August 13, 2017

To: sarahparkertroy@gmail.com

From: corycorycory@hotmail.com

Subject: gender accumulations in The Box

Dear Sarah, 

I hope you don’t find it strange and overly formal to receive an email from me. My name is Cory Sayers; we met a little over two years ago at the SFMoMa Archives. You might remember that I was pretending to be a graduate student at the time. Anyway, I’m reaching out because it’s not often that I meet a fellow Orgone Alone enthusiast who cares to consider the show’s implications on trans embodiment specifically, and I’m starting to connect some different webs of thought, and I desperately need a sounding board. So I looked you up, and here I am, typing in the middle of the night, illumined only by my laptop screen in my hovel of a basement apartment. 

This evening I attended an art show in the Santa Fe Railyard District—this, you’ll see, is the jumping point of this email as well as the veritable fountain of theory I’m about to evince —and it seemed to me that all of the artists, who wore black and/or white and nursed slim glasses of alcohol, were preoccupied with the grid or the box. There was both two dimensional and three dimensional work in the gallery. Paintings squared off, boxy in their diameter and abstract in nature. Nets and lines and grids dispelling any sense of narrative. Not a portrait in the place! One artist, with the temperament of a science-experiment, had participants step into a sort of Faraday cage, where they could listen, in headphones, to a broadcast of different pieces of classical music (mostly Mahler). Of course, the imitation Faraday cage, with its seething, crackling lightning, didn’t actually conduct electricity (there were well-disguised monitors and webs of wire sculpture). It was reliant on an illusion. And the artist got upset with me when I stood there through both symphonies no 2 and no 5. But there it was, a portal: so referential of Reich’s cage, his closet, his particular manner for ordering the world into its gridded, energetic, ideal form. Standing in there, getting Mahlered, I tried to imagine how I might step back out of the portal into a transformed world. I couldn’t help but think of Audrey, sweet demon that she is, and how she always bounced out of the Orgone Accumulator, prepared to take on her new and frightfully altered reality. 

When I was a teenager, and an insomniac, I would crawl into my closet to sit beneath my mother’s hanging linens. She teaches at St. Johns College, and is the proud owner of approximately 20,000 blouses (mostly florals, some geometric, some plain, some bold, some iridescent). Beneath the blouses, my sense of containment was complete. It was this order, this small compact darkness, that seemed to offset the terror of my wakefulness, my constant/inescapable consciousness. So, containment as the first principle of Orgone Alone. Each episode we see Audrey contained (maybe it’s too on the nose to say ‘closeted’, but I typed and deleted it several times) in the Orgone Accumulator, stuffed into a box and thrashing through the transformation from her regular world to the altered one. Many critics of the show point to the fact that there is no explicit distinction between the worlds that Audrey inhabits pre- and post-orgone. We see it reflected in the animation and imagery, and experientially the difference is paramount, but there is no clarification. Only students of Reich can read the difference as energetic in nature. 

I’m tempted to pivot here, and really examine the Orgone Accumulator as closet metaphor. The energetic difference between pre- and post- accumulation (if you will) can be drawn to parallel the difference between pre- transition and post- transition embodiment. Of course this difference is not always obvious to the outsider, and does not immediately manifest in one’s outward presentation or embodiment more broadly. It would be tempting to claim that pre- transition embodiment is only represented by Audrey's experience within the Orgone Accumulator—stifling, trapped, limited—but that seems to me like an extremely derivative way of looking at closeted-ness as a concept. After all, one can experience trans embodiment without realizing what it is. The question then, in my mind, is twofold. Why this preoccupation with the imagery of the box—that limited, stifling, paramount moment pre-release—that bridges or transgresses these two worlds? And secondly, perhaps even more importantly, What does it mean to embody something (transness) before you can name it? What is that precognitive knowing, and how does it accumulate (accumulate! I cannot emphasize the role of accumulation enough here) until it is named, and therefore known anew? 

I’m afraid to say that followers of Reich who buy into his orgone energy as a real, actual phenomenon don’t have much to offer to this conversation. It’s tempting to sideline these questions out of fear, because Reich’s later conceptions of orgasmic energy and sexual freedom, or his embrace of pseudoscientific delusions of grandeur (that the Orgone accumulator could cure cancer, for example… I have to confess that my father died of cancer when I was small: I feel a sort of wishful knife in my gut when I read Reich’s optimistic fantasies of renewal), so overpower his notions of sexual freedom and the innate health and quality of human sexuality. It’s tempting to collapse gender and sexuality into one energetic place, and claim that the show’s representation of orgone accumulation has to do with Audrey’s coming of age as a sexual being instead of as a gendered one. Reich, as far as I can tell, was a homophobe in his own right (think of his treatment of Allen Ginsburg!), and saw homosexuality as a perversion of his good, pure sexual energy. But something about the portal, the containment stage of Orgone Alone, and how it's represented, brings me back to gender over and over again. After all, how can you talk about embodiment without talking about gender? 

All this to say, have you ever thought that Audrey might be a trans girl? I hope you don’t find it off-putting that I would lay it out like that. I’m desperate to hear your thoughts on this matter, and particularly whether the representation of Audrey’s transformations in the Orgone Accumulator resonate with your experience of transitioning. When did you transition? I’m not trying to be nosy. I just want to convey the fact that I’m very interested in your perspective on all this, which will inevitably involve divulging some personal information. For what it’s worth, Sarah, it seems delightfully incongruous that we met; I mean, the flow of my life was completely interrupted by the weekend we spent together. I sometimes think about the things that you said to me when we were having sex, and the self that I reached and embodied through your touch. God, I hope you open this email in a private place, otherwise I’ll have really humiliated myself. 

Be well, sweet Sarah!

Sincerely, 

Cory Sayers