Eric Fershtman: the last thing this essay needs is a name

The equivocation, the verbosity, the footnotes, the salmagundi of, like, obscure academic jargon and colloquialisms—the e.g.’s and i.e.’s and shucks, folks, and w/r/t’s and etc.’s, etc.—all speak to a kind of theft, or: a repurposing/appropriation, if compelled toward Not Being Hard On Oneself.

This confession’s long in the making and yet, your humble writer is afraid, a little bit, and inclined toward prolonging, for at least a little while, the Truth, which will no doubt prove to be freeing, as it is on occasion rumored to do.


THE BIG LOOMING THING: A VIGNETTE

One hesitates to plunge into the milky waters of myth, but it seems necessary when considering the topic is language, which is very old indeed.

And so: Thoth.

Ever heard of this guy?

Seems obscure now and perhaps forgotten, but Thoth was once one of the most powerful gods in existence. The dude, according to Wikipedia (itself according to a book called The Gods of the Egyptians, by E.A. Wallis Budge, one of the world’s “foremost Egyptologists”), “served as a mediating power, especially between good and evil, making sure neither had a decisive victory over the other. He also served as scribe of the gods, credited with the invention of writing and alphabets.”

And so: Keeper of the Great Dichotomy, Inhabitant of the Border Space, and Originator of Writing. Thoth, in contemporary parlance, was In. His “power was unlimited in the Underworld,” or, i.e., that place souls go after death. And too: he’s one of two gods in the Egyptian pantheon trusted enough to accompany the sun-god Ra (Zeus-equivalent, although more so, if this makes sense) on his nightly voyage across the sky.

The other? Thoth’s wife, Maat. Who was, if possible, even more powerful than Thoth: Wikipedia via Budge claims her as “cosmic harmony” itself, more concept than goddess, who “bound all things together in an indestructible unity: the universe, the natural world, the state, and the individual.”

Maat was the personification of what today we’d term Truth.

And Truth’s married to Language. And together, they’re responsible for the weighing of souls, after Death. What we’re dealing with’s an anthropomorphism and triangulation of the Big Organizing Concepts of the Western world.

Your humble writer is here stumped on how to continue. It seems significant, but in a way which defies explication beyond the obvious (not to mention that this all, philosophically/anthropologically speaking, is above yr. wr.’s pay grade). Myths function, after all, as placeholders, stand-in for actual knowledge, and often strike us modern folks as primitive, in contrast to Science, that enlightening and mostly putative—in that it often sets itself up as negative, as out to disprove and discredit—force.

And yet: we’ve ingested such myths. To a degree, one sort of suspects, that’s greater than we’d like to admit. Or are, more likely, even aware of.

In exuding and discarding the effluvia of such myths, something’s been left behind. It’s that which is essential. Which is basic. Which is very, very old, and maybe, could possibly be, true.


THE BIG LOOMING THING: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ARGUMENT

But really it’s newness which concerns us, due to, Art Is Theft, and There’s Nothing New Under The Sun, and It’s All Been Done Before.

These phrases are clichés, defined in the OED as “a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought.”

Phrase, in case you were curious, refers to “a small group of words standing together as a conceptual unit[1], typically forming a component of a clause.”

Lack, likewise, means “the state of being without or not having enough of something.”

And original, which is perhaps the trickiest term in the original definition, can mean (1) “present or existing from the beginning; first or earliest” (significant, in that this is the beginning/first/earliest definition of the word), or (2) “created directly and personally by a particular artist; not a copy or imitation” or (3) “not dependent on other people’s ideas; inventive and unusual.”

And so one sees cliché complicated, considerably, by this proliferation of words, themselves referencing and referenced by other words, a kind of intricate scaffolding built around—

And also, being polysemous, or: not at all precise, in definition.

Lots of philosophers (“a person engaged or learned in philosophy, especially as an academic discipline”) have been concerned with this issue—with defining it, to be precise. Guys like Frederick Nietzsche, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jacques Derrida.

The most basic problem is the act of definition itself, or the impulse towards, which seems to be very human, very us, or, i.e., one of the few things one might be somewhat comfortable terming universal. We can’t resist making meaning, and even to discover this, or figure it out, is to make some kind of meaning. And so the issue seems to be circular, and muddy, and always leaves us scratching our heads.

In other words: Shit’s[2] fucked[3] up, folks.

It’s not your humble writer’s intention here to delve into such yawn-inducing theoretical stuff. To do that would take more space than we’ve got for our discussion; not to mention, yr. wr.’s not nearly smart or ambitious enough to do more than graze the hem of the whole thing, big and complicated and interwoven as it is. But it Looms, and so it’s got to be mentioned and touched on in at least an ancillary way.

One might consider, over the course of our discussion, the questions: what (the hell) is The Big Looming Thing? And why’s this guy so obsessed with it? Does he perhaps need to just chill the fuck out and get laid?


SO, OK, ENOUGH WITH THIS BIG LOOMING THING

What your humble writer would actually like to do is hone in on a specific aspect of craft, as it relates to the above-mentioned Big Looming Thing: How language confronts that which (we think) can’t be gotten at in language. I.e., the saying-of-the-unsayable. There is, one thinks, a lot at stake for us in this question and yet, the issue’s tangled up in The Big Looming Thing, and too, in issues of ethics and aesthetics.

David Foster Wallace[4] was, to seem degree, concerned with this stuff in much of his work. In his essay “Consider the Lobster,” he dedicates the last sentence to it:

These last couple queries, though, while sincere, obviously involve much larger and more abstract questions about the connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality, and these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here.

His silence here is suggestive: those questions aren’t ever actually resolved, but they’re asked (or actually: alluded to) which seems to do the trick of bringing that Big Looming Thing we don’t or can’t look at directly into peripheral view. And we’ll notice the use of metaphor as a stand-in for the thing Wallace can’t quite say: those “deep and treacherous waters.”[5]

Your humble writer would like to try and posit here that what we do when compelled to say the unsayable thing is this: we use other people’s words. We’ll use figurative language, and clichés, and aphorisms, and bits of repeated philosophy, and archetypes.

And so Re: Thoth, who’s equated, we’ll remember, with Language and Myth. The Great Substitute. Here’s our link. It’s Thoth who speaks/writes the will of Ra. Who stands in. Whose words Ra desperately needs to keep the whole thing functioning. Likewise Maat, whose existence is unknown, without Thoth. Thus, the convenient marriage.

No Truth without Language. And yet Language substitutes for Truth. This little paradox is what we’ve in this discussion been calling The Big Looming Thing, and what another dude, Jacques Derrida (previously mentioned), calls “the metaphysics of presence."

The stakes: Everything. Because we’ve built/organized our lives/society around the existence of a Truth separate of Language. Science, in fact, organizes itself around this basic premise.


SERIOUSLY, ENOUGH WITH THIS BULLSHIT

Yikes! Imagine the hangdog look on your humble writer’s face on realizing he’s so consistently and awkwardly returning to a question outside the scope of our discussion.

But so, to refocus w/r/t saying-the-unsayable and using-other-people’s-words: In a very real sense of the word, we fictionalize: “It is increasingly likely,” wrote Ander Monson, in Vanishing Point, “that what we remember—all of it—is fiction, variously true or edited. It is constantly being reedited to fit our version of events with what we think of ourselves, the narratives we use to define our lives and give context to action, and we might as well admit it.” It’s related to the larger phenomenon of empathy[6], in which we see ourselves in others. The big implication behind the existence of which being that the whole Self/Other distinction by which we define ourselves is a lot muddier when looked at closely, as most things are. But that discussion would take us into deep and treacherous waters.

Your humble writer is sure this argument’s been made before, which is, sort of, its case in point. Q.E.D., WWWWW, etc.


METHODOLOGY

Let’s try starting with two assumptions:

1. the borders between fiction and nonfiction are porous, perhaps even nonexistent, and

2. the defining impulse, or the fact that we just can’t seem to resist making meaning is, at its essence, a narrativizing impulse.

In other words, if we look closely at the ways we define both fiction and nonfiction, we’ll discover that they’re both organized around the same principle: that of interpretation of experience. E.L Doctorow, quoted in a New York Times essay by Michiko Kakutani, quoted in Reality Hunger, by David Shields, and now quoted here, by your humble writer, hits[7] on this: “There’s no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction,” he says, “there’s only narrative.”

Seems a good time here to set down a definition, so we’re aware of the boundaries within which we’re working: the OED claims narrative is “a spoken or written account of connected events; a story,” and goes on to give three senses or shades of this more general definition: (1) “the narrated part or parts of a literary work, as distinct from dialogue,” or (2) “the practice or art of telling stories,” or (3) “a representation of a particular situation or process in such a way as to reflect or conform to an overarching set of aims or values.”

Dictionary.com has this: “a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious.”

And too, Thesaurus.com lists both fiction and history as synonyms.

It’s slippery, to be blunt. But it seems to be trying to mean something that coheres, that’s whole (re: Maat—or more precisely, Thoth-speaking-Maat, “cosmic harmony,” etc.) and which, in being whole, creates meaning.

It’s important to note narrative as a possible organizing principle, because it offers us a shot, however long the odds, at unifying those above-mentioned genres, which division is sort of unnatural, in light of the kinds of stories we’ve been telling ourselves for thousands of years. I.e., myths, which, we know, combine both fiction and nonfiction, inside their structures.

(Just now realizing our project here’s much bigger than initially anticipated, and so feeling all sorts of intimidated and not totally up to the task.)

The relevant questions to ask, regarding the two assumptions we began with, are these: why separate the two (meaning, fiction and non-)? And why equate nonfiction, defined not as itself, but as the negative of fiction, with Truth?[8]


BRIEF INTERRUPTION OF METHODOLOGY TO OFFER A BIG UNBACKED CLAIM

Truth is defined, in our culture, against what it isn’t. This might be because we have such trouble saying what it actually is.[9]


RESUMPTION OF METHODOLOGY, FEELING SHEEPISH FOR THE ABOVE TWO SENTENCES

The evidence used to support the above assumptions are quotes from other writers, culled from eight books and four essays, credited only in the endnotes, because the argument is made as collage, to amplify and perhaps exaggerate the main claim, which is, again, that we appropriate, when confronted with failures of language. As Monson wrote: “So I have reconstructed this story out of other stories, fitting them together so they feel (hopefully) satisfying.”


THE ARGUMENT

I am beginning to learn what it means: unspeakable.

I remember myself then as always missing words, unable to speak, caught in the space of my still mostly unspeakable feelings.

The unreliability, the misrememberings, the act of telling in starts and stops, the fuckups, the pockmarked surface of the I: that’s where all the good stuff is, the fair and foul, that which is rent, that which is whole, that which engages the whole reader.

What happens when we can no longer freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience?

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

The act of writing is inevitably viewed as an act of courage (brave is all over the place). Life’s difficult, maybe even a drag; language is (slim) solace. No one else gets what you’re doing; I alone get it. You and me, babe. Intimacy. Urgency. We alone get life. Let me explain your book—the text—to yourself. Let me tell you what your book is about. Life is shit. We are shit. This, alone, will save us—this communication.

An aside: I am primarily a fiction writer. It’s been an incredible struggle to make it to this point in the essay.

It’s a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.

To be forced to think about things overtly, explicitly, when I’d been used to working my issues out by constructing imaginary characters and subjecting them to all sorts of problems and difficulties, has been really hard, to say the least, and this lack of a payoff at the end of it, of a happy ending, has compelled me to rethink the way in which I assemble my fictions: why am I constantly denying my characters their due glimmers of happiness? Why do their hopes go unfulfilled, when I have the power to fulfill them? The short answer is because it’s realistic. The long answer is…It’s long. It’s complicated. It has to do with issues of existence, and identity—two words I hope never to write again, pending the completion of this essay. It has to do with mortality, essentially. The Big, Dark Thing lurking in the innermost depths of all other things. Happiness wards away The Big, Dark Thing using an ingenious defense mechanism: distraction. Success and achievements. Notice the language: succeed, achieve—these are words set in contrast to another, more ominous word: fail. Failure is irrevocably tied to mortality in the English language: You can beat that cancer, you can fight the good fight, you can die trying, your heart, lungs, liver, etc. can fail, you can lose a loved one, and so on. To confront failure is to be reminded of an impending Failure.

Still, I kept trying, unsure whether the labor would ever end or just beget another failure.

Not only is life mostly failure, but in one’s failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

In the work of my favorite writers, the armature of overt drama is dispensed with, and we’re left with a deeper drama, the real drama: an active human consciousness trying to figure out how he or she has solved or not solved being alive.

(Ambitious) memoir isn’t fundamentally a chronicle of experience; rather, memoir is the story of consciousness contending with experience.

In a larger sense, all writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it. The real question is: this massive autobiographical writing enterprise that fills a life, this enterprise of self-construction—does it yield only fictions? Or rather, among the fictions of the self, the versions of the self, that it yields, are there any that are truer than others? How do I know when I have the truth about myself?

When a self can (through language, memory, research, and invention) project itself everywhere, and can empathize with anyone or anything, what exactly is a self?

Self-study of any seriousness aspires to myth. Thus do we endlessly inscribe and magnify ourselves.

As an aside: I do all of this too. I can’t see a way to stop it, either, thinking about the I, examining myself (I must face the fact that I do, in the end, find myself interesting, which is good, I suppose) in text and thought.

We are always only in our own company.

We are everywhere on the surface of the self-space, and not permitted to sink to the metaphoric center, to rise into the heaven of release from identity.

In the individual essays, and in the book as a whole, the pattern recurs over and over: a self declares itself; a text emerges as countertext to the self; the text becomes heroic or the generator of the text becomes a heroic figure, a parental figure, an authority figure of some kind; gaps emerge; the text can’t get talked about directly; what gets talked about is the culture surrounding the narrator, the culture surrounding the text; we keep circling self, circling text, keep searching, can’t quite access self, can’t quite access text, but we can access the space between the text and the self. That space is magical. That space is oddly redemptive.

This is the location in between, not solid land, not high seas.

And this is only one example where some cliché peels away to reveal a kernel of real feeling.

The only way I’ve found I can live, literarily, is by carving out my own space between the interstices of fiction and non-.

The in-between is where I finally want to live, where the practical and the projected bend like the Mississippi on a windy blue day.

This, then, is a space of my own making. This is the story I am learning to live.

Around it is yet more beautiful emptiness.

Truth, they know, rests in silence.

For one, I’d like to find the courage not to tell my story. Since we would all—apparently—prefer to tell our stories, the smarter thing, the harder thing for lots of us, is silence.

I could not have imagined containing, as the farm woman slumped next to me did, the sheer narrative bulk to say, “I could tell you stories,” and then drifting off with the secret heaviness of experience into the silence where stories live their real lives, crumbling into the loss we call remembrance.

Too much death, you know? His brother: (silent this whole time) To him you want to say, what? Listen, uh…the words just…

The first time I was alone in the wilderness, I walked through a field that throbbed with song and wondered whether the crickets played their wings or their legs. My footfalls, instead of causing the usual thud, caused spreading pools of solemn silence. Sound stopped wherever I walked. And I walked and walked to hush the world, leaving silence like spoor.

Someday a sentence will come to me, a magic sentence that will undo all that is wrong and make everything right. But until that sentence comes, I say nothing.


SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

So at the very least we can diagnose a kind of flow to this thing: we begin with the unspeakable, and more important, the urge to speak it, and move from there to an attempt to speak it which ends in failure, to a deeper consideration of the self, and particularly, the self as space (which can contain, paradoxically, other selves), and from there to the space “in between” or i.e., the space not contained by categories or meaning, to another silence, this time embraced and to some degree, known.

Of the six quotes at the end of the collage that deal with silence, all of them come at or toward the end of their respective books/essays, save for one (Patricia Hampl’s “I could not have imagined containing…”) which comes at the beginning of her collection of essays, in a preface-like essay that really sort of captures the gist of the other essays[10].

Interesting to note, as well, that this pattern loosely (and unintentionally, believe it or not) follows a traditional story arc: there’s the conflict (in the urge to speak the unspeakable), the rising action/hurdles-to-overcome (the failure to speak it), the climax/epiphanic moment (the discovery of the space-in-between), and the denouement (the embrace of silence). This arc, of course, has been appropriated in various shapes and forms for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

As of course is the technique of collage, taken from visual arts.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, state the case unequivocally: “Our concepts,” they write, “structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people…since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is like.”


AND SO, WE’LL END WITH A CONFESSION

This has been an odd and circular little exercise in failure. Your humble writer’s more than a little bewildered by his own argument, which, such bewilderment’s embarrassing, and also time-consuming to work through, and exhausting, because he’s sort of sure he’s onto something, but each time he assays to clarify just what that something is, he ends up confusing himself and spinning off into weird tangents (and perhaps irritating you).

Well but so, A Confession: This was not about a book, or a collection of books. Nor was it about nonfiction or fiction. It was about language itself, the ways we use it, and’s therefore a much more basic problem, and harder to conceptualize, because it’s buried so deeply beneath other problems.

And another: A couple of those quotes in the collage were taken from an essay your humble writer wrote when he was twenty-four, and working through a massive, disorienting grief occasioned by the death of his best friend.

And, finally: I don’t know how one says the unsayable.

I’ll drop the “humble writer” bullshit. I’d just like to talk directly to you now, if that’s okay.

But so: I don’t know how one says the unsayable. Mostly because I don’t think the unsayable gets said. It’s kind of tautological, sure, but I’m thinking we lie to ourselves and others in asserting that something is unspeakable. That term probably actually refers to traumatic incidents or taboo subjects, which are, sure, really difficult, oftentimes, to discuss, but also necessary.

And so the term unsayable is really more of a rhetorical device, meant to ratchet the intensity of the discussion, to command the reader’s attention.

And in so doing, Speak the Truth—whatever that is[11].

And set us free.



NOTES!

[1] Defined as (1) “an individual thing or person regarded as single and complete but which can also form an individual component* of a larger or more complex whole**” or (2) “a quantity chosen as a standard in terms of which other quantities may be expressed” or (3) “the number one.”

*“A part or element of a larger whole**, especially a part of a machine or vehicle.”

**(1) “a thing that is complete in itself,” or (2) “all*** of something.”

***(1) “used to refer to the whole** quantity or extent of a particular group or thing,” or (2) “the whole** of one’s possessions, energy, or interest.”

[2] (1) “feces” or (2) “a contemptible or worthless person,” or (3) something worthless; garbage; nonsense,” (4) “personal belongings; stuff,” or (5) any psychoactive drug, especially marijuana.” Worth noting that none of these usages seem to apply to the way the word’s used above. Which implies a, like, disjunction between signifier and signified, which, this disjunction, itself implies a separation/division. Which and so no such separation/division exists that’s not got a border of some sort, and it’s here where good old Thoth reigns.

[3] (1) “have sexual intercourse with (someone),” or (2) “ruin or damage (something),” or (3) “an act of sexual intercourse,” or (4) “used alone or as a noun or a verb in various phrases to express anger, annoyance, contempt, impatience, or surprise, or simply for emphasis.”

[4] Defined, variously, as (1) “an award-winning American novelist, short story writer, essayist, professor of English at Illinois State University, and professor of creative writing at Pomona College,” and (2) “A versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy…a maximalist, exhibiting in his work a huge, even manic curiosity,” and (3) “struggled with depression for more than twenty years,” and (4) “dead.”

[5] It’s worth noting another quote, in which he tries to confront the Thing directly (this in an interview with Larry McCaffery, published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993—that is, about twelve years before “Consider the Lobster”: “I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art-fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.” This sense of entrapment and loneliness and death that Wallace speaks of here—what is it? The language here and elsewhere in his work suggests he’s struggling with a problem which he can’t even properly conceive, which maybe’s because language is not up to the task.

[6] The OED’s definition of this word—“the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”—is all sorts of problematic in an epistemological way, thanks to the trickiness of understand as a concept. But again, we won’t go there, because it’s tethered directly to The Big Looming Thing.

[7] This sort of rhetoric, the back-your-claims-with-quotes variety, is more than a little clunky and dubious, because it’s often tautological: what you’re doing, basically, is decontextualizing these little snippets of text, and plugging them into a new text that has them functioning according to its rules, and those quotes that you can’t make work, don’t get included. This by the way’s the essential dilemma of meaning-making: what you select from the onslaught of experience determines how you view it, which in turn’s got major onto-phenomeno-epistomological repercussions.

[8] In July 2013, your humble writer spent some time at a writers’ conference in the Adirondacks. On the conference’s last day, a conversation was had—in front of us young writers—between Jim Miller, an essayist and Foucault scholar, and Darin Strauss, a novelist whose memoir, Half a Life, was a recent bestseller. Miller, a big aggressive dude, took the lead, immediately lasering in on this question of Truth in nonfiction, stating his view unequivocally: it was the nonfictionist’s job, he claimed, to tell the Truth—the Whole, Nothing But, etc. Strauss looked uncomfortable. Softly, he claimed to disagree, with the caveat that he hadn’t lied in his memoir.

[9] So earlier, we touched on a Self/Other distinction, which let’s not burden ourselves here with an extensive explanation of, other than to say: all dichotomies feature mutually exclusive and yet mutually dependent players, which, if you were to eliminate one of those players, the other would cease to make any kind of sense (e.g., what’s Night, really, without Day? Man without Woman? Coke without Pepsi?) Truth’s more difficult, because we’ve—with certain exceptions*—got a know-it-when-we-see-it attitude regarding it, which keeps it, essentially, societal/situational (or, the opposite of universal).

*Fundamentalists of all stripe, being the most notable.

[10] Just a smidge of critical theory here to clarify: Derrida, in his essay “Outwork,” beautifully—if a little opaquely, thus sort of contradicting the clarifying intent—captures the function of prefaces: “From the viewpoint of the fore-word, which recreates an intention-to-say after the fact, the text exists as something written—a past—which, under the false appearance of a present, a hidden omnipotent author (in full mastery of his product) is presenting to the reader as his future.” I.e., a preface is written after the text, and yet presents itself before it.

[11] John Jeremiah Sullivan, in his excellent essay collection Pulphead, struggles with the question of Truth. He concludes: “Mystery is not despair. The sheer awe inspired by [this] vision makes a sufficiently stable basis for ethics, philosophy, love, and the conclusion that a fleeting consciousness is superior to none, precisely because it suggests magnificent things we cannot know, and in the face of which we simply lack an excuse not to assume meaning.”


REFERENCES! (CORRESPONDING TO EACH PARAGRAPH BREAK IN ‘THE ARGUMENT’ SECTION AND WHICH, NO, SORRY, ARE NOT IN MLA FORMAT)

The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison
Body Geographic, Barrie Jean Borrich
Vanishing Point, Ander Monson
Reality Hunger, David Shields (John D’Agata, The Next American Essay)
Reality Hunger, David Shields
Reality Hunger, David Shields
“Thanatopsis, Or How the Heat Lost the Finals,” Eric Fershtman
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
“Thanatopsis, Or How the Heat Lost the Finals,” Eric Fershtman
Companion to an Untold Story, Marcia Aldrich
Reality Hunger, David Shields (Gore Vidal, quoted in Lopate)
Reality Hunger, David Shields
Reality Hunger, David Shields (Patricia Hampl, interviewed by Laura Wexler, AWP Chronicle)
Reality Hunger, David Shields (J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point)
Maps to Anywhere, Bernard Cooper (from Foreward by Richard Howard)
Reality Hunger, David Shields
Vanishing Point, Ander Monson
Reality Hunger, David Shields (Nietzsche)
Maps to Anywhere, Bernard Cooper (from Foreward by Richard Howard)
Reality Hunger, David Shields
I Could Tell You Stories, Patricia Hampl
Maps to Anywhere, Bernard Cooper
Reality Hunger, David Shields
Body Geographic, Barrie Jean Borrich
Vanishing Point, Ander Monson
Vanishing Point, Ander Monson
I Could Tell You Stories, Patricia Hampl
Vanishing Point, Ander Monson
I Could Tell You Stories, Patricia Hampl
“Thanatopsis, Or How the Heat Lost the Finals,” Eric Fershtman
Maps to Anywhere, Bernard Cooper
The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison



Eric Fershtman’s work is published/forthcoming in various places, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Seneca Review, The Good Men Project, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and The Barnstormer. He won the Summer Literary Seminars Emerging Writers Award in 2012.

Chelsey Clammer: Body of Work, on Structure Courting Content

Introduction

We learned this in school. Were force-fed the essay’s acceptable appearance, all our thoughts squeezed into five paragraphs. If/then statement. If we write within the standardized confines, then we prohibit explorations of an essay’s true beauty. We’re taught the expected infrastructure. The bare bones of persuasive narrative. Introduce, provide three bodies of proof, conclude. But creativity lives in our bones—pulses in the pith of what makes us. How we thrive in a variety of forms. Like our bodies. We want to move away from social conceptions of beauty, away from standardized bodies, size 0, the expected texts of our looks. Like the confines of structured writing. Acceptable language. Graded. The expected looks of our texts. But narratives are alive and moving (the memoir of scars, the poetry of clavicles, the language of lungs). Let’s get to the heart of the matter. How we could follow the rules—canon, grammar, five-paragraph form—but the parameters of expression take on different shapes. Always have. How we could continue to follow rules—restrict, thin skin, show bones—but the dimensions of our physical forms want more. Different shapes. Always have.

 

Body I: Writing Skeletal Fractures

We press against the tenuous fences between poetry and fiction and nonfiction and humor and critical writing and academic writing and blogging and every other genre that has ever existed, ever, in order to discover how to discuss our lives. Stretch through our porous boundaries of self, of genre, to touch what’s on the other side. Hybridize. Here in these in-between spaces, narrative rules no longer apply. Hybrids help. Hybrids show us how to re-think, resist, grow. Regrowth. How to read differently, write inversely, away from the boxes. Writing is alive like a body. Kazim Ali: “The text is a body because it is made of the flesh and breath and blood of a writer. The mind which declares intention is a collecting of senses. And memories. Chemically it is invented in the brain. Thought is matter.” No matter how we have been told to write, our writing is a forever growing thing and how it can grow away from expectations. Born anew in new forms. Throw the skeletons of standardized writing into the closet and forget about them. Find the key, lock it, then lose it. Ander Monson: outlines, indexes, his periodic snow. Jill Talbot: syllabus. Michelle Morano: Spanish grammar. And more: questionnaires and lists and prosetry and letters and textual adventures. Mathematical problems, even. Lauren Slater: maybe a fake memoir. Sherman Alexie and Tobias Wolff and their autobiographical novels. Jo Ann Beard: braided. John McPhee: woven. Lawrence Sutin’s postcards. Sven Birkert’s objects. Renovate self and paint the world with blue. Maggie Nelson. I have an affinity for hermit crabs. Structure courting content, perfectly juxtaposed to make a (w)holy matrimony of form. To un-organize our thoughts, to let the form live as it wants to live. Such as prose poems, lyric essays, mosaic stories, crossword puzzle interviews, poeticized science. Forever restructure the structure. Transform.

 

Body II: Restructuring the Fractured Body

The head is how we introduce ourselves. Words. Eye contact. Head nod of introduction, recognition. What’s up? Past the main three segments of our bodies—arms, abdomen, legs—we reach the conclusion that’s lying there, right between our legs. Because what will become of us? Come from us? Come out of us? Beginnings and endings can form into unique shapes and values with a personalized purpose (the face, desire), but it’s the body that’s regulated. Marya Hornbacher says, “We turn skeletons into goddesses.” The narrative of normativity. The strive for 0. It’s not for nothing, though, as I’ve been told that part of joy is sorrow. The almost literally fought-to-the-death 0 that eventually (hopefully) goes away, fades. How to allow this? Acceptance of self. Reject the fairy tale of being s(t)ick thin and all those expectations. And how a body can move away from this, can work against it by creating a new text of physical self. Cut up the archetype. Expose the horror story we believe our bodies to be, solve the mystery of how we can fit in this world by simply fitting in with ourselves (acceptance, yes), and get real here—get a thrill out of living creative-nonfictionally. This is my body. Fact. This is what it says. Create. Crack open the 0-shaped shell of social constructions and find the self, the comfortable body that lives within. Powerful. Lia Purpura observes, “How easily the body opens.” Coax yourself out. Forget creams and shampoos and toners and diet foods and magic pills and lose ten pounds in seven days. Instead, open up to personhood, to that aliveness. Create. Describe. Feel real with yourself, in yourself and tell the world a new body narrative. Phillip Lopate claims, “When I write, I almost feel that they, and not my intellect are the clever progenitors of the text. Whatever narcissism, fetishism, and proud sense of masculinity I possess about my body must begin and end with my fingers.” The story of subversion. Re-writing the scripts of our skin.

 

Body III: Bodies of Writing Made by Writing Bodies

Arianne Zwartjes ignores science writing, ignores lab reports with her lyrical explorations of the body. “Our bones surge and flow with blood. Not only a clothes hanger for skin and organs—they are very much alive, vitally interconnected tissue.” Hypothesis: If we use metaphors in science writing, then our body of work becomes alive. Because when the norm continues to fester in our bodies (you must look like this, act like this, be this) our bones fuse with fright, become restricted by thematic hesitations of I’m not doing this right and I never will. Self-declared failure. Now, work against this. Push your writing into something else. Past the page, past the pessimistic perspective of your physical self. Breakaway. Listen for the real stories of your body. They’re hidden within the expectations. Un-five paragraph your writing.

See?

Now we’re more than what’s expected. More than what we’re instructed to do—conform to the insistence on the 5-paragraph form no more.

I un-social-standard-of-beauty my body. Dreadlocks. Hairy legs. Armpits, too. And my skin that is no longer thin. I'm learning how to re-write my letter of acceptance. To encourage before criticizing. And end each thought with a you’re doing great and a just keep going. There’s always more to write. Always. More to read. Always. Now consider the new shapes of text. The new ways we can read our bodies. Edit. Revolt.

Don’t let five paragraphs constrict nor conduct you.

Make anew.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, language and bodies can be fluid if we encourage them to be so. Because if we write within the standardized confines, then we prohibit explorations of an essay’s true beauty. Our true beauty. We’re taught an expected infrastructure. The bare bones of persuasive narrative. The methods of storytelling we live by—those that must be complete. Are complete. Inherently. According to Zwartjes: “We live by story and dying without story seems the most terrifying of ends.” The terrifying end reached by not writing past oppressive narratives. Move away from it by moving about, by believing in the power of motion, the concept of uncertain future. Believe and keep the body talking. Its strength should never be silenced. Likewise, let’s keep the essay moving, shifting. There is no such thing as a final draft. The bodies of (emotionally) provoking books. Stories of skin. Persuade and re-make, re-frame five-paragraphs of an essay that just wants to explore. Stretch. To have room to flesh (out). We hold spines in our hands as we journey through each page. We hold our bodies in the hands of our perspectives when we read not just the skin, but everything within—the narrative of who we are. Who we might be. Time to read.

Our bodies—this page.



Chelsey Clammer has been published in The Rumpus, Essay Daily, The Water~Stone Review and Black Warrior Review (forthcoming) among many others. She is the Managing Editor and Nonfiction Editor for The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review. Clammer is also the Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown. Her first collection of essays, BodyHome, was released from Hopewell Publishing in March 2015. Her second collection of essays, There Is Nothing Else to See Here, is forthcoming from The Lit Pub, Summer 2015. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.com.

Naomi Washer: Not the Map but the Winding

The first poet I ever personally knew died a week before the launch of Ghost Proposal’s first issue. I am still trying to find the sense in that. It is an answer I may never find; the essay I will continue to attempt. When he died, I returned to his poems. In them, I rediscovered qualities I have sought out in writing ever since—doubt, risk, and the grounding of place amidst timelessness.

From the Ghost Proposal mission:

Proposal: an offering; a possibility; a conjecture; a guess; a hypothesis; a thing-to-be-explored.

Ghost: a shadow on the sleeve of your sweater; a rhythm returning from lifetimes before; the meandering suggestion of a river on an ancient, yellowed map.

We want to publish your strange objects. The whispers sitting in between your shoulder blades.

*

As a writer and reader, it is not answers that comfort and sustain me, but questions. I write and read not in an effort to conclude but to attempt to stretch out across boundaries in hopes of forming ties between my own questions and the questions of others.

It is this kind of essay that we seek to include in Ghost Proposal. The essays we publish move beyond particular circumstances of place and situation to that space of timeless wondering which is open to all who risk accessing it.

And I do believe that space is real; is physical. We know that essays begin with a question but I believe it is equally necessary for them to end on one. The best essays traverse un-articulated landscapes, but I do not think that they leave every corner of those landscapes discovered and named. As editor of Ghost Proposal, I look for essays that pull back their seams so inner contours may be glimpsed, then end on the invitation for the reader to step inside—to take over, to take the exploration some place new.

Take the final lines of Ryan Spooner’s “Syskrin” in Issue 3:

How the eye darts. How it wishes to lead the body to wear it lands. On the edge of a scene—there, over there, away.

Spooner uses the description of encountering an object to teach readers how to enter a space he will end by inviting them into. He begins by enacting his very writing process: “Peeling out the cantilevered drawers and hinged trays of my great-grandmother’s syskrin…” He goes on to describe what is inside, then: “I’m peeling out the memory of it, too…” He asks, “Getting back to it, remembering it, what do I get back?” Then reaches for it, “I would arrive always at a squat pot of dark India ink…” Then focuses: “Where else have I known that ink’s luster?” And then this ending that cinematically zooms beyond the box, beyond the spot at the end of the couch in the myriad homes in which it took up residence, to a summer long gone, “the whole sky sweating, heaving…” Who among us has not known that sky?

*

Ghost Proposal is still young—we’ve just published our fifth issue—and Issue 4 marked our transition into un-labeled writing—uncharted territory, as it were. We no longer label the work by genre, which allows readers to discuss what a piece is doing, where it’s going. I am most excited when I see an essay enact the whole aesthetic of Ghost Proposal, such as the middle of Jill Talbot’s “On Trouble, Like Dust” in Issue 3, from a section subtitled Detour:

I have empty streets inside me. Streets that have built cities, maps of trouble. With the slightest turn of direction, I can be back on any one of them. Their coordinates fixed and sure, a grid of who I once was, who I thought myself to be, who I tried to outrun.

The essays in Ghost Proposal are so often my own troubled maps that I have to believe other readers will recognize them too. Because essaying is larger than any one of us. Ghost Proposal was founded through correspondence, between myself and another poet, and our mission corresponds with Spicer’s poetics in After Lorca—letters to a phantom. The confluence of correspondence (one object in relation to another), correspondence (letter-writing) and translation (re-placing a piece of writing in another time, context and language) is what we believe a ghost proposal is.

Imagine my pleasure, then, in publishing Dave Snyder’s “An Open Letter to Everything” in Issue 1. Letters, originally designated to the private sphere, now reside in a public space surrounding genre: “…nothing and no one that reads this is not you. In this I feel safe to tell you, dearly, what I must here in the privacy of the crowd.” Snyder’s letter-essay simultaneously serves as microcosm (on paper) and macrocosm (in concept) of the aesthetic we’ve developed as each new issue evolves.

Because what have I done here, if not placed our contributors together on an India-ink map, traced the correspondence between them? Objects arranged on a dark cloth, surrounded by darkness, take on a heightened color and focus—such is the nature of the essays collected in Ghost Proposal:

Spooner’s remembered sky—Talbot’s empty streets of the self—Snyder’s letter to all of us.

Seeing it laid out like this, I remember another I’d like to add after Spooner and leading to Talbot:

Sometimes I can’t watch Revenge in its entirety because it hurts me to see people hurt. Even cognizant of the fiction, I flinch at the elaborate and destructive plots, and postpone watching until the dark place in me awakens and requires its balm. 

(“On Revenge,” Carmen Gimenez Smith, Issue 1)

And what emerges out of a space both private and public—a space that both belongs and does not belong to the essayist?

I will venture an attempt:

I near the end of writing this, make a stop at Essay Daily to check out the most recent post. It’s a review by John Proctor of Steven Church’s book Ultrasonic; it hones in on both of their experiences writing about the deaths of their brothers. I’m wanting to include some references here to other Ghost Proposal essays such as Dan Beachy-Quick’s “The Fragile Bow: On Imagination and Atrocity” (Issue 4) and Patrick Thornton’s “Silent Eulogy” (Issue 2) but I now feel compelled to speak to John Proctor directly.

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Dear John,

I read when I get stuck in writing, as so many of us do. I hit a dead-end on my own page and seek a new route in someone else’s. Insert here: new coordinates on the circular map of the essays we’re trying to find. We begin in one place and find the next road when we are meant to. There are so many echoes these days. My poet friend died and his name was Johnny. This paired with the explanation of the work we seek in Ghost Proposal corresponds to your review. We read each other because we correspond; because we correspond, we go on writing.

Dear John; Dear readers; Dear contributors; Dear Everything,

Here is a haunting; an offering; a shadow; a prompt, from the end of B.J. Hollars’ essay “SOS” in Issue 4. With what will it, for you, correspond?

I try to make sense of the koan that has risen to the surface:
if two boys don’t drown in the river, is the grief you feel still real?

Naomi Washer is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Ghost Proposal and an Assistant Editor of Hotel Amerika. Her essays, poems and Cambodian translations have appeared in Ampersand Review, The Birds We Piled Loosely, St. Petersburg Review and Poor Claudia among other places. She lives in Chicago where she is completing an MFA in Nonfiction at Columbia College.

Kathryn Winograd on the Lyric Impulse: Blizzards, Bricks, and the "Glaciology" of Purpura

Warned of, craved, the blizzard finally barrels across the ice dark street. The known world whittles down to black elm, chiseled hoar frost, and my breath against the slim windowpane, periodic circles of clarity against a gathering snow, a white space.

“I am not a poet,” my student informs me, not by text message or email, but by phone, landline phone. My enthusiasm over the metaphoric possibilities of this student’s obsession with bricks in her narrative on building a new house with her second husband has aroused a knee-jerk reaction—and it’s not a good one.

Already this blizzard must mean something: the white exterior world beyond the cold glass I press my palm hard against. The interior world my breath inhabits, warm with its fireplace flame even as the insistent voice of the anchorwoman ticks off degrees and inches as if the world beyond the window that I cannot yet feel, and the world beyond the self I do not yet know, could be made measurable.

When I wrote Michael Steinberg about an AWP panel I was proposing on what I saw as a gap between the student who enters creative nonfiction from the prose side of the spectrum versus the poetry side, he wrote back, “Strictly speaking, I’m not a lyric essayist. But one of the things I’ve been talking and writing about for years is the connection between memoir and lyric poetry. The essay (and/or memoir) is the story of one’s thinking, the revelation of consciousness. Except for those essayists who reflexively use poetic elements and language in their work, these are missing from most of the MFA work I’m seeing—even the very good ones.”

The lyric impulse versus the storytelling impulse. The “revelation of consciousness.”
      “Back stories,” my student tells me: the neighbors’ bricks she obsesses over, the migrating birds that roost in paragraphs throughout the chronology of her house-building, and those faintest hammer taps of her new husband who “remodeled” the house my student must for now live in, the house he built for his first wife, repaired in places with baling twine.
      A leftover house.
      “Extra stuff,” my student says.
      The real subject matter of her narrative on building a house?
      Building a house.

The philologist Max Mueller said that “man, as he develops his conceptions of immaterial things, must perforce express them in terms of material things because his language lags behind his needs.” Figurative language then becomes the vehicle for greater precision of expression; exactitude grows through metaphor, not necessarily through narrative.
      “Bricks,” I tell my student.

I assign to the class Lia Purpura’s Glaciology, her “deposition” on glacier and thaw, on X-ray and artifact, on the fallible body and the mind-in-waiting.
      “A little shard, small bit taken out of my body and sent off for further study,” Purpura carves so lightly amidst her glacier surge and ice sheets, her “striated stone from Mauritania.” A 650 million year old backdrop to this uncertain moment, to this white space, external and internal: “Bones stacked and bent in the attitude of prayer, the edges honed and precarious.”
      “Too much poetry,” my nonfiction students tell me, Purpura’s own hieroglyphics—that “cache of loose details” she resolutely attends to while she awaits the medical world’s verdict—abandoned, they claim, to Orpheus, strummer of the poet’s lyre, though I tell them that even the king of the dead has wept.
      “Metaphor,” as the New Critics said, is “not a rhetorical device . . . but a means of perceiving and expressing moral truths radically different from that of prose or scientific statement.”

My table light burns in the night window, sky lantern lit to flame now, reflected, refracted, my own face the blizzard’s whiteness.
      How do blizzards form? I wonder.
      I think of André Breton, surrealist poet who described the “vertiginous descent within ourselves . . . the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of all other places.” My student writes, We’ve gone around and around. Too dark, too light, too orange, too red. I never realized there were so many variations on the color of brick. And then, later, bricks, typically rectangular and used for centuries to build lasting structures.
      “Extra stuff,” my student says, my life-long leaser drawing houses of bricks since she was a child that no wolf could blow down. Her very first house.
      “My last house,” her new husband reminds her.
      “Bricks,” I say.
      “I am not a poet,” my student reminds me.

Warm air rises over cold and the white wishbone of the world cracks just below. Here is Purpura, still in waiting—“the inside-out arms of clothes pulled right, made whole and unwrinkled” taking “lovely hours.” She writes, “The work of glaciers changes a landscape: old stream valleys are gouged and deepened, filled with till and outwash. Filled, of course, over millions of years. In sand-grain, fist-sized increments.”
      Ellen Bryant Voigt in her essay, Images, says that in the expressive theories of art “the poet’s vision supplants the objective or empirical world, and the classical virtues of clarity and precision take second place to passion and sweep.” And so we remember glacier, and sand-grain, and the fist we cannot but imagine now clenched beneath the “riotous stillness of the week,” “the intimacies akin to falling back to a pillow,” “the gratitude unspoken.”

The house stills. The blizzard outside my window shape-shifts the world. Snow solidifies within the barrel staves of streetlight, cold shuttling in between the window’s half-shutter, my hand gone white with cold.
      “Words as images,” Breton said, “[have] an autonomous life of their own.”
      Say blizzard and the snow burns thigh-high again, my body once more in the endless white space: daughter, other I could not yet feel, neither breath nor sound.
      Say glacier and the world turns into “morning glory” and “roadside aster” after Purpura’s unnamed test returns negative, clarity found in the tangible—petal, I’ll write, sepal, anther poised against the glacial white space, against this poet’s “confession”: “I resisted the easy convergence—spring, warmth, I’m fine—not a bit, and I knew that to be an indulgence, a failure, partial sight.”

Say bricks, and my student will tell me, “I am not a poet.”
      But, then, a small blizzard, warned of, craved:

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.
—Ludwig Mies va der Rohe, 1886-1969

Until recently, I took bricks for granted. . . [T]hey were background scenery, something that was just there. That changed when my husband and I decided to build a house. . . bricks became my obsession.

Kathryn Winograd is the author of Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation and Air Into Breath, winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry. Her essays have been noted in Best American Essays, and published in journals including Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, River Teeth, The Florida Review and The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, 6th. She will teach for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program beginning in January, 2016.

John Proctor on listening to Steven Church's Ultrasonic

“In this book, essays become sounding lines, explorations, probes and tests, each one a map of what lies below the surface; and the form is meant to mimic the way our thinking sometimes moves between points of engagement—navigating in the dark by means of echolocation, bouncing from one idea to another, searching and seeing through sound.” 

Author’s Note to Ultrasonic

I’ve always wanted, though I didn’t always know I wanted, to write more like a song than a story. I’m tempted to say Steven Church does this, but on second thought this explanation might be looking at these essays from the wrong end of the earpiece: I think he writes like I listen to a song.

Take, for example, “Seven Fathoms Down.” This might be the essay that most thoroughly elucidates Church’s note on his technique for these essays. In seven parts, each ostensibly going deeper into Church’s mind as it circles its subject(s)—which might be the derivation of the word “cockle,” or sound-based synesthesis, or the life cycle of the catfish, or the word “fathom” itself—Church comes to a realization of sorts as his “subject,” a drowned boy Church saw dredged from the bottom of a lake in his childhood, is just beginning to resound:

I believe most of us are fishing for ghosts—those spectral ideas about life and death that hover at the edge of our consciousness or just beneath the surface of our waking life. Sight promises knowledge; but perhaps it’s only by closing our eyes and listening, by echo-navigating through the landscape of memory that we can explore the unseen terrain below.

I hear—I mean read—sentences like this, and the sensation is a lot like the one I get singing along to my favorite songs: the words, at that moment at least, are mine. I might even steal them, paraphrase them, forget who originally wrote them, but they will continue to resound in my own voice.

*

That thing about always wanting to write like a song? Not entirely true. When I started calling myself a writer, I thought of the word as synonymous with storyteller. And when I started calling myself a nonfiction writer, I wanted to shoehorn this newish conception of myself into the rules (as I saw them) of storytelling—progress, conflict, rising action, resolution. But the essays found myself loving are different. They circle or weave, or go for walks or stand in place. They do flips between literal and figurative, concrete and allegorical, small human and humanity-at-large. Whereas telling a story, to paraphrase Nabokov, is essentially a process of world-making, essaying is a process of weaving oneself into the existing world.

In “It Begins with a Knock at the Door,” by far the most overtly narrative piece in Ultrasonic, Church essays this weaving of himself into the lives of his neighbors while also calling himself on his moves, both as a person and as a writer:

[I] knew nothing of these people as real people. [I] only imagined, speculated, predicted what couldn’t be predicted about them as characters…They needed [my] help not because [I] was funny or good at storytelling, certainly not because they need [my] sympathy or jokes or essays, but because [I] was big enough to pull Larry out of a bathtub.

…

I didn’t want the story to end this way. When I told it later to friends or family I often didn’t get this far, never making it to the part where there is no easy resolution, or where the resolution seems all too predictable and sad…We all wanted to believe that everything was the same, believe that the story never changed and was always funny and weird and safe…We all enjoyed the luxury of humorous distance.

…

…[B]ut I had no control over this scene or the larger story, no agency through imagination, because it was all impossibly, uncontrollably, and tragically true.

To me, as an essayist and a lover of essays, these asides from the story, these refrains from the action and the plot, are more engrossing than the story itself, perhaps because, in talking to himself, Church is letting me in on his process of mythmaking, his role in the creation of the story he tells on the page and the one he tells and retells out loud. I think of my own stories, and the differences between the way I tell them to friends who share a part in them, or to students to elucidate a point, or to strangers in writing.

I spent my childhood thinking both myth and song sprung forth from a mysterious part of someone else—never myself—and that was part of the joy I took in them: the aura of other people’s experience. In pulling himself out of the process, in establishing his own culpability in the straining of truth into personal mythology, Church does something that I find very hard to do as a writer: he is critic of his own story, even in the process of telling it.

*

I’ve been trying for years to locate the person who said, and of course I’m paraphrasing, Writers write to stop time. Maybe it was Frank Conroy—that would make such perfect sense—though I’ve for years attributed it in my mind to Bob Dylan. In any case, many of Church’s Ultrasonic essays don’t just stop time, they romp through it. The most obvious example is probably “Auscultation,” an essay divided not into parts but into chambers, sending its narrative threads—the invention and development of the stethoscope, the entrapment of miners in a coal mine shaft in Utah in 2007, the fetal development of Church’s daughter—pulsing through them.

The development and birth of Church’s daughter in fact could be cited as one of the main narrative threads—or perhaps chords?—connecting many of the essays within the book’s covers. A father of two girls, I found myself humming the universal refrain of worry, circumspection, and paradigm-shifting that the birth of a child produces.

I also have to confess: I read Ultrasonic while deep into the process of collecting my own essays into my first book. I’m pretty sure this made me more attuned to its style, its form (both within the essays and within the collection of them), the words themselves; in other words, I read it to teach me, to nourish me as a writer. But I couldn’t help being entrapped in Church’s sound-web, empathizing with him as a person at least as much as I did with him as a writer.

*

I apologize, both to Steven Church and to his current and potential readers, if this review has become just as much about me as it is about his book of essays. I can only say that I felt, reading Ultrasonic, like his essays were as much about me as they were about him.

I should say here that I went to the same high school Church did—he was a senior when I was a sophomore—though we never knew each other then. I discovered his work when Patrick Madden read something I was writing about being thoroughly traumatized by Eighties nuclear-holocaust miniseries The Day After as a child, and said I should read Church’s The Day After The Day After. Reading it reiterated a foundational principle for me as a writer: that my own experience isn’t that exceptional, that the words I write, the stories I tell, are not unique as words or stories; someone has told them before or will after me, and (in Church’s case with The Day After The Day After) probably better. I’m refraining from quoting Ecclesiastes here.

Even now, I’m surprised to think that I went through high school without knowing Church. I thought I knew everyone. Actually, I knew very few people, but I did know of them, from poring over the yearbook and the school newspaper, taking in as many of the names and faces and stories in our gigantic school that would fit into my hormone-addled mind. I did know his brother Matt, or at least I knew of him. Matt was in my grade, and I seem to remember envying him. He seemed, to me then, at ease with himself, and most of the people we both knew seemed at ease around him. A good guy.

Matt’s death his freshman year of college is the subject his brother Steven circles around in “Crown and Shoulder,” using the two bookends of the title as sounding lines to find himself and the reader at the shoulder of the highway in Indiana where his brother’s car, full of friends, ran headlong into a tree. I read this essay within days of reading Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Documents,” in which D’Ambrosio sketches a tragic outline of one brother’s suicide, another’s mental illness, and his father’s breakdown through the letters they either sent or left him. I keep thinking, even now, How many sentences of personal essays are littered with the bones of dead brothers?

This question, for me, is not entirely critical. One essay I wrote last year that I’m currently revising is ostensibly about my collegiate running career, but it is really about my brother Jeremy, who was found hanging from a bedsheet when he was ten years old, and my father’s grief at Jeremy’s death, and my other brother Brian’s grief at the loss of his own first, stillborn son.

In “Crown and Shoulder,” Church says, “When I say to grieve, I mean my response to the intransitive, to die…And I mean the object, the intransitive form of the verb. I grieve his death.” He also says, “I don’t really know the exact cause of his death.” I still haven’t found the words to describe my feeling towards my brother’s death, or even to give an accurate account of it. I use the passive voice to describe the way he died—he was found hanging, rather than hanged himself—as I don’t want to imply agency. The local obituary listed his death as a suicide, but ten-year-olds don’t kill themselves, do they? I saddle the death of my other brother’s son to it, implying in my mind some sort of family curse that I don’t think my father or my brother Brian would agree to or appreciate.

I’ve been planning on going back to that essay, circling around the hours and days and months and years of my brother’s death, and the echoes that still ring down through my fragmented family. I’m going to finally do that next month.

Now this month.

Immediately after I finish this.



John Proctor lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, two daughters, and Chihuahua. He’s written memoir, fiction, poetry, criticism, and just about everything in the space between them, which he tends now to collect under the generic term “essay.” His work has been published in The Normal School, The Austin Review, DIAGRAM, Superstition Review, Underwater New York, Defunct, New Madrid, Numero Cinq, McSweeney’s, Trouser Press, New York Cool, and the Gotham Gazette, and is forthcoming in The Weeklings. He serves as Online Editor for Hunger Mountain Journal of the Arts and Dad for All Seasons columnist for the blog A Child Grows in Brooklyn, and teaches writing, media studies, and communication theory at Manhattanville College. You can find him online at NotThatJohnProctor.com/.

J.C. Hallman: The Shriek from the Coffin

The Shriek from the Coffin

or

How to Read Essays With Pleasure

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J.C. Hallman

*

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One of the problems of the pleasure argument for reading is that there are many different kinds of reading pleasure, and not all of them can co-exist. For example, the argument that reading is a pleasure on the order of a Hollywood movie or a rollercoaster (both quite keen pleasures, by the way) doesn’t really jibe with the kind of pleasure I want to describe here, which is the pleasure of finding small hints of a writer’s literary aesthetic embedded in the essays he or she produces. This pleasure is not compatible with the books-as-excitement pleasure because it amounts to the spark of insight that leads, ultimately, to what I’m doing here, writing something of, ahem, a critical nature in reply, and, frankly, you’d be hard pressed to find many people who would risk conflating the writing or reading of a piece of criticism with The Cyclone at Coney Island (which actually batters you around a good bit—my advice: wear shoulder pads on The Cyclone).

    A few years ago, I set out to write a book about the essayist and novelist Nicholson Baker, B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal. What was odd about B & Me, in its conception, was that I hadn’t read any Baker at all when I sat down to start writing about him, and the idea was that no one had ever chronicled a literary relationship from its moment literary conception, that moment when you realize there is a writer out there in the world that you should read, and so you read them. What that meant was that I could read Nicholson Baker “in order,” that is, in the order in which his work was actually produced. I wasn’t able to sustain this for the entire book – I bet you couldn’t either – but what it meant was that some of the very first Baker I read was a series of essays from the early eighties, “The Size of Thoughts,” “Rarity,” and “Changes of Mind,” all of which first appeared in The Atlantic. It wasn’t until I started in on his novels, The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, that I realized how very important these essays were to his career. And what I want to propose here is that this exercise in “deep reading” revealed a very keen, but not much discussed, kind of pleasure: an echoing resonance between Baker’s novels and his essays.

    This continued throughout his career. For example, a scene in The Fermata, in which the monstrous boy-masturbator Arno Strine perfects his time-stopping ability with a complicated system of thread passing through his fingertip calluses (yanked by the agitating post of a washing machine), echoes the film projector imagery of “The Projector,” an essay Baker published in The New Yorker within weeks of the publication of The Fermata. Similarly, Jay and Ben, the hapless comedy team that semi-conspires to murder George W. Bush in the much-maligned 2004 assassination farce Checkpoint, often find themselves straying off topic to discuss Ben’s writerly work on “Cold War themes,” which, as it turns out, is a pretty perfect description of whole range of nonfiction that Baker himself produced from the mid-nineties through the turn of the millennium.

    I don’t think this is merely a case of recycling material. Because it’s not always retroactive. When I began reading the footnotes for which The Mezzanine is famous (and which are the prototype of the footnote fad more commonly associated with David Foster Wallace, Junot Díaz, and a host of other shameless imitators), I experienced the sharp joy of a repetition sounding from “Rarity,” published five years before The Mezzanine hit the shelves: “the ecstasy of arriving at something underappreciated at the end of a briareous ramification of footnotes.” And imagine my joy—my pleasure—when I stumbled across a plea for rhyming poetry from Paul Chowder in The Anthologist, and recognized it as an idea published twenty-five years earlier, in an essay of Baker’s called “Reading Aloud”:

And there were the suspect intonation patterns, the I’m-reading-aloud patterns—especially at poetry readings, where talented and untalented alike, understandably wishing in the absence of rhyme, to give an audible analogue of the ragged left and right margins in their typed or printed original, resorted to syllable-punching rhythms and studiously unresolved final cadences… (italics mine)

    These kinds of repetitions aren’t only forward-looking, either. The critic Doug Phillips, in a remarkable recent piece about Eliot’s plays published in Text and Presentation, documents the temporal somersaults of a writer commenting on his or her own work:

Like any good philosopher-cum-poet-cum-playwright-cum-essayist-cum Nobel Prize Winner, Eliot thought the Real important enough to at least take a peek, and so he devised a strategy for doing so, via verse drama. While he laid the groundwork in his early essay “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama” (1921), Eliot would wait some thirty years to really flesh things out in an essay called, simply, “Poetry and Drama.” Perhaps he needed first to put into practice what he could only theorize early on, and so in the intervening years wrote five of his seven plays, all in verse. Whatever the case, “Poetry and Drama” appeared just after The Cocktail Party in 1951, the very year that Lacan would begin holding his now famous seminars, all of them in some way concerned with the Real, and the truth of our desire.

It would seem, then, that essays serve, for the multi-genre writer, as a kind of navigational fixation system, a way of setting the course of one’s blind and wandering submersible, the yellow submarine in which we all live and work. In an essay, a writer states an aesthetic hypothesis that is then tested, proved, or warped into new hypotheses in other work. 

    But what explains the pleasure of the reader peeking, as it were, behind the wizard’s curtain? Ours is an age in which those who are compelled to indulge the critical reflex are more or less required to ignore the writer in favor of his or her text. This is true in spite of the fact that the same critics who claim to respond to text alone show a preternatural interest in writers’ biographies, particularly those aspects of a writer’s life that are not detailed in essays and interviews. (Poor Henry James’s sexuality is the classic example of this, in spite of the fact that sexuality is not among the many controversial subjects he addressed in his work.) Indeed, the critic, however fired into frenzy he or she might have been by Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” will not hesitate to stretch tortured inferences between a writer’s work and their life, particularly when some prurient suggestion, held together by strained sinews of logic and association, is of the sort that is likely to land in a journal just obscure enough for their tenure file. For me, it’s quite different. I am not much interested in aspects of writers’ lives that they do not attest to themselves, and I very much want to hear them anticipate, and retroactively assess, the nature of their creations. Indeed, it seems to me that essays in which writers fess up to their aesthetic intentions is a way of ensuring that posterity understands that they knew what they were doing, that their productions have not simply downloaded into their minds from the creative ether. In the larger context of the long and dubious history of criticism, then, the essay may be a writer’s shriek from inside the coffin for which “The Death of the Author” served only as the final nail.

    So—the pleasure. The pleasure for me, reading Baker, is what I find to be the true pleasure of reading. It’s not entertainment. Nor is it any masochistic drive toward tribulation based on a misguided notion of reading as transcendent self-flagellation. It’s this: When you read a writer’s essays anticipating or reflecting on their other work, you sink deep not only into their psyche but into their process, you enter into their plans, their hopes, their doubts, and celebrations, and regrets. You no longer watch the process, you are part of it, quite as if you rode the rollercoaster, and then sat down for a lovely chat with its architect. Would that not add to the thrill?

*

J.C. Hallman is the author of a number of books. His study of Nicholson Baker, B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal, comes out in March, and is available here. He lives in New York City.

Shaelyn Smith: The Goal is to Claim a Suit

It feels late. I am visiting a friend in New York. We walk through light snow across Broadway, headed to some dive, some Upper West Side billiard bar. We consider simultaneously accessing both the critical & creative articulations of emotion. We move slowly in the cold, but slow is not static. “People don’t explode,” writes Susan Stewart.

Danny and I order beers; talk around what is quiet, silent, unbearable. How this affects our experiences. We get quarters to shove into the pool table. After John Cage dies, Merce Cunningham muses, “on the one hand, I come home at the end of the day, & John’s not there. On the other hand, I come home & John’s not there.” These two sides to a thing that is one thing. What can we know of internal combustion, spontaneity, formation of the effable, the perpetual, the sound of it? On the one hand, each piece matters. On the other hand, each piece matters. Danny racks the balls.

*

In “A Manifesto For Cyborgs” Donna Haraway argues for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and responsibility in their construction.” Good writing, I think, does this—it takes pleasure in confusing boundaries, but also takes responsibility for constructing them. As nonfiction editor for Black Warrior Review, I value that which forages new ground where none thought new ground could be found. I appreciate refrain from pulling us along for a direct purpose, but rather that which suspends us in moments of both utter disbelief, and the etching out of how we come to believe. In the same way, I like the associative that meanders a territory of meaning, rather than that which simply wanders without specific purpose. I thrive on delicate balance of the direct and the indirect, the fabricated and the normative, the natural and the unnatural. As a writer of nonfiction, I don’t want to be scared to admit that in the production there is also reproduction, and that in the knowing, there is ultimately an unknown. As people, I think we must understand that often the personal is political, but not always. That the political is, also, not always personal. We must be comfortable both blurring these boundaries and unpacking them, and feel confident enough to rest in a place of discomfort or dissatisfaction.

*

These are your hands, formulating this triangular rainbow in space. John Ashbery says, “I could think only of my own ideas, though you surely have your separate, private being in some place I will never walk through.” That divine presence of thine own ideas. We say, it’s your go. We hand over the pool cue. That divided preservation of time and space.

That said, everything fails. Why attempt in the first place? I break. The balls scatter. It’s not about the rejection of closure, but rather the reiteration thereof. Try, know you will fail. Still try. There’s a way to return to something, to mop again & again a mess, but when returning to something, we bring something else with us, & leave thus with a new thing as well. No matter how stubborn. It’s not about revision; it’s about re-appropriation. That’s the reason we learn to laugh. That’s the reason we fall in love. John Cage says there are only two sounds that mean nothing—laughter & silence.

My father always asks me why I would waste my time re-reading or re-watching things. Danny sinks the eight, re-racks the balls. In the repetition there is a rejection of closure, but also a reconstruction & reinterpretation of meaning. What it means to close something, but moreso what it means to be close to the thing you have learned to close. A girl I used to babysit would have me read the same book to her over & over, sometimes as many as 14 times in a row. This book is about a badger, & the badger’s younger sister has a birthday party under the dining room table. Ionie had the whole thing memorized; she was three years old. I would ask her why? why again? She would say, because I love it. What I think she meant about love is a thing repeated, a thing with grandiose & innate expectations that can be broken afresh, again, & again, & again.

*

To avert a silence that could be static, I move faster. Take a shot & miss. Imagine listening to a record on the wrong speed. The hyper-speed cartoon voice. This is where I’m learning to be deliberate. This might be more about performance than intention. Take a sip of beer, take a deep breath, take another shot & win. Tracey Emin makes a distinction regarding her work, that there is a difference between an exhibitionist & a person who exhibits; that in exhibition the work exonerates its creator. We say art. We say perfection. We say silence. Emin sits by herself in a dirty bed of her own making.

Stewart writes: “the grotesque body thus can be effected by the exaggeration of its internal elements.” A ball flies off the table from a bum hit. We must go in search of this piece, take the parts as a whole. Nothing individually, inherently, has less weight or importance than any other. Abstraction, we say. Emotive, we say. The composition thereof becomes the narrative heat of the art.

The lights dim. We consider what could be considered GROTESQUE. From the root hidden place. A secret typically imbues shock, or something like it. Illicit, we say. Someone sinks the 8-ball before the end of the game. Who wins, we ask. Plenty of beautiful things remain hidden. The suffix indicates exaggeration & what is this moment, but some exaggerated notion of an emotion, a reaction. Here: hyperbole. Here: a hyperbola forms on an axis—a point of origin.

*

My best friend and I spent most of our early twenties shooting pool. We both had just graduated college with degrees that held little prospect for careers. It was the recession; we worked in restaurants. Though these endless post-shift nights of constant games we learned english, we learned how to rack, we learned how to drink, how to flirt, how to bet. We learned poker faces we would begin to use in the world outside the dark confines of the Alley Bar. We learned how to lie, how to cheat, how to hide, but we also learned how to be honest, how to let go, how to love one another. We learned angles and deflection, we learned how to take whiskey shots without squinching up our faces. We learned tangents and dialects and swerves. We learned jump shots and geometries and smooth transitions from one topic to the next. We learned how to stand on the footrest beneath the bar and lean our crossed arms over the top to push up our breasts. We learned that in the world of dive bars, and the world of dive bar games, we must learn the rules, but we also learned to make our own rules, and insist on responsibility for that making.

*

When I was young I was intriguingly terrified of the fat woman in floral cotton pants that stood outside of the 24-hour Wal-Mart to smoke cigarettes. My mother was not a very feminine person. She never taught me about make up or menstruation or sex or flirting or dating or dressing. My mother would take me with her to her volunteer shifts at the local food co-op with her long-haired, hippy friends who smoked pot and didn’t wear bras. My aunts were very practical women. My maternal grandmother passed away before I really got to know her. My paternal grandmother was a very stern Irish Catholic woman with enormous tits who rapped my knuckles with a knife for being improper at the dinner table. No one really taught me how to be a woman. No one really taught me how to be a man, either. My first friends were boys, most of who ended up queer. Most of my early female friends grew up queer, too. As a child, gender never really meant much to me. I played dress up with my father’s clothes more often than skirts and heels. I made my brother wear those:

Drugged up and decorous. I tell him he needs to be me and I tell him I need to be him. I am six years old, it is winter; I have figured out the camera. I have figured out what is allowed and what is not allowed, some age of reason. I am interested in gender and genitals. I have figured out how to figure this out, to get around the margins. Here put on this dress, I say. Here put on these shoes, I say. Here put on these pearls, I say. Now you are a girl, I say. Here hold this camera, I say. Jump-shot. I put on construction gloves, a ski mask, a flannel shirt and work boots. My tiny body totally eclipsed. I speak, muffled, but I imagine it goes, Now you are me and I am you. You are a girl and I am a boy. Now you dance, I say. That is what girls do. He does, he’s two and he spins and spins in his heels, his nightgown, his play make-up, some plastic jewelry, some unsung music. Dancing, he falls, cracking his two-year old skull on the corner of the cedar dressing trunk. He will be scared of this trunk for years. I will drink grape juice and tell him to stop crying and act more like an adult. The faint fuzz of my upper lip stained a deep purple, I will put my hand on my hip and tell him to act more like a man.

These women of my formative life taught me how to be quiet, silent, unbearable.

*

In “Why I Write” Joan Didion says “in many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind…there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” This is how I want to feel when I read your work; I want to enter your private space, but in order to do this properly you must force me to first encounter, pass through, and call into question my own private space.

That vast and biased territory. That undergrowth of confusion and indecision. That rotting mess of detritus we step over again & again & again.

Bully me into recognition. Bully me off the table so that I may learn how I must improve for the next round. Drink me under the table so I can go home and take responsibility for my own construction.

It’s the oldest trick in the book, and it gets me every time.

*

A woman I dated in New York told me she could see all of the pain I had ever felt present in my face. I took this as a compliment. Faces and work have a lot to do with one another. I respect faces that carry their pain out blatant. I respect faces that refuse to hide anything. I respect faces that construct their own kind of beauty out of all the dirty things that have happened, faces that make the grotesque seem quite feminine, faces that don’t apologize for their scars or tears or bruises. This is the most vulnerable kind of respect. These things may not seem beautiful, but they are honest, and honesty is the most beautiful thing we can share.

*

Eventually, it stops snowing. Danny & I shoot another game; share another pitcher. Later, he will send me an essay on Pound’s final canto, concluding that there’s “a sense that Pound didn’t err at all, rather that people seem to get the project wrong.” Your hands close around it.



Shaelyn Smith grew up in northern Michigan and now lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she currently serves as the nonfiction editor for the Black Warrior Review. Her work can be found in storySouth, The Rumpus, Sonora Review and Forklift, Ohio.