11/15/2024
Phlogiston and the Beautiful Void:
Week 2 of November Writing Challenge
I am behind. Between work and winter, the urge to write has shriveled within me. It's already near midnight on the 14th as I begin this essay, and I have written eleven poems. I like about four of them. I feel tired, impossibly tired, having barreled through this first week of the month, seemingly face first. Every poem has taken physical effort to get on paper, even the ones I liked. As the days get shorter and the dark yawns to greet me much sooner than it used to, I feel something burning away. This is art by attrition. Art by removal. I am becoming less to make more.
Since I first heard of it in a Jack McCarthy poem, I've been fascinated by the concept of phlogiston. In a now debunked scientific theory, phlogiston was the element in all combustible matter that allowed them to burn. It was created to explain the weight difference between the aftermath of a fire, and the fire. That which is burned away. The parts of ourselves we lose when we are engulfed in flame. As the days get colder, I burn to make my poems, to keep warm. My poems are phlogiston. They are within me until they are burned away. Sweat of the fever, heat of the forge, the smoke that rises from the lathe.
A lot of my favorite art involves removal. My friend Samara does woodwork, carving and shaping and cutting away until she has something smooth and perfect. Since most of her wood is scavenged or budgeted, a lot of it subpar. When I asked her about her process she explained it:
"I'm kind of searching for the best form the wood can take as I cut away the less healthy parts."
To me, it sounds more like bedside manner and healing than craft. The wood is sick and she expertly amputates the rot until it is beautiful and clean and complete again. Samara is a healer of wood, a guide for the discarded to find themselves in a ritual of cuts. Being in her company feels the same way, the sickly parts of you burning away as she turns you in careful hands. It's not transformation, but realization.
Michaelangelo, a name almost too grand to invoke in reference to my own process, in addition to his masterful painting, sculpted as well. Whenever I stare at a sculpture, I am reminded of his wisdom:
"I saw an angel in the marble and I set it free."
From a stone, an angel. The beauty of Michaelangelo's sculptures, their staggering detail and meticulous form, it all feels as much a celebration of its surrounding stone as its artist. The beauty of the uncarved marble is honored and thanked in its obliteration. Phlogiston is a sacrament. It is the offering.
In addition to writing, I’ve been exploring painting in VR again. I’m terrible at it, but there’s something healing about being bad at something. I’m sure I’ve talked about it elsewhere, but it really gives me permission to be reckless. My “process” if you can call it that is to cover the canvas in a color, and then slap random brush strokes across its surface until a shape and color palette forms from the chaos, then erasing and blending around that form until it exists. I see a painting in the mess and set it free. As I wipe away an hour or more of frantic layering to distill the object, I feel the weight of its erasure. I feel time reversing itself. The fox coming back together from soil and maggots.
One of my favorite works of art in the world, currently the home screen on my phone, is Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing. In 1953, Rauschenberg wanted to make a work purely through erasure. Similar to Michaelangelo and other sculptors, he wanted to make by unmaking.
Unlike them however, he wanted to start with a completed and perfect form. He saw the void in art and wanted to set it free. At first he tried this with his own drawings, but found they had no emotional pedigree. They had no phlogiston. An artist can throw out or unmake his own drawings infinitely. (With as many crossouts and false starts as I have in my notebook, this is also true for poets.) If his void was to mean anything, Rauschenberg would have to carve its portal into the flesh of a far nobler sacrifice.
There are few painters with the pedigree, skill, and spanning career of Willem de Kooning. His abstract works are breathtaking and the art world took notice. Art critic Peter Schjeldal called him an “an intellectual giant among painters, with an analytical grasp that registers in every move with pencil or brush.” For Rauschenberg, there were even fewer more perfect choices to unmake. To erase, stroke by stroke, something as vaunted and thoughtful as an original de Kooning drawing, that’s how nothing becomes art. Staring at the blank page, in its gilded frame, I am lit on fire with imagination. What could the drawing have been? It summons the void and begs you to fill it with something worthy of its sacrifice.
Everything I write or make this month is a celebration not only of its own creation, but of the time and strength I had before it existed. I was a stone before I was rubble and a poem. I was wood before I was sawdust and a poem. It’s effortful to make art of one’s own raw materials.
I was a hunched and troubled man before I was anxiety and depression and a poem. I honor that man, his sacrifice with each gentle erasure of the body before. Even in his complete erasure, I am a work of art paying homage. I am the gorgeous void of the burning boy.
Trans people have the unique perspective of being their own Christ, dying for their own salvation and being born again. We are the de Kooning and the mischief of Rauschenberg all at once. We are the body horror and its catharsis. Auteur filmmaker David Cronenberg, in an interview about his movie Crimes of the Future, offered this perspective on trans people:
They’re saying, “Body is reality. I want to change my reality. That means I have to change my body.” And they’re being very brave and they’re investing a lot in these changes, especially these ones that are not reversible, which most of them aren’t. I say, go ahead. This is an artist giving their all to their art.
Whether I fill this void, this darkness of winter, with nineteen more poems or nothing at all, there is phlogiston. There is my reality. There is my art. As long as I give it my all, I can be satisfied. No matter how much I burn, I will be kept warm.
Yours with an open mouth,
-B
