Renèe Helèna Browne - Lessons from Urania
This text was commissioned as part of ‘call + response 4: DONOR’
Image courtesy of Renèe Helèna Browne
Fizz becomes an inescapable guest of my brain, crashing around each time I look at the studio walls. Small portrait drawings in colouring pencil, scrawled on sticky notes, printed articles laden with highlighter, and quotes on cards that I want to remember but have probably written too small to really take in again. I can feel the fizz wake up when I begin my work day by leering, as I have come to do in recent weeks, at these documents of work. They no longer seem to harness any ideas beyond their edges. The exciting escapism of being in the studio with them seems, amid the limits to life beyond it, to have moulded itself into a hissing vacancy. I realise I need to quit the leering, somehow pop the bubbles in my head, and decide to take a break from being there. With delight, I quickly find myself awash with linear tasks at home. Unlike the studio, there’s a lot to do here. There's things to think about free of any fizz, and then to act out the thoughts of which immediately. A clear trajectory of work.
I begin my new work day by rearranging the furniture in my sitting room, realising urgently as I enter that I need to find a more ideal spot for the couch. It's enshrouded in sunlight right now. My eyes will never be able to focus on the laptop screen. I buy a large round rug online, reading about how rugs pull a space together ‘creating a sense of wholeness’. That must be what I'm missing, a sense of wholeness to do my work. I shop for curtains - sheer ones to diffuse aggressive sunlight beaming in from too many angles. I write a reading list for the week, make some amends to my calendar for this refocused environment, and lay out paper for possible New and Useful ideas. I plant seeds. The seedlings die. I replant the seeds. I change the lighting conditions and watering schedule and check them every morning, allowing their growth-death-growth routine to anchor my mood for the upcoming day. I bleach the bathroom. I organise a food shopping list for meals that, as advised by google, stimulate brain power. I read old notebooks, trying to remember how my brain operated at my most productive periods. I do not recognise my past self in their entries. I set new goals, write more lists, reread the old notebooks and buy some plant food online. I bleach the bathroom a few more times. Dissemination becomes the main thought, to no real end other than the word sits lazily in my mind amid the bleaching, growing, moving around, and self reflective failure of a past self.
Urania was a privately distributed journal focusing on gender from 1916 to 1940. It’s main editors were Irish poet and activist Eva Gore-Booth, English activist Esther Roper, and Irene Clyde, an English lawyer. Through the journal, the editors of Urania formed an informal network of two hundred and fifty subscribers. Every two months, these two hundred and fifty people received a black-inked A3-folded newsprint through their post boxes. Urania foregrounded fluidity as an ideal model of gender and sexuality, each issue headed with the statement: "There are no 'men' or 'women' in Urania." The journal featured a mosaic of texts ranging from re-printed articles from newspapers around the world, editorial commentaries, poetry, and prose, all of which gave readers an alternative scientific and cultural basis of expression on androgyny and love. To go under the radar of a conservative early 1900s Britain, Urania had to be simple and look like commonly distributed newspapers at the time. The way tampons are advertised where the boyfriend thinks the girlfriend has little containers of sugar falling out of her bag onto the cafe table, not something she’s going to insert into herself later in the bathroom.
I have haphazard and minimal documentation of the journal taken when I decided on a hunch to go see the copies a year ago. These few jpegs of random texts, printed from a folder in my laptop, are simultaneously both small riches to me now, and, in their fragmented form, a difficult reminder of a much greater wealth beyond my reach. I find myself checking the archives proposed reopening dates on their website daily and tentatively consider sending an email pleading with the staff to let me in. I’m aware though that the Out-of-office reply I know I'll receive back will devour my mind, and therefore the working day in its automatic rejection. I reread one particular entry from Urania set in the mining town of Lochore in Fife, Scotland. A 15 year old daughter of a collicery manager had been noticed to have “changed her habits and demeanour” and, after consultation with ‘her’, is given orders by the family doctor to “have her sex changed”. The article stated that since the event, “she is now an excellent specimen of virile boyhood, upright, square shouldered, and alert in every way.” The father gushed to a local newspaper that the boy can now begin a new life.¹
I make what I feel is a fair assumption quickly: the editors of Urania, Eva, Esther, and Irene, read the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrich, a german writer and pioneer of sexology believed to have been the first person to publicly ‘come out’, in the modern sense of the term. Between 1864 and 1879, Ulrich published twelve volumes of essays titled Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Studies on the Riddle of Male-Male Love) which elaborated his theory of homosexuality. In which, Ulrich referred to the term Urning (Uranian) for a man who desires men. In between the tasks of domesticity above that I’ve prioritised, I read some of this, his most famous texts. It takes an age and I resent him for the length. In 1870 he then released what he stated would be the first of many journals titled under the singular heading Uranus. Ulrich did not, however, do so, releasing no more Uranus journals. I have searched for but cannot find any reason why this happened. He published other writings right up until his death in 1895 at 70 years old. I do however feel somewhat seduced by this, Ulrich’s act of withholding. While promising the world multiple, only to hand out a single without explanation. At Ulrich's funeral, his friend and landlord Marquis Niccolò Persichetti gave a eulogy. He said:
But with your loss, oh Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the fame of your works and your virtue will not likewise disappear... but rather, as long as intelligence, virtue, learning, insight, poetry and science are cultivated on this earth and survive the weakness of our bodies, as long as the noble prominence of genius and knowledge are rewarded, we and those who come after us will shed tears and scatter flowers on your venerated grave.²
I search ‘venerated’ on reading and it tells me the word is akin to worship, to deify, and to praise. I appreciate these words, finding myself able to garner a billowing enthusiasm for things that I like. A dramatics and reverie in positivity that is an easy drink to sip, and so infrequent a taste of late. Persichetti’s outpour at Ulrich’s funeral is remarkable in that he compares both Ulrichs work and his virtue, in its ability to survive, as akin to the lasting human activities of learning and insight, of poetry and of science. I quickly wander into thoughts of what my closest friends might say at my own funeral, hopefully comparable to something equally monumental like poetry! Or science! It's quite amazing how the dead are celebrated, as if their virtues, if any, in life get blown up with helium upon their departure to death. One’s apparent goodness reaching a high-note just for managing to die before other people. I think for a moment maybe I should write my own eulogy now to avoid Ulrich’s fate by Persichetti. Remind those that attend my funeral of all the wrongs I have done amid the priggish glory of not being able to survive the weakness of my own body.
Laying on my repositioned couch, outstretched and idle, I watch an Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick talk on my laptop and simultaneously scroll through twitter. To begin with I am mainly distracted by the quick whips and bitchy subtweeting happening within the small screen of the phone. But I become drawn in by the talk, not just by what Sedgwick says but with her humble voice and almost embarrassed demeanor in how she delivers each sentence she has written. She quickly scans the lines before saying them aloud and then, in soft excitement, reads them with a sense of discovery and delight. In 1991, Sedgwick was diagnosed with breast cancer and subsequently wrote the book A Dialogue on Love (1999) of which she reads a passage of as the lecture. While noting the relationship she had with her parents, she states “If u dont have the talent to fake intimacy, a lot of the time you are forced to do the real thing.” God, I think, the real thing. That sounds utterly terrifying when I think of how out of reach Urania is to me sitting locked in an archive, and my attempts to connect to Eva, Esther and Irene through it.³
I then decide to read some biographies of people that make things, by artists, writers, and musicians I respect or have felt affinities with through what they make and/or how they make it. I become quickly and obsessively concerned with how to frame a ‘valuable’ life. To make the most of it, before the Persichetti-style eulogy reframes it at my funeral. I begin to worry about having some kind of purpose now - about what meaning might come from being in the world when that world boils down to my newly decorated sitting room and chemically imbalanced bathroom. Those biographers seemed to have, for the most part, experiences, personal, environmental and educational, that were not that distant from my own. Yet they had come through them while slowly building a practice, their stories mainly constructed around the things they have made. Objects, books, plays, and music that sit, due to their trailblazing quality, in states that seem to transcend tense now. Each author regales, laments, and rejoices of times gone by as ways to think anew about what meaning there might be for living. How the mistakes of their youth, the chance encounters both in and outside of their workspaces, formed the things that have helped them make sense of their worlds the most. Sitting in my tidy little sitting room world, a newborn dread cracks open the shells of my brain, of which has been previously sheltered with the sheer curtains and the seedlings and the bleach. I decide to go out for a walk to try and escape this new bubbling fizz.
Quilted in troves of yellow, the park beside my house provides a calming detour where I gather a bunch of daffodils and give them to my lover. I’ve learned to pick the ones that are just about to open, those poking their heads through high green collars asif checking it's safe to come out. The lesson here resides on when presented to the receiver, one passes on a journey. A quiet anticipation followed by resulting delight, as they keep an eye out for this floral birthing to occur on their own windowsill. My father told me recently that he thinks his distant cousin sold flowers on the streets in Glasgow years ago. I imagine she didn’t have a stall, but instead think of her shop as her arms and in it a bundle of red roses. Its opening hours varying on how fast sales were made each day. So when the bundle was gone, her shop closed and she could go home. I imagine her specific target was couples. That she would play with the expectation of one of them to feel they must enter into this romantic economy that roses historically perpetuate. If they didn’t it would show cracks in the seams of their devotion to the partner, and therefore a willingness to construct meaning between them. This complicated relationship with care, when passed from the hands of one to another, allows flowers the space to move between being objects of grief, of sickness, and of love in a way that few others can roam.
On www.findagrave.com there is the option to ‘Leave a Flower’ on famous peoples gravestones. George Washington is the most popular grave on the website, closely followed by Benjamin Franklin, William Shakespeare, and Walt Disney. I search, and end up finding Eva and Esther, two of the three editors of Urania. Eva and Esther were lovers, buried together twelve years apart at St John-at-Hampstead Churchyard in London. Their headstone is tall and rectangular, filled with a sculpted cross in celtic patterning below which a quote reads from the Greek poet Sappho ‘Life that is Love is God’. Under the name RHB1, I create my own account on the website and leave a flower for each Eva and Esther, a daffodil and a red rose. This virtual offering to their physically buried bodies is the closest I can get to scattering flowers for now and I attach quite quickly to an idea that this gesture, one acted out in my sitting room, is an intimate exchange with them.
Deciding, after a few weeks of inactivity and mindless revamps of the home, I need to do something with my hands. I think again about dissemination, printing multiple, quickly and cheaply and I buy a lino printing kit on the internet. On its arrival, I set about carving into the soft blocks in my sitting room. I decide to make an image of Aphrodite Urania, relevant to the publication name but I also feel a fondness for the hybridity of her entrance into the world; Aphrodite Urania was born from the white foam produced by the severed genitals of Uranus, after his son Cronus threw them into the sea. In order to make legible prints, you must reverse all images and words when carving into the lino block before finally transferring the image, via ink, to paper. I learn this lesson a little too late and end up with a fairly rough image. The ink is too thick in places losing the detail of the lips and fingertips and in others barely discernible asif uncarved and, more annoyingly, unconsidered. Below the image, the following text sits stamped on the podium she resides on:
AINARU
It takes me a second to address the confusion in my head. I look, between block and paper, a couple times until the new lesson sets in. I then feel a sense of emotional relief at simply having a genuinely unexpected experience in my little sitting room. Chance encounters have become so unfamiliar a feeling lately, even with objects like paper and lino and ink. Quickly, I decide to post the print to a friend. Someone that I've always thought has understood and lived through a kind of queerness that seems to me alternative to, if not actively detached from, the structures of that which does not serve and celebrate her. An unusually genuine selfhood, while the rest of us clammer around after our ‘identities’. In the queue at the post office I think and attempt to plan a new course of action. I want to keep working in a way that this feeling, the unexpectedness I felt as the paper pulled away from the block, is cultivated. Something of an allowance for drifting, for this kind of rude mistake to flourish again. Simple acts of trying to get the right ink consistency, carving the letters, and pressing down evenly and firmly on the block to print are focussed efforts in attention that I haven't felt in months. I like how the point is to create multiples of the same image, but knowing, due to my amateur abilities, I must allow for unidentical sets, strange pieces of a puzzle I do not understand yet. On the walk back home I pass a window with a snow globe on the sill. While noting the odd timing of such a seasonally specific decoration, I start thinking about how their magic works. Snow globes offer a 360° view into the world they hold. Through this, they invite its user into the making, becoming a part of visual mechanics to continually recreate. You pick it up, shake it vigorously, set it down again and watch the fake snow fall around the little buildings and gardens and people. These kinds of gestures in rerouting the snow and allowing the natural fall of it to occur are what might help me move forward and maybe back into the studio again.
In reading the documents I do have access to from Urania, I have found anonymous people in history that I want to fuck, that I want to befriend, that I despise, that I feel a deep and lasting empathy for, and that feel like they are already close to me. I have felt people’s moments of euphoria when building the right architectures around them and the blasted scenes of emptiness when these buildings have been demolished by others. I have nodded enthusiastically reading entries, saying out loud “ME TOO ME TOO” in childish outbursts of connection and I have cried into pages of accounts of public and private shaming, of exclusion, and of violence. It warmed the bones in my body and the brain in my skull to consider myself part of this ancestry. It made me feel excited and humbled to learn of a past where alternatives to the social order were so actively lived long ago. It also made me feel the deep need to publicly praise both the people that made Urania and those I’ve come across inside its pages. And in turn, it made me want others to feel the heat of the emotions I accidentally got to feel as well. Not yet having access to the majority of Urania makes the work of response frustrating. But it also enables me to consider the politics of that contact - the desire to hold, shake, and set back down, the desire to be part of something that is, for now, unreachable. In response, I want to insert myself near Urania, like getting an autograph from a celebrity, to have a form of closeness to the authors and feel what the threads of a trans lineage might be like. An attempt to try and, as Sedgwick notes in her talk, force myself “to do the real thing.”
Bibliography:
1. Editor, “Scotland”, Urania No. 105 (May - August, 1934) 2.
2. Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs (1825 – 1895). Available at: https://www.jahsonic.com/Ulrichs.html
3. Kessler Lecture 1998 Eve Sedgwick, Uploaded by ‘CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies’. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE1_Rg3mJf4&ab_channel=CLAGS%3ATheCenterforLGBTQStudies.
Renèe Helèna Browne makes essay films, vocal soundscapes, and angsty drawings. They are 2021-2023 Talbot Rice Resident Artist with ECA at the University of Edinburgh. In 2021, Browne is screening work with the European Media Art Festival No. 34, will participate in the Experimental Film & Moving Image Residency at Cove Park, and are commissioned by the Project Arts Centre (Dublin) to make new work.