"The queers ability to move to, from and through...without succumbing to the inevitable and self-fulfilling narratives of desperation and violence that haunt the spatial peripheries"
Karen Tongson
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Proper Places
"I like airplanes. I like anywhere that isn't a proper place. I like in-betweens. "
Neil Gaiman, Sandman, Brief Lives
Across his Sandman graphic novel series, Neil Gaiman depicts faeries bringing to close their direct interaction with the human world, setting the mass exodus at the rise of the Early Modern period. Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Nights Dream is presented as a payment to Dream, the protagonist of the series, in exchange for awakening his literary genius; which Dream in turn offers to the fae as a gift upon their flight from our world. The rational behind the self-exile is ambiguous and many-fold, but corresponds to the flight of England to cities. The populated rural spaces appear to have been foundational to an alliance between these peoples. The fairies seem unable to follow humans into the city.
And yet, in Neverwhere, an urban fairy population is exactly what is depicted. It is discovered and explored when a human "falls between the cracks" of normative society into an invisible fairy underworld which exists in alleyways, subways, and skyways. The the veiled but interpenetrating lands of the fair folk in the rural setting, these city-faeries live alongside humans in the city, like shadows. From the perspective of the newcomer, many of the magical others appear as super-naturally inflected homeless, insane, and transient persons. Thus, both the people and the place of the fae are evidently out of joint with normative space, time, and temperament; situated as in between and ever in motion.
While these two portrayals of the fae in Gaiman's imagination may appear on the surface to be contradictory, rural versus urban, separate versus cohabitant, in both we see a population which is disturbed by the normifying structures of society and thus thrust into motion to salvage what they can from the loss. I ask, are not the transient fairies in these stories queer? Might queers be faeries in more than just metaphor? In addressing these questions, I look to Karen Tongson's Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginary to find in her description of a bastardizing, moving mix of migrant queers the presence of those she does not imagine in great detail: the disposed.
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Toxic
Habitats
I invoke the story of Sir Orfeo, to be a guide as we travel between city, land, and middle-scapes into the fairy underworld and back; paying special attention the queer environmental transformations and disturbances which keep disposed populations in perpetual movement.
Tongson invites us to imagine the toxicity of the city and how the normative practices there seep into the skin of the populations, making them chafe and ultimately expelling them from the urban community. We see this active in Sir Orfeo, where his body, matriomonial body, and his body politic are infected with desires and discomfort that seperate them long enough for Orfeo's wife to be touched by one of the fae that come from outside the manor. Her dreams become haunted by disturbing images and for-castings, which bring her to the conclusion that she must leave the urban setting of the castle if she is going to survive un-maimed by the systems at work. From her perspective, she is put into flight. From her husbands, perspective, she is taken.
Orfeo then becomes infected by a severe grief over the untimely loss of his wife disturbs his mind so that he can no longer function in his role as lord of the manor. His dreams become plagued with visions, so that in his waking days he can longer focus on things and events as they happen. The present moves on, but he remains mentally torn between the past and the unknown otherworld which exists just outside the community center, where dangers and monsters live. At last he disrobes himself, appears in unseemly and unlordly clothes before his community members and announces that he can be one of them no longer. Mentally and bodily disturbed, he is compelled out of his home, onto the streets and then into the wilderness.
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Queer
Transience
Tongson goes on to invite us to imagine queer life as not bound by space or time, but as disturbed and disturbing bodies which perpetually travel through the world, erring as they go along. In Sir Orfeo, we find the story of Orpheus has been revised so as to trouble the definite divide between life and death, now and then, that is introduced in it. During his exile, Sir Orfeo travels the wilderness, the borderlands of his old home, and becomes a transient presence there. He spends his days composing music, an art which depends on the motion of bodies, fingers, strings, and air. His companions are animals which come, listen, and live with him for a time, but are not domesticated or naturalized as either companions nor extensions of him. Living on the medieval equivalent of the side-streets, years pass Orfeo by, who lives in a sort of indifference to it. His life is no longer ordered by Church holidays or by royal banquets, but by the fluctuating duration of his songs and the changes which incrementally alter his form to resemble the environment through which he travels.
One night, Orfeo is stirred again by the Fae. They pass by him in mass, with horses, dogs, horns, and men as if on a hunt. These place-less, home-less, bodies move by him, indifferent to him but affecting him greatly; because he sees his wife among them. She travels with the hunter, who never stop to actually seek game, but romp through the woods in a state of perpetual disturbance. Orfeo's wife sees him too, but regards him as part of the landscape, and moves on without dwelling on his sighting. He follows her, again relocated by his contact with these queer folk, into the underworld. This otherworld is described by the narrator, as Orfeo travels through it, as a place where great beauty and horror's coexist simultaneously. Their place, if it is a place, is one of disorientation and joussiance. Orfeo arrives at their version of a castle as soon as they hunting party does, seeks an immediate audience with the lord who holds her, plays his song to persuade him to release her, and they are off together back to his own castle. While this constant movement appears interrupted by the sudden insistence of a restoration and urban teleological narrative, Orfeo insists on returning in his wilderness clothes in order to trick and disorient his followers. Although they come to recognize and reinstate their lord, their return is as a queerly infected disturbance to the body politic.
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Passing Possibilities
Tongson further invites us to note and imagine the spontaneous avenues which open up possibilities for us, but which are not always followed or charted. These queer side-ways alley-ways and fair(y)ways are necessarily going to proliferate as we move and which not even our best efforts of normification and naturalization can fully map or order. Whenever we turn to see the shape in the peripheries, the shadow disappears. When we jump on the strange form rummaging in the buses, we land upon air. The fairy and the queer are always on the move, haunting and disturbing us with the taunt that whenever we chose a path, we surrender ever other; whenever we look somewhere to attend on it, we lose focus on the rest. This should not come as a despairing remark on the limit of our experience, but on the over-abundance of life and queer possibilities which perpetually shift around us. Our world will always exceed our powers to grasp it.
All throughout Sir Orfeo's relocating, we see glimmers of possibilities which are left unexplored and mysterious. In going to the woods, Orfeo loses sight and control over the courts. His new woodland neighbors creep in and out of view, so that he cannot even command them. Their lives remain mysteries to him, even as they live in proximity. Upon seeing one another during the hunt, the lovers pass by each other. We may wonder what would have happened if they had grasped each other just then, but may their acceptance of the different tracks they were on just then (one in motion in the hunt and the other standing amazed, like a tree in his forest) have been a tacit acknowledgment that even married persons remain mysteries and even unrecognizable to each other at times? If we might imagine the otherworld as death, or a transformed way of life, then could not this moment be a nod to the fact that we are all only temporary companions that at times must go on journeys which the other cannot? And all those transfigured, dismembered bodies in the fantastic buildings of the fairyworld, why only see a glimmer of them when our compulsion for awe and horror would ask us to stare? Is this not another acknowledgment that there is wonders and terrors, and transforming lives going on all around us which we can only ever see as we pass by on route to somewhere else? For most people, most of us will only ever be glimmers of possible persons, possible paths, and possible lives left unexplored.
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Temporal
Drag
Just as queers have long been regarded as those who have dwelt too long on a certain part of sexual, gendered, or other element of personal development, so too transients and fairies are ironically imagined as anachronistic hold-outs to the progress of humanity. Tongson invites us to think through Elizabeth Freeman's concept of Temporal Drag, in both the performative sense of enacting two times at once, but also the sense of being out-dated. In a modern, urban environment directed towards progress (generally conceived) things are perpetually transforming but imagined to do so on a very set path. There is only one road, or else all roads lead to Rome. Here too, queers, fairies, transients, and Sir Orfeo see to dance together in a temporal cluster fuck.
For those unfamiliar and for many of those who are, Sir Orfeo may sound like a strange half medievalization of the classic Greek story of Orpheus. We imagine Greek columns and togas even as we imagine castles and knights in armor. Visual depictions of Sir Orfeo often mix imagery from medieval and classic cultures. There is a temporal drag in effect throughout the story. Furthermore, the fairies too are consistently in Sir Orfeo and across much literature figured as anachronistic. Are they indigenous peoples, or new incomers? Are they coming or going? They look like us, but somehow older and wilder. They seem to live forever, and yet exude a tangible youth and freshness. When his Heurodice is contacted by the fae, she dwells upon dreams of the terrors of the future but also of an ancient people, all while still in the machine of the castle. When she is taken, Orfeo too is lost in dreams of the past and future, coming to disregard the present as worth his attention. In the woods, as he hears the hunt coming, the first sound he hears is a hawk, which draws him back to the time in
which lived in the urban landscape of the caste; hawking is a courtly activity. So too describing the parade as a hunt is a return to castle language, even as the text admits they kill no animals. In the otherworld, we see a strange mix of present with past in the modern yet ancient architecture and the living yet dead bodies inside them. As noted, the couples return to the castle, is just another relocation, which haunts the end of the story with the disturbance of all that has happened and may occur there, as a result of contact from queer, transient, fairy bodies.
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