Bob Flanagan (1) (1952–1996)

"I'm not satisfied with the shit eating i did do." — Bob Flanagan (47)

On Being Selected For an Anthology

There's a humorous moment in most works of De Sade that accompanies the movement in which we dismiss the shit-eating (e.g. the "delicious turd") as too hardcore/vulgar/repulsive to be taken literally. Moving from the declaration, "such a thing is happening," to the spacing of the subjunctive, "imagine if such a thing were happening," produces a zone of safety that permits the entry of humor — a spacing perhaps also responsible for the edgy humor favored by tween boys. It's also a false movement. Gershom Scholem is remarking in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism on four readings of the Talmud: (1) Historical, (2) Tropological (as moral allegory), (3) Halakhic (as juridical law), (4) Mystical, (and (5) Lyrical). Though this may open up the text to a reading of humor in De Sade and of lyricism in the Midrash, we are always returning to Kierkegaard's notion that it really all depends on veracity of the historical fact of the incarnation — that the eternal came to exist in time. That's another way of saying, "let the shit eating begin." (45)

The text/journal is already a kind of Bob Flanagan contraption. I'm thinking precisely of the masochistic apparatus in which our chief character places himself in a cage, in handcuffs, and tied up such that he can't escape until he eats through a pile of his own shit and sucks through the Lifesavers hidden inside, which are rigged by strings to a mechanism that releases a key to his cuffs. The tension lies precisely in the notion that the author is outsmarting himself into a position in which he will have to eat shit (against his own proclivities) for a masochistic release. He does not suffer fools eat shit gladly. A different Bob Flanagan has been reborn to life-after-death (bad connotation - from undeath) following the selection of The Pain Journal for publication in Eileen Myles's pathetic (good connotation - from Pathos), Pathetic Literature (2022). We get to the shit eating right away. Kierkegaard remarks that the upbuilding to be had in the biblical binding of Isaac lies precisely in emphasizing the difficulties. The anthology is re-inscribing this internal movement such that we might consider it a different work entirely.

The phrase, "My brain's the weak heart / and my heart's the long stairs," from Modest Mouse is a bit of a howler for abusing a metaphor within a metaphor, but it kind of works. If we take the same approach to Flanagan's contraption, considering what the anthology is trying to get out of it, we can trouble the metaphor a little bit: The key is the shit (since it lets you eat shit); and the shit is the cage (in its trapping function); and the strings are the text (since they're an impediment tying you up but also attached to the releasing function of the key i.e. shit); and the handcuffs are the anthology (since they function as key-hole, and therefore a means to use the key i.e. shit). All this to say that we're getting strung up into a weird position, for which nothing could be better than Flanagan's (anticlimactic) assessment: "Tastes like [bitter] mud." (46).

On Heterosexual Punk

Kathy Acker's opus is a reminder that perhaps the only thing more perverse than turning something into nothing is the possibility of turning nothing into something. Wanting a "permanent abortion" (Acker, 30) is really very cool, but not as punk as the picture of heterosexual domesticity in The Pain Journal. 'What is to be done' after nailing your penis to a wooden plank. Kierkegaard remarks that the Aesthetic does not exist in time — it darts between moments of happily-ever-after (i.e. the moment of orgasm). Flanagan is always coming down from a masochistic high to be really tortured by his wife's nocturnal snoring 'like a two-man saw' (misery whip). This is the other kind of "Rolling in the shit of time," (Eileen Myles, For Now, 12) that Myles had inscribed with a good (poetic) connotation.

The "Supermasochist" nails himself to a block of wood in jest, but the artist dies in earnest. Setting aside the complicated sado-masochistic psychological apparatus, we perceive that domestic squabbles are such noxious stimuli that our master of mortification can't manage. Flanagan writes: "You—whoever you are—must be sick to death of me in front of the TV in bed, every night, describing Sheree’s snoring and whining about how awful I feel," (37). Our narrator is mortified by the painful domestic event, and is then failing to achieve the inversion of pain into pleasure, and is then failing to restrain himself from writing about it in his journal against his own better judgment (a "Winchilsea phenomenon"). Going further, he appears to be such a glutton for punishment that, in a model movement of heterosexual-conformity-as-abnegation, he categorically refuses to sleep in separate beds. (Aside: The Anthology is a kind of reading-as-sleeping-in-separate-beds). This punk sensibility, with ostensibly unlimited tolerance for punishment/pain is producing, at it's apotheosis, a phantasy of invulnerability, which is simultaneously (by a process of convergent evolution) the model of heterosexual domesticity: "Mr. Adjustable. There’s a new super hero: Mr. Adjustable. Able to withstand anything because he adjusts to everything. By day he’s a whiner and complainer. But by night he’s Mr. Adjustable!" (88)

"an enormously liberated feeling which certainly abuts on this awesome space which is writing or art or rolling in the shit of time." — Eileen Myles, For Now

… (more)

At the age of 42, Bob Flanagan began to keep a journal. He had cystic fibrosis and the journal was kept during the last full year of his life.

This book is a powerful one mostly, I think, because Flanagan is so thoroughly down-to-earth. I don't think the word 'journey' is used, but if it is it's certainly not used metaphorically. There is no mention of dealing with stages of acceptance, no attempt to find a bright side of dying, no waffling about spirituality, no suggestion that death is ennobling or its immenence uplifting. Instead, Flanagan complains of his wife's snoring and tells what he's been watching on telly. He wonders if his friends are abandoning him and worries over ordinary misunderstandings in his family. And perhaps this is a disquieting aspect of the book: Death may be just as near when one's watching daytime telly or taking out the rubbish as it is when one's doing the good deeds or thinking the great thoughts that are the stuff of stock tributes to the dead.

The descriptions of his decline, especially those of pain, are striking and nearly harrowing. Imagine putting a plastic bag over your head, he writes at one point, and every now and again violently banging your head on a table and then gouging your thumbs into your eyeballs. But here too, there's no pretense of somehow finding a meaning or a purpose in the suffering; here too, the descriptive is at least as effective as the introspective would have been.

A short book, a worthwhile one, and a richer one for Flanagan's sense of humour… (more)

The Pain Journal is a diary that performance artist Bob Flanagan ("supermasochist") kept a year before he died from cystic fibrosis. Honestly, it's pretty boring. At this point in Bob's life, he was too tired and in too much pain to do much of anything besides watch tv and play computer games. The two things that gave him a reason to live--S/M and art--became too difficult for him to participate in since he was in and out of the hospital and literally dying a slow and painful death. Still, it's hard not to cheer him on through each small triumph he has in his last months.… (more)