TO ESCAPE VELOCITY
A BRIEF TREATISE ON TRANSPOETICS
An escape, a freedom. To escape velocity is a phrase that dances with the aporia of being trans and using language. To escape velocity is the motion through four moments of contradiction that shall serve as the spine of this brief treatise on transpoetics:
i. SPEED WITHOUT DIRECTION / DIRECTION WITHOUT SPEED. Velocity is measured speed. If something is moving in a direction, it has velocity. This demands a centre, a point of reference with which to measure direction. Moving from A to B at 20mph. Language, poetry, works at a speed. How fast you talk, how fast a line reads. It also works towards a point. To the end. To the next word, the next letter. Downwards from the title. To escape velocity then, we must refuse speed and direction. But to refuse both is to stand still. To become a centre. To refuse both is to not talk, and fall into silence. SPEED WITHOUT DIRECTION might then be employed. To move without reference to a centre, without measurement. We move without going anywhere. We speak without a centre. We speak then, often past intelligibility, with some degree of difficulty. Everything happens so fast, and things blur. Individual details cannot be understood. You might flick your eyes when staring out of a car window and catch one still image of a hedgerow, the blooms, the stems, the stalks. But you’ve missed the next flower completely, and the hundreds after that. If you let your eye stay still, and watch the blur as a whole, you might catch greens, flashes of yellows. The flowers are here, undoubtedly, but you cannot see them. You can only look at their effect. DIRECTION WITHOUT SPEED might also be employed. To go without speed. To be with no means of being. To realise the injustices we face. To recognise and make the ethical demand to be treated right. To have healthcare, to have it immediately. To say your name, and for it to be your name, immediately. To be trans, and to not have transitioned, or to be post-transition, or to never transition. To stand still when told to move: to resist direction. To assert your pronouns, to refuse to be called a boy, or to be a boy, to act like a boy. To refuse to die, to shut up. To continue, to grow, to endure, to survive, when told you’re an impossibility, or a fancy, or a mistake. This impossible ethics, to be with no means of being, is
ii. FREEDOM HAVING NEVER ESCAPED / ESCAPE TO NO FREEDOM. It is to recognise, immediately, your freedom, your autonomy, without it never being achieved. Trans people deserve good lives. We deserve healthcare, and a freedom from aggression, from murder, from suicide, from trauma. Yet so often, our only way to achieve this is assimilation: to become part of the systems that have historically killed us. To sell queer on a t-shirt. To free words like tranny, faggot, queer, and adopt them into our our language, our own autonomy. To make pride out of violences. In this, there is FREEDOM HAVING NEVER ESCAPED. And if we do? If I do transition, go stealth, be safe, and cared for, there is always another sister with a mutilated body, and a deadname on her tombstone. She is usually black. Usually a sex worker. If given the grace of ascendency into a statistic, she is once more categorised into a cisgendered language that will then most likely mis-categorise her. If I commit suicide or if I am murdered, it is an ESCAPE TO NO FREEDOM. I cannot enjoy my life as a woman, I cannot be a woman, I cannot perform it any longer. That agency is in the hands of others: in the living world of memory, of history, of language. This is where the transpoetic embodiment of language lives. To enact a freedom beyond the grave, and to be recognised, immediately in your own terms, your own voice. It is to
iii. SAY SOMETHING WITH NO LANGUAGE / SAY NOTHING WITH LANGUAGE.
A poem that uses only numbers, a poem that cannot be read aloud. Poetry with attention to pattern, to visual detail. The trans body. Our performances, the way we walk, talk, dress, look. Crossing the street, getting home safe. To SAY SOMETHING WITH NO LANGUAGE. Our interactions with the material world, and our poetic disturbances of the linguistic world. Both come with an immediacy, and they are never silent. They are the irrefutable facts of our existence outside of the cisgendered linguistic centre. It is when you look at me: the girl with a beard. It is when you read my poetry. When you see this, when you read this, now what do you do? Do you refuse to read? You can’t. Once you’ve learnt how to read you cannot not read, there is no choice. Even the impossibilities, and the typos, and the coinage, and the numbers and the patterns: they all must be read. These impossibilities are here. I am here. I’m a typo and you’ve read me. You’ve read my name and seen my skin and heard my voice say “she/her”. These impossibilities are here even when we SAY NOTHING WITH LANGUAGE. When we make a poem that cannot be read, or understood; that celebrates its difficulty and refusal to be read - whilst still making the formal and linguistic demand to be read. When we talk amongst ourselves, in poetics, in theory, in our day-to-day. Our slang, our language. Gaff, pussy, queen, serve, real, stealth, read, shade, tea, trade, tits, trans-, fish voice, fish, sissy, femboy, dick, packer, tuck, clit, bashing, closet, coming out, girlslikeus, mother, legend, tranny, faggot, queer. These words, this language, has its own violent history. Of colonial domination: the global imposition of the supremacy of the heterosexual nuclear family. The evisceration of native gender definition, of gendered language. The impressions of Man and Wife that are the stamp of the missionary world. Of working man, of the property-less wife, of the queer child cast out of the family and into the street to die. Of straightness: the Real, the referent by which we are all measured. The capitalist beast that conquers and lives and breathes through language can only in transpoetics be fought and defied through language. We are forced to iv. USE LANGUAGE TO DESTROY ITSELF / USE DESTRUCTION TO CREATE LANGUAGE. We are told again and again we are not real. But in this, who is being told? Who is listening? The negative definitions of the post-structural space answer: we are. We, the impossible, the eviscerated, can now talk. In our violent relation to language, in merely using language, we destroy its central capacity. This allows us to then USE DESTRUCTION TO CREATE LANGUAGE. To embrace the violences of aporia, to embrace coinage, the typo, the mistake. To form our own names, to name our own forms. Transpoetics then arises alongside the tradition of reclaiming slurs, from the empty space left in the ruin of the centre, in the infinite possibilities of incomprehension, metaphor, simile, poetry. This new language, these new names, new motions of unintelligibility, are all then staged to escape the language that we use, that ensnares us, that sets itself up as centre, and then removes us violently from that. There is always something self-destructive in this. Suicide, self-harm, even the desire to change oneself beyond recognition, to pass, invisible, in the cis eye. To escape one’s own body, the site of violence we carry each and every day of our lives. A body constantly resisting the whim of the cisnorm to have the last ruling say on it: a man’s body, with a man’s name. So much has been said of poetry and artifice performing immortality, but here, transpoetics is scaled back and offers not immortality per se, but a life in itself. Writing one’s name, saying one’s name. Expressing the violence that is imbued in your body, into language - exposing that violence, finding the violence not only in your material body, but in the words you use, even in the poetry. There is no escape. And yet we write, and our names are printed, and our experiences and voices heard. We achieve so much not without violence, without destroying the language we are writing in, by destroying form, by pushing at intelligibility, by performing our autonomy in poetry. It is in so much that we write and re-write, repetition becomes a self-validating process, a performance. It impresses your autonomy, leaves your mark: your name in the stone wall. The more one repeats this message, lives it, stands by it, writes it, in the same way, in various ways; the more one becomes self-contextualizing and self-validating. The more one becomes real. The more we attest ourselves, this impossible existence outside of the centre, it the more we collapse the centre. Hence our play with form and language. A desire to destroy and break language by using it refuses the boundaries of the centre and collapses it. Language is destroyed and yet made anew. We continue to exist in language. It is impossible to escape, but with our violence we can draw attention to the originator of the violence and hash our new language, our reality, into existence. Something that will linger beyond the police report, something that resists straightforward interpretation. Such a motion can be captured in the impossible and necessary desire TO ESCAPE VELOCITY.