MC Hyland
Essay on Materials (Thread)
Montaigne wished to test his knowledge. The translator notes the frequency of two related terms: essai and essayer. Noun and verb, essay and assay. Montaigne’s first essays take the subjects appropriate to a man of his rank: battle and war. On these subjects, there is what he knows and what he can learn from his library, though he claims he rarely reads.
Do I want to test my knowledge, or just to record it? What is strange about writing is how it moves thought from a thinker’s body into an unknown other space. I wanted to know how printed writing was unlike writing in a notebook, in a letter, in stone. How a book in thousands of copies was different from a book in ten copies, or one. Walter Benjamin had some ideas about this, as did Walter Ong. I think this difference has to do with my body, in which I am a reader or a writer. The fluctuating space between my body and the bodies of those I read, those that read me.
Books are bound with linen thread, and that thread has three strands. Past, present, future. Body, mind, spirit. I knock over the tarot cards and pull one out while replacing them: The Hanged Man. It is one year into the time of the virus. I’ve been waiting and I’ve been transformed, just as you have.
On a website called goldnfiber.com, an article begins Thread is a common, subtle, twisty element. The article written in another language, or in English by a non-native speaker. Cotton thread was first spun by machinery in England in 1730 and from then on it spread quickly like a wildfire around the world, thanks to the British Colonies. I learn here that the Egyptians made thread from the hair of their pets, that the Babylonians or Assyrians invented embroidery, that a man named Thomas Saint designed the most efficient industrial sewing machine in 1970. History as a series of marvelous assertions. I once thought of these sorts of assertions as “facts”: true things said clearly and entirely out of context. In my own life, work, and research, I rarely find truth so simple.
Bookbinding thread may be waxed or unwaxed. Often it comes from Ireland. It has a grain, which can be felt by running it through your fingers first one way and then the other. At the last conference before the virus, I bought a large spool from a table outside the conference rooms of a boutique hotel. Two days ago I brought this spool to my co-editor to sew our next books. One day we may again invite friends to our home to sew many books at once, but that future is not yet visible from here.
Essay on Labor and the Body (Gender I)
I find myself considering the genders of labor. The word so mothering: a fertile body at the limit of what it can contain, torn through as a new being enters the world. The pain of labor might be a template for many pains of separation. To make two people out of one requires tearing, and blood. To make one person into two may require a suture to mend the torn site of separation. So when I was young, and became pregnant with a man who no longer loved me, I tended to the wound of his disappearance for months, for years. Even decades later, when this man touched my arm in a coffeeshop, tears rushed through me from some elsewhere. The child I did not bear had gone underground to become a spring from which hot and sulfurous liquids oozed.
My own pain passed without the labor of childbirth. But bleeding slowly in one of the many temporary bedrooms of my early twenties, I understood my sorrow and anger as proximate to labor-pain’s sharp and intermittent evacuations of the self. This understanding made a kind of false equivalency: for many people I love, physical pain is not a metaphor, but a structuring condition of the self. Pain comes to them as a thief: of time, of opportunity, sometimes of meanings. Depending on their genders, on their race, on their class, doctors may or may not correctly estimate their pain. People in pain may need to develop a dazzling verbal competence in order to persuade others of their bodily experience. So: L says she should have fought through migraine in order to go to dinner with the two famous writers. So: B describes his pain, as we walk through his neighborhood, as a fog that descends between his person and his language.
And yet there is another sense in which I hear the word labor invoked. This sense often denotes a specifically masculine body or performance. The grease- or paint- or soil-marked arms of laborers who sell their time, their strength, to, as they say, put food on the table. In this sense, the word also denotes a bodily pain, and a separation—not pregnant parent from newborn child, but instead, of the self from the self. What Marx calls alienation. Or: another day older and deeper in debt. My father-in-law’s rage at his wife, for proving that, should the patriarch fail to put food on the table, others might step in to fill this role. Alienation loves a binary, as property loves a wall.
Essay on Labor and the Body (Gender II)
Last year, having reached the end of funding for my doctoral program, I applied for sixty-five full-time jobs in colleges and universities. Near the end of hiring season, my options dwindled. I was called to interview for a teaching-intensive postdoc at the university I attended. This interview was on the same floor of the same building where, one hundred and eight years and one week before, 146 workers—mostly immigrant, mostly female—either burned or leapt to their deaths when, in a fire, they found the factory doors locked from the outside.
I badly bombed the interview by bringing with me a poem I planned to teach in my proposed class, Morgan Parker’s “All They Want Is My Money My Pussy My Blood.” The three men interviewing me stopped talking to me after I produced this poem. Instead, they talked to each other, at length, about how the international students the university wished to court might respond to the language of the poem’s title. “Language,” in this case, meaning “biology”; meaning “the sites of biological sex, necessarily unspoken in this late stage of global capital.”
And yet, how capital depends upon the fantasy of gender! Not just in the sense that, as Federici writes, the separation of (unpaid) care work from (paid) productive labor proceeds along lines of perceived or performed gender. But also in the sense that consumer desires—and, through them, the desire to work for pay—enter the person through gender’s agglomerated fantasies. Sexual desire, beauty, the fantasy of the isolate self. In my forties, as strange men address me less on the street or in bars, I feel most gendered when I pause for a moment in front of a certain kind of shop window. The plate glass holds both my own reflection and the crystallized dreams of the perfect dress, the perfect jumpsuit, the perfect shoe.
It doesn’t matter that I rarely if ever enter these shops. I feel the desire these products produce as simultaneously internal to, and external from, my person. This desire coexists with the knowledge that its pull upon me keeps in place, often in countries I may never visit, the very systems of unsafe and underpaid labor that burned 146 workers a century ago, in a space now dedicated to the administration of the “global university” that, almost accidentally, continues to issue my paychecks.
MC Hyland (she/they) is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress. She is the author of THE END (Sidebrow 2019), Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press 2010), and the forthcoming book of poems and short essays, A Book of Borrowed Light (Everybody Press 2023), as well as over a dozen poetry chapbooks/artist books. An Assistant Professor at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, PA, MC is also a letterpress printer, walking enthusiast, and committed home-baker and classic-cocktail-maker.