A Short Note on "increase" by Lia Purpura

Lia Purpura’s book, increase, lingers. I ordered this book a few weeks ago on a recommendation and when it arrived began reading it immediately. Its size felt perfect: a hardcover, not too big or too thin. An odd picture on its cover offered no insight into what might lie between its pages, and its title, increase, could have meant anything.  Why did she choose so vague a title? But the colors of the cover art are perfectly matched to draw hues from each other, to contrast and compose, the book looked ornamental on my night stand; it felt right in my hands.

Having read, last year, Purpura’s book of essays, On Looking, I knew her work was breathtaking, original, lyrical and contemplative (she is also a poet).  I knew that she had a gift for training her readers to read her work at a different pace—her pace, her pulse and beat. I would call it a pace akin to the energy required of reading poetry: a contemplative pace that needs breathing room and cannot rush. What fascinated me about On Looking as well as increase, (beyond the obvious talent of the work) was the way Purpura’s writing drew me back to her.  I thought of the book throughout the day and I wondered why I  anticipated returning to it at night as I had when reading On Looking.  How could a book composed in journal format, lacking a traditional narrative structure, having no plot, draw me back to it with such force?  How could it speak outside of itself, extend itself by strength of language alone? I wanted to understand this because if there is any writer’s work I’d like my sentences to resemble, it’s Purpura.

The book is structured around the birth of her son, which takes place about a third of the way through. The first page reports the experience of the positive pregnancy test. “A blue X slowly crosses itself, first one arm, then the other in the small white window of the test.” This short first page ends with, “Tell me, now, who I am,” which sets up the book for an exploration of self through motherhood. The journal structure of the book—dated entries—works well with the theme of pregnancy and anticipating birth and even as record of her son’s first year (which is where the book takes us). In pregnancy we anticipate dates which mark the growth of the fetus, changes in the body, and the nearing birth. However, Purpura doesn’t play up this structure, she very rarely writes about the typical topics of pregnancy—how it feels to have something growing in you, the fear of birth or of raising your child, the anticipation, the inconceivable love of one’s new born child, and so on.  Purpura almost always remains within the cocoon of the poetic, not stepping too harshly into the personal, but maintaining the ephemeral shape of the poetic where we are once at a distance from and in complete intimacy with the narrator. What the Seneca Review calls the “coy” or “reticent” voice of the lyric essay.  For example:

                The time I have, I take to look at him. To watch, which is to be struck, clear-cut,

                swept, and reseeded. I need not move toward any task, at that moment, past

                gazing on the face of my child.   108

There is intimacy in the mother’s observation of her child; an act we can assign intimacy to without much effort. Distance is created by abstraction, “to be struck, clear-cut, swept, and reseeded,” but abstraction or the metaphor used also deepens the intimacy of the given act of gazing at her child.  This then is the cocoon of the poetic.

The Rings of Saturn

Having recently finished W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, I was pleased to stumble upon a full-page spread titled “Rambling With W.G. Sebald in East Anglia.” in the travel section of the Sunday New York Times. The article, which loosely charts the late author’s tour through the coastal villages and port towns of Suffolk County offers a resourceful guide to the same lyrically archaic castles and charming local pubs featured in Sebald’s book—a hybrid of memoir, novel, and personal travelogue—but nowhere is there a guide to the stunning observations and poetic sensibility of Sebald’s prose.

~

First and foremost from the epitaph, we learn of the rings of Saturn—that the great circle orbiting the planet’s midriff equator is composed of little more than ice crystals, meteor crumbs—dust, really—the fragments of a former moon.

Like the rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald’s book of the same name is a striking and melancholy journey, infused with fragments that compose to reveal a beautifully ephemeral journey through England’s Suffolk County. Exploring the profound effects of a rich imperial past on the pastoral landscape, it is a story both thought provoking and emotionally devastating. Though the book was first published in German in 1995, then translated for English editions in 1998, its reflection on the current economic downturn is all the more relevant now “for it is one thing to read about unemployment blackspots in the newspapers,” Sebald writes, “and quite another to walk on a cheerless evening, past rows of run-down houses with mean little front gardens; and, having reached the town centre, to find nothing but amusement arcades, bingo halls, betting shops, video stores, pubs that emit a sour reek of beer.”

Told in ten chapters with photographs and archived memorabilia interspersed, The Rings of Saturn has the feel of an old travel album, or an encyclopedia, as we follow the narrator’s journey, sharing his observations and encounters along the way, as he meanders into his own memory and reflection, his own retelling of stories past. So that while we are trekking the eastern countryside of England, we are also amidst the cities of Germany in flames, with Joseph Conrad in the upper reaches of the Congo, with the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi of China, in a replicated Temple of Jerusalem.

To step into Sebald’s stream of conscious narrative is to release oneself from sequential order. “It just takes one awful second,” he writes, “and an entire epoch passes.” Like a literary time machine, Sebald seems to suggest experience as a simultaneous mosaic of past and present, then and now. We enter the labyrinth of his dreams. We visit the house of a friend, in which the narrator believes he has lived once. Things left stacked in a corner, he writes, “seemed as if they were still lifes created by my own hand.” But while time may be knotted and coiled in a serpentine stream of events and reflection, it is not without consequence—Sebald takes a profound measure of before and after—the past and present—of the places he visits.

The Rings of Saturn is at once beautiful in its telling, and unsettling in its concept. Sebald exhibits deep concern for the economic impacts on cities and towns and the vacancies left in the wake of production. The result is a story of wreckage—a catalogue of destruction. Sebald’s sense of loss is evident when he glimpses the bird’s eye view from a plane en route to Norwich from Schiphol Airport, describing one of the most densely populated areas where over the centuries, “the whole region was transformed into a geometrical pattern. The roads, water channels and railway tracks ran in straight lines and gentle curves past fields and plantations, basins and reservoirs. Like beads on an abacus designed to calculate infinity.” Or the countless near-mystical passages depicting the past, a time when railway carriages brought eloquent supplies—“cases of hock and Bordeaux… whalebone corsets and crinolines from London”—to manor houses like Somerleyton Hall that, now crumbling, once “had the illusion of complete harmony between the natural and the manufactured.” Or the once vibrant city of Dunwich, now sunken, “quite literally… beneath alluvial sand and gravel, over an area of two or three square miles.” But is it also a story of relativity, of what remains amidst the rubble—the mystery of observation and the magic of what once was in the forlorn harbors, ghostly fishing villages, and dilapidated forests.

Sebald exhibits a touching ability to pay homage to the natural world and the life therein as the narrator himself becomes lost amid a field of heatheror finds poetry in a heard of swine and a solitary mallard. He explores the history of the North Sea and the rise and fall of the herring, their “myriads of scales floating on the surface of water, shimmering like tiny silver tiles by day and sometimes at dusk resembling ashes or snow.” He considers a batch of swallows circling as if “the world was held together by the course they flew through the air.” He writes odes and elegies to the trees. He empathizes with a Chinese quail. He mourns the beauty of the silk moth, “pale, almost transparent creatures, which would presently give their lives for the fine thread they were spinning.”

In the end Sebald masterfully joins all the seemingly disparate parts of his story to form a mysterious and heartbreaking unity that leaves his reader wondering where we have just been, where we are going, even where we are right now. It is the strange exquisite art of a writer, blending fiction and history, to craft a story that reads like a scientific dream, an encyclopedic serenade, a soft plea for an ounce of poetic justice braided into the silken threads of the world’s endless stream of calamity. Sebald’s journey is an expedition on the rings of Saturn themselves, sustained by mere crystal fragments of a distant moon.

~Jericho Parms

Notes From No Man's Land

Eula Biss begins with the telephone. In a series of facts and headlines she offers a brief history of Alexander Bell’s famous invention and the so-called “War on Telephones Poles” that ensued in America in its wake. But “Time and Distance Overcome” is not an essay about property rights. It is not an essay on telephone poles as symbols of urban blight, or the miracle of invention, because “Even now it is an impossible idea that we are all connected, all of us.” Instead, it is an essay on the dark lining of an alternative history. A history that has to do with a black man being hanged from a telephone pole, and then another, and another. And the list of facts and headlines turns to a litany of hate crimes and the invention of lynching.

In this manner, both artful and unexpected, Notes from No Man’s Land explores the intricacies of race relations and identity in America. “There is no biological basis for what once we call race,” Biss writes. “It is a social fiction. But it is also, for now at least, a social fact.”

Biss herself is a white woman, born to white parents, but she often identifies her family as mixed. “Mixed” in the sense that both her mother and her mother’s sister lived with or married black men, and that Biss grew up alongside black stepsisters and biracial cousins, an adopted sister Cherokee, another sister Chinese. Biss is a white woman, yet her cultural and familial experience colors her essays with a unique perspective on American diversity.

In her essays, Biss creates seemingly effortless connections, constantly infusing the past and the present, as she escorts her readers through the various corners of America. We see New York City, California, and points in between. When a storm hits Iowa City interrupting the drunken debauchery of the university neighborhood where Biss resides, she ruminates on the villains and victims of the hurricane in New Orleans, and, in a gestures subtle but sure, Biss turns the common dialogue of race relations on its head, challenging the role of diversity in higher education, questioning even, the nature of integration.

If Biss were merely an observer, then her historical references and careful musings about telephone poles, the gentrification of a lakeside neighborhood in Chicago, or reparations for slavery would be interesting, albeit yet another white perspective on the collective memory of race in America. Instead, Biss daringly and unapologetically inserts herself directly into her essays.

In “Relations,” a story hits newspapers about a Long Island woman who gave birth to twins—one white, one black. Though both the woman and her husband were white, the black baby was a result of an error at a fertility clinic in which a second embryo was accidentally implanted along with that of the couple’s biological son. The event led to a fierce custody battle, stirring public debate over to whom the black child rightfully belonged. Within the framework of such events, Biss explores relevant points in history—both her own history, and the country’s—including her personal reflection on how, as children, she and her sister played with one black doll and white one; the “doll studies” of 1939 conducted by a Woolworth store in Harlem, which monitored demand for a more multicultural selection of dolls; Mattel’s release of the classic white Barbie in 1959, and subsequently, the alternative black Francie doll in 1967.

In the same way Biss’s prose reflects the range of environments in which she has lived, she too utilizes the array of jobs she has held. In “Landmines,” she draws from her experience as a teacher in the New York City public school system. In “Black News” she writes of being a reporter in all black neighborhoods in San Diego.

In California, Biss considers the metaphor of urban spaces while weaving in the science of succulents, crafting a meditation on gardens and cities, and the lasting symbolism of the ancient tales of Babylon. “Babylon could stand for any city—” she writes, “for New York, for Oakland, for California, for the United States—for capitalism, for imperialism, or simply for excess.”

Though her writing is straightforward and direct, Biss manages to create starkly powerful images that pack a lingering impression: a black and white topsy-turvy doll in the antebellum South; the green streak across a fellow teacher’s face after his class hurled a round of open-capped magic markers at him as he fled the room; the sight of a used refrigerator on the front stoop of her Harlem apartment; a young black boy donning a pair of hillbilly teeth issued from a gumball machine.

Biss writes with other senses as well: of the aroma of Oakland, “where bougainvillea climbed the telephone poles and huge hibiscus flowers poured over the front yards of all the little houses;” of the sound of Don Henley’s “Hotel California” filtering through a sleepy bar in Mexico; of the soulful vocals of Nina Simone while Biss drives with her husband through southeast Chicago, contemplating the plight of the Irish Americans and the black Americans while they dream up names for their yet unborn children.

Notes From No Man’s Land is a collection that takes on human exodus in all its forms, that observes life on the boundaries, the borders, the boroughs, and between: between New York and California, between privilege and consequence, between white and black. Through this profound grouping of essays, Biss presents the American fabric as a woven synthesis of migrations that created the landscape into which she—into which most of us—were born.

In the endnotes to her collection, Eula Biss describes her first encounter with the concept of a No Man’s Land after learning of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wall had been surrounded by a stretch of gravel and anyone that entered that “no man’s land” would be shot. “What I learned from this lesson,” she writes, “was that it was not so much the wall that divided the city as it was the no man’s land around that wall.” This understanding guides many of Biss’s essays, because it is not so much the physical or cultural distinctions that keep us apart but the way we create our own perceptions of those differences and guard ourselves against them.

In her opening meditation on the telephone, Biss admittedly writes, “When I was young, I believed that the arc and swoop of telephone wires along the roadway was beautiful. I believed that the telephone poles, with their transformers catching the evening sun, were glorious… I believed that the telephone itself was a miracle.” And who wouldn’t? Yet one of the most striking aspects of Biss’s collection is the clarity she has gained as a woman about the American experience. At any point when the essays threaten to stray too far, at any point when she seems to draw forced or exaggerated connections, Biss regains an understated and graceful tone that marks her collection with an intuitive, visceral maturity.

“The children’s game of telephone,” she writes “depends on the fact that a message passed quietly from one ear to another to another will get distorted at some point along the line.” It is the space we maintain around us that colors the world where the messages, the innocence of youth, and the question of identity, become lost in the vast No Man’s Land of our own perceptions.

~ Jericho Parms

Genre-Bending: Richard McCann's “Mother of Sorrows” and the Meandering Path of Self Truth

           My brother, Davis, went to his room, where he listened to Radio Moscow on his shortwave. As for me: I cleared the table.

          “Sit with me, son,” my mother said. “Let's pretend we're sitting this dance out.”

          She told me I was her best friend. She said I had the heart to understand her. She was forty-six. I was nine.

              --Mother of Sorrows

          When I became a MFA in writing student at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I began to hear in workshops and lectures, from certain advisers, a disdain for fiction that took too directly from the author's life. I've noticed, also, that certain book jackets praise authors for creating characters wholly different from their own life experience.

          One teacher hinted that a central character in my story lacked development because it was perhaps too close to a version of myself. He said, and I am paraphrasing, when writers create themselves on the page they often forget to develop that character because they already know everything about her. Shamed, I put my story in the bottom drawer of my desk and moved on to writing characters that would not be detected as versions of me, though of course they were.

          In retrospect, when I think about my life as a writer from age 10 to present, most of my interest in writing had to do with creating a world where I could at first dump my emotions, then make them into art, make them into something with a voice and a presence in the world, into entities that existed, in time and space, apart from me.

          When I think about emotions, I note that emotions have a beginning, middle and end. They do not last. Likewise, stories carry the same characteristics as emotions. However, life, the daily process of living, or, lived experience, doesn't have such book ended neatness. We all experience life chaotically, and while we retell our experience in the trinity of the story, this isn't how it's lived. Yet, do we want our art to mimic our living so closely, or do we want to capture and define, to hold in our glass jars, emotion, other things? What is it we are trying to do as writers, as artists?

*

          In an NPR interview, Richard McCann reports that he spent 17 years working on his book Mother of Sorrows, which was always about real life until the end, when his publisher told him that it had to be published as fiction because he had left out or put in too many things for it to be memoir. I don't exactly buy that answer, there is something fishy about it to me. But, McCann had previously published most of the ten stories in the collection as fiction. The book, because its about the same characters throughout also reads like a novel.

          This is an instance I think in which fiction writers can take a page from creative nonfiction writers or memoirists. There is something magic about Mother of Sorrows. Fluid, beautifully constructed, and sparse, it's a book that sings heartbreak, while offering sorrow as a “cut-glass vase” through which its many angles offer time and again a new way of recognizing the varied, vertiginous, and ultimately always cracked self—with her/his cracked way of seeing.

          In the chapter or story, “My Mother's Clothes,” McCann writes about trying on his mother's clothes with his friend, Denny.

Like Denny, I could neither dispense with images nor take their flexibility as pleasure,

for the idea of self I had learned and was learning still was that one was constructed by

one's images—“When boys cross their legs, they cross one ankle atop the knee”—so

that one finally sought the protection of believing in one's own image and, in believing

in it as reality, condemned oneself to its poverty. (25)

          How clearly McCann articulates the experience not just of growing up gay in Suburbia 1950s and 60s, but of having a body, seeing that body as a kind of truth or “reality,” confined and condemned by cultural definitions that say, this image, yours, means this. And, believing this, what is it that we destroy? (I leave you with that question, not to be answered here, because it is the question that for years I have asked myself. The things we cannot know, perhaps, become our greatest muse)

*

Human characters, the real people of our lives, continually change and evolve in our eyes. It's not that we as people necessarily change so much in life (although some do) it's that our perspectives of each other are constantly shifting, moving further away into a tiny dot on the horizon, back into focus through a particular lens, and then bumping into each other. We see our mothers from a variety of angles, and if we are lucky or have half the brains of someone as genius as McCann, we seek out these different perspectives. Our real life characters are rounder and more complex than our fictionalized ones because they remain (even after death) on the loose, destined never to be fully captured.

          One might argue in opposition, as those lecturers and teachers I encountered, saying that in fact our real life characters are too close to us and we are too intertwined with them, entangled and attached. Our vision of our spouses, mothers, lovers, and children are bias, emotional, wildly nonobjective. Thus we fail to create whole characters on the page. Yet, McCann disproves this in spades. His self-portrait character, seems to lift to life on the page, and through these stories our nameless narrator reveals angle after angle of self, startling us at times, but always humbly, sometimes painfully, honest portrayals that dig at core emotional truths, many of which most writers wouldn't dare provoke. McCann in a recent VCFA lecture said: “You must double as both character and writer, therapist and patient.” What does this mean for us as writers of nonfiction and fiction?

          More and more the “issue” (if it is in fact even an issue) of genre and genre-blurring makes its way into our conversations as writers. For example, Kelly Nuxoll, in an online Poets & Writers post titled, “Obama's “bitter” and the Creative Nonfiction Writer: Postcard From the Campaign Trail,” says “Creative nonfiction offers a lens that is colored by voice, tone, and critical intelligence.” Nuxoll has her MFA in creative nonfiction, and she reports here, “I expect the reader to take my work for what it is—the perspective of a single individual.” And yet isn't that what writing always is, we ask? Creative nonfiction, according to Nuxoll has a specific form, with complex syntax that uses the devices of fiction to make a scene come alive.

          Referencing a specific political essay, but I believe also speaking in broader terms of creative nonficion, Nuxoll writes:

As a piece of writing, it lacks the speed and focus of a blog; the lead insofar as it has one,

is buried; the purpose is neither to advocate nor to inform but to ruminate on a theme.

           What leads in Nuxoll's piece is this highlighted quote: “As a creative nonfiction writer, I consider my first obligation to be to the truth, and the second to the integrity of the prose.”

And here, I find another tangent, what is it with our American pop-culture obsession with the truth, which prominently makes its home in reality TV?

          The point of having the category of “Creative Nonfiction” is that it's not Biography, Autobiography, or Journalism. It is about the writer's truth, whatever that may be, not about a public truth.

          Now, let me consider a different angle, not that of the interest of truth and non-truth. After reading Philip Lopate's recent essay in River Teeth, “In Defense of the Essay Collection,” I started to consider something else. Lopate defends the publication of the Essay Collection, which most publishers do not want to publish or try to get their writers to somehow squeeze their collections into other forms such as memoir.

Lopate has this to say on the vital differences between the essay and the memoir:

          The memoir tempts the memoirist to grandiose self-representation. The essay,

          with its essential modesty, discourages the impulse. The memoir tends to de-

          individuate its protagonist, enlisting him to serve as a slightly larger-than-life

          representative of the sufferings of a group or community, while the essay calls

         attention to the quirks and fallibilites we take as marks of our essential seperate-

         ness.

          These distinctions seem crucial for Lopate because he sees the importance of defining a form as vital to its reading. If we define our genres we then have a sense of what we expect when we begin to read. In terms of the essay, a form that wonders with the authors psyche, mind, imagination through any number of topics, Lopate writes, “(T)he essay form is such that—unlike the poem and the short story—it does not readily permit crystalline perfection. It is too open to the incidental, too impure, too forgiving” (23). This “shagginess” of the essay is why Lopate likes the form.

           Returning to Mother of Sorrows, I wonder if publishing the work as fiction had to do with defining what the reader can expect when entering the book, with labeling its form. The pieces are not essays, the book does not read as memoir, it feels most like a collection of stories. Still, why does McCann speak about the book as a work of nonfiction? Is it just that he wants to speak the truth about the book, or is there something else at play here? The book is known among writers as nonfiction, because that is what McCann has often called it. In fact in a recent email correspondence with writer and teacher, David Jauss, he insisted that he reads McCann's work as a collection of essays. So then, is it merely the publishers “trick” to label this work “fiction”?

         As I have said, the Truth Debate in terms of memoir and creative nonfiction writing, seems dull and boring to me. Last winter at VCFA, Robin Hemley, lectured against the push to sequester creative truth in the memoir. Some fellow(ette) students believed his speech “genius.” However, in the academic atmosphere of postmodernity (whatever that means) advocating creative truth and denying that there could ever be one truth, seems rather predictable to me. Of course, we all believe that blatant lying isn't permissible. But, most of us have undergraduate degrees from liberal arts colleges or departments where they hammered into us the merits of the Po-Mo world, a place where 'we just can't know.'

I support a letting go of our imagined capacity to define truth or what we can and can't know to a certain point. Recently I formed this statement after spending several months writing about my family and childhood: I no longer know what is true and what is imagined in my childhood relationship with my father.

          The oddity of Mother of Sorrows, perhaps its brilliance, arises from McCann's use of both genres, fiction and creative nonficion. He uses the mechanics of story-telling; he is not interested (as perhaps a memoir might be) in his own personal truths being brought out on the page. The truths of his brother and mother remain central here, and of course the title points to the books focus, his mother (we might expect the focus be McCann's experience of this mother-creature, which in many ways it is). McCann's work asks both the question of what is a self in the world and what is the art of constructing a self on the page.

          “Oh, right,” he said. “Cut glass. Your precious cut glass. But let me say this—

          what I am trying to talk to you about is not an obsession. It is me. It is who I am.

          It is my life.” (142)

         All our stories, our essays, our poems have a beginning, a middle, an end. It is to each of us to decide how we will construct the self of our pages. Even in fiction the authorial self is made present—it moves, it speaks, specific to the author. I think of bodies coming forth in bodily ways to our stories, rhythm, pressure, eruption, deflation, lying still, the deep silence that entombs and yet makes holy the radically unfamiliar marks of letters on this space of white that somehow conjure visions of light and color in our minds. I hear your voices in between the click and clack of the keys, “please, let me write one true thing.” How strange all this desire, all this longing and love for our craft, for ourselves.

-Emily Casey

Rebecca Solnit and "The Blue of Distance"

At first glance, the title of Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost might confuse. My advice to any reader: embrace the confusion. I first read this book, shortly after dislodging from the familiar confines of city life, while both relishing in the calm of the northeastern woods and bewildered by the transition. Solnit was a welcomed guide. After all, her collection of nine essays is, at its core, more than a “field guide;” it is a celebration of the origins of disorientation.

Painters and pilots, early pioneers and punk rockers, all have staked their place in Solnit’s prose, her wingspan as an essayist ranges far enough to encapsulate a grand portrait of things lost: of the lost history of her family, of 19^th century travelers lost in a desert in search of gold, of Yves Klein’s disappearance after his great leap into thin air. She offers a eulogy for lost creatures. She writes of lost objects, of lost memory, of lost love, and though she bears a sincere melancholy for the past, her stories are laced with a precious optimism.

In both form and content, A Field Guide to Getting Lost traipses over topics so vast that it almost threatens to lose readers in its tangled thread, but with a veteran spirit of adventure, Solnit exudes an assurance such that we feel safe wandering through her prose. When she strays into long anecdotal passages, she brings us back to familiar landmarks. When she dips into lengthy historical explanations, she resurfaces with an eccentric image, a classic song, a statement that leads like a riddle to points of interest, common attractions, as if guided by an invisible map.

Yet the most persistent theme throughout Solnit’s collection is not maps, geography, or epic journeys of lost souls—though they all have their place—but the color blue. “The Blue of Distance” is a term Solnit uses as arecurring title to link several of her essays and create a thread of color throughout the collection. Through Solnit’s own curiosity, we learn of artists in the 15^th century—the first generation of painters concerned with verisimilitude, with the way the world appeared before the eye—who used the color blue in their paintings to connote distance, “the color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away.”

Like an artist, Solnit utilizes the urban and cultural world around her: the architecture of San Fransisco, the stories of Nabokov, Borges’s “endless labyrinths,” Hitchcok’s Vertigo. She creates gestural portraits and surreal landscapes of how we search for, discover, and ultimately lose again and again our places in the world.

In one essay, Solnit reflects on the associative power of music as she recalls making mix-tapes for road trips, each a compilation of songs that got at “The evocation of place and its emotional resonance in that music.” For example, Geography Lessons, Mostly Tragic or “The Entirely Liquid Mr. North… a compilation about rivers and drinking, about drowning from the inside out,” which consisted mostly of southern tunes. She explains that many country singers—Patsy Cline, Bobby Gentry, Tanya Tucker among them—sang songs about anonymous protagonists, with vague descriptions of improbable loves, all filled with drama. “But the territory in which these dramas played themselves out were evoked in detail over and over again, and if they were tragic songs about the failure of human love,” she writes “they were also love songs about places.” Sometimes, landscapes, after all, offer a deeper anchor to our experiences than a melodious storyline of what occurs there. We may not turn back time, but we can return to the places of meaning to us.

And in such places, Solnit’s essays take a closer look at the natural side of things: the nature of hermit crabs, daisy chains, terra incognita—once featured on maps as a mark of “unknown land.” Which Solnit claims is no longer a legitimate label.But it oncewas. Or is it still? Might one say that all land is terra incognito to somebody? And that even when maps were labeled as such, all unknown land was in fact known, to someone?

In another essay, Solnit tells the story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish adventurer who lost his bearings in the Mississippi Delta and was captured and enslaved by natives. After ten years learning the native customs and languages, Cabeza de Vaca “had so adapted to this new life he had fallen into that he no longer considered himself lost” until he walked west, as far as New Mexico, where he found himself back among his once-fellow conquistadores, only to struggle to regain the old customs and habits he once knew well. “He was of the first of the Europeans lost in the Americas,” Solnit writes, “and like many of them he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.” This metamorphosisis akin to that of other creatures, “The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and re-form more than once in its life cycle.”

And still, Solnit returns again and again to the concept of blue: its color, its connotations, its etymological history. “The term blue comes from an old English word for melancholy or for sadness,” she explains, “blue moods, blue devils, the blues… The world from which the blues came is largely vanished.” She tells the story of the French artist Yves Klein, whose obsession with the color blue marked many of his most prominent works: a blue that represents “the spirit, the sky, and water, the immaterial and the remote,” a blue that “however tactile and close-up it is, it is always about distance and disembodiment.”

Through her examinations, Solnit comments on the fear of not knowing where we are, which has, based on innovation in technology, become virtually impossible in modern times. Likewise, perhaps it has even grown difficult to navigate anew through our own ideas, for “Some ideas are new, but most are only recognition of what has been there all along, the mystery in the middle of the room, the secret in the mirror.” Solnit suggests, but not without a glimmer of hope, faith even, that it is in the art of exploring that “Sometimes one unexpected thought becomes the bridge that lets you traverse the country of the familiar in an unprecedented way.”

An important theme, in many ways the bloodline of Solnit’s essays, like the story of Cabeza de Vaca, is the idea that getting lost means accepting change. Yet as I read A Field Guide to Getting Lost—the same days I set off, in my own way, to navigate through the blue of distance—I quickly realized, too, that pursuing change sometimes means accepting the sense of being lost, if only for a while.

~ Jericho Parms

Mark Doty's Still Life

“I have fallen in love with a painting… and the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.”

So begins Mark Doty’s book Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, as he explores the rhapsody of viewing a still life painting by the Dutch artist Jan Davidsz de Heem exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. More than an essay, though not quite a memoir, the book is an extended meditation on art and life, full of lyric observation and free association sure to carve a place for Doty in the history of writers drawn to the visual expressions of art.

The relationship between writers and the visual arts is nothing new. For Mark Doty it is the 17^th century Dutch still life painters that hold his rapture. Before him John Updike contemplated the Americans—Wyeth’s realism, Hopper’s light, Jackson Pollock’s frantic grace. Ralph Ellison wrote of the triumphant color of Romare Bearden. The modern German poet Rainer Maria Rilke completed many of his best works under the influence of Rodin’s bronze sculptures and was later awed by the paintings of Cézanne.

When Rilke encountered the work of Cézanne exhibited at the Salon d’ Automne during his stay in Paris in 1907, the poet visited the galleries day after day for months and wrote letters home to his wife. In those letters, later published as Letters on Cezanne, the poet ruminates on the artist’s paintings—still lifes, reclining nudes, landscapes—and the ways, like language, they communicate to the viewer. Like Rilke’s collection, Mark Doty’s book bears the intimacy of a letter home while it explores the boundaries of observation, considers the representation of objects, and exemplifies to what degree one artist’s eye can penetrate the essence of another’s art.

Though Doty’s observations on art are widely applicable to still life painting, it is Jan Davidsz de Heem’s “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon” and Adriaen Coorte’s “Still Life with Asparagus” that garner most of Doty’s reverence. While sparing readers much of the art history and context for the 17^th Dutch genre painting, Doty focuses his lens on the depiction of objects and the intimacy they maintain on an aging canvas, like the memory of objects in one’s own life. Of still life painting, he writes, “It is an art that points to the human by leaving the human out; nowhere visible, we’re everywhere.”

Like Doty’s poems, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon is full of exquisite detail. Doty articulates the spiritual nature of artistic encounter. “In the light that has come toward me through a canvas the size of a school notebook,” Doty writes, “we are all walking in the light of a wedge of lemon, four oysters, a half-glass of wine, a cluster of green grapes with a few curling leaves still attached to their stem.” Ultimately, he casts his attention on intimacy, memory, death, and the human condition.

In this sense Doty creates his own still life, weaving the memory of objects from his past, like the “red, pinwheeled peppermints” he remembered among the contents of his grandmother’s purse when he was a boy in rural Tennessee in the 1950s, “each wrapped in a shiny square of cellophane which twists at the ends into little flourishes.” The blue and white china platter among the vast collection of objects obtained at antique auctions and flea markets with his late partner, Wally, amidst other objects filling the rooms of the house, that amass to “tableaux and still lifes of old things spilling over, one season’s purchases crowding out the last’s.” With refreshing willingness to share these moments sparingly, Doty allows objects to create deeply moving illustrations of the larger concept at hand while allowing space for dialogue with a reader’s own thoughts on art and intimacy—informal invitations to join the great correspondence des arts. In writing, like in painting, there seems a sort of aesthetic mysticism that accompanies the act of creating from observation. Description is “an act of interiorizing what we see,” Doty writes. “Description delineates the world, yes, but in doing so it informs what’s seen with ourselves.”

It is through such suggestions, understated yet consistent, that Doty upholds his thread of spirituality, the transient nature—and ultimate continuity—of life and, furthermore, suggests a connection between elements of human existence and the depiction of objects in a still life painting, all of which contain a history of their own significance. They did, after all, belong to someone. “The paintings seem to refer to this life of ownership,” he writes, “and to suggest something of the feeling attached to things, while withholding any narrative.” Antiques acquire beauty as they mature. The same is true of paintings—their glazes crack, their coloration ages. Art is itself imbued with its own life, and in its greatest manifestations, it serves to bind us to the world. Through his poetic eye, Doty bestows the grace of still life and “the deep pun hidden in the term: life with death in it, life after the knowledge of death, is, after all, still life.”

~ Jericho Parms

Nabokov's Pale Fire

Nabokov’s Pale Fire is like nothing I have ever read, so fully realized are the dark mysteries of human experience within the magical world of his creation. Audre Lourde said that we cannot take apart the master’s house, using the master’s tools, and Nabokov brings this concept to fruition in Pale Fire. We must find a different way of seeing, of speaking as well as structuring, if we are to know and think about what we sense and feel but can’t seem to articulate. This is always the challenge we face as writers: how to craft work that speaks to that otherness that encapsulates each of us. The otherness of believing we are separate, that our experience is in some ways isolated and disconnected, when in truth we live lives of incredible similarity. Just as Charles Kimbote believed that his story of the fall of Zembla was so spectacular that John Shade was a fool not to use it in his great masterpiece, so too do we see ourselves at times—our great particularity. And yet in reading Pale Fire, as one comes to recognize the duel beauty of the magical world of Zembla and the world of the Shades, each seeking to recreate the pain and beauty of their histories in the aftermath of loss, we are given the experience …

We cannot help but scoff at Kimbote’s arrogance in his notes on the poem, even while we take great pleasure in the world of Zembla, and in fact eventually begin to forget the Shades as we more and more want only to return to the world of kings and adventure. This is Nabokov’s goal, to allow his readers to navigate an experience that we might come out of it with a different understanding of who we are. To be clear, I believe Nabokov is poking fun at his readers, but greater than that at our way of creating the world in our honor, or seeing it from the central focal point of “me”. Kimbote makes Shade’s poem into his own personal story of adventure, and even though we know all along that he is doing this, we are drawn so fully into Kimbote’s Zembla that we take more interest in it and in fact while giggling to ourselves about Kimbote’s interpretations of his interactions with the Shades, we allow the poem and the Shade’s to slip into the background, hoping that we’ll get our fill of Zembla and not have to think too often of the Shade’s. Yet, in the end, our great narrator begins to crumble, and we feel that perhaps we’ve been duped by a crazy, estranged professor making up fancy stories about himself¹.

How does this then affect us, the reader? In a way it reads like a poetic metaphor that must eventually be slaughtered if the poem is to manifest itself fully: we must kill the metaphor. Shade is dead and Kimbote’s credibility is destroyed, and we are left with ourselves, wondering what it all means, thinking a bit about whom this Nabokov guy is and what he’s up to? Is he taunting us?

Beyond the obvious beauty of Nabokov’s gorgeous sentences, which can be held up to those of Woolf, both sometimes so rich and exact that one wants to stop reading after a paragraph because so much is given in just that short space, Nabokov crafts this work with a duel plot meant bridge the world of the everyday with that of fantasy. I assert that the poetic rests only in both these worlds in that as Shade’s poem anchors itself in the familiar world of object and place through which we enter the fantastical realm of the poetic—a beyond of created perceptions—that we might then return to the familiar upon exiting the poem with an altered sense of what is, and what is possible. Similarly, we enter Zembla through Kimbote’s analysis of Shade’s poem, where we then become lost in the narrative of Zembla, in fantasy. But, what is changed of the reality of the Shade’s? What do we come to understand? If we see at the center of Shade’s poem, the suffering of the loss of his daughter Hazel, and his attempt to reconcile her tragedy, then perhaps we understand the truth behind Kimbote’s statement that he is rather like Hazel Shade. Rejected and socially marginalized, Hazel lived in the fantasy of her own creation, a place as beautiful (we might imagine) as that of Zembla. Her date, unwilling to waste his time getting to know her, makes an excuse to depart early, is this unlike the excuses made by the Shade’s when Kimbote came to call? Nabokov crafts his characters so that we cannot write them off as good, bad, honest, or ignorant, and when we think we’ve captured a character, Nabokov destroys our illusions, refusing to give us easy answers.
by Emily Casey

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Jenny Boully Bon Voyage

Absent in Jenny Boully's book The Body An Essay is the actual text. Her book is composed of footnotes to a missing text. Boully's work is challenging in a frustrating yet delirious way; she sees the book as an open form, a kind of living body. It's not the kind of book you can sit down and read through. You find yourself skipping around, stalling, daydreaming, flipping back to recover the fragment that keeps resurfacing in your mind. The question then that every reader asks is how do I read this book? The answer is, I have no idea. Yet, what Boully has done is force her readers (her contemporaries) to question the idea of a book, and also, considering her title, an essay.

     Boully's work is missing its body, the body has gone missing, or the body was erased, the body is void. The blank space above her footnotes reminds us that something is missing each page of the book. One page in the text is blank (p.56). One footnote is left blank (p.49). Blank space varies in size depending on the length of the footnotes. So what is the blank space or why is it there and what are we to do with it each page? What does Boully mean to say about the book with all this empty space?

     Reading the footnotes to the missing text, out of habit and a desire to connect, one attempts to find patterns and to link together multiple stories, or create stories. For example the “Great Poet” is referenced multiple times, enough so that we might begin to feel her as a character, if only vaguely and loosely created. The footnotes range from personal notes about the author to dense philosophical notes. Notes such as 153, “62° 17' 20”, 19° 2' 40” and 37.29 N, 79.52 W respectively” remind us that we are reading a work of art in which such coordinates can only signify something to the one who knows, much like an address only means something to the family who calls it home. At times I wonder if these notes are to be seen as a series of signifiers failing to signify, language breaking down, but then there are places when Boully offers fragments such as the quote in footnote 131, “...all women secretly desire to be sacrifices; they long to be 'the chosen one'” where I am struck, I smile, I say yes, I understand you/this. But, this is me, not everyone will respond to that footnote.

     What I begin to understand about this book comes from my desire to connect with a book, to feel at home there. We do this by following the established rules set out by the book at its start. Without such rules we feel adrift, uncertain of what to expect in the story or plot of the work. Boully challenges this concept of the book as having a set form, a way to enter and a way to exit, a plot that pushes us along in a highly formulaic manner. The essay more than other forms of writing, questions this already, but Boully's “essay” pushes these questions to a place of extreme perhaps to reset the scales a little.

     The form of a story, perhaps an essay as well, but more so a story, embraces and propels the idea of experience having a form, and thus we could also say of life having a story—a beginning, middle and end. Wherever there's an “end” we risk the loss of the “middle” which of course in books forms the majority. Not only that, the form of the story has for at least the last century embraced the idea of epiphany. We are now reading for an end and for the experience of epiphany. Now I'm being a bit dramatic here, but clearly contemporary trade fiction systematically attempts to hook its reader at the start, setting the hook with enticing bits about the plot, maintaining the catch with its character development and plot twists, only to dramatically release the reader with its grand finale or resolution. At the end, the reader closes the book with gusto, eager to do it all over again. But, do what? We aren't reading for language, we aren't really reading for meaning, we do gather information, and we feel a certain prescribed way. The overwhelming consensus about a good book is “I can't put it down,” because I've got to get to the end. What does this mean about the experience of books?

     If writers are given the task of showing readers how to read their work, then writers are responsible for how we read. From what I have begun to gather in this semester of learning about and exploring creative nonfiction, the essay is the avantgarde literary form. The question for me is, as always, will readers (not just writers) be up for the likes of the Jenny Boully-esque bon voyage?

by Emily Casey