In his 1818 treatise Le Nouveau Monde amoureux, utopian socialist Charles Fourier suggests that the limitation of sexual relationships to the monogamous, heterosexual couple is one of the greatest frustrations of civilization, arguing instead for liberated sexuality as a necessary opposition to capitalist productivity. Derided by Marx and Engels and a figure of fun to subsequent generations of leftists, Fourier was re-evaluated by Walter Benjamin in his testamentary text on the philosophy of history. “According to Fourier,” Benjamin writes, “as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man’s bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials.”
The dream of liberated sexuality and a socialist political hope (“Maybe socialism will unveil something”) are two sides of Marie Buck’s triangle in Unsolved Mysteries, a book with many threesomes; its hypotenuse, announced in the title of the first poem, is “the dead.” This triangle roughly maps to the work’s three sections: the dead in “Unsolved Mysteries,” politics in “Documentary,” and eroticism in, well, “Desire.” This architecture gives us a pretty good idea of the preoccupations of Unsolved Mysteries, a book whose title derives from a trashy long-running documentary program, about which the author informs us:
If you don’t know it, it’s a TV show from the late 80s and early 90s—and on up into the aughts, apparently, though I haven’t seen those episodes—about various eerie phenomena: unexplained deaths, paranormal activity, lost loves, hidden treasure, lost heirs, UFOs, missing persons, etc.
As Brian Whitener once wrote, it’s “kind of a mid-90s thing.” That period also marks Buck’s coming of age, and the book returns to such touchstones of the time as New Kids on the Block and ACT UP. In its preoccupation with generational recollection, Buck’s book shows some affinity with Joe Brainard’s classic I Remember, but the difference is the almost complete mediation of memory by the televisual—and later, by the Internet, which has inherited the syndicated shows of yore. Binge-watching Unsolved Mysteries on demand on a computer is a different experience than watching it whenever it was running on Lifetime, and that small difference is one more mark of our specific modernity.
Buck further informs: “If you remember the show, you probably remember it for the unexplained death segments, which mostly recount people going about their daily routines and then disappearing or turning up murdered.” In my recollection of the program, it was part of the constellation of cultural documents of the mid-90s concerned with the paranormal, of which The X-Files was the principal exemplar, but Buck wants to develop the particular affordance of “the violent deaths of mostly working class people, often living in rural places, whose lives would not otherwise be well-documented.” A number of the texts take their titles—“Jeremy Bright,” “Dottie Caylor,” “Kari Lynn Nixon,” “Kurt McFall”—from the names of people whose deaths or disappearances formed the subject matter of an episode:
I hope Kari is in New York City,
but instead,
at the end of the episode
we get a perfunctory update:
Kari was raped and murdered by a neighbor
who buried her body in his parents’ yard.
Others, like “A Stream of Discharge Arcs Away from a Nipple,” recount elements of the speaker’s daily life along with sexual experiences. The mosaic of materials slowly builds into the presentation of something like a counterfactual autobiography—the author, of working-class background, contemplating all the fates that could have been theirs but by chance or grace were not. (This meditation forms the substance of a text called, appropriately enough, “My Death.”)
The texts of this book are alternately prose paragraphs, broken with white space to suggest stanzas, and enjambed poetry. In either case, the basic method of the book is discursive, though much of its effect comes from the juxtaposition of these panels in series. The book feels indebted to other volumes of the past ten years—books by Brandon Brown, Dana Ward, and Lauren Levin, for example—that proceed prosily through diverse materials, often anchored by a first-person that is plainly the author and frequently in relationship with (often abject) pop-cultural materials. Unsolved Mysteries stands out from these texts on account of its obsessive preoccupation with the relation between politics, sexuality, and the dead. Its manner of thinking the disastrous conditions of capitalist subjection through the pop detritus of an old TV show also remind me of Kevin Killian’s Argento Series, which uses Italian horror movies to refract the calamity of the AIDS crisis.
The rhapsodic sexuality hearkening to Fourier is on display in “Dream in Which You Are Ineffectively Surveilled,” which imagines a transfiguration of bodies that is both erotic and political:
Desire satisfied, we’d begin to experience more desire, but—since we knew the political situation—we could channel that desire, brushing our lips over one another’s plastic, smoothed-over labia and clits until the brushing produced something that was not cum, and also not a weapon, but instead a device, a device that embedded us more concretely into ourselves and expanded the time that we would have: we would go to the meeting, we would print the fliers, we would show up to the demos, we would attach ourselves to others, all without losing our jobs.
The transformation into impossible or utopian bodies is almost a catachresis for the fundamental rewiring sexuality has undergone in the age of the Internet—but the poet pushes it toward a hope for sublation in which satisfying raunch is preserved and commodification and surveillance are discarded.
Even more fantastically, we read in “There Are Not a Lot of Universes in Which Time Travel Is Possible”:
You moan; they return it; their finger glows, E.T.-style; your clit glows back; the glowing finger and the glowing clit become vine-like and entangled, become animated by something else, pull the two of you back out into the world.
The future of a transfigured erotics bends back toward the early childhood charge of E.T. and its fantasies of perfect friendship, fusion, and escape from governmental containment.
Even the informational objects which are our conduits of knowledge are eroticized: “I’d suck on the shoulders of the g-chats,” or “it is a PDF of the personism manifesto / that you are fucking, and the PDF in turn fucks / a scene.” Again and again sexuality appears as a solution, or a response, to political problems—or sometimes, as an immediacy that answers the questions of mediation, distance, and loss: “I’m picturing the world not being garbage, me and my lover in the non-garbage world feeling not like garbage, grinding our clits against one another’s knees and thighs and worrying about nothing.” Buck is not the first to enact a sexuality that feels liberated, or to describe it in literature, or to imagine there would be a connection between such sexuality and political freedom. The legions of people reading Wilhelm Reich paperbacks in the 60s (and, uh, having sex with each other) make that clear. But much of this book turns on the idea that there might be something inherently revolutionary about sexual pleasure, or that a major purpose of societal change would be to make sure that we can have sex with who we want to. “Mid-day fucking, the opposite of work”? Reader, you decide.
As mentioned above, the TV show Unsolved Mysteries documents the proletarian lives and deaths that are frequently forgotten or made invisible. Documentary films are another through-line of the book, particularly those that likewise insist on rendering the biographies of working people. Mostly these works deal with social struggle and the fight for justice, such as United in Anger and How to Survive a Plague (AIDS and ACT UP), Harlan County, USA (coal-mining), Eyes on the Prize (the civil rights movement), and God’s Country (overproduction in farming). Like Buck’s reading of the TV show, they present lives compromised or ruined by the violence of capitalism. The addition of several autobiographical scenes set in cemeteries like Greenwood in Brooklyn, where “the pauper’s graves were dug / up to make the Gowanus Canal,” or further upstate, where “the gravestones are doing their jobs” of reminding us about the lives of people who are gone, underscore one of the book’s central preoccupations: who is memorialized, how, and why. A reading of Frances Yates’s classic Art of Memory leads the author to conclude: “the lower classes are hard to remember.” Under capitalism, the lives of working people are blurry, contingent, unimportant. The TV show’s recurrent tragedies suggest that “the price the working classes can pay to be memorialized is a horrific death.” But proper memorialization, and the legibility of these effaced lives, would be healing: “The point of reading is asynchronous intimacy, and hopefully it works forever.” Buck directs our attention to a utopia of care inherent in attention to texts, whether they are books or old TV shows, and asks us to imagine its expansion from the point of reading to an infinite horizon.
How can justice be done to these generations? Well, sci-fi sex is one proposal: “I’d like to sleep with the pig farmer [from the documentary God’s Country] in his youth, at the time of the documentary; I’d need a time travel machine to do it.” Time travel unites the intolerable present, the dreamed-of future, and the past in need of redemption—the past whose memories form the basis for all that we even can desire. Unsolved Mysteries turns, then, on the stakes of historiography, about which Benjamin writes that “[only] that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” Buck is convinced and fights for the dead: “All we’re going to do after the revolution is document the lives of the dead, not the dead we already know about, but the dead we don’t know about.” Remembering shifts the world on its axis. We can time-travel now.