Do I Dare?

I’ve been saying I’m gonna get a tattoo for fifteen years, but my body’s still bare.

Nowadays, I want to get an oyster shell on one wrist and a lemon slice on the other. The lemon is a nod to my sibling’s first published poem. In the piece, I’m preserving lemons, but then demons arrive to feast on them.

We talked about getting lemon tattoos together. They’d be matching but not matchy-matchy. Their tattoo taste is cheekier than mine. Sue me! I like those self-serious line drawings! But perhaps this ship has sailed; maybe my dithering has cost me this cute sibling bonding. 

The oyster: my beloved, sapphic, Pacific Northwest bivalve. She might nurture us through the apocalypse: her farming heals the waters, her protein is low-carbon. She tastes great with a squeeze of demon bait. 

I’ve been saying I’m gonna get these tattoos for at least four years. My friends have placed bets on whether I’ll ever lie down under the gun. 

But the first tattoo I ever imagined, when I was eighteen, was a line of poetry: T.S. Eliot’s “Do I dare?” I’m glad I wasn’t so trigger happy. 

Eliot is my problematic fave. I first read “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” as a teenager and delighted in its angst. The poem is about wanting to take action but being afraid or blocked. 

The poem is a cry from the post-World War I “lost generation”, brothers and friends dead in the trenches, all meaning lost. My electric-guitar-playing, motorcycle-riding high school English teacher would casually smile at me in the hallway and ask, “Have you dared today?” I always wished I could say yes. I wished I dared leave a home I hated, say no to a boy, hurt myself, make scary art. 

In 2009, the poster for National Poetry Month (April, the cruelest month) was of a rain-spattered window with “DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE?” finger-etched in the condensation. As I left for college, I sent a $5 check and a self-addressed stamped envelope to the Academy of American Poets so it could hang in my dorm room. 

I ended up writing both my high school and undergrad theses on Eliot. In college, writing about “postmodern theatrical adaptations of modernist literary works”, I realized mid-project, aghast, that I would have to write about Cats, the Broadway mega-hit based on Eliot’s poems (and by far the most famous work to fit my description). Had he been alive to see it, Eliot would have been far too much of a snob to like it, but I argue it’s exactly the kind of theatre he claimed to want. His coffin must have quivered after the “film” and its discourse (the buttholes!). Roll in your grave motherfucker! Roll!

In 2015, when Girls was on HBO, men from Brooklyn were twirling ironic mustaches, and I was sporting Zooey Deschanel bangs, internet pundits at centrist rags spouted “kids-these-days” thinkpieces about millennials—and our white, affluent, urban avatars: hipsters. I became somewhat obsessed with Karen Swallow Prior’s Atlantic article “When T.S. Eliot Invented the Hipster.” She writes, 

I felt seen by this description, like it helped me make meaning of the cultural moment, of the hipster I was (though it was anathema to admit as much). In hindsight, I think instead that I let that reactionary publication fix [me] in a formulated phrase, leaving me pinned and wriggling on the wall. There was reflection, but no liberation in those essays. I shouldn’t have let those pearl-clutchers define me.  

For a few years in my early twenties, I tried to write a theatrical adaptation of The Wasteland. At first, it was about his wife, Vivienne, who suffered from various inexplicable illnesses. Twice, I read half of Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines, an autotheoretical exploration of the “mad wives” of the literary modernists (Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien Elliot). Today, I opened the book to the page where my long-forgotten bookmark sat and read this passage: 

Zambreno wrote the book while isolated in Akron, Ohio because of her partner’s professor position there. One of the times I (half) read it, I was recovering from a scary depression while staying with my long-distance boyfriend in Amherst (where he was a professor). It was a bit too close for comfort; I couldn’t finish. 

Eventually, I ditched the maligned wives, and the play became an allegory for climate collapse, entitled Fear Death by Water. A girl in an arid plain, a wasteland, where there is no water only rock, travels to the sea. But a great flood is coming (fear death by water), and the mermaids (singing each to each) might save us all. I wrote the first act. I shared a plot treatment and a song with a circle of experimental artists who I thought were too cool for me (the curse of the hipster) at an artist’s retreat at a summer camp in Wisconsin. Everyone got naked and jumped in the lake, but I felt like too much of a prude to show my tits. I never finished the play. 

My politics weren’t sharp in those young-adult years; radicalization was still on the horizon. I didn’t understand Eliot’s racism, his antisemitism, his misogyny. In a certain reading, Prufrock could be an incel ode—a story of a man too afraid to speak to the women who come and go. He could be railing against women who “lie” to men by wearing too much makeup, to prepare to meet the faces that we meet. “I distrust the feminine in literature,” he once wrote. 

Eliot was an avowed right-winger, belonging to at least half a dozen societies dedicated to conservatism. No teacher, in either high school or college, spoke to me of his politics. But alas, I didn’t really understand at the time that my college, The University of Chicago, is conservative in macro and micro: spreading global neoliberalism and backing Pinochet, stealing more and more land from the South Side, hiring one of the largest private police forces in the U.S, chastizing students for desiring “safe spaces.” It’s no wonder I never learned. But when I re-read that thesis, I notice how I blatantly overlooked Eliot’s minstrelsy in The Wasteland; Fear Death by Water had a gratuitous (and, blech, dare I say, Game-of-Thrones-y) act of sexual violence. I should have known better.

Like many conservatives, Eliot diagnoses a problem pretty well, but offers a bad solution. He and his generation are alienated from themselves and one another by industrialization. They are grieving a pointless, impersonal war. His verse evokes this so well: “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” But his solution is to return to some fabled previous age, “the classics,” where men were men of action. He thinks cultural control—by the elite class, by the Anglican Church, by patriarchs—will “restore” “civilization”.

A long time ago, I saw a tweet that was something like…“Why is ‘Can you separate the art from the artist?’ always about…liking an abuser’s movie? Why isn’t it ever ‘Jake’s band sucks, but he’s a really sweet guy’?”

I’m glad Thomas Strearns’ words aren’t etched in my flesh. But these days I think of them often. I wanna reclaim “Do I dare?” from Tommy. 

Last fall, on an episode of Against Everyone with Conner Habib, Dean Spade said he feels strongly that “people’s dominant feeling in the current context is avoidance.” He says this avoidance can come up as social anxiety, isolation, numbing with TV or video games or drugs, or just a feeling that everything feels bad to do. “There’s a major avoidance mode which is a really reasonable response to a culture with this much coercion and [so] few reasons to feel hopeful.” 

I resonate with this “dominant feeling.” I am not texting back someone I love even though I want to. I am hiding from my laptop though I wish I was writing. I gotta respond to someone in my mutual aid pod, but I’m already behind so I feel guilty so I can’t make myself do it. The gorgeous CSA lettuce in the fridge is wilting because it feels way too hard to do my favorite thing: macerate shallots in sherry vinegar, emulsify it with oil and mustard, toss it with the greens and lots of salt. My beautiful art—photographs from my sibling, a square from the Gaza quilt, an old Winnie-the-pooh print—still isn’t hung, three years into living in this apartment I love. To make art or community or home or dinner is to overcome foggy numbness and prickling fears.

In her newsletter Group Hug, Elise Granata writes about “agency as a means of community worldbuilding.” She defines agency as “the gap between the idea and the realization of the idea.” More specifically, in micro, her example of this is when she “sew[s] a button back onto my sweater that has been dangling for months.” This is “desiring something and acting on that desire so that it leaves your consciousness and now exists alongside you in the real world.” It’s experiencing free will. It is, in fact, to dare.

Granata argues that this feeling of agency, when scaled up, helps us to build a new world in community. In “high agency spaces,” we feel free and inspired to…throw a baked potato party, organize a tenant union, or make a zine (to cite a few of her examples). “Do this enough times, and it’s impossible not to thrum with your own sense of power,” she writes. “It’s impossible not to get hooked on the loop of actualizing something with other people, leading to more and more collective practice of agency.”

Spade’s suggestion is similar, if splashier: smash a subway turnstile, steal things, fuck in public. These spontaneous actions access “forbidden parts of the feeling spectrum,” reminding us of our power. They connect us with our desire, including the pleasure of destruction—”destroying and defacing our opponent’s giant edifice that does feel impermeable.” Do I dare disturb the universe?

Last year, in the early days of this Trump presidency, I found myself deeply inspired by Granata’s “acts of agency.” I challenged myself instead to do one each day. I wrote them in the back of my journal, a daily litany: 

None of this is heroic. It won’t halt the wildfires, the genocides, fascism. But it helped an ember of power burn. I was a bit less alienated. I looked away from the doomscroll. And a friendship/comradeship was healed, a friend was fed, my emergency-preparedness was strengthened—hardly nothing!

One of my favorite passages from Prufrock reminds us of the time we have, the things we could choose to do with it, and all the ways it can be lost in freezing and dithering. 

Today, I logged into my bank and created a savings account entitled “Oyster Tattoo.” I fed it nine bucks. Today’s little act of daring, fighting against my hundred visions and revisions that keep art off my body. 

Read more: While working on this essay, I read two gorgeous pieces about Eliot and Prufrock: Avani Garg’s “T.S. Eliot: The Conservative Prophet of a Dying World”, and Sarah Kendzior’s “Bell Fountain Retreat.” Give them a read!