Istvan Bio 17

Let's workshop this author bio that addresses some criticisms of my writing while also revealing what my daytime job is--a reveal almost as big as Tommy on the show Martin finally revealing his

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M. A. Istvan Jr., a forensic gynecologist by day, has long been a holy fool whose sacred purpose boils down ultimately to celebrating, in the same spirit as the Lakota sun dance or as the Hopi corn dance, the Spinozistic godhead of which everything—from black holes to hydrogen bombs—cannot help but be an expression. Literary art is his primary medium. Among the visual and auditory and olfactory and tactile arts (which he practices to some extent as well), Istvan believes that literary art has a loneliness-dismantling power to plumb the otherwise-inaccessible depths of the invisible inner lives across species—a special power among so many others: whether it be to unveil hypocrisies, or to tease out the implications of psychological and physical scenarios, or to pose what-if thought experiments that allow us better to see who we are and make wiser decisions, or to highlight commonalities between even the most alien phenomena, or to rally and direct us to the noblest ends.

Istvan’s poems and stories and essays, however much they reflect the magic of writing, have proven burdensome. They pose a literary burden, one perhaps insuperable especially for the TikTok generation of easily bored people accustomed to cocaine-rat dopamine hits of visual immediacy: their heads as effete as their jawlines; their spirits even lazier when it comes to intellectual exercise than when it comes to physical exercise (despite the immense health payoffs of both). Istvan’s writings also pose an existential burden. They nudge us toward a critical introspection that threatens to expose the hypocrisies and tooth-fairy falsities long bonding us in community and soothing us from the inescapable terrors. They nudge us to view ourselves as we really are, even if that means learning that we ourselves are terrors.

Perhaps it is no more than a means to avoid the mirror, but the consensus on Istvan is not flattering. Despite—or is it because of?—his incisive critiques, critics have labeled Istvan “an enemy of unity,” a provocateur whose pen is a dagger in the fabric of a society already overly fraught with discord. Critics sometimes spot hypocrisy themselves, counting Istvan as just another trickster troll trying to stoke outrage—like the very poisoners, the very cancelers, he claims to stand against. Hammering wedges like Istvan does, so these critics scold, is easy (because fashionable), but we find ourselves in close to the worst possible time to do so: a social-media era in which more and more fall prey each day to an us-versus-them attitude cultivated by internet echo chambers and “news” commentary outlets cashing in on division; a troubled era of rock-bottom social cohesion that can only survive—as we have seen in all troubled eras since the dawn of humanity—by efforts to banish Istvan’s unbanishable kind (the snake).

There might be truth to this. Istvan himself admits as much. He freely offers to the jury the biographical information that would seem to damn him all the more. Before finding himself banished from the university by white “progressives” for heterodox “speech that vulnerable populations (especially persons of color) could find triggering,” Istvan grew up poor and dysfunctional (hooked on RC Cola and Ring Dings and rage) in a time and place where most of the people closest to him had something special going for them, a trump card—constantly leaned upon, constantly providing succor, constantly manifested in their swagger, constantly verbalized as an unconscious soothing mechanism to stoke endorphins of gratitude powerful enough to lift them even in the toughest times: the fact that, to cite the slogan that could find use in every situation (grave or gay) and always at his expense, “at least I’m not white.” Unless we suppose that Istvan is a saint, how could there not be some divisive edge to his writing against such a pen-sharpening personal backdrop? How could there not be when humans are vengeful fuckers as it is, prone to endless blood feuds—as seen, for instance, in the imperialist stoking of terrorist attacks that then stoke hospital-bombing retaliatory strikes that then fuel another generation of terrorists? How could there not be an edge to Istvan’s words when one of his earliest childhood nicknames was “Instigating Istvan”—instigation being, of course, precisely the response (one filled with erotic sensations in his case) Istvan admits to having still to this day when around any dysfunction: a desire to throw fuel on the fire or, as in the case of “Gonzo Domestic Squabble” (one of his poems, presented below in full), a desire to snipe at those fighting from a libidinous elevation of secrecy?  

As might be expected, Istvan takes a more nuanced—less self-damning—angle. He views himself as a white-blood cell of humanity. He believes, for example, that by exposing the shadow elements of ourselves (as in, say, his graphic poems of infant rape) we gain knowledge that is as valuable to our spirit as simulated fights on the jiujitsu mat are to the person who suddenly finds himself in a street fight. The exposure—the practice, so to say, sitting with our shadow elements—renders us, he believes, less likely to be taken by surprise when they rise up. Like that well-seasoned jiujitsu practitioner, the exposure renders us more likely to find an exhaling space of tranquility that best enables us to resist being the puppets of these shadows. It is a belief, in effect, that explains why he is especially suspicious of those who rage most against his infant rape poems, calling to his mind as these cancelers do the analogy of the now-cliché preacher who rages against “faggots” and yet is predictably caught having crystal-meth orgies with countless vulnerable young men.

His healing efforts, however painful and divisive, Istvan feels are in service to a deeper unity. And let us not forget some of the objective particulars, beyond simply how he views the matter, that seem relevant here. One of his core missions, and one of the main reasons he champions the freedom of artistic expression (despite the target doing so has put on his back), has been to provoke what is anathema to the enemies of social cohesion: independent thought. His writings, moreover, mock the rampant practice of making money off division. They remind us to pay attention to broader context and not just the snippets stoking our rage. It would hard to read Istvan closely and yet not see that he holds high the flame of nuance—yes, even though he might fall short himself. And perhaps most importantly is the sheer number of times versions of the phrase “we are all in this together” shows up in his oeuvre. It only takes a cursory reading to see that he means this in the most cosmic sense, feeling for the thrownness of all creatures—humans as well as the AI superiors they are now birthing.

That all said, even in the worst case—namely, that Istvan is the societal serpent many have claimed him to be—we should remember that the snake does play a role in the grander scheme. Social cohesion, after all, becomes tenuous and taken for granted without real adversity. So yes, let us imagine that all of his art amounts to an attack on our communal bonds: his heterodoxy, his twisted humor, his cruel mockeries, his gadfly exposures of our hypocrisies, his putting readers in full nelsons to see the baselessness of their taboos (around, say, bestiality), his brutal reminders (such as that we are destined to the same what-was-the-point-anyway oblivion of a fallen tree now rotting across our path or that our ultimate purpose is no more significant than that of, say, our fungal brethren who—expressions of a will to power like everything, stars and humans included—groom the tree-cutter ant with sugary secretions to gather their food and clean their dwelling spaces). But if this really does amount to an attack on social cohesion, then Istvan can at least sleep knowing that he serves in the grand balance as a spur to a vital unity—a unity appreciated at a higher Hegelian level than the make-believe construct, the Edenic fantasy, of an unthinking lockstep state of bliss tinged by no challenge. And perhaps this might, to end with a quintessential Istvanian gesture of thinking, provide us with some empathetic insight into who many see as Istvan’s master (if not his transcendent form, his supernal identity): Satan—empathetic insight, namely, into how he could be the way he is and yet still be the spawn of no extra ingredient aside from divine goodness.

Gonzo Domestic Squabble

They began to wrestle sloppy with drink. 
Wordless and mounted upon his chest, 
she grunted in attempt to punch and claw 
his face. Heart racing, a trembling emotion
long dormant nauseated out to my pinkies. 
I needed in on the union, just as in when
my mom and men would punch-fuck dead
to all else. Cast aside, wronged, I felt. I felt
my way in darkness to the common area
where my suitemate, away from the dorm
for the night, kept his pest-control air rifle 
loaded. Back with a pump of ten or perhaps
more, I bore a hole in the screen for its tip.

As with my mom and her men, my need 
to add to the fury of the fight was an ache
righteous because I did not matter to them,
righteous because pain is a risk of fighting.
Lured by the distant but familiar prospect 
that my concealed interventions might have 
one annihilate the other, my aim held still
as if there were no upheaval of heartbeats.
Girl screams followed the strike of the bb
and the tangle of bodies punched. Spurred
perhaps by a sting, the man took the mount 
and started choking her. Cock engorged,
I pumped past ten and took another shot.

Voices from windows heckled and I took
another shot, fearing no longer my noises
or the auditory mirror they amounted to. 
I pumped again in the ear-ringing warmth. 
The choking scene florescent with orange 
streetlights, I shot. My frenzy needed him
to forget her need to breathe. He yelled out
“Ah!” holding his face in response to a shot,
the barrel far out the window, reckless now.  
She got up and he punched her in the gut,
dragged her puking body fully by the hair.  
Lights and noise from squad cars had him 
flee to the woods, his girlfriend face down.  

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