Her Ghosts

“i can feel the heat from your brain a polite / way of saying you’re smarter than me so much / smarter there’s a shift in our power dynamics / one fingersnap i will subvert patriarchal / hegemony two naps i will gather wildflowers / for you out where the sidewalk ends…”
(p. 57, A Reading from the Book of Panic)

Eve’s Aphasia, or what I’d like to call the case of Eve’s suffering is something that caressed a personal note I’ve long been overdue in working out. Semi-functional is my aim for most traumatic experiences, semi-functional is where I exist, feebly confident enough to continue, uncertain, but clad in something thick and creamy. Placing meaning beside loss of expression forces me to examine the state of dysfunction for clues of punishment: did I do something to deserve this? Nothing helps when you’re brought to inarticulacy. Words are play, and play is what work evolves towards, and work leads to the combative forces of great minds keeping the world from further crumbling, and their importance is close to cellular, and the way in which we weep after such sudden loss and the unsupervised ugliness it exposes is what I’m failing at delivering properly in paragraph form. Painful attempts, stopping short, forgetting something simple in front of my boss, corrupted wording I used to be able to taste, memory like a drowned coral reef: I’ve done something about it (Choline supplements, Coral Calcium, rest) and taken an MRI to capture any damage, but my heart’s different after the experience.

Justin Lacour’s version of Eve’s ache is important to discuss in context with disability, and while I’m hardly anything but a thirty-something woman with a desk job and unpopular X presence, I’ll do my best to write something readable about his deeply brilliant collection, A Reading from the Book Panic. It’s provocative in the soft-spots-you’d-forgotten-were-there indisputable way that only a book about the gradations of love can do for you.

A wrecked union is hell to live in, and Lacour’s slim collection opens with bird’s-eye perspective for an analogy we know by heart, complicating the naked cadence of Eve and Adam with a sophisticated enjambment only a master could accomplish in the climate of original sin. Eve’s noticed the absence of the tectonics for placing verbal meaning to things. This halt in language serves as protection yet gives barrier to the common tongue, something we’re now bartering for the delicate ease of A.I.’s replacement. Language causes stress. Woman’s ability for conception is ripe for wordplay—or, as Lacour’s politic snake phrases it—growth… “nothing can grow inside the man the snake says / the man is not magical,” (13), while the woman’s craving for language serves as necessary catalyst for Eden’s corruption, “…but the woman wants a / word for when the juice runs down her cheeks,” (13). They’re like grapes on Woman’s tongue. Not a mother, so why not name, instead? The creature becomes closer, and the child-wound softens. God is fatherly in Lacour’s account and blesses the woman with just enough to get by—“a new word God says you have all the words / you need” (14)—and, like a child, she circumvents his denial. It’s the great want for commitment she’s after, and she’s intelligent enough to realize that progress relies on transmission, that love itself is found in the elbow grease of an honest exchange, and in this context, it’s reliable dialogue with her husband, or, the ability to place names to things, knowing by heart that a thing’s translucence is made purely animal when it’s called–conquered–resurrected by the syllable.

Lacour threads biblical into the personal, commenting on his own marriage. In these exchanges between husband and wife, Lacour emphasizes the necessary lack of relational epoxy that many couples find they lack after years spent sanctified: sharing and shitting and making the great start together. “The snake lays its head in the woman’s / lap… but i / think if there’s a hole in the marriage something / will fill it up,” (14-15). Snake as filler – but who/what serves as the poet’s own marital sealant? Children? Maybe. It was at this point in the text I began to cry. One of Lacour’s best assets as a writer is tenderness. “Some poems can only be / written with the help of children,” (15) but, despite babes, there’s still the hole and the lack. Eve’s mission, of course, leads to the most famous eviction of all time, but Lacour’s experimental handling of the analogy props the collection on the certain shoulder of idolization, and leaves God sad. “[w]e’re so lost but God / is looking,” (18). Is it naive to expect happiness in marriage? “If i say i love you more than football it means / you have agency…” (85). Our separateness shows up in our possessives, in the core language we choose to represent our relationships with the other. It’s all over us, and the special handling of fervent coupling—its deep sympathies ramming themselves like suicides against the spellbound altar of the happily, fleshly possessed—previews Lacour’s desire towards inoculation via the deep sex of the psyche… together as one but apart and together and if only we could break open the skin and share the unity of our deathly communion and wear the brutish shrapnel of requited blood bath like leaves in our hair. “… [t]here’s a slow dance with room / for the Holy Ghost Who deals not in miles / but nano inches so we can be close no closer,” (85). You get the feeling that Lacour’s rapture requires loving another so well an erection is mere pretense for thanking God. A man who worships is made sublime, and the way Lacour writes love feels similar to how the functioning addict checks his RX codes in the grocery store parking lot: a slippery, physical need as recent as a second-degree-burn towards salvation, in the special headspace of nurtured dopamine, the winning reason for setting the alarm again, and the next day, and the next. There’s fever in Lacour’s lines, and his wife, at collection’s center, gets to play God(dess) for 90 pages of canonical restructuring by way of her lover’s writing her into Archetypical significance.

Mental health, too, sit heavily towards the end of Lacour’s inaugural poem: “i speak to my wife words that heal / all the years i was too panicked to go outside / except for work school beer the years i did / not write one word and hated even my own / body i’m not the god of this poem…” (18-19). Mental health readjusts the narrative lens so that allegory and the adjudication of emotional anesthesia by way of substance (the solace it provides) becomes contingent to our correct reading of the first couple’s tragedy. While Eve/Adam are trapped by Father in early paradise, the poet contends with his own enslavement set against a dysregulated amygdala and previous comfort of the beer glass. Fear detection, and the multi-generative reflex to threat, or the peripheral pressing of existential danger the poet references, gives way to the greater reasoning of the god-brain. The divine touch is in our temples; whether that speaks to hallucination, or whether the divine speaks to us closest in buried membrane is something reading Eden can’t provide us answers to. The myth folds itself firmly against ecclesiastical truths, and Lacour makes understated notes of these clever prisons. Our neuroses bind us to the body and the inebriating effects of the over-active/under-active so that we can’t touch proper sunlight. Sanity’s that sun. Maybe God is, too. May we all experience the freedom of partly cloudy cognition on the better days.

The heat of self-insertion devises a framework of Lacour’s poetry that can only be read well if the reader’s willing to microdose love under their tongue for an evening and agree to face the resuscitation of morning grief with adult perspectives towards possession.

The women are immune to the siren’s song
it’s like a striptease the women already know
how it ends but the men jump ship en masse
to swim towards the song this is the part of the
epic where the women debate Marx discuss
what’s left of Freud while a she-wolf gnaws at
his bones… (87)

Lacour’s heavy substitutive device uses the first woman as rubric for writing his wife into legend. The poet’s decision to utilize sirens in conversation with Freudo-Marxism is an interesting one and makes me wonder if it’s directly related to the poet’s own feelings about the uselessness of philosophy in light of politicized health prerogatives. I’m far from any expert, but F-M crushed subsections of the population leading to an increase in isolation and debilitating repression; and the lonely, otherfiguring of maiden-monster leads me back to my own ignorance on this subject; I’m wary of public health conversations when backed by government funding, and Lacour reminds us of this danger. Freud’s writing on communal life is propped by a foundational doubling of love and work, and—to paraphrase theory semi-coherently—seeks to define both activities as impulsive and necessary within the confines of humanity’s survival. We’re on rote. Permanence is key. Both cultivate offspring and continued economic growth, and the cycle is replete with Freud’s theory around satisfaction. We love because it feels great, and the work we do excavates our sexual longing for completion, in similar ways an orgasm satiates our disturbance of mind for a stretch of an afternoon, (Emi Komatsu, Societal Alienation and Discontent: Freud and Marx on Our Relationship with Love, Libido, and Labour).

Marriage makes a life but it can also destroy the main character. Lacour’s structure remarks on what colloquial internet subcultures often refer to as “the dark night of the soul”—at least, this is my reading of it—when examining the curation of the collection’s front matter. Lacour begins with “A Marriage”, revoking seven pages of established, incarcerated bliss (paradise) for ten studies in what I’ll take liberties of referring to as the poet’s Calavera period. This grouping of poems as a whole enlightens us on the historical events leading up to infatuation / deep love. The quiet epic of our lives leads us to cruel precipices of trading independence for the serfdom of uniting with a partner. As an unmarried woman of a thirty-something number, I speak boldly about an activity I’ve yet to experience the joys and desperations of. Please forgive me if I speak out of place while figuring my way through the pitfalls of placing commentary on the richly, unplumbed complexities of the marriage bed—I’ll learn one day, if I’m lucky.

In “Devil Music”, I once again tracked Lacour’s thick theme, words = reclamation: “for a word to lift you out,” (23), another iteration of Eve’s doomed hustle towards self-government (language is our salvation); in “Dead Teacher” Lacour tackles mental health, citing those who do the saving when we’re sickest, “… but you thought i / was worth saving for an english degree back / when i was drinking Night Train in Bayou / Coquille smoking cigarettes in my backyard…” (25). Synthesizing the peripheral versions of ourselves troubles the next stanza, depicting the purposeful loss of self we undertake when studying English, our anagarika period, a time for cloistered apartments and books, when the sheltered out-croppings of young and flexible thinking are primed—“sometimes i get to the end of a poem and i don’t / know how to get out,” (25)—reminding me of my own deep entrenchment during the three years I spent working towards my MFA and how things looked different on the other side of that studious darkness. Inflatable Jesus (25) makes an appearance, reminding us that consumerism remains a viable source for spiritual inquiry, that the power of plastic has its death grip on immortality in equal measures to the cross—these days, we’re filled with air. Although pure, it’s sinks suddenly. In “Dark Ages” I noted bear cubs, googled their spiritual implication, and was surprised. The forest serves as hallway between asceticism and daily life, maybe ushers Lacour’s grief over his students’ absences towards easy exit points within proximity of where he is his most bare: home, or just outside of it. “I only lost two students from that class one / deployed to Afghanistan the other dragged / to the state mental hospital no one ever came / to office hours,” (26). In “Dark Ages”, Lacour hides in the forest, smoking, recounts the brush with two spiritual cubs, before gathering himself indoors to watch Frankenstein with a lady neighbor. I’d sound like a student myself if I pointed to the parallel of addiction under forest-cover of evening and baby animal (illness / nature / damaged goods of man) and the promise of inside, television (society). Is Lacour readying himself for the role of Monster in this instance? In “Alcohol”, images of the virgin Mary are jimmying for interpretation. The abutment of addiction and the Madonna—a cousin speaking in tongues, and Mary, our standardization of a human sacrifice, receptacle for pain and divine life and something further—comments on the natural law of destruction benefiting creation. It’s a rhythm of living women are raised towards and indebted to. Sometimes, an only chance towards societal ordainment. “Conversion”, like prayer, acts as reiteration of the poet’s own struggles with what sounds (a naive guess) like generalized anxiety. Lines like “[w]hatever panic i panic is part of your death,” (31) position reader as witness to the imagined crucifixion of lover and the temptation of possible resuscitation. It isn’t God the poet’s speaking of, and he exchanges principal characters [Christ / lover] as an act of nobility. Something better, even? He holies her.

Gender’s melting against the nails and heat of archangels, and Lacour’s careful dalliance with biblical theme resurfaces love’s great and scary starlight: we give up everything, even our gods—later, wind up criminals under flashlight—and we’re there, holding our hearts in our palms.

At this point in Lacour’s collection, I began counting famous men. “Crossroads” (Robert Johnson), “I just Want to See His Face” (Mick Jagger), “Poem for the night before the first day of school” (Herman Melville). I simply want to note their company. The archetypal worship that Lacour belabors is productive, and the “great men” as my marginalia categorizes them as feels like a celebrity audience, a positive witnessing to it all. Added note: the fourth section also contains male visitors: Euripides, Keanu Reeves, Billie Holiday, Ernie K-Doe, Odysseus, Glenn Danzig. Without our predecessors, myth fails to impart any meaning in the modern hemisphere of tried-on and overly done; perhaps Lacour’s séance is well-worth the populated elevator of our greats.

In Lacour’s third section, “I am a pilgrim” proves itself worthy of its stand-alone structure, placing emphasis on coupling: “…on earth we get to walk two by two,” (39). It also contains one of my favorite lines in the entire collection: “Cockblocked again by my seasonal depression,” (40). Lacour dedicates the fourth section to the heart cavity. In “Little motors: some love letters” the reader’s reminded of other writers and their notes of devotion (Vladimir Nabokov and Vera), and I appreciated more mentions of mental health facilities–what a strange / damning sentence to type–but puzzle over its placement in conversation with partnership: “… the guy on the neutral ground / blowing sax patients at the mental hospital / across the street screaming periodically you’d / call work so i could hear the baby cry like all / nostalgia this poem comes from a dark place,” (46). After reading it again, I’d like to amend that question. Maybe love and madness and the infant’s cry have a place together in our daily bread.

For the remainder of part four, I’ll track mental health references. There’s an intentional uptick. A “MEN NEED THERAPY” patch makes an appearance on p. 48, before fairy tale and compulsion coexist–a lonely buttery quality–on p. 50, “…then how i fall asleep early / leaving you alone with a glass of red blend and / your book of brutal fairy tales until it’s time to / tell your own stories your stories are like snake eyes shimmering… you chewed your / hair for loneliness not eating so you could say / you were an artist.” Another mention of snakes, another ode to Woman as creative vessel and anointed storyteller. It’s the woman (Lacour’s wife) doing the work, here: health and art, the denial of health for the sake of artistry. “… & around / my language crushes the muscle that makes words…” (52) pursues the topic of storytelling / gathering our words / wordlessness, while “… i want to pay for authenticity / and sanity and independence so you can / vanish into art send me back my allowance / of dopamine what you make has the integrity / of cave paintings,” (55) speaks to the issue of support. How do we support the artist? It’s a delicate balancing act of bills and time sanctioned for creative acts, reinforcing the need for partnership. “You drew a picture of a brain gradually / evolving into a vagina,” (56) does smart science for the reader, referencing the hormonal feedback loop and its critical role in the reciprocity between sex hormones and brain health. The maternal brain is a composite of our most intimate portions, and I wonder whether the gut may show more sagacity than our amygdala, after all.

Lacour’s language nudges us towards deeper meanings, always, and I’d like to take a moment to declare this collection as gnostic for its consummate understanding of love’s source material: “Art is magic to those of us who can’t do / it,” (56). There’s a bit of the demiurge in its handling of Woman / Saint / Creator, and I’ll stop and marvel, suggest you do too, at the way in which Lacour parses the ancients for a modern understanding of what marriage means, and further suggest that magic is bedfellow to illness; oftentimes we’re creating around past damage, and I wonder if damage can be good in the instance of artist? Trauma is damage, so simple, but I’ll say it anyways. Is there a necessary damaging that must occur for the Sovereign Empath to transcend to a pure state of self-discovery? “… the muse’s brain / which knows more and wants more than his / words she knows the poem is wrong the poet is / trying to crowbar her into fantasies he’s carried / in the back of his head since childhood…” (72) feels like an admission of maladaptive daydreaming, something immediately forgiven in light of love’s toxic tonic. The universality of fantasy feels a bit like required reading for healthy roleplay, and I believe the stimulation of this creative exploration warrants a mental health nod.

“You can do anything with an english degree,” (66) writes Lacour, even wed the brain and body in delicious meter, further pronouncing just how in love you really are. Can we do it? Can we fall in love again? Lacour makes you long for its forecast in your life.

Sources: https://artsone.arts.ubc.ca/student-journal/societal-alienation-and-discontent/