to forgive design

By Jack Snyder

Queerness as a personal failure starts out with deep roots, hidden beneath good, black earth. With something you don't realize is around until you dig it up. Queerness as a personal failure is a failure to rectify the burden of expectations with the authentic self, which is to say, I had been feeling too goddamn determined by my adopted community, so I turned to prose and philosophy to find the failure of my queer body. I discovered Hegel, who said I should be a being-for-itself, 

whatever the hell that means. But I’d been spending too much time in furious and shallow waters to care about who I am. I still do. So when Saturday morning came around with a painful sky, I couldn’t help but think Hegel knows what he’s talking about. Butler brought me back to square one when she said my gender (thus the expectations leading to my failure of harmonious rectification, of design) is a performative role. Beauvoir gave me direction without aim: the spot between two rocks that the river calls home. In a soup of black markings, I now start to manifest

these words as only those deceptively trivial things are: between my mind and the page. I now begin to search for the river-water. If I cannot become the body I am meant to be, how am I to be a successful body? How am I to navigate such deceptive waters as the ontological imports as mere expectations of queerness? What a heavy burden, the pleasure of renouncing all presuppositions of gender and sexuality. What a blessing in disguise, the complications of avoiding the slippery rocks of the queer and the antiqueer. And what a thirst it awakens, to see that river-water for the first time. 

I am not asking to forgive design as beings independent of themselves, but rather to forgive design as the cause of my deterministic angst. This is to say: the bridge does not fail in virtue of its design alone. A torrent is always a torrent, for as Alain says, "If I go from rock to rock, the same torrent becomes another with each step." If I go from expectation to expectation, this queer body will never be authentic, will never be for itself. And is this not to forgive design? Is this not to forgive the political? 

Queerness as a personal failure starts out with deep roots, yes. Queerness, then, as a personal failure ends with a political—with a poetic, with a philosophical—body. There are no beings-for-itself here, no performances here, no abstracted purpose here: as a queer body, you must earn the right to be dissected, and oh to be dissected with sharp instruments. You must earn the right to be for yourself. And if I am not for myself, with so many expectations shoved in my mouth, choking my Being from this body, I do what I can: chew them like gum, and like gum,

make sure the boys watch me swallow.