“I shuffled, cut, and shuffled The Tarot and got The Tower. Oh, God. How was I to be worthy of that?”
In an age of prose poetry where Bluets by Maggie Nelson, or essays by Deborah Levy act like Matryoshka dolls — the framework of her life opening to stories and anecdotes, diversions into friends lives, to books she’s read and liberally inserted quotes — Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell is an illuminating and unique addition to the essay form. Worthy of the Event is unabashedly poetic and lyrical in its tender descriptions of the worst and best things in Blaxell’s life of up-and-down multitudes,while maintaining the exacting analysis of an essay by a philosophical academic.
Blaxell has occupied many roles in her life — but this way of introducing her might be reductive, or even a disservice to her — she points out that many memoirs from transgender women, like herself, focus solely on this issue of ‘transformation’, evolving identity. She has varied expertise in both translation of Japanese poetry, being a former mental health nurse, and being a professor of political philosophy and Japanese history. She is a transgender woman who views life as constant becoming and transformation — ‘being’ in a finite state is death and immanence. Her essay collection traverses countries and continents and flights and bullet trains and the Sydney Harbour, reminisces on hotel rooms in Paris, sex in Istanbul, and highways in America. The fact of her straddling many roles or identities takes on a different sort of ethical tenor when I consider her transgender identity — Worthy of the Event asks us to consider the ways in which transphobes seek to peel apart identity and reduce someone to a kernel of determinative sex. Even likening the essay form to a matryoshka doll takes on a sinister connotation — it parallels the reactions of discriminatory doctors Blaxell faced who sought to peel back a female exterior to see what could be inside — What genitalia? one doctor wondered as he forced Blaxell to strip her clothes. She queries this trope of the ‘true self’ lurking inside the body of a transgender individual: “troubled child, realization that there is female inside the male body, a bad case of gender dysphoria, much suffering, coming out, gender transition, oh joy!, more suffering, then some sort of détente. All that lovely old transsexual shit.”
The book opens: “My vagina disappoints me.” Vivian Blaxell confesses that it was somewhat calculated, a clever and mischievous manoeuvre that plays into the impolite and intrusive curiosity of cisgender society regarding the genitalia of trans people. She says in an interview: “That first essay was published really quickly, I think because of the first sentence… I didn’t add that until I’d written the essay, and thought, What am I going to do to make sure these people that really don’t want to hear from me just can’t resist it?” I really couldn’t resist Blaxell’s compelling writing — Blaxell grounds the abstract and the unreal in anecdotes, in the real pulp of life, as great essayists do. The memoir-essay-creative-non-fiction hybrid Blaxell creates traverses thoughts and scenarios, straying everywhere in the annals of her mind. She guides us through Japan’s most unsatisfying tourist traps, the plagues of attributing tyrannical human meaning to animals, the curious case of Rachel Dolezal, McKenzie Wark, J.M.W. Turner, heavy smatterings of Spinoza, conversations with Nietzsche, natural disasters and plane crashes, court dates, tribulations at the doctor’s office, Getrude Stein, Deleuze, and Parmenides — and well, that’s just the abridged version.
I picked it up as someone who loves quoting things. I am an unbearable citer of things I’ve read. Sit next to me in one of my Comparative Literature courses and I will invariably name drop. Maybe it’s a disease to filter everything through this sieve constructed by other people’s words that have stuck in our heads for so long that the only way to deal with them is to connect them to other things in the gel mesh of life, in the hopes that it might all be harmonious and join to reveal one big pattern. Maybe Blaxell’s list of topics seems exhausting and pretentious and more like a list of shortcuts to sound well read or the substitute for an attempt at meaning. Maybe it seems like there is no semblance or pattern in the topics she covers. Well, not that it matters that there is a pattern to life anyway, as some may say. However, Blaxell is the gel in the book’s multiple lives and moments, and the book is a page of her wavering consciousness. She threads it all together very well with self-disclosure.
I’ve never felt, while reading essays, more aware that this person is also a person. Montaigne said: “lecteur, je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre (reader, I am myself the subject of my book).” Blaxell says frequently in interviews that she reads a lot of poetry but cannot write it. She reads it because it teaches her how to use language and write lyrically, which she does at necessary moments, when she gouges from herself intimate and honest and real memory, and paints them in vivid pictures. Her prose, inspired by Gertrude Stein’s oral quality of writing, has that ugly-beautiful consonance and rhythm in human tone of voice. Most of all Blaxell imbues in her writing what I consider the hallmark of poetry, what distinguishes it from fiction. Fiction is the art of subterfuge. The author hides behind a sort of reflective window pane, a kaleidoscopic one that is divided into fragments or shards of character. Poetry, on the other hand, makes us very aware that its author is also a human. The poet lays claim to their humanity. We are reading the unashamed disclosures (writings) of a person. Blaxell’s essay writing hews close to this poetic spirit.
If you’re wondering what it means to be worthy of the event, the quote is taken from Gilles Deleuze, and it is extracted in the first page of the book: “Self-enjoyment is being worthy of an event…whatever the event might be, be it a disaster or falling in love, there are people who are unworthy of what happens to them, even when these are not very prodigious events. Being worthy of what happens!”
Beyond the slew of quoted philosophical names and slices of trivia Blaxell writes about, the book is really what all great art is about: love and death. I say that like it’s a truism. Her book made me think about a lot of things and rethink about them. It made me think less about myself, though, a respite from my usual self-dissection, and it made me think more about the collective of everyone, us, and our consciousnesses wandering like lamps on this black star, as Nietzsche puts it, that we all call home.
