“Pussy: A Companion Piece” Nikki Darling talks to RECAPS by Martabel Wasserman

Pussy! A Companion is a pet project, a spin-off, a guide of sorts to Pussy! A Progression!, the five-part literary manifesto by Nikki Darling recently published by The Art Book Review. As Darling explains, when putting something like a manifesto into the world, you have to do everything you can to get the work to the intended audience.  She invited me to her backyard where her pack of cats wandered in and out of the frame, as they tend to do in RECAPS interviews, to talk about Pussy! and how she wants it to exist in the world.

Born in 1980, Darling is not quite a millennial; she explains her generational vantage point as “mixed-up, digital, falsely nostalgic and emotionally exhausted.” Where does one from this generation — growing up on MTV and entering adulthood at the moment of Y2K — turn to in order to write a manifesto? Prozac Nation, of course.  But before she gets there, she reaches further back, when modernity was beginning to reconfigure the ancient relationship between the artist and mental illness. A time right before visions went from being seen as prophetic to pathetic. She frames the five essays with paintings of cats by Louis Wain (1860-1939). Not knowing who Louis Wain was, I assumed the kittens were relics or recreations of the Age of Aquarius. In one image, a cat stares out of the frame so intently her eyes blossom into purple flowers. She has both the sweetest and most cynical rendition of a Mona Lisa smile. In another, the wide-eyed creature looks directly at us with her mouth agape, on the verge of a rainbow vortex.

Pussycat. Wain was born in London as the only son in a family of six children. He was an outsider from the beginning; a cleft lip prevented him from attending school regularly but he did manage to study art. He ended up in love with a woman ten years his senior, Emily Richardson. We are still collectively reconciling our fears of the cougar — marrying an older woman at the time that he did was taboo at best. He began his career as an illustrator, sometimes drawing animals but not always. Enter Peter, the couple’s cat who quickly became Wain’s muse. Richardson dies only three years after their wedding, after which Wain channels his all of his energy into his cats. He becomes famous for his anthropomorphized drawings of kitties. His love of cats leant itself not only to representational splendor, but also to advocacy not limited to the realm of the aesthetic. From 1889-1911, he was president of England’s National Cat Club. According to Wikipedia, he was an active member of Governing Council of Our Dumb Friend’s League, Society for the Protection of Cats and the Anti-Visection Society, feeling that he needed to “wipe out the contempt in which the cat has been held.” In 1924, he was committed to a mental hospital where he lived the rest of his life. It was there that the cats got trippy.

The feline heart befuddles me. I relate more to the effusiveness and desire for constant tummy loving of a well-loved dog. Darling likes dogs, don’t get her wrong, but she is invested in interrogating the complexity of the cat. She is interested in how we obsess over their image but are so easily disgusted by their habits. She is not making a reduction that the cats are perfect proxy for women. Rather, she is interested in overlapping the two archetypes to see what emerges. Why do people loathe what they cannot understand about cats? Darling loves that cats are “entitled assholes,” who do whatever the fuck they please but for whom many would still do anything to get a purr out of.  She wants to give us all permission to be more cat-like, embrace our contradictions and not shy away from our irrational behavior.

Pussy, as an oppositional stance, operated in Wain’s life on many levels as it does in Darling’s work as well. He loved a woman he was not supposed to. He advocated for cats as comrades a century before Donna Haraway helped us theorize our affective bonds to companion critters. He was cat-like in his outsider status – deemed unsociable to the point of institutionalization. I cannot comment on the effects of his mental illness on his sisters and those he loved. We can, however, collectively theorize how mental illness is socially constructed and produced, and speculate about the link between pussy and insanity that came to define his life and work.

We will return to Wain again in this pet-project, but now lets follow Darling’s Progression. The first essay is about two related activities very close to my heart: listening to the Beatles and smoking weed.  Darling is in a lineage of thinkers who turn to the herb over the bottle for inspiration. This is evident in the texture of her writing. Her rage does not initially cut like a razor, but rather teases and provokes us with personal anecdotes strung together with citation and carefully curated cultural artifacts. She muses on the Beatles: “To be the artist or creative that you really are you must first shed the parts of yourself of your work that while perhaps the most commercial or acceptable, are not simply the road that will lead to your true work. When we do reach that place, when you embrace all the flaws and shortcomings of your own ability to express successfully, then you will find you might finally have something greater: honesty.”  Sometimes honesty comes from having to shed an identity that feels false with time. The fab four, who crafted the persona of Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in order to rediscover their creative potential — are the starting point of the Pussy Progression.

Persona is something Darling thinks a lot about. Pussy! is in many ways about playing with her persona as a critic. The five essays are in fact all book reviews that she unapologetically infuses with her personal experiences and political stakes. Always upfront and embracing of her contradictions, she is a transcendentalist who is an obsessive instagrammer. She is constantly negotiating her public and private persona.

The essay that first garnered her critical success was about loosing her virginity. She is not a shy person or someone very invested in boundaries, but she keeps some things (/lovers, friends, memories) to herself as she makes subtle distinctions between who she is as writer and as a woman. As she said in our conversation, she has a theory that the better the writer, the bigger the liar. And that is what drives and necessitates the construction of a persona.

Essay 2 in the progression addresses persona, this time in its links to narcissism, entitlement and mental health issues. It centers on Elizabeth Wurtzel, who is, as Darling describes it, “a Rosetta stone for the piece.” Before we read, we watch. A YouTube clip from Batman Returns of becoming the alter ego Catwoman. A woman walks into her apartment and says, “Honey, I am home. Oh I forgot I am not married.” Cats purr at Michelle Pfeiffer’s window as she cuts and claws lustfully at the latex she turns into her iconic suit. The clip ends, Pfeiffer completely transformed, declaring to herself and to the world: “I feel so much yummier.”

Of Wurtzel, Darling said, “I feel like she embodies the cat in a beautiful way. People can’t stand her but I don’t think they have an understanding as to why.” In our conversation she goes on to talk about the relationship between the taboos surrounding mental health and those that frame “feminine” ways of knowing and being in the world. We think of mental health as self-indulgent, a symptom of privilege and a product of naval gazing. Wurtzel confronts us with those dismissals, which is why Darling thinks her confessional writing is something so easily dismissed: “If people don’t talk about what she is doing, the hate-mongering piles up until it gets completely lost.” Darling gets inspiration from the work of her friend and contemporary Raquel Gutiérrez; in her essay titled “Radical Narcissism,” Darling argues for the confessional as a feminist form.

Pussy power. “I certainly enjoy my pussy,” Darling tells me over kale and avocado salad in her backyard. Darling’s feminist awakening happened because and despite of the commodification of girl power in the 1990s. Her discussions of sensual pleasure are steeped in second wave thought with the aesthetic flourishes of someone who came of age when she did. She talked a lot about appearance and performance, how she has come to embrace femininity and fashion through the theoretical frameworks of feminism. She talks about desires to shave and pluck and tweeze alongside ideas of naturalness and embodying deviance that she developed in her readings of bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa. She sees this polar tug as the feminist landscape women navigate daily. Darling makes clear she is a womanist, and she aligns herself with the struggles woman of color. She identifies as mixed-race, acknowledging both the privileges and pitfalls of passing as someone who appears as white. In an email exchange in which we discuss some of these complexities, she writes, “I think it’s very dangerous to suggest that I have anything in common with someone who walk their life daily as a visual representation of what makes certain people nervous.” She adds, “My place or project, is to act as a voice, someone who has access to these entitled glass ceiling places where I can carry the concerns of my people to the forefront, and basically impolitely rip assholes as often as I am allowed.”

“Have you seen Fear of The Black Hat?” she asks me. When I reply “no” she jumps out of her seat to retrieve her iPhone from inside. “Its all on YouTube. I’ve already seen it a million times. You have to watch this scene.” She passes me her phone and watches me as I watch the final clip about embracing the P.U.S.S.Y. Darling explains to me that she wanted to include the scene but decided against because of how it might lead some to easily dismiss the essay. Darling talks up a storm about contradictions, sexuality, and performance. She says that writing is acting and acting is writing — an adage that makes sense given that one of her many charms is her ability to monologue on subjects about which she is passionate, in this case powerful, difficult and fierce cats.

From Madonna to Susan Sontag. A YouTube clip she embeds of Sontag serves as another Rosetta Stone to the piece, strangely harmonizing with Wurtzel in a different key. In our conversation she moves from Sontag to an Arizona transwoman named Stephen, who is documented in a video of police harassment . Like Black Hat, it didn’t weave its way through the reviews, but serves as a structural underpinning of the manifesto. “He is throwing judgments back in the faces of the judges, whose system is of the restrictive status quo.” So many ways to perform a cat.

The essays in the piece, along with Wain’s cats, become increasingly abstract. As her work becomes more experimental, we are pushed to focus in more intently. Darling has come to embrace this strategy over the didactic and polemic, wanting her feminist treaty to engage and enrage through literary deconstruction, mash-ups, and misbehaving. I think of a quote by Kathy Acker: “Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.” She cites William Boroughs and Kathy Acker along with her 21^st century references to selfies, emails from ex-lovers, and embedded videos. In many ways the project is about the history and present of feminist form.  She is deeply invested in these formal choices as a way to reach her audience.

As Darling puts it,  “To shut down your own shine is a crime against the universe. The universe is like a machine that needs grease, and if you are not operating at your best because of capitalism, society has not embraced your pussy. Then the universe is like a cog that’s not working. I am always trying to reach my people, queer people, women, and people of color, people who are stepped on the most in the name of the golden green dollar.” One of her many strategies to accomplish this is what she calls “communing.” Coming together. She invited me over to commune, providing shade, popsicles, weed, weirdness and wisdom. I had to leave but I wanted to stay. But fortunately, she will continue to claw at the structures that take time away from cats conspiring.