Excerpt from Laura’s Desires
Laura Henriksen
Nan Goldin the photographer and Nan
the best friend character in Variety are so
similar as to be almost indistinguishable,
they even work at the same bar,
Tin Pan Alley, have the same friends
who hang out there, talking about
the same things. The appearance here
of transparency, the apparent relationship
of identity, where Nan is Nan and
none other, feels to me fitting
to her artistic ethos, thinking about
the way she positioned her photos as
her visual diary unveiled, more than
documentation of her relationships,
but the relationships directly, not
mediated by the camera but
rather clarified through the
image-making process,
an offering to the viewer of
her eyes, her face, her feelings,
her voice in our heads, her shared
memories suffusing our own like
a color. In addition to acting
in Variety, or maybe better to say
appearing in it, Nan worked as the
on-set photographer, and she incorporated
two of the images from Variety’s set into
her enormously important book, The Ballad
of Sexual Dependency. The first
is of Sandy in the ticket box, the other
of her friend, the radiant Cookie Mueller,
pictured during her appearance in Variety
as one of the women at Tin Pan Alley,
hanging out, talking about men and work.
There are photos from other film sets
too, and in fact one of those photos,
of Vivienne Dick in a green dress
on the set of another Bette Gordon
short, Empty Suitcases, is also
visible as set decoration in Christine’s
room, the one she can’t afford.
Seeing these portraits of characters
next to portraits of people, marked
particularly by their sense of vulnerable
immediacy, as if truly exposed, too bright
to be unreal, I get a sort of tumbling
feeling, art and life as railroad
apartment where you have to pass
people sleeping when you get up
at night to pee. Since The Ballad
is presented as “directly from my life,”
the inclusion of these photos from movies
raises exciting questions about what
“from” and “my” and “life” can mean,
as James Crump also points out in
his afterword for Variety: Photographs,
a monograph that came out in 2009.
In the set photos, for example,
the portrait of Cookie might be
a portrait of Cookie, it’s just
captioned, “Cookie at Tin Pan
Alley, New York City, 1983,”
but Sandy is being Christine,
who is no one, who is a story
that Bette and Kathy wrote
together. Or maybe it’s between
takes? When do I ever stop
being myself? Where do I go
when I’m putting on a show?
When I’m not performing?
A few weeks ago in one of the
more elaborately organized group
sex experiences of my life, there
was a moment where I was on the floor
of an apartment in North Brooklyn
watching a friend fuck her girlfriend.
As the latter got closer and closer
to coming, I felt myself fade further
and further from her awareness, she
needed to concentrate, to be alone
with her concentration and her
girlfriend’s hand, a throne. At the
same time, I felt myself become
more and more central to my friend’s
conscious awareness and experience,
I felt her watching me watch her
girlfriend’s transforming face,
and so I performed my watching, my
pleasure in looking, which was easy.
Or maybe I was projecting on the
orgasming girlfriend, her perceived
departure from the room something I
imagined because that’s what it’s like
for me, that I want to feel observed
until I’m ready to disappear, and to
disappear I close my eyes, I’m all
feeling in darkness, slick fingers inside
me, wet tongue in my ass, all eyes
on me finding my way to an expanse,
a descent, an escape, release, whatever.
“Can I come?” “No, not yet,” “No,
not yet,” and then eventually, “Yes,
now.” In her introduction to The Ballad,
a totally beautiful piece of writing,
Nan explains,
We all tell stories which are versions
of history—memorized, encapsulated,
repeatable and safe. Real memory,
which these pictures trigger, is an
invocation of the color, smell, sound,
and physical presence, the density and
flavor of life. Memory allows for
an endless flow of connections.
Stories can be rewritten, memory
can’t. If each picture is a story, then
the accumulation of these pictures
comes closer to the experience
of memory, a story without end.
Like, I assume, most people, my memories
are totally untrustworthy, I keep them
in the same place I keep my fantasies
and they start to smell the same. Did I
really see a lone figure on horseback
on Fulton Street at midnight, or did I just
imagine her? Did I conjure her, create her,
channel her, witness her, project on her,
misunderstand her, all because in that
moment of loss, I needed her? I don’t
super care one way or another,
although for some stories, I do
understand it’s important that
they’re true. In that same intro,
Nan explains that she photographs
because—
I don’t ever want to be susceptible
to anyone else’s version of my
history. I don’t ever want to lose
the real memory of anyone
again.
I know that’s not why I write, or
I don’t think so, I’m just trying
to think some things through, but
perhaps that’s just because from my
particular subject position I’m less
susceptible to anyone telling
my story for me. When I see
Nan Goldin’s pictures, I think
they show the kind of non-
normative, potentially (and
sometimes actually) dangerous
desire that both the conservative
Right and anti-porn feminists were
so worried about, they show a world
of sex that makes and unmakes
subjecthood, and more than sex,
abuse, friendship, love, all those
dependencies. All the people in
the photos look so fucking cool.
Or maybe I don’t completely relate
to Nan’s explanation of her
artistic practice because I don’t
relate to having a version of my
history that isn’t an amalgamation
of other people’s versions of it. Or,
I just said that, but I wonder if
in some way in gesturing towards
this network of relationality I’m just
trying to distance myself from how
undeniable my own lived experience is
as an organizing principle, the incredible
force of my unique, often myopic,
perceptions, because I want always
to escape myself, feeling as I do
overwhelmed, embarrassed, kinda
fucked up, and honestly not that
comforted by the knowledge that
you probably feel the same way too.
I don’t know, I don’t want to
glory in my fantasy of a self,
but pretending this self doesn’t
exist isn’t helping me much either.
Years after her death, I remember
finding a picture of my cousin
getting ready for her wedding,
a guerilla-style affair in a gazebo
at the West Des Moines Botanic Gardens,
the cold days of early spring, 2002,
performed quickly and unofficially
by my family before we could be
asked to leave. In the picture she’s
sitting on the floor, looking in a mirror
leaned up against her bedroom wall,
applying mascara. Visible in the corner
is my fourth grade photo, framed.
Seeing this, I am so moved I almost
laugh, this surprising recognition,
evidence of the relevance of our
love on our daily lives, a background
on which other stories unfolded.
I retrieve this photo from another
family guerilla intervention, twenty years
later in Colorado where we gathered
to surreptitiously bury the ashes of
my aunt and uncle, my cousin’s mother
and step-father, in a public park, a plan
that, to be honest, I was against, but I
didn’t say anything because I didn’t want
to bring more stress to an already
stressful situation, and anyway I do
think my aunt at least would have
found it funny. Sometime between
the Iowa wedding and the Colorado
funeral, my mom spoke with a psychic
she sometimes visited in Northern California,
and afterwards she called me from a sunny
parking lot to say that Joan, the psychic,
told her that my cousin watches over
my sister and I, that she’s with us all
the time. Joan said that she was never
meant to have a long life, but now
she protects ours. She makes sure
I avoid situations I only think I would
want but would later come to regret.
I just collapsed on the sticky fake tiles
of my kitchen floor, I couldn’t breathe,
but in a good way, no news had ever
brought such relief. I was surprised
by the intensity of my reaction, since I both
miss my cousin terribly and also feel sort
of strange about it, because at the time
of her death we had grown apart. I was
living in New York and she in Iowa, I
almost 20 and she almost 30, I focused
on my own shit, and she focused on hers.
When I learned that she died, I didn’t know
what to do, I took a shower and listened to
“The Way You Look Tonight,” a song
I can’t imagine that she liked, one that
I had barely thought about before
that moment, but suddenly it reminded
me of her beautiful face, the way she
would show up to church in scandalous
dresses and laugh at everyone over
donated pastries. Looking back on
this wave of relief I felt at the psychic’s
reassurance, I wonder how something
as platitudinous as “she wasn’t meant to
live a long life,” could have comforted me
so deeply, since haven’t I been on this
whole long trip about how nothing is meant
to be anything? I don’t know, my cousin
is with me, she loves me, she forgives me
for everything, she’s a slow shimmering
comet, she controls the radio to send
messages when she wants to, she’s free.
Let it be so. Nan Goldin first showed
the photos that would eventually
comprise The Ballad as a slideshow
at Mudd Club and later OP Screening Room,
sometimes with music, to heighten
the sense of the cinematic, sometimes
with Dean Martin’s “Memories Are
Made of This.” This play with earnest
vulnerability and a kind of sentimentality
that in its excess sounds at least a little
sarcastic feels like more splashing
in the bathwater between life-
and myth-making. But maybe I am
only projecting sarcasm, I mean, that
really is what memories are made of,
did I learn nothing from crying in
the shower to the promise, “someday,
when I’m awfully low, when the world
is cold, I will get a glow just thinking
of you”?
Laura Henriksen’s first book, Laura’s Desires, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books, and an excerpt is available now as a chaplet from Belladonna. Her writing can be found in LitHub, The Brooklyn Rail, Newest York, and other places. Along with teaching at Pratt, she also works as the Program Director at The Poetry Project.