Trish Salah interview

Below is the next entry in a series on trans writers and the essay, this time with Trish Salah. The author of Wanting in Arabic and Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, she is also a critic and editor, focusing on trans literature and writing. I was thrilled to chat with her about form, genre, and memory, and of course about her own writing.

Check out some of the earlier conversations in this series, too, with Torrey Peters, manuel arturo abreu, and Ching-In Chen. 

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T Clutch Fleischmann: I begin these interviews by asking everyone about their relation to genre as a writer and to gender as a writer, and specifically how you respond to your work being labeled as "trans," as "poetry," as whatever categories it might intentionally or unintentionally run into. I wonder if you could speak to such categorization to get us started. Your statement in Troubling the Line, for instance, that "the writing is singular, and eclipses particular modalities of thinking about," suggests one way of resisting such categorization.

Trish Salah: Thanks for asking, Clutch. Such a loaded question for me. When I was a kid I liked genre writing, as in “low writing,” best: science fiction, fantasy, horror, porn, comics. Sometimes I still do. My first attempt at a book length work was a collection of interconnected short stories—I wanted it to be both grittily realist and baroquely fantastic, à la Angela Carter’s Love and The Bloody Chamber, and also to pay homage to the Halifax goth/punk scene I fell in love with in my late teens. But while I was writing it I was also reading more intergenre works, like Borderlands/La Fronteras, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and so the thing morphed and I ended up writing poems as intertexts to weave the stories together. Oddly those poems are what, from that project, ended up being published some years later, as the core of the Language Becoming a Girl section of my first poetry book.

In the time between writing that short story cycle, and publishing Wanting in Arabic, I’d begun my transition, and perhaps as importantly, had read the following line from Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Writes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto”: “…I suggest constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic “third gender,” but rather as a genre-a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored” (Camera Obscura, 165).

And while I’ve persistently quarreled with what I’ve understood to be the material and psycho-social implications of Stone’s argument for forgoing passing—implications she is well aware of, and allows for within the manifesto— I’ve also been profoundly enabled in my thinking and writing by Stone’s suggestion that trans people actively seize and redeploy the genres through which we have been written. In a certain way I’ve been pointedly literalist in my reading of that suggestion, focusing on the literary and political potential of taking archives of sexological-psychoanalytic, anthropological, feminist/queer, and literary representations of “transgender,” as critical objects for my doctoral dissertation, and as found material for the Lyric Sexology project.

Relatedly when we—Casey Plett, Owen Campbell, Shelagh Pizey-Allen and I—were planning our trans literature and criticism conference at the University of Winnipeg, we titled it Writing Trans Genres. That was not just to add to the long list of bad trans puns, but in order to surface the way in which, as Namaste, Prosser and others’ have pointed out, trans subjects have been rendered, as textual figures, and to recentre the question of literary genre around trans authorship and audience. To do that was effectively to ask the question of minor literature. That is, beyond articulating a minority discourse—self-representation, which is still an important goal— to ask how might trans writers, critics, audiences intervene in and revise how and what we mean with and by genre, figure, literature, writing?

I'm excited by that process, in which similar archival material is rendered from critical object to academic dissertation and from found material to poetic text. Your work often seems like it is engaged in these multiplicities, of form or genre, discipline or writing practice. Could you speak more to how that might offer us some of those trans revisions to genre, to writing? I'm also thinking of what comes before the text I read. 

The presence of the archival also makes me think of the question of documentation, of self and information. In Wanting, in the surgical diary, you say "The question is how I can here try to rewrite this body which is less truth than occasion…" The turn to occasion seems to allow for these archives to speak on the present moment (the event) in an important way, maybe even insists upon it. Does truth in some way need to be turned away from, or decentered, for occasion to come?

Within "Surgical Diary" there is as you say a documentary impulse, and it seems to sometimes be read as a key to other poems in Wanting in Arabic. As you know documentary is often received or interpreted as somehow mimetic, as if it were less evidently writing than is obvious with other forms. Certainly there are truth claims evoked by the genre... and on the other hand, the Foucauldian and feminist discourses on truth claims vis a vis sex and the body, have been, by and large, deployed in ways that are anti-transsexual.  So, in terms of occasion, in a minimal way I was troubling truth as something either arising from or written on the body, but also allowing for something more modest, local, and active to be done with/as a body.

Regarding your first question, I think for me the important thing is that the palimpsest of "trans representation" we encounter as if it were what was knowable be made available for recollecting and reworking, or for analysis or deconstruction, rather than that it exist as a foundation for our being. Poetry and critique both offer ways in, as do other genres. My own preference is obviously for showing the trace, its violence and the ambiguity of it.

When you say "poetry and critique both offer ways in, as do other genres," are there trends we could align between those particular genres/ways-in? Poetry might be particularly adept at showing the traces, for instance. If that's the case, what might the essay, or the memoir, lend themselves to, as ways in? 

I'm wondering especially about the utility of memoir, how its attention to personal memory seems to offer some ripe potentials for trans writers, while in reality trans memoirs tend to default to that "foundation for our being," rather than the reworking or analysis (that is, there are exceptions, but trans memoirs seem often to write themselves into the memoir genre, rather than rewriting that genre).

At the same time, we find memory dealt with across other forms of art making-- the domestic, home movie of Gender Troublemakers: Transsexuals in the Gay Community, or memory in a Ching-In Chen zuihitsu, etc.

What might memoir, as a genre, offer you? Anything?

I think that is what I was trying to get at, a little, not a solid correlation, but perhaps a tendency, an associative drift or drags within any given generic repertoire. So sure, poetry or any work of erasure or fragmentation might stage or disclose traces, whether of "the body is the inscribed surface of events" or the mystic writing pad variety. Where is the common ground between Kate Eichorn's Fond and Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin? There are really different orders of traces. For instance,  "phrases in dispute," and the question of what might be a trace of a violence that conceals (or cancels out) the evidence of violence having taken place. But again if we think of ecriture feminine as that which is a writing of the incommensurable of the feminine and the libidinal with a syntax that precludes feminine subjectivity and embodiment, there is a doubling of the liminal with what’s excessive.

As for the essay, Stein famously asked us to experience writing as a way of holding time, and for her composition practices duration and extension. What would a Steinien attention to duration look like in terms of trans memoir? Her sense of composition does resonate for me with zuihitsu, in fact, although maybe there is the deployment of genre breaks internal to that form to mark changes in thought's tempo and topos within a long duration? I've thought more than once that a book like The Heart's Traffic looks like a novel from one perspective and like an essay from another.

I wonder about erasure as it features within the conventions that guide both the writing and reading of trans memoirs. Xanthra Phillipa and Mirha-Soleil Ross’Gender Troublemakers is a self portraiture, but certainly not memoir; more like kitchen table theory and a love letter and a call to accounts, each with different points of address, and in places its polemic and its satire are indistinguishable.

But I've always felt that trans memoir, even within its conventions, was a hybrid form, and some of this is from Prosser. But if you look carefully at the memoirs and at bildungsroman like the Well of Loneliness or Stone Butch Blues, you can see within those forms, others: the medical case study with its sexological introduction, the social protest novel, as well as elements of the how to guide and the erotic reverie in the stylized narrations of self discovery, etc. 

That said, I look forward to memoirs that look nothing like what I've read so far.

Lastly, could you speak a bit about the differences between writing and publishing in, say, 2002, when Wanting in Arabic came out, and writing now? What have the efforts and shifts in trans representation, in focused trans publishing, in trans scholarship meant for you, putting words on the page?

In 2002 there wasn’t a broader trans literary context that I was aware of, but in Toronto there was a community context, thanks to zines like gendertrash and the Counting Past 2 film festival, which had in previous years brought to town writers like Aiyyana Maracle, Viviane Namaste and Max Valerio. Xanthra Mackay, who edited and published gendertrash, and Mirha-Soleil Ross, who curated the festival, were also both writers, performers and film makers, and very actively thinking about the politics of trans representation. Counting Past 2 included a performance cabaret, and panels on transsexual cultural production, and transsexuality in cross cultural contexts, and Wanting in Arabic was launched as part of CP2 in 2002. South of the border, kari edwards had two books out that year, and had published post/(pink) back in 2000, but I didn’t know of her work until she invited me to submit something to Transgender Tapestry a couple of years later.

Anyway I had been unsuccessfully trying to place my poetry manuscript  for several years before approaching TSAR in 2001. They specialized in diasporic and postcolonial literatures, and had recently started publishing queer of colour work and that along with Counting Past 2, and the left, were my contexts. There were early and generous reviews of the book by queer writers like Margaret Christakos, Rachel Zolf and RM Vaughan.

The launch for Wanting in Arabic was organized by Anju Gogia and May Lui at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, which was an important site of qtpoc feminist organizing at that time. As was the feminist literary periodical, Fireweed, which had a trans guest collective in to edit a special issue called “Trans/ Scribes: Writing from Trans Communities” in 2000—that was one of my first times being published by other trans people. There was also Jason Barsic’s zine, Willyboy, out of Portland, which Xanthra and I had work in and which Mirha organized a virtual launch for in 98 or 99….

Of course since that time, or rather since around 2007, we’ve seen countless trans special issues of journals, the rise of an academic subfield, trans owned presses and literary journals, anthologies, novels, short story and poetry collections, as well as blogs, reviews, panels and conferences on the subject of trans literature. There is a much larger discourse, and there is a lot more opportunity to be in conversation with other writers who want to think about as well as make trans literature. In many many ways that has been wonderful, making our thinking and writing more complex, more attentive to differences among us, and to the great variety of possible literatures we might make. On the other hand, I do sometime think that this exciting proliferation of newness might inadvertently function to eclipse or erase what has come before it.

Lia Purpura on Imagination

(This essay, like the others published this week, was originally presented as part of the AWP 2017 panel “Imagining the Essay” with Rebecca McClanahan, Ander Monson, and Lauret Savoy.) 

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Well, everything’s changed, hasn’t it. At this very moment, I feel a sense of terrific urgency and a sharpening of alertness; I’m scouring, as never before, the worth, intention, purpose, and role of my work and my teaching. This is a necessary and constant task of course, but one that requires a new kind of attention to the forces bent on decimating the commonwealth. Today I’m going to speak as a writer who teaches and I’m going to talk about imagination, and the cultivating of it in the context of this historical moment, wherein language is being dangerously and concertedly macerated, and where the truth is being perverted, and for good measure, shredded. How to teach in such a climate?
     We are accustomed to calling up good content—the poem, story or essay as anti-toxin approach. This is important. More important than what to teach our students, though, may be how we teach them—specifically, how we communicate what they’re being trained for. I’m proposing that we consciously discuss with our students not just the value of Poetry or the Essay or Fiction, but that we discuss the values students are upholding by practicing as writers and readers. So this goes out to all of you who are teaching and working to articulate what you do in broader, more public ways. (I’m slanting towards undergrads but you can extrapolate.) Let’s be unabashed about the term “values” and haul it back from those forces that have profoundly narrowed its meaning, appropriated it, and politicized it. The values of art-making are among the most humane I know, and I want my students to understand exactly what it is they’re upholding and building and creating by being involved in art creation.
     In general, I make it a point to teach my students to live like writers, which includes teaching them practices that openly resist the forces of noncommital irony, unchecked consumerism, passive perception, and inherited assumptions about who’s stance and subjects “matter.”
     At the beginning of each semester, I ask them to assent to a practice for those 14 weeks—not in order to make professional writers out of them, but to confirm that there exist ways of being and habits of mind that will feed them for the rest of their lives in ways they can’t even imagine right now, and so they undestand that the act of creation is open to them, and is not some rarified realm for experts. I am direct about this and I make these claims openly: I say these practices will feed you for the rest of your lives in ways you can’t even imagine right now, and the act of creation is open to you. It is free, it is yours and it is powerful. So here are some of the practices I teach, and the values I associate with them and openly discuss with my students—3 points.


1. Keeping a Journal and The Problems of Perception

The practice of keeping a journal helps students recognize, take seriously, and make use of shades of perception. These back of the head thoughts, flashes of image and insight, unworded emotion are the first to be compromised by a “goal oriented” society—or currently, by a totalitarian leaning one. The culture at large generally devalues roaming and dreaming and conjuring. Much that isn’t quickly identified as potentially “useful” gets jettisoned. The first step is to teach how to recognize worthy inklings and then confirm that it takes work to keep these thought-realms alive. Keeping a writer’s journal shows how to protect a young, green idea from critical pruning too early on. I give explicit and daily assignments in how to perceive or what to think on, look at, look for, remember, and then how to notate quickly and unselfconsiously and how to keep it all organized in once spot. We read aloud from these assignments in class to show our different angles of entry, we listen for both exciting subjects and language moments, and I spin out for them how an image or perception might work itself into further complexity or depth—in other words, I make up stuff in front of them. I imagine ways in to a poem or essay—I “what if” my way through on the black board with them. I remind students that work spins out from the smallest moments. I confirm that pressure to set forth “big ideas” stifles and tanks the free imaginiation in search of idea.
     But in addition to imagining into their words, I talk about the ways that contemporary life makes perceiving and imagining really hard. I’ve always know this was important but an impromptu moment last semester illustrated this very clearly. There was an amusing, triggering event for this but I won’t go into it here….I asked my class to put their phones on the desk and empty their pockets, and instructed them to go outside and walk, look, just notice stuff, pay attention for 20 minutes, by themselves, without stopping to talk to anyone, then come back to class. What they had to say was pretty shocking. One woman said walking over dry leaves startled her terribly because she always had earbuds in and was totally unaccustomed to other sounds. Another said it was so unexpectedly bright out because she was looking up and not down at her phone; similarly another said she couldn’t even get herself into an upright position because she was usually bent over texting which she realized looked in others like the “posture of depression”. One guy reported a “quiet screaming in his head” because “I always mange to distract my mind with music because I’m too afraid to hear my own thoughts”. One said she felt as she hadn’t in years, like a child, and “she remembered how green the grass was and everything felt new upon inspection.” Yet another said “I was suddenly able to look at things around me and see how small I was in this world which I know should be terrifying but for me was calming. I enjoyed the peace so much that I’m actually craving it now as I’m talking about it.” And “I felt completely naked without my phone but it was an unexpected great feeling to find out I had my thoughts to accompany me.”
     So, while we as teachers and writers know we’re up against the forces of techno-distraction in many forms, I want to show my students how those forces actually manifest, and it’s a whole lot more potent if they themselves see how distraction and mediation manifest, than if you harp on them about it. (Show them exactly what they’re up against and exactly how to notice and counter that.)


2. How to Think About Time in Revision and Reading

I've talked about teaching students how to perceive, and how to recognize the impediments to perceiving. Now, about how to work with Art time. Art-making reframes time in profound ways. Art comes into being over a kind of time that’s mighty different than the urgencies students are accustomed to, and have to adapt themselves to (production, efficiency, evaluatives). I want them to understand revision as the practice of “working with time”. I lay out the different kinds of time they might encounter. There’s the rare gift piece that just descends whole, say in the shower—though I confirm that the daily practice of sitting down to it lays the ground for the gift’s arrival. I talk about the whittle and build methods of incorporating others’ comments. I have them write something on the first day and I hold it till the end of the semester and ask them to revisit it and what can happen when you let something sit for a long time—how you either lose total contact with it or it snaps quickly into place. I bring in 20 drafts of a totally failed piece of mine that just had to be let go. Or that got utterly rerouted. In other words, I want to make explicit for them the many things that can happen with time. Why is this important? This shows a way of imagining creation and collaboration which runs contrary to a reliance on singular, immediate fixes. You might also use this sort of discussion to teach a wariness about any one singular solution, any one claiming that he “alone has the power to fix our problems.” Similarly, as we know, poems, essays, stories need to be read very differently than other words on the page: repeatedly, slowly, for seepage. Not for informational gist or fact gathering. So many students sort of sheepishly admit “they had to read a thing 3 times before it really sank in”—I let them know this is exactly right according to Art values and art time and that art asks exactly this of you, and this kind of time is worthwhile and lets you be a slow grower, not a quick gulper. Take any opportunity available to point out occasions for depth over gist.


3. Workshop as a Way of Thinking and Being

Give explicit instructions for workshop that accord with the values of the free imagination and the drive to maintain that freedom for all. So you might say in your instructions that “the goal of a workshop is to see what a piece itself wants to be and help it grow into its best self. Not make the piece what you want it to be.” Once that language is posted, and persistent reminders laid in, it can be used and referred to by students and it becomes a ground of shared reasoning. Workshops are complicated - -so many “issues” roiling around. I’m sidelong addressing the “self-assigned gatekeeper issue,” those students bent on adjudicating what’s “proper art” tonally and subject wise—and this is done either overtly or it’s unwittingly coded and maintained by the consent of a majority aesthetic. You can read in depth about one form of this in Claudia Rankine’s profound article in last fall’s AWP Chronicle “In Our Way: Racism in Creative Writing." Some of my language directions include not using the phrase “I want” as in “I want the father here to do x or y”or “I want more of...”—not only is this the language of unfettered//grabby consumerism, a kind of personal pan pizza approach, but it’s language that short changes critical thought. It’s really not about what you want (and who are you anyway?) There are things other than “wanting” at stake here. I say. We teach forms of imaginative entering –empathy—by way of the very language and stances and roles we ask students to use or avoid—but these need to be well defined and our reasoning behind them made clear. So yes, I know “I want” is shorthand, but again I’m emphasizing the issue of time, and the importance of confirming how long it takes to fully articulate thought on behalf of the work.


Conclusion

I mean to encourage you to articulate the values at the heart of the practices you’re already likely teaching and present those values as central to the health of imaginative behavior. I hope to give my students a language for this subtler register of perception, and confirm what they already suspect: that those realms and registers, the ones that come on hazy and grow slowly are not only worthwhile, but are in fact where the deepest roots of civically important values like empathy, curiosity, tenacity, surprise, justice, historical contextualizing, and so on, are planted. And it’s the realm where spirit lives, and where the ineffable finds its body. Though students may have a sense of why their work matters to them, I’m trying to help them sustain a sense of the practice of art as a way to uphold a humane, creative society—one that we are all in danger of losing if we do not actively tend to its best and most powerful features.

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Lia Purpura is the author of 8 collections of essays, poems, and translations. Her awards include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, and four Pushcart prizes. On Looking (essays) was finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, MD and is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. It Shouldn’t Have been Beautiful, her new collection of poems, has recently been published by Viking/Penguin.

Rebecca McClanahan: The Essay as a Warm and Shifting Presence

(This essay, like the others published this week, was originally presented as part of the AWP 2017 panel “Imagining the Essay” with Lia Purpura, Ander Monson, and Lauret Savoy.) 

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Several years ago, during an AWP panel similar to this, I was sitting in the audience, and as the panelists began their talks about forgotten essayists, I caught in my peripheral vision a sudden movement, and something animal moved in me, for being at the time a NY apartment dweller, I was accustomed to that form of furtive skittering. Some of you were there, too, and know where this is heading, so I’ll cut to the chase: When in the course of human events a mouse appears, all bets are off. For mice are all about movement, digression being their foremost power. They live and breathe their grammar of prepositions, all those outs and ins. And this particular mouse—Mus Musculus, as I would later name him—was something to behold. His digressions included among the boots, between the aisles, along the extension cord, beneath the tablecloth spread for our panelists’ modesty, and now here he was skittering across the room and onto the partition, lifting his head in a literary pause as if to acknowledge his audience, and then he was out of sight.
     Later, as I thought back on the event, Cynthia Ozick’s essay came to mind—“She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body,” which meanders through quotations and arguments and suppositions, coming to rest on this: the essay is not an abstraction; “She is too fluid, too elusive, to be a category.” She has contours, a body, is “a presence in the doorway.”
     Which brought me back to Mus Musculus. A warm body, yes, and a presence—in the doorway and elsewhere—but beyond that, an active, moving presence. He was, the more I thought about it, the Essay Mouse. For one of the primary elements of the imaginative essay is its movement. Ozick describes this as “the movement of a free mind at play.” Phillip Lopate notes the movement of the personal essay as “wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of a matter.” And Deborah Tall and John D'Agata, in their editors’ notes in Seneca Review, write, of the lyric essay, “It elucidates through the dance of its own delving.”
     Drawing on these ideas, I began to examine some of my favorite essays not for the elegance and surprise of their language or for the voiceprint rising from the page—the two characteristics that usually seduce me as a reader—but rather for the moves the writers make.
     I started with short essays, like Barbara Hurd’s “Moon Snail,” which moves swiftly from its title, to an epigraph from Aristotle, to her first sentence—three words that begin an argument with Aristotle—followed by an “if” supposition, and then a description of a shell. And we’re only into the third sentence. As with most essays, as Alfred Kazin once observed, “… it is not the thought that counts but the experience we get of the writer’s thought.” And reading an essay rooted in imagination, we sometimes hang on for dear life because we are on a moving track. The more essays I studied, the more I saw, until my list of moves grew to more than seventy, including sidewinding, colliding, weaving, reversing, echoing, shifting tense, shifting point of view, employing negative space, as well as numerous camera and editing moves—flip image, splice, stop action, split screen, zoom in for closeup, and on and on.
     One of the most gear-shifting, wide-ranging essays was Reg Saner’s “Pliny and the Mountain Mouse,” which (speaking of the essay as a warm body) opens from the point of view of a marmot, who after months of hibernation wakes in what we now know as Colorado, though it is not yet named Colorado, for it is August 24, AD 79, and, as Saner moves on to say, “You and I aren’t here yet.” In this essay, Saner not only inhabits other minds than his own and moves backward in time, way back, he also imagines his way across wide expanses, sometimes straddling two continents at once, thus employing what I think of as the classic “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” move. We’re now seven thousand miles to the east, in Herculaneum, with science writer Pliny the Elder, who is sweating over his voluminous Natural History to insert facts about marmots. Then Saner moves on to the eruption of Vesuvius, which results in the death of the Elder, and then (here comes that wonderful “meanwhile” again) it is “evening in another country,” and we are back with the marmot, but in our own time. For, as Saner writes, “We can be here now. It’s our turn—to be, and be curious.” Finally, the “I” of the essay enters, an “I” who has seen hundreds of marmots, and, recalling one particular marmot, remarks that “to remember what sheer courage looks like, my mind’s eye often invokes him.”
     The mind’s eye, of course, is the eye of imagination. For some essayists, the eye of imagination does not leap like Saner’s across expanses of time and space but rather looks inward, finding the rocky, constantly changing terrain of the mind more than sufficient landscape to traverse. This kind of essayist might appear at first glance to be single-minded, but upon closer reading is shown to contain any number of multiple identities, including past and imagined selves as well as the present-tense self, a self that changes even as the words appear on the page. I’m reminded of Lewis Thomas’s “My Magical Metronome,” an ode to his pacemaker. At one point, he admits that in the past, writing as a physician, he had been critical of such technologies. Now, as the patient, he writes, “And here I am, enjoying precisely this sort of technology, eating my words.”
     Imaginative essayists are constantly eating their words, like Pac-Man ingesting dots so he can move to the next level, even while the ghosts pursue him. Reading their work, we can witness this process on the page; we can witness them eating their words. For they not only digress, they retract, reconsider, go forward one step, backward two, take another forward step, sidestep, and reconsider, because the act of writing moves that self more deeply into its most deeply divided thought. While in real life—whatever that is—we are often instructed, “No ifs, ands, or buts,” in an essay of imagination, these conjunctions are sometimes the main characters, and should be invited in as often as possible, like guests who disagree with our opinions. Here’s Montaigne in “On the Art of Conversation”: “When I am contradicted it arouses my attention, not my wrath. I move toward the man who contradicts me: he is instructing me.”
     Let’s take Montaigne’s idea a step further and imagine that “the man” (or woman) “who contradicts me” is myself. The first time I read C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, decades ago, I didn’t notice that he was doing exactly that. At the time, I was too hungry for answers. Or, if not answers, at least consolation. Wisdom. Guidance. A pathway through the forest of grief I was lost in. If you know the book, which I consider an extended essay, you know that I got more than I bargained for. Forget comfort and consolation. This writer is on fire, arguing with his culture, his God, established notions of grief, and, most startlingly, with himself, writing his way through the grief of losing his wife, yet refusing to solve the dilemma. “I will not, if I can help it,” he writes, “shin up either the feathery or the prickly tree. Two widely different convictions press more and more on my mind.” Paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence, Lewis employs ifs, ands, and buts freely, contradicting himself, eating his words. Here are three brief examples:

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me . . . I mean my own body. 

What does it matter how I remember her or whether I remember her at all? None of these alternatives will either ease or aggravate her past anguish. Her past anguish. How do I know that all her anguish is past?

I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness . . .The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her. An admirable programme. Unfortunately it can’t be carried out. Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again;

It is a commonplace that “essay” is rooted in “attempt” or “try,” as in trying an experiment. But let’s enlarge and re-imagine “to try” to include “to put something on trial,” to argue both sides of the case. Because sometimes an essayist argues both sides of the case. She is both defender and prosecutor. She is, literally, beside herself.  Not out of her mind, but rather out of her single mind, making room as she writes for two or more aspects of herself to exist in the same moment on the page. She begins writing and finds that, say, the mother inside her is arguing with the daughter. The doctor with the patient. The ex-Catholic with the Buddhist. Through the process of imagining, of allowing—no, encouraging—collisions, she creates her own personal call-and-response choir. Turns out Ozick was right, or partly right. The movement of the essay is the movement of a free mind at play, yes, but is also the movement of a free mind conversing with all the other free minds living beside, and above, and beneath it.
     Which leads me to imagine that the most important questions an essayist can ask herself are, “At what place am I most deeply divided? Where am I of two minds? Or three, or four? And how can I bring those minds into the essay?” As Whitman suggests, we contain multitudes. Why not put them together and let them talk (or sing) it out?

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Rebecca McClanahan has published ten books of nonfiction, essays, poetry, and writing instruction, most recently The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change and a new edition of Word Painting: The Fine Art of Writing Descriptively. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, The Sun, and numerous journals and anthologies. McClanahan has received the Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, a Pushcart Prize in fiction, the Glasgow Award in nonfiction for her suite of essays, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, and literary fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She teaches in the MFA programs of Queens University and Rainier Writing Workshop.

PREDATOR VS AWP / Ander Monson on the Imagination of Predator

(This essay, like the others published this week, was originally presented as part of the AWP 2017 panel “Imagining the Essay” with Rebecca McClanahan, Lia Purpura, and Lauret Savoy.)

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I’d like to begin with a quotation from Nicole Walker, the Jesse Ventura of literary nonfiction:

Fiction is just nonfiction that hasn’t happened yet. 

If it’s in the essay then it’s happened. I mean, it’s happening right now—something is happening right now—out loud and on the page and in the little stage that is your mind as you hear these words and try to parse the mask. I hope you can hear me through the mask. That’s how the magic works, that the thing you read—however incomplete the record is—is a recording of my lighting up that lights your light up when you read it or when you listen. Ask John D’Agata. He’s got my back on this for sure. From our boats we can just make out the semaphore. Or ask Robert Pinsky, who tells us that the medium of the poem is the body of the reader. Or ask Ice Cube who tells us that the medium of the predator is the body of the editor.
     It’s that we watched the film in 1987 that anchors us. It’s that we ate the thing alive and still it moves in us these thirty years later. If you haven’t, it’s not too late to become one of us, we temporary predators. Walk home from this talk and watch and become another.
     Or just listen to this song I sing, a secondary echo. Let it hit you in your sedentary retro. Or think about it later on the metro. Let it sort the future from the past. If it kicks a little ass so much the better.
     In his novelization of the film, the poet Paul Monette tells us that the reason the Predator gets obsessed with us—humans, the only thing it cannot become—is that we have souls. It can shape-change into any other creature in the book (though not the film: the novelization was novelized from an early version of the script, before the film discarded that) and does. But not into our hot protagonists, sweating and gleaming and shooting their way through jungle.
     Any form it cannot assume it wants to know. We know this well. How obsessed we can become with others’ forms. (Check your libraries of porn or funny videos of pets.) We can settle at least for second-best: in watching a thing we hope to inhabit it. In inhabiting a thing we become it for a minute. Becoming something for a minute means we can become it always if we find that moment in it in ourselves—that movement, the way it moved, the way we moved in it, the way it moved in us, that mode of being Predator. Becoming something other than ourselves means we embiggen (what? it's a perfectly cromulent word), deepen, contain more, become bigger Predators, better editors. This should remind us—even if it probably won’t, because I know how we are, poor in thought and deed, always seeking to feed on something smaller—that when we act we do not act alone.
     Watching Predator is exercise in otherness, an associate’s degree in empathy with a minor in animal husbandry. If the film has genius, which I believe it does, it’s in how we get the creature’s POV, its thermal vision mainly and its attempts to parse our speech. Now I can approximate that effect with a little camera dongle that shows me the world in thermal ways. In Tucson, Arizona we appreciate the heat but cannot read its gradients without long expertise or tools. This is how the creature sees, not in solids but coronas. How the line of sweat that crests my brow cools the skin a degree can be measured: I change color. Compare to Alien: that animal is unknowable, even in the fictional. We have no clue how it sees us except as reproductive hosts. Does it have a soul? Monette never wrote the book on that to say.
     But Predator observes our interactions, our stupid jokes that we have to explain to land, how men speak to each other when they’re alone. In this way we are shown ourselves in ways we’re not in, say, Commando or Total Recall. The Predator does not share nor understand our language. Listening to men talk what the president refers to as “locker room talk” I wonder what I understand about our language. I am not around them often: presidents nor predators nor when they are one and the same. I do not live with them. Visiting my brother the investment banker the Trump supporter, I’m surprised what parts of me arise and what I’m capable of saying. When he starts in on the NEA I reach for my laser spear. There is much of me I’ve put away, it seems, since 1987.
     As usual I’ve taken it too far. Maybe I’ve eviscerated a few things but not yet a human (though one could argue that this is what a good essay does). I’m overcivilized through and through. Like you I drive a Subaru and tweet. If I could wear the thing as easily as I wear its mask I would have killed all of us already with my shoulder cannon or some other cool weapon—or at least those of us who are armed.
     Thomas Hardy tells me “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” Imagine the cognitive work it takes to think like another thing. Now think of the I in essay as another thing, a role you play, a rubber suit you have to work to get on yourself with a visor inside the mask that shows you—forces you to see—the world in a slightly different way. That’s what you want: to be yourself but inside another, to activate something new in you when you put on the suit. To give yourself permission to speak—to think—to live in a different way.
     The exploratory draft is where you start to figure out the features of you that show that will become your role. In a second draft you start to play it better, to see the contours of the I, and give the creature that you’ve made of you more to chew on, more to see and do. This is how to figure out its idiosyncrasy. It doesn’t have to think like you exactly, this thing you made: your homunculus looks like you but the more you feed it the more independent it gets. That’s good. Key discoveries can come by rhyme or tracking language, even in error. In another draft you can introduce it to other people, throw it in situations it’s unaccustomed to: an Alison Bechdel situation, for instance, to watch it try to camouflage itself in a cold old room with an absent father. How much other is too much other is a question we shouldn’t bother with. It’s transformation that we’re after.

*

(Photo credit: Edward McPherson)

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Ander Monson is one of the curators of this site and coeditor, with Craig Reinbold, of How We Speak to One Another: an Essay Daily Reader, out this month from Coffee House Press. If you're reading this and enjoying it, you should really buy the book.

V. V. Ganeshananthan: On Essays, Assays, and Yiyun Li’s “Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life”

Excerpted from How We Speak to One Another, an Essay Daily anthology of essayists in conversation.

I am guilty of what many people would consider excessive rereading. The most cherished books of my childhood remain among the most cherished books of my adulthood; if a story resonates with me, I will seek out its best sections over and over again. Those pages will become thumb-worn, and I will intentionally let the binding break there so that, eventually, I will find those preferred places more quickly. But even with all these habits and customs designed to keep my most precious words close at hand, there is an essay I have returned to so frequently that some time ago, even its presence on paper ceased to satisfy me. How to carry it with me, then? An odd solution—I took a picture of one of its passages. Now I keep it on my phone so that I can read it whenever the urge seizes me. There it is in my library of photographs: I can flick my finger to turn from

a picture of my parents to
a picture of my brother to
a picture of friends—to
a picture of children I know,
to a picture of a landscape I admired,
to a picture of a parking space I was trying to remember
—to pictures of some parts of my past I would rather forget.

Unlike all the other pictures, the one of the essay exists unmarked by time or place. It isn’t located anywhere, exactly, but on the page and in my head; I don’t remember the second that I took it, but every time I turn to that picture to reread, I reenact it anyway. I carry it with me as a talisman not of protection, but of uncertainty. Stripped not only of its page numbers but also of the name of the friend who wrote it and its title, it articulates both a question and a terrifying possible answer to that question—an answer that points to my own choices as someone whose two obsessions are the past and guilt over obsessing over the past.

Of course this is the picture from my phone. The essay from which it is taken, Yiyun Li’s “Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life,” first appeared in A Public Space and then later in Best American Essays 2014. (Now it appears as the opening chapter of Li's first nonfiction book.) It is impossible to ever finish reading. This year, I assigned the piece to my students. (I should add, by way of disclosure, that I am friends with Li, although I have never spoken to her about the piece.)

I tend to look at the picture in between destinations, appropriately enough; it is about everything and nothing and therefore perfect reading for traveling. Because I have moved so often, it sometimes occurs to me that this is all I have done—traveling: leaving one place and arriving at the next just in time to plan leaving it. (No wonder I find myself at home with, among others, Calvino.) As a writer, and perhaps especially as an essayist, I am simultaneously bound and freed by questions of the past; I am often writing about an experience I wish had gone differently. I am attempting to reconcile myself to what has happened, although really, I would prefer not to; I want something else—I am a train for which the engine is regret. I want to honor the past as I destroy it. Is it possible for me to be otherwise? I am always wondering what I could have done differently, or what I am, in the present moment, doing wrong. Is it useful to ask these questions as each second falls away behind me, impossible to unravel? And if not—must I only ask questions that are useful? What if this emptiness is what keeps me carrying on? What if, as a writer, I am made of my warring obsessions? The past, and its mirror-hall of endlessly reflected regret?

This particular essay reinforces these ideas, and yet, although it is a talisman of uncertainty, that is comforting rather than disturbing. Unlike most other things I read, which give me the sensation of reading (albeit closely) about someone else, this essay gives me the sensation of reading about myself. This used to be a feeling I could get only from writing, and not from reading; reading was about entering other people’s pasts, other stories. I never saw myself on the page. But Yiyun’s consciousness opens to me in such a way that I discover something new about myself every time I read this essay; I am able to ask myself another question, and also forgive myself for my past a little bit more. What I want is this: to say, the past is not my fault. Yiyun’s essay ventures something better: it may be my fault, and that’s acceptable.

I can remember a time when I read not to reconcile myself to the past, but to discover the future. I am not quite sure when I crossed the line from one kind of reading to the other.

*

“Dear Friend” is an unusual essay, eliding easy questions of theme and form, and offering among its gifts openness, intensity, and that capacious consciousness. In reading I get the sensation of entering a bare, open, beautiful room—being unable to see the walls—having no desire to leave. This is all the more remarkable considering its spare, decisive structure: twenty-four comparatively short, numbered parts. Of these, it is that nineteenth that makes me feel the most.

At first, I thought that the essay was about being existentially troubled, and then I thought that it was about unhappiness, and then I realized that it had announced itself as being about time: before and after and in between. But for me, existential woe and unhappiness and time are tied up in one another, and of course with writing, and probably with essays themselves. What I want out of an essay is, perhaps, not original: When I teach essay writing, I ask my students to think about the central questions driving each essay. What is the subject? What is it that the writer hopes to learn by writing about this subject? How does the writer arrive at an answer? It isn’t interesting for me to begin an essay (at least, a personal one) by asking a question to which I already know the answer; if I knew the answer, I wouldn’t have to write it.

But this approach also presumes that knowing will be possible. The modern world, with its urges toward mindfulness, often invites us to be in the present moment, and I have to admit that my skepticism of this may have been rooted in one suggestion that sometimes underpins that one: that being engaged in the present moment means that we will know ourselves better and therefore be happier. “Dear Friend,” on the other hand, with its unapologetic depiction of ostensibly contradictory feelings and ambitions and thoughts, gives me a strange kind of permission to fail to understand my own inconsistencies, and to be both interested and unhappy in the present. It opens the door to uncertainty. I am grateful for this, engaged as I sometimes am in a flat daily performance of happiness. That performance is often a strange counterpoint to my changeable, contradictory interior. “The present does not surrender so easily to manipulation,” Yiyun writes in the third section of this essay. She defines the present as truer, then—but not necessarily happier. I am not sure, and the essay is a space in which that uncertainty is fine. One does not always arrive at knowing.

Yiyun does not write as though she is able to answer the questions she has raised about time. In an interview with Iron Horse Review, Yiyun herself points to the sixteenth section of the essay, in which she writes,

I had this notion, when I first started it, that this essay would be a way to test—to assay—thoughts about time. There was even a vision of an after, when my confusions would be sorted out.

Assays in science are part of an endless exploration: one question leads to another; what follows confirms or disconfirms what comes before. To assay one’s ideas about time while time remains unsettled and elusive feels futile: just as one is about to understand one facet of time, it presents another to undermine one’s reasoning.

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that this muddling will end someday.

Is there a silent but at the beginning of that second paragraph? At any rate, the central question need not be answered; this essay may be a good enough reason for me to stop saying that in my classroom. A question may just lead to another question.

What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after. . . . the train, for reasons unknown to us, always stops between a past and a future, both making this now look as though it is nowhere. But it is this nowhere-ness that one has to make use of. . . . One has made it this far; perhaps this is enough of a reason to journey on.

The essay is, among other things, a manifesto for writing—but she does not stop at an after, or an answer; she stops on an if without any apology for how nowhere if can be. A picture on a phone leads from this passage to a photograph, to another photograph, with no definitive end in sight.

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V.V. Ganeshananthan teaches fiction and nonfiction writing in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota. Her debut novel, Love Marriage (Random House), was longlisted for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World's Best of 2008. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, she is at work on a second novel, excerpts of which have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014.

Will Slattery: On Memorials

I fear I may here reveal myself as a uselessly young essayist, as the sort of person in possession of a great number of words but rather little wisdom. Still, I will make my case: it is sometime in one’s mid-twenties that the full weight of untimely deaths makes itself truly felt. This is not to say that such deaths are a novelty. One always knows, usually from a very young age, that not every death presents itself as a narrative act, as the culmination of some arc. One knows, quite simply, that these sorts of things happen, and that is that. But what changes is just the sheer regularity of it. One gets habituated to the rate at which these little skyborne darts of loss fall down, striking without particular rhyme or reason. Looking at my own life over the past few years I see, amongst others, the motorcycle accident, the brain aneurysm, the other brain aneurysm, the unspecified natural causes, and most recently an acquaintance who, quite stupidly, auto-erotically asphyxiated himself to death this past December. Given that I am a white dude living in the 21st Century, this catalog is relatively small and mostly mundane; I’m fairly well insulated from historical traumas and most forms of structural violence. Still, despite the ordinariness of it all, these deaths—these little sudden disappearances—have lingered with me in a way that most that events don’t. I’m not grieving them exactly, though each was undoubtedly a case for sadness. But after each my life resumed its normal pace quickly enough, sometimes with no real interruption beyond rumination.

And yet still I find my mind, and by extension my essays, returning to them again and again. What transfixes me so is, I think, the question of what precisely remains in death. There are emotions to be processed, families to be consoled, arrangements to be made, and yes, ultimately, graves and bodies which will persist in a literal manner. But I am never quite certain what to do—or even what could be done—with memory, both individual and collective.

At the opposite end of a human life from where I now reside, Roger Ebert (who is somewhat under discussed as an essayist, I think largely because he mostly confined his work to the format of reviews until he began blogging in the last act of his career) took a stab at dealing with the question of memory only about a year before he died. While viewing a slideshow of old family photos at a relative’s funeral he found himself confronted with a stark reminder of human impermanence. Ebert, who had at this point lost his ability to speak due to illness, realized that he was then the last human being able to identify the peripheral figures in the old photos, the ones the younger funeral attendees knew were dead relatives somehow, but couldn’t quite place. His unvoiced memories formed the very last bulwark shoring up whatever remained of those departed souls, and once he was gone—what then? An existence confined to census records, for as long as those might last? Like Ebert, I find myself continually turning round again to the question of what persists, and what remains.

These questions take on a different dimension, I know, for those who believe in an afterlife. There is elevation, or resurrection, or damnation, or transmigration, or purgation, or reincarnation, all of which provide some sort of answer. I am not one of those who believe in an afterlife, though I had the distinctive (mis)fortune of being born and raised Catholic, which is an indirect way of saying that I come from quite morbid stock. Taking into account ordinary Sundays, Holy Days of Obligation, and the odd extra service, in the first 20 years of my life I witnessed somewhere around 1000 times what they call the sacrifice of the Mass, the process by which Catholics ostensibly receive and consume the literal body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus the Nazarene. The Mass is a participatory testament to the death and resurrection of a god and (depending on where your metaphysical loyalties lie) it can be understood as a memorial that will continue either until the eschaton itself or until every Catholic in the world has perished. Given the stakes that were driven into my mind as a child, is it any wonder that I should find myself so skewered by questions of death and history?

*

He was a good person, and I am better for having known him, but it would be dishonest of me to say that I was especially close to my acquaintance who passed from auto-erotic asphyxiation this past December. We were very close once, when our lives aligned tightly for about 6 months, but our friendship gradually attenuated, largely due to the fact that we lived permanently on different continents. We settled into a comfortable pattern where we spoke once every three or four months, and slightly less than that the past few years. I suspect that if he had not died we would have quietly drifted out of each other’s lives, each becoming eventually the sort of person you think about once or twice a decade but no longer know how to get in touch with. But no: his death happened, and now I suspect I will bear him with me for a very long time.

The death of my acquaintance by auto-erotic asphyxiation was a shock to those who knew him, though not for the reasons one might expect. In all spheres of life he fashioned himself as something of a sexual bon vivant. It was no secret to any who knew him that he had a great deal of sex in a wide array of modes, that he would try more or less anything once, that he viewed sex as a canvas for any and all possibly pleasing sensations. And he made his erotic dimensions as literally visible as possible, in that he spent a huge amount of his free time producing amateur erotica for the benefit of, more or less, the entire internet. This was, again, no secret at all, and he felt no need to hide it from his friends and family because he did not feel that his homemade pornography was the sort of thing that should be hidden. He could have made a modest living from his erotic work, as many people do (usually on live webcam sites), but he had zero interest in monetizing his experiences, and distributed his pics and vids for free across a number of platforms. Nor was his work purely a self-gratifying vehicle for his own exhibitionism—though he was, undoubtedly, an exhibitionist of some sort. He enjoyed showing off, but he also treated his own sexual capacity as a sort of public good: if the sight of his dick or his ass or the curves of his arms or his whatever might give a moment of happiness to some far-flung viewer, so be it, for the human world needs as many moments of happiness as it can get. As with the rest of his being, his erotic life was consistently joyful, transparent, unashamed, expansive, optimistic, magnanimous even, often to the mild embarrassment of his boyfriend, who blushingly agreed with these values in principle but often approached their enactment in a somewhat more halting fashion.

His passing then was no sordid revelation of a hidden life. Rather, the shock came from the feeling that he, of all people should have known better than this. Even amongst the boldest of the world’s sex-positive explorers, those who navigate the obscurest regions of the sexual imaginary, it is a cardinal rule that one should never tie things around one’s neck while alone, for the obvious reason that one may not be able to get it off in case of emergency. My acquaintance knew this. He knew this very, very well. At one point he wrote and distributed to his local kinkster community a guide warning about this very possibility, imploring them that no matter how fascinating they might find asphyxiation, they should never try it alone. And yet this is how he passed—bound alone in his apartment, where he would be found some hours later by his boyfriend, who faced at the same time the gutting tragedy of this loss and the alienating indignity of explaining all this to the confused, suspicious police while under a 6-hour detainment.

As the eroding streams of time and forgetfulness wear away at those who once knew him, the memory of my acquaintance who died by auto-erotic asphyxiation may be outlived by the digital monument his internet erotica forms, and he may someday exist only in a vintage collection or an artsy porno remix, leaving the world with a record of his smiling face and smooth flesh but nothing else of his person. This is, I suppose, a very different sort of memorial, a new way of giving one’s body for others to eat and drink.

*

Now is as good a moment as any, I suppose, for the requisite metatextual interlude (and what is Essay Daily a home for, really, if not metatextual interludes?), if you will permit me a few such moments in this otherwise overbearingly bleak essay. This essay is now three or four times over last-minute delayed, and its most recent such delay was the source of an editorial lacuna in January that Ander seized on to talk about David LeGault’s forthcoming collection (you should read that piece, and read the collection too when it comes out). It’s good that such a delay became a space for Ander’s midnight oil creativity. And this essay is likely better off for it too, in that between then and now I purged from it a tiresome 1800-word tangent about Venetian monuments and reliquaries.

But the reason this essay comes to you so late is simple: dear readers, it turns out that it is damn near to impossible to write about somebody with a strong internet presence (i.e., his social media and his erotic work, which are easily connected) who died in a very specific way (i.e, the auto-erotic asphyxiation) without making them quickly Google-able. After repeated testing I discovered that even slight, seemingly minor details about an unnamed person can give enough of a portrait for a dedicated internet sleuth to work with, and this essay had to be repeatedly pushed back and re-drafted simply because I continually failed to recognize those details until the last minute.

My writing is reflexively, even neurotically open about the private stuff of my own life. One could easily reconstruct about 90% of my intimacies just from essays attributed to me online. But as for rendering my acquaintance so visible—and visible in so singular a way? To make his life a possible internet search result? And to risk leaving space for interloping essayistic voyeurs to potentially worm their way into his boyfriend’s psychic wounds? This I could not do. I considered employing D’Agata-esque elisions or falsifications to throw the scent off and lead any would-be internet stalkers down a false path, but given that the memorial, as a form, makes a bulwark against emptiness, it seemed deeply perverse to employ such trickery here.

Craig Reinbold, my editorial predecessor here at Essay Daily, hit a somewhat similar ethical stumbling block this past winter, and he took that as an opportunity to write about stumbling blocks themselves instead. The constitutional difference in character this reveals, I suppose, between the two generations of Essay Daily management, is that when Craig is presented with a potentially bad idea he works efficiently around it, whereas I instead throw myself repeatedly at the idea until something in one or the other gives way. The above account of my acquaintance who died from auto-erotic asphyxiation should, I hope, finally be enough to give a sense of him without committing a moral offense as to the privacy of his boyfriend and family.

But besides my fears that I may have rendered my acquaintance visible to pernicious Google stalkers a perhaps greater fear is that I have not sufficiently rendered him in more important dimensions—that I have not arranged my experience of this young man’s life in such a way that it illuminates anything about our human condition, that I may have become mired in the familiar failures of human particularity which plague essayists: excessive subjectivity, over-determination, forgetfulness, retrospective selectivity, imposition. The essay after all, if nothing else, is a human vehicle for the making of sense. The essay is how we make meaning from the patterns of the atoms as they fall on the mind and how we sketch out the contours of Woolf’s semitransparent envelope. But what meaning do we get from writing an essay as memorial? How are we to arrange the murky substrata a life leaves behind? And who does this arrangement serve?

The portrait of my acquaintance I’ve drawn reveals only a tiny sliver of his life, and it’s possible that my effort simply isn’t broad enough to give a sense of who he was. I may also have carelessly lionized his sexual quirks, twisting his erotic visage into some faux-heroic sentimental tableaux, and in so doing attempted to wring out more meaning than his proclivities ever contained. It’s also possible that I’ve failed to treat the manner of his death with the sensitivity and subtlety it deserves. I wanted to avoid turning his death into a spectacle, accidentally making him an exhibition in a zoo of kinky homosexual wonders for the viewing pleasure and potential moral edification of a mostly straight audience. Despite my best humanizing efforts, I may have already here turned him into a gaudy allegoric chimera—half David Carradine (lost to us in so fleshy and lurid and stupid a way) and half Matthew Shepard (so young, so sweet, so fair, so gay, so tragically taken from us so soon)—for some kind of medieval morality pageant in the minds of my readers today.

*

A simpler version of the essay I am trying to write here might go something like this:

I’m sorry, pal. You deserved a better end than the one you brought down upon yourself. And you certainly deserve a better memorialist than me. But this is the world we have, and I’m not sure what else to do, so I’m going to keep at it.

*

When I think about the difficulty—maybe the impossibility—of the memorial as a form I think inevitably of Anne Carson’s Nox, a hybrid text which collages translations, visual art, photographs, found documents, and essayistic fragments to serve as an art-book epitaph for the author’s departed brother. The book opens with a blurry facsimile of a Latin poem (one Catullus wrote as a eulogy for his brother, we will later learn), followed by a lexical entry for the Latin adjective multas, and then this brutally melancholic pronouncement:

I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expend on that, we think, he’s dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history. So I began to think about history.

Carson and her brother were not close. He fled the country in 1978 to avoid criminal investigation, lived under an assumed name in Europe, and passed away in 2000. During that time they exchanged a handful of letters and spoke on the phone 5 times. Nox is a working through of her own memorial process, and it locates the act of memorialization—the method by which we reconstitute the absent, the process by which we articulate that which has gone mute—as a sort of interpretive gesture by triangulating it in reference to the disciplines of translation and history. “History and elegy are akin”, Carson tells us, in that they both constitute a form of asking, and she traces out this process of uncertain inquiry by juxtaposing biographical fragments involving her brother, an ongoing struggle to translate Catullus’ poem, and a running commentary on the difficulties of Herodotus’ historiographical methodologies.

The trouble lies in this: “we want other people to have a centre, a history, an account that makes sense. We want to be able to say This is what he did and Here’s why. It forms a lock against oblivion.” But this is never how history, or translation, or the reconstitution of a person works, and this sort of investigating “often produces no clear or helpful account.” Carson doesn’t think that this is because of a failure to excavate information, but because of a difficulty that inheres to subjects themselves. In a deliberately uncertain, slippery account of the historian’s practice she puts it thus:

History can be at once both concrete and indecipherable. Historian can be a storydog that roams around Asia Minor collecting bits of muteness like burrs in its hide. Note that the word “mute” (from Latin mututs and Greek myein) is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.

The historian can collect data, accounts, explanations, investigations, corroborations, testimonies, and all other manners of evidence, but no accumulation of acts or words can provide a definitive certainty. And this “fundamental opacity of human being” continually resists Carson in her efforts to work out both the interpretive problem of her brother and of the Catullus translation. The problem is “solved”, so to speak, not by resolving it but by reconciling to it:

But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end. Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.

Carson laconically notes that “when Herodotus has got as far as he can go in explaining an historical event or situation”—when the accounts reported are at their murkiest, when human experiences push back against arrangement, when a thing seems most untranslatable—the Father of History will conclude with a remark like this: “So much for what is said by the Egyptians: let anyone who find such things credible make use of them.”

That is something to hope for, I think. That while our memorials may never be certain, comprehensive, authoritative, sweeping, definitive, canonical, revelatory that they may still, in their smallness, be of use to someone, somehow.

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Will Slattery helps curate things here at Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery.