It either started with Gian Lorenzo Bernini and his 1651 sculpture, Ecstasy of St. Teresa, or it started with Lindsay Lohan. Scratch that. It really started with my friend Marion and this little café in the West Village swamped with golden light in the late afternoon. Marion and I met there a couple of times to catch up. As our conversations always meander into the wonderland of new ideas, I had several notebook pages scribbled full by the time the sun rolled off Varick St. and into the Hudson.
We were debating the wisdom of trying to inhabit the perspectives of people who check different identity boxes than we do. I had been working on a poem “about” my mother (who is also named Marion), and I was struggling to find an approach that would discover something worthwhile about one or both of us while honoring the mystery of difference that separates us. What was driving my interest in this poem? Was it love or some attempt to control my mother, however symbolically? I knew I couldn’t write fairly (forget objectively) about this person whose identity was so important to my own. I worried that if I were truly candid and unguarded and all that, I might reveal unconscious feelings of resentment in the writing like spinach caught in my teeth. Because she is a woman and I am not, writing in my mother’s voice was out of the question. That kind of interpersonal cosplay was a big no-no, doomed before anyone could say mansplain. These were just a few of the challenges to writing the poem. The stakes were high.
Something Marion (my friend) was working on at the time involved Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa. What did I think about the seventeenth-century male artist’s celebrated work depicting a woman in ecstasy, Marion asked. My face told her that I had no idea what she was talking about, but I suspected that whoever he was, this Bernini guy was playing a dangerous game. Marion explained that Bernini carved the nearly twelve-foot architectural sculpture to glorify the ecstatic experience St. Teresa described in her autobiography. When Marion pulled the image of the sculpture up on her phone, she also pulled up a popular meme composed of two similarly cropped photos. The left photo was a closeup of the saint’s face as depicted by Bernini. On the right was a paparazzi photo of Lindsay Lohan passed out in the front seat of her car. With her eyes closed beneath the drape of her hoody, Lohan’s mouth hung gently open, echoing Teresa’s expression, although we understand Lohan was shitfaced rather than ecstatic. It wasn’t funny hah-hah, but I felt like I was expected to chuckle at the symmetry. Marion’s question about the ethics of a male artist depicting female ecstasy was now complicated by new questions about how the meme itself was working.
Why would anyone put those two images next to one another in the first place? The more I thought about it, the more the meme seemed arch and a little misogynistic. The joke was definitely at Lohan’s expense. Yet both figures seemed to have suffered some unwelcome intrusion. The pairing leveled contempt in Lohan’s direction, as if in mocking her the viewer was helping to put Lohan in her place—her place being back inside the beauty rules that were invented to privilege women who looked like her in exchange for allowing themselves to be objectified. The meme seemed to hint that Lohan wasn’t holding up her end of the bargain, wasn’t responsive enough to the demands of the male gaze, so the rules were weaponized against her. Just as the sacred implies the profane, veneration holds the door open for humiliation.
The meme’s logic put a spell on me. Now on the lookout for memes that would give me a similar sugar high, the high that I get from a surprising metaphor, social media fed me a steady stream of AI mashups. The mashups felt stale, and prove only that everything is collapsible. I wanted memes that signify, as in the Black literary tradition. This was something the algorithm couldn’t deliver.
(Editor’s note: Click here to see Gregory Pardlo’s poem “[Erasure]” [from Spectral Evidence, pg. 73].)
I happened to be googling cathedrals (as one does, naturally) when I came across the famous woodcut diagram of the interior of a slave ship. Bullet-shaped and embellished with bodies chained to one another in neat rows to illustrate the bounty of kidnapped hostages the ship could hold, this image had been burned into my nightmares from an early age. I almost scrolled right by it reflexively before my mind snagged on the oddness of a slave ship appearing on a website for gothic cathedrals. I looked a little closer and realized it was not, in fact, that horrific image of the slave ship. My mind had tricked me into seeing the slave ship instead of what was actually there—the floorplan of a typical Catholic church, bullet-shaped and embellished with pews to illustrate the bounty of parishioners it could contain. I tracked down the image of the slave ship to see what it might look like next to the church. I found the image of a cathedral that was closer in shape and size to the slave ship. Finally, I had my signifyin’ meme. The juxtaposition put an equal sign between them, but the equivalency was unstable because I kept trying to make one condemn the other. The Catholic church played key financial and ideological roles in the transatlantic trade of human beings. While the church took pains to justify the trade as part of a civilizing mission, abolitionists highlighted the church’s hypocrisy by publicizing the conditions on board a slave ship. Just as the Saint/Lindsay meme relied on histories attached to each image to make its point, my cathedral/slave ship meme had enough historical baggage to make itself monstrously alive. Yet the images resisted each other enough to prevent the meme from flatlining in didactic finality. Cathedral/slave ship was provocative like Saint/Lindsay, only, in this case, the shit wasn’t funny at all. What to call it? I guess I could have titled it simply “Meme,” but I decided that thinking of it as an erasure poem would add another level of irony. What was being erased here, and by whom?
By the way, I was still struggling with the poem about my mother. I decided to think of the poem as a meme. I had a Styrofoam wig head that I’d trash-picked expecting it to turn up in a poem about beauty at some point. All I needed was a counter-image of my mom to meme-ify the composition. There was a studio portrait of her that I’d grown up with. It hung in our house for as long as my parents lived there. In the years since leaving home, I’ve attempted to write ekphrastic poems about that portrait many times. The fact that it was an eroticized image of my mother kept pushing it into the periphery of my consciousness and safely out of reach. Juxtaposing the portrait with the wig head, however, whatever I wrote would be downwind from the bonfire of my emotions. Meme-ing the two objects allowed me to think about the colorism that haunted my mother’s beauty. This gave way to experiments with other meme-pairings: the cover art to Prince’s first album, the Shirley card from Kodak film, a couple of Renaissance paintings. Each pairing offered new insights, new reflections.
Out of self-interest perhaps, I want to defend Bernini’s sculpture. He was interested in a higher aesthetic order than physical beauty. He wanted to represent, and in the process, commune with Teresa’s spiritual experience as she described it. This, for me anyway, heightens the contrast in the Saint/ Lindsay meme: Lohan has no say in the matter. She is all surface, all object. Chastened beauty as in my mother’s portrait. I hate to see anyone put on display like that. To extend my conversation with Marion, I think as long as the point of the poem or artwork is to identify with an individual’s unique experience and not to represent that person’s character or, worse, their social category, then maybe interpersonal cosplay on this intimate level is the most ethical form of engagement.
