Moina Pam Dick’s 70-page poem Moira of Edges, Moira the Tart (OPR, 2019) is almost as inscrutable as is the poet who wrote it. And that seems to be precisely the point. Pivoting between “reason” and “unreason,” the poem invites the reader to follow Moira/Moina Jones, an extension of the (fictional) authorial voice, as she slips along the edge of unknowing:
Now untie the knot of reason to release un-
Reason
To dissolve
The paradox
Of time; the dissolute paradox
It was, was not
Be bare now (28)
Without clear signposts for the reader, Moira of Edges resists clarity; however, its frequent (albeit subtle) allusions to its source, the life of St. Mary of Egypt, provide some ground to establish meaning. Mary of Egypt was a fifth-century sex worker, often refusing payment from her clients since pleasure itself was all she sought. Sleeping with sailors in exchange for passage, she crosses the Mediterranean from Alexandria to the Holy Land to seek out and seduce vulnerable pilgrims congregating for the Exaltation of the Cross. When she arrives at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, however, she encounters a mysterious force barring her entry. An icon of the Virgin Mary miraculously intercedes, exhorting her to discover a life of sanctity by losing herself in a vast desert across the Jordan River.
By the time Mary of Egypt is discovered forty-seven years later by another human, a monk named Zosimas, she is completely blackened from the sun, naked but for the glowing white hair that covers her, and alluring in her newfound sanctity. She has been wandering the desert with only three loaves of bread. Covering herself with Zosimas’s cloak, she tells him her salacious story. Like Mary’s projected pilgrim-victims of Jerusalem, Zosimas is instantly charmed. He commits to waiting for her on the banks of the Jordan every year on Maundy Thursday to bring her the Eucharist. Her spiritual consumption of Christ’s body would echo her reception of the many physical bodies she has consumed sexually. On Zosimas’s first return, a Christ-like Mary walks across the surface of the Jordan River to receive the host from him. On his second return, however, he discovers her dead. With the help of a lion, Zosimas buries Mary’s body in the desert.
The popular eroticism of women like Mary of Egypt—a genre of saint referred to as “harlot-saints”—challenges the simple conversion story, a point that Virginia Burrus makes in her Sex Lives of Saints. “Failing to register the profound ambivalence of such a figure, scholars have scarcely begun to plumb the depths of attraction that the Lives of women in extremis exert. We have, perhaps, been unwilling to surrender to the power of the unabashed (possibly even unrepentant) pleasure that inheres in the texts.” Burrus provocatively concludes, “Put simply, my argument is that the ‘holy harlot’ of ancient hagiography is just that: already holy, and still, unrepentantly, a ‘harlot.’”[1]
This is exactly the kind of tension Dick explores in her modernization of St. Mary’s story, Moira of Edges, Moira the Tart. Dick—who has previously published under the names Gregoire Pam Dick, Hildebrand Pam Dick, Mina Pam Dick, Misha Pam Dick, et al.—writes as Moina, echoing the eponymous protagonist’s name, Moira. This authorial identity threatens further collapse when the protagonist, just over halfway through the poem, refers to herself as Moina: “Stop your rubbing, Moina” (39). With its near homophonic relation to the French la moine, a feminine form for “monk,” “Moina” names a female recluse and realizes the “conversion” of harlot to saint (as a female desert hermit) even as the poet’s near identification with her protagonist problematizes this too simple allegorization.
Just before introducing Moira’s second identity as Moina, Dick reflects on the equivocal meaning of “cleave,” meaning both to split and to unite. This third-person identity, naming herself in her post-conversion identity, is simultaneously a continuation of Moira’s former self and a new identity:
To cleave or to cleave to?
Detachment or attachment?
Either way to spirit
Severs contact of two series subtracts friction
Stop your rubbing, Moina
But it’s consciousness that does this. (39)
Dick reveals through this self-naming the paradox of a unified self-identity. With the exhortation “stop your rubbing,” a second voice interrupts the stream-of-consciousness style, exhorting Moina to stop rubbing, with all of rubbing’s masturbatory implications. This imperative, presumably coming from Moira herself (“But it’s consciousness that does this”), illustrates the price of achieving a self-conscious subject-identity: the subject achieves consistency (redemption?) through a submission to self-enforced norms—the superego, according to the psychoanalytic tradition—that paradoxically severs the subject’s unified perception of reality. A self-reflexive but also self-policing subject contradictorily achieves a sense of unity by becoming split, a cleaving and a cleaving to. The messiness of material reality and its pleasures, both associated with the frictions of rubbing, are preconscious, becoming lost in the “spiriting” that seeks to smooth over any contradictions. Dick overcomes this risk of total transcendent collapse by heightening the reader’s awareness of this subjective split—emphasized by the doubling of the name—that unites poet and protagonist while also accentuating the multiplicities inherent in each of the identities.
The friction of the above lines could cease if Moira and the poet fully united in the figure of Moina the Pure. Rather than collapsing these identities, Dick revels in the transitional space, the “edge” or “verge” that allows the identity of “harlot-saint” to be one not of a before-and-after, but of simultaneity: a whorish sanctity that is at once a sanctified whorishness. In other words, Moina, remaining heterogeneous, keeps rubbing, keeps grinding:
A holy verging is barely
Touching
At rough edges
If on edge or with God’s edge on
(Black sheep, prodigal son, lost girl: desire’s potency, divinity)
To rub all over words (punning as word sex, incestuous or homo
phonic syno nymic homo nymph
make nth contact) (27)
Moina cannot be rationalized, but persists in unreason, pursuing the illogic of desire’s insatiability: “you must / eat less / while insatiable” (16).
The doubling that occurs—cleaving of identity/cleaving to identity—further informs two competing phenomenological relationships to time, a central theme in the poem: “Two ways of stopping time: / 1) to leave the present, now, observe all times as equal / 2) to love the present, now, shun other times as gone, unreal” (39). Time can be experienced by consciously reflecting on and thus leaving the now to consider the trajectory of its passing; or, in direct opposition to this, time can be experienced in the now by embracing the fullness of present feeling that drowns out any sense of conscious reflection, and thus any awareness of time’s passing. The present now becomes either a fiction or the only reality. Referencing Kurt Gödel, the Austrian analytic philosopher who appears alongside the poem’s many other artistic and philosophical interlocutors, Dick discusses the four dimensions of spacetime and the four times of timepoint (reflected in Moira’s impressive sexual endurance, “four at a time one time” p. 40):
Thus point is not reducible to time (in timepoint)
As time is not reducible to space (in spacetime)
(unless Gödel: time is space if relative
and isn’t built, block time spatial from outside it? All
the instants simultaneous?) (30)
Dividing timepoint into five component parts matching the first five letters of the alphabet (Arrow, Block, Chord, Edge, Dot), Dick constructs a scale of perfection, à la fourteenth-century mystical treatises, that moves from the straight flow of time (arrow) to dimensionless immanence (dot), the latter realized in ABCED’s transliteration as “abyssed” (59). Shifting from time’s theoretical flow to its experience as a nondimensional now is a becoming-abyssed. (The subtle switching of D and E, however, interrupts the straightforward development that such a model seems to introduce.)
Despite the constant allusion to theoretical traditions, Dick repeatedly brings Moira/Moina back to the present experience of the text: “But Moina, don’t do Kurt now! / Curt, girdled, be a cut girl. Edit” (30). The name Kurt Gödel slides over the readers’ tongues as it becomes variously punned. Although she isn’t fully doing Kurt, she gives the reader a taste of him.
Through puns (and their undoing), homophones, homonyms, and other homos, readers are invited to feel and taste the similarities between verge, vierge (virgin, blank), and virgule (comma), finding in the slight pauses of the commas (which dangle over the edges of lines) a resistance to the kind of finality associated with the period (and the nondimensionality of geometry’s punctum). The metaphysics of such a narrative comes about when words, resisting an overly simplistic comprehension, edge up against the brink of collapse or madness.
With its lack of reference points and shifting meanings, the text itself becomes a kind of vast, blank (vierge) desert. Every time I’ve returned to the text, I’ve discovered different relationships between words, sounds, lines, as if wandering across the pages brings about a new kind of meaning that cannot be rationalized. In a 2015 interview with BookThug (now Book*hug) about her book Metaphysical Licks (2014), Dick says that this sort of “improvisational philosophizing” is exactly what she’s interested in pursuing:
[I’m very interested in] doing a philosophy in a non-systematic way, so you’re not creating a large systematic structure out of your philosophy, but that it would come in these kinds of instants and these moments, where there might be a moment of insight and that might lead you to something else…; that you could actually have improvisation be a part of your philosophical thinking; and that’s rather counterintuitive because people tend to think of philosophy as very organized and controlled and restrained.
Moira of Edges is a poem of commas becoming periods, of johns and Johns, and Jeans (but not really jeans), of rimming Rumis and swerving girlish dervishes, leading to Moira’s (or is it Moina’s?) version of conversion that is a little less con- and a little more cum: edging and edging, and edging ever closer to the abyss. This poem evacuates the content of words and meaning, folding and collapsing time and space, only to take the residual detritus and reintroduce it back into the swirling sublime: the nondimensional transcendent internally throbs with all of the stuff that it purports to leave behind. Moira and Moina struggle against (or alongside) each other, reincarnating the mystical void into the paradoxical identity of a harlot-saint.
By choosing a protagonist based on a fifth-century female saint, Dick calls up a tradition of illiterate women who purportedly gained immediate access to the mysteries of the universe, not through study, but through their sanctity: “She could not read language, but divinely / Constructed” (24). Like many female mystics before her, Moira Jones—and Moina Pam Dick—discovers an écriture féminine grounded in bodily experience that challenges the normative ideological systems of knowledge. Moira of Edges draws philosophical—and deeply erotic—possibilities out of a theology that purports to foreclose any such possibility. Moina Pam Dick’s poem presents the readers with the vibrating, pulsing promise—as seductive as Moira is herself—of radical change.
Notes:
[1] Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 131.