{"id":127087,"date":"2018-07-02T09:00:07","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T13:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=127087"},"modified":"2018-07-03T16:41:30","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T20:41:30","slug":"the-burning-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/02\/the-burning-house\/","title":{"rendered":"The Burning House"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

David Wojnarowicz with Tom Warren, Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz<\/em> (detail), 1983\u201384, acrylic and collaged paper on gelatin silver print, 60″ \u00d7 40″.<\/p><\/div>\n

I<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was reading Close to the Knives <\/em>in Mexico, where David Wojnarowicz spent significant amounts of time\u2014Oaxaca, mainly, and Mexico City and the border towns\u2014though I didn\u2019t know that then. I was staying at an expensive resort, which was in a state of constant repair, as those kinds of resorts always are: stucco was being smoothed and repainted, bright clouds of bougainvillea were being trimmed, concrete was being resurfaced. It was an ultimately futile tussle between man and nature, one frustrating and poignant to watch; it took teams of people, and their collective diligence, to try to undo what nature would keep doing. One day, the resort would close, and within months or weeks or days, all of those years of vigilance would mean nothing\u2014the rains would rust the metal lanterns, the sun would leach the color from the walls, the hibiscus would grow stalky and shaggy.<\/p>\n

I mention this because we tend to associate Wojnarowicz with a specific moment in the culture, with a particular movement of art, and with a brief span of years. On one hand, you can\u2019t not: His art was inextricable from his own biography. It was art that swept up the entirety of who the artist was and what he had experienced\u2014and had seen and felt\u2014into a single image and spat it back out at the viewer; there is a shimmering present-tenseness to it. My life flashed before my eyes, we say when we fear we have just only escaped death, and to look at his work is to realize how charged, how exhausting it must have been to live when your life was always <\/em>flashing before your eyes, and not just your life but your friends\u2019 lives, and to be so overwhelmed by that constant blur of images, that whir that both never ended and that you prayed would never end.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yet to associate Wojnarowicz with only <\/em>those years (though that would be enough) would be to ignore one of the essential teachings of his art, which is that throughout its short history, America has always hated some part of itself. You could write a chronicle of this country by documenting which part of its population America has loathed and tried to disown at various points and why: Native Americans and women and Japanese Americans and Mexican immigrants and people with AIDS<\/small>. Some groups\u2014like black people\u2014America has always hated. But this self-hatred, this turning against our own, this disavowing of those we have hurt or harmed or those we might be able to help, is a curious and awful national impulse, as baked into our identity as our equally notable sense of generosity, our love of friendliness. All countries hate their own, of course, but what makes America\u2019s tendency so wounding to those of us who have been or are hated is its promise\u2014which so many of us still believe and which the country depends on our believing\u2014that it will behave otherwise, that it will be the exception, that it will not do what nations throughout history have always done. \u201cThese are strange and dangerous times,\u201d I read in an essay titled \u201cIn the Shadow of the American Dream.\u201d \u201cSome of us are born with the cross hairs of a rifle scope printed on our backs or skulls. Sometimes it\u2019s a matter of thought, sometimes activity, and most times it\u2019s color.\u201d Wojnarowicz wrote those lines in the late eighties. But just five hundred miles north of where I lay watching a man in a stifling-looking tan uniform scrape a sun-seared gecko away from the pavement, there were policemen killing unarmed black men, and political candidates announcing that we should turn away refugees from regions whose affairs we had injudiciously involved ourselves in\u2014he could have written them now. When you accept that this is how your country operates, you will always be fearful: Will I be next? \u201cThese are strange and dangerous times.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

II<\/strong><\/p>\n

Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration <\/em>was published in 1991, and while it\u2019s not Wojnarowicz\u2019s only book\u2014there are also Memories That Smell Like Gasoline<\/em>\u00a0and In the Shadow of the American Dream<\/em>\u00a0and Seven Miles a Second<\/em>\u2014it\u2019s his best known and one of only three that were published before his death from an AIDS<\/small>-related illness, at the age of thirty-seven, in 1992.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s perhaps not surprising, given how many more artists are educated these days at graduate programs and how dedicated to one genre of art or another those programs typically are, that relatively few writers are also painters, or dancers are also photographers. Wojnarowicz was self-educated in almost everything in life\u2014painting and stencil work and printmaking and photography and activism and sex\u2014and in his writing, as in his artwork, you can feel the presence of someone for whom there is no fear of breaking the rules, because he has never been taught the rules to break. That ignorance is part of what gives the work its charge and confidence, its seethe and crackle.<\/p>\n

When you look at Wojnarowicz\u2019s work, you are struck by how imperfect it is. We live in an era of technical perfection, of art that is beautifully presented and beautifully composed. In his prints, though, colors smudge outside the borders; you can actually watch, as in time-lapse, his photographs become more accomplished, less unintentionally grainy and more intentionally so. You have the sense, as a viewer, of both someone for whom time was on fire\u2014and who was compelled to produce as much as possible, as quickly as possible because perfection and finesse demanded an extravagance of time that he didn\u2019t have\u2014but also, more achingly, someone who was rapacious about his learning, for whom improvement was important (a very American quality, that). But there\u2019s also a thrilling sense of someone unable to edit himself even if he wanted to: unlike his colleagues and peers, Wojnarowicz couldn\u2019t hide his art\u2019s ferocity behind likability (like Keith Haring could) or cool wit (like Tseng Kwong Chi) or elegance (like Peter Hujar)\u2014his work was his work.<\/p>\n

In the same way, the writing is imperfect. It assaults the reader: to enter one of Wojnarowicz\u2019s texts, whether on the page or on the painting, is to be sucked immediately into its undertow, its incantatory, rushed, gloriously run-on sentences and breathless paragraphs, its made-up, jittery punctuations and scattershot capitalizations. It is impolite writing\u2014impolite in its lack of structure, in its sudden, prefaceless glides between fantasy and reality, in its hyperactivity, in its lack of deference to the reader. But the work doesn\u2019t taunt: it\u2019s the difference between writing that says,\u00a0Catch me if you can, and,\u00a0Come with me, come with me, come with me. This writing wants you to follow it, and you want to follow it too.<\/p>\n

Close to the Knives <\/em>is subtitled and marketed as a memoir, and it sort of is, in the same way that all of Wojnarowicz\u2019s work might be subtitled and marketed as memoir: a collection of essays and speeches and dreams that circle between two poles, of anger and sorrow, like a crop duster buzzing an incessant loop over a smoldering swath of land. But really what it feels most like is what it in fact is: war reportage. The most similar experience I had to reading Knives <\/em>is encountering Shomei Tomatsu\u2019s 1967 monograph Nihon<\/em>.\u00a0Tomatsu was one of Japan\u2019s greatest postwar artists, and his subject was the country\u2019s defeat and humiliation and eventual rebirth as a Westernized, modernized country. There is nothing in content or style that relates these two artists, and yet to look at Tomatsu\u2019s photographs\u2014of almost-elderly Japanese women still wearing traditional dress, their hairpieces knocked askew and their makeup tawdry; of a middle-aged couple, clutching at some of their possessions, sitting slumped and unloved at the end of an alley, at the heel end of their stores of dignity\u2014is to sense the same sort of rage, the same sort of awful privilege of getting to see and record suffering, the same sort of tenderness and love for those around you, for life itself, that makes living both unbearable and worthwhile, that you find on every page of Knives<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Because if rage is most of what motors Knives<\/em>, it\u2019s not the only thing. In instance after instance, the prose becomes beautiful and loving, comes to celebrate <\/em>beauty and loving. Sex is a confusion, something that was done to the ten-year-old Wojnarowicz; sex is something that makes him less than in his own country; and yet sex is also a source of ecstasy, both a release from and one of the fundamental pleasures of being alive: \u201cIn loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life,\u201d he writes, in \u201cLosing the Form in Darkness.\u201d In the writing, there is that yearning for what we all hope love will do: answer the silences that live within us, release us from the torment of being ourselves, remind us that what we are taught to think about ourselves is meaningless compared to what we can occasionally feel about ourselves.<\/p>\n

Indeed, part of what makes Wojnarowicz\u2019s work so potent is how sincere it is. It reminds you that there is a distinction between cynicism and anger, because the work, while angry, is rarely bitter\u2014bitterness is the absence of hope; anger is hope\u2019s companion. What you find instead, tucked like blossoms into the text, is real desire: for love, as I\u2019ve said, but also for belonging. This fury of not belonging, of being rejected, isn\u2019t contextless; it is the fury of someone who wants, who demands<\/em>\u00a0to be counted as a full human being, who wants his life and his dying to mean something to his fellow Americans, who wants a price to be attached to his existence. In a country where some people are reviled, other people are valued, and Wojnarowicz\u2019s gall comes from his daring to have a sense of entitlement, his expectation that he, and all his tribe, should be valued too. It is such a humble, vulnerable wish\u2014a child\u2019s wish: Please let me matter\u2014that it makes you want to cry. There is also his unloved child\u2019s habit of creating parents where none exist: Father Genet, Father Rimbaud, Father Mishima\u2014ways of reassuring himself that he belongs to a family, a race of men who love other men.<\/p>\n

And there is also in Knives<\/em>, unexpectedly, a celebration of America itself, specifically the iconography of America\u2014the long, long highways; the blue glow of the television; the roadside truck stops; the low-ceilinged motels; the orange-clay buttes; the truckers and the cowboys and the cops. It may be a sour celebration\u2014the cops are there to beat you, the truck stops are where you get fucked, the television is where you see Jesse Helms saying you don\u2019t deserve to exist, the highways are what you traverse to get away from your father, who hates you, to a city where you can finally search for your own people\u2014but it is impossible to read these chapters without recalling the iconography that Wojnarowicz invented for himself and spray-painted around the city like runes:\u00a0If you can read this, you are one of us. The burning house, the target, the soldier with his gun, the flames, the clouds, the dancing man, the falling man\u2014again and again, the falling man.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

III<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recently, there\u2019s been a revival of interest in the years Wojnarowicz was working in New York, making his art, raging against those who reviled him and so many thousands of others for having AIDS<\/small> and for being gay and for being inconvenient. New York in those years\u2014from the late seventies, when the first cases of AIDS<\/small> appeared, the gate-crasher bringing the giddy party to its end, through the naming of the disease by the Centers for Disease Control, and then the rapidly mounting death tolls\u2014has been or will be the subject of novels and television shows and movies. There is at least one book being published that imagines Wojnarowicz\u2019s life in the city, and it\u2019s not difficult to see why and how, in the midst of this resurrection, Wojnarowicz might be irresistible: he was so young and so prolific and so vivid. He may have been ambivalent about the art world and its populace\u2014\u201cSusan Whatshername,\u201d he dismisses Sontag, writing about photography, and in the essay \u201cPostcards from America\u201d: \u201cThe major museums in New York, not to mention museums around the country, are just as guilty of \u2026 selective cultural support and denial\u201d as the government\u2014but one can\u2019t help but wonder what he\u2019d think of this New York, our New York, so close (and it is) and so far (and it is) from the one he inhabited. One wonders if he will become a piece of iconography himself, the kind that is pinned to a dorm-room wall, with only the face changing every decade: James Dean to Malcolm X to Jimi Hendrix to John Lennon to Steve Jobs.<\/p>\n

And yet it\u2019s important not to romanticize either the era or the man because when you make a person into an icon, you stop seeing anything past the image itself. A weariness of looking sets in: every movement in America has its own totems, and it\u2019s easy enough, in this age, to shorthand our way through history, to assume that recognizing the symbol\u2014the fold of red ribbon, the hot-pink triangle, the hooded sweatshirt, the multicolored flag\u2014means understanding the narrative behind it. When we make artists into martyrs, we stop their movement and affix them to a sheet of paper, rendering them immobile. We can\u2019t help ourselves; it happens so easily, and we are always looking for people to love, even difficult people. But it doesn\u2019t help us understand them any more clearly.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s equally easy to fathom what might have inspired this renewal of fascination for New York during its most inequitable, most desperate, most death-filled years in modern times: what we crave is that sense of collective movement, of collective uncertainty, that sense that nothing, not gender or sexuality or money, could insulate you from something large and immediate and terrifying that could yet shrink itself into something so tiny that it could wriggle in through the walls of your building, past your sheets, and into your blood; that sensation that life was quavering and temporal, that you had to be vigilant, even while completing the most mundane tasks of life. Now that seems exotic and bracing. Then, the war wasn\u2019t someplace far off, something you could turn off or ignore or dip into only when you were feeling guilty; it was two miles south of you, it was seven blocks east, it was one door down. For years, AIDS<\/small> stratified the city; it drained it of compassion. Like all plagues, it segregated and categorized. But if you lived in the city, you had no choice but to contend with its existence. If you arranged your life just so, you might be able to avoid thinking about it, but you weren\u2019t able to deny it.<\/p>\n

In America, we are consumed with the idea of happiness. It\u2019s our birthright, this promise, and so much of our lives is spent in pursuit of it that the quest can become oppressive (not to mention ridiculous: so many of us can\u2019t define it and yet are told to want it, which is the equivalent of running a race on a road that doubles back on itself without our noticing). But really, this country has always been at its best when it is angry, and what really makes us American is not the right to happiness but our right to be angry, to shout and protest without fear of reprisal, to know that even if we are a member of the most hated group in this country, it is our right to try to be heard. Maybe what we\u2019re all yearning for is the blood-zinging fervor of being angry together, of feeling that there is something so urgent that it can\u2019t be ignored, of feeling something so huge that it blots out logic and good manners and good taste. \u201cI wished I had a motorcycle and that I was in a faraway landscape, maybe someplace out west,\u201d Wojnarowicz writes in the fever-essay \u201cIn the Shadow of the American Dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

I saw myself riding this machine faster and faster and faster toward the edge of the cliff until I hit the right speed that would take me off the cliff in an arcing motion. At that instant when my body and the machine cleared the edge of the cliff and hit the point in the sky where I was neither rising nor falling\u2014somewhere in there: once my body and the motorcycle hit a point in the light and wind and loss of gravity, in that exact moment, I would suddenly disappear, and the motorcycle would continue the downward arc of gravity and explode into flames somewhere among the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I love this passage because it, like so many of Wojnarowicz\u2019s creations, captures another key element of Americanness: the need for velocity, to feel ourselves being propelled through space, imagining we have the ability to outrun anything that might be pursuing us, that we can make it out of the burning house with not just the one thing most precious to us\u2014but everything.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

IV<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have said it\u2019s important not to romanticize, and it is. But as I was reading, I kept thinking of a fable I had loved as a child. \u201cThe Boy Who Drew Cats\u201d is a Japanese folktale, recorded, altered, and published by the literary anthropologist Lafcadio Hearn in 1898. The story is about a boy who grows up in a family of farmers, but instead of performing his tasks, he wants only to draw\u2014specifically, to draw cats. He is talented, but there is no money for school, and art isn\u2019t even a dream; it is an impossibility. His father, frustrated, gives the boy to a local temple as an acolyte, but here, too, he is rejected: he is dreamy and unfocused and unable to do anything but draw cats.<\/p>\n

The night he is to be cast out of the monastery, the abbot gives him some food and some advice: \u201cAvoid large places; keep to small.\u201d And with only these kindnesses, so stingy they are hardly kindnesses at all, the boy leaves. He walks and walks. He should be frightened, and perhaps he is\u2014Japan at night is full of goblins, the hills busy with demons\u2014but no mention is ever made of how the boy feels on this journey, on being discarded for a second time. Finally, after many miles, he is exhausted, and when he sees a temple, high on a hill, he climbs toward it. The boy calls out, but no one answers, and finally, he lets himself into the empty building.<\/p>\n

What the boy doesn\u2019t know is that the temple has been abandoned because it has become the haunt of a goblin, one that not even the monks can expel. Here, Hearn tells us, he is frightened, but it is dark, and there is nowhere for him to go. To comfort himself, he finds some ink and begins to draw: over the rice-paper walls, across the tatami-mat floors, up and down the wooden beams. Again and again, he paints cats, so many that soon the room is covered. But before he goes to sleep, he remembers the abbot\u2019s warning\u2014avoid large places; keep to small\u2014and tucks himself into a cupboard.<\/p>\n

Late that night, he wakes to a terrible noise: a screeching, a wailing, a tearing of flesh, a splatter of liquid on straw, a rending, a ripping\u2014Hearn does not specify. The boy hears bone cracking against bone, hears the wet thwack of meat being slammed against a hard surface, hears the clamorous sound of death and suffering. He tucks himself tighter into the corner of the cupboard and waits. On and on the horror goes; on and on he waits. And then, abruptly, it stops. He waits and waits some more. And then, at last, he draws back the cupboard\u2019s sliding door and steps out. There he sees, in the middle of the room, a rat. A goblin rat. A goblin rat so enormous that for a while, its exact shape is unclear: the boy sees only a hill of bloody fat and flesh, not its actual form. And then he looks around him and sees his cats and sees that all of their mouths are wet and red and realizes that his creations have killed what others, in their inability to conquer, have run from.<\/p>\n

After that, Hearn tells us, the boy becomes a hero and, later, a great artist. \u201cThe Boy Who Drew Cats\u201d is meant as a ghost story, but it is really a fable of transformation, the one every artist has at some point hoped for: that someday, his art will do what not only he cannot but what no one can. It will come to life, golemlike, and it will save him, it will protect him, it will avenge him. One day, this kid will get larger, and he will destroy everyone who tried to push him down or away, who hid him in a cupboard.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that hope burns doubly high when what you want to be avenged for is the right to love and fuck who you want. Perhaps it is doubly charged when it is driven by the belief that eventually sheer relentlessness will save you, that if you say it enough, if you draw it not once but hundreds of times, thousands of times, the America you want to exist will materialize before you, its atoms rearranging themselves to create a picture you don\u2019t yet know how to imagine.<\/p>\n

Maybe Wojnarowicz saw all this. Probably he didn\u2019t. But I like to think that he would have liked to see all these symbols, his own versions of cats, here in one place, an army of his own fighters that have long outlived not only him but so many of his friends and members of his tribe. All this iconography drawn not across a temple\u2019s walls but across his own version of a temple, New York, the place he came to, as so many have and so many will, when no place else felt like home: on the walls of the Hudson Piers and the Second Avenue subway stop, on the sidewalks of the East Village, and on the backs of already-used pieces of paper collected in his apartment. Hundreds of them, a militia of orphans: burning house, falling man, target. Soldier, dancing man, America in flames. So many that even after the goblin is killed, they\u2019re waiting still, ready and tensed for when they might be needed next.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hanya Yanagihara is a novelist based in New York and the editor in chief of\u00a0<\/em>T: The New York Times Style Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n

Reprinted from<\/em>\u00a0David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night,<\/em>\u00a0by David Breslin and David Kiehl, published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and distributed by Yale University Press. \u00a9 2018 Whitney Museum of American Art.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I I was reading Close to the Knives in Mexico, where David Wojnarowicz spent significant amounts of time\u2014Oaxaca, mainly, and Mexico City and the border towns\u2014though I didn\u2019t know that then. 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