On “Pathemata, Or, the Story of My Mouth” and “Bluets,” by Maggie Nelson
Goodbye to the Dirty Canal
You chat with a person at a party. Their relationship is shot, they tell you. In fact, now it’s worked out that their schedule is such that they’re waking up just as their partner is going to bed, and they spend the morning picking up last night’s cigarette butts (not theirs). Their great friend, who’s been living in debilitating pain for the past eighteen years, is now dead, of an unrelated brief bout with cancer. And, on top of it all, they’re suffering from chronic jaw pain. They’re not really reading a lot; they’ve even given up on Jeopardy because they can’t stomach Trebek’s replacements, and have been watching The Brady Bunch on Hulu, or at least they were, until Hulu yanked the show with no warning and no explanation. This tale of woe is delivered with a limited amount of humor.
There’d be a couple of ways to go. If this was a first impression, it might be too much to take. But if you’d known this person for 25 years (which is how long Maggie Nelson has been chronicling, over the course of now a dozen books, her great subject: what it’s like to be Maggie Nelson) you might be more forgiving. You’d at least be able to follow along with something like interest, and maybe sympathy.
Wave, the publisher of both Bluets (2009) and this year’s Pathemata, invites readers to view this latest book as a sort of companion to the earlier one. Both works are discursive, circling around their nominal subject: in the former case, meditations on the color blue; in the latter case, Nelson’s chronic jaw pain. And the principle characters are the same: C (Nelson’s mentor and friend, paralyzed in 2003 in a freak bicycle accident); and H (Nelson’s partner, who is fully treated in The Argonauts (2015) but whose presence looms over Bluets). There are also references, direct and oblique, to her earlier works about a murdered aunt (Jane (2005) and The Red Parts (2007)).
To read Maggie Nelson’s Pathemata, it helps, in other words, to already be a Maggie Nelson reader; to actually enjoy it, prior acquaintance is probably required. There’s a quarter-century worth of Nelson lore, and if you’re coming to Pathemata blind, she’s not going to catch you up. Pathemata is one for the heads.1 For those who don’t count themselves as a member of that club, the unrelenting catalogue of misery may come off as overbearing.
If Pathemata breaks new ground for Nelson, it is to write a world that’s been denuded of intellectual excitement. Bluets was omnivorous: not just the color theories of Wittgenstein and Goethe, but also the work of writers as diverse as Sei Shonagan, Novalis, Joubert, and maybe two dozen others were brought into direct conversation with one another. In Pathemata, the most significant critical judgment is that passed on, yes, the successors of Trebek, and the most sustained critical engagement is with The Brady Bunch. There’s a bit on Equus, a reference to The Golden Bowl, and a quote from Thoreau’s journal: “The question is not what you look at but how you look & whether or not you see.” True enough, but as warmed over as Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better.”
The best way to read Pathemata is as a form of fan service, a sort of The Nelson Bunch set in a contemporary pandemic-dominated dystopia. For those not already part of the extended family, there’s still Jeopardy.
Bluets; Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth
Author: Maggie Nelson
Pages: 112; 80
Years: 2009 (2015 re-issue); 2025
Genre: Philosophy; Symptomology
OSR Tiers:
Bluets: Major Arcana
Pathemata: Minor Arcana
Next: Two by E.B. White
Full disclosure: I am one. My view is “The Canal Diaries” portion of Something Bright, Then Holes (2007) is the purest distillation of Nelson’s particular ability to pick out the intoxicating in the eerie, a good entry point into her project, and a good read on its own merits.