New Vintage

Margaret Schnabel

…it’s hard to sleep knowing so little
about everything, so I enroll in a night class

without end and it asks only one question:

How dare you?

— Paige Lewis, “Because the Color is Half the Taste,” Space Struck

My parents live in Ireland. Besides general childly goodwill, I had been seduced by promises of a weekend wine tour in Spain (“we’ll hop over!” my mom kept saying, brightly), a thing that probably nobody should be allowed to do ever, so ridiculously indulgent it felt—but like other ridiculously indulgent things that scant people are afforded in life, the moment continues despite your well-meaning but ultimately selfish and useless guilt about it. And so boom: there we were, looping through the mountains of Spain’s Priorat region in the car of an excessively nervous Irish man (no relation) who spent the hourlong drives between vineyards expounding upon his climate conspiracies. The central character of said conspiracies were commercial airlines in cahoots with the Spanish government, whom he insisted were dumping dirt or toxic chemicals or some combination thereof into the air, thereby purposefully dimming the sun with no clear profit nor ethical motive. This he knew because his brother worked for Boeing. “It’s not climate change,” he kept saying. “It’s climate control.”

No one, I repeat, should be afforded this experience, least of all someone who barely drinks because an oblique shroud of doom drapes itself around their shoulders whenever they experience a tinge of bodily dissociation. I sipped and sometimes discreetly spat out tiny mouthfuls of very expensive wine, and watched the heat boil the air that cloaked the vertiginous dusty-green hills, and imagined that I was dying.

The second morning of the wine tour began at Scala Dei, a Carthusian-monastery-cum-winery established in 1194. Let history remember that there have been cool monks. The building had that combination of ancient stone and meticulous lighting that begets the feeling that one is in a museum. Sitting with us at the high-top “tasting counter” were a sickly thin Slovakian woman and her potbellied husband; a coiffed American couple eager to appear gregarious yet polite, who, though apparently born and raised in the Midwest, had thick Southern accents; and a gaggle of ruddy-cheeked Scandinavians in sensible shorts. We had our attention turned to Scala Dei’s butchy, ebullient tour guide, whom I kind of had a crush on. She uncorked a bottle. “This is our last vintage from before the drought,” she announced, and poured elegant swirls into our glasses.

So dystopian was that sentence that I got halfway through my first micro-sip before fully processing it. “Last vintage before the drought” is the stuff of apocalypse fiction, the sort of thing a gross billionaire might say to his luxury-bunker visitor before forcing him into a blood pact with the literal devil to marry off his cryogenically-preserved daughter.¹ But there it was, in my glass: a living memento of the world before we fucked it up beyond repair. Glug.

Scala dei, by the way, is Latin for “God’s ladder.” I imagined it stretching between the vineyard parking lot and heaven, each rung glowing with righteousness. How many visions of the afterlife are founded on escape from the mess we’re leaving behind—a kind of forgiveness-via-departure?

If you were wondering: that vintage was 2018.

In moderation, drought can be a good thing for wine. Vines struggling to find water will produce sweeter fruit, in order to attract animals who might eat it and deposit its seeds elsewhere.

That metaphor’s a little too easy, of course. Why should suffering make life more meaningful? Why should death?

As a child, I held a firm and unworried conviction that I was going to die young. Adults would mention college or marriage, and I’d think to myself: oh, I don’t have to worry about that. I won’t make it that far. Death felt around every corner; no day, month, year could be taken for granted.

Perhaps because of that morbid certainty, I became preemptively nostalgic. I’d set up Polly Pockets in immobile vignettes, not allowing my siblings to disrupt them; I’d squirrel away wrappers from the nightly singular pieces of chocolate we were each allowed and collect them in a bag, where I could smell them privately and remember pleasure.²

Each passing year brought with it an acute awareness that I was, in fact, getting older. In middle school, I started journaling. One entry from that time period is exclusively dedicated to my future self, begging them³ to remember exactly what it felt like to be crouched breathlessly beside my bed, scribbling madly.⁴ I drew a diagram, the exact placement of my pillows. I scrawled the question again and again: Do you remember? I feared the judgment of my older self, as I had judged younger versions of myself: how naïve I had been before I learned XYZ! How embarrassing. But no, my middle school self insisted, I was still one continuous person—no better or worse or more noble in my preoccupations.

How much ties us to previous versions of ourselves? What metonymy fits the bill? “Mind” (defined how?) as “me” (defined how?)? Or is my younger self extricable from that environment—was I in some important way continuous with the warm lake I swam in, the balcony I leaned out over, the ugly off-white chaise longue from which I first texted a boy?⁵

We tell some stories about growing up. One of them is that “coming of age” sets us on an invisible, inevitable path hurtling towards a life partner. Desire as a kind of cannily predictive magnetism. Desire pulling us neatly into ourselves like a psychic corset, then sewing us into the family quilt. Repeat generation after generation ad infinitum. What you want is what you are, or so goes the story.

But the summer after my freshman year of college, my desires abandoned me, splayed me out on the dinner table in front of my parents. If you have the stomach to imagine it, here’s an approximation:

      ROSE [Margaret’s sister; buoyant; maintaining a blind faith in their parents’ acceptance]: I have an announcement.

      General confusion and ribbing from parents. If they understand what’s about to happen, they don’t let on.

      MARGARET [psychically]: no no no no no shhhh abort mission abort mission

      ROSE: I—

      MARGARET [psychically]: PLEASE. GOD OH PLEASE NO DON’T

      ROSE: I am pansexual.

      Silence.

      MOTHER [tight smile]: What do you mean?

      ROSE [smile fading]: I’m pansexual. That means I’m into people of all genders.

      Wrinkled noses at phrase “all genders.”

      PARENTS ask ROSE to elaborate. ROSE does, is met with thick discomfort.

      MARGARET [internally]: Bury me under a mountain of expired soup cans. Liquify my organs and ship them to a Yankee Candle factory in the dead of night.

      FATHER: Well I mean, this affects, uh, your future. Whether you’ll have kids, you know. But you’ll have to be aware, you know, that some men find that attractive.

      MARGARET [internally]: Staple my body to a dying palm tree.

      MOTHER [turning to MARGARET]: and what about you?

      The world explodes.

And then the world picks itself up and keeps spinning.

Around my parents, I have preserved myself in a thick glob of ice, which makes me suitably blurry to them. Everyone’s happy. It’s pretty cold in here.

Over the past few months, I’ve started chipping away at it with a pair of chopsticks I found in the backseat. I should be fully out in 150 years or so.

My mom sees my queerness—when she can’t ignore it—as an incomprehensible religion that I have invented and whose strictures I blindly abide by. There’s hope yet that the right man will shake me back into my senses. To her, queerness is a contrivance; a strange and pointless craft explicitly aimed at giving her, and by extension Well-Meaning Reasonable America, a headache.

Midway through my visit, my sister—always more optimistic re: my parents’ progressiveness than I—proposed a family screening of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It was my fourth or fifth time watching the movie, and for the first time I felt strongly compelled by the Orpheus-Eurydice thread. The two lovers and protagonists, Marianne and Heloise, debate Orpheus’ decision to turn around, damning his wife Eurydice to the underworld just as she is on the brink of escaping with him. Marianne declares that the “lover’s choice” would have been to refrain from looking back, bringing Eurydice into the world of the living. Instead, she posits, Orpheus made the “poet’s choice”: privileging the memory of her over her reality.

My mom didn’t like it—but she didn’t like it for the same reasons that I didn’t quite love it when I first watched it. She wasn’t convinced of Marianne and Heloise’s chemistry; there weren’t, she argued, enough scenes of them building rapport, actually getting to know one another; sometimes Sciamma’s sparseness felt like oversight. I didn’t tell my mother that the moment I became convinced of the leads’ chemistry was when I first watched the movie with a girl, our limbs entwined in a freezing British cinema. I did tell her that I thought Sciamma made the poet’s choice, rather than the lover’s: she would rather the perfection of the subterranean—emotional and character depths unplumbed—than the risks and potential disappointments of dredging them up.

Opacity can protect the physical and emotional safety of queer people, yes. But illegibility is not, here, a contrivance, I don’t think; queerness feels impoverished when ordered in language, made to be slotted into folks’ existing conceptions of the world. Nature, too, shares this untranslatability. And what an absurd, beautiful irony; that proverbial Place From Whence We Came, the very stuff we’re made of, rendered alien through our language or lack thereof. Queerness, likewise, sheds light on an oft-obscured truth: of course we exist before, beyond, between language. How could we ever have deluded ourselves into thinking otherwise?

And yet language is the core of our spiritual and emotional safety. Metaphor assures us that nothing is truly incomparable, truly unprecedented.⁶ As we stumbled into the humid shade of the processing building, another, better metaphor hit me in the face. Red wines, the guide explained, derive much of their flavor from the grapes’ skins, stems, and seeds. Their “first ferment,” therefore, takes place in a large vat with all of the above. As the active yeast produces carbon dioxide, the skins et al rise and create a “cap”: a thick, hard-to-penetrate layer at the top of the vat. Leaving the cap undisturbed means missing out on the potential flavor of skin contact,⁷ so winemakers use a variety of different methods to break the cap up. They might punch the cap down manually or with a hydraulic arm; or they might draw liquid (“must”) from the bottom of the vat and pump it over the cap, slowly filtering the liquid back through the skins. This last method offered my favorite metaphor: a kind of cyclical concentration, infinite restarts that might seem pointless but for the slow increase of richness. Growing up to me has frequently felt recursive in that way: I’m channeled through the same conditions or situations, growing more myself each time I pass through.

Cyclicity is theoretically trendy right now—and is often suggested to be more in tune with the natural rhythms of the Earth. But as human practices endanger those very rhythms, we’re confronted with an undeniable linearity: a steep drop-off into extinction. The uncomfortable reality is, as I currently understand it, that we are bringing the Earth to a point of no return: a cycle from which it cannot recover, at least not while the human race continues to kick around on it.

I think of Spain’s rocky soil growing more and more inhospitable, producing brighter, sweeter fruit—until it’s too much, the conditions have pushed the vines too far, what has grown for decades crumples in an instant from champion to corpse. I imagine a squeezing, squeezing, squeezing of the Earth. Just a little more liquid. Just a little more.

What to do when the increasing difficulty of your craft is a symptom of the earth’s sickness? Do you stop? But who would stopping help? But how can you continue?

Not everything gets a second chance. Before the wine tour, we spent a day in Valencia. We stopped at the Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero, which I considered a silent gift from my family members, none of whom much like modern art. We picked our way through the comforting forest of chrome blobs and ugly hair-covered things and ended up in front of a giant screen. Before us stood a simulation of what looked like an ancient Japanese town: villagers conversed in squares, entered and exited the temples, and carried baskets across bridges.⁸

The docent explained that the simulation followed the rhythms and weather of its surrounding environment: the simulation-sun rose and set in tandem with the real sun, and if it rained in Valencia, it would rain in the simulation. When visitors touched a villager on screen, it would wiggle and frown, clearly upset. Afterwards, the villager would pick fights with a handful of surrounding people, increasing the restlessness and volatility of the town. There was no way to tell how angry each villager was, the docent explained, or how high ambient tensions had risen; once they reached a breaking point, however, the entire village would erupt in fighting and flames, eventually burning it down and killing the entire population. The simulation could not be restarted; once the village burned down, it could not be rebuilt.

After the docent’s speech, we stared at the screen dumbly, each fighting an internal battle between our curious wiring and socialized guilt. They were only pixels, ultimately. But they were humanoid pixels. But the simulation would certainly reach a breaking point eventually, so by not participating, were we just delaying the inevitable? How much would our paltry interactions actually change? On the other hand, our only option to engage with the artwork—to register any kind of presence—was to harm it, shorten its lifespan.

My moral code is roughly do absolutely no harm unless you’re in a hurry or in a particularly indulgent mood (see: the biannual egg sandwich I allow myself despite my veganism), and I was neither in a hurry nor in a particularly indulgent mood, so I was dead-set on not interacting with the piece.⁹ So, apparently, were my family members. We stood stiffly, as if not trusting our bodies’ urges should we relax them.

Then a girl wandered in, not having heard the docent’s talk, and began touching the screen. Villagers squirmed and cried. I wanted to grab her shoulders and scream. WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS IRREVERSIBLE! YOU DON’T KNOW IT BUT YOU ARE CONTRIBUTING TO A VAST NETWORK OF HARM FROM WHICH THIS WORLD WILL NEVER RECOVER!

But why don’t I grab myself by my own shoulders and scream when I buy my gay little iced coffee and accept the plastic cup? Where, exactly, do I think it’s going?

Why did art activate a sense of justice that daily life couldn’t? In this case, maybe, the answer is anthropomorphism. In “Ideas of Nature,” Raymond Williams surveys changing conceptions of nature throughout history, critiquing the modern abstraction of Nature as a unified entity in opposition to Man rather than a series of repeated, variable, historical engagements and interrelated systems.¹⁰ Besides a glancing reference to nature as “divine mother,” however, Williams doesn’t dig into the persistent figure of “Mother Nature”: a decidedly gendered abstraction that positions the human race as a single family.

One expects the gendered personification of nature to encourage a relationship of mutual care, even obedience: your mother made you; she loves you; you must love her back (and, perhaps less happily, share her with your siblings). This personification also does something interesting to time: Mother Nature becomes a continuous, transgenerational entity, an unchanging being watching over the trials and downfalls of human civilizations.

And yet, in effect, Mother produced offspring that would destroy her.

My own mother quilts, scrapbooks, cross-stitches, crochets, and sews. Her penmanship is impeccable; her sheets are always fresh, pressed, and tucked in; she’s in bed by ten-thirty, where she reads the latest novel recommended by the New York Times and then falls asleep, easily, her mouth falling open. She likes Monet’s water lilies, British dramas, anything sweet. When my parents moved to Ireland, she immediately set about imposing the order of an Indiana suburb onto the Irish wilderness: trimming the hedges, paving the driveway, putting down mulch and planting flowers in it.

Her crafts are perfect, usable, slipping easily into their environments. When I made her a collage for Christmas, she looked at it, puzzled. “I don’t…understand it,” she said politely, “but…thank you!” Seen in one light, the art-craft divide—however real or fake you find it—is the crux of our difficulties. She interprets my profundity to be mocking what she sees as her own intellectual inferiority—and I want, so desperately, for her to understand me.

Craft is what you can live with, what you do live with: the quilt you smooth over your bed each morning, the handmade pencil case you reach for in class. Art is what you can’t; it’s supposed to bowl you over, act fickle under your gaze. We ascribe an atemporality to art and a dailiness to craft, and I feel the latter viscerally. My mother knows I’ll use her quilts for years to come, imagines them moving with me, eventually draped around a loved one (read: husband). So too do crafts gesture towards long traditions of making, bring the past into the present. Presence, I keep trying to remind myself, is not the lack of profundity. Annie Dillard: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

What I’m doing with my one wild and precious life is, apparently, attempting to come out to my mother through the postal service. I drop artful hints in my letters, overstating my vacillation: I’ve really been struggling recently with the question of whether I’m attracted to men. I’m drawing up a heartwarming pilot episode of Your Kid’s Queer and Nonbinary while I live on Season 4 Episode 57.

Sometimes I feel like a huge coward. Dive in, right? The lake’s not getting any warmer.¹¹ But my identity feels too fragile to be subjected to the funhouse mirrors of my mother’s misunderstanding. Even if she made a good-faith effort, she’d still warp me into a shape that made sense to her. I don’t want to see something that feels to me precious and true reflected back as a garish contrivance.

Babak Ganjei: “art is the thing nobody asked you to do.” Being queer is the thing no one asked you to do, either. Queerness wasn’t in the job description of a Good Life that my parents envisioned for me. “I wouldn’t give up all hope with men,” my mom responded to my letter. Giving up all hope with men would mean giving up a particular brand of futurity: the wedding that will prove my success to my conservative aunts and uncles and soothe my grandparents; the house in the suburbs (maybe); the biological children (sort of).

In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that contemporary politics is grounded in reproductive futurity, invoking the figure of “the Child” to justify conserving the status quo. “That Child,” Edelman writes, “remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention.”¹² Think of the children! Queerness, of course, “is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end,” and thus “comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form.”¹³

As an actual child I held wisdom that I was encouraged to forget. I knew I wanted to kiss Natalie Wilkinson in the preschool bathroom, knew I didn’t want to wear dresses or pink. I told my parents, at 7 or 8 years old, that I didn’t want kids. My mother, clearly disturbed, came to me quietly one day and said, “is it because of all the blood? Because you know, you don’t have to look at the blood. The nurses can put a barrier up.” I looked at her and thought, it’s because I’d have to marry a man. And I swallowed and smiled and said yes. The blood.

The poet’s choice depends on partiality. The fragment made perfect by what future viewers imagine surrounded it. The lover’s choice is presence, is craft, the gift of a momentous dailiness. But the poet’s choice thinks beyond and around salvation. To be queer is to live in a world not designed around your futurity—which is, perhaps, more like the natural world. Even though I’m not The Child, I am still a child, am still middle-school me waiting for my mother (and my Mother) to look at me, to see what she’s made.