As If Love Were Art

Katie Ebbitt in conversation with Poet Rachel Rabbit White

“But there is also no certainty that things will not go well”

Rachel Rabbit White, the erotic poet "with no passion for reality," expands on the excess of Porn Carnival with Paradise Edition (now available for pre-order), a romantic turn from the reverie of her debut collection. White is still "restless & anarchic,” but her focus is now channeled into a series of missives written to the poet's fiancé author Nico Walker.

Porn Carnival is a work dedicated to identity construct, molded through the lens of labor. White questions the limits of being and body under capitalism, confronting the grief and rage that limitation inspires. With the inclusion of Paradise Edition in the second printing of Porn Carnival, White gives a more internal look into the realm of self, focusing on a whirlwind romance and how love can offer opportunities for transformation and rebirth. Deconstruction of identity is never easy, and certainly not linear, but White is forever candid in her inexhaustible joie de vivre. 

Rachel Rabbit White speaks to poet Katie Ebbitt about her move to Mississippi, fantasy and domesticity, inspiration for current writing projects, the religiosity of love, and rebirth.

Read an excerpt from Porn Carnival: Paradise Edition here.

Katie Ebbitt: There is a dialectic in your poetry between an anarchistic and devotional love. How do you hold these two loves simultaneously? 

Rachel Rabbit White: I’m thinking about getting baptized. This feels related... I was reading Kierkegaard to Nico over dinner the other night, a passage from Works of Love about how cheating oneself out of love is the most terrible deception, how guarding oneself against love is the ultimate disservice – an eternal loss for which there is no reparation. 

Of course, Kierkegaard being Kierkegaard this turns into a treatise on Christian love – how all love begins in God’s love. Despite being raised in a Jesus-loving household in the heartland, I was never baptized, as my parents’ values weren’t to influence me in that sort of decision. I wanted to be baptized as a child though, it weighed heavily on me, and yet I couldn’t decide to do it. It felt too big, maybe or too private a thing to do publicly. A devotional love often feels private. Maybe I was guarding myself, as a child.

Kierkegaard says “Need, to have need, and to be needy – how reluctantly a man wishes this to be said of him! And yet we pay the highest compliment when we say of a poet ‘it is a need of him to write.’”

Maybe part of embracing neediness is the unconscious pull to aestheticize need, to make it theatrical or scenic. Lauren Berlant writes that without fantasy there would be no love – love is always deemed an outcome of fantasy. To say I’m thinking about getting baptized, that’s also a fantasy. For Berlant, desire itself is anarchic and reckless and it's through fantasy and the narrative we tell ourselves that we feel stabilized. I think the devotional is part of the fantasy, the feeling of something larger, something fated, that we so often feel in the specter of love. But I don’t want to forget that it’s also madness, random, it’s terrifying – to not truly know the other and the ways in which they could and will hurt you. And isn’t that what gives the devotional bit its weight? 

I guess I’m being very romantic, but I like when Berlant also writes that desire is practical – it takes what it can get. 

KE: Most of us are grounded in the Christian ethics of love, so it makes sense that you're craving baptism. Sacrament by definition is mystical and sacred. 

In "What I Saw, I Saw Perfectly" you write: 

at five am you wake to ask

do you doubt my love?

I answer in half-sleep 

no~ you doubt yourself 

and let doubt cast its shadow over me

The psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva argues that love "reigns between the two borders of narcissism and idealization." What do you think of this assessment? 

RRW: I always laugh at that part of the poem because the scene is so vivid for me, it was lifted straight from my life. I really did wake at five am and say those words, half asleep. Getting simply at this truth of self-doubt being cast onto your partner and the ways your partner is a part of you – a projection of your ego. Like that experience when you’re staring at your partner’s face, so enrapt, it feels like it’s your face.

Being in Mississippi – away from my friends and community and the ways in which I’m used to seeing myself – my sense of self-identity has been thrown off a bit. I’ve been thinking a lot about ego and identity and gratification and love. 

Back when I was writing personal essays and working in media, I was more self-involved – and I miss it, even if it feels healthier to be less connected to ambition. Somewhere along the way, doing heavy sex work, it seemed my personality changed from being very inward-focused to focused on the other. When I was overworked and living so fast, I lost a sense of my own interior life, or maybe as my interior life grew more fraught, I became reliant on my ex for a sense of internal life, wrapped in a shared mental space. Of course, it also serves the ego to cater to another person so deeply, but I think it felt like a loss of ego identity because being purely receptive to the other isn’t what I most value in myself, it’s not how I see myself.

It’s intoxicating to fall in love with someone who you’d want to be. Or wouldn’t mind being. In this way the idealization of the other is imbued with narcissism. I’m always interested, given that Kristeva quote, in the narcissism of the couple. I crave more novels, more art about it. The specific addicting ego gratification that happens in every coupling. Every time I fall in love it is a great love. Does everyone feel this way? I put so much of my drive, my will, my passion into the relationship, as if it were a project, as if love were art.

One thing the ex of mine, who I am friends with, said of mine and Nico’s relationship is that it’s clear to anyone who sees us together that there’s a huge sense of giving between us. That we’re each always aware of the other, that there’s this constant back and forth of catering to each other. There is such a mutual admiration between us, and I feel a balance in it. 

Right now, I am trying to not fully lose myself in the relationship as I’m no longer engaging in things I previously got a sense of identity or ego gratification from: I’m not in New York with my friends and community, I’m not doing sex work, I’m not being polyamorous. There is a natural loss here, a grieving and a sense of shock. I know I am on a new journey, that it’s a sort of rebirth but I don’t yet know who I am becoming. But to let love change your life, for me to let Nico change my life, it’s a gift, a terrifying gift and a gift nonetheless. 

KE: I so agree with wanting love to be a project – but true love is wanting to be the other person. I wrote in a poem that true love is wanting someone to get "you" pregnant, and I really believe this. Wanting to be the other person so badly that you have to make a baby.

RRW: I totally know what you mean. I think it took me a long time to find that kind of love, to be comfortable with how terrifying it is – the kind where you want to be the other person. I feel like in the past, when I was being more narcissistic or more selfish, I went for easy loves, the ones I knew I had in the bag, someone to be there for me as I continually focused on myself and myself alone. When I finally fell in love in this way of overwhelming desire and want it totally shattered me! And yes, I think the pregnancy fantasy is huge here – there always has to be some dividing of the tension of the couple, of course it's the most psychotic and maybe the most romantic way to, sort of shatter the person you love literally, genetically, into that third.

KE: Nico is a novelist. In Paradise Edition you chronicle the beginning of your companionship. Tell me about the creative potential of your bond and the role writing has in your relationship.

RRW: I once heard a piece of advice, that the best way to finish a book is to write it to someone you know. Writing poetry about and to Nico was so natural – poems had never come to me more easily or gracefully. People are always saying “there can only be one writer in a relationship” but who could understand the psychotic schedule, lifestyle and needs of a writer other than another writer? I’ve long felt that I wouldn’t be able to love passionately, devouringly, unless I am loving another writer. Maybe it’s about a shared path, a greater purpose to serve, comorbidly. We want more than anything for the relationship to sustain but truly, we want to be there for each other’s writing.

Writing is a sort of alchemy, maybe the only alchemy that actually exists, and to be in a relationship of two writers comes with a sense of endless possibility, a feeling that new worlds, previously inaccessible, could be forged into being.

I guess I’m speaking about endurance. What’s needed for either romance of writing to be seen through is a sense of grounding, of ritual, of alignment and realignment. You need stability for a long-term relationship to survive yet to simultaneously deeply share the mysterious world of writing brings a feeling of excitement and novelty, of seeing your partner through a different lens – it’s like an eternal affair. The relationship between writer and reader is an inherently seductive relationship and as Nico’s most intimate reader, and with Nico as my most intimate reader, there is a constant sense of play and drama and romance between us.

I know I said I’m in a moment of rebirth, moving to Mississippi, not knowing who I’ll become, but I am ecstatic to have the time to finally write in a deeper way alongside the person I’m in love with, madly, the person who most inspires me – I mean, Nico currently has three novels in the works, the writing is so funny, so smart, so poignant. I can’t imagine not being in love with a writer, it's like being able to love in simultaneous multiple dimensions.

KE: In Paradise Edition, your love with Nico is conceptualized within the lineage of Romeo and Juliet, Cupid and Psyche. Did you need to mythologize your life with Nico to make it palatable – to accept a rebirth? 

RRW: That’s the fun part of falling in love, how to fall in love is to create a narrative, it’s always a story that you tell yourself that shifts and grows as you live in it. I pointed out in an interview with Flaunt magazine that, by invoking Romeo and Juliet, it became clear that maybe the fantasy I have about love is that love is a bit doomed. I tend to like art and writing that has a darker, wry outlook. After all, Nico and I did our engagement photoshoot in a cemetery – clearly, I am drawn to the macabre. 

I think we all mythologize our love lives. Just look at how many people go into debt for their weddings – there is even an industry of “wedding loans”. The wedding is the one day where private people get to be famous. In part this is about family and how there’s so much mythologizing within the family: the stories family members tell and retell, stirring a sense of grandiosity and importance – remember being a child and seeing your extended family in such a mythologized way? 

One must aestheticize her life for it to be tolerable. To aestheticize is to curate a vibe, and a vibe requires tending to, you have to shift a mood as the atmosphere calls. I love a good make-over, not just physically but when people change any big aspect of their lives. I suppose my life is marked by risk – leaving the small town I grew up in, moving to the city, becoming a writer, leaving relationships, starting new relationships, doing sex work, getting plastic surgery. I realize most people live more risk-averse and yet life’s inevitable consequences happen to us all – people get divorced, they have affairs, they get fired, they get sick, they go broke. But there is also no certainty that things will not go well. Maybe you will be in love forever and live happily together and die on the same day. Why play it safe? Why not live for beauty?

I used to joke “Look, George Bataille taught me nothing about consequences!”, defending my deranged choices. I’ve long lived my life with this Batallian sense of pushing every experience to a limit experience. But really, to live in this intense way is to know there’s no way to avoid consequence – that there is no true security. No one knows what is going to happen.

To live with a sense of romance is to live with a sense of risk. To aestheticize one’s life and be aware of the narrative (that always exists) makes life fun. It’s sort of the only reason for living. Nico innately understands this about me. It’s like how we both love getting dressed up, just to walk around the square or to go get cigarettes. Nico wears a suit, even when writing in the house, every day I double-glue false lashes and style myself like a haunted Bratz doll. One of my favorite anecdotes about Nico is that he loved costumes as a kid, that he wanted to wear a costume every day. 

One reason our love is so exciting to me is that I get the feeling that there are many narratives and aesthetics – many mythologies – that will continue to unfold into our love’s future. There’s definitely shared joie de vivre between us.

KE: Initially, I read Paradise Edition and Porn Carnival as creative testaments to longing, a way to deconstruct the limits of our autonomy – but I now want to categorize your work as a new genre of self-help confessional or life-style guide (Paradise Edition did inspire a perfume). In these texts, you’re being zealous and courageous – writing a blueprint for the aestheticized consciously narrated ethos you embody. While Porn Carnival has a darker revelry, Paradise Edition reminds me of Juliet whispering “The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.” Your love of life, of Nico, of community is rooted in your understanding of impermanence. Tell me more about your love of life, your desires and wants for the world. 

RRW: I hadn’t thought about the ways I’ve looked to literature for how a person should be. Literature definitely gave me a blueprint for the life I wanted to live. Reading Jean Rhys or Anias Nin or Colette or Mary Gaitskill at a young age helped me to understand and express my own interior, their characters, which were so real to me, helped me understand who I am and the sort of introspection I value. It’s like you read Jean Rhys and the characters are so sad but they have a sense of awe for life, for the small things that make them happy in spite of their own sadness, which they dissect. You want to stay in that world with them.

There’s a poem in Porn Carnival called “After all the Beige”: 

in Turin I complained I felt nothing

barren at the earth’s three vertices

of black magic

but that’s why Proust started to write

he said

I was in Turin with an ex, at Piazza Statuto, which is said to be one of three portals on earth to the gates of Hell. Turin is said to be home to both a white magic triangle and a black magic triangle, a city suspended between forces of good and evil. I’d been looking forward to it but when we got to the fountain that holds the secret hatch to Hell, I sat in the grass and felt nothing.

I had expected to feel a certain awe or one-ness, wonder, this secret feeling I’d known since childhood. It scared me to feel nothing. But as my ex pointed out to console me, that feeling, that loss of wonder is why Proust started to write. I think also of Anias Nin who wrote to “taste life twice” and who, from reading and re-reading her continuous novel I think I most share a sense of joie de vivre. 

You write not just to understand yourself and the people around you, but to hold onto a sense of wonder. I once attended a lecture by the poet Kaveg Akbar where he said that bewilderment is at the core of every great poem. If poetry doesn’t have a sense of wonder, is it even poetry?

I guess by evoking “a literature of self-help” it’s that my poems seem to have hope, but I think what they try to fight to hold onto is a sense of wonder, bewilderment, for the fact that we’re alive. From that comes a politics, a want for manifesto, or a way of living.

Whatever helps people helps people, but I don’t read self-help. To me it’s what happens when car salesmen try to get into books. Self-help is what happens when you take only the edifying nature of literature, which is how literature teaches us both how to desire and gives us its wisdom. Literature’s wisdom is coded in aesthetics but in our “self-care culture” of productivity, aesthetics has been forgone because of puritanical impulses and now you get this therapeutic self-help with its business aesthetics. You get a self-care that comes by way of buying products and concentrating always on the self-framed as something that you have to do for capital or to make money. 

It’s interesting that self-help is perceived as a feminine genre, but the approach often is to put together a life to do things you don’t want to do. I’m not saying people should act like children but it’s like the difference between refinement and respectability. Refinement is where you work on yourself, you limit yourself to put yourself toward a joyful goal. You sacrifice for beauty or for love. You sacrifice to make others happy. Respectability is directed to make us conform socially. It points us toward dullness and conformity where refinement points us to a controlled excess. I don’t know, maybe this interview is my lifestyle guide!

KE: Leftist politics are intrinsic to your writing. You have been candid in your labor as a sex worker and involved in various organizing projects aimed to assist those impacted by state violence such as SESTA/FOSTA. You mentioned a grieving in no longer participating in sex work and polyamorous relational structures. Do you have a sense what will emerge from moving to Mississippi and coupling with Nico?

RRW: My hope is to get into a really solid writing routine and start writing prose again. It sounds cozy in idea but I know how much work it will be so I’m sort of dreading beginning that work but there are things I want to express that fictional prose feels like the vehicle for.  

Writing can really take up all of your time, but I also have a wedding to plan. Nico just got his wedding suit yesterday. I want to continue to study tarot, to read novels, poetry, theory, to have sex with my beloved. Maybe I’ll make my Instagram into a little diary of my life. My nice cozy life on a more straight and narrow path. I really hope I’ll just be able to slow down and really be with my thoughts, my memories and evolving impressions of the world in a more leisurely, languorous way. To me that sounds like the height of decadence, after so much fast living. Even monogamy, which I am excited to be a new convert of, seems almost hedonistic, like some special luxury. 

KE: Tell me about your writing desk (is it still a bed?), daily writing habits, and what current creative projects you’re developing. 

RRW: I’m writing this to you, from Nico’s bed where my cat is lying next to me and there are like a million juuls and juul pods and books all around me. I’ve been off writing projects in the midst of the move, the holidays and promoting the book but after Christmas is when I hope to lay down some new habits. We’re living together, of course, but I did rent a separate space to go write from every day, as it’s so hard for us both to be at home all day and not want to hang out, and talk, and just generally be as close to each other as possible. I remember when I was here before Nico was like “we’re going to die if we keep going on like this” or “I’m going to die fucking you” – when you’re in love it’s an illness, it’s really the only thing you want to do. I could lay in bed with Nico for weeks on end. It would be nice to not have to think about money and treat life as an extended honeymoon, like the first part of Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, before she throws his manuscript in the fire. (This scene has become especially haunting to me as Nico writes on a typewriter and whatever huge stack of paper is on the floor is the only way his future novel exists.)

Nico has to write to make money, and I need to try to do the same. Forcing myself to go to a separate writing space will hopefully help us stave off death a bit longer.