Floodmark: Vernon Meidlinger-Chin

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I spent fifteen minutes of a twenty minute grocery trip in the liquor aisles tonight. I seldom drank in college, but the four months I've spent at my first job are tombstone-marked by empty bottles beside the end table in my bedroom. These aren't the only bottles keeping track of me.
I've been taking anti-depressants for almost seven months, and let's be clear that mixing SSRIs with alcohol once a week, or three days in a row, or any increment of time other than "intermittently" packs a suckerpunch of health risks. There's something very Beatnik about mixing prescription drugs with alcohol.

Clockwise from top left, skeletal diagrams of the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. Diagrams from Wikimedia Commons.

I hate the Beatniks.

There's always been a bad taste in my mouth when I read writing inspired by someone's drug use. I don't regard my art as my own if taking a substance that modifies me is to take credit for my creativity. There's a lot to do with intent behind it: I don't agree with choosing to take some mind-altering substance in order to create art. It feels cheap to me -- like, what, you weren't creative enough on your own? Steroids build muscle and water is wet -- you just don't have enough of a drive or the skills or the talent to succeed the God blessed American way through hard work and tenacity.

To me, artwork inspired by and promoting drug use isn't something with which I connect. I guess Bush's War on Drugs really did succeed - thanks, D.A.R.E.

During my teen years, I mentally cautioned myself against getting mixed up in drugs --whether they were hard, soft, smoked, injected, cheap, expensive. I knew that, as an artist, I had an addictive personality, and substances are typically, you know, addictive.
Now, I've found myself using alcohol to fall asleep, or to feel happy and carefree for once. It's even inspired a poem for me.

Because I've been using SSRIs and alcohol to cope through this depressive period, I decided to try a style of poetry I was first introduced to by our loving and lovely leader, Alli. The form is a palindrome: a poem that can be read forwards and backwards, producing two meanings or stories from one form. It's a BOGO deal! Some common palindrome words or phrases are racecar, borrow or rob? , or red rum, sir, is murder.
I regret to inform you that "palindrome" is not a palindrome.

Damn Beatniks. Photo courtesy of The Onion

Though the poem itself was about alcohol, the difficulty of crafting a palindrome required sobriety. This kind of inspiration from alcohol seems a bit ass-backwards and atypical, though, and a choice of which I think the Beatniks wouldn't be too fond. I don't know if I'd be open to appreciating artwork inspired by someone's drug use, though the concept has crept into my own life in an unexpected way. It's definitely something I need more exposure to and consideration of.

--Cam

I used to play in a band with a friend who referred to cannabis as "green inspiration", the implication not only being that was inspiration something that he could turn on and off through his consumption of marijuana, but that inspiration would not come unless he smoked. In this way, he used art-making as a way to excuse a frankly disgusting habit.

On one hand, I resent artists who lean on mood-altering substances of any type for inspiration, if only because it impedes collaboration. As a songwriter and a former bandleader, I have had to wrangle musicians who have shown up to performances or recording sessions lit up like a pinball machine, stoned out of their gourds, rolling down paradise parkway, monkey tripping, candy flipping, or good old-fashioned drunk. These incidents almost always resulted in my best impression of J.K. Simmons' Dr Fletcher from Whiplash.

On he other hand, while keeping in mind that mood-altering substances should never be a crutch, I nevertheless support the idea that they provide crucial supports in the creative process and in living. We all do drugs, in one way or another. But please do not misunderstand me - by "drugs" I do not strictly mean "controlled substances" or "psychedelics" or "uppers and downers". We all have some sort of habit, either regular or irregular, that we use to regulate our moods and support ourselves in our creative lives. Philosopher Alain de Botton has cited, in his School of Life videos, that his drug of choice is, based on this definition, emmental cheese.

Increasingly, I have become interested in what drug use means as a wider social phenomenon. My generation is one that came of age between years of peak methamphetamine and cocaine overdose deaths (2007) and peak opioid overdose (2016, but perhaps 2017 or 2018). What are we to make of that? My generation has embraced the use of adderall and microdose LSD in order to maximize productivity. What are we to make of that? My generation holds a generally positive opinion regarding the use of magic mushrooms, ecstasy, and ayahuasca in mental health treatments, or even for "spiritual healing". What are we to make of that?

From the National Institute on Drug Abuse

Making sense of large-scale drug use trends usually means talking to drug enthusiasts, which has invariably led to some of the most frustratingly circuitous conversations of my life. Broadly speaking, drug users I have spoken to fall into one of three camps: supplementers, brain hackers, and oblivion seekers. Supplementers see drugs like cannabis, adderall, or microdose LSD as harmless supplements they can take to improve their day-to-day lives. These drug users see drugs as room for personal improvement, making them less anxious, more productive, more perceptive, or more outgoing. Brain hackers see the human mind as something than can be radically altered for the better by entheogens or psychedelics. They might be simply more intense supplementers, but more frequently they carry utopian visions - think Timothy Leary, Huxley's Doors of Perception, or Tao Lin's upcoming Trip - that radically from simpler self-improvement goals.

The benefits of brain hacking, from Tao Lin

The oblivion seeking mode of drug use, in my mind, represents the Thanatos to the other modes' Eros. A drinker looking to black out is an oblivion seeker, as is an individual who seeks out opioids, benzodiazepines, or other drugs that slow and mind and numb sensation. True, the current opioid crisis is due in large part to the greed of the Sackler pharmaceutical family and the flaws of the American healthcare system, but do what degree did these drugs satisfy a preexisting, Freudian death-drive? I don't have an answer to that. Not yet, at least.

--Vernon

Read the more from Cam Best on Floodmark Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.

Alison Evans’s novel Ida has just won the 2018 Victorian Premier’s People's Choice Award, and by all measures the prize is well-earned. Ida is a taught thriller, a coming of age tale and, at times, a romance and a horror story. But what sets Ida apart is the way the story is grounded in the authentic experiences of queer and transgender Australians. On the phone from their hometown of Melbourne, I ask Evans, who identifies as genderqueer, if they had to defend having a majority non-cisgendered cast.

Image courtesy of The Guardian

“I had one review that was very resentful of what they called my ‘gender agenda’,” they laugh, adding, “People who don’t think they know any trans people have been like ‘Oh my god there are so many’, but it reflects my real life.”

Evans’s critics tend to accuse their work of pushing ‘political correctness’, not realizing that they are in a shrinking minority. A 2017 study by GLAAD found that twenty percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 identified with a sexual orientation other than heterosexual and a gender identity other than cisgender.

“One-fifth of millennials identify as LGBTQ in some way and I love it,” Evans says, “Everybody is trans, so everybody’s going to be trans in the book!”

Ida follows the eponymous Ida Wagner, a young woman living in the Dandenongs region of Victoria. At the beginning of the novel, Ida can travel in time by slight increments, allowing her to rescind any decision she makes. However, she soon begins traveling to paralleldimensions – some of which are hauntingly bleak – and finds herself hounded by mysterious doppelgangers with malign intentions. Yet, despite this, Evans does not consider Ida science fiction.

“Scifi is about highlighting human nature by taking a human out of their natural life and putting them some place alien,” they say, “And I love science fiction, but for me, Ida is contemporary fiction in the way that it’s rooted in everyday life.”

This distinction is an important one. Treatments of gender in science fiction are rare, and many of those already seem outdated. Ursula K LeGuin’sThe Left Hand of Darkness, for example, while nonetheless on the cutting edge in its time, presents a non-binary conception of gender as something wholly alien. Evans, in contrast, rootstheir spectrum of queer and transgender characters firmly, not just in the “real world experiences”, but in the distinct and lovingly rendered landscape of suburban South-East Australia.The tree-ferns, drizzling rain, and smattering of Australian slang constantly reminds readers that they are not on another planet or in an alternate dimension.

“Is there a right way, then, to handle representation in fiction?” I ask Evans.

“It’s very dangerous to think there is a right way,” they reply,“Especially for gender stuff, because our understanding of gender is evolving rather rapidly at the moment. You read a book from even five years ago, and it feels really outdated.”

“So how do you approach representation in your work?”

“The way I do it is I can only speak for myself,” Evans says,“That’s also why I had so many trans characters in the book, to show that there are many ways to be trans.”

Photo courtesy of Joan Caldwell

As Evans and I talk, we reminisce about the young adult books that shaped our tastes and, quickly, it becomes clear that while there is no right way to approach representation, there is certainly a wrong way.

“How did you feel,” I ask, “When JK Rowling revealed that Dumbledore was supposed to be a gay character from the beginning?”

Evans audibly winces.

“When it first happened, I was pretty happy then, because I was just realizing that I was queer too,” they say, “But now, I find it really lazy and a bit shit, honestly.”

“Queerness should be evident in the story,” they add, “Otherwise it’s just cheating. People use the ‘scraps’ metaphor. Cis-het people get a meal and queer people get tiny little scraps and crumbs they are told to be grateful for. I think Dumbledore is definitely a crumb.”

“How do you make that evident in your stories?” I ask.

“A lot of my issue with queer characters, especially bi characters, in a lot of things they never use the word,” Evans says, “In every single piece of media where a character could be bi, nobody uses the word, which is why I used it in Ida. It would be cool to reach a point where you don’t have to use the words at all, but I don’t think we’re there.”

What ultimately makes Ida so compelling is the way it is fundamentally about the process of creating identity. To do so, Ida struggles against her ghostly doppelgangers, but for Ida’s genderqueer partner Daisy and her transmasculine cousin Frank, the struggle is against a world that is at times painfully homophobic and transphobic. Over the course of the novel, all the characters claim agency over external pressures and create their own unique gender identities through lived experience. Evans expresses this conviction in an article they wrote for The Guardian, saying, “We can make a new way of talking about ourselves, one that includes and expresses our gender the way we want to. We are writing ourselves into existence with our words, lives and stories.”[1]

Such is the power of Ida and novels like it. We need more stories that reflect our rapidly evolving understanding of gender and, more importantly, guide us in constructing and accepting our own gender identities. There is no doubt that Alison Evans will continue to provide some of the best work of this type on into the future.

Find more of Evans' work at their website

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.

[1]: Alison Evans, “My gender didn't exist in fiction when I was growing up – so I wrote myself into existence,”The Guardian, 28 February 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/28/my-gender-didnt-exist-in-fiction-when-i-was-growing-up-so-i-wrote-myself-into-existence

Your first exposure to comics may have been limited to the mainstream superhero genre, and as such, you may have been unwilling to dig deeper into what the medium has to offer. While it can be quite exhausting to rifle through stacks of celluloid depicting hyper-masculine beefcakes, there are gems to be found. This series of reading recommendations aims to find those gems for you. In the previous installment of this series, I picked a couple of my favorite "comics of the weird". For this week, the category is...

Postmodern Comics

This category of comics is dominated by the presences of graphic novelist Chris Ware. Contributor to The New Yorker and author of the recent Monograph and Building Stories experiments with the medium, consistently pushing the medium, trying to find the places where the comics are unique - places where they can do things that film, literature, and video-games can’t. Nowhere is this more apparent in Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. Corrigan tells the parallel stories of two men named James Corrigan, one a boy living under the thumb of an rough and cold father in 1893 Chicago, the other his grandson, living in late 20th-century Chicago. The latter Corrigan, the titular Jimmy, meets his father for the first time and we experience his thoughts, his fears, and his fantasies through stream of consciousness non-linear narration told through some of the greatest innovations in visual storytelling, all of which builds to an emotionally devastating climax.

Image from Jimmy Corrigan courtesy of The Guardian

Also Worth Noting: “I Guess” by Ware, which Charles Hatfield called “a radical questioning of the way comics work”. Ware recognizes the creative potential of dissonance between word and image and uses it to brutal affect.

Image from "I Guess" courtesy of From Dusk Till Drawn

Runner Up: Here by Richard McGuire. The non-linear story of a place and all the people who interact with it. Absolutely one of my favorite graphic novels, but because I find myself thinking about and rereading Corrigan more often, Here is relegated to a runner up.

Image from Here courtesy of Harpers

See you next time as we explore another exciting genre of graphic novels!

Prompt:

We’ve all undergone experiences that have felt, in some way, Sisyphean. If you’re a writer, the process of writing and editing, revising and rewriting, can feel endless and futile and impossible. Write about such an experience, either your real or imagined. How does associating such a labor with a Greek myth effect how you write your piece? Does Camus’ association with the absurdity of life inform your writing?

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.

Heat sand hot enough, and you get glass. If you are a glassmaker, you can do this in a kiln. If you are a harbinger of extinction, you can do this with a meteor strike. And if you are J. Robert Oppenheimer, you can do this with a nuclear blast.

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Meet trinitite, a rare, slightly radioactive glass formed when the fireball of a nuclear bomb draws sand up into itself, melts the particles together, and rains molten glass onto the ground below it.

The name “trinitite” derives from the name of the nuclear test site where it was first observed – Trinity, the first atomic test in human history. The site gets its name from nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s love of the poetry of John Donne. “Batter my heart, three person'd God,” Donne wrote, and, centuries later, nuclear history was made.

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Note the shoes worn by Oppenheimer and his crew in the picture; they are specially designed so as not to track trinitite away from the test site.

Prompt:

You could write a lifetime worth of poetry and never have to use the word trinitite, but consider the way poetry and science and world power come together in this word. There is a certain beauty to the code name of the first nuclear test. Members of the Manhattan project recognized the singular significance of their work, and chose associated words deliberately. So rather than give you a real prompt this time, may I just wish that the words you chose be likewise deliberate and evocative.

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.

From left to right: Czech novelist Milan Kudera, Pygmalion and Galatea by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Mexican poet Octavio Paz.

Once, when I was falling in love and desperately trying not to fall in love, the object of my affection gifted me with two books: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and The Double Flame by Octavio Paz. And I, in one bitter week apart from her, I finished both.

In my lovesick throes, the two books offered two much needed views of love, desire, and their role in art. Now, as we consider the history of the artist-muse relationship we began here, these two works allow us to see the Muse in a more positive light. I object to the romanticization of the artist-muse relationship as a façade, obscuring an unstable power dynamic in which a (typically) male artist draws “inspiration” from a (typically) female muse, and, in doing so, marginalizes her identity in any context other than in support of his work. While Paz does not address this issue directly, his work does lead us to an alternate perspective.

In the essay collection The Double Flame, Octavio Paz examines, not the role of the muse, but the role of eroticism in the development both of art and human relationships. Paz argues that the roots of art lie deeply in the realm of sex and human sexuality. “Eroticism,” he writes, “is a poetry of the body and [poetry] an eroticism of language. They are in complimentary opposition.”¹ This is to say that both the human body and human language are crude instruments, and in seeking beauty, we eroticize both. In eroticism, we take the crude and make it beautiful.

Paz goes on to emphasize that eroticism alone does not suffice. He writes, “Sex is the root, eroticism is the stem, and love is the flower. And the fruit? The fruits of love are intangible. And this is one of love’s mysteries.”² Therefore any quest for inspiration or beauty must be built on loving relationships, not the sort of exploitative one-sided relationships I object to above. Such relationships must be built on a foundation of love, Paz explains in an interview, meaning a relationship built on a pure reciprocity of feeling, in which the object of love becomes a subject that loves. “This has nothing to do with sexuality,” Paz says, “This doesn’t happen in eroticism. We only find it in love. But like all important things, it happens little.”³

In Paz’s view, a loving relationship is characterized by reciprocity and therefore an artist-muse dynamic, as long as it exists in the context of love, cannot be an exploitative or unbalanced relationship. But many of us would likely agree with Paz that true love is rare, so what do we make of relationships that do not claim to be built on true love? Is an artist-muse relationship built on anything less necessarily still exploitative? Czech novelist Milan Kundera might argue that it is not.

If we consider The Unbearable Lightness of Being with our current context, Kundera offers an explanation for why we fall in love, fall out of love, commit infidelities, remain in unhappy relationships, find meaning in casual flings, and construct identities as lovers all the while posing an implicit question, “what are lovers for?” In answering this question, Kundera expands the model of an artist-muse relationship in which the artist takes inspiration from his muse and marginalizes her by implying that this is what happens in all relationships. We all do this, artist or otherwise, Kundera suggests, in order to complete what he calls the “musical compositions” of our lives. And since any two lovers will do this, relationships can be seen as bidirectional flows of inspiration.

Kundera’s key character in this imagining is, herself, an artist. Sabina pursues casual relationships two men – the recently married lothario Tomas, and a bookish long-married Franz. Sabina and Tomas cultivate an aesthetic quality to their relationship, as if they are performing or creating art. “I want to make love to you in my studio,” she says to him, “It will be like a stage surrounded by people. The audience won't be allowed up close, but they won't be able to take their eyes off us.”⁴ Subsequently, Tomas and Sabina’s intercourse adopts a performative quality, and as they participate in the shared performance of their relationship, they lift and borrow aspects of one another with which they compose the symphonies of their own lives. In Sabina’s studio, Tomas finds a bowler hat that belonged to her father and grandfather. Kundera writes:

The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina's life. It returned again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed…each time the same object would give rise to a new meaning, though all former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echoes) together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each time enriching the harmony.⁵

Kundera suggests that a meaningful relationship is one in which lovers mutually exchange motifs, one in which the performance of a relationship enriches the symphonies of the lives involved. A poor relationship, on the other hand, is one in which the exchange of motifs is hampered, one-sided, or nonexistent. Such is Sabina’s relationship with Franz. Unlike Tomas, Franz is uninterested in the symbolic value of Sabina’s hat, and is therefore uninterested in the motifs she has to offer him. He “listened eagerly to the story of her life and she was equally eager to hear the story of his, but although they had a clear understanding of the logical meaning of the words they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river flowing through them.”⁶ Franz and Sabina’s affair ultimately fails, and Franz finds another, younger mistress who is more receptive to the motifs he has to offer, as “the musical composition of her life had scarcely been outlined.”⁷

Because all lovers are artists creating the musical compositions of their own lives, and because meaningful relationships involve lovers taking motifs from one another and incorporating them into their own lives, an ideal relationship can be seen as two-way artist-muse relationships. A life of love can therefore be a collaborative masterwork. If you are not at artist, this perspective encourages you to construct your love life like a poem, an eroticism and elevation of crude existence. And if you are the kind of artist who finds the artist-muse relationship aesthetically alluring, consider if your idealized relationship is based on idealizing your muse or in engaging creatively with another autonomous individual.

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.

Notes:

1: The Double Flame (1996) by Octavio Paz, 38.

2: Paz, 2.

3: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/books/octavio-paz-goes-looking-for-his-old-friend-eros.html

4: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by Milan Kundera, 9.

5: Kundera, 44.

6: Kundera, 44.

7: Kundera, 66.

L’s horse is a chestnut mare, fifteen hands, that he has named Beatrice. Beatrice likes carrots, but prefers ones with the green still attached, which she eats prior to the root. Today, L is riding Beatrice in a joust. Their rival is none other than the king himself, for L has been accused of seducing the queen consort, which he has. He wears a ribbon from her on his sword arm and another on his shield arm, a gift from his other lover – a novice nun who, therefore, is a secret lover.

From the edge of the jousting grounds, the queen waves to L He lifts his lance in her direction. On the opposite end of the pitch, astride a black stallion, the king leers at L, fury in his eyes.

II:

L has a human heart, kept on ice, that he is to transport from the city of Q___ to the city of N___ for transplant into the body of a terminally ill patient. This is the first time L has handled a heart during the time it is without person. How does he feel to guide it through the liminal space between bodies? Is he, perhaps, proud of his unique role? Then again, does he see his responsibility, his task, as unenviable?

In the operating room, the doctors allow L to place the heart into the patient’s open chest – which he does, delicately – before sewing her closed. L is still present when the patient wakes. She bursts into tears.

“Are you in pain?” the doctors ask.

“Yes,” she replies, “But I find, for the first time, that in that pain there is joy.”

She wraps her arms around L and he presses her weeping face to his chest.

III:

Lances shattered, horses riderless, the joust has become a duel. The king attacks relentlessly, but L fights without anger. The king’s blows cannot find purchase in L’s defenses, and he grows redder, breathes harder, and sweats. How does L intend to escape this melee? Is he willing to slay his ruler and face the consequences? Does he believe he can fight to a fair stalemate and earn his opponent’s respect? The crowd can read nothing of his intentions. L’s handsome face betrays nothing. In a moment of pause, L turns to look at the Queen.

She is weeping.

L drops his defenses.

IV:

A student asks L about so-called “Platonic” relationships wherein the two partners love one another deeply, yet chastely. L replies that this use of the term “Platonic” implies that chaste relationships are closer to the ideal form of a relationship, while sexual relationships are somehow less perfect. A real platonic relationship, in the true sense of the term, ought to be one that apprehends the platonic form of love. In such a relationship, the perfect selves of the lovers, the platonic selves, would meet and intermingle and would have perfect, platonic intercourse.

The student asks, “Do the physical lovers also have intercourse?”

“Absolutely they have intercourse,” replies L, “They have intercourse, and it is perfect.”

Under a beech tree, L’s lover tends to his wounds. The king has spared his life, but L may not return under penalty of certain death, L’s lover has turned her habit into a bandage, her crucifix into a splint. She kisses L beneath the beech tree, bitterly.

The sun moves across the sky and, nourished by a meal of honey and rose petals, L summons the strength to rise. He kisses his lover a final time.

He mounts Beatrice and departs.

VI:

L’s boss asks him to get an email address and they meet together before a great computer screen. L’s boss walks him through the process of creating an email address, choosing a secure password, and choosing and answering security questions. L dislikes leonardcohen@gmail.com, saying, “That is not how I write my name,” and his boss changes it to l.cohen@gmail.com, and L leaves, apparently satisfied.

Since then, L’s boss has periodically received letters from L, hand-written on parchment and sealed with red wax, asking him to please reset L’s passwords and to remind him, please, of the answers to such questions as, “What as your paternal grandfather’s great unspoken fear?”, “In what city did you first fall in love with cold, still water?”, and “What was the name of your first pet?”

VII:

L lives in the attic of a former abbey in Languedoc. He has his meals brought to him by a half-blind peasant girl who speaks no French. She has a large, indigo burn covering the right half her face. L eats no more than once a day. Sometimes less frequently.

The roof of L’s room slopes, his bed positioned where it is the shallowest. He has his lute tuned such that it emits the same low chord whenever jostled. An E-minor chord.

“Thank you,” says L.

In memory of Leonard Cohen,

21 September 1934 – 7 November 2016

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Prompt:

Prompt:

In memory of Leonard Cohen,

21 September 1934 – 7 November 2016