Arrest Ritual by Ming Lauren Holden, Part I
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.
EPISODE FIVE:
ARREST RITUAL
Now, I don’t know about you, but I tend to think professional sexism via artistic infantilization is a bummer, frustrating, disappointing, but distinct and apart from those violent expressions of misogyny widely agreed upon as horrific: domestic violence, sex slavery, rape. Stephen Elliott did not rape me, did not attempt to rape me. I am not anywhere close to implying that he did. I am saying a sexist negation, a refusal to acknowledge a female writer as a writer, as a peer, as a person, is of a piece with sexual entitlement. No, more than of a piece, it is practically a prerequisite. Humans are wide, open vessels, capable of almost anything—if you read you know this—but you cannot beat the mother of your children, or rape your childhood friend while she’s unconscious, or walk up to a sorority outside Santa Barbara and start shooting without first convincing yourself and allowing our culture to convince you that those women are less than human.
— Claire Vaye Watkins, “On Pandering,”
Tin House
[ Before I walked to the UCSB campus bicycle path roundabout and stood in the middle of it for fifteen minutes I gave papers with this invitation to members of my graduate seminar on Avant Garde Performance on March 7th, 2014.]
In honor of
Marina Abramović's “Rhythm 0”
& Yoko Ono's “Cut Piece”
I.
Title IX, Stalking Investigation Hearing into the Conduct of Matthew Smith, UCSB, July 2020. Dr. Ming Holden, Complainant, Closing Remarks:
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Yoko Ono's 1965 performance artwork Cut Piece, which took place in in New York's Carnegie Hall, and in which Ono seated herself in nice clothes and invited the audience to cut pieces of her clothes off with a pair of scissors she laid before her. Ono first performed the piece in Japan the year before, and has since performed it multiple times, but what snagged my attention is the video of her 1965 Carnegie performance. Maria Abramović’s, in her 1974 piece “Rhythm 0”, laid no fewer than seventy-two instruments of pleasure and pain (grapes, a whip, honey, a bullet, a gun...) for the audience to use on her body over the course of six hours.
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The first thing Ted does when he strides into the wine bar where I am waiting for him is to dutifully give me a hug. He’s in a corduroy blazer with the elbow patches. He can really do the Hot Professor thing. I’m in the loud polyester rainbow sherbet dress my father has just given me as a belated birthday present.
One of the first things I mention, since I know he loves horror, is Haunting of Hill House.
“I saw that series maybe like 72 hours sooner than I should have,” I say.
Ted grins broadly across from me. It feels like the only time since our very first dates that I’m clever enough for him in person. He hands me his phone to lookout pictures of Sophie. She’s the most queenly kitty I’ve ever seen, and I have missed her. A little “aw” escapes my lips and I catch Ted catching my tone and my expression, nostalgic for her.
“She’s beautiful as ever,” I say, handing the phone back.
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The statement of Ono's on Cut Piece featured on her website is quite brief: “People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me finally there was only the stone remained of me that was in me but they were still not satisfied and wanted to know what it’s like in the stone.”
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I'm at a disadvantage here for a few reasons, among them that I'm not a lawyer, but here's what I understand:
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Ted got to Yale the year after my brother graduated. We figure that out on the first date, when I’m watching his somehow deeply familiar face in the half-light, and I tell him that my favorite part of his book is the husband at the Austen conference running across the lawn after his wife, so that she won’t forget her heart pills. When I was in New Haven for my brother’s graduation, I tell him, there was a woman who had to be a mom of a graduate who set off across a cobblestone street in the rain to look at a plaque, and her husband, slightly alarmed, ran after her, holding the umbrella out so she didn’t get wet.
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“The human being, on the other hand,” writes Beuys, “can exist as a free individual, and his thought is his freedom.”
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A lot here seems to depend on the "reasonable person" standard, which within its legal context requires a two-prong subjective/objective test.
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There’s a certain triptych of memories that didn’t happen, too.
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Fluxus was the international art movement challenging the genre boundaries of art through “radically empiricist” “actions” or “happenings” that often defied rational explanation during the decades in which Abramović and Ono performed their pieces.
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At the time we dated, the respondent mentioned often how terrible he understood the conduct of my superiors to have been in various academic and teaching struggles. I always appreciated his assurance at the time that that would make sense.
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One of the ways my sexual desire for Ted manifests is a persistent daydream about a sexual position we didn’t get the chance to try.
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Though not perfectly aligned with the ethos shared by Cut Piece and Rhythm 0, another performance art piece of that Fluxus-laden era speaks to their intrinsic examination of freedom:
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I want the record to hear me say: None of that is normal.
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He’s a Yale legacy who sang a cappella in the White House.
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The 1974 work of Fluxus heavyweight Joseph Beuys called I Like America and America Likes Me, in which the artist shared a room in New York with a coyote for eight hours over three days.
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None of that is particularly reasonable.
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He can absolutely hang with the good old boys, I’m sure of it.
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Later Beuys co-authored a book about the piece, writing that “there's the question of whether man will change, and then whether he can link his organic instinctive feeling power to his thinking processes...only a man with his thought can bring new causes into the world and these determine the future of history.”
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Basic literature on dating violence support the notion that I took reasonable precautions in a situation that was escalating.
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And so perhaps because of that, in part, I keep thinking of him in an armchair, sitting by the fire, either with brandy if he’s young enough, or Perrier or some shit if he’s not, with Wharton or something on his knee.
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When Ted says he’s also seen the whole season of The Haunting of Hill House it’s first week out, I have a fleeting moment of wistfulness. I wish we could have watched it together, and still don’t exactly know why we’re not watching things together, pausing it to fuck. But we agree on the most well-made episode of Haunting, which is a series of long takes inside a funeral home and the haunted mansion. The youngest daughter, Nell, the one who will grow up to die in the old and abandoned house by hanging, is haunted throughout her like by a shadowy figure she calls “the bent-neck lady.” Nell gets lost in the shuffle during a storm that cuts the electricity. In the final shot, her ghost is there, by her coffin, her neck broken, crying. The voice-over is from her child self during the storm: I was shouting and jumping and screaming and none of you even looked. Why couldn’t you see me?
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But if the context of someone's past behaviors doesn't matter here, that's saying that context doesn't matter.
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I remove the book and sit on his lap, but I’m not facing him. And that’s how we fuck.
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Bueys endangered his own health, while Abramović and Ono chose rather to make it available to the audience to damage their health, which is what makes their pieces more exercises in trust and therefore in vulnerability.
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I'm not sure what a woman being treated the way I was needs to use to make her determination if she's not allowed for the totality of the relationship to inform her sense that things are escalating in a potentially dangerous way.
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In the wine bar I admit to Ted that while the funeral home episode of The Haunting of Hill House is the most well-made, the episode that gutted me was the one before it, where we see the final moments of Nell’s life. Nell dances alone in the decrepit old house with the ghost of her husband, who supposedly died by aneurysm. Nell was overcome by sleep paralysis, and could do nothing as she watched the Bent-Neck Lady hanging there and her husband die by some unseen force right in front of her.
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Yoko Ono cutting her own clothes up there onstage, Abramović cutting her own flesh, would not have been nearly as legendary, would not have been what Phelan calls, in her description of Abramović's work, “an experiment in intersubjectivity” that is “fundamentally theatrical in the sense that it depends on an audience.”
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It seems here that I have been punished for two years for reporting too soon that I was worried, and that I literally needed to wait for him to harm me even more for my fear of escalating behaviors to force himself back into my life to have weight here.
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And I think of it all the time, hot and bothered in the classic sense and like I never was about Matt, no matter how hard I tried to be.
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Is vulnerability “depending on an audience?” Is depending what it looks like—from without and within? That I depend on other people not to hurt my body?
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I would have needed to be traumatized again, and worse, and possibly to allow students to be traumatized, for Title IX to care.
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The second is an image, or maybe a gif, that replies in my mind starting with the very first of perhaps twenty or thirty dates I go on in the Bay Area after Ted blows me off on new year. The very first one is with a tech bro who lives near the Embarcadero, who is so nice that he actually buys my book off my press’s website after we wander the stalls of oysters and orange peel-flavored olive oil and end up in the bookstore. I start to feel sick and sad and finally figure out that it’s because I’m both looking for Ted’s book and afraid I’m going to find it.
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It also remains a mystery to me why I was denied due process rights to read a thousand pages of distressing material when it took Title IX investigators two years on their end.
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And that’s when I see him, in my mind’s eye, clear as day: he’s holding up a book and smiling at me. It’s a Saturday or Sunday and we’re a couple, going to a bookstore, and he is very triumphant. We must have just been talking about the book, and wanted to find it, or perhaps making pointless wagers about whether or not the book would be there, and he won. Either way, he’s smiling broadly at me, in a pea coat, with a scarf on, holding the book like Simba.
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Before she dies, Nell spins round and round with her dead husband alive and back in her arms. Nell can’t believe her late husband is in her arms and she’s in his. The decrepit house seems lit softly to her, like the lighting was at their wedding reception.
Link for Parts II and III of Arrest Ritual
Cover art credit to Earl Wilcox