Recently I learned about two books by Jesse McCarthy. McCarthy has become well-known as a whip-smart critic and passionate scholar of Black artistry. He teaches at Harvard, co-edits The Point, and in the last two years, came out with two books: a collection of nonfiction essays called Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul and a novel called The Fugitivities. I found the essay collection slow-going—beautiful but challengingly dense—like wading through water teaming in life. As a result, I decided to listen to the audiobook and let the words wash over me, which has felt rejuvenating. It is about Black artists by a Black artist interested in the interplay between the past, present, and future. (He would have me write black in lower case, as Toni Morrison did.) The novel, on the other hand, I have found addictive. I’ve been reading it voraciously every night for days. It’s filled with the kind of internal dialogue that makes novels so unlike any other form—a kind of voyeurism of the freewheeling mind. I recommend both for the intensity of the experience and also the pleasures.
I haven’t been in contact with Jesse for years, but I knew him as a student a year older than me at Amherst. He had a feral electricity, as though if you touched him you might smart from the shock. He was dating a friend, and we orbited the same friend group. I have few vivid memories of really hanging out. One severed memory strand that comes to mind was seeing Jesse and several of his friends in someone’s bedroom at a dorm called Marsh talking wildly and passionately, laughing and shouting, jumping about. Their topic: philosophy. (Which branch? Which philosophers? I wish I could remember!)
My next memory of Jesse comes to me almost whole. It was around 2008. I’d graduated from college and a dear friend was living in Paris, giving touristy tours, and recovering from a breakup and the corresponding heartbreak. I went to visit her on my way to Uganda where my cousin was in the Peace corps, and one night, we met up with Jesse, who was living there, and several of their mutual friends. We closed out a bar and then grabbed City Bikes—it was the first time I’d ever seen one—and pedaled to someone’s apartment up on Montmartre. There, inside a small flat, we smoked cigarettes, drank copiously, danced with each other, and ate a delicious washed rind cheese as wrinkly and pink as a scrotum. I remember the strong smell of body aroma and the wetness of sweat brushing against my arm. I remember talking to a French woman my age, but about what? I remember Jesse dancing in a kind of greedy way, like he wanted to eat all the music—and maybe all of us.
At some point in the middle of the night, four or five of us fell asleep in a puppy puddle. A few hours later, I awoke with a start, overcome by the most intense smell I could imagine. All of the cigarettes, the wine, the hormonal sweat, and especially the cheese, which no one had covered, had condensed into a thick sludge that was clogging my nostrils. I jumped up, and then everyone else jumped up, and we stumbled into the first light of morning to escape the aroma. Jesse bought a croissant as we made our way to benches on the hillside next to stairs leading up Montmartre to the Sacré-Coeur. We were bedraggled, smelly, tired. We smoked more cigarettes, slouched on the bench side by side, and watched the early-bird tourists making their way to the basilica to ogle or pray or cross a destination off their list.
That night I felt like I was young, in the full, almost capitalized sense—Young!—making invisible trouble, filling up the world with my smell, sucking in the putrid air and finding it both sickening and life-giving, looking at the everyday people with a side eye and puffing smoke in their direction.
When memories come back, sometimes they land hard. Somehow, not quite two decades later, this human who I associate with palpable and slightly feral lust for life has become a leading thinker and writer, someone whose voice is carrying over the cacophony and reaching people. I’m amazed and delighted!
In reading McCarthy’s work, I am reminded that meeting someone in person and on the page can be radically different acts. What I am finding most revelatory in both books is not his precision with words or his clarity of thought, which are both extraordinary, but his interest in lineages—formal and informal. The art and artists that shape him are so deeply ingrained in his work that he has made himself immense. Like the Fred Moten trilogy he writes about, consent not to be a single being, McCarthy has become multiple. (Is that not also, perhaps, a form of group living?) He consumed his influences, his heroes, his artistic forbears, and now he is sweating them out, and this time, I don’t want to flee the room.
In McCarthy’s essay on Fred Moten, “The Low End Theory,” first published in Harvard Magazine, I was also struck by the repetition—and reverence—for the word weird. Moten says, at various times throughout the essay [my emphases]:
“The critics I loved and who were influential to me were all weird: Empson, Burke, Benjamin, Adorno—they all had a sound, and it wasn’t like a PMLA, academic-journal sound.”
“I grew up around people who were weird. No one’s blackness was compromised by their weirdness, and by the same token, nobody’s weirdness was compromised by their blackness.”
“In my mind I have this image of Sonny Boy Williamson wearing one of those harlequin suits he liked to wear. These dudes were strange, and I always felt that’s just essential to black culture. George Clinton is weird. Anybody that we care about, that we still pay attention to, they were weird.”
I have been thinking a lot about weirdness. It was a word wielded against me as a young girl by classmates. At the time, I didn’t revel in it—or even understand it. I felt ostracized. At the same time, I wanted to be myself, and I was, according to others my age, “weird.” But in Moten’s mouth, and in turn in McCarthy’s, weirdness is profound. It’s not an appearance, something shallow and needy; it’s a form of being that sits right at the very heart of the human experience. Weirdness is a way to explore ourselves and push boundaries, to find out what we love and to share that love with others. I like the idea that it can be inclusive in the sense that it’s an invitation to self-exploration. I can be weird, and so can you; those two things will look different and both will be true. It can be about making art. It can also be about trying to come as close to freedom as you can reach for. But freedom isn’t untethered. These artists, musicians, writers, neighbors, and friends weirded their worlds because they were unsatisfied and hungry for something that tasted better.
My “uncle” Walt Curtis, who I recently wrote a tribute to, was weird. My parents are weird. I am less weird than I sometimes wish I were. I am interested in what Moten and McCarthy mean when they say weird. I am fascinated by their weird works. I’m interested in what it means to go against script, but beautifully, articulately, passionately. Weirdness isn’t in and of itself a virtue, but damn, it isn’t a vice!
I’m surprised you don’t reference the etymology of weird - check it out if you don’t already know it. I thought I did but it turns out it goes back further than the weird sisters of Shakespeare.