Maggie Nelson, _Pathemata, or, The Story of My Mouth_

 I WAS A couple dozen pages into Pathemata and persuaded that it was one wild ride when I checked the acknowledgements page in the back--I wanted to see what Nelson may have said there about partner Harry Dodge. At the end of the acknowledgements, I found this "Disclaimer":

"This work conjoins dream and reality; all representations of people, places, and events should be understood in that spirit."

Hence the wildness of the ride. The territory explored in Pathemata is a lot like the Wonderland explored by Alice, logical and absurd at the same time, frightening and consolatory at the same time, monstrous and familiar at the same time. And like Wonderland, it's a dreamscape--or some of it is. 

For me, it hearkened back to the old Maggie Nelson. After The Argonauts landed on so many coffee tables and syllabuses, Nelson seemed to be working from her new standing as a public intellectual in On Freedom, and she just did not seem comfortable. Nelson is more at home in the disruptive and transgressive, the strange and unsettling. In Pathemata, she is back home.

Pathemata is a (dream?) journal about buccal-and-dental health issues during COVID days, and it deserves shelf space alongside Huysmans's A Rebours or Mircea Cartaresçu's Solenoid in its evocation of the nightmarish aspects of dentistry.

It's not just about that, of course, given the range of Nelson's interests and the acuity of her perception, not to mention the complexity of her life. I was wondering whether Dodge was mentioned in the acknowledgements because throughout the book Nelson's relationship with "H" seems strained. Was the estrangement just in dreams, provoked by 2020's gamut of anxieties? Or actual? None of my business, anyway, and the acknowledgements do thank "the magical creatures with whom I shared heart and home during this time, including Dodge, presumably.

"Pathemata" is Greek for "suffering" or "pain," and the word is often used in a phrase, "pathemata mathemata," that means "learning from suffering." Does leaving "mathemata" out of the title imply nothing was learned? I would say no, it doesn't imply that, since the book ends with Nelson telling of a lesson about pain she did not get around to learning while undergoing labor but may be at last ready for: "The moment for the lesson is now."