Arrest Ritual by Ming Lauren Holden, Part II and III
Ming Lauren Holden, PhD is the author of REFUGE, which was selected by judge Lidia Yuknavitch as the winner of the inaugural Kore Press Memoir Award. Holden worked successfully as an advocate for PEN Center formation in Mongolia during her year there working with the Mongolian Writers Union and the Asia Foundation as a Henry Luce Scholar. Holden has won the Glimmer Train Family Matters Fiction Prize, the Bellingham Review's 49th Parallel Poetry Award, and the Chattahoochee Review's Lamar York Nonfiction Prize. In 2014, the US Embassy in Suriname brought her to Suriname to lead workshops in creative writing and theater. Holden has worked with marginalized populations, including refugees and incarcerated youth, in fifteen countries over the last two decades.
"Arrest Ritual," excerpted from a book-length work called Netflix and Narcissists (working title), uses the braided essay format to explore the narrator's close proximity to the 2014 Isla Vista shooting spree and her experience as a stalking victim as a product of misogyny in the white American progressive elite via the intersection between performance art and pop culture. Link to Part I of Arrest Ritual.
II.
On the night of Matt’s arrest, it’s early December. I get the call from Detective Avila, who has been calling almost daily as she’s built the case. She’s about to go on vacation, and I’m glad they acted before she leaves. “I wanted you to know,” she says, “He’s in jail.”
My body is a tuning fork. It’s misty outside, about to rain a cold California rain.
I tell Detective Avila I love her.
I tell her I know that might be inappropriate.
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In the meantime, I had to make some swift decisions based on patterns of conduct in the context of a recently ended unhealthy dynamic with a man who refused to go quietly into the good night after ending the relationship in a way I'd told him would burn the bridge.
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Reader, I also know I need to tell you the third piece of the Ted triptych. I have not wanted to. I suspect it’s because I’m ashamed. I know it technically to be premature.
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Could these works also be fundamentally theatrical in their dedication to such dialogic connection insofar as it occurs without language?
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I'm still not sure what distress is or what the reasonableness standard is according to Title IX.
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But in addition to climbing on his lap, facing away from him, to make love to him that way by firelight; and to his holding up a book in a bookstore, triumphant; I also saw us dancing at our wedding.
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This concerns my investigation of vulnerability because physical violence, or the immediate threat thereof, is just that: immediate, without medium, without the buffer of text or language.
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If I need to have a black eye in order for someone's patterns of conduct to be worrisome there's even a bigger gap in progress to fill than I thought.
IV.
I knock on Ted’s door in the light rain with nowhere else to easily go on short notice. On the drive over the pass, dangerous on rainy nights in the best of cases, I started...panting. I’d never hyperventilated before, and I didn’t understand why my hands were cramping and my lips were tingling.
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In spite of any interview given, or picture or video taken, Ono, I believe, is right: no matter her nakedness, people still didn't know what it was like within the stone of her subjectivity.
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The first thing I do is ask for a hug from Ted at the door.
My body shakes so badly it’s more like it jolts and lurches in Ted’s armpit.
“He’s in jail,” I say.
“Whoa,” says Ted, holding me.
“I need you just to keep hugging me for a minute,” I say.
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For this reason more than any other I undertook the creative research of Piece Zero, because while it wouldn't give me a full window into the particular historical or cultural moment of either Ono or Abramović's pieces, or into each artist's particular experience—I had not, after all, included a gun or instruments it would be relatively easy to kill me instantaneously with—it would provide me with my own experience, one which, I hoped, might give me my own definition of vulnerability.
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And he does hug me when I ask him to, in person, in real time, using my actual voice.
“I wasn’t making it up, assholes!” I say into Ted’s armpit.
And then, to Ted, “I didn’t mean you.”
But I think, reader, that I did kind of mean him.
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Stachelhaus chronicles a Fluxus action of Beuys called Friday Object 1a Fried Fishbones that took place in 1972 (during the time between Cut Piece and Rhythm 0) in which Bueys smoked in spite of firm doctors' orders not to.
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The dedication to silence practiced by Ono and Abramović throughout their performance takes on more critical weight because of the informative tensions that bloom up in the absence of verbal medium.
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Such fine breeding.
Such manners.
I am so grateful to him for doing the bare minimum of what any friends and family would have done the night my stalker is arrested, which is hug me while I cry, help me take an ativan, and give me some food.
It’s the first time Ted makes food for me.
Macaroni from Trader Joe’s. My favorite. He asked earlier what I’d want to eat.
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O'Dell, in her investigation of the curious ex-communication of many female artists from Fluxus, including Yoko Ono herself, quotes Forte: “The very placement of the female body within the context of performance art positions a woman and her sexuality as speaking subject, an action that cuts across numerous sign-systems”, a “strategy” that without even a single word spoken creates a “semiotic havoc.”
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Ted holds my hands and gives me hugs and I put my head between my knees and hold onto Ted’s knees until it makes me think about fucking him and then I quickly take them away from his knees. There’s still that warm crackle between us. At least on my end, it can’t be denied.
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I would usually never go through a woman’s bag, Ted said when I showed up on the night of Matt’s arrest, needing the atavan in the white bag crumples inside and unable to stop trembling enough to get it myself.
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The charged space of the woman artist whose body she has given over to some degree creates the tension between the busy performance of those doing to her, and the untouchable meditative or prayerful interior performance in herself for herself, that is perhaps the point of praxis of one of the more profound “semiotic havoc”s or “a world of sound and impulses...without semiotic content” to be found in a culture plagued by phallocentric language that takes root in that very semiotic content.
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After Ted walked quickly out of the church patio adjusting his pants for his erection and whispering urgently to me that he’d call me, he waited six business days to email me about a cup of coffee. I said I’d like to jump in his lap and if that wasn’t what he wanted I had a lot of friends to get me through the gnarly stuff.
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O'Dell brings to bear through the writings of Lacan the notion that the world of symbolism itself is a patriarchal one, as language shapes the human subconscious since the time humans are born, and language, one of the “sign-systems” “cut across” by “a woman and her sexuality”, inherently enforces the binary thought process so central to “masculine” thought.
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While the prospect of jumping in your lap is no less tempting, he writes back, I’ve still got work to do before I can responsibly say I’m lap ready, so while I can’t help but be curious about how your doing, I can keep my questions to myself for now.
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There persists also something of an eerie echo between this assertion of Bueys about the coyote and the body of Yoko Ono, as she ventured the theory that the Fluxus movement “disowned” her (as O'Dell points out in “Fluxus Feminus” that Fluxus leader Maciunas often did to Fluxus' female participants) because her work was “too animalistic.”
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Ted apologizes for “manspreading” by opening his legs on either side of me as I sit on his bachelor bed, tony and shaking, and I tell him no it was actually very comforting so go back to doing it please, and squeeze my fingers because it’s helping. I voice bewilderment that if Matt had just deferred for ten weeks, just one quarter, all this could’ve been avoided.
“Why didn’t he take that sweetheart deal?” asks Ted.
That gets a laugh out of me.
We watch The Good Place. Ted’s never seen it. I’ve seen it all twice. He immediately sniffs out Ted Danson’s character’s shady side.
It reminds me of one of the articles that came out to publicize his memoir, wherein he and his mother, a Jane Austen expert in a northeastern liberal arts college, do an interview. She recalls that when he was thirteen, he was lying on the sofa reading and told her he wasn’t so sure about one of the characters who did indeed turn out to be shady.
When Ted mentions Danson’s shadiness as the architect of a disneyland-looking community meant to be heaven, or the “Good Place,” I wonder if it would seem obsessive that I remember the article, which I read when we were dating.
“Didn’t your mother mention in an interview with you that you guessed about that one character? You were thirteen and reading on the couch…?”
Ted says the name of the character immediately.
“Clever boy,” I say, without taking my eyes from the screen.
I think privately of how little time has passed since he was nodding at me as I went down on him on this futon, nodding in encouragement because he wanted eye contact but I felt a little shy.
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Perhaps, for Abramović, her own body, or rather what was done to her own body, was “an example of man's tendency to offload his own sense of inferiority on to an object of hatred or a minority” – the minority in this case being the body that was publicly sanctioned to be done to.
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My parents moved last year, so I can’t go home to the ranch. That’s part of why I go to Ted’s. I make sure to ask in a phone call as I drive the night highway in San Diego after running for hours at the Ecinitas YMCA if he wouldn’t mind catching me on a turbulent night. Inside rite aid, where I am picking up Ativan, I text him again that no really, I might really need reassurance and hugs. I can promise a reasonably sunny presence, he responds.
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“For Beuys the persecution of the coyote is an example of man's tendency to offload his own sense of inferiority onto an object of hatred or a minority.”
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Detective Avila calls with the news that they plan on making the arrest on Wednesday, when Ted and I are scheduled to hang.
I call Ted from the road. “Hi, so, checking in about Wednesday. I hope it’s still Ok to hang out and I just wanted to make sure you’re okay with getting me in kind of rare form. I might be kind of —there might be a lot going on. So I just wanted you to know that.”
“I just canceled band practice,” he says.
“You did?” I ask.
“Yeah. Because, fuckem.”
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Such inquiry led me to wonder if vulnerability simply always took the form of a literal and not symbolic presence of the body, and that the performance art pieces that left the female body vulnerable were an inherent critique of semantic oppression by refusing symbolism on the physical level.
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“So Wednesday,” Ted says. “Yeah?”
I don’t know if it’s because Wednedays are blue or December is green but I’m glad and also not sure whether I should say that.
But Ted knows just what to say.
“Because even numbers are better colors,” he says.
All I actually say is, “Yes, well. Good night.”
We hang up and the highway disappears underneath the car, and the stars are uninterrupted, I adore the man so much I can barely stay tethered to the planet.
This is what makes it so hard to let you go, baby. You’re good at this. You’re so good at me when you’re not trying to stop being good at me. Someone trained you well. There are these little glimmers of the boyfriend you know how to be and I cannot help myself from falling for them.
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Yet in her take on the work of Abramović, Peggy Phelan instead celebrates the symbolism she believes remains intact throughout Abramović's oeuvre, casting doubt on symbolism's opposite with her assertion that “literalism..has haunted performance art from the start.”
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I would usually never go through a woman’s bag, says the Yale-educated senior editor at Pacific Standard who sang a cappella in the White House and asked me for “updates!” on a domestic violence situation—during the point where it can be, for the stalking victim, most fatal, when the abuser realizes she’s really not coming back—like it were a TV show, while simultaneously bailing on it.
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O’Dell saves the potential theoretical damnation of the performed female body to the sphere of the wholly literal by contending that works like Cut Piece, because they “focus on the body as a seemingly pure, wholly natural entity”, “represent the phenomenon of symbolic representation itself.”
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I would usually never go through a woman’s bag, says the man who got an FSG memoir out of the manners and breeding that make up Jane Austen’s world and that of her super fans—a memoir about dressing as Mark Darcy, a character whose arc goes from haughty disdain to becoming a true ally in the sense that he sacrificed for the well being of less fortunate women in his community.
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Such “commingling” in the work of female artists like Ono and Abramović, this “desire to occupy the middle ground between what would only later be called essentialism and constructionism,” is not only what O'Dell suspects triggered the exclusion of several female artists from Fluxus with its implicit criticism of binary conceptualizations. It also brings to light the charged nature of any such conceptual and physical commingling.
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Ted closes his laptop after the second episode of The Good Place, a gesture I understand as a signal I’m meant to leave. He walks me out to the sidewalk.
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Phelan points out the relationship between such meeting-points as central to the “transformation” of both artist and audience into co-performers in ethical terms:
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I give him a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“Thanks for canceling band practice,” I say.
“God,” says Ted. “I’m glad they got him.”
I don’t tell Ted that he sounds surprised that it was actually this serious.
That he sounds surprised that I wasn’t exaggerating.
That he really does sound surprised I was telling the truth.
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“The possibility of the mutual transformation of both the observer and the performer within the enactment of the live event is extraordinarily important, because this is the point where the aesthetic joints the ethical [...] The face-to-face encounter is the most crucial arena in which the ethical bond we share becomes manifest.”
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I would usually never go through a woman’s bag, says the man who stopped texting me back after having sex with me one last time and dropping off the map during the week I was giving the police testimony about my stalker during the most dangerous time for a domestic violence victim: that is, when the perpetrator realizes she’s really not coming back.
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I tell him I have a place to go, and not to worry.
I don’t tell him that I need to stay awake until I get the call that Matt has bailed out.
It will cost more than what I would have made in the quarter Matt refused to defer to bail out, but I have no doubt he’ll pay it. He’s got the money.
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If “questions of identity” are buried “like land mines” in the “middle ground” between essentialism and constructionism, what sort of questions are buried in the middle ground between lived experience and the making of meaning? That middle ground, that site of “semiotic havoc,” is one that Phelan contends is morally vital meeting ground, and one that I believe can only be approached if efforts to do so are at least partly made in the flesh.
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I drive up Garden Street to the Mission. Claire lets me stay over, but at some point she needs to go to bed because it’s Wednesday. It’s started to rain lightly. There are tree lights strung up around the oak on her back patio. I don’t mind the rain. It’s soothing on my forehead. I text the pit crew about the arrest. Paul immediately gets word to the bodies at the university (judicial affairs, Title IX) that are supposed to care.
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And as in-the-flesh is a condition requisite for possible mortal violence, and therefore for the kind of vulnerability that leaves Abramović to possibly be shot, Ono to possibly be stabbed, and even me to possibly be strangled, I would argue that this in-the-flesh experience is an arm of research that must be carried out, if possible: not to give me words for what is ineffable, but to give me chills at the feeling of unexpected encircling around my neck, chills at the feeling of a man's cheapening words in my ear.
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“Because even numbers are good colors,” he’d said. The sort of undeniably boyfriend-y thing to remember about someone.
I smile in the dark, San Diego’s unfamiliar dark asphalt rushing under the car.
“Yes,” I say. “Well.” Letting the moment hang there. “Good night.”
And I hang up excited to see him. In spite of the absurdity of my life.
The San Diego freeway disappears under my headlights. For some reason it occurs to me that I’m driving a two-ton machine seventy miles an hour. If it hit a person, they might spray blood.
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I turned in the reflection paper on my performance piece about two months before Elliot Rodger’s killing spree one block from where I stood motionless, potentially strangled by my own dress, painted up by my peers.
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In the reflection, I wrote: Can primary experience be a part of academic research? I believe that it can when the relationship between subjectivity and analysis is what's at issue, which is the particular province, I would argue, of performance studies.
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Ted texts me personally, off the Pit Crew chain, that he’s glad the police got him. I thank Ted profusely, as though I don’t wish I could have stayed at his place, where if we were still dating, I could have stayed every time I came back through Santa Barbara, making love to him and watching stuff.
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The performance artist is the point of praxis in that investigation: the praxis of praxis itself.
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I text Ted that he represented for the whole Pit Crew.
For the first and last time ever, he texts back a red heart.
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You’ve been waiting for me to get to him, haven’t you, dear Reader?
And to misogynist manifesto he posted before the shooting rampage a block from where I stood motionless in the middle of a roundabout, Blythe painting “brave” on my hand, Alissa wrapping my dress around her neck, Tristan painting “oppression” on my belly and sidling up to murmur “you come here often?” in my ear—
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Cut Piece, O'Dell points out, likened Ono's body to that of a “creature in the process of being skinned.”
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The rain makes gentle spatting sounds as I smoke cigarette after cigarette.
It’s 1:30am when I get the call that Matt has been released.
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—and how the blonde undergraduate in my department remembers him asking her out as she worked at the coffee cart and she got a scary vibe from him?
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I come away from this short paper unarmed with a sturdy, bulletproof definition of vulnerability, but armed, as it were, with physical, sensory information about the bulletprooflessness of the body itself.
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How I was in the Hatlen theater, watching a department production of Bill Cain’s Equivocation, and how the effects from the play kept us from hearing the gunshots two blocks away? How the director came onstage after we applauded to say that we’d been locked in the theater for the second act, unbeknownst to us, during the rampage?
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After we make love I worry aloud to Ted that the stalking crisis has made me boring. He’s sitting up in my bed and scrolling through his phone. He rolls his eyes.
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I wrote the reflection paper wrote weeks before the nation read his manifesto blaming the women who would not date him for the six murders he committed by stabbing, strangling, and ramming them, the very best friends of students of ours, babies, nineteen years old students in the theater department, some of them were tri delts, the blondes in ugg boots and sweat pants in our acting classes, the quiet guys of asian descent, who dies because they happened to be asian and men, because they happened to be blonde and girls?
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“You know what’s really interesting?” Ted asked, rolling his eyes, deadpan. “Asking if you’re interesting.” His disdain makes something move in my chest that has never moved before.
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In that reflection paper, which preceded his manifesto and killing spree by a matter of days, I wrote: I understand more about the nature of misogyny as a sort of gaseous force of culture, threatening my life whenever I leave my house for work, or even when I don’t.
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It will be the last time we make love. He will disappear the following week, ghost me during the worst of the crisis, and lie about there being another woman the night before my court hearing.
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How all of them could easily have been one of the kids in our theater department class especially, because it was open to any grade and any major for their art credit?
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Tonight it’s a sensation, but it isn’t outright pain.
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I would usually never go through a woman’s bag, says the man who, for all intents and purposes, left me to die.
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You’ve noticed, reader, that I haven’t used his name in this essay until now? And maybe you recall how he entitled the manifestos he left things like “My Twisted World” and “War on Women”?
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George Chen.
James Hong.
David Wang.
Katie Cooper.
Chris Michaels-Martinez.
Veronika Weiss.
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I would usually never go through a woman’s bag, says the man who—
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—called his pre-murder-suicide rampage youtube video screed his ‘retribution,’ the last two lines of which were I'm the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.
But I haven’t had to use his name, have I?
Photo Credit to Earl Wilcox