Hooray for You

"You don't have to bend the whole world.   I think it's better to just enjoy it.  Pay your dues.  And enjoy it.  If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high....hooray for you."

          ---Dorian Corey, in Paris is Burning (1991) directed by Jennie Livingston


Today's quote is taken from Jennie Livingston's controversial, award-winning documentary Paris is Burning.  This film documents the black and Latino tranvestite subculture of New York City and their performances at balls.  Livingston introduces her audience to some of the key terms of the ball culture, such as "voguing," "shading," ""mopping," "legendary," and most importantly "realness."   Ball participants perform in a wide range of categories in which the goal is to look and act as much like one's white, straight (and most often upper-class) counterpart as possible.   

Livingston's work has been praised for the way that it exposes identity as largely performative.  Yet her film also underscores the impenetrability of racial, sexual, and class-based boundaries in defiance of the American myth of the self-made individual.

Dorian Corey is one of the older drag queens and his sage reflections provide a unifying narrative thread to the film.  His musings point to the possibilities and the ironies of life, not only within the drag community, but for the white, straight audience that Livingston seems to anticipate may be viewing her film. This quote--the final line before the credits---is not uttered with resignation as much as amusement and the knowledge that comes from years of successes as well as disappointments.  Corey's wry humor in addressing people we might well refer to as life's "archers" keeps his commentary from succumbing to the mere cliche.

Dream House Part III: Cliff-Dwellings

"The moon was up, though the sun hadn't set, and it had that glittering silveriness the early stars have in high altitudes.  The heavenly bodies look so much more remote from the bottom of a deep canyon than they do from the level.  The climb of the walls helps out the eye, somehow.  I lay down on a solitary rock that was like an island in the bottom of the valley, and looked up.  The grey sage-brush and the blue-grey rock around me were already in shadow, but high above me the canyon walls were dyed flame-colour with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern.  In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light.  When that was gone, I could still see the copper glow in the pinons along the edge of the top ledges.  The arc of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water."

---Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)

In this scene from Cather's novel of modern life, The Professor's House (1925), the orphaned cowhand, Tom, describes the enchanting cliff-dwellings of the Mesa Verde.  Once inhabited by the Anasazi Indians, these dwellings have remained untouched for centuries, preserved as if in "amber" by the sun and the dry climate.   In Tom's account, he narrates his discovery of the dwellings and the amateurish archaeological project that he, his friend Roddy, and their housekeeper, Henry, pursue in the hope that the Smithsonian will take an interest in their findings.   When Tom returns to the Mesa following an unsuccessful trip to Washington, he discovers that Roddy has sold the artifacts to a German trader. After a bitter feud, Tom evicts Roddy and remains on the mesa for a solitary summer.  

This particular scene follows the loss of the men's friendship, their idealized family housekeeping-museum project, and the loss of the relics.  Tom's description of these homes from a position below  is one of the most vivid passages within the novel, and its detail and splendor suggests an oneiric home.  The dismantling of the idealized or utopian home is a modern conceit for Cather, and this story is set within a longer story about (in the simplest sense) the loss of cultural meaning in the 1920s.  Yet the intensity and purity of Tom's final experience on the mesa resonates with our very contemporary longing for wholeness and well-being.  As Tom discerns, the unadulterated happiness he experiences in these final months will only be temporary.  In a similar way, while we strive for happiness (almost as if it were a state that could be attained or sustained for any length of time) such moments are likely to be unpredictable and fleeting--something we grasp from a distance, in a flash of quickly changing color and light.

Gifts

Julia Glass only hints at the significance of bodily gifts in this quote from her National Book Award winning novel Three Junes.  The novel focuses on several different love relationships, including the one featured below between the intense NYC bookstore owner and art historian, Fenno, and his (temporary) partner, free-wheeling Tony: 

Among those charms was Tony's talent for random gifts. A linen shirt the perfect cobalt blue of hyacinths. A beautiful if battered reliquary shaped like a miniature foot (a lid where the ankle would be, a primitive glass window over the metatarsals, because it had once purportedly held such a bone from the foot of a saint). A first edition of William Carlos Williams's Journey to Love (its title, I guessed, more a tease than a promise). Each gift presented without fanfare or occasion, wrapped in want ads or not at all, handed over as we walked along the street or sat together in a taxi, stalled in traffic. ("Here. Picked this up for you.")

---Julia Glass, Three Junes