Day 16. Nicole Walker on why tiny things are good. David Hawkins' "Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-it Notes" and J.B. MacKinnon's "False Idol."

I hate nature essays, which is a horrible thing, since I write them. nature essay runs the risk of a) making everything it touches precious. Oh, here’s a beautiful rock. Oh, look at this twig! I mean, I like to look at rocks and twigs and I like to write about rocks and twigs but reading about others’ love of rocks and twigs is more like being hit over the head with rocks and twigs that looking or writing about them. And then there’s b). The idea that the authentic experience exists “out there” in the wild. But JB MacKinnon’s essay "False Idyll," published in the May/June 2012 issue of Orion is the opposite of your usual let’s-praise-the-authenticity-of-the-natural. McKinnon, after situating himself in a pretty bleak, cold, violent wilderness, where “A black bear was hanging around, skinny and sickly from the bad berry crop and probably bound for death by starvation in its winter den,” writes that nature, when it is real, is not so sweet. “The idea that nature is a bittersweet and sometimes forbidding place is not, as they say, currently trending. More prevalent is the view reflected in a recent caution from the Chicago Manual of Style editors that capital-N “Nature” is to be used only to denote “a goddess dressed in a flowing garment and flinging fruit and flowers everywhere.”

We want Nature, capital N, to be this beautiful place where we should go and be one with in some religious type authenticity, where the “real” exists. But MacKinnon disabuses us of any idea that the wild we go into is in any way “real.” He catalogs the lack of abundance, the lack of wild, the lack of stuff out there. Sure, it’s easy to idealize an idyll if it’s just a bunch of safe twigs and rocks. “ Only 20 percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface is still home to all the large mammals it held five hundred years ago, and even across those refugia they are drastically reduced in abundance.” If nature can’t attack, then is it even really nature, or just a proxy for nature? “The second point,” beyond this taming of the wild, he writes, “is that we nonetheless have a deeply embedded psychological attachment to the living world. Having lost our daily communion with that world, our modern spiritualization of it can be seen as a kind of prosthetic—or, if you prefer, a way of turning up the volume on a signal that is increasingly faint. We have created an imaginary connection with nature because we lack a tangible one, and we carry that connection in spirit because we no longer follow it in body.” So we think about nature rather than touch it. We arrange twigs and rocks and feel that aha, now we have access to the real thing.

What MacKinnon sees as the real threat is the ecological collapse that happens when nature is rendered safe. If you take out all the danger, you also take out all the complexity. By removing the threats in nature, by making nature something easily accessed, by thinking you’re in the real wild when you’re standing on dirt rather than asphalt, even though there’s not a real bear mauling you, you flatten the thing. You make a consistent narrative of it. Nature, capital “N” is a park with lovely birds. But this lovely park with lovely birds is too easy. We've taken out the complications. We think we've adjusted it to our liking but “When fishermen’s nets fill not with fish but jellyfish; when pestilent tsetse flies spread with the scrublands once held in check by browsing elephants; when overpopulating deer eat the flower gardens of suburban America—all of these bear the markings of the ecological cascade.” The ecological cascade is a flattening out. A removal of the important details like the idea that the way to keep the tsetse fly in check was to keep the big elephants alive. It’s not the elephant, the big animal, that’s necessarily important, it is the small difference he used to make in the system that you thought you had all figured out. Now he’s gone and the little effect he had means that now you’re eating spoonfuls of flies with your breakfast cereal.

But to me, as a writer, it’s not just the collapse of the world that troubles me. I patch over that with a glass of wine and a commitment to Facebook. What seems equally true, psychologically, in exchanging fish for jelly fish, is the complexity behind the picture. It’s not so much that I go into the nature to find the authentic, but that I go into the nature to see the complex, the constant metamorphoses that occur in front of my eyes that remind me what authenticity can be—a constant reshuffling of what we think we see. A combination of perception and thinginess that is so impossible it’s almost magic, but then, there it is. A stump that looks like a bear. A twig that moves into the s of a snake. The bird that flies light right into your eyes. These are the small things. These complicated shifts that, in the white space between what you think you see and what there is to see, the real slips by.

Which is why David Hawkins short book written on short Post-it notes which has nothing to do with nature at all exemplifies this lovely slip. His pamphlet-book, “LorraineNelson: A biography in Post-It Notes” (you can read an excerpt by following the link) from The Cupboard, a press that devotes itself to tiny volumes, is printed as a book on pages just about the size of Post-it. At first glance, you think you’re going to read a book about this woman named Lorraine. But how can you get a whole life on a Post-it note? Nature and the lives of big mammals like humans have one thing in common: they’re too big to get into a book. So, instead of the whole thing, the whole life, we get snippets. Post-it sized snippets that allow in the page turning that same sort of action that happens in the wild. The synaptic surprise that happens in the wild where you thought we were looking at a tree and instead now you realize you’re looking at a bear happens too when we read about our narrator, Hawkins, working at a Foot-locker but flip the page and now he’s talking about Plato’s Cratylus and James Joyce. Finnegan’s Wake for Foot-locker? The language is slippery. Both start with ‘f.” Why not connect them? Where is this Lorraine person anyway and did she work at Footlocker too? No, the narrator, says quickly, flip the page, taking us instead to a company called DDS where he worked later, after Foot-locker, to proofread direct mail for primarily “proprietary schools—computer techs, HVAC training centers, business institutes, nursing programs.” These are not the kinds of schools like the one Hawkins attends (grad school. Phd. Lit. Creative Writing), who take great pleasure in the slips of language. These are the kind of schools that would like things simple and straight forward. Lovely birds, these schools.

But Hawkins does like the slips. The funny slip in the typo here: “Have you ever dreamed of eating your friends’ pets?” Not eating. Treating, it is supposed to read. But the slip leads Hawkins on a complicated imagination tour that ends with the image of “the photo of a handsome young woman in a white lab coat cradling beneath one arm a bushy Pomeranian like a Thanksgiving Day ham seeping into their dreams (18).

It’s in the slip that imagination comes. It’s in the slip where the typing and the idea behind the typing lead to a delicious Pomeranian, real in our arms, if not on our tongues.

White space is the domain of nonfiction—the way it lets the essay open up. That’s where the shift happens in Hawkins book. Every short moment has its own integrity but, under this rubric of “Lorraine” and “Biography” and “Post-it Notes” we begin to gather his point. Between the Post-it notes there is electricity. Each note contributes just a bit of information but it’s only in the tiny things, the twigs and rocks, that we begin to approximate anything like real, or nature, or authenticity, or Life, or Lorraine. “There’s only so much you can cram on a Post-it note” (31) but you can cram this:

Lorraine Nelson
322 Palm Beach Blvd.
Pompano Beach, CA 90525

You can also cram this: “Language is continuously on the move. For this reason it can be a tough bird to land, hard to gauge. We groan when someone trips on the proverbial trave, stumbles over some old saw, but our reactions are reflexive, self-conscious. Perhaps, these bunglers, like the punsters who parody them, too-well remind us of our own tenuous grasp on the language” (37).

As MacKinnon laments in “False Idyll,” the ecology collapses when it becomes static—placed perfectly for our occasional traipse through it. For a thing to truly be wild, it must always be on the move.

In “Lorraine Nelson,” we don’t even discover who Lorraine is until page 54. She is no one. She’s just a name, an address, a “stand-in, a proxy for the insignificant, faceless hordes who receive DDS’s pamphlets, brochures, and surveys. Where they would eventually appear, she stood, holding their place.” Lorraine is the white space, the slip, the absence of a real body. Like our current unreal Nature, she is that ephemeral holding pattern occupying a sacred space where there is no physical connection. But in the flicker between Post-it Notes, when the lighting is just right, and the twig suddenly moves and the rock purrs and the tree stump trudges toward you with a kind of danger, “for all irreal essence, she had become for me more substantial, more final than any of the actual person or daily activities that populated my office day.” She is the chimera in the forest. The chimera is the real. Maybe if you blink often enough, she will shift into focus. The world is complicated enough if you look through it with a strobe light.

It’s these little details that maybe only are interesting when there is no Facebook and no Direct Marketing that make nature still a wild place, slippery as language. As MacKibbon notes, it’s not beautiful, but it is small and confusing, that’s where the good flips by like Post-its.“Instead, the challenge comes from the wilderness’s countless mortal shocks, from maggots teeming in the brainpan of a dead deer, to the steady watchfulness required of life among large predators, to weirdly disturbing realizations such as that adult mayflies have no mouths, no digestive tracts, no anuses. Yet another memory from this past year’s visit leaps to mind: a strange preponderance of bleeding tooth fungus, Hydnellum peckii, which weeps transparent beads of red liquid across the white pulp of its mushroom cap. If the bleeding tooth fungus is the answer to any question, that question could only be, “Why?” The gross and the tiny. The small, irritating, weird-looking, weirdly-named bitey mushrooms.

If authenticity and the real only exist in the flip of pages, in the white space of essays, in the impermanence of sticky notes, then perhaps there are only real questions left. And perhaps we can only get near those questions in the tiny spaces between tiny things like “blood and shit and electrons and birdsong.” And those lovely birds may slip into the real to be tiny and slippery and elephantine for real. Nature, just as language is made up of tiny words, is made up of tiny things, —birds and rocks and twigs. It adheres together with the weak bond of the sticky Post-it substance. Flick through it. Somewhere in the adhesive, between the flipping of the notes, the whole, real thing appears.

~

NICOLE WALKER’s nonfiction book, Quench Your Thirst with Salt won the 2011 Zone 3 nonfiction prize and will be published next year. She is also the author of a collection of poems, This Noisy Egg (Barrow Street, 2010). She edited, along with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Nonfiction, which will be released by Continuum Press in 2013. She’s a nonfiction editor, with T. Clutch Fleischmann, at Diagram. She received her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Utah and currently teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona where it just snowed 18 inches.

December 16: T Clutch Fleischmann wants you to read Samuel Delany

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Dec 15, 2/2, David Griffith on Thomas Merton: "Letter to an Innocent Bystander": Meditation on the Possibility of Learning from the Newtown Tragedy

I had originally intended to write in praise of Ross McElwee's film-essay Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.  I've seen it a dozen or so times now, most recently this week when I screened it for students taking my Art of the Personal Essay course.  One the options for their final project is to make a short film-essay, and so I needed to show them a representative example of the genre--to me, the representative example of the genre.

For the uninitiated, the premise of Sherman's March is that McElwee receives a grant to make a documentary on Sherman's march to the sea, but before heading south to begin work he visits his girlfriend in New York.  Upon arrival she informs him that they're done and she is getting back together with an ex.  McElwee narrates all of this through voice-over, while on-screen we see him pacing back and forth across the width of vast, gray, empty New York loft--not a stick of furniture in sight.  He paces, he half-heartedly sweeps the ridiculously empty loft space, and glance into an empty refrigerator, as though in there is the answer to all of his problems.

It only takes a few paces for us understand his heart-break, and the existential tail-spin he's been thrown into.  Everything seemed to be going so well, and then this...

As it turns out, this is a pattern in McElwee's life, and he, being a reflective soul with an essayist's spirit,   recognizes this, but he doesn't fully understand it, and he wants to--needs to.  And so, he decides to trust in this misfortune and allow it to be the lens (literally and metaphorically) through which he will see Sherman's infamous march--hence the "Romantic Love" part of the subtitle.  

The nuclear weapons part of the subtitle comes from his life-long preoccupation with nuclear annihilation borne out of a childhood memory of standing on a Hawaiian beach and watching a nuclear test hundreds of miles away beyond the curve of the earth light up the sky as though it were day.

With these troubles on his mind, he resumes his plan to re-trace Sherman's march to the sea, a route that ends up intersecting with a number of women--some new and some from his past.  What does Sherman have to do with my love life?  What does my love life have to do with nuclear annihilation?  What does Sherman have to do with nuclear annihilation?  How am I like Sherman?  All of these questions become tangled together in his mind, and ours, leading to one big existential question: How can one love deeply and meaningfully with the threat of death hanging around us?  It goes without saying that the film he is now shooting will be very different than the one he first imagined.

As I said at the beginning, this is what I intended to write about, but then yesterday afternoon I got wind of a shooting, something about an elementary school in Connecticut, and plans changed.

I began yesterday morning, like I have begun every morning this week, by dipping into Thomas Merton's book of essays, Raids on the Unspeakable.  Wednesday marked the forty-fourth anniversary of his tragic death.  Stepping out of the shower in a Bangkok hotel, he reached to adjust a fan and was fatally electrocuted.

Raids on the Unspeakable isn't my favorite of his works, but in the prologue Merton admits that it is his: ". . . Raids, I think I love you more than the rest."  He goes on: 

You are not so much concerned with ethical principles and traditional answers, for many men have decided no longer to ask themselves those questions.  Your main interest is not in formal answers or accurate definitions, but in difficult insights at a moment of human crisis.

It would be easy to discount much of Merton's writings on nonviolence, and this book in particular, as an overheated relic of the nuclear hysteria of the 50s and 60s, in which basement bomb shelters were marketed to the nuclear middle class family and children were drilled to duck and cover, as though that would protect anyone from a lava-hot wave of nuclear wind.  But Merton's work has that prophetic voice that implicates you; it has the ability to reach across decades to grab you by the shirt-front and not let you go without a fight.

  

"The prophetic voice has a relationship to time," writes Lewis Hyde in his introduction to Thoreau's collected essays, "but telling the future is the least of it.  The prophet does not say that the price of oil will go up in October, or that a comet will strike the earth is twenty years.  Rather, the prophet speaks of things that will be true in the future because they are true in all time" (emphasis his).

And so, last night, laying in bed reading Merton's Raids, my wife laying next to me in stunned silence as she read Facebook posts by heartbroken parents, I came to the essay at hand, "Letter to an Innocent Bystander," an open letter addressed to "intellectuals who have taken for granted that we could be 'bystanders' and that our quality as detached observers could preserve our innocence and relieve us of responsibility."

In other words, this letter addresses someone like me (a professor and writer) who believes that his politics will, in the long-run, prove to put him on the right side of history.  Merton's letter/essay implores such people to stand up to a monolithic "them." It's unclear exactly who "them" is.  He refers to "them" as "those special ones who seek power over 'all the others,' and who use us as instruments to gain power over others."  These "powerful ones" attend to the "machinery," those whose job it is to convince us that "their way is 'inevitable.'"

The vagueness is frustrating, but intentional.  "There are three groups I am thinking of," Merton writes, "'they,'  'we' and 'the others.'  We, the intellectuals, stand in the middle, and we must not forget that, in the end, everything depends on us." 

And while I'm uncomfortable with his sense that the intellectuals will save the world (working at a college or university for any length of time will cause you to second guess this possibility), laying there in bed I was reminded of Ginsberg's Moloch, the insatiable beast to whom the Phoenicians and the Canaanites sacrificed their children.

It's terrible--I'm sick to my stomach as I write this--to discover these resonances--the way that Merton's prophetic utterances ring so keenly true, where just two days ago they would have sounded dull.

Reading Merton's essay now in full, glaring light of the the school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut--27 dead, 20 of them children between the ages of five and ten--I am reminded how an essay, a preoccupation relentlessly chased, an attempt to articulate--to assail--the unspeakable, written decades ago with no thought of Newtown, Connecticut or gun control laws, can implicate us and charge us--and here I mean "everyone"--with a mission: "Our duty," Merton writes, "is to refuse to believe that their way is inevitable."

I will not explicate Merton's entire essay, because the prophetic voice loses its poignancy, its claim upon our consciences, in explication, but I do need to give you the ending of the essay, in which he uses a well-known tale to illustrate his larger point:

You know it, of course.  It has been referred to somewhere in psychoanalytical literature.  Tailors deceived a king, telling them they would weave him a wonderful suit which would be invisible to any but good men.  They went through all the motions of fitting him out in the invisible suit, and the king, as well as his courtiers claimed to "see" and to admire the thing. In the end the naked king paraded out into the street where all the people were gathered to admire his suit of clothes, and all did admire it until a child dared to point out that the king was naked. 

You will perhaps find that my thought has taken on a sentimental tinge.  But since the times have become what they have become, I dare to blurt this out.  Have you and I forgotten that our vocation, as innocent by-standers--and the very condition of our terrible innocence--is to do what the child did, and keep on saying the king is naked, at the cost of being condemned criminals?  Remember, the child in the tale was the only innocent one: and because of his innocence, the fault of the others was kept from being criminal, and was nothing worse than foolishness.  If the child had not been there, they would all have been madmen, or criminals.  It was the child's cry that saved them.

For Merton, a Trappist monk, and for those familiar with Christian faith, this last line has, of course, a literal and a latent meaning, especially during this time of Advent, and I do not wish to complicate the Newtown tragedy even further by dragging theodicy into it, and yet there it is, staring us in the face.

At the very least, it can be said that essays like McElwee's and Merton's, different as they are, and tragedies like the one in Newtown, assert that we must allow ourselves to be guided by tragedy and misfortune, because they will often lead us back to ourselves and to our senses.

But I would like to think that in a time such as this we will not be satisfied with the very least, and instead take up the most pressing question: What does love require of us?


Dave Griffith is the author of A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America.  He lives in foothills of the Blue Ridge with his wife and two children.  He teaches at Sweet Briar College.  He blogs at davidgriffith.tumblr.com

Dec 15, 1/2: Lisa O'Neill on Lorraine Doran

Binding the Bones

The first time I encountered Lorraine Doran’s “A Film of Our Life, Played Backwards” [here's an excerpt over at Gulf Coast] I read it through twice. Then, I called a friend. “Listen to this,” I said, and I read the entire essay aloud over the phone. I feel emphatic about this essay in a way that I rarely do about writing. It’s not that I don’t love and appreciate and respect a great deal of writing. But this essay comes with a kind of urgency, a thick vein, visible and pulsing, just under the surface of the text. The essay speaks keenly to a need we all have and to a need that is so often overlooked, unseen, unacknowledged. That need being intimacy and vulnerability, the act of sharing our stories out loud and in person. The need to unbarrier and unblock ourselves, even for a few moments, to reveal who we really are.

Doran takes us through her experience serving in a position called “intervenor” for an art piece at the Guggenheim conceptualized by Tino Seghal. For the piece, the walls hung bare, the sole objects for consideration being the bodies of those leading the museums goers through and the museum goers themselves.

But that’s not where she begins. She begins with a story about her own birth. A story in which she was folded in half to be delivered because her mother’s pelvis was too small, this decision resulting in her clavicle breaking. When her mother discovered the fracture, she brought Doran to the doctor, William Carlos Williams’ son, and he told her that if she continued to nurse, the milk would bind the bones back together. The milk would bind the bones.

We all live lives of the mundane that are then tied together by moments of incredibility, metaphors that speak not only to our solitary stories but a collective one made up of all of our individual movements on this earth. Doran writes, “Our life stories do not begin with our own birth, they are not shaped by our memories alone. Our narratives can be altered by an event that occurs beyond our consciousness, and by the briefest interaction with someone we’ll never see again, or by someone we never met at all.”

In the exhibit, there were four different guides: a child, a college student, a middle-aged person, and an elder, who led each participant through, asking questions and engaging each visitor in conversation. Each encounter lasted no more than six minutes. And in this time, a time that most of us would think is inconsequential, there was room for so much disclosure and intimacy that when Doran’s own mother went through, she said she couldn’t talk with her daughter about the conversation she had with her intervenor. “It was too personal. I will never forget him,” she said.

As Doran weaves in and out of the memories recounted by participants and her own witnessing to these memories, the line is blurred between them. It is true that the intervenors are controlling the experience to a certain extent: walking the participants through, asking the initial questions, leaving them when each intervenor’s time is up. And yet, this is not an experience that can be fully controlled by those in charge. The participants have a say. They not only choose how and how much to engage, but they also speak and, in speaking their stories or even in refusing to share, leave an indelible mark on the intervenors.

Ultimately, this essay is about engagement and dismissal. And what lies beneath these, courage to be vulnerable or the act of backing away: out of ego, out of fear, out of lack of recognition. The truth is that we are all impacted by those around us regardless of whether we choose to acknowledge that impact. Do we choose to engage? Do we back away?

Doran’s essay embodies the sort of engagement it describes: telling the readers intimate stories, asking them to consider their own answers, their own memories and associations.

She writes, “We live in an age of individual universes that bump up against one another but rarely touch.” This art “that exists in this moment, and is documented only by memory” is an antidote to the fierce and furious documentation of our lives. Nowadays, everything, every moment must be recorded—“to dos” must be spoken into our iphones, meals must be photographed, statuses must be thought of and instantly shared. The immediacy of our digital lives is a sort of tension bridge, the snap of the line always reminding us of each moment’s impermanence and ultimately of our own impermanence, in our bodies and on this ground. But these encounters with strangers, if we choose to engage and connect, can reveal a different kind of immediacy, one that acknowledges life outside of and yet connected to our own. Doran talks about one day in which she spoke with a visitor about the house that Doran’s grandfather built which was demolished two weeks after he died; the visitor was about to return to Indiana to see her childhood home for the last time before it was razed to the ground. We can choose to see this as coincidence or instead as “some form of grace…these moments of synchronicity between two lives previously foreign to one another.”

Doran also brings in the work of French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, who took a job as a chambermaid and catalogued items left behind by guests, considering what they meant about each person and imagining encounters between those who had just left and those just arriving. She also talks about her own participation in Marina Abramovic’s piece The Artist is Present, in which she sat across from the artist, both of them staring without speaking. These pieces add complexity and depth to Doran’s discussion of why and how artists try to create intimacy among people and, in doing so, somehow preserve elusive moments in time.

Positioned at the entrance to the exhibit, the first intervenor, a child, introduces herself to the museum visitor saying: “This is a piece by Tino Sehgal? Would you like to follow me?” Doran discusses how, before word had spread about the exhibit, visitors would dismiss the child, walking by, walking on. They had come to a museum to look at art. They were educated. They were serious. And this child—with her youth, exuberance, lack of knowledge—was in the way of their experience.

How often do we shrug off and walk by authentic experience or the possibility of authentic experience in our day-to-day lives? Because it comes in a form we have learned to see as less important. Because we have already decided what we need to do with this time. Because we need to believe we have it all figured out.

Doran creates a contemplative space in which we can all consider the ways in which our stories have been shaped, marked, defined by small moments and by events that happened long before we were born. She offers, too, a kind of challenge to not look away. Sehgal’s piece opens with a child asking the question “What is progress?” and then asks participants to define it more specifically and then discuss other memories as they walk through. The piece, whose name is only announced at the end as the visitor leaves, is called “This Progress.” Doran delineates the choice we all have in our lives. Moving through life is inevitable, but how do we choose to progress?

*

A native of New Orleans and resident of Tucson, Lisa O’Neill teaches writing at The University of Arizona. She has also taught writing workshops with incarcerated students at Tucson detention centers and presently serves on the board of Casa Libre en la Solana, a literary nonprofit supporting Tucson writers. Lisa received her MFA in nonfiction writing from The University of Arizona. Her work has most recently been published in defunct, The Fiddleback, drunken boat, and DIAGRAM. At her blog and literary hub, The Dictionary Project, she writes posts inspired by one dictionary word, selected at random, each week.

December 14: Noam Dorr on Liat Berdugo’s "The Everyday Maths"

I was one of those kids who had it easy in school (except for gym class, the bane of my asthmatic  existence). I didn’t have to work hard to do well, and this ease of success formed slacker tendencies I still struggle with. My academic life was great (not so much my social life-- there’s probably a correlation there), I was coasting through, riding the waves of a strong memory and aptitude for problem solving, and then it hit me and took me down: 9th grade math. It was the one subject I couldn’t half-ass. There was something about calculus and trig that I just couldn’t grasp intuitively. Perhaps it was their abstractness, their unbridgeable distance from what my senses were telling me about the observable world. Perhaps I just encountered one of the limits of my higher-order thinking. Whatever it was,  for the next four years of math class I found myself having to work hard, having to struggle to comprehend, kicking furiously to stay afloat. And I didn’t like it.

So for someone with arithmophobia, why is it that I feel so much joy when I read Liat Berdugo’s The Everyday Maths (see excerpt here)? A chapbook* that explores the poetics of mathematical diagrams should send me running, and yet, the same figures that used to make me want to stab my math textbook with the needle end of a drafting compass repeatedly now fill me with fuzzy warm feelings, make me smile, make me ponder.

Berdugo reinterprets figures she encountered in textbooks while studying for her degree in mathematics. Recontextualized through her mischievous brain the diagrams become playthings, symbols that now represent many meanings. The original figure in the textbook was meant to illustrate and clarify a mathematical concept, but surrounded by Berdugo’s text it becomes a contest of interpretations between the expert and the layman, between those who know what the figure is used for and those who know that each image can tell many different stories. 

Over the course of the forty seven figures we begin to not only rethink the meaning of mathematical diagrams, but also to get a sense of the strange and humorous brain behind the words. I love the way in which Berdugo’s text sometimes points to the obvious association,  the image everyone can see (why yes, how can this curved plane in a box be anything but a caged bird?), and yet how sometimes I have to bend my mind in order to figure out the connections, the new interpretation, a meaning only the author could find (a closed jagged shape becomes an opportunity to consider the arbitrariness of national borders). And even though there is no I in this chapbook, no arrow-signs pointing to the author, Berdugo is very much present throughout the text, meditating on the obscure and the obvious, and in that sense this poetic chapbook is very much an essay.

 
There is a statement here about the beauty of math and its accessibility. Berdugo’s texts point to the power of these images to at once evoke feelings of terror and awe, frustration and joy. While reading them I fall into that 9th grade self, the one stupefied by ideas just beyond his comprehension, drowning in a sea of confusion. Except this time I’m given a way out-- a lifesaver with a note attached saying: “You can make up your own story. It’s OK not to know what this figure means.” And on the back of the note it says: “But don’t you wish you did?”

 
* Winner of the 2012 Anomalous Press Chapbook Contest. To pre-order a copy email erica@anomalouspress.org.



Noam Dorr's work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Seneca Review, and Wag's Revue. He is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Nicosia, Cyprus. He is still afraid of math.

Dec 13: Craig Reinbold loves Sugar

Dear(est) Sugar,

I think I might love you.

I just said that out loud as I typed and now my wife—across the room—is laughing at me. Don’t mind her. She doesn’t know you like I do, not yet. She’ll love you too, soon, I hope.

Sugar, I’m a married a man. Baby on the way. But I think I love you—there it is. My only consolation really, is that you’re fiction. I mean, you’re Cheryl Strayed, too, but really you’re just a persona*. I know how these things work. Or you’re like 82% fiction, or at least 18%, or something like that. You’re fiction in the way that Phoebe Buffay (who I also once professed to love) is fiction. But don’t worry, my love is blind to such silly distinctions. And don’t worry about Phoebe either—that love-trip fizzled circa ’97.

I met you on a Friday, Sugar—do you remember?—at the library. (I know I could have found you at The Rumpus anytime, but I didn’t want our first encounter to be online; I wanted to hold you in my hands.) Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life had been reserved by 179 people before I got to it**. The wait was four months, but was worth it—there you were, on the library’s reserve shelf, decked out in mostly red (the color of love, of course), a receipt inscribed with my name tucked inside.

You were so chic, so sleek and pretty; I ogled you. But I really swooned once I looked deeper: You offer such insight, such sound and sage advice, and you do so with such lovely sentences, with such vernacular! You’re such an advice-column maven, Sugar! And the act, if it’s an act, never feels forced, and it’s this realness, this honesty, this sincerity—this bringing of oneself to the brink for the sake of troubled strangers—that has won me, and so many others, so completely over.

I don’t have a question for you, Sugar. I’m not chasing advice. I just want to say, publicly, how much I like you. I like you a lot.

I like this: “Attention is the first and final act of love.” And this: “My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.” “The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.” “Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word ‘love’ to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.” “We’re all going to die someday. So hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.”

That’s what I’m doing here, Sugar.

I like love, I suppose, I love it, and so I like all of this very much. But you offer more, too. You’re familiar with the other, darker side of things as well: “The reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.” “Nobody will protect you from your suffering.” “The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.”

There’s no room for coddling in your world. You say it like it is: “…we have to reach hard in the direction of the lives we want, even if it’s difficult to do so.” You tell it straight. You tell those who ask what needs to be done. “Be brave enough to break your own heart,” you say, and I have actually since seen this emblazoned on a coffee mug. I am not above this commodification. I don’t mind it at all. I am asking for this mug for Christmas, even if that phrase, as good as it sounds alone, doesn’t really mean much removed as it is from its original context.

Of course you’re quoted on a coffee mug. Your lines, wrought as they are, are so comforting, and spurring. They are irresistible. You are irresistible.

You’re just such a humanist, Sugar, a more understanding and honest version of myself. You are saying things I’d like to say. You write as if lives depend on it. You write how I would like to write, which is to say, like a motherfucker.***

And I can’t help but love you for it.****

* You outed yourself last Valentine’s Day, after two years of doling advice incognito. And I don’t mind. While one personality could have potentially obliterated the other, in fact, this revelation has made both somehow more vulnerable and relatable, and sagacious and intriguing. One persona nicely complements the other.  

** Your admirers are legion—my competition—I know. What chance do I have? Luckily for me, loves like these need not be returned. In fact, we should probably keep whatever might happen between us here on this page anyway—I am a married man, Sugar, with a baby on the way. And you’re married, too, with kids. What would Mr. Sugar think?

*** This line, also coffee-mugged, is available for purchase here; bought with irony and presented as kitsch, or gifted from the heart, either way you call it, no matter, this would make a great stocking-stuffer.

**** My wife is still laughing at me. Don’t mind her, Sugar. She’ll come around. Everybody’ll come around. You’re already a bestseller on my list.

*

Craig Reinbold’s nonfiction appears in recent or forthcoming issues of the New England Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Post Road, High Country News, and a number of other more or less literary places.

Dec 13: Dinty W. Moore on Sven Birkerts' "Telescope"

I can’t help but admire the remarkable concision and precision in Sven Birkerts’ essay “Telescope” in TriQuarterly.  I can’t help but admire that the essay, and essayist, cover so much ground in a paltry 630 words.  I can’t help but admire the way in which Birkerts captures the movement of the human mind, or at least the humanist mind, so carefully and exactly on the page. I love this small piece of nonfiction prose in much the same way that I love a brilliant short film.  It is all about the movement.

Birkerts begins with the possibility that Italian researchers have uncovered proof that neutrinos – those miniscule particles that only physicists can see – travel even faster than light at times, upsetting nothing less than the scientific applecart that is Einstein's special theory of relativity.  He then, deftly, references string theory and parallel universe theory, via a colleague “who actually can think about these things in intelligent ways.”  Birkerts momentarily threatens to swamp our mind with super science then lets us down easy through his own essayistic persona; he too is boggled, grasping these enormous concepts for only a fleeting instant before they become too huge to grasp.

So Birkerts moves on to the directly observable, “metal filings on a sheet of paper,” “baking soda added to vinegar,” radio kits, and chemistry sets. The quotidian trumps the unfathomable.  We are kids again, when science was as simple as an apple dropping from a tree.  

And then the turn. Birkerts once had a microscope. Once startled at “a sudden eyeful of the honeybee’s shockingly hairy leg.”But he didn’t like the squinting. “That magnitude of inspection,” he writes, “did not compel me—which should have told me I was a humanist.” He wanted a different view, not a view of micro-phenomena, but of “people who did not know they were being observed.”

In the end, Birkerts brief meditation on science and observation becomes an essay about essaying, about his own use of the essay as a vehicle for understanding human nature, and about the “glimmer of how the one thing related to the other.”  

Like Montaigne before him, Birkerts sees drama in the movement of a curious mind.  Suspense, even.  His essay is itself a telescope; “with a few gratifyingly decisive moves,” his essay pulls “section from section, snap snap, elongating, until” the essayist has created “a device worthy of old-time sea captains” and of a certain crotchety 16th century French noblemen who invented the form.

*

Dinty W. Moore is the editor of Brevity and writes books.