Dec 21: Patrick Madden, Pietà

Pietà

Patrick Madden

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There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that, the first time I saw it, evoked from me an involuntary sob, a kind of bubbling up of weeping emotion, sadness and joy together, from an instantaneous recognition of the visual allusion that I was unconsciously sure writer/director Mike Flanagan intended. The sound I heard from my own mouth can best be rendered in text as one of our simplest words, "O!," a word that precedes and resists resolution into meaning, a sound of which Rebecca McClanahan asks, "Is there a vowel more heavy or sad than the long o? It hollows out the mouth, intones the deepest sorrow."

There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that, for fifteen seconds, between cuts of the climactic breakdown of Crockett Island's society via mass vampire conversion, centers in a vast frame of apocalyptic fire the recently rejuvenated Monseigneur John Pruitt and his long-ago lover Mildred Gunning, kneeling on a bridge caressing their daughter, Sarah, who's been mortally wounded by a bullet just moments before in the midst of the chaos, shot by a confused Sturge, who'd not yet realized that it was time to give up the misguided quest for eternal life.

There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that struck me pre-linguistically, pre-consciously, as an homage to the many sculpted and painted Western representations of a moment unreported in the gospels: of Mary the mother of God caressing her son, who's been crucified unjustly but necessarily, and who's died just moments before and is now again in his mother's arms in echo of the days decades before when, wrapped then too in swaddling clothes, he nestled in her bosom, just moments after he was born.

There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that seems so clearly a pietà in its arrangement and prefacing, though there are two parents present, and the dead child is a daughter, a doctor, a lesbian, one of very few people on the entire island uninfected by vampire blood, which Monseigneur Pruitt has been slipping his congregation in the Communion wine, unwittingly, or foolishly not wanting to know the true nature of the grotesque "angel" he's shipped back from the Holy Land. The family has gathered in mourning on a wooden bridge over a creek with Father Pruitt sitting on our left, Mildred to our right, and Sarah slumped across them, head resting in her father's lap, legs lying inert in front of her mother. John holds Sara's head; Mildred her hand. The scene's clearest referent is Michelangelo's 1499 sculpture, so prominent among similar artistic representations that it merits the definite article: The Pietà. Unlike so many stiffer, indefinite-articled and lowercased pietàs I've studied, Michelangelo's Jesus seems truly dead, subject to gravity: his long, lithe body slumps, supported only by his mother and the rock she sits on. Despite the inflexible medium of marble, the muscles and sinews and fabrics ruffle and flow in pyramidal grace from his arched head on the left to his languid legs on the right and centered with Mary's eternally youthful visage above it all.

There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that follows and fulfills so much else that it's impossible to convey the intricacies of the story. But let it be said that, as in the gospels, the proud get their comeuppance and the humbled and the outcast come to a peace and understanding, and that earlier themes of sin and forgiveness and earnestness and hypocrisy resolve in satisfying ways as Sarah dies setting fire to the island's shelters where the vampires might escape the sun, and her conspirators likewise die in noble, painful ways, including Erin Greene, who, beneath the Ur-vampire, her lifeblood draining as he suckles, slices his leathery wings and returns outside time to a conversation with her friend Riley Flynn, in which she now re-members her answer to the question "What happens when we die," narrating her revelations as she experiences death, as a legato piano touches a simple melody: "Were you there when they crucified my Lord," a soundtrack beneath all the burning and Erin's soliloquy until we reach a moment of transitionary silence and a shift in the spirit as the remaining townspeople, repentantly aware of their hubris and resigned to their fate once the sun comes up, sing aspirationally, "Nearer, My God, to Thee."

There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that evokes the meaning of pietà: "pity," most cognatively, or "sorrow," "compassion," maybe, shared feeling. Maybe it takes a whole series to get here, or maybe it takes centuries of intricate Christian stories told and taught, repeated and recreated, inculcated, indoctrinated. Maybe it takes something both intimately personal and culturally repeatable. But for me, this brief scene meant, not even meant something, just meant. And I’ve been sitting with its meaning for years now, sometimes content to leave it unexamined, uncriticized, and other times, like now, eager to seek a dinghy of words to take me somewhere from it, or towards it. I know, of course, that the whole of my response to my response is assembled in its aftermath; it is not what happened, or what I understood. I don’t know if I can be said to have understood anything, in fact. But I felt something. There was my sudden unbidden utterance, then a long while to think on whats and whys. There is now a memory of what happened, but not what happened. That is gone. But there’s the lingering conflict: a reluctance to trouble the innocence of the response, a resistance to resolving “something” into some thing, but also a hearty desire to untangle and share what I felt, which is not, never was, a thing I could point at or label, no matter how many words I try out toward that end. So maybe the best response was my first response, a genuine, unpremeditated, unpretentious "O!" Or maybe there is just the scene of John and Mildred anguishedly holding their daughter in similitude of Mary holding her son. Sometimes it causes me to tremble.

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Patrick Madden, author of Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), coeditor of After Montaigne (2015) and a 25th anniversary collection from Fourth Genre (2025), teaches at Brigham Young University and curates the online anthology of classical essays www.quotidiana.org. His next book, Recenses/Recencies, will be published before the next Advent Calendar.

The Deer Out Here: Matt Morris in Conversation with Hea-Ream Lee

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The writer Matthew Morris was sitting at my kitchen table in Tucson, Arizona. He was in town to promote his new book of essays, The Tilling, winner of Seneca Review Books’ 2024 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. Earlier that week he had read from his book in front of a packed crowd beneath twinkling lights for the Distinguished Visitor Series in Creative Writing sponsored by the University of Arizona MFA in Creative Writing. Matt and I were graduate students in that program together, and as I listened to him read, I remembered sitting in workshop together discussing some of the essays in his new book in their earlier forms. It was strange and wonderful to be in Tucson together again, feeling time collapse, sitting at my kitchen table, with his book in front of me. 

We talked about The Tilling, which is a lyrical exploration of mixed-race identity, Blackness, and love. The book is searing and tender, and full of the kind of lines that beg to be read aloud. It was a pleasure to talk to Matt about how his book took shape, about riffing, and his thoughts on rhythm and sound. Our conversation made me feel the way his writing has always made me feel–a little less alone. —Hea-Ream Lee

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Hea-Ream Lee: This is very exciting. I'm so excited to talk about this book. How cool that you made this. When I read anyone's work, it feels kind of like walking around inside their brain a little bit. And I felt that while reading this book. Maybe it's because I know you, and I know your literal speaking voice well, but I felt like I was just kind of hanging out with you for the duration of the book. So that was a cool experience for me.

Matthew Morris: Hopefully my speaking voice sounds a little like my writing voice, yeah. There has to be some correspondence there. I think there definitely is.

HRL: Well, maybe we can start by talking about your journey towards the book, or the journey of the book. We were in workshops together, so I recognized some of the pieces. I was also remembering pieces that you had written for workshop that aren’t in the book. Could you talk a little bit about that process of getting to the published object, whether that's writing or rewriting, collecting, drafting?

MM: I think some of those essays that maybe we both remember from our time and workshop together were the pieces where I was trying to explore my family history. I remember writing a couple of pieces for Alison Deming’s class where I was trying to dig into my father's ancestry. And I bring that up because this project originally had a middle section that was called Lost Rivers. It was in three parts, and the first part was supposed to introduce the tragic mulatto trope, kind of orient readers in that way. And that was called Fucked Fable. And then there was this middle section, Lost Rivers, that had this family history stuff going on, which I later cut because it was just too much to take on in this book. I couldn't wrap my head around all of it, and there are too many silences in the historical record. And then there was this third section called Ghost Hand that was meant to sort of break out of the trope and just sort of be me living in my body as a human being apart from race. Not that you can ever completely escape that. It ended up being the case that the middle section went away, and so the book as it is is just that first section and that third section.

Only a couple of these pieces were written prior to our thesis year in the program. I'd written the first piece, Tragic Mulatto, and I think I workshopped Pardo/Ghost Hand in a class we took together. The summer before our third year I wrote Fucked Fable. So that's kind of this nucleus that I had to write around when I was working with Chris Cokinos in our last year in the program.

Having the lens of the tragic mulatto trope to write through gave direction and a trajectory to the book. Because as you probably remember, when I first got to the program, I was still writing about mixed race identity, but in a kind of looser way. I think you said at one point when we were in the program together that one of the essays I'd written was kind of doing auto theory.

So I feel like writing into the trope, the stereotype, and trying to break out of that box gave the project some momentum that it didn't have before. 

HRL: That's super interesting. To go back to the thing you said about cutting that middle section out, was there a moment when you realized that it didn't belong in this book?

MM: It was definitely a realization I had as I tried to shape the project. Maybe when I showed it to Chris for the first time. It still had some of the family history work in it. But, yeah, I think when I realized that I couldn't get my head around that stuff in the time of the MFA program, which is a very brief period in the writer’s life, right? It goes super fast. You don't even really know what you're doing for the first year and a half or two years, unless you know what you're doing coming in, which I didn't. Maybe Margo did. But I think at the start of our second year, we were in Ander’s workshop, and I turned in this long piece about a family history trip to North Carolina.

I think writing that piece was what showed me that I wasn't ready to write about that stuff yet, because that piece actually probably needed to be a lot longer, and I still don't really know how to write about family history in the context of African American history. There's just so much stuff that I don't know, and Ancestry.com can't tell me. I can only trace my predecessors on my dad's side so far back. 

You know, we were talking before we started the recording here about how nonfiction writers sometimes lean towards poetry or fiction. And I think if I had more of that fiction writer in me, which maybe you do more than I do, I’d feel more comfortable speculating on the page, and that would be a way into the family history. But it's not really my toolkit.

I'm in a PhD program now, as you know, and I've been writing a little bit about my mom's side and Mormonism, which is much more present in the genealogical record. So that's an interesting tension. You know, the Mormons keep crazy records, and there's like nothing for Black people at a certain point.

HRL: Yeah, that's super interesting. Do you think that project will someday come to be? 

MM: Yeah, I have this thought of writing a literary biography about my mom's aunt, who was this Mormon novelist named Virginia Sorensen. Some of her books are at the UA library. She was married and had a family and was living in Provo for most of her life, writing novels and children's books. But then near the end of her life, she left her family and married–you know the writer Evelyn Waugh? Yeah, she married his brother in Gibraltar, off of Spain. So anyway, she's really interesting to me, how she went away from this domestic life. But I think she didn't write after she left Utah, which is also interesting. Anyway, I kind of heard about her and my grandfather's grandfather on my dad's side, about whom I do know a decent amount, because he was a professor at an HBCU after the Civil War. So I feel like hearing about those two people's lives–that might be an interesting way to approach mixed race identity. 

HRL: Whoa yes, I can definitely see that. This makes me think about research, which I really wanted to talk to you about. 

MM: Oh, cool, yeah. 

HRL: Because this is an extremely researched book. There's so many types of research in here too. You're citing books and films and songs and poems, and you also travel to certain sites. I know from your other work that you've done a lot of archival research as well. You've also mentioned Ancestry.com. So, yeah, I wanted to know about the role of research in this book. What that looked like, how it plays into your process. Where in the writing process does research come in for you? How do you think about research generally?

MM: That's funny that you say that, because I don't think of myself as being someone who does a lot of research, but maybe I'm not thinking about research broadly enough, right? Because yeah, it is research to watch that film Imitation of Life. But I guess I think of it more like, I want to watch a movie that's about the subject matter I'm thinking about. And maybe that'll give me an entry point that I haven't found yet. The Rothko painting feels like another entry point. 

So this is probably a bad thing to say, but a lot of the research I do, like the part of Ghost Hand around the sterilization laws in Virginia—that's all from Wikipedia.

HRL: Oh yeah I love Wikipedia.

MM: To your question about, where does research enter the process, sometimes research is the beginning. It's the thing that sparks my curiosity or imagination. Like that Dallas essay really started when I looked up the difference between a bull and a steer. And then I started thinking about being on Wikipedia earlier in the day, reading about these laws. But I wasn't reading about those laws to write about them. I think I was just really interested in that stuff at that time.

Like you probably do, I have a lot of tabs open on my computer and my phone at all times. And you know, as nonfiction writers, maybe all creative writers, we kind of just throw a bunch of stuff into the mix and see what the alchemy produces. 

There's something Maddie Norris said to me when I asked her about research in her book, that it was the stuff she was already thinking about. And I think that's true for me too.

HRL: I can see that in the prose. It's so clear that we're following your train of thought or where your curiosity is taking you. It doesn't feel like these are the references that we need to have because we need to have them in the book, but rather that they come from your curiosity, or they're driving your curiosity in some way. I feel like that's really coming through in the writing itself, too.

MM: Thanks. That's a good thing, that it doesn't feel imposed on the book.

HRL: Sometimes when I’m adding in research, it's like I have to cover my ass or something like that. It does not feel interesting. It's almost out of fear, to back up what I'm saying.

MM: You're offering evidence.

HRL: Yeah, it's my comp teacher brain.

You read a newer piece at your reading, and I believe it was in that piece where you wrote about riffing. I was thinking about that as I was looking back through your book for this conversation, which led me to look up what riffing means. According to the internet, there's two meanings: a refrain or repeated phrase in music, and also, an improvised monologue. I feel like I see so many examples of both those things in this book. The motifs and repeating phrases of fucked fable, American you, or the idea of love, the cliche of the tragic mulatto. There's so many of these repeating phrases and motifs. 

There's also a lot of examples, and this maybe crosses over into the research realm too, where you're taking an Audre Lorde poem or the Rothko and you riff on that. You're taking that apart and making it your own. 

That's a huge, long intro. How do you see riffing? How do you feel like it fits in with this book, or your writing process in general?

MM: Yeah, cool. That's an awesome question. I love that question, and it's neat that you looked up what it means to riff, because that's something that I think I associate with jazz musicians and the improvisational definition more so than the repeated structure. But I can see how those two things actually go together, because within improvisation, there's still gonna be structures that you're like, calling back on, and that's part of the improvisational play. Pulling on these different elements that appeared earlier, but maybe they’re cast in a slightly new light the second or third time you do it. Yeah, it's just a creative thing that happens. 

I feel like the longer I write, the more interested I am in riffing and being kind of spontaneous. And the mind in motion, to use one of Ander's phrases about what an essay is and does, how it moves. I'm much less interested in carefully shaping thoughts, and I'm more interested in the way my mind moves over subject matter and moves through language and works with sound and rhythm. And that's not to say that in revision I would not try to sculpt the riffing that's already happened. I remember Brandon Shimoda talking about how poetry is, for him, just what comes out. That's something that I am feeling drawn to more and more. It's just like, what comes out when I sit down and I'm thinking about something, and I have this line that I want to start with. 

A couple weeks ago, I was in upstate New York, where Seneca Review is. I was with my editor, and we were driving past this state park, and he told me that there are deer in the park that are stark white. I'd never heard of that before—stark white deer.

HRL: Terrifying. 

MM: Yeah, like, what would that feel like? I wanted to see one. We didn't see any. But, yeah, I've been wanting to start something with a line about that. "The deer out here, he said, are stark white." That could be the starting point of some kind of riff on, I don't know what. On deer and whiteness and I have no clue where else that would go. But that's part of the interest for me, is that I don't know where it would go.

I don't really want to know where I'm going right now. Maybe I never really did. I feel like the second I can feel my mind mapping out what the thing is going to look like, I don't really want to write it anymore. 

HRL: Yeah, that makes total sense. That's so interesting. I love how you're saying that the riffing happens on the level of the line or even the sound or the word, as well as on a larger scale, around the subject you're writing. Some writers are very image driven. Like, their way into a piece is an image. And for you, it sounds like it is sound or rhythm.

MM: I think that's true. I don't know if you would say you're a writer who's drawn to image, but one characteristic of your writing I think about is the richness of the imagery and the carefully wrought images. And it's not that I don't want there to be nice images when I write, but I do think that I am mostly interested in the syntactical play. I'm more interested in the way that clauses are, like, accumulating and bouncing off of one another, and the ways that my voice can, like, modulate through the syntax.

HRL: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense given what's in this book. I definitely want to talk more about rhythm or sound. That feels like one of the hallmarks of your writing. To me, that's how I know I'm in a Matt Morris piece. I picked out so many examples of amazing sentences and phrases where we have this careful attention to sound, rhythm and breath. I can't read them all for time’s sake, but there's this part in the last essay. Could you read that short paragraph for me?

MM: "I’m pretty sure some of her ancestors were slaves. That some of them were enslavers. Light-skinned, mixed; white, just white. (No, not white, just white: I simplify, I do. Same cruelty dealt to Black bodies. The joining at the hip. You’s all a conglomeration. Can’t sit/drink/live here. Know your pigment, they said, and so know you. No. No, more like: Euro-white; white, once of England, Ireland.)"

HRL: Thank you. I think this paragraph is an example of something I see your writing do often. It's not rhythmic simply for the sake of rhythm. You're also using rhythm to add complexity and layers of meaning, and take apart some phrases and add in interjections, and you're kind of interrupting yourself. 

I have so many questions about rhythm. How do you think about sound during the writing process and the revising process? How do you know when to stop polishing? Or differentiate between moments to lean into musicality and when to lean out? 

MM: Well, maybe I'm getting worse at that, because I feel like I'm leaning in more and more towards musicality, maybe at the expense of the careful arrangement of thought. I don't know, or maybe that's just not how I want to think on the page right now.

One thing I do is when I'm revising something, I'm reading it out loud to myself, like every time. Then I can hear the rhythms, and I can hear the sounds, and I can feel the places where maybe I want to let the line get stretched out a little more, or make the language more compact. Or maybe I do want to do a little bit of that interjecting. Yeah, I've become obsessed with parenthetical structures in the last few years, and so I do think that there's a lot of, like, interruption that helps to produce some kind of, I don't want it to be, like, choppy, but some kind of start and stop, herky jerky rhythms in the prose. I want to sound like me on the page. I want to sound like, basically the way I sound when I'm talking to you, or someone I know and trust enough to sound like myself. Not so buttoned-up. I want there to be a level of eloquence, if I can achieve that. But I also want there to be a plain-spokenness. I remember one of my first professors saying that this piece I'd written about my family's first dog sounded like I was having a drink on the porch with a friend. And I really liked that idea, that the voice can be conversational and can be approachable in that way.

HRL: Do you listen to music while you're writing? 

MM: I don't. I'm trying to create my own rhythms on the page, and if I'm listening to something, then that makes it really hard for me to find my way into my own rhythms and cadences in my language. It’s like this pianist is developing his lines in my ear as I'm trying to write my own lines of language. At times I have written to instrumental jazz. I definitely can't write with someone singing; like, that's a non-starter for me. I can't even hear myself think at that point. But yeah, a couple of years ago, I went through this period where I was having a really hard time with my writing. It's like after we had graduated, and it was for a lot of reasons, but at that time, I did start listening to music a little bit as I wrote, and that allowed me to relax a little bit. So at that time in my life, it actually did prove useful to get me out of a mental state.

But generally, I'm a total-silence person. I share a house with a woman who teaches yoga classes. Sometimes I can hear her voice coming up through the floor. I live on the top floor. And even that is enough to make it hard for me to like, feel out the sentences. You know what I mean?

HRL: I know some people who don't like to even read much when they're writing, especially if it's something similar to the subject that they're writing about, because they feel like their thinking can be shaped by that other person's voice. 

MM: I definitely believe in reading while I'm writing, for what it's worth. I think that helps me with sentence fluency on a very basic level, breaking you out of your own sentence patterns.

HRL: I want to talk about place, because this feels like a book that's very deeply grounded in place. It’s also interested in place as a way of conveying meaning. The idea of bone home, and what home means, and where your ancestors come from, and what that means about you as a person. I was also thinking about how some of these essays are taking place during the pandemic, and so there's this longing to go places. I was wanting you to talk a little bit about how you see the importance of place in this book and maybe in your writing more generally.

MM: I used the word cadences just now too. It's a cool way to think about the play between different places. In terms of the places in here, I feel like the book is mostly bouncing between Virginia and Tucson. But North Carolina is kind of looming, and South Carolina as a shadow or a place that my father's family left and that I've gone back to. But maybe I don't really understand it in the ways that I feel like I understand Virginia just by virtue of having lived there for the first 24 years of my life. And having gone to undergrad down in Charlottesville made me understand Virginia a lot better. Central Virginia is really different than the DC area. I was just there a couple days ago with my oldest friend and we were walking around Monticello. Yeah, what a crazy place. We were reading all about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. I used to think that I needed to live in Virginia to write about it because it has this complicated history around race and Blackness and whiteness, specifically with things like Sally Hemings and TJ. Yeah, good old TJ… 

And also Mildred and Richard Loving. We were in Virginia, where the Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage or protected interracial marriage happened. Virginia, yeah, there's just a lot of stuff in Virginia. It's also in the middle of the east coast and it doesn't quite feel like the South. Sometimes it does–Charlottesville feels like the South. Arlington, where I grew up, does not but it doesn't quite feel like the North, either. You have Arlington National Cemetery where I grew up. I think Robert E. Lee is buried there, and my sister's high school was named after Robert E. Lee, although it was recently renamed Washington Liberty High School. It was supposed to be Washington Loving, but I think there's some resistance to naming the school after the Lovings. 

And then, sorry, this is all things that are actually in the book now that I think about it. But yeah, there's also ‘Virginia is for lovers,’ which is the state's motto. And that's so interesting–yeah, I need to get a bumper sticker for that. It's a really interesting idea for me. I feel like this is a book about race, but maybe what I didn't realize until I was really writing it was that it's also a book that's asking questions about what it means to love, and different kinds of love. There's an essay about my parents’ relationship—

HRL: I love that essay.

MM: Oh, thanks. That was actually a really nice essay to be able to write because it sort of took the pressure off my own story. And Tucson, well, I guess Arizona as a whole shows up in the book to the extent that obviously I'm living there partially during the pandemic, but also my dad's mom was in Phoenix at the time that I was writing the book. I really think that she became one of the most important figures in this book, like she kind of became a main character in a way. I just remember going up to visit her and she was such a complicated woman. I had a really different relationship with her than my dad did. Like I had a much easier relationship with her, which I'm grateful for. I was getting to know her as I was writing these essays. Because as I said, I was raised on the East Coast, so we wouldn't get out to Arizona very often. 

When we did, it was for a few days at Christmas, probably. And yeah, she could be a little unpredictable emotionally. So I didn't really feel like I got to know her until I was in grad school and driving up to see her and spending one-on-one time with her. 

Anyway, yeah, I do think place is important and yeah, I think I told you earlier that I'm writing about Utah right now a little bit. And also Missouri. I feel like this is a place where I could go with research, knowing that I want to write about something like the Missouri Compromise, like, an important piece of legislation that helped for a little while to maintain the balance between slave and free states. 

That's pretty interesting in the context of mixed race identity, I think. Columbia, Missouri, where I live now, is also in the middle of Missouri, which is in the middle of the country, so I feel like I'm in the middle of the middle of everything right now. So, yeah. Yeah, place, place, place. 

HRL: It sounds to me like place is so tied to history. That's the immediate jump that you made there. And I think not every writer does that, not every writer makes that move, but it feels really ingrained in this book as well. These places that have different histories and the people who have left, or stayed, or whose ancestors have been there and what that means about them.

I love that part where you're talking about how so many of your friends have lived in North Carolina. And like that is a thing that ties them together and that something of the place kind of remains on you even after you leave. 

MM: Yeah, the North Carolina thing is weird. I still feel like that's true–I get along with people who have a North Carolina connection. What is it? It's got to be history in some way, maybe. 

HRL: I love that, yeah. Maybe we'll just end with this question. This is a book that's attuned to the writing of others. You bring in lots of other voices and I wanted to ask about books or writers that you connect to, whether it's for the ideas or even their voice or their vibe. Who were your literary North stars as you were writing this book?

MM: I like that question because I've been thinking a lot about Emilio Carrero, who read here with me, and was a really important friend for me in the MFA program. He's really interested in intertextuality right now, and I've been thinking about intertextuality as a result of talking to him. Fucked Fable is obviously very intertextual. Like it's mostly other people's voices. Maybe not mostly, but there's a lot of other people's voices in there. 

I do think that other folks' voices are really important to me in the writing of these essays. I think that James Baldwin is definitely always a literary North star for me, both because his sentences are so beautiful and because he was so bracingly honest and brave on the page, no matter what he was writing about. I feel like he never shied away from saying the hard things or going to the heart of his subject matter, which is something that I find deeply moving and courageous in a writer. To not skirt the center of things, which it's surprisingly easy to do if you ask me. Yeah, so I definitely highlight him. 

When I think about prose style, I always think about Virginia Woolf. Just the play of her lines and the closeness of the looking in her work. I don't think she gets any shoutouts in here, but she's one of my favorite writers too. 

I think that part of the reason I wrote this is that I hadn't encountered that many mixed-race writers, even at the time that I was writing the book. And that might just partly be because I hadn't done a great job of seeking them out, but it's also because we don't always get assigned books by writers of color in school. I think I first got assigned a mixed-race writer when I was in my junior year of college, Danzy Senna’s Caucasia. I didn't even finish that book because I was in like four English classes and couldn't read everything. 

I wanted to put myself in conversation with other Black writers in this book. Writing is a way for me to feel more a part of the Black community, which is a community that I'm a part of, but people don't always see that. 

So there are other ways that I can still exist as a Black person that are not tied to skin tone, and writing has become probably the best way I know how to go about asserting a Black identity and a mixed-race identity. 

HRL:  I feel like we should end on that. Well said. Thank you so much for this conversation. 

MM: Yeah, thank you, Hea-Ream. It's very special to talk with you because you were always such a great reader of my work. Your stuff and the pages that other people were turning in when we were all in workshop together really spurred me as a writer to do my best because I didn't want to embarrass myself. 

HRL: The best motivator. Thank you so much.

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Matthew Morris is a writer from Virginia and author of The Tilling (Seneca Review Books), picked by Wendy S. Walters for the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. He is a graduate of the Arizona MFA program and lives in Columbia, Missouri, where he is a Ph.D. student at Mizzou.

Hea-Ream Lee’s essays have appeared in Ecotone, Shenandoah, Terrain.org, and others, and her work has been anthologized in The Lyric Essay as Resistance (2023). Hea-Ream has taught writing at the University of Arizona, where she earned her MFA. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where she teaches creative nonfiction at the Governor’s School for Arts and Humanities. 

Dec 21: Patrick Madden, Enough (on tense, timing, recreation, evocation, and eternal happening)

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Enough (on Tense, Timing, Recreation, Evocation, and Eternal Happening)

Patrick Madden

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I have just enough sugar left in the jar for Karina's morning Postum (which is what we call a cebada in English, given that the Postum brand has eclipsed other brands of barley-based coffee substitutes), so I dispense with the teaspoon as measurer and simply dump whatever's left into her cup before measuring out the toasted powder, then adding milk, little by little as I stir, so that the dry ingredients are evenly absorbed into the solution. My assumption is that over so many years of meting out ingredients, my judgment has been trained to recognize closely enough what constitutes a teaspoon's worth, and that given the inherent and inescapably inexact nature of such a crude volumetric method, it won’t matter much to the taste of the completed beverage whether it contains exactly 18,136 grains of sugar, as one intrepid online mathematician has calculated (using the weight, diameter, density, and packing efficiency of sugar), or the more nicely rounded but therefore less believable 20,000 grains, as others estimate, always with the qualifier “about” appended. Note that nobody (nobody who’s posted online) has bothered to count the grains of sugar in a teaspoon, and who can blame them? I mean, besides the tedium of such a futile exercise, there's the inevitability of missing something or losing count and guessing or having to go back to the beginning and start again.

So let's start again. You didn't think that I was actually now dumping the rest of the sugar in Karina's cup and adding the barley and milk and stirring gently to ensure a proper mixture, did you? You understood that my choice of present verb tense was a stylistic one, right? But did you perceive that it was determined by the pattern I've established over many essays in the past years, where every piece begins "I have just," usually followed by a verb, which gently allows us to exist in both past and present (the catalytic event is nestled in the recent past, but the writing happens in the present), but in this case, where I've intentionally goofed into another idiomatic expression, following "I have just" with the determiner "enough," we lose the pastness of the witnessed event and are stuck both experiencing and writing now?

Now this doesn't entirely preclude the possibility of some cosmic alignment where in the exact moment you read "I have just enough sugar..." etc. I am, somewhere else on the planet, simultaneously contemplating the enoughness of the sugar jar's dregs and deciding to simply dump them in the cup, and then spooning out the burnt brown powder, then gradually pouring the milk while stirring to achieve optimum creaminess. I mean, maybe. Who knows? If you've got my number (as you likely do, given the audience for my essays), shoot me a message when this happens, and I'll let you know.

You surely already know that in the more general sense, things like this are cyclical: we settle into patterns and routines, sleeping and waking, going about our daily business, working and playing, eating and drinking for tomorrow we die... So, sure, if you're reading this essay with your morning coffee in a time zone near mine, I very well might be meting out the ingredients again, even if the sugar jar's not almost empty yet. I do it many, perhaps even most, days. It's nothing special. One more insignificant example of "love's austere and lonely offices," as Robert Hayden revealed.

In any case, I'm not averse to the idea, which I've discovered here and there, especially in Brian Doyle's essays (hey, this is a Pat Madden Essay Daily Advent Calendar essay; writing about Brian Doyle is in my contract), that the act of reading revives the things written, happens them again. As in:

I am not just reporting this, or trying to recreate the moment, or telling you this story to escort us both toward a cool theme or conclusion near the end of the page. Nope: I want the moment again, fresh and wild and hilarious. I want it so bad I can taste the stony chalky desperate of it. I don’t want to remember it; I want it again right now before this sentence ends. If I write it I’ll have it again.

And, a bit later, though if we believe what we’re saying here, then "later" becomes meaningless:

While I am bruised I am not yet broken, aged but not yet dead, and my shaggy brain still works, and I can type fast and try to make sentences that sing and roar and snarl and sob and insist that everything that ever happened is still happening and will happen again.

As he wrote just a few years before his shaggy brain was overrun with cancer, leaving him very much dead, very much recoverable only in what he wrote, or what others wrote about him.

In this crude, most-obvious of universes, we do decay, we do die, we drain our cup of roast barley mixture, we use up the last of our ingredients. But we who read reside elsewhere: here, again, we find me judging the grains left in the bottom of the container to be about a teaspoon's worth, spilling them into a ceramic cup, spooning the cebada, pouring the milk, the gentle stirring, all happening sporadically forever, in spite of the inevitable.

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Patrick Madden, author of Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), teaches at Brigham Young University and curates the online anthology of classical essays www.quotidiana.org.

Patrick Madden on Exactitude in Translation (feat. Eduardo Galeano with a Christmas Eve pun)

I have just finished reading Eduardo Galeano's last book, Hunter of Stories, in English translation, against Karina's advice, and I admit that she was utterly correct to question my judgment. I know Spanish well enough, and I do own the book in its original language, but that copy is miles away at my office, and I am sick, and I'd been waiting so long to say goodbye to Eduardo, who died many years ago, and I've been rereading my favorites of his books but avoiding this one, I suppose because the act felt too final, but this long weekend seemed like the right time to finally do it, "it" being to read, but also to bid farewell, which is not really farewell, as Eduardo himself learned as a young man in the old cafes of Montevideo:

I discovered that the past could become the present, and that memories could be recounted in such a way that they would stop being yesterday and become right now.

So maybe I was just missing my old friend and I wanted him present again, and Karina was right that I should have listened to his voice unfiltered through a translator. This point came home to me most clearly near the end of the book, in a scene from years ago in Montevideo's Parque Rodó, which the translator renders (in part) thusly:

suddenly I found myself surrounded by an uproarious crowd of children, dressed in their school uniforms, the girls with big blue ribbons in their hair.

As I've mentioned, Cazador de Historias is ensconced on a shelf in my university office. I will write the next bit before I get the book.

Reading that line, I knew it was mistranslated. I felt curious, a bit miffed, a bit betrayed, a bit territorial, a bit elitist. I wondered why Mark Fried, who'd translated eight of Galeano's books, who'd worked with him for twenty-five years, would have interpreted the idea this way into English, knowingly or unwittingly. My cavil was with the ribbons. While it's possible that some girls wore blue ribbons in their hair, I'm certain that Galeano was noting the big blue bows on the front of every Uruguayan schoolchild's uniform, boys and girls alike. I imagine the translator, encountering a strange detail that didn't map onto his experience, deciding that Galeano must have meant ribbons in the girls' hair, a logical place for such things. Who ever heard of a school uniform featuring giant blue bows, or, for that matter, flowing knee-length white smocks buttoned up in back? Who would design such a cruel outfit, not for private school students, whose risible getups are an expected part of their hazing, but for every child in the public schools of a country that led the Americas in establishing free, obligatory, laical education for all (1876)?

I guess I'm surprised that Fried seems either never to have visited Uruguay, or never to have noticed the ubiquitous schoolchildren in their silly uniforms, or maybe he visited only in the summer, or he didn't think to check on what must have seemed an odd phrasing in Galeano's Spanish (Galeano would have been dead by the time Fried got to this part of the book, I believe, so he couldn't have consulted). Or perhaps he decided not to "go there" in describing the reality Galeano had written, knowing that most of his English-speaking readers would be confused by an accurate depiction of the scene. But not this reader.

I have just found the Spanish edition of the book and checked the original phrasing. I was right (of course; I wouldn't complete this essay, or release it into the world, if I were wrong). Here it is:

me encontré súbitamente rodeado por una alborotada multitud de niños, vestidos con sus túnicas escolares y sus grandes moños azules.

I like "uproarious" for "alborotada"; "crowd" is better than the cognate "multitude." Same for "uniform" instead of "tunic," though the latter term gets us much closer to an accurate visual. Syntactically, "suddenly I found myself" is the expected rendering of what reads as "myself [I] encountered suddenly" in word-for-word translation. Nearly everything feels pleasing, both accurate and artful, but maybe even the non-Spanish speaker can see that there are absolutely no "girls" and no "hair" here. Just "grandes moños azules" = "grand moños azures" = "big blue bows" ("moño" is supposed to have entered Latin from Etruscan, where "muhn" meant "knot").

I don't know why this bothers me so much, but I imagine it has something to do with the unavoidable imperfections of translation, or even the imprecisions of writing generally. For instance, I have been to Parque Rodó, numerous times, so I can locate Galeano's scene in a kind of general scenery/geography. In fact, I do locate it (unconsciously) just outside the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, where I once ran into the novelist Mario Delgado Aparaín. Obviously, the happenstantial similarities deepen the topographical. In this transposition of memories, I guess I am the rowdy schoolchildren and Delgado is Galeano (note the near anagram: 5 of 7 letters). But I am certain that my image is "wrong," not only because what are the chances, but also because Galeano used to always walk along the riverfront, which intersects the park several blocks from the museum, nearer to the amusement park, which seems like a more likely place for kids to (want to) be. Of course, a reader doesn't have to visualize the scene with any measure of specificity (and even my sharpest experiential memory of the park is only hazy and vague) to get the point of the vignette, which is that the children were excited to see an author they'd read in school; that they hailed him as "lord of the flames," misattributing to him a story he'd recounted from an unnamed man from Neguá, Colombia; and that, as Galeano points out to end his piece, this was "the only title of nobility [he'd] ever received." There's a lot here, but mostly the inversion of our expectations about value, about whom we ought to impress. Not only does the piece celebrate children; it undermines the whole system of back-patting honorifics. It's typical Galeano, in a good way.

So why should it matter if the translator transplanted the blue bows to the girls' hair?

I guess I could ask you how you would read "an uproarious crowd of children, dressed in their school uniforms and their big blue bows." Would you breeze by the description? Pause to consider it? Wonder what those bows were doing? Where they were located? Might you place them in girls' hair anyway? And does knowing that they’re on every child, dangling just below the neck, on a dresslike white smock, advance the plot? Does it help you understand anything about any message? Or does it give you another kind of pause? Are you heading to your search engine right now to see this sight?

Here. I'll save you the trouble:

For me, who didn't grow up in Uruguay and who's never worn the uniform, but whose children have (betimes, when we have lived in Montevideo long term), the sight of those comical dandy-painter costumes always elicits a smile, sometimes even a chuckle. Karina repeats the party line about how the uniforms equalize rich and poor, because nobody sees whether your clothes are ratty or fashionable, but I'm not so sure. For one thing, you can see pants legs and shoes; for another, maybe your smock is not in the best condition. A related justification she gives is that kids never have to worry about what clothes they'll wear to school because they're covered up with the uniform anyway. I mean, yes, those are possible interpretations of the tunic-and-bow, but couldn't we also be perpetuating a minor humiliation on our children, or, better said, a humbling, to good purpose? Enforcing a kind of uniformity as a means of, well, uniting them, us, not just spatially-socioeconomically but temporally-historically? Children wear the same uniform their parents wore, same as their grandparents and great-grandparents wore, same as those kids who thronged Eduardo Galeano that day. Dress (as redress) is yet another way past becomes present. Everybody does it. Has done it. See? We all survived. We're still here.

And while we're still here, extrapolating ad nauseam from such a trifling mistranslation, I should clarify that I'm resolutely against the idea that writing is purely secondary to what we commonly call "reality." Galeano first taught me this:

We begin with the moment an act happens in reality, outside an author's head, and then the author reproduces in himself what happened outside himself. Then this idea, this reproduction of the act inside the author's head, also becomes part of reality. The original act, which comes directly or indirectly from reality, is transfigured in the process of creation.

You would be right, given all we've been through, to wonder what this statement sounded like when Galeano spoke it through the air to my ears two decades ago in Cafe Brasilero in Montevideo's Old City. For the benefit of Spanish speakers or Google translators, I'll share a transcription here, noting, with a humbled smile, how my own translation smoothed over quite a few extemporaneously rough edges:

...y de algún modo siempre a partir del momento en el que un hecho que proviene directa- o indirectamente de la realidad, o sea un hecho ocurrido en la realidad que está fuera del autor, o un hecho nacido en la cabeza del autor, que al fin y al cabo es un ser en sociedad, por lo tanto reproduce dentro de sí lo que acontece afuera, por lo tanto eso también es parte de la realidad. Ese hecho que viene directa- o indirectamente de la realidad se transfigura en el proceso de creación.

When he said it, amidst hours of jovial conversation, it struck me as something utterly new and vitally important to understand. I comprehended, epiphanically, the power behind the motto Galeano printed on all his books: "la creación literaria": literary creation: the idea that the written word not only derived from but created reality. Reality expanded infinitely, immediately, it seemed.

Before we move on, allow me a brief additional consideration of transfigurations. All this reminds me of another Galeano piece, one of the "Walls Speak" segments in Walking Words, where an unknown graffitist has written

Las vírgenes tienen muchas navidades, pero ninguna noche buena

which was translated as

Virgins have many Christmases but no christenings

The grace of the Spanish joke is that Christmas Eve is called "Nochebuena," or "Good Night." So the sentiment of the graffiti is that virgins (recalling Mary, the Virgin mother of Jesus, of course) may celebrate many Christmases, but they don't have any good nights. Ever. Because...well, you get it. The problem with the translation is that, while it's technically true (or is it? a virgin could attend the christening of a friend's child), it's not funny. Yes, there's the alliterative wordplay, but there's no pun. So I tried my own translation:

For virgins Christmas comes but once a year, but every night's a silent night

While the rhythm stutters at the outset (that pesky "for"), it settles into a pleasing, regular trochaic nonameter. And what's more, it finds a pun in the same last position, and with the same literal Christmas-Eve connection, and with a very similar double meaning, as the original. In order to pull off that feat, it has to revise the initial premise (from "many Christmases" to rare Christmases), but this feels like a more forgivable revision than ditching the joke altogether.

Which reminds me of yet another nitpick I've had with a Galeano translation, but I'll spare the backstory and simply let Eduardo remind us that

every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated, or forgiven.

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Patrick Madden, author of Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), teaches at Brigham Young University and curates the online anthology of classical essays www.quotidiana.org.

Advent 2022, Dec 5: Patrick Madden, f-Words: An Attempt at an Essay on Style (feat. Brian Doyle)

f-Words: An Attempt at an Essay on Style (feat. Brian Doyle)

Patrick Madden

 

Years ago, when he was visiting BYU, Brian Doyle offered me what I think was meant as a compliment, saying that one potential downside of my teaching could be that scores of younger writers might notice and emulate only the superficial qualities of my essays, the easily identifiable traits (such as jump cuts from one topic to another seemingly unrelated one) without perceiving or achieving the deeper connectedness or the surprise of the buildup to a kind of epiphanic wholeness, the shock that what seemed like rambling has instead been a tightly controlled weaving, which readers apprehend viscerally if not explicitly. The comment landed well, felt good coming, as it did, from a writer I deeply admired and hoped to emulate, but I think it also began for me (or at least coincided with) a period of self doubt, or perhaps a dissatisfaction with my self, or my style. I began to grow tired of what I often did, not without effort, but naturally and habitually. I wanted to learn something new, as a challenge or an adventure.

Here might be a good place to pause and mention that this essay could strike some readers as self-indulgent, even self-congratulatory. I would fain reveal that I do not feel these ways about myself, and while I have a vague grasp of rhetoric that might otherwise lead me to dampen these qualities in my writing, I have, in this moment, as the kids say nowadays, no f---s left to give.

There, in that most recent paragraph, we have three f-words that might illuminate the inner battle I mentioned in the first paragraph. The first is fain, an archaic word that I know primarily or perhaps solely from Charles Lamb’s essay “New Year’s Eve,” wherein the author states that he would “fain lay [his] ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel” [of time, it’s understood]. Except I’d been understanding fain to mean something like “like to” or even “pretend to,” but in the older sense, which I feel in the Spanish pretender, which gives off a vibe that whatever you’re trying to do, it’s doomed to fail. Maybe I was equating fain with fail, in fact, though shifting its part of speech. But (I’m continuing my “except”) that’s not what fain means. Instead, it’s “gladly,” derived from an Old Germanic root meaning “rejoice.” What do you know. (Let the pretentious adverb, which I misunderstood when I wrote it, stand there, under my hand, to all posterity, as Louise Imogen Guiney might say.)

Following closely after fain we find feel, which I do, often, though I filter this or strain it so that what lands in my writing can sometimes seem devoid of it, of feeling, that is. I’m sorry about this. Lo siento.

The last f-word is the f-word, a word I’ve never committed to print, as far as I can recall. I am, I fear, too restrained by the culture’s taboos, but I quite like the sense imparted by the phrase I’ve invoked here, and I feel that it accurately describes my current mood. And anyway, it’s just the latest of several vague words stripped of any correspondence to things in favor of a kind of all-purposey emphatic functionality (see “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” etc.). What, exactly, one gives or doesn’t give or refuses to give is beside the point.

But back to Lamb a moment: I admit to feeling a little disappointed that my context-gathered definition is “wrong,” because I feel that it works quite a bit better than “gladly.” “I would try but fail to lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel” aligns with the fatalism elsewhere apparent (resplendent, even) in the essay. Or, better still: “I would lay my finger upon the spoke of the great wheel of time, but I’d fail to make any difference.” Maybe I’m commuting “ineffectual” over the whole event. Maybe Lamb intended something like this from the adjective but couldn’t find a place for it except on “finger.” Maybe everything I feel here is contained in the subjunctive “would” coupled with the metaphorical philosophical wheel.

Maybe you’re wondering where I’m going with all this.

I have titled my essay “f-words” in feeble homage to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who begins her own essay of this title wishing she might call her work “The Essay as Form” (a well-known treatise by Theodor Adorno) or A Room of One’s Own (which likely needs no tag, but, for the sake of some, Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking lecture/ essayella). Her piece is subtitled “An essay on the essay,” and this is where we diverge slightly, except that all essays are essays on the essay, including this one. There is no more self-referential form. And I do understand that “An attempt at an essay” is redundant, or self-distancing like one of those infinite parallel mirrors images or Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma album cover.

I’ve been spinning my wheels, catching my interest on small accidental (or at least subconscious) details in my own sentences, and I’ve gotten so tangled in the weeds that I feel like the best next move is simply to stop and declare that my occasion for writing this brief and personally limited essay on style was a recent exchange I had with Dinty Moore, editor of Brevity, about the title of an old Brian Doyle essay published there.

A student essay I was reading had reminded me of it, so I went to reread and then recommend it, but found that instead of “A Child Is Not a Furniture,” the title I remembered confidently, the essay was now (perhaps always?) titled, more “correctly,” “A Child Is Not Furniture.”

I felt faint at that missing determiner. Could I have misremembered? Could the journal be wrong? Why had I never noticed this before?

Upon rereading the essay, which recounts and recreates a conversation with a woman on the bus in Chicago at three AM, I discovered the phrase I’d remembered, intact, in Doyle’s interlocutor’s words. She is talking about discussions with her husband over whether or not to have children. She says (of him), “He measures and calculates. He arranges things just so. But you cannot arrange a child just so. A child is not a furniture.” While the saying is cast in the voice of the woman on the bus, it is exactly the kind of phrase Doyle would notice and highlight, and thus it feels like his style. After all, writing is only arrangement of preexisting words, and in general, when Brian Doyle quotes other people, he tends to inflect their voices with a little bit of his own. Or his own voice is the result of absorbing so many other interesting voices. Either way, this is one instance of that.

Given that Brian died five years back, I took it upon myself to write an email to Dinty, asking whether the title might have been accidentally changed. Then, while waiting for his reply, I found the essay in Doyle’s book Grace Notes, where its title includes the “a.” Then, inspired, I searched out an archived version of the webpage from back when and confirmed that it had indeed originally been titled “A Child Is Not a Furniture.” Meanwhile, Dinty responded, agreeing with my revision/reversion, and assured me that he’d fix the error.

This is a small thing, perhaps as small as it gets (while other single-letter words night occupy less space or use less ink than the humble lowercase a, I would argue that given its function in a sentence, its position in the alphabet, and even its variable pronunciations (long vowel or schwa), the indefinite article is the least noticeable of words and the most takenforgranted). But see how sharply its presence inflects the essay’s title and, by extension, the essay. When I hear it, I both understand the phrase’s meaning and wonder about its everslight variation from expected usage. Perhaps, I wonder extratextually, the speaker was translating from Spanish or another language where “furniture” is not an abstraction but is cast as a quantifiable noun. Un niño no es un mueble, indeed.

This would be example enough, but a very similar thing has happened once before, so I’ll tell you about that, too. I was reading Doyle’s “From the Editor” in the journal Phoebe when I noticed this sentence (amidst the sprawling hypothetical responses that an editor wishes he could send in response to an unsolicited submission):

A piece like yours, we are sometimes tempted to write, is not elevating or edifying to the reader, but merely performance, or comment, or confession, or rant, or the product of insomnia or inebriation or incoherence, or lecture, or sermon, or humility, or browbeating, or elusive goop, and is the very reason why so much of what is sold culturally as art is nothing at all like art.

Did you catch the misplaced word in the list? I did. There’s no way Brian would have written “humility” in the context surrounding it. I was certain that he’d meant, or a copyeditor had changed, “homily” in that position. I wrote to the editors (this happened at a time when Brian had just undergone brain surgery and was incapacitated, so we could not ask him directly) to argue my case. I had, I explained, read many of, perhaps most of, Brian’s published essays, and I’d absorbed his cadences and phrasings, and thus knew that he’d often rail against sermon and homily (a simple Google search confirmed this), but he’d never rail against humility.

Within a week I got an email back from editor Robbie Maakestad, who agreed with my logic and forthwith made the change.

I mean, great. Congratulations, Pat. You did it! Twice! You noticed something no one else had noticed or could possibly care about. Here’s your Pedant Certificate.

But maybe there’s something to be said for knowing someone by his voice. (After my first public reading, a friend commented, pleasingly, “You sounded like you.” After my first [anonymous] external tenure review, when I ran into her at a conference, the new associate professor commented, “I recognized your voice in the letter.”) Maybe noticing the smallest things corresponds with the kind of prayerful attentiveness that Brian was always encouraging.

There are the generalities of style: the long, sinuous sentences that challenge and surprise with their ordering and nesting of information. The short, clipped ones. The fragments. The preponderance of elemental or ornamental words. There’s also the understanding that whatever your style, it is not a thing you’ve invented; it’s a thing you’ve inherited, largely, overwhelmingly, without knowing it, or at least without knowing its intricacies. What’s important, it seems to me, is to strive for humility and to challenge yourself beyond your current defaults. When you get tired of yourself, experiment with something new. Take in influences consciously and voraciously, make new attempts, play, see what feels natural, what sticks, what becomes your own.

[Look. As far as I remember, Rachel Blau DuPlessis didn’t stick with the f-words thing religiously either. There was no structuring element built from it. So forgive me if I seem to have left it behind (some word of it may still be found off in a corner). I mean, I have. But also I haven’t.]

One more story: On the day I learned that Brian Doyle had begun hospice care—perhaps this was also the day he began hospice, I no longer remember if I ever knew—on that day, I went to see my daughter’s middle school dance recital. For the sentence you just read, I have channeled, at first subconsciously and then consciously, a sentence from a poem by Mark Halliday in which I feature as a character, the antagonist even, having conked Halliday on the head during a game of basketball. Halliday delays/resets several times where I’ve done so only once:

On the day that my lifespan matched my mother’s lifespan,
on the day when I had come to live as long as my mother had lived—
she died in 1975, of cancer, three days after her 52nd birthday—
on the day when I had lived as many days as she got to live
(though for her there were hundreds and hundreds of days of
miserable pain, which has not at all been my fate)—
on that day
I went to the gym to play basketball with some friends.

This is the sort of thing I do quite a bit: crib consciously from writers I admire, whose voice has imprinted itself upon my subconscious. Once, when writing about my infant son’s skull operation, I took from Brian’s phrasing about his son’s heart operation:

When have I been filled with grace? One time above all others, when my son was under ether.

One time above all others I felt the great divide between theory and practice, was closest and the situation heaviest: when my son was under knife and morphine and screaming ceaselessly.

I admitted the theft, still in time for a possible revision, but Brian gave his blessing, so I kept it. And I’ve borrowed knowingly other times as well, with things like skimping on punctuation to establish exigency, or shifting suddenly into the present tense to cast a moment into relief against the background. And then there was that one odd time when Brian attempted to write like me (at my invitation, for an essay subverting the simplistic view we sometimes default to about “originality”) but, in my view, couldn’t quite pull it off, or maybe didn’t care to. Readers familiar with his style will recognize him by his voice in this uncredited passage in the middle of my essay:

But to return, sidelong, diligently, like a small child who was going to check out that cool bird’s nest in the backyard but got distracted by how hard it is to hop on one foot for more than, say, eight hops, to plagiarism and the essay. One might well say, as certainly someone has, perhaps in another language, that the essay is by nature a magpie, a confluence of all the influences on its author; even Montaigne, for example, was soaked in Plutarch and the Bible and other literary glories of antiquity, and no force on earth can utterly erase the music and cadence of writers from the sponge-like crania of subsequent writers; the most honest essayists among us admit with admirable honesty that we all have, as Robert Louis Stevenson says, “played the sedulous ape” to writers we admired or admire. All that we can hope for as essayists, it seems to me, is to have learned something of rhythm and pace and sentence-carpentry from our predecessors, while gently leaving their particular styles behind like a teenager tiptoes away from the college of his or her parents; although I will here confess, in public, right on the page, right here at the end of this sentence, that there are some writers I cannot read while writing, because their music is so alluring it begins to dilute my own.

And readers who’ve been paying attention to this attempt at an essay will note that Doyle’s topic fits neatly with our considerations here. Not only have I played the sedulous ape to him, but he has to others, and they to their forebears, so that we realize the folly in claiming any kind of ownership, in the traditional, uncomplicated sense, of a style. And it’s worth noting that sedulous does not mean “copycatty” as I’d assumed from context, but “dedicated and diligent,” as in consciously attending to the writing styles of others in order to own our influences, beyond the inevitable osmotic assimilations.

So. What happened at that dance recital? As I waited impatiently for my daughter’s troupe to take the stage, I recalled, at first subconsciously and then consciously, Brian’s similar experience of seeing a “forgettable” amateur play, not wanting to be there, noting one particularly “execrable song” and its singer’s “groaning tractor” voice, and yet, by force of will perhaps, finding beauty and even joy in the imperfect attempts of the performers. From what I knew of Brian, this reversal would have been expected. That he’d “roar with delight” at the young man who sang so gratingly but also with “deep humming joy.” That he’d perceive the dreck made art, be willing and able to appreciate it. Of that singer he said,

He had made something wonderful of nothing but dreaming and labor and passion, something that probably not even he knew he could make with such eerie skill—and that is where I wish to begin talking about creativity, for dreaming and labor and passion are its ingredients, and wonder is both its engine and its product.

So in the midst of my silent caviling and kvetching, my wishing myself away as I watched others' children while awaiting my own, I thought What Would Brian Do?, and I knew, and so I did that. I shifted my perspective in such a way that I was enabled to sit calmly in my seat and gladly enjoy, truly enjoy, the hard-thumping electronica, the asynchronous jerky movements, the mistakes and the moments of harmony. And not in an ironic way. I became present for the dances. With the back of my mind trying to reckon with the inevitable and imminent loss of my dear friend, I borrowed his strength and found beauty where I’d been unable to perceive it before.

*

Patrick Madden, author of Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), teaches at Brigham Young University and curates the online anthology of classical essays www.quotidiana.org.

Advent 2021, Dec 21 Patrick Madden: On a Pleasing Encounter without a Pickpocket

after Louise Imogen Guiney's "On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket"

"It struck me that the sweet symmetry of the thing ought not to be spoiled; that I was serving a new use and approximating a new experience; that it would be a stroke of genius, in short, almost equal to the king pickpocket's own, to make love to the inevitable."

This essay is a cover in the prewriting primarily, in the doing more than in the reporting. In other words, I may not talk the talk, but I did walk the walk. (Yes, I am happy with this slight inversion of the cliched phrase, but not proud. I'm sure this particular reversal has been done before ["Woo hoo hoo!" sing the Barenaked Ladies in their song attesting to this truth, and I always imagine them performing on Jay Leno's Tonight Show, with David Duchovny accompanying on a shaker-egg (more or less) in time and singing along]. But perhaps a pilgrimage to that "lonely street corner [still] not adorned by a gas-lamp" is a thing unique in the footnotes of the annals of literary history.

An explanation is in order. I was attending the AWP Conference (weren't we all?) in Boston in March of 2013 (a month before the Marathon bombings, as it turned out, and in the same vicinity). The Hynes Convention Center where it was held was only a few blocks away from the corner immortalized in Louise Imogen Guiney's lamentably unknown essay "On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket." I knew this not from the essay itself, which is appropriately vague about its exact location, but from a letter the author wrote the day after the fateful titular event (which, felicitously, occurred exactly 129 years before today, on December 21, 1892). There, writing to her friend Sonny Day, whom she owed money (which she could no longer repay, now that she'd been robbed), she pinpoints the location as "Berkeley St at the corner of Chandler St, between the grain elevator and the vacant lots."

I was off, in the keen winter air, toward who knew what, but with a fire of enthusiasm for the comewhatmay. Not a block from the center, striding confidently off a curb, I stepped in a mound of what I thought was snow, and found myself shin-deep in slush, liquid freeze slurping over the edge of my boot and sliding in, soaking my sock. "Propitious!" I thought, and kept on marching toward destiny.

Twenty-odd minutes of purposeful striding, with appropriate pauses for automobiles and zigs and zags for subsequent mounds, and I had arrived. Five-story buildings met the sidewalk on each corner, to my right a smattering of street-level shops, to my left nondescript walls of stone and glass. No granary, no vacant lots, no "coal-sheds and broken tins" anywhere in sight. Nor any people. Nonetheless, I strategically placed a dollar in my left jacket pocket. I crossed on the WALK light. Wandered around, waiting for someone, anyone. There was no one. It was too cold. Perhaps too early. I would not be pickpocketed today.

Unless...I tugged at the dollar (yes, it occurred to me that I was being far too cheap in my experiment, but the budget for essays had recently been cut), pulling it half out of my pocket. If no "tiger-lily of the genus 'tough'" were available to help me fulfil my mission, perhaps the whipping wind would. I peeked out from the shelter of a windward edifice and stepped into the gusts.

Really!? I'm subjecting myself to this suffering so I can say that the wind took my dollar? And of course, it didn't, either. The bill remained firmly in the pocket, delicately stirring but unremoved by the buffetings. I want to say that I was always self-aware enough to laugh at the ridiculousness of my quest, but especially once, in the absence of the possibility of a "real" pickpocketing, I turned mystical. I mean, how would I have written that? And what was this whole enterprise, anyway? Homage to a beloved essayist? Essayistic thrill-seeking? A record of my contemporaneous sensations? I had begun the day expecting something to work out, as it always does, creditable or the reverse, and if "nothing had happened" as yet, perhaps it would. Or it wouldn't. I suspected that the answer to this dilemma lay not so much in the external world, but in my openness to it, my perceptiveness and willingness to understand and to connect. I might trust, still, that something would become clear, or that I would make things clear. That things would work out. That the universe would provide.

To the vacant air I sang out my silliness, then decided to return the way I had come.

All the way I walked (squish, step, squish, step; my left foot still wet and cold) with the abstracted Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, whom I knew only in the vaguest sense, but whom I expected might have some wisdom for me were I to consult him. I have done so now, at long last, with the help of an interpreter, George Long:

"To be vexed at anything which happens is a separation of ourselves from nature." (II.16)

"Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee? Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around." (II.7)

"Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgment." (II.17)

"Either it is a well-arranged universe or a chaos huddled together, but still a universe." (IV.27)

That afternoon, I attended conference panels asserting the importance of essays that essay, celebrating essays that flash (into, out of, around existence), that think on themselves self-referentially. Other than my still-soaked sock and shriveled toes, there was no record, were no lasting effects from my excursion. The thousands of people milling about me were completely unaffected by my pilgrimage. No matter.

"Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe." (IV.23)

Later that evening, on my way to who remembers where, I gave the dollar to a stranger singing in the cold on another street corner, less lonely, quite adorned (still no gas lamp). The next day, upon retrieving a bag of chips from a vending machine and scooping up my change, I discovered four quarters too many. When I returned to my office the next Monday I found, pinned to the cork board outside my door, a crumpled dollar bill.

*

Patrick Madden, author of Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), teaches at Brigham Young University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. He curates the online anthology of classical essays www.quotidiana.org.