If Aurora Mattia’s first book, The Fifth Wound, is an autobiography as vision, her latest work Unsex Me Here—which came out this past April—offers itself as an autobiography of vision. Seductive, spiritual, and prismatic, Unsex Me Here is a mythology of Mattia’s writing life, spanning over a decade.
Peacock feathers, angels, opalescent substances, skin; Mattia’s language of symbolism is tight with desire, comprising a singularly ecstatic vision that composes transfemme pasts into a fantasia of futurity.
“Transition is not a transformation but a refraction.” Mattia notes in our conversation below. “It’s a question of the kaleidoscope of the self.”
—Daye Jung
Daye Jung: Dense, powerful symbols appear throughout the text, such as orchids, opals, and peacock feathers. Blueberries burst into flame in the garden of “Via Crucis” and they herald an end in “Ezekiel in the Snow.” How have you been able to interpret these signs across time, and how do they guide you as a writer?
Aurora Mattia: Those symbols are the encrypted language in which I communicate with god. And by god I mean whatever I feel when I apply mascara to my lashes.
Daye Jung: Could you talk about your relationship to mythology and the part that plays in your writing?
Aurora Mattia: Mythology is how I complete what reality suggests, but doesn’t reveal. “This way of seeing is methodically bound to all that is precious.” So wrote Alexa Jo Berry in a gorgeous essay for the Poetry Project
Daye Jung: You write, “A pearl is the silent howl of an oyster. In the beauty of my phrases seek their inverse.” Unsex Me Here inverts fiction with the fact of your life, and speaks to the narrative of your first book, The Fifth Wound. Can you speak to their relationship, and how the overall project of your two books works with, against, around the constraints of fiction?
Aurora Mattia: Unsex Me Here and The Fifth Wound are portals to a parallel reality, a half-step away from our own. A woman named Aurora lives there. I hope I meet her one day. I’m sure we’d have a lot to talk about.
Daye Jung: How does the transition from dreaming to waking figure into your writing process? How do you maintain a sense of mystery, or symbolic ambiguity, in that transition?
Aurora Mattia: Though I prefer them to waking life, I don’t like my dreams. My books are a way of rewriting them.
Writing is lucid dreaming.
Daye Jung: Unsex Me Here traces over your lifetime as a writer, doubling back with dates of revision. I’m curious how the process of revision has gone for you?
Aurora Mattia: Revision meant many things for this book.
It meant arranging—the stories are arranged in anagogical rather than chronological order. From the beginning I knew “Via Crucis” would be the keystone in relation to which the other chapters were balanced. I could call them chapters or stories, but Unsex Me Here is neither a novel nor a story collection. It is one story and many, like the Stations of the Cross: a spiritual movement: less a progression than a recursion, in the mathematical sense. There are recurring phrases, there are recurring horses and powders and flowers; I wanted them to function not like redundancies, but like déjà vu.¹
It meant writing a new story—because the collection felt incomplete. I knew something was missing, but I didn’t want to find out what. I thought I could hide the absence by means of arrangement, that if I could place the stories in the right order, the absence would shrink. But it didn’t; I felt it all the time, precisely in the shape of a single story. It irritated me, like when I’m trying to sleep, and I’ve turned out the lamps one by one, laid on my bed, and closed my eyes, only to find the almost-perfect quiet disrupted by a street lamp beaming thinly through my window: a light that I cannot turn off, whose halo of diffraction spikes poke and prod my attention. I wanted to ignore the missing story, just as I want to ignore the incompletion of the darkness. I am tired. I don’t want to get up to close the blinds. But otherwise I cannot rest. So I wrote the story, “Wild and Blue”—I didn’t drink for two days, an extraordinary rarity at the time; I shut myself away and took a lot of Adderall and wrote until I was finished. Then the pieces of the book clicked against one another; the tension was evenly distributed, and “Via Crucis” was no longer off-balance. My headache abated. I went to sleep.
It also meant changing publishers. In an essay called “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” Fargo Tbakhi writes:
“This can be our approach: to engage in a guerilla war on the page, to consider it an additional front in our solidarity with those who will always and forever be the targets of the state’s weapons.”
And:
“[H]ow can we refuse the integration of these choices and this language into a new neoliberal set of constraints that pay lip service to the struggle but work to neutralize it nonetheless? … It might mean writing things that are unpublishable and forcing publishers into doing it anyway; it might mean circumventing or ignoring the structures of publishing in favor of means of circulation outside the bounds of capital and therefore free from the grasp of the invisible hand. It might mean boycott, pressure, and refusing to allow the return of the oppressive dailiness in any space we inhabit. It might mean being loud, annoying, and resolutely steadfast in our refusals and our insistences.”
¹ After reading Unsex Me Here—whose constituent languages, hereafter partaking of simultaneous time, date from before transition, and the flickering sped-up heat of high transition, and the cool slow outer rings of life-in-transition—Emily Zhou said she was startled by her sense that, despite having been written in so many times and places, the stories in the book nonetheless formed a definitive statement. That effect was intentional, both in time as I wrote these stories and after, as I edited them. And it was unintentional, because the stories were responding as much to each other as to the needs and intensities of whichever moment I was living when I wrote them. Transition is not a transformation but a refraction. It’s a question of the kaleidoscope of the self: how the same few materials—some beads and bits of tinsel; some memories and obsessions—when rotated (by time) in a prism (the narrating mind) can produce so many different shapes and textures, which nonetheless retain traces or residues of each other, or of a common vision or source: the void at the center of the mind, which they circle and which is their non-mother, their mother of nothing.