The Voice in the Vacuum

By Paula Eisenstein

Many of the poets of Influency 7 made reference to poets of the past. Doda had Donne and Schiller. Turner had Spencer. Moore—Catullus. Robertson had several—a canon full. Pretty much all men. The Men?

I noticed in Salah’s Wanting in Arabic a reference to a personal father, “anyway, who cares why/ I ended up my daddy’s little girl?” (4). But even then the personal past gets re- and deconstructed through the narrative of a moving lens of a shifting sexuality.

I think about the personal relationships these accomplished writers had and/or have with their personal fathers. How they got through or past or transcended them, putting themselves in a position to get into conversations, and sometimes arguments with our greater fathers, the Donne’s and the Catullus’.

My conversations remain only personal. We watched Star Trek together—my father and I. Naturally it wasn’t buff, sexy Kirk I related to. It was Spock. Spock was my dad—cold, remote, smart, detached. He was tall. He was not the lead character. My mother was.

If it wasn’t for my connection to Spock I probably would have given up on Stephen Cain’s American Standard/Canada Dry (AS/CD). Fortunately AS/CD read like strange alien space language, with a grammar so deconstructed it seemed that only an experienced three-dimensional chess player would have a chance at putting it back together. I wouldn’t have noticed that “Enunciable coincidental still shrewish” (Cain, 62) sounds like a fuel form for a warp drive engine. I wouldn’t have remembered Spock using his mind meld technique, in Episode 25 Devil in the Dark, on a Horta, a silicon-based life form that looks like a rock, in order to create rapport. When it did appear, rapport was, as Spock would say, highly improbable.   

My father also liked to keep things pleasant. If he was in Ronna Bloom’s “burning room of your life” (Permiso, 18) he would not leave. If he did leave (say accidentally) and was told “Come back./ We are not done.” (18) then he would come back. But if he was the one in the position to say “Come back” he might not do that either. Doing that might not be pleasant.  

But like Ronna Bloom his heart that would be like a tree and like a closed tulip and also even like the space behind breasts because he told Cindy he wanted to come back as a woman. Which she told me when we, my brother and sister and me, were packing up his place after he died. She said she had laughed about it with him, because of knowing him the way she did, but my siblings refused to engage with Cindy beyond normal civility. They were humiliated by the power his attachment gave her, and also maybe because they were mad at her about it, mad that she accepted that part in him —so like Ronna Bloom he would say “Permiso.” So that if he was Spock in Episode 61 Spectre of the Gun he would face the consequences and/or wrath of the alien of the week, if the alien deemed he trespassed on that alien’s territory. He would take responsibility. He would permit (Permiso) being forced to re-enact the shootout at the O.K. Corral.

Not that a shootout with a bunch of guys was really his thing. He liked the women. But maybe he liked them the way Harry Mudd did in Episode 6 Mudd’s Women in which Mudd is caught giving illegal Venus drugs to plain-looking women to make them appear more beautiful than their natural appearance. But what if you’re doing this to women all by yourself, with your own mind, is that so bad? And what if you also do it to your daughter so she gets in the habit of feeling she has to be other than what she is to stand a chance? And what  if relating that way to her contributes further to an alienation already present in her relationship with her mother?

Still, I think (either that or I like to think) he would have enjoyed relating to the female perspectives of both The Men and Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (MSW). Sure MSW’s,

Everything is for the first time mortal

Improvised, surging to the look

Nothing else foams towards me.

Nobody lifts their eyes to

No romantic, impracticable, extravagant ideal conditions

No impossibly ideal schemes

No impossibly ideal, visionary chimerical perfection having

       no human location (Robertson, 37)

would have to hurt his delicate sensibilities.

But he would choose it over the shrieking aesthetic tribulations of Christopher Doda’s mergers “of the wrong kind of beauty” (Aesthetics Lesson, 13), its heady viciousness reminiscent of the situation in Amok Time, Episode 30 when Spock starts acting irrationally because he’s suffering from Pon farr which will kill him if he doesn’t return to Vulcan to participate in a brutal mating ritual, his mate coolly calculating to dispense with the inconvenience of him—meaning to see him dead (and you thought Star Trek wasn’t serious). Because, like Doda says, “sometimes, however, the muse can be a real fucking bitch” (30).

I also think he would choose direct talk from a telling female perspective over the abandoned mummified anachronism of Moore’s Catullus’ gene. Like in Episode 74 Requiem for Methuselah, when the Enterprise encounters an immortal human who lives as a recluse on his own planet, the weight of Moore’s Catullus yanked 2000 years forward out of his time, too depressingly familiar. Irony fades in the circumstances, like in Episode 41 The Deadly Years, when strange radiation diminishes the command crew under the effects of rapid aging.

We weren’t expecting my father to die when he did. It was unexpected. Pancreatitis—usually caused by abuse of alcohol. Which he was, he was drinking a lot before he left his second wife, when they were still together but really not, when she was really with someone else. Not that it wasn’t known and open. But I didn’t think he was doing that anymore. He was exercising. He told me he was going to the pool for swims.

Hydromel.

The sidewalks in light are the sidewalks of childhood

with the men walking on them past the trees of

childhood also and the sky flattened with light as in

the childhood of the men. Memory stands up in slow

motion and moves in their light. (Robertson, The Men, 47)

Like in Episode 4 The Naked Time when an intoxicating infection lowers the crew’s emotional inhibitions. Like in Episode 24 This Side of Paradise the only episode in which Spock falls in love.

In Episode 30 That Which Survives the Enterprise finds an abandoned outpost guarded by a mysterious computer—a representation of the marginalization themes of Kate Eichhorn’s Fond? In Episode 60 Is There in Truth No Beauty the Enterprise taxis an alien ambassador who must travel inside a special black case because his appearance causes insanity.

How do you relate to people when they’re dead? I thought thinking about the dead would feel morbid but it doesn’t. It feels nice. I like having my father dead. Text is dead. Books are text on paper, paper made of trees, dead trees. Don’t feel sorry for the dead. People and situations that are hard to relate to can be improved by one of the parties being dead.

In Episode 56 Spock’s Brain aliens steal Spock’s brain. This is ironic but you don’t realize it because Spock is so smart and logical you think it makes sense that it would be his brain getting stolen. But overall it isn’t men’s brains or a very smart man’s brain that gets stolen, its women’s. Jacqueline Turner’s Seven into Even shows it in so many subtle ways:

but still couldn’t write the letter imagined at two in the morning to an

uncle whose wife had died in one of the worst possible ways because

almost no one would believe she was sick because believing she was

sick would mean facing what was all around them the air and maybe

what they put on their crops and how that made its way to her lungs

filling them too full the day she died (14)

Where was my father? Who has something to say about getting stolen brains back?

Salah’s Wanting in Arabic is deaths within births within deaths within …

But my father wasn’t within. He was without.

In Episode 79 Turnabout Intruder Kirk’s consciousness is trapped in the body of a woman bent on destroying him and taking his power. A pre-operative transvestite? In Episode 28 City at the Edge of Forever Spock discovers that the woman Kirk loves must die if Spock, Kirk, and Bones are to be restored back to their proper timeline.

Why is there always a sacrifice to get back to the proper timeline? What about the warp drive? Why can’t the warp drive be the metaphor it surely should be; for a narrative of the deepest transformation? I remember how seriously my father took Robin, a female friend of a friend of my mother’s, a female friend with a deep voice and broad shoulders who didn’t feel female. My mother, not out of her particular closet yet herself, even commented on it. Kindly. Peculiarly, uncharacteristically kindly. Back then, a wife, three children: it would be impossible. Too many ideals to uphold. Far too many. My father the pleasant idealist.

in the reach or range of love or rage or

in the torrent of a common frailty or

in the push came to shove of inarguable necessity

the capacity to, if not overcome, then endure (Salah, 74)

 

Afterword

Margaret Christakos' Influency 7 final class assignment was to create an intertext, to look at two or more of the texts we had studied during the term in relation to each other. The intertext could be comparative and critical. It could be creative. Or such was my impression.

In my intertext I wanted to address the issue of how a personal response gets to be more than merely personal. Not that I have a problem with personal responses. I'm a big fan of the personal response. But some of the more experimental texts of Influency 7 had gotten under my skin. They weren't polite. They were demanding a personal response (which is a very different thing from having one and deciding to share it) and it was getting uncomfortable.

It was those texts that made me talk about Spock and about my father. They made me source every single one of the class texts as references and not more sensibly just stick with a few. At least, it seemed to me, that going "big" was the only solution to what would otherwise feel like being sucked into a very bad kind of a vacuum which undoubtedly has happened before in a Star Trek episode or two.