Pure at Heart
LLMs, KPop Demon Hunters, shapewear, & Alice
I had an uncomfortable realization the other day: the subject of my current book is writing. Uncomfortable because I’m always trying to resist being a writer who writes about writing, even if writing is always at issue (because medium will continually peep through all productions). What am I writing about writing? I think I’m writing about what comes next. Writing about prediction, predictability, rhetorical chains, thesis/antithesis etc. I’m writing about the tragedy of writing in the era of the LLM (how’s that for predictable). I’m writing to find a way out—not to be an escape artist who eludes readers and machines, but to discover a mode that’s ours.
In one sense all modes are ours, because only we care or understand. Yes, given. AIs don’t understand anything because they don’t know anything, are incapable of revolving anything within an interiority—but, you know, as soon as I say all this (or really sooner), I doubt our own caring, understanding, and knowing. Not that I think we don’t—but I wonder whether our doing so arises from the instruction to do it, whether the capacity comes from the action. In which case we would never be safe assuring ourselves that we have something they don’t.
The whole tendency of this bit of writing (above) is an us/them which quite possibly will look indefensibly humanist in fifty or a hundred years. Will it or won’t it, I don’t pretend to know or even care, but I don’t want to find myself caught in yet another predictable emotional tussle. I want to find what lies beyond exclusion and war.
So what I’m trying to find is a mode that could be ours now, that we can now enter, that will pull us beyond war. I mean, I’m trying to find the voice that saves the world.
Years ago an editor of mine (are you there, Susannah?) proposed that I write about pop culture. She wanted to see what it would look like for my sensibility to come up against the real housewives or whatever was the object of the moment. I didn’t—this is back when I spent most of my life engaged with cultural productions of my choosing, an enviable state I recommend to you all, and I didn’t want to crush my soap bubbles and egg shells against the mainstream. However, then I had kids and got a job, etc. (another enviable state I recommend to all), and thus I found myself recently in a movie theater at a singalong for the sensation of the summer: KPop Demon Hunters.
What even to say? The heroism of every moment reveals the perversion of the moment: I’m having this thought as I work through Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey towards the long-awaited, thrilling, yet utterly terrifying and excessive cataclysm in which Odysseus purifies his house with blood and torture. Yes, that happens. We fixate on the recognitions, on Odysseus coming home as an underdog, on the little trick of the bed that Penelope plays on him. But for the Greeks, Odysseus’s homecoming was not complete until he slaughtered the suitors who abused guest-host relations, until he reclaimed his position as king, father, husband, master, with various gruesome acts of dominion.
I could go on, but no, let’s get back to our century. It’s interesting to me that only women and girls seem able to sing songs of empowerment; only women and girls can claim the mantle of the Pure-at-Heart, the divinely inspired warrior-queen who fights for all of us. That’s Rumi, the heroine of KPop Demon Hunters, but it’s also Elsa, Moana, Wonder Woman, and every film character played by Jennifer Lawrence, among a hundred others. KPDH has a male lead, but he is cursed, and his heroism can consist only in giving his life for Rumi; meanwhile his best songs are sexy and a little sinister. It’s no wonder that my son and all the other boys I’ve surveyed don’t like KPDH—what is here for them?
My daughter and her friends, however, love it. And so do I, and so do my female friends who’ve seen it. We love it and we love it for them—that girlhood can have such meanings now, can have such hopes. And maybe we love it for ourselves most? I’ve found myself watching the song clips in the way that, in the dark time when Leigh was little, I replayed Taylor Swift videos (oh yes, Tay is another such girl hero). I need this.
Why? It’s suss, as the kids say. If I have to make my inchoate emotions into theories (I guess I do), it’s because I feel I’m called on to give so much all the time, and I’d like to feel that this full-spectrum effort (mental, physical, emotional, comprehending everything from my sexual self to my clean house to my political stances) does connect to something larger. It’s a promise: if I give my all, I will defeat the demons once and for all.
I’d like to be. . . less? I’d like to have a self. I’d like to do one thing at a time. On the other hand, goddammit it, I do feel I’ve grown heroic capacity, and if I’ve been made to build that, can I contribute its force to something more than middle class sustenance and FY26 goals?
OK, so what are we wearing?
Strangely, that’s the iceberg this nowing has been wrecked on for the past few weeks. I keep mulling, pushing various points around, and meanwhile my nowing’s getting stale in the drawer. I think I have to accept that while we can make politics out of clothes and make clothes out of politics, I’m fundamentally not that committed to the moral valences of garments.
That said. . . do the “solutions” offered by skin-toned shapewear in various grades of compression really address any problems you need to have?
A while ago Joseph pointed out to me that to the extent that feminism means making the lives of women easier, the ethos can countenance all kinds of strange stopgaps: e.g., there’s a feminist case for facial fillers in that they free women from signs of aging and therefore help women stave off sexist ideas about aging as females for a few more years. In the same way, sure, shapewear can be billed as making women’s lives easier by making certain exposures less demanding. But in both cases, what helps the individual hurts the group: that is, when facial fillers and corseted waists become the norm, everyone is forced to new pains, disguises, expenses.
Still, still, one lives as an individual, and the individual is foolish, and that foolishness is the sign (or the price) of something else. I have this little fight with myself now, as in Why do you need to test yourself against these new things as if you were twenty? And the answer is that I’m alive. I’m alive, and I want to keep going.
One kind of reader might look at this episode and gently suggest that “women” are the problem—that is, that the concept of woman causes most of my pain. Sure. I can see that analysis, but reader, I can’t—in my personal smallness—really get to or even want to get to the logical next step of moving to something else. I’m reading Alice Notley’s giant Speak Angel Series, which begins with our Alice being drafted to lead the dead (all of them) on to something else, some freedom—and one recurring note is the furious anger of women at the trap of the female lives they lived. I wonder what Notley will do with that in the next 500 pages of this epic. Sometimes, we can do in art what life does not allow.