'Tigris! Tigris!' A Species Loneliness

On second thought, it might have been revelatory to witness a tiger. While in Bangladesh, I had convinced myself otherwise. To avoid disappointment? To temper entitlement? I return from Dhaka the day before my birthday, in thrall to Red Roof Inn desynchronosis. Broad-eyed and crepuscular, I daydream of Panthera tigris tigris, a fetish I’ve cultivated over the past month. At midnight, a Chinese businessman waits behind me at the vending machine. I forget I only have Bangladeshi taka notes in my wallet, so I tell him go ahead. “Ah,” he says, grinning, “you are still disorienting.” I nod, assuming it is a grammatical slippage, that he meant to say disoriented. He offers to buy me a “treat,” but I tell him I’ve changed my mind, thanks and goodnight. Back in the hotel room, I realized he’s just wasted perfectly good double entendre on me. It was a joke. Of course: you are still dis-Orienting. I’ve spent enough hours with Edward Said that I’m not sure I would have laughed anyway. A mute CNN reporter with Turkish backdrop blabs about the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. I type the homographs over and over again, a keystroke daydreaming as if into the CNN teleprompter: Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said etc.  

I want to hurl the extra mattress from the balcony into the pool area. Its housekept sheets await disarrangement. The vertiginous canyon between the mattresses accentuates my loneliness. In a state of lucid drift, I imprint the sheets with shallow indentation, the curvaceous haunches of megafauna. In his essay “Dreamtigers,” Jorge Luis Borges writes, “This is a dream… and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.” If by staring at my gift on Christmas Eve 1999, I became an infamous doglover (O, caged terrier, your insomnious eye shine), then on this birthday eve 2015, I will myself to become a catlover too. I keep distant company with the sustained pseudohallucination of Panthera tigris tigris in the dim airport hotel room.

Known as the "father of sociobiology," Pulitzer-prize winner Edward O. Wilson defines biophilia as "the urge to affiliate with other forms of life." It's why we sometimes tap our brakes to bear witness to motion on the roadside, to remind ourselves the margins' whir is still habitat: a rafter of turkeys in Orangevale, California; the scurry of an armadillo in Chickasha, Oklahoma; the chukwalla's pushup in Tucson; the rooting javelina in Sedona; a jilted bear cub in the New Jersey highlands. Unlike zoophilia (persistent sexual interest in animals), biophilia is natural, adaptive, instinctual. When I was in my teens, I thought the cover of Belle and Sebastian's 1996 debut album, Tigermilk, was the former; it seemed overtly sexual, the lactating mother sitting in the bathtub as her suckling infant wore a tiger costume.

                                                                                                                                               

It was the facelessness of the infant, I think—or maybe its cockeyed ears—that made it erotic, exhibitionist, transgressive. Eager to make sense of the album cover, to project my own ordeal onto another, I had decided it blended two paraphilias (zoophilia and lactophilia). As an adult, though, I recognize the photograph outsources the intimacy of breastfeeding— the implicit bonding and nourishment—to the tiger. It is decidedly biophilic.

One can read the urgency of biophilia, that imperative for affiliation, in the lines of Borges’ trials in “The Other Tiger”: “We shall seek a third tiger. This / Will be like those others a shape / Of my dreaming, a system of words / A man makes and not the vertebrate tiger / … I know well enough / That something lays on me this quest / Undefined, senseless and ancient, and I go on.” Unlike Borges who wrote of the tiger in all three genres, resigned to impossible destining after a single species, my biophilia is scattered among several species: dog, ferret, parrot, tortoise, badger, and then there was tiger (most recent of fetishes). In the tiger’s absence, Borges seems to discover his species’ profound loneliness. Sometimes, when I’m alone—in house or hotel—my subconscious fabricates a companion who's just on the other side of the wall, using the bathroom. “How does a tiger get in the bathroom?” Alan asks in The Hangover. “Of my dreaming… senseless and ancient,” Borges replies.

In the past couple decades, scientists have been debating geochronological nomenclature. The current epoch, the Holocene (Greek for “entirely recent”) is being slowly abandoned for a new parlance, the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity (as opposed to glaciation or other climatological phenomena) impacts the planet’s ecosystems. The term, which has been predictably politicized, doesn’t ring true to Edward O. Wilson, though. In the Economist, Wilson rejects anthropocene because it’s too self-aggrandizing, “a time for and all about our one species alone.” Instead, he offers the Eremocene, or the “Age of Loneliness.”   

Back in the States, I’m able to receive text messages again. “Dad wanted me to send this,” my mother says in one, followed by a slew of photographs. One is an accidental video, my parents background bickering over aesthetics (“Hurry up, it’s beautiful now,” “I don’t know how,” “They’re beautiful now,” “I know…”); another is taken through the screen door, indecipherable through the distortion of mesh; for the last photo, though, my mother has opened the door to our Western Pennsylvania backyard. It’s snowy blue hour, and she captures (just barely) two deer mid-bolt after being caught eating the birdseed dislodged from the feeders by the squirrels. Dad, with his broken ribs and collapsed lung (another brutal winter, as if snow-shoveling would have cured his ennui, Nobody’s expecting you to be a hero here, Dad) has been spending a lot of time at the windows, counting the deer—“…five at one time!”—waiting to command his wife (“Get a picture, Mar!”) and share with his son (“Send them to Lar!”) whom he sees just twice a year.

I reciprocate with a photograph of spotted deer from the Sundarbans; standing ass-to-ass-to-ass-to-ass beneath sundari trees, their collective of eyes search in all directions for tiger as they wait for the macaques to drop leafy twigs onto the alluvium. As we approached, a few deer barked while the others burst away. Aboard the R. B. Emma, the green motorboat that grumbled us through the channels, I read Kenneth Anderson’s Nine Man-Eaters and One Rogue. Each essay is littered with the pug marks of tiger, ecstatic imprints in the nullah. Anderson coaxes the reader through bush and sapling forest. “Trust me reader,” he seems to say, expertly. “I know how to find the tiger.” Written sixty years before my Sundarbans tour, Anderson’s confidence seems antiquated; by comparison, my Bangladeshi tour guide, Emamul (“Emu”), begins by all-but-guaranteeing we won’t see a tiger. By reading Nine Man-Eaters and One Rogue in between treks and meals, amidst uninspired sightings of crocodile, kingfisher, egret, kite, soft-coated otter, wild boar, and the others, I am still able to engage with the megafauna fantasy. Unfortunately, by the end of each essay, Anderson eliminates the tiger he has been promising to his reader. The tigress becomes bulleted becomes carcass becomes taxidermy becomes trophy becomes essay becomes, over and over again, a cipher for my loneliness in the mangrove forest delta. In this way, Anderson’s essays are inevitable corpses, but I read on, trying to resolve the dissonance.

If the tiger in my hotel room is real, she will eventually leap the mattress canyon, slash and devour my computer screen, its photo gallery of deer transmuted into buffet. I find quarters in my backpack and return to the vending machine at 4 a.m. for the orgiastic selection of American snacks. I look behind me for the Chinese businessman, but he’s not here at this hour. I study Tony the Tiger depicted on the coil-kept Kellogg’s box. Because my room is already sufficiently tigered, I snub Tony’s digits. Every time I am in a hotel room with my pets—the parrotlet in his traveling cage or the tortoise in the bathtub—I am reminded of Doug Aitken’s migration (empire), an eighteen-minute video I used to watch at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh every Thursday after bio lectures. I’d bypass all other exhibits, sit in the dark room, watch the video twice (at least), and then leave, my acute biophilia slaked. Filmed at lackluster motels not unlike this Ref Roof Inn in Burlingame, Aitken films a cast of North American species inhabiting room after room.

The video obscures the taxonomical rift by extending human accommodation to fellow animalia. I can still remember the exhilaration of a raccoon on the kitchenette counter, the beaver under the gush of the bath faucet, an unblinking owl on a bed as down feathers flurry around it, the curved horn of the bison parting the curtain, peering outside to the motel parking lot. In “The Deep Zoo,” Rikki Ducornet writes, “the mysteries of matter are the potencies that, in the shapes of dreams, landscapes, exemplary instants, and so on, inform our imagining minds; they are powers.” In Aitken’s video, matter’s mystery is reclaimed because potencies are allowed to, as Ducornet puts it, “fall into sympathy with one another.” I may tap my brakes to let deer cross the road, but not since the docile sika of Assateauge Island in Maryland have I ogled one at full stop. And I may bow hungrily into my refrigerator, but have I ever sung its praise, the puzzling convenience of its thermal insulation?

When the deer peeks into the motel refrigerator, though, the two fall into such sympathy, a sympathy that can be called irony or anthropomorphism, depending. In each room of migration (empire), a new animal inhabits a space designed for human transition—eagle, fox, some kind of white peafowl—thrust into this impermanency and afforded basic amenity.

The cougar is the most dynamic actor of migration (empire). If my tuxedo cat is 95% genetically similar to the cougar or tiger or any large cat (so the genome says), then this cougar segment is a demonstration of the 5% that is savagely dissimilar. A static image of the cougar would not look so anomalous, just an excellent taxidermy in a sterile motel room. But then it springs, mauling the pillow, rumpling the sheets. Like my hallucinated tiger, this cougar is dispossessed of its wild, so it ambushes the mattress. migration (empire) is a sophisticated Dr. Doolittle in which the animals articulate through their embodied potencies. Aitken’s dramatization of biophilia is psychic, sublime. 

The sun rises in Burlingame, and it’s officially my birthday. I’ve only managed forty minutes of sleep, dreaming my parents’ snowy Appalachian yard was actually the grassland steppe of Beringia, and we watched the transcontinental species swap from our porch like it was a water station in a marathon, the nuclear family’s breath fogging with each whoop. Mom texts at 6:34 a.m. PST. In the past, she would set the alarm for my true birthday (EST), but more tired these retirement days, she sleeps in. “Happy birthday!” she texts with emoji accoutrements—hearts, balloons, and a gift box. “Sorry for breaking your pelvis,” I reply out of habit. “What are you doing?” she wants to know. “Corn beef hash at hotel diner,” I reply. “Your favorite!” she reminds me.

I drink coffee, rereading the first essay in Anderson’s book, “The Maneater of Jowlagiri.” By the time Anderson kills the tigress, the pleasure of the essay evanesces. To read is to re-assassinate the tigress. When the writer kills (actus reus, Latin for “guilty act”), the reader becomes an accessory to the crime (mens rea, “intending mind”). What if, instead, the end is the beginning? If I, as reader, could elect for “Give me the bad news first.”

FALSE START: The next second the .405 crashed squarely between the [tigress’] eyes, and she sank forward in a lurching movement and lay twitching in the dust. I placed a second shot into the crown of her skull, although there was no need to have done so; actually this second shot did considerable damage to the head and [caused]… unnecessary… work [for] the taxidermist.

If I read the essay in reverse, beginning with the displeasing terminus and ending with the manifest tigress, will the reverse path effectively undo the essay’s causality? Resuscitate the tigress killed by my first reading? I try it out, and surprisingly, the essay coheres. But it’s hard to renounce the forward linear path entirely. No matter how subversive I am as a reader, on my second tour of the essay, I am still complicit in its original momentum—gummed up by Anderson’s intention, his actus reus, the initial vector impulse. At best, this reading is contrapuntal, a fugue with an ecstatic finish:

FALSE FINISH: Suddenly, from the thicket of ever-green saplings to their left, could be heard the sound of violently rustling leaves and deep-throated grunts. What could be there? … There was a snarling roar and a lashing of bushes, followed by a series of coughing ‘whoofs’ and then silence. Not pigs, but a tiger!

In a village in the Sundarbans, we were led down a dirt path to a shrine devoted to Bonbibi, a syncretic protectress of the outer forest. We huddled beneath a beehive to peer into the shrine.

Bonbibi, center, separates the demon god Dakkhin Rai (left-center) from the young honey-hunter Dukkhe (right-center). Bonbibi is regularly propitiated and petitioned, recognized by Hindus and Muslims alike, for safeguarding citizens of the “beautiful forest” against tiger attacks. When I asked the eldest villager if Bonbibi had a husband, she nodded. “There was a husband, but he was killed by a tiger,” she told Emu, who translated. There was some disagreement among the women. “Wait, Bonbibi is a tiger widow? Or this woman is?” I asked Emu, but the women were talking about something else, and the moment passed. Having read dozens of Bonbibi tales, I have never encountered this detail. Her vahana (Sanskrit for “vehicle”) is a tiger, sure, but this new revelation would mean her fabled dominion over tigers is just a protracted revenge killing. Suddenly, the mythic protectress seems no different to me than Kenneth Anderson; both are just vindictive trophy hunters.

“The Maneater of Jowlagiri” discusses how “death [follows] death” as the tiger marauds towns, looking for her mate: carrying a boy in her jaws, mauling farmers in cattlepens, devouring a new bride, consuming the skinny chest of a priest, puncturing the throat of a defecating pilgrim, etc. And who can forget how, as Anderson waits alongside a half-eaten corpse, expecting “the return of the [tigress] to its gruesome meal,” he glances at the remains, and it seems “one arm [reaches] upward… in supplication or [calls] perhaps for vengeance.” Anderson baits the tigress with livestock, but now that she has acquired a taste for human flesh, the method is ineffectual. Instead, Anderson resorts to embodying the male tiger, the partner whom the tigress grieves. The slayed tiger is, after all, what has instigated her ferocity. Anderson’s is a deceitful mating call, but an even more treacherous biophilia.

I could then easily distinguish the intonations of a tigress calling for a mate… Twice I gave the answering call of a male tiger, and received at once the urgent summons of this imperious female. Indeed, she came to the edge of the clearing and called so loudly as almost to paralyze us all…

  

By calling the tiger, Anderson causes the tiger just as in the lucid “Dreamtigers,” Borges can cause a tiger. It is a spontaneous generation as when (in the first century) people believed certain creatures were derived from dust, foam, moss, and particulate. The Roman architect Vitruvius wrote in De Architectura, “in libraries with southern exposures the books are ruined by worms and dampness, because damp winds come up, which breed and nourish the worms, and destroy the books with mould, by spreading their damp breath over them.” As a result, Roman libraries thereafter faced east to prevent Auster (the personified southerly wind) from spoiling texts. 

In Borges’ short story “Blue Tigers,” the protagonist Alexander Craigie is, like Kenneth Anderson, a man of Scottish descent who finds himself in India, chasing tigers. Published twenty-three years after Nine Man-Eaters and One Rogue, it is possible that “Blue Tigers” is another of Borges’ fantastical roman à clefs. Upon hearing of an anomalous blue tiger, Craigie goes to a village on the banks of the Ganges. After being misled by the villagers, he independently discovers a collection of brilliant blue disks stored in a crevice in the ground. The villagers, familiar with the disks, call them “the stones that spawn.” Over the course of days, Craigie finds that it is an impossible task to count the stones; they multiply and divide, spontaneously generating and degenerating, and the paradox burdens Craigie, shattering his rationalism. In all of Borges’ writings about tigers (the blue one, the “other” one, the dreamt one, the Zahir, etc.), the speaker struggles with their finite inventory. It occurs to me that the literary ecology of a species has always been one of impractical keystrokes hoping to conjure “the feel of the bony structure that quivers under the glowing skin.” It’s a futile exercise, a senseless relay writing we’ve been committing for generations while failing to generate even an embryo from our imagining, let alone something that could decimate a “tribe of buffaloes.” Not songs of experience, but shrinking fantasies that bear the dubious reminder: if you want to witness a tiger, you must go to the zoo.

My girlfriend meets me for my birthday (2/6 in San Francisco). We eat oysters, drink martinis, and even though she hasn’t seen me for over a month, she indulges my chatter about Panthera tigris tigris. “We saw tiger poop,” I tell her, “and claw markings on the bark of the trees.” I tell her about the muezzin who alternated between pointing in the distance and looking over his shoulder, the boy in the village with bow and arrow, how we heard baagh growl from inner forest. Walking through the Lower Mission, I see depictions of tigers on doors (emerging from bamboo) and windows (one tiger chases another on the sill); tiger print and tiger tattoo; its stripes in Chinatown too, the zodiacal mural (the “Water Tiger” will be back by popular demand in 2022). I take stealth photos and have delusions that my urge to affiliate causes these tigers. On Valentine’s Day (2/14 in Sacramento), Shane McCrae reveals the cover of his new book, The Animal Too Big to Kill, via Twitter: a matryoshka set of tigers, identical but scaling down in size, each emerging from the previous tiger’s jaws. They roar each other into existence. In this vomitous book cover, a tiger contains Whitmanian multitudes. My perception of it feels clairvoyant. When a friend points at the inebriated woman bucked by mechanical bull (2/21 in Los Angeles), I study her backdrop instead, the music video for “Eye of the Tiger.” I am trying to convince myself that upon my return, the tiger’s range has coextended with my own, and why not: the MLB claims there are tigers in Detroit, the NFL in Cincinnati, and the PGA would have you think there’s one teeing off in Georgia this April.

I start to become aware of where the nearest tiger is to me at any given moment (which zoo) and realize it’s only a matter of time until I pay admission. Where was I when I last saw a tiger? I start asking myself questions such as this, goading myself on. (In Baton Rouge, across from LSU’s football stadium, the living mascot in his enclosure: Mike VI)

I read that the Folsom City Zoo Sanctuary has feral cats, bobcats, cougars, and tigers. It’s hard to imagine the zoo will be anything less than an extension of the city’s infamous state prison, but I go anyway for the sake of their project of sanctuary (for unwanted wild pets, injured wildlife, and surplus and confiscated animals). From the joint parking lot for the sanctuary and public library, I can hear the Folsom Valley Railway, a miniature steam-powered train (according to its website, “the only 12 inch gauge railroad… in the United States”), and I can’t help but wonder how many times the tigers hear the whistle each day (“I hear the train a’comin’…”). Inside, ample enclosures seem like cells, the kindly volunteers like jailers. “How long have they been here?” I ask a volunteer. “Um, since two-six in oh-four,” Susan replies. My fifteenth birthday. I peek at Misty and Pouncer, worry them for a minute until I realize they’re as lethargic as my own tuxedo cat. They seem just fine.

  

Misty and Pouncer were just two of thirty-nine tigers confiscated from Jon Weinhart’s Colton, California property in 2003. It was the largest rescue of big cats in United States history. Originally intended as a sanctuary for retired big cat actors in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Tiger Rescue functioned more like a tomb when PAWS arrived. According to CNN, there were thirty animal carcasses in the yard, “including the skeleton of one big cat sharing a cage with a live burro” and fifty-eight cubs frozen in three freezers. Not only was Weinhart breeding the animals (there were “seven tigers cubs and two leopards cubs” in the attic), but he also stored big cat pelts in the barn.

Pouncer, who was found tethered to a pole on Weinhart’s property, hides out of sight in the Folsom City Zoo Sanctuary. Misty, who was once emaciated and covered in mange, privately lounges on a rock face. Her gorgeous sprawl defies the reality that she was once crammed in a cage only three-by-three foot in area, having never touched a natural surface. According to the World Wildlife Fund, there are more tigers in American backyards than there are in the wild in Asia. I imagine Misty and Pouncer passing through my parents’ backyard in Pennsylvania, inserting them into my Beringia dreamscape, and I shiver. It seems to me the black market is the most irresponsible way to cause a tiger. Despite the horror of Tiger Rescue, I don’t doubt that Weinhart was a cat lover, that his was just an unchecked biophilia. Despite his best intentions, a mismanaged urge to affiliate resulted in the deaths of ninety big cats, a figure six times greater than Anderson’s spree in India. I leave the Sanctuary, pass the miniature train still circuiting the sidewalk, and as I enter the library, I hear the shrill whistle. “Far from Folsom prison, that’s where I want to stay / … And I’d let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away.”

What, indeed, is the best way to cause a tiger? If by pointing, it only appeared. If by gale force, it spontaneously generated. If by squinting through the orange saline stripes of the phoenix palm, shadows conspired in fleet illusion. If by writing, the futile song was fruitful—if, à la Ducornet, “words, just as things” could “acquire powers,” become “the mind’s animating flame.” If only, just for one seductive instant, when the nervous system reactivated, sleep left us a wink of its perilous hallucination.

Because we cannot adequately cause a tiger, though, in our Age of Loneliness—we can’t even reasonably anticipate one in its natural range—the fetish becomes gradually extinguished. It becomes as endangered as the species itself. If I am to ever see a tiger in its wild, then I must discontinue the relay, accept once and for all (as Louis Pasteur did 1,864 years after the Vitruvian treatise), “La génération spontanée est une chimère” (spontaneous generation is a dream). With this, Tigger and Hobbes return to what they always were: synthetic fiber batting. By law of “Omne vivum exvivo” (all life comes from life), only a tiger can cause a tiger, meaning an optimal ending for a tiger essay is not one that successfully coaxes the tiger into existence. We cannot cause by intention alone. If we could, Borges’ trials would have resulted in an overpopulation of the Royal Bengal Tiger. By ending with implicit conditionality (i.e., Anderson would cause a tiger if he could), an essay can promote the natural biophilic urge. In this false finish, the writer appears to give up his trophy as he calls to the absent species in continuous petition, a “senseless and ancient” ritual with the veneer of zoophilia:

I clambered up [the tree] some twelve feet to a crotch… Then, expanding my lungs, I called lustily in imitation of a male tiger. Nothing but silence answered me… I called a second time. Still no answer. After a short interval, and expanding my lungs to bursting-point, I called again.

Works Cited

Anderson, Kenneth. Nine Man-Eaters and One Rogue. New York: Dutton, 1955. Internet Archive. Creative Commons. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

Borges, Jorge L. Dreamtigers. New York: E. P. Dutton &, 1970. Print.

Ducornet, Rikki. The Deep Zoo: Essays. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2015. Print.



LAWRENCE LENHART holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. His essays appear or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Wag's Revue, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. Currently living in Sacramento, he is a reviews editor and an assistant fiction editor of DIAGRAM. 

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.

*

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.