrue, or even that I felt in denial about any of the chirpy yet chewy words that I had personally signed off on as categories for myself. Rather, it felt more like I was a fish, and the holes in the net she had for me were too big. I wanted her to take a hand and grab me, to feel my shoulders.

she was giving birth, my mom neck that the blood vessels

When constricted so around my

tightly

in my tiny slightly.

baby forehead would smirk

burst in a heart My mom

shape. For the on my head.

first couple years as a red shadow

of my life, it would reappear

whenever I got dehydrated,

Let’s me begin again:

It is a hard feeling, having something stuck inside you.

It is a hard feeling, having something round and rolling around inside you.

There is a way we are our skin, and there is a way we are the something moving, stuck inside. The two become meaningful through their collision, even as it unmakes us.

It is a violence to pin a butterfly–

but violence, it can’t be denied, is also a creative action. It creates something new.

I once wrote a story about a man. I took the story to a writing teacher. She told me to refine it: give him more specificity, more details – more life. I once wrote a story about a man who began each day with a blue bowl of cereal, whose mother’s name was Alice, who feared the loss of the blue sky to blindness. I took the story back to the teacher of writing. She told me it was better – could go further. I wrote down a hill of specificity, splitting infinities smaller and smaller. He was born in May, just two days after the day his mother’s lawyer crashed a car into their home. He was born in May, it was drizzling. He was a man, like any other, but more specific. The writing teacher took my story. And now you see where the real work begins. There is always more to get to, it is only through the specific that your work becomes interesting. And I, more motion than word, imagined the man, knowing him to be more motion than word (knowing the world to be more motion than word). I want to ask: what kind of stories could we tell if we didn’t assume that ambiguity is something to be solved?

Bumper sticker idea: RESPECT LANGUAGE’S HOLES

The intimate and the empire: A story in a word

I’m trying and trying to see myself beyond the edges of words. We are flesh, alive, heaving. I am writing not about myself, but about the vessel of the word “I” – where I feel helplessly drowned.

A friend tells me that her favorite word is “I.” Bloated on the feeling of describing my writing project to people, and hearing the words “navel-gazing” echo unstated – as if that isn’t central to the impulse to make anything, as if interest in the shape of the tools we are all using is in some way taboo. As if we could escape them.

Others seem more able to get past this first translation, having made peace already with the slanted world that filters through each of our pupils and skin. “I” “I” “I” I begin a sentence again with the most boring word. I open my mouth, again, and try to say what my friend said so clearly:
I is the most individual word. There is no smaller, more personal unit. And at the same time, in the same way, there is no other word that we all share more intimately and disparately.

Can details here look for the way they fill a shape? The fabric of how I make sense in words has become like paper desiccating in the bottom of a backpack, the edges where things become soft and crumbly are the parts where I take most care. The feeling of clenched things, private. That which is private and most shared. The prayer is to find the shape of the vessel. I am trying to make words breathe like I do, as I believe we all do.

Most things people say are thinly veiled shapes moving in the same ways that clouds do.

Pattern recognition, mostly.

Watching clouds is an example:

looking for shapes and observing their choreography.

It’s precisely conversational.

(The focus is on the shape and the edges/how words cut us in our mouths.)

In Conversation

If I were a rock, I would be by a river, a river rock.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place Stuck between

a soft and a rock place Stone between mountain and a silt place.

A couple months ago, I woke up every day gasping.

Do you feel this way?

Somehow the center of my chest is in danger, I feel the way a piece of text does, highlighted on a page.

But anyways,

A couple months ago I said

(paraphrasing from some book I read)

Isn’t it neat

This conversation between the water and the rock,

called a river.

The identity is a dialogue of difference, fluid and rigid making each other possible.

It becomes itself in conversation.

But then my friend, a student of geology, said

Well I want to say just one thing.

Rocks are hard

We think they are hard. But on the timescale of the earth, which is like 4.5 billion years old like–

rocks are always changing.

On their own timescale

all they are
is change.

I am sitting on the sidewalk, a car driving past drowns your voice. We are young and we are in love, and for the first time I get a taste of life that doesn’t feel like it is reaching towards something that isn’t right here, in the July sun, next to the road, with my bottle of water warming beside me. So far, to live has felt asymptotic–the graph of an equation that is always approaching, never quite touching (whispered: anything at all). I drop a pebble in my mouth. I think: why do we assume approaching is something to be solved?

Once, an ex-boyfriend tried to capture me in a game of conversational chess. We were standing by the Hudson River talking about something I can’t quite remember, and I said – crossly –

Well, I only believe that you can’t know anything for sure.

And he said

Are you sure?

Where does that leave me?