An Interview with Bianca Rae Messinger, Author of pleasureis amiracle

What are the logics of pleasure? Bianca Rae Messinger’s pleasureis amiracle makes, if not an argument, the architecture of one (contoured by her preoccupations—language, sound, the sacred). “I think one of the book’s goals,” she writes, “is to be true to pleasure, which means to be unpredictable, latent, emerging.”

There’s a collage of references—from sonic mediation practices to religious heretics—that challenge and compound pleasure, and its discontents. Messinger expands on those references, and others, in our conversation below. 

You can order pleasureis amiracle—something “ravishing and graceful,” to quote Elizabeth Willis—here. 

—Dante Silva


Dante Silva: I wanted to start with the word pleasure, which you refer to as a “peculiar object.” How does pleasure—its attendant structures and politics—become peculiar?

Bianca Rae Messinger: The phrase itself, which I’ve messed around and truncated a bit, comes from the French writer and artist Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency. For Klossowski, the body is a “particular” object because, though it is the most “urgent matter,” it relies on instinctual drives which place it outside of any kind of “use-value.” In other words it’s an object you can never pin down. But most importantly, “erotic pleasure” for Klossowski shouldn’t be confused with “sexual need.” In danger of falling into a generalization, pleasure is peculiar because we can’t always tell where it starts or ends, it is both social and individual.

I think the book also tries to look at the logic of what we could call “pleasure simulation,” in the Catholic sense (and the catholic sense). I’m thinking particularly of the end of the book. And in that there’s an attempt to extricate myself from the logic of Catholicism, or the logic of my upbringing. But there are also many elements of Catholicism that I find quite interesting, such as its acceptance that pleasure can only be simulated. But anyways, I think Catholicism has a lot to do with the production of pleasure as an object, and the production of the object as pleasure. And then we have a whole tradition of Catholic mystics who say, wait a minute, what if we actually tried to be true to pleasure? Of course they were condemned as heretical, especially as Christianity became more and more a part of the state, but in the end I do think Catholicism itself has a peculiar relation to pleasure.

I see this issue also happening “peculiarly” in the book with regards to gender. Or, in order to change one’s gender under western society’s “attendant structures,” one must constantly prove how much “pleasure” they’re having, how “happy” they are having such and such a body; as if we live in a society that has any actual conception of what “pleasure” actually means; as if we actually have any idea whatsoever of what it means to be a body. So, there’s really so many levels of simulation going on all the time. I think one of the book’s goals is to be true to pleasure, which means to be unpredictable, latent, emerging.

Dante Silva: Where did the project start? 

Bianca Rae Messinger: Well geographically, the project started in a frozen field in the so-called Midwestern United States. It started out as a series of letters to the ambient composer Joanna Brouk. And also as emails to friends about her and poetry. So that’s the Joanna that the book starts with. It must have started out in 2018-2019, or that was the peak of my obsession with her. But it’s important to say that the book does include real letters. In the time since my obsession with Joanna I also became engrossed in gothic novels, which almost always include ephemeral writing, such as letters or lost diary entries discovered by a nervous heroine. So the book is a lot about letters but it’s also about moving between states and forms. 

Dante Silva: The poems are concerned with metaphysics, the porousness of matter (and how, through that porousness, one can reach other spatial and vibrational states). How do you work with sound, in particular? 

Bianca Rae Messinger: Wow, what a generous question. Well without launching completely into a metaphysical debate, while writing the book I was desperately trying to stop time. Or to look back at memories I didn’t realize I had. Then I realized sound became a tool for memory. Is it that there needs to be a constant buzzing to lull the conscious brain into submission? I’m not sure. In any case I needed to listen to the space between the notes, in that “porous” way that sound can have. For instance, Joanna Brouk is not a musician per se but finds these sonic moments which were instrumental, if you will, in emerging from a depressive episode. Every walk I took, I would listen to Joanna, and afterwards write down everything I saw and felt (and heard). Sound, vibration, and feeling have a wonderful way of complicating hierarchies, enabling me to enter into the world. Another piece or meditation that was particularly curative is Pauline Oliveros’ “Horse Sings from Cloud” from 1982. She of course had her own very involved sonic meditation process but listening to this piece with little to no direction was a meditation in and of itself. Finally, the book does shift as the speaker becomes more aware of the world around them, or put another way, the book goes from music to movies. 

Dante Silva: I loved the visual experimentation. There are shapes that appear throughout, structures of language and movement whose relations are “untranslatable.” How do you craft a visual poetics? 

Bianca Rae Messinger: The section of the book “parallel bars” was also published as a chapbook back in 2021. I really don’t want to give too much of it away because as a whole the section tries to give the reader their own pathways and tunnels through the text. But there is a way in which this section tries to destabilize the primacy of the visual field. For instance, Leslie Scalapino calls the visual space an authoritarian one. And she was someone very much invested in what it is sight does, what it regiments for us and language, on and off the page. What I hope for is that pleasureis tries to be true to a visual space which allows for these moments of untranslatability, or instability that you mention. 

Dante Silva: In “the state of the holy spirit: notes for production” the narrator describes action as an “awful amount of effort.” I was reminded of a quote from Agnes Martin—“To the detached person, the complication of the involved life is like chaos.” 

How do the poems work through, or against, that chaos? 

Bianca Rae Messinger: Now you’ve got me wondering what the “involved life” is like. The word awful is funny, something that means the opposite of its parts—it felt like a good hinge for the poem. I think that they, the poems, respond not so much to the “chaos” of the outside world, but to the chaos of the “internal” world. At least that is one intention; or that to be true to the chaos of the unconscious does to a certain extent put the individual outside of what is typically “political.” But at the same time this divide is fairly artificial, and it’s one I’m constantly trying to undo in the book, I’m not sure how successfully.    

I hope this isn’t too far removed from the book but, I was recently reading the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s series of lectures on Galileo, and about how the problems of modernity are problems of separation of the individual (and the production of knowledge) from social life, to grossly paraphrase. Ortega states that the current (for him 1933 Europe) inability to think historically, results from the fact that knowledge has been taken up and considered as operating separate from the world around it. For three hundred years (from roughly 1633 to 1933 ) philosophers have looked towards the world through the lens of pure reason, have thought themselves gods. But for Ortega, living (vivir) in the “political” is inextricable from the “individual” world. Therefore in order for us now, to actually understand history, its substance, we have to understand “living.” So we are never actually this idealized detached artist finding knowledge and building it, our structures need to be far more porous (a great word you used) and adaptive to everyday life if we are to attempt to understand “living.”