Sands1974

Blog review of “Airless Spaces” (1998) by Shulamith Firestone.

9 February 2014. Sunday. 17:20 pm and 10 February 2013 Monday late evening.

I’m not sure if I can write a proper review of Shulamith Firestone’s “Airless Spaces” book from 1998 because I am myself depressed to a degree most of the time, tired, scared and nervous. She puts all of that quite well into perspective in her book, starting for me with the topic of shitting, which I think she handles perfectly…when we lose control of our bodily functions because we are out of sync and just don’t care. I myself have shit my pants before being able to make it home. What a humiliating experience that was. No one noticed, at least not that I knew, but I was too ashamed to shit although I knew I needed to – after a day of heavy “teaching” / tutorials at an Amsterdam higher education art school residency program. I had to be let out of the building with a key, so a student had to accompany me, the guy who came with me I actually would have been somehow comfortable telling I had to go shit first, but for some reason I resisted, I thought I could make it home (about a 10-15 minute walk). I was tired, my body was tired, all was out of sync and I was questioning the logic and functions and reasons for being of art itself and in general. I called my husband Robin on my mobile and that’s when everything started to flow off of me and relax, when all that cramped, pent up energy just exploded out of me in swathes, in waves. I had a sort of shoulder / gym bag with me and that combined with my coat sort of covered my ass / back of my jeans, I just kept shitting as I walked. Once I started it was kind of impossible to stop. When I finally got home with this horrible mealy feeling of the shit in my underwear and in my jeans our next store neighbour was coming down the stairwell which led up to our apartment. I had to pass him to get upstairs. To this day I wondered if he smelled the shit…

So depressed people talk a lot about shit. Things / daily activities and bodily functions are somehow flattened and magnified…under the microscope. These perfectly bundled essays in Shulamith’s book are just like the flattened out world of a depressed person’s mind: with no visible horizon and just endless nothingness. It’s amazing looking at the contents again that so many suicides are detailed. If one person knew this many suicidal people, then how many must there be…the ones that never find their way into the news. And this is what I get from the book: the horrible daily significance, or insignificance as the case may be, of a depressed person’s life—you wouldn’t believe so much suffering could be crammed into one life. Because there is an absence of hope and perspective.

You could also say there is an absence of humor, except that there is a dark humor in depression, especially the way that Shulamith Firestone writes about it. In depression there is an irony, as if things have a sort of dark logic to them. As if everything makes sense in the most terrible way – as if all failings and mishaps are strung together by fate…There is a feeling in this book that the world only exists as a dead end. Loser is the title of one whole section of chapters, and this word is one that flashes like hot red neon in the mind of many who are depressed. It’s amazing how many forms depression can take, and how it can mutate within the same consciousness to appear different every time it appears or ‘rears it’s ugly head’. I think what interests me the most about the book is how identity becomes a focus. I had not noticed this with depression before and oh this is just bullshit it reminds me of doing high school book reports. I had not noticed this in depression before, perhaps my feelings surrounding the reviewing of the book relate to feeling infantilized by the way depression functions in the psyche. Shulamith talks about race and class and weight issues and gender, what interests me here is that in this book she has made clear how everything that has to do with identity is eroded by depression. The very core of one’s humanity is subject to becoming overripe, even rotten.

There is a wish among depressed people to be someone else, anyone else, without all the pain and insecurity that come with depression. This is very well illuminated in “Airless Spaces”. Things just trail off, with no real end or even any real beginning. The tone of the book is depressed. I have only encountered this kind of writing once before, in the book “Flying” by Kate Millett from 1974. Kate is manic depressive so that book has a different cadence, more urgent, less painfully languid as is the case with “Airless Spaces”. Mania helps one to have pockets of energy, as I can attest to, being manic depressive myself with a diagnosis for nearly 10 years now and a course of medicine and therapies.

What I don’t agree with in the book is that there is no hope. Perhaps this is the situation in the United States at a particular point in history, but my experience with mental instability in The Netherlands has been overwhelmingly positive, with care and help that exceeded the wildest dreams of what I could expect or could have expected. I felt and feel cared for, and this led me to believe that one has to be a “good patient” to get “good treatment”. It is a very tricky and broad idea of what is a “good patient” and what is a “good treatment”. And I suppose the fact is that one also has to be fortunate or even lucky.

I can, having left the United States of America myself, unable to live there anymore in peace mentally…I can imagine that Shulamith’s path off the beaten track, not wanting to be a figurehead of a professional feminist…and existing in the United States where identity is a competition [in my opinion] that her very existence felt threatened and horizon-less. What she witnessed all around her was crushing, and she apparently did not know the love of a good partner in equality to help soothe the pain of living as a depressed person in those times in that place. I can relate to all the anecdotes in the book, but I know the power of humor and perspective that can come from finding and opening yourself to an equal partner…whether that is luck or circumstance or fortune or fate I cannot say, it is not for me to say. I myself believe that I opened myself for the experience, having suffered mentally for many years, and always tried to pick up tips and learn from those who hurt and abused me mentally. At a certain point I lashed out and spoke up for myself, when I learned that saying stupid things that I was afraid of was a freedom. I spoke up and seemingly by coincidence found a partner who appreciated / appreciates my stupidity.

Some people are trapped by their circumstances, heck I guess we’re all trapped by our circumstances.

Or hell I guess we’re all trapped by our circumstances somehow. Maybe it’s the walnuts I ate tonight that are making me fart so much now, or maybe it’s the cannellini beans from dinner. And the green bell pepper. Life is gross, and depressed people know that better than other people. The gross and the domestic and the private are all culturally determined to a degree. In China for instance men shit squatting in troughs right next to each other, no separation wall, very military style with toilets lined up, but without even a toilet to somehow hide the shit. I guess doctors and nurses are used to shit, and the body itself as an oozing organism. People who work in nursing homes too. How to have dignity when we are aware of our shortcomings, when things are bleak, the outlook bleak, the road endless with no respite? The solution lies in a humanity of acceptance of multiplicity and diversity as I see it.

Shulamith’s book might tell what it feels like to be depressed and incarcerated in hospitals and institutions, but unfortunately for her she never manages to rise above the flatlining of the death wish.

Not a wish for absolution but actually somehow a wish for salvation. Of not being afraid to be stupid, to be human. Depression is one of the most contentious topics in the world today. And I applaud Shulamith for detailing how it feels and how it looks and how it appears, but I regret that this monument has no future. It’s like a grave stone, an end. Madness is based on social factors, and it is in exactly these same social factors that salvation is to be found. In my experience the construction of life has to be unethical, unconventional, inventive to work. An awareness of past and future humanity.

And I must say flipping back through the book after a thorough reading that Shulamith has a great eye for observation of detail in behaviour. I myself possess no such eye for detail, just a sloppy belief in the fact that each of us plays a part in the larger / bigger picture and that the ones who kill themselves don’t tell anyone beforehand normally so that it’s an important lesson to write it all out and “confess” the inner life in order to avoid dead ends.

17,18 February; Monday, Tuesday.

I can’t finish the Shulamith Firestone review. No body would believe me. Emily Roysdon could do it much better, she probably understood Shulamith better than I did, and maybe knew her (I would like to ask Emily if she knew her). Shulamith mentions “Jew” a lot and that is a very problematic word in my vocabulary, because I believe some of the collective guilt and hard-on-oneself intellectual tradition has not been completely successful…it has really hurt and stunted some people in the United States.

Shulamith actually talks a lot about the lack of ceremony in death in The West, and I’m not giving or have not yet given enough credit for her talent in storytelling. There is something very harsh and U.S. American about it. Perhaps Shulamith is too clever for me, in that American way that people are too clever for you, but don’t know how to form emotional attachments except superficially. I hate editing and writing until I get things right, mixing, cutting, adding, it’s useless. What difference does it make what I write? Please read Shulamith’s book “Airless Spaces”. Heck read her “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case For Feminist Revolution” (1970). She makes great points: page 130 (“Airless Spaces”), “Nor did I particularly value her book “The Scum Manifesto” : at the time I thought it had a dangerous leaning towards what would become matriarchalist theory in the women’s movement, a glorification of women as they are in their oppressed state.” God this is brilliant writing, sooooo smart. I have decided that I don’t want any female characteristics anymore, or maybe in fact that’s all I want, but to have my penis and eat it too. I don’t like making sense and Shulamith did, maybe that was her downfall. That doesn’t change the fact that her writing is unique and special and interesting and meaningful. Sitting here diminished and feeling attention hungry and sexually frustrated. Maybe I should start a club for sexually frustrated queer people who don’t like to make sense (but actually make sense in an absurd way…is that called irony?). Who would join my club?

That grrrl I met in Potsdam at the porno conference perhaps. Maybe it would all become a bit one-sided. Like not enough like a consciousness raising group where a diverse group of people get together and talk things out. Shulamith says she didn’t think people should take “The Scum Manifesto” seriously as feminist theory (Shulamith believed that pressure to do so was from the media—INTERESTING).

There is this give and this take, and maybe what I like about this book “Airless Spaces” is that it details all of the little miniscule human factors that make people up, at least it shows a keen observation and skills. Perhaps the book is too complicated for me. Perhaps I am too complicated for it. My life sure is precarious in any case. Me and my big mouth. Trying to be all arrogant and above it all, when actually I am just scared, confused, unsure of the right thing to do. And if all artists feel this then why are some successful and some not? The book is so packed with information and I am not writing this very well, why should I even try? I haven’t been to Hampshire College in Massachusetts and that’s where all the cool people went, and they didn’t even have grades or so, they made their own study programs. Maybe all that would have been good for me too. All I want to do is fuck (or in my case be fucked). So I must be a guy. “A Boy Is The Only Thing God Can Use To Make A Man”. Is a guy a boy? Is a guy a man? Am I an idiot? Just high on marijuana, want to paint. For now it seems too confrontational. What Shulamith writes about the mentally ill on page 55, in “Passable, Not Presentable”: “Perhaps this is why the mentally disabled always seem so bland looking as a group: they had to strive to look ordinary, to “pass”. That little bit of extra aplomb that made one stand out of the crowd was beyond them.” Again, this is as close to my own intentions (not that anyone should care….modesty) as I have read since “Flying” by Kate Millett from 1974. I can’t say anything smart about the book because I don’t have anything smart to say. I only have my emotions and my narcissism, like a blankey or favourite plush toy (=regression). Or not. Nothing is ever good enough for me. And then everything seems too good. Shulamith feels sorry for herself / felt sorry for herself, and that is part of the depression. Weed makes me happy it helps my depression, it makes me want to be social and be with people, that’s how I know my depression is somehow controllable (at least with medicines).

I have a tendency to be enthusiastic, and I think I have structure but I can never be sure.

Shulamith has structure, that is tangible, but she is BLEAK (in this book anyway). Sometimes it’s hard to realize what life is until you lose it. Shulamith writes about Diane Arbus (whom she calls Yvonne Tree) and Diane Arbus said she photographed physically unusual people because they had already experienced the trauma that most all of us try to avoid in life. When trauma occurs then often we gain new insights, and this is the saving grace of mental disability, as long as things are somehow at some erratic points kept in check.

I don’t have the guts to send this to Chris Kraus as a review. Why do things have to make sense and when they don’t make sense then they are called “sense-less”? What about romantic? What about sensual? What about glamour as an anecdote to depression (explaining it’s prevalence and popularity in capitalism)? I think Shulamith underestimated extreme thought…and hers eventually undermined her. (No judgement intended).

Feeling a bit desperate sexually and not sure why…

Shulamith is often quite judgemental, as depressed people often are. She says of a 79 year old woman with cancer who underwent Reichian therapy (“Orgonomy” page 65), “(Maybe this is why she had gotten sick in the first place – a cry for attention)”. There is, Shulamith says, no one in the woman’s life to share her cancer’s remission after the Reichian therapy with. I am always so interested in the partnered aspects of life, of the contingency of human social existence. Other people make life worth living, and they also can make life not worth living. Depends on the person and the situation. The way people look, and the way they look to other people…seems to be an obsession, because for social reasons the depressed person wants to fit in. But never really can. Some rather beautiful people who are depressed seem then glamorous, “we” all love a tragic female story (“us” gay males). But this is wrong. And yes, that’s a judgement. We are jealous of beauty, because female beauty can attract male attention and that’s what we want as gay males. This is all a smokescreen, smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that I have nothing to say and I’m saying it. Shulamith ends with a story about her brother Danny’s suicide and her Orthodox Jewish upbringing and all the tension and muddled unclarity that went along with it, at one point she calls it European neurosis. And the Holocaust and Hitler and his men surely had something to do with this…and centuries of persecution of Jews. Things as layered and again contingent, nothing in human life exists on it’s own, right from the first Humanoids we are implicated by relation. Germaine Greer says there is no such thing as security in human life, and I think, after reading Shulamith’s revealing documentary book, all we can really do in life is “hang on and enjoy the ride”…We can unravel our family histories as Shulamith does in her final chapter on her brother’s suicide, as if it gives her own instability a context and a frame, but in the end we are only still asking questions mostly for which there are no answers. And that should be fine and even good. I feel a bit hopeless after looking through Shulamith’s book again and again during the writing of this review, but I know that is only temporary. I believe in enthusiasm and optimism no matter what. Especially in crisis.

Intellectuals as cynical and grumpy – not smiling (funny, I am not for happiness but think “intellect” needs to be broadened to include “emotional intelligence”).

Acting out? As a concept? Stories or behaviors rooted in truth...but somehow not what they seem...Like Shulamith's. Yes I think she also meant well.