myrrh to re all myth
j/j hastain
Furniture Press, 2013
6 x 9 / 120 pages / $14 / ISBN 9780982629994
Reviewed by Joseph Cooper
Body as the Integral
In j/j hastain’s poetic exhilaration myrrh to re all myth, hastain has realized a cosmic endeavor. The introductory image and text deploy the sexual processes of the jellyfish, how it “…replicates itself with infinite capacity/rendering the jellyfish organically immortal” and in that we are introduced, amniotic, the dark, visceral cataclysm of beginning. But the beginning doesn’t end there in blind awakening; we are posed the question: “what are the places you’ve never been touched?” which immediately brings this reader to the once-virgin wanderings of my own fingertips, the groping closets of adolescence, the writhing, uninhibited thrust of confident underpinnings, and then at once to maturity. In maturity, we may find that our fingers have not wandered as deeply as they once did, and that we (still) long for the slight grate of nails, tongue wavering above pubis, the feelings of loss in where we have not been touched, or have not been touched in some time. “You are making them in me,” hastain states of these places, the places untouched, which simultaneously arouse youthful hope and dire misdirection.
“This is a romance of fractals”, one of conjoining and disintegration where “an endless prothalamion” meets “vigorous holograms” giving us the impression that love/weddings/gender identity/form/content are illusions, temporary calibrations of flux emotion without the soaking ruptures of experience awe. When desire is pendulous, and knowing
that I came back into
form
in order to feel myself
refusing
frame
it is difficult to feel anything but distraught. Wrought from “a paper cornea” from which interpretation/projection seem ultimately penetrable, fallible, utterly manipulated, to an “amniotic marionette” in whom it seems we are all puppets in love, lust, in the disintegration of self. What is there for us if we are all strung up/out on genetic limbs, hoisted by social predetermination?
But when all seems hopeless, a rose dying in static water, hastain brings us back into confidence, realizing that
it is so much about how
you belong
not what you belong to
differentiating between the real body and the given body. We are all given a form, an identity, a self, but what happens when you outgrow the flesh, the pronoun, the title, the masculine/feminine social obligation? What does it mean to be a man? What does it to be a woman? Are we inside each other any less when we ignore our sheer sameness?
Yet, even in our independence from each other, there is an absolute need to be touched, to be welcomed into arms:
you are curled so tightly into me
that there is nothing else
but this sense
that I am yours
that this is what I am
designed for
softening the borders between desire and satisfaction. hastain writes that “only through the body/can form experience form” crystallizing further the notion that drawing lines between ourselves, our experiences, is a violation that requires blending, in order to perhaps transform into a new self, one that is everything and nothing—converted by a kiss.
My experience with this text was one of great humbling; hastain’s vocabulary is both scientific, poetic, and profound forcing readers to not only learn and relearn themselves, but to dissect their preconceptions of poesy, of others through intimacy, alienation, and the radiance of undiscovered territories we so ravenously invent and, as hastain writes:
perhaps it has always been
that I don’t want to be
a perfect
but I do want to be
________ ever-changing, the conditions in which we exist. So, in defining these identities, these preoccupations, we are in essence limiting the extraordinary, the boundlessness of our own humanities, imperfect, (un)original, raw, pushing and pulling you inside me, me inside you, unencumbered by the restrictions of flesh: become the transmutation of loving expression, “electric”, “immortal” “to become a thing/that would never need to second guess”.
As hastain writes, “this is how/I becomes we” “so much like inserting/waves into waves” a finding and relocating that requires of us a willingness to contort, to use our “interior retina” to locate a “venerate peace” where we “love in countless dimensions”. “You must meet me with the vow that I will not ever be the lace/that you wasted”; the lace, the latticework, the delicate intricacy of romance, human relationships, love, and how truly sensitive they are regardless of flesh dimension.
Whether myrrh here is used for its medical purposes, its fragrance, or both, we readers are guided through a distinct biological endeavor to not only understand, no, to inhabit our bodies, but to realize that our flesh, its costume, its sensory delivery is defined perhaps more conclusively by our relationship with what we touch and what touches us. hastain leads us into the mouth, the fleshiness of tongue, the rough abrasion of teeth, and swallows us down and from there we are given a choice: find our way out, or succumb to the transformative nature of all beings.
Joseph Cooper is currently writing in Winston-Salem, NC and is the author of TOUCH ME (BlazeVox 2009) and Autobiography of a Stutterer (BlazeVox 2007). His work has appeared in numerous journals including most recently Diode, Dear Sir, Ditch, Fact-Simile, Jellyfish, Other Rooms Press, Otoliths, Peacock Online Review, Phantom Limb Press, REM Magazine, and The Internet is Dead.