Syzygy, Beauty: An Essay

by T. Fleischmann

"T Fleischmann's Syzygy, Beauty shimmers with confidence as it tours the surreal chaos of gender, art, and desire. Its declarative sentences—seductive, abject, caustic, moving, informative, and utterly inventive—herald a new world, one in which we are blessedly 'here with outfits like strings of light and no future.' I hail its weirdness, its 'armpit frankess,' its indelible portrait of occulted relation, and above all, its impeccable music."—Maggie Nelson Construction becomes quiet, the saw buzz and the bang little white wisps that stop at my edges. We'll get used to most anything, at least enough to keep going. The will of the wisp. I want to poke a hole in my words so that people notice you are not here. Comfortable divots you could fill some day, if you wanted to. My mother sighs, my friends sigh. "You're so sad," they say. I'm not, I'm really not. I'm just trying to breathe fully. The shadow of the mountain turns with the day, encroaching. When it settles on me I put the hammer down and walk to where it is still warm. In Syzygy, Beauty , T Fleischmann builds an essay of prose blocks, weaving together observations on art, the narrator's construction of a house, and a direct address to a lover. Playing with scale and repetition, we are kept off-center, and therefore always looking, as the speaker leads us through an intimate relationship that is complicated and deepened by multiple partners, gender transitions, and itinerancy.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Queer, LGBT, Art

144 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 2011

About the author

T Fleischmann is the author of Syzygy, Beauty and the curator of Body Forms: Queerness and the Essay. A nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM and contributing editor at Essay Daily, they have published critical and creative work in journals such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, and others, as well as in the anthologies Bending Genre, How We Speak to One Another, Little Boxes, and Feminisms in Motion.

Reviews

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

'In physics, Mach’s Principle states that the movements closest to our bodies are controlled by all the mass of the universe. Absent the distant cosmos, I would reach for you with new motion. The neutrinos would float undetected through us in a different way than they float undetected through us now. Think of all our forgotten pasts, the trees we climbed that are still standing or that have fallen.'

The Argonauts author Maggie Nelson remarks that this book ‘shimmers with confidence as it tours the surreal chaos of gender, art, and desire’. To me it seems like she waxes lyrical as she really has no fricking clue as to what it is about. Neither do I, both before and after reading it. But that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Some books are there to be experienced rather than understood. Of course, the key to the meaning of this so-called ‘essay’ lies in the word ‘syzygy’ itself. Apart from being a killer Scrabble word, and the name of a 1996 X-Files episode, it refers to ‘a conjunction or opposition, especially of the moon with the sun’, as in ‘the planets were aligned in syzygy’.

Indeed, there are a lot of references to planets, orbs and orbits and also conjunctions, which are perhaps better understood as binaries or opposites. Fleischmann also references artists Méret Oppenheim, Man Ray, Grayson Perry and Louise Bourgeois, all of whom I am unfamiliar with.

The book is organised into brief prose blocks, one per page, which raises the question of whether or not it is better understood as a collection of prose poems. I think that the dichotomy or distinction between poetry/fiction is one that the author deliberately challenges here, with mixed results.

Fleischmann himself comments: “I consider Syzygy, Beauty to be an essay, even as it draws from poetry and other genres. I’m attracted to the essay’s own relationship with truth, its kind of scandalous, drunk messing around with veracity … In figuring out my own experience, I have to be aware of my subjectivity, of my lies, and of those stories I omit through forgetfulness or intention.”

So what is it about? As far as I can tell, there is a relationship that is unravelling (I was unclear how many people were drifting in and out of said relationship, not to mention their gender), some kind of construction work going on (?) and much discussion of contemporary art. In terms of gender, which seems deliberately elided from the text, no fixed pronouns are associated with Fleischmann in his brief author bio either.

If you enjoy poetry, this is quite a conventional hybrid text, with a lot to admire in the writing. Albeit there are a couple of real clunkers along the way: “Form and content are two slugs fucking, their slime all over one another until they may as well be one big twisting slug. Someone stomped on form and content and now they are goo.”

[Emma Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

this essay felt like a sleepover because there were so many parts that fed the small animal of my heart, parts that reminded me of the feeling you get when you hear your new favorite song, and parts (let me hold your hand while i say this) that made me want to tell my friend that they needed to dump their codependent commitment-avoidant partner.

idk part of me feels so seen when people talk about not feeling beautiful in a truly reflective way? like i’ve never felt truly pretty and yet i’ve still had romantic experiences and yet i continue to not feel pretty as the way i see my friends (none of whom i am having sex with fyi) so i appreciated that sub point

[Ella Hachee · Rating 4 out of 5]

My 4 on the AP Art History test did a lot for me here.

I think I've decided that as long as you have some grounding detail and some intellectual substance, then you're allowed to confuse the reader. Just a little. As a treat. Don't abuse that privilege.

[Kirsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I am having trouble living somewhere, or anywhere. After only a month has passed, I find myself on the side of the road again, walking to the trains. I have been so many places I must be sunlight. I have been diffused by clouds. To hike to the top of the mountain, I must spend the afternoon facing the steep slant of earth, my hands in brambles. Only once I am high enough can I turn and see the tin roofs and straight beds of flowers, dropped to a Euclidian flatness. Where have I been? Listen, I have been diffused by clouds, by everyone who has touched me, and just like you I am a radiation destined for the earth."

[Josiah Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

Idk man. This was cool and frustrating. I wonder if, like Bluets, in two years time, I’ll reread this and think got damn! What a masterpiece! But alas, we are in the here and now, and I didn’t love this.

The language is absolutely beautiful. Fleischmann really knows how to structure a sentence. My reluctance to rate this lower comes from this love of their language but also because this felt, like Abigail said in class one time, looking at an abstract piece of art in a gallery. It’s more the experience and less about what it all means. At least in the moment.

This and Bluets have given me permission to write things that abstract and confuse. I’m cool with that.

[Jessie Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. wowowowowowowoo. W O W. completely obsessed with everything about this essay. so romantic and yearning but also clinical and haunting? felt like a mindfuck in so many ways. loved every moment of every page.

T Fleischmann I hope your house in the woods is treating you well

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pro-tip: don't share passages of a lovely book like this with some tinder person who is going to ghost on you making the pleasure you took in this book hard to return to and thus who knows when I will finish reading it but I'm not reading it so here's my review so I can get it off my "reading" list.

[Anahita Kaman · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredible perfect beautiful they should replace the bible with this

[Cindy Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, but some parts are confusing (at least, they were to me!). I'm going to be studying it with a group, so I have no doubt that better minds than mine will help me make sense of the parts I don't understand. I spent some time trying to determine the speaker's gender, but realized that the ambiguity was the point. I loved that profound sentences were dropped with such casualness into the stream of thought, causing me to pause and reverse to reread. I loved the repetition of imagery, such as the number 102, green glass, fur, and telescopes. The narrator speaks quite a bit about seduction and interlaps all these relationships, and I gave up on trying to figure out if they wanted to steal a boyfriend or engage in a threesome. I'm sure my group discussion will enlighten me!

[Bitchin' Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I enjoyed:
-The twisting of word and phrase
-The blending of the uncommon so that they become synonymous and common with each other
-The structure was very interesting and made for a surprising quick yet deep read
-Loved, loved, LOVED the circling around sexuality and destroying the divides between male and female and what it means to be each and the different forms of sexual preference

What I struggled through:
-Sometimes the twisting and blending were too much, went too far, and I became lost (I hope rereading will improve this)
-Trying to understand that connection between everything

It is one of those reads that you will understand the struggle I had as soon as you begin.

Don't know if anyone realized, but it isn't until halfway through that you find out that T has the body of a male, therefore born a boy--even I was trying to define his gender constantly, and he was always challenging the stereotypes that have been instilled over my lifetime. It was mind-blowing how he was redefining them the entire time I was reading.

[Charlee Remitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A perfect choice to follow up THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, which is feminist sci-fi featuring androgynous aliens. I kind of liked that I spent the first half of this book guessing at the main character’s gender, only to be wrong, and then realize it truly didn’t matter at all.

A myriad of pretty lines. I had a tough time connecting all the book’s parts and bits together. However, I much enjoyed his/her analysis of major arts.

[Matty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weaving a narrative that is both ethereal and concrete, T. Fleischmann lays bare the minute details of a relationship like an emotional puzzle, allowing the reader to slowly assemble the pieces until the love there is wholly visible, thrumming like a generator. It is not written as a
guidebook to writing technique, nor does it pretend that it has that intent, but it can be
argued that any essay can have lessons on craft, and for any aspiring writer, this book provides a lot of lessons. Syzygy, Beauty involves itself with the concepts of sincerity, truth and liminality; the past imagined and the future imagined, phrases borrowed from Jenny Boully, build layers to tell the story of a relationship, of a house being built, of artists like Méret Oppenheim and an exploration of gender expression. It's an easy read for pleasure but more importantly, it's a pleasurable read for the deeper meanings that haunt all of our lives, in dream and daydream. No wonder physical copies are so hard to track down.

[Abigail Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"looking pretty the way I am supposed to look pretty" / "you are in love and I am dropping pennies in the space between, making my wishes plop" / "I call you on the phone to tell you that I feel like a swan in love with a plastic swan" / "I'm picking through all my old mistakes and offering you the best ones"

The more I read this one (three times), the more I want to drown in it. This essay feels so wholly enveloping, and makes me want to cry the same way that walking through a contemporary art gallery makes me want to cry (the overwhelming feeling that I am in the same space as Art with a capital A and that the "meaning" of something matters so much less than how I respond to it at face value and of course how I respond at first will be different than how I respond once I've discovered the "meaning" of something and I want to experience all of those responses as many times as I can) and it captures so perfectly the feeling of loving someone who loves you but not quite the way you want them to. I want to chew on this prose. I am changed for having read this.

[Viridiana Cabrera · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found a couple of essays in this book, particularly the more personal ones, quite enjoyable. However, I was looking for something more personal and felt that these essays had a slightly clichéd quality to them. While there were some great thoughts, I couldn't shake the feeling that certain ideas and expressions seemed overly familiar or lacking originality. Although the author's insights on poetry were interesting, I had anticipated a more personal essay rather than a collection of essays grouped together simply because they were written by the same person. As a whole, the book felt a bit scattered, but it did contain some fantastic thoughts.

[JJ]

Didn't like this as much as Time Is the Thing . . . too vibesy & poetic for my tastes, but I see the vision. The artworks discussed were well-trodden ground by the publication date, and I'd like to have felt some awareness of that come through, bc if it's trying to walk the line of 'art writing' and 'poetry' then some contextual knowledge of the public reception of those works is important. I feel like they're introduced as if the reader doesn't know of them—I struggle to imagine the audience for this wouldn't. . . This is kinda ad hominem nitpick though. I'd love to read a meatier, longer project.

[Jacob Binder · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excruciatingly vulnerable open letter to a love that has drifted out of alignment. The speaker painfully grasps at the remembered but fading details of their fleeting love, surfacing insecurities as they contemplate art, duality, beauty, perception, and haunting.

“Different ways to go about the same thing, and the moon stayed constant. I want you back, another chance for relief. I want to announce you with the tide” (75).

[John LaPine · Rating 4 out of 5]

unique language, poetic and rather indescribable (is that word a cop out?) essay about relationships, bodies (corporeal and celestial), and art. at times, very opaque and rather hard to follow, but I like that. I wish I had written this book.

[Kia Sconiers · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.85, it was a bit weird but also kind of beautiful at the same time.

[Melina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complex. Deep. Will need to re-read...

[Tala · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many thought provoking and interesting things said. I didn't get all the references though so I was confused most of the time. Filled with pure emotion and heart.

[Emrys Donaldson · Rating 5 out of 5]

More nonlinear than Fleischmann’s other work, this book-as-essay circles around the narrative of a love affair.

[cy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, but mostly just cause i’m reading their second book and i like it more

[Sarkis Antonyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

i think i found pure magic between these words, some untapped, holy thing i saw in flashes across these pages.

[Shelbs]

so formally exciting- paragraphs and references. i’m gonna copy u t fleischmann!!

[indigo · Rating 4 out of 5]

“you toss love like it will land in worn leather.”

[AJ Lonski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a unique read — poetry / prose keep me fed

[Xia · Rating 4 out of 5]

SYZYGY, BEAUTY. July 17, '23.

A review of T. Fleischmann, Syzygy, Beauty: An Essay 2011, Sarabande books.

Syzygy, Beauty. Syzygy, typically an astronomical term. An alignment of bodies, all suspended in the endless unknown, for just a moment. Beauty, the word, descends from the reconstructed pieces of a language we don’t actually know exists. The proto-indo-european root deu-, thought to have meant to perform. Syzygy, Beauty is about temporal moments. Caught in the amber of language.

The impulse to run your hand along the wall, touching it but so barely and forward. Sitting room and coats of paint. You shake out the sheets. You disperse like a drying pond.

Impulse is to live in the present, to let your body guide your movement. Without premeditation, without prediction. The disparate images T. Fleishmann employs, creates a moment, between you and the author. Between you and your memories. Instantly feeling the boredom of summer, of a waiting room. Maybe a hospital, maybe business, maybe school. Proust questioned memory — I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive … in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object. To disperse is to be lost. Infinitesimal parts of you, sailing, drifting, on the wind. For each of your manifold memories to latch on to the world in places you will soon forget. In mundane rooms, waiting, sitting. Someday, you stumble upon them, like Proust’s madeleine.

My last boyfriend had a boyfriend and my first boyfriend a girlfriend. I'm not trying for a pattern, but if you draw back the lens far enough, everything will line up straight. Planes of intentionality, an x radius and a y radius that both know where this is going. I declare everything okay with a gray banner and I mean it. All the problems I can find are cheap dates, just a little liquor and we're getting down to business. It's a comfortable couch, knowing which days I can see you. When the right planets are in the right order they are supposed to allow power, like maybe we can feel something. A chance not just for you, but for so much more, him and maybe some day another you. And before you know it the planets are out of line again, speeding past nothing.

Syzygy is a word that describes inexorably massive cosmic phenomena. Coincidental alignments in canted orbits of celestial bodies. But like many phenomena, it is only meaningful in your eyes. The universe itself, indifferent. Like the moments in your life, you give it significance through your vantage point. Syzygy, indescribably vast, becomes a synecdoche for something small.

Drift away, earth constellation. Rip the girl right out of me, and take the boy with you, too. Ground me in what everyone else sees. Our geometry, a pattern as everywhere as daylight. Axiomatic.

An axiom is a proposition, a declaration, onto which a structure is built. A self-sufficient logic. Atoms. You are made of axioms. Quanta, qualia, for which external justification need not apply. There are some things however, like the girl and boy in me, that are not axiomatic, rather, they are predicated on the minds of others. A property born of relations. Any property of you is either predicated or axiomatic, and the only person in the universe that can decide that, is none other than you.

I am going to have thousands of loves, and each will have a ghost of me. “It’s more like an apparition,” you say. I will apparate to everyone who has loved me so that it is like they still love. “I think the verb form is appear,” you say.

An apparition is something ghostly, temporal, gossamer. An appearance is something palpable, immediate, certain. Of memories, are they one and the same?

Collections of Gnostic texts usually take care to stress that they are not authoritative, that there is no Gnostic text. Just treat it like some thoughts on our love, ignore the parts that don’t work for you. I think it’s odd, that we expect there to be a book, something to close and put aside. The grammar isn’t there for me.

Spinoza, in his Ethics, states in his 19th proposition, that he who conceives that the object of his love is destroyed will feel pain; if he conceives that it is preserved he will feel pleasure. These Gnostic texts, non-definitive thoughts on our love are our interpretations on the phenomena of the world. They are objects of our love. But as objects of our love, they aren’t simply objects which we love, they are extensions of ourselves. Objects of our love. Like beauty, like syzygy, they are connections we draw in the midst of the confusion of our lives. But they are real. Objects of our love.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly unique essay-prose poems detailing the amorphous and clashing qualities of the universe, relationships wanted and then unwilling to end, art, gender, house construction, and the natural and cosmic world. Even when I was challenged by it, I knew there was a spark of something very, very great in Fleischmann's words.

[Jackie Payton · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a mighty punch this tiny book packs! Can't say that I've ever read anything that manages to be both obscure and beautiful all at the same time. It's been a pleasure to come back to and re-read in bits and pieces.

[Tom Hrycyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

8.8/10
Iowa graduate T. Fleischmann is a devout realist making the most of their dreams within this essay comprised of one-page vignette. Their commitment to both sides of the equation is what turns their debut essay into a uniquely soulful masterclass.