'Whispers Out of Time': The syntax of being in the poetry of John Ashbery

Within the represented world of the poem, there is a subtle but powerful homoerotic component in the speaker's attraction to the figure of Parmigianino, for the beauty of whom the speaker borrows Vasari's description, "'rather angel than man'" (73). The poem continues,

Perhaps an angel looks like everything We have forgotten, I mean forgotten Things that don't seem familiar when We meet them again, lost beyond telling, Which were ours once . . . . you could be fooled for a moment Before you realize the reflection Isn't yours. (74)

Here the beauty of the painter - coded chastely as angelic - kindles a scopophilic engagement with his image, both as reflection of the subject and as that subject's erotic double. At the same time, Parmigianino's beauty recalls the fluid indifferentiation of the mirror stage, for which sexual union, according to Lacan, is only a metaphor. The speaker's gaze repeats the lost vision in which we first recognize our own beauty in the beauty of an other.(15)

Inherent in Ashbery's complex, muted representation of gay desire as a dynamic relationship between subject, other, and self-as-other, in the context of his more general refusal to allow his speakers the safety and propriety of stable form, is the enactment of a radical - and generalizable - insight: that gayness, as a shared condition of being marked by various configurations of desire for members of the "same" sex, emblematizes - in a certain sense is - the recognition that human identity, in its sexual composition as in other respects, does not conform to any general set of culturally inscribed parameters.

Early in "Self-Portrait" Ashbery's speaker, reflecting on, and identifying with, the maddening distantiation, the lack of identity, that the act of self-identification involves - a distantiation that Rimbaud, on the brink of another modernism, finely articulated as Je est un autre - speaks of Parmigianino's as

the face On which the effort of this condition reads Like a pinpoint of a smile . . . A perverse light whose Imperative of subtlety dooms in advance its Conceit to light up: unimportant but meant. (69-70)

This "perverse light," in which alone Ashbery's poetry yields its "unimportant" gay reading, is a metaphor both for gayness as a way of being sexual that plays with the erotics of sameness as well as difference, and for Ashbery's formal procedure as a kind of gay poetics.

"Self-Portrait" is intensely a poem of time, in both its synergies and its aporias. The speaker's effort to determine his subjectivity can be consciously structured only out of past passages of that subjectivity: "The tale goes on," Ashbery writes, "In the form of memories deposited in irregular / Clumps of crystals" (71). "My guide in these matters is your self/ Firm, oblique, accepting everything" (71), says Ashbery's speaker, referring to Parmigianino but effectively recalling another Ashberyan image of subjectivity, "The Picture of Little J. A.," with its "hard stare, accepting / Everything" (Some 28-29). Yet what is most apparent to Ashbery's speaker is not, finally, his continuity with these images (despite the fact that "you could be fooled for a moment / Before you realize the reflection / Isn't yours" [74]), but "The distance between us" (71).