It was magic. After finishing Bluets the second time through, I messaged a friend — in fact, another former student, another writer, who has given me permission to write about her work another day. Had she read Bluets? I asked.
No, the reply came. ‘We were assigned The Argonauts.‘
The Argonauts, I told her, is a text, as I know for myself in my own heart, for which I have had to gather as much courage to approach as The Glory of the Lord. Of course, it is for entirely different readings. Balthasar is just long, probably because he needed an editor. The Argonauts, on the other hand, opens with the following description of an early encounter that Maggie Nelson had with her partner, Harry Dodge: ‘Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad.’ Thanks, I said my first time reading it. ‘What’s your pleasure? you asked,’ the paragraph concludes, ‘then stuck around for an answer’ (The Argonauts, 3).
As a reader who is as straight and insecure as a heteronormative man can get, I much prefer the kind of thing Nelson describes later on the ‘queen of queer theory’ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick had. ‘Sedgwick,’ she writes, ‘who was long married to a man with whom she had, by her own description, mostly postshower, vanilla sex,’ sounds more like what I prefer too (The Argonauts, 29). Of course, I too realize, as Nelson does on the next page, that I also ‘support private consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please,’ so long as I get to do my own boring thing with complete privacy as well (The Argonauts, 30).
I’m not done with The Argonauts, though I took great pleasure in Nelson’s description of the Proposition 8 days in California, a time that I am also very interested in in my research. For the uninitiated, Proposition 8 was a citizen’s initiative to ban the use of the word ‘marriage’ to describe same-sex partnerships in California’s state constitution in the 2008 elections; it passed at the time by a narrow margin, but it was also struck down by a series of federal cases, notoriously beginning at the district level with Perry v. Schwarzenegger.
But if the first part of the chapter in Seeing the Form on ‘The Light of Faith’ sent me to Bluets and all of its fucking, then the second part naturally has me checking out The Argonauts for the first time.
What I’m referring to as the second part of this chapter is actually its third section, the ‘Elements of the Form of Faith.’ Again, I feel like I’m just learning to read Balthasar, to wade through the deluge of his words, which honestly feel like the way that I write when I have a first draft — or when an unfortunate friend has to receive one of my notoriously lengthy emails because I don’t have the time to think about what it is that I truly want to tell them.
But the one thing that I do take away from this section is Balthasar’s insistence that the differentiation is not between faith and reason, but will and affect. This is because, he repeats over and over, the ancients did not see any differentiation between philosophy and theology. Instead, the difference lay between all of the faculties of reason, including the faith that allows a person to move toward the light through desire, and the affect through which a person’s bodily form is stirred.
Nelson, I realize, is not at all an inappropriate interlocutor here, especially given her interest in theology. I ask another friend, this one in the theological academy but who has read her fair share of Nelson, whether Nelson is someone with whom theologians interact. Not that she knows of, she says, and this is before I start The Argonauts today. So much of Bluets is theological, right up to the very end where she refers to her relationship with former lover as her trying to live in the ‘light.’
The Argonauts, by contrast, feels more like a meditation on queer theory, that which tends to make especially Catholic and Orthodox theologians queasy with their stated anxieties about ‘transgenderism’ and ‘gender ideology.’ Their most familiar bogey-nonbinaries will be found in its pages, especially Judith Butler.
But here I wonder whether Balthasar, though himself and Speyr notoriously heteronormative in their description of the sexes, offers a helpful reminder to such ecclesial establishments. An ‘ism’ and an ‘ideology’ is, after all, a description of something conscious, something willed, a sense that can be developed. But so much of queer theory, from Sedgwick to Butler and beyond, is not in fact about ideology; in fact, it is what they critique as a kind of ‘homonormativity’ that is presented by ‘the assimilationist, unthinkingly neoliberal bent of the mainstream GLBTQ+ movement, which has spent fine coin begging entrance into two historically repressive structures: marriage and the military’ (The Argonauts, 26).
But is this what queer theory is about? Is it what it is in Nelson, who with her partner goes the day before the elections in 2008 to make sure to register their same-sex marriage, only to have it rescinded by Proposition 8 — even though she spends a fair bit of time writing about how there is
something truly strange about living in a historical moment in which the conservative anxiety and despair about queers bringing down civilization and its institutions (marriage, most notably) is met by the anxiety and despair so many queers feel about the failure or incapacity of queerness to bring down civilization and its institutions. (The Argonauts, 26).
If my reading of The Argonauts, which is couched in a literature that my secular graduate studies prepared me far better than any of my dabblings in theology did (one might imagine Balthasar chuckling here), is anything to go by, then in fact so much of it is suffused by affect, that which animates the body, but is itself unthinking, perhaps even unconscious.
What is that subjective experience? Could it be faith? Is this why Nelson herself has written so much about faith in relation to sexual practices that even Balthasar and Speyr would find difficult to speak about, except in the closet of the confessional?
Whatever it is, it is probably why Nelson names her book The Argonauts. She cites Roland Barthes for saying that the utterance of ‘the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.”‘ She continues: ‘Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as the “very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new”‘ (The Argonauts, 5).
Is this not also the light of faith that, for Balthasar, meets the form of the lover in Jesus Christ and cries out with the Holy Spirit, Kyrios Jesus? I do not want to word this in any way but as a question. It is what I now ask in openness, without foreclosure, so that theology stays open to the beautiful that is mystery beyond words and tries in vain to describe it anyway.
Is that not what affect is, to be daimonically affected by the other who is beautiful?
godforsaken geographies 
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