The Sex Life of Pearls

The Sex Life of Pearls: Pygmalion, Pearl, and Objectumsexuality

Obsession. Radiance, hardness, smoothness, whiteness, roundness. Textured. Obsession, obsessed, pearls. A pearl: “sengeley in synglure”. 144,000 pearls, resounding together as a single note. The Kingdom of Heaven?

His head spins; he feels like he is going mad. Is this love? If it is, it feels one-sided. The pearl was recalcitrant enough when she was in his possession, but now she is lost: “Alas! I leste hyr in on erbere!” The exclamation interrupts the smooth meter and redirects the rhyme scheme. Not so much love as “luf-daungere”: coyness, coldness. He understands how Pygmalion must have felt, but Pygmalion doesn’t know the half of it. Pygmalion could never have created such beauty. The pearl is alluring, seductive even. Her natural perfection exceeds even Aristotle’s ability to systematize: any articulation of her qualities would miss the mark, but the Dreamer verbalizes them anyway. Obsessed.

            Pearl is a poem that hints at metamorphosis as it recounts the queer encounter between an objectophile and his cold mistress—an inanimate pearl. It is not surprising that the Poet references Ovid’s Pygmalion; however, unlike Ovid’s anthropocentric story of an enlivened statue, Pearl invites the reader to decenter the human, discovering the vibrant materiality of stone, and learning the value of becoming pearl-like. Through the lenses of OOO, New Materialisms, and a posthumanist queer theory, I follow the desires of the dreamer, considering how such desires rely on attempting, and failing, to translate this queer encounter into a relationship between mere human subjects. Only when the Dreamer’s desires are thwarted—by surprise, frustration, failure—does he begin to recognize the ontological differences between himself and the stone, and only within such difference is the reader invited to discover the possibility for transformation. There are no subjects here, just objects: a man becoming-pearl, as the pearl becomes-otherwise.

Puking Out Pearls

Below is my abstract for the 2015 BABEL Working Group conference:

Lady Gaga is fabulous. She came out on the scene with a fabulous single and a fabulous album about being fabulous, and we were all starstruck; we were also seduced by her illegibility. We wanted her to be a man, dressed as a woman. We wanted evidence of a penis behind the layers of glitter, makeup, wigs, and bubbles. Gaga performed femininity in a way that recalled and surpassed drag queens, and we were, ironically, confused at her female body—What could it mean for a woman to play at being a woman? Starting from this illegibility, Gaga carefully cultivated a persona that not only performed the fabulosity she articulated in her music, but also exposed the mechanisms of legibility in what Benjamin has called the age of mechanical reproduction—Gaga became intertextual with herself, and we began to feel like we understood her without fully understanding her.

            Terence Koh is fabulous. When the artist was asked to explain his fabulous appearance, he responded, “That is my nature. Perhaps we shouldn’t interview with what happens most naturally.” Koh’s fabulosity is natural, and it is artificial; it is truth, but, in his art, truth is deception and self-deception: “I get scared and don’t want to know the truth…. I tink [sic] this way there could be world peace. And really people would just be more happy.” Koh has cultivated a look, a phonetic/homonymic writing style, a form of artwork featuring “layered insincerity,” and the slopes of his performed self are always a bit slippery—his natural artifice (or artificial nature) blurs boundaries between legibility and illegibility. Sometimes not asking questions reveals the most answers. Maybe, Koh teaches us, the essence is not as important as the meaningfulness of the surface.[1]

            Pearls are fabulous. Terence and Gaga collaborated on a fabulous video and a fabulous performance featuring fabulous pearls—88 pearls to be in/exact (which might mean something)—and these fabulous pearls might also remind us of many fabulous people’s disease and death.[2]

            Un/like Gaga and Terence, the Pearl-maiden is fabulous. She lives in a jewel-encrusted world of numeric complexity (which also might mean something). She reminds us of daughters and statues, idolatry and death. She reminds us of the kingdom of heaven and wealth, whores and lambs. Can we ingest her, or does she resist consumption? All we know, by the end of the poem, is that we have never seen anyone more fabulous.

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Frustrated and confused at my writing style, my professor recently wrote to me: “[Your] essay sometimes feels merely clever rather than substantial. It is charming, but it entails too much rhetorical performance, too little sustained analysis.” Exploring the meaningful absurdity of Lady Gaga’s and Terence Koh’s fabulous resistances to legibility, I would like to consider what might be gained from reading the maiden in Pearl through the lens of clever and charming rhetorical performance and what might be lost if we care too deeply about traditions of  “substantial… sustained analysis.” My talk will be fabulous.

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[1] “Down the Bunny Hole,” interview by Kathy Grayson <http://terencekoh.com/hole/down-the-bunny-hole>

[2] Lady Gaga and Terence Koh collaborated for the American Foundation for AIDS Research. After sipping from a teacup on top of a piano, Lady Gaga spits out a mouthful of pearls, which Koh describes as “puking out beautiful things.” <http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lady-gaga-salutes-elton-john-with-special-set-at-all-star-amfar-gala-20100211>