Lars Horn - Voice of the Fish

A Lyric Essay

Lars Horn

Graywolf Press

Copyright 2022 by Lars Horn

The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

212 Third Avenue North, Suite 485

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

This is a work of nonfiction. It is also a work of memory and craft. On occasion, names, places, and events have been altered in the interest of personal privacy and artistic intent.

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-64445-089-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64445-177-9 (ebook)

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2022

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021945923

Cover design: Kapo Ng

Cover art: Shutterstock

For my mother and father,

Sheridan Horn and David Horn

For my wife, Jaquira Daz

I mean river as a verb. A happening. It is moving within me right now.

~

This is not juxtaposition. Body and water are not two unlike things they are more than close together or side by side . They are same body, being, energy, prayer, current, motion, medicine.

The body is beyond six senses. Is sensual. An ecstatic state of energy, always on the verge of praying, or entering any river of movement.

Energy is a moving river moving my moving body.

Natalie Diaz, The First Water Is the Body

On June 23, 1626, a fishmonger of Cambridge market discovered a century-old manuscript in the belly of a codfish. Half-dissolved and wrapped in sailcloth, the sextodecimo fell into the hands of Dr. Mede of Christs College, Cambridge, who happened to be walking through the market that day. Vox piscis or The Book-Fish , as the manuscript became known, was published a year later and contained several theological treatises: The preparation to the Crosse and to death ; A mirrour, or, glasse, to know thy selfe ; A briefe instruction, to teach a person willingly to die, and not to feare death ; The treasure of knowledge .

The texts were attributed to the Protestant reformer John Frith, who, during his lifetime, spent months imprisoned in the belly of an Oxford fish cellar on charges of heresy. Sentenced to death on June 23, 1533, Frith was burnt at the stake in Smithfield, Londonupwards of 250 nautical miles from Kings Lynn, where the codfish was finally landed ninety-three years later.

In childhood photographs, I blur within a bath of dead squid, sleep atop hot concrete, severed magpie wings splayed across my back. My mother always distrusted conventional family portraits and, along with mirrors and weighing scales, banned them from the house. The body was movement, volume, was rhythm through space. The body was not to be looked at. Except when that looking made it strange. When the stilling of a body undid it. Lent an enduring instability.

I experience my body as interiority that radiates. Mirrors unnerve me. I dont know my weight. I dont tend to look at myself. I like gestures. Words come least naturally to meI tend to think in images, textures.

In the summer of 2014, I tore the muscles from my right shoulder to my lower back while weightlifting. After two months, the injury hadnt healed. Not even begun to. As it turned out, I would spend the next six months bedbound, medicated, unable to wash or dress myself. Doctors would fail to explain the lack of progress, and I, having exhausted the list of hospital units, would return to bed, watch flickering images on an old television set. Around the same time, I lost the ability to speak, read, or write. At first, I stuttered; later, I remained silent. As for reading, I could manage a line, but any more and I felt nauseous. I still cant fully explain this loss of language, why my body cavedexhaustion, depression, the sheer physical pain. But living for six months in a body that wouldnt adhere to words, that balked at sentences, made me aware of the body as texture. As image and gesture. Rhythm. As varying weight.

After those months of illness, I wanted to write differently, wanted language and narrative to carry more physicality. Come as the thud of soil burying a face. Plummeta bird petrifying as it enters a lake. To adhere to a visual or gestural logic. Less worded, more photographic. More movement.

I quit academia, research, a translation career. I started over.

I have always found pronouns to be slippery, distant things. At school, I wrote and talked about myself in the third person masculine. My teacher expressed concern. My mother, thank Christ, replied: So, the kids fucking weird. They all are. Give it time.

I remember the evening my mother knelt down, sighed: Lars, my love, youve got to start writing I for homework. I stood therecrew cut, boys clothing, boys toys, a boys bike. And my mother in front of memens shirt, mens boots, a woman who, in her own words, was never meant to be a mother, because she was queer . A woman who decided not to abort when she fell pregnant by the man she was about to divorce for a woman; who, when she phoned the UK Lesbian and Gay Helpline in 1988, was told that if she mentioned her sexuality as a motive for divorce, she would lose child custody, her teaching job, would remain unemployable. This woman, who has lived in the closet her whole life, from family, friendsfrom me until I was elevenshe looked at me, not saying anything, both of us just looking at one another. Even then, I didnt like the direction in which this was going.

I came home that week with a writing assignment: What I Did This Weekend . I remember how the sentences clotted, disintegrated every time I thought them. How I broke them before they hit paper: He buried a cat.I, I buried a cat .

I learnt to use this Ito speak and write and do as if my body somehow reverberated within this sound. But I have never felt comfortable with an I, or in bringing any concept of me as a self to language. I find silence and physicality come more naturally. And distance. To feel oneself as over there, as nebulous. Within and without.

Nonbinary, transmasculinemy gender exists, for the most part, as unseen, unworded, unintelligible. It is instead reduced to the gender I was assigned at birth, as if any counter to this will always be less real. Somehow, gender requires corporeal inscription to be accepted. I regularly find myself trying to explain my gender in terms that will make it intelligible to another. Yet despite trying to explain how pronouns still carry somewhere in water disjointed from me. How I sense myself as movement. As lake or late-night radio. As a thing that feels weighted, finds it hard to rise, break surface. Eventually, these attempts return crudely to bodily specifics, usually of erogenous zones.