When I first met my husband he had just injured his cremaster, a muscle most people don’t know about unless you are really obsessed with penises. The cremaster carries the testicles up and down, further from or closer to the body. Most people only learn about it if they have a problem—the muscle commonly plagues men who jog without sufficient support for their testicles, straining the cremaster as it tries valiantly to hold the testicles steady. 

The cremaster moves the testicles in order to regulate the temperature of the scrotum. Sperm stay alive at the ideal temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and the cremaster works hard to preserve this temperature: it links up to a system of muscles and fascia from the oblique muscles to the pelvis, a delicate loop that controls how much surface area is exposed and thus how quickly body heat moves away from the testicles. Thus testicles hang low when it’s hot out, and high when it’s cold. Like many delicate systems in the body, we only notice this one when it stops functioning. 

Two months into our relationship, my husband asked me if I wanted to take a bath with him. He brought in candles and tried to make it a romantic night, but the true reason was that he had injured his cremaster, and the doctor had said that heat would help the sore muscle heal. In the soft, warm water, he snuck in care for his own injury while folding his large body around mine from behind. 

//

Ten years later I was at an art museum in Berlin. I had been sad and solitary while struggling to finish a project. I reached for my books— or, more accurately, my pdfs—for protection. In one of my loneliest moments, I read Harry Dodge. In The River of the Mother of God: Notes on Indeterminacy, Dodge reads Hannah Arendt in search of what it means to be ethically social. Dodge describes how “one can be more readily social if one allows oneself some time and space to think (simultaneously alone and together with others).” It is public space of contemplation that allows one to actually think something through—not entirely alone, but given space around one’s body and mind. 

And so I took the very long walk to Hamburger Bahnhof, a quiet, airy contemporary art museum where I knew I could stand next to others. 

Upon entering the museum I went first into the exhibition entitled Die Elefant in Der Raum. The title excited me because much of my experience in Germany involved the elephant in the room: the history of the country that haunted every conversation even when I wanted to dodge it. But, in a twist, the Elefant in this exhibition referred not primarily to politics or history, but to sculpture itself, the elefant being the form of sculpture and how it literally takes up space. 

The German artist Joseph Beuys was featured heavily in the exhibition, especially several of his felt pieces. I walked around them on the shiny wooden floor, thinking of the 2018 German film Werk ohne Autor in which a character based on Beuys slams piles of lard against walls and fervidly repeats “dur felt and Der filz.” In this film, the Beuys character says that he is focused on felt and fat because these are the materials to which he has the most immediate emotional connection. He instructs the main character in the film—at the time a young art student under his charge—to discover for himself the materials with which he has this kind of immediate connection. The Beuys character recounts the story of how he was nursed back to health by nomadic Tatars after his plane crashed in Crimea during WWII. (All of this is based on Beuys’ own personal mythology, though records show that Beuys was in fact recovered by Germans and there is not evidence of any Tatars nearby. It’s largely agreed that Beuys at least partially invented this story in order to develop his persona and the narrative around the materials he chose to use in his work.)

In Die Elefant in Der Raum, Beuys’ supple materials felt extra theatrical, placed as they were against the planked floor and the white wall, under the high rounded glass ceilings of Hamburger Bahnhof, a museum designed inside the curves and drama of an old train station. Pacing around them, I found myself impatient with the sculptures, seeing only the movie and Beuys’ tidy explanation, unable to speculate as widely as I’d wished. 

I rounded a corner to get away from the Beuys, and tried not to step on squares of felt arranged in the middle of the space, the elephants of this room. I noticed a smaller room to the side of the main exhibition, and headed in that direction, looking for something that was actually cozy, instead of something soft that I couldn’t touch.

The smaller room was a rectangle with only a few objects in it. As I stood in the doorway, I could see first that the room was dedicated to the work of American artist and director Matthew Barney, particularly his series of films, Cremaster Cycle. On opposing walls of the room sat framed stills from various films in the Cycle. At one end a bench was set up for viewing a large screen showing Cremaster 1 (Choreography of Goodyear + MS Goodyear) (1995). The room felt extra white, its walls glistening against the glass display case set up just underneath the monitor screening the video projection. In the case were a few props used in the filming of Cremaster 1, most notably a clear plastic high-heeled pump. 

I moved toward the case, but realized, as someone cleared their throat, that standing by the case meant blocking the view of anyone watching the film. I hovered nervously to the side of the glass, then moved quickly away to the bench, where I sat compliantly. The clear shoe glinted at me from across the room, at moments flashing reflected colors from the screen above.

Cremaster 1 has been sometimes referred to as the most “feminine” of Barney’s Cycle which is, after all, named after this muscle around the testicles, and deals—among many themes—with masculinity and its discontents. The Cycle is known maybe best for being notoriously difficult to get through, and according to critics, requires great concentration and dedication, a kind of strapping feat. From the bench I was only watching one film, not the whole cycle. Still, sitting there I felt most immediately the feeling of being inside—not just encased in this smaller room, but inside of Barney’s aesthetic, his carefully curated world.

I was somewhere in the middle of the film. The camera moved between groups of women, each wearing very specific makeup and costumes that indicated certain divided roles, each with a high femme cast to it. The bulk of the film transitions between two tracks: in one, dancers form grand formations across a football field, over which two blimps fly. In the other track, we see inside these blimps, where bored flight attendants smoke and eat grapes from giant tables, underneath which a woman dressed all in white satin appears to be trapped. She moves ever-so-slowly, steals grapes from the table above her through a vulva-like rip she tears in the tablecloth with her long nails. She silently and painstakingly waves her legs around in those clear plastic high heels. She seems to be controlling the dancers down below on the field, as the patterns she creates with falling grapes predict and echo the movement of the dancers. 

The best known scenes of Cremaster 1 are often referred to as “fallopian imagery,” including scenes in which those falling grapes trace the outline of Fallopian tubes and uterus, and glamorous dancers do high-kicks in old-Hollywood style. To me, though, the grapes seemed less like a human ovum and more like sperm, the way they survive falls and travel from great heights, dancing in a direction that seems required of them. They are solo travelers, alone together in the same film, each dedicated to their own targets.

//

I’m meeting a German friend who I don’t see very often. We hug over his bicycle, and I am suddenly aware of how lonely I have been, my body caving towards his, eager to be absorbed. I pull back quickly so that he will not feel my need. We stand apart and I wonder what next, so I suggest that we find a place to settle on the grass and talk. 

My friend nods, and we walk to the Landwehrkanal. He asks good questions, and peppers me with many, earnestly trying to catch up. How are you? How is your work? How do you feel being here? I speak cautiously, feeling careful and slow before his friendliness, always a little suspicious about opening up until someone proves they actually want to know. My friend spreads a blanket and we sit by the canal a few feet apart from each other, though in the past we’ve touched with ease. We’ve been lovers, but mostly friends for years now, and it’s never been confusing—there’s always been a clarity to our communication, a trust that we want to know each other but do not want to bother or intrude. We live far away, and don’t try to maintain something that’s difficult over distance. When we go a long while between seeing each other these boundaries can feel high, like I can barely see my friend over his politeness, and we have to work our way back to the intimacy of the past. Our talk today feels like this, formal, obligatory somehow, and I realize I am breathing shallowly, waiting. I am waiting out this part for the time it takes to grow comfortable again, for the part when that switch will turn on to closeness, the way I remember us laughing easily together at other times. I try not to speak much, but turn most of my friend’s questions back toward him. I watch his face as he answers me and I have a hard time concentrating on his actual words, more taken with the colors of his beard, his eye creases, and the minutiae of his gestures after time apart. 

At one point, while he is updating me about his mother, something stings me very sharply on my ankle. I feel it, notice it, but make no sign or sound. I take in the prick of it, and continue listening. Only later, when I slip away to the bathroom, do I investigate the area. It is red and hardened, but not swollen. It’s not a bite or sting I’ve seen before.

I take a while in the bathroom with my ankle pulled up over my knee, inspecting. Someone knocks on the door and jiggles the handle. “Uh, yeah!” I exclaim, never knowing how to respond from that position. Wrong, I think: wrong language for this country, wrong thing to say, wrong activity to even be doing in the bathroom. I place my ankle down cautiously, open the door, and return to the blanket on the grass, where my friend has a patient look on his face and is starting out at the geese on the water. I ask him what one is meant to say from inside the bathroom when someone knocks. 

He doesn’t understand, at first.

“I mean, in German,” I say, “what do you say when someone is checking if you are still in there?” He laughs. 

“You say: go away, I’m shitting?” 

“No, really,” I press. I want him to give me what I need, something sincere, a phrase truly useful in polite exchange. I am tired, now and already, of this conversation, the surface we can’t seem to puncture. He senses my impatience and shifts his posture, turns away from me and stretches his legs toward the water. “Okay, the correct word would be besetzt,” he says. Meaning, occupied. 

“It’s the same as squatting in a building,” my friend says, “or Occupy Wall Street.” I can tell he’s proud of the reference he’s made, and he leans toward me. “Or you could be besetzt with your work?” 

I sigh, and he notices. “This means something to you,” he says. Things are finally, slowly loosening between us. I think of Arendt and Dodge, Arendt’s insistence that free thought primarily takes place in dialogue with another, and how my friend is reaching for this, for co-thinking. Besetzt. I feel the porous sense of where this word could go, and nod. I tell my friend how many hours I’ve been spending at the computer feeling stuck, how it seems impossible to continue, that it’s all been pointless and the book impossible to write. 

“But this is how all artists feel,” his chin tilts down toward me, his hand now very light at my calf, comforting. His finger slips across the tendon, and encounters the red bump at my ankle. He looks up with concern. 

“Something stung me a few minutes ago,” I say, pulling away from his grip. 

“A few minutes ago? You kept it to yourself while we talked?” He seems disappointed, left out.

I straighten. “I’m upholding my masculinity by not showing pain.” I mean it as a joke, but also feel a showy pride. 

//

As it always happens when you learn a new word, I begin seeing besetzt everywhere, particularly on posters about an upcoming protest. I spend a day waiting for a friend to get back to me about our plans tonight, besetzt with the ongoing annoyance of my attention drawn in her direction. I’ve been waiting on her, and cannot tend to anything else. It eats up the day. A friend texts a group to say we should come to the park tomorrow for his birthday, but no big deal if we are not already besetzt. 

I show up at the park and drink warm beer on another blanket, this time surrounded completely by gay men who are engaging in a conversation about penis shape, size and angle. I nod and pretend to care, fake total enthrallment in this topic about which I already know far more than enough. I let myself be just another body in the soft heat of the night, overtaken by a conversation. It’s relaxing in its way, sucked in without having to participate at all. 

//

My uncle taught me how not to be tickled. It started because he’d tickle me as a young kid and then I’d try to get him back, but he’d sit motionless and relaxed against the couch. I would stare into his face as I scratched harder and harder into his armpits and his waist, but nothing. His jaw would barely move. I was angered by this unevenness, but also awed. Eventually he explained to me that if you concentrate hard enough while someone is tickling you, you can relax your muscles and control the sensation, or, more exactly, dull your relationship to it. We made it a game and practiced together until I could feel the input of a tickle but control the response, soften my body around the stimulus. It took my full concentration, to the exclusion of all else. The minute he would start talking to me, I would lose it. I had to seal myself off totally in order to play.

//

The longer I sat in the white room watching Cremaster, the more I felt I could space out. It wasn’t the loop, the 40 minutes after which everything returns. No: it was the feeling of watching images familiar but exaggerated; the campy version of everything that normally surrounds me. As beautiful as the images were, I closed my eyes and didn’t feel that I was going to miss much.

“Rather than reading Cremaster, we are encouraged to consume it as high-end eye candy, whose symbolic system is available to us but hardly necessary to our pleasure,” write critics Alexandra Keller and Frazer Ward, “meaning, that is, is no longer a necessary component to art production or reception.” The film presents a set of symbols and images that meet whatever the viewer wants them to be, or whatever the viewer associates with them: a kind of junk-food manna. We are not nourished by it, but have the opportunity to notice in the film’s content the symbols we’re already carrying around.

Keller and Ward continue: “Left to its own devices—and it is all devices—Cremaster places us in a framework of mutually-assured consumption, consuming us as we consume it.” I watched the woman in white tear open the tablecloth and sneak a grape through, and I watched her calves move weakly across the surface of her confinement. These devices are ones I already know, and already know how to use, so I ate them up as I went along, snacked unavoidably on familiar modes of patriarchy, not disrupted. Placid. 

It was nearly silent in the gallery as people moved in and out of the room, catching a few moments of the film and drifting on. I felt powerful with my eyes closed, having staked out my place on the gallery bench and stayed icily still. My affect was flat, my face smooth, and I felt vigorously immune, mountainous in that Zen-sense. 

//

I do not understand how a joke has not been made about the "seminal nature" of Barney’s Cremaster Cycle. The Cycle has been referred to as “seminal” in one review, but it’s not couched ironically. Seminal: Groundbreaking, strongly influencing of what comes after, creative in the sense of birth. What comes after as linked to the original thing whether the after-thing chooses or no, like a petulant child standing in their parents’ shadow pouting, I didn’t choose to be born to you. The Cremaster Cycle occupies a room and something oozes from it. Something wraps around us that owns the place.  

//

I left Hamburger Bahnhof and took myself out to lunch, something a friend told me to do for “self-care.” I usually roll my eyes at this overused term, but accepted it this time because I wanted instruction. “Order yourself something special,” she texted. It’s a kind of consumption practice I try not to engage in, but I was very tired, so I got an iced coffee with some kind of homemade non-dairy milk made from an exotic nut the waiter only knew the name of in German. It sounded right, and the coffee came in a fancy fluted glass, but as soon as the glass hit my table, a wasp arrived and began circling. I tightened. A few years before I would have screeched and run away immediately, notorious as a child for my skin’s intense reaction to bee and wasp stings. But over time I’ve learned the adult behavior of waiting it out. I stared at the insect cautiously as it moved from my elbow to my plate. 

When my salad arrived, the wasp liked that, too. I lifted my fork ever-so-slowly and took tiny, cautious bites to my face, closing my lips carefully and setting the fork down as far as possible from the insect. I breathed in and out, making no sudden movements, no jerks. I clenched, but kept my surface soft.

Like the tickle, I could hold this out only to the exclusion of all else. I didn’t eat much of my lunch, losing my appetite as the fear tightened my belly. I pulled out my book. I tried to read and write but failed. The wasp whizzed by my ear. I couldn’t concentrate, my skin itching with tension, and then, suddenly, as the wasp moved to the back of my hand, I stood. 

I gathered my things in a clump and marched away from the table, hot, itching. I was fast now, away from the wasp, opening and closing a door to the cafe so it couldn’t come through. I was embarrassed, imagining everyone around watching my childish behavior. I paid at the counter and shut myself in the bathroom for a moment of peace, where I crouched over the toilet and ran my hands across my arms and legs, squeezed the back of my own neck. The skin across my arms red and prickling, my body suddenly rippling with a larger anger.

//

Sarah Ahmed uses the term “feminist snap” to describe the moment the feminized body dramatically refuses something it’s been tolerating for a long time. One event precipitates the snap, but the snap is caused by many events in sequence to which the subject has not been reacting. Ahmed writes, “[s]enses can be magnified, sometimes after the event, in a way that one may not just touch lightly upon the issue, but cling on the detailed recollection of components ‘too overwhelming to process…” Ahmed’s “components” ring through me here like Barney’s “devices,” the tendencies and traditions that have been in our air for so long we barely see them—until we do. Until our senses magnify, having been taut and allowing for so long, unable to focus on much but our tolerance: for the wasp, for the film I watched for longer than I meant to, for the fat and the felt and Der Elefant in Der Raum. An exhibition with a name that gestures toward an awareness of secret undercurrents, of powerful forces at work, but then neatens everything around it, doesn’t spill an ounce. 

One of my favorite definitions of loneliness is that by Harry Dodge, who frames it through how much is permeable or shared: “I am interested in the thinking of solitude as vibrantly contaminated by companionship and loneliness as a kind of stark, depilated situation of non-collision.” Periods of non-collision often involve a flood of information otherwise: I am not isolated from information altogether, but what I do receive fills my space not as companion but as current, alluvial. I am lonely because I do not get to interact with what comes through, its “depilated” legs continuously slipping past me, far too smooth to grab. 

Cremaster 1 opens by panning across a group of dancers in heels standing still but together. They seem to be preparing for a big dance number, all costumed up and carefully arranged in rows. The women in the front row hold up giant orange hoop skirts revealing most of the length of their legs, and their toes tap very slowly in front of them. This tiny movement feels oddly intimate in a group of performers, like a coordinated nervous tic. Their toes tap side-to-side, just slightly, waiting for something bigger to begin.

From the view of these toes we pan out to a football field and then to the two blimps that fly above it. These blimps will become the location of many of the scenes that follow. From the minute we begin to see inside of the blimps, there is a soft whooshing sound in the background, like a white noise machine, a buzz that grounds the remainder of the film even as other sounds come in and out. The sound of occupation. Though the film has many interesting audio tracks that enter to indicate and align with particular characters, this whoosh is the one that stays with me. It’s the sound that covers over, blanks out whatever else is at work. 

//

Once my husband had the cremaster injury it became something he could talk about with other men. I have encouraged him a few times to explain the cremaster publicly to someone who has not yet had the occasion to understand it. More often than not, that other man’s eyes will widen and he’ll realize he once had this injury too, but never knew exactly what it was. “Just crotch pain,” they say, as the cremaster becomes shared territory between them. 

A warmth unites these men, though soon they move on to “cream” jokes. They can acknowledge now that they share a delicate something, something that usually moves in and out of sight in its soft sacs, the cremaster carefully tucked between layers of spermatic fascia. Listening, I find myself jealous of this moment of exposure. Because it is about a penis, the information has the potential to be more funny than vulnerable, its elegant (if slightly torn) systems in place. It’s a reminder of fragility, but only as a brief pause before the cloak of patriarchy takes over. I watch these men laugh together, and do not see any indication that a person could get stuck in the injured place. I envy the laughter that allows them to move beyond the pain point, social moments that do not require a person to disappear. 

//

I began this writing long before COVID-19, but it emerges into the world as I am beginning to emerge from  three months of quarantine, and it’s impossible to think about fragility, loneliness, or anxious occupation without considering both the insideness many of us have experienced this spring of 2020. Many of us privileged enough to stay inside have been less occupied than usual, and there are ways in which this insideness has felt like an uncovering, as opposed to or alongside the isolation of it. People I love have expressed how quarantine has un-cloaked what is “truly important” in their lives, or un-cloaked the evils of inequality we live within, or both, or more. For people like me living with white privilege, the tremendous uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black people has made visible the constancy of mourning of Black life in this country, and ways in which my daily life as a white person has kept me occupied, not seeing, complicit with racist violence.

As I leave my home, I am thinking about how I move out into a world full of people, some of whom have been less occupied inside, some of whom have been more occupied with mass movement, most more raw in multiple ways, the raw skin of recent illness and mourning.  Mourning the loss of loved ones, loss of financial security, or loss of any illusions of safety nets and state-organized care systems. This means very different things for different people, but my hope is that these skins not disappear so quickly under the dressing of our old costumes, that the social be a sting where it needs to be, instead of just the known, blanking escape of how we used to mingle—I hope that we let the fragile change us.