Behind the Wallpaper

An Essay by Sandow Sinai

I once asked a dear friend of mine, a trans woman and left-wing philosopher, to explain one of her tattoos to me, a reproduction of Jacques Lacan's graph of desire. Lacan's point, she explained, was about the retroactivity of time, memory and meaning, the way that the development of consciousness follows a logical order, but not necessarily a chronological one. She gave me a familiar example: the process of realizing oneself as trans. We all have various childhood memories that we point to as evidence of our transness — the stereotypical "I always knew I wanted to wear dresses and paint my nails," for instance — but there's no real way to know that these memories mean what we think they do. They only make sense when we, in adulthood, look back on them, inserting our present desire to think of ourselves in a cohesive story. On this basis, the basis of what we want, we decide what those memories mean, assembling a coherent narrative: "I am trans, and I was always going to be." This understanding helps overcome one of the biggest problems of "how I knew I was trans” narratives — that many of us don't have very clear memories of those moments; we were dysphorically dissociating the whole time.

When I say that I hear Alex Temple’s Behind the Wallpaper as a piece about being trans, about self-knowledge and transition, this is what I mean. It operates in a hazy, dissociative, symbolic space, the space of half-memories and pure vibes, and each movement is one such moment. You can't point to any individual moment as the "proof" that Temple wrote the piece to be about transness (her own or anyone else’s), but if you, as I do, listen with trans ears, "you'll know that all of this was here the whole time" (a lyric from "Spires"). And from that perspective, hearing Julia Holter tell you in matter-of-fact, second-person perspective all of what has transpired, Behind the Wallpaper becomes brilliantly didactic. Whose transition is it about? Yours. This is a how-to.

The first step to knowing yourself as trans is to become aware that trans people exist. This is the story that begins in "Midnight Bus". As you traverse an unfamiliar environment, vulnerable to transformations of your consciousness, you encounter mysterious figures. You can't look at them directly, because you don't have the cultural context with which to parse them, so they appear "out of the corner of your eye" with "the faces of aliens". They are, at this juncture, objects of anxiety, compelling and destabilizing. 

The inverse of this structure is that supposedly ordinary people are equally terrifying to you. While the aliens have terrifying bodies, the people in "Unnatural" are overwhelmingly laden with social meanings, "a wild tangle of blood and bones covered in their neighbors opinions". At the end of this movement, you can't help but reference the canon: "You make me feel like an unnatural woman." As the original chord dissolves into dissonance, you feel at odds with your sense of self. It is as if you know what gender you are supposed to be, but don't quite believe it. You ask, ‘if all of these people’s social presentations don’t correspond to their senses of self in ways that feel natural, what is to say that mine do?’ This is gender dysphoria.

You don't yet know that there is a community of alien-faced figures, but you know that there is a community of other people that feel uncomfortable (dysphoric) with everyday life. "Tiny Holes" is about finding this community. You still can't face the matter directly, but you can displace the anxiety onto objects that are porous and permeable, that you identify with and feel exposed by. This fear is, however, social, as you find others who have "seen the picture." You are in a double-bind; the more you find people who validate your feelings as real, the deeper you experience them. "This American Life" is when you realize that this is better than the alternative: cold, bleak, emotionless, and fundamentally lonely.

"Science Park" is a central pivot-point for you. You know that you feel disconnected from the social reality around you, that at every turn you feel things that you don't know how to feel. You can't stop your feelings from manifesting outside you, outside your control. The strings echo your thoughts back to you, then coalesce in unison with you in blinding chorales. There is a moment where you see, in your own shadow, the supposedly alien presence you fear, "a figure in silhouette impossibly tall," and then suddenly you see everything, the stars become "a network of roads spanning the continent," as your every social relationship returns to you with new meaning. A gnosis. "Something dropped! And you went home as someone else."

Now that you know, you can't not know — you now have to reevaluate your relationship to the regular world, and you begin to do this in the next few movements. To the ‘regular’ world, you are now the alien.. In "Fishmouth," you are forced out of the closet, which you experience as body horror; you are now  stuck with "the friction of the scales in your throat.” In "Purple Stain," you go on a date with a cis man who clocks you, misrecognizes you, and becomes inhuman in the process. In "Night After Night," you are again clocked, this time by a chaser who wants you only as an impossible fantasy, leaving you powerless and exposed.

This process culminates in "Jolene," a rewrite of Dolly Parton's classic from the perspective of your girlfriend, who's threatened by your transition: "she’s terrified, but you've never felt so at ease". Your changing body is manifested in the house you share; where Dolly Parton has "ivory skin and eyes of emerald green," you have "white walls" and "moss-green shutters," and your girlfriend is afraid that the house is growing out of her control. There's a new "ballroom," "fourth floor," and "iron staircase." In Dolly Parton's "Jolene," we never quite find out if Jolene takes her man, but here, "it's too late. It's out of your hands now."

You'll find it very easy to lose the plot, to become jaded and pessimistic, to forget why you made, or couldn't not make, the decisions that led you here, with all the fear and disorientation that the process entailed. But I told you earlier why you're looking at these memories, why you're reading your own story: because you wanted to. 

And in this simple articulation is something primal, something utopian. Behind the wallpaper, you find something you couldn't yet imagine, something radical (in the truest sense of the word), something foundationally different from everything you knew about how to relate to yourself, your body, and your society. Built into this transformation is the potential for something better. This is what we see, at last, in "Spires" — "people the size of trees," "trees the size of mountains," and a "city the size of the moon". And, with the same melody that first accompanied the alien-faces in the corner of your eye, "you'll know that all of this was here the whole time. And you'll understand that you have finally come home."

– Sandow Sinai