The Paris Review's Blog, page 156

The Art of Distance No. 18

In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below.

“Record collectors love to spend long hours trawling through boxes and bins in pursuit of the rarity, the one-off, the perfect B side, but I think this same obsession with the archival can apply to literature lovers as well. There’s a triumphant thrill to be found in this hunt for the unknown, and as someone who spends a lot of time sifting through the Paris Review archive as part of my job, I’ve been lucky enough to feel it often. Wait a minute, I realize, we have an Art of that?! Those writers took part in a roundtable in the eighties, the transcript of which was published in a back issue? Colleagues who’ve received many a multi-exclamation-mark’d message from me can attest—there are some buried treasures to be unearthed on theparisreview.org! In that spirit, this week’s Art of Distance lifts the paywall on a series of one-offs, rarities, and uncategorizable pieces from the Paris Review archive. If you find yourself looking for something a little different to read, perhaps one of the following will be a welcome discovery.” —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor

 

Truman Capote. Photo: Andy Warhol.

 

Although The Paris Review is known for its Writers at Work interviews, if you read enough back issues you’ll find that the magazine has also published a number of interviews that don’t necessarily fit within the usual “Art of … ” rubric. There’s the one and only Art of the Musical, with Stephen Sondheim, from the Spring 1997 issue, for instance, or this “composite interview” with Pablo Picasso from Summer–Fall 1964. Or this Winter 2016 interview with the critic Albert Murray (a close friend of Ralph Ellison’s), who discusses the history of the Black American literary tradition. Or 1993’s “A Humorist at Work,” with Fran Lebowitz; I dare you to read it without laughing out loud.

Art portfolios, too: if you’d like to see Andy Warhol’s party shots of William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Shirley MacLaine, Allen Ginsberg, and more, then you’re in luck. Or there’s this selection of work from the manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, known for his antiheroes, in Spring 2006. Speaking of images—poetry and art are generally kept somewhat separate in the Review, but the Summer 2017 issue paired a selection of poetry from Jeffrey Yang with paintings by Kazumi Tanaka. (Such collaborations have appeared in other issues, too, such as this one from Peter Cole and Terry Winters.)

Or how about a philosophical essay by Simone Weil on the problem of religion, published in the second issue? If that doesn’t sate your need to ponder existence, there are also these texts by Flaubert, written on the occasion of two deaths in his life and appearing for the first time in English in the Summer 2007 issue. And here’s something fun you probably hadn’t thought to look for: a Trainspotting glossary from Irvine Welsh, published in Spring 1996.

One of the wonderful things about little magazines like The Paris Review is that they can so often be the site of the odd, the curious, and the unknown. Round out your journey with this essay by George Wickes on the history of the little magazine and the birth of Modernism as we know it, published in Summer 1969.

 

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Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Memories of Unrest

In Tash Aw’s column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him.

I was born in a region fractured by civil uprising, in a time of violent protest and revolution that would color almost all of my childhood and teenage years. Throughout the seventies, the struggles in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, played out on an international stage, dominating the news. Away from the headlines, smaller struggles would flare up in Jakarta or Bangkok or Manila, and we got used to seeing news images of students taking to the streets, or of burning cars in front of buildings with barbed wire. In the relative calm of Kuala Lumpur, these reports hovered constantly in the air but were largely absent from conversations at home. The events took place in the capitals of our closest neighbors, in cities that looked like ours, filled with people we knew. The papers would arrive, my parents would flick through them without comment, and I would read them myself later, trying to figure out what I could. At the earliest age, I understood that instability was so much a part of our lives that it wasn’t worth talking about.

It was not so much that we had become inured to trauma by our own experience of poverty and deprivation—a theory frequently offered by people of my parents’ generation. As an adolescent I began to form my own critique of Southeast Asian politics, railing against our reticence to address the catastrophic events in the region (“You young people, you don’t know what real suffering is, talk to us about revolution once you know what it means to starve”). We were trying to deny the truth: that our own peace was fragile, too newly attained for us to feel that it would stay for long. Malaysia was still recovering from the killing of hundreds of its ethnic Chinese citizens in the riots of May 1969—a subject rarely discussed in public or in private. In Indonesia, Sukarno’s New Order was struggling to maintain a semblance of normality after the massacre of an estimated one million people during the coup of September 1965. It felt as though violence on a national scale could erupt at any moment. On my way to class one day (I was still in primary school), I saw on the front pages of the newspapers Benigno Aquino’s body on the tarmac at Manila airport following his assassination. In the way that we, a traditional Asian family, were superstitious about talking about death for fear of inviting it into our homes, we were afraid of dissecting the turbulence elsewhere in the region, in case it somehow pushed through the cracks and filled our own lives again.

But when I recall this period—from the mid-’70s to the fall of Marcos in 1986—what I remember is not the danger but the sense of optimism. We should have been paralyzed by fear, but instead our days were filled with a glorious normality. We went to school, we saw Star Wars at the cinema, we discovered burgers and french fries. Malaysia, like many of its neighbors in Southeast Asia, was just at the start of two decades of rapid economic growth, and perhaps it was precisely this deliberate silence about the trauma, both recent and continuing, that allowed us to enjoy that moment. Look away from suffering long enough and soon it’ll cease to exist; we can make anything disappear if we simply deny its existence. Or perhaps our memories are selective. When we creep back into the recesses of our political memory to try and fashion a narrative from it, what are we trying to do? We wanted so much to be middle class, and for violence and oppression to belong to our past rather than our present, that we retained only what was pleasurable.

Anocha Suwichakornpong’s second feature-length film, By the Time it Gets Dark, is ostensibly a story about the brutal crackdown on student demonstrators at Thammasat University in Bangkok in 1976—the year of the filmmaker’s birth, forty years before the film was released—but its unpredictable, twisting narrative doubles back on itself in such strange ways that it becomes an interrogation of collective memory, a questioning of the role of history in contemporary Southeast Asia. The premise appears simple: two women arrive at an isolated house in the countryside, relieved to be there yet not entirely at ease with each other as they admire the spectacular views of the dry northern landscape. They have the clothes and demeanor of Bangkok dwellers, and we soon learn that they are there to tell the story of the Thammasat University killings. Taew, the older woman, was a leading figure in the student protests of the time, and has since become a celebrated writer. Ann, the younger, is a filmmaker, and spends the following days organizing oddly formal interviews with Taew, recorded on her camera, trying to piece together enough information to write a screenplay for a film based on the killings.

Taew’s responses to Ann’s questions are factual at best, and sometimes even stilted. In remembering the events of 1976, she never rejoices in the emotional highs of student activism and resists a dramatic rendition of the horrors she witnessed. Injustice, brutality, the confusion of opposing forces—everything is delivered matter-of-factly and so stripped of intimacy that we start to wonder how Ann is ever going to fashion a movie out of such dry, event-based information. And yet we know that she will go on to do so, for spliced between their interviews are scenes from the young Taew’s student days, sometimes woven into her interviews to form a dramatization of her recollections, other times offered frankly as takes from Ann’s film, with cameramen and stylists entering the frame. Their appearance feels like deliberate trespass. How far do we have to intrude into someone’s uncooperative memory in order to re-create history?

We keep thinking that sooner or later, Ann will make a breakthrough, that she and Taew will form some sort of intimacy, but if anything, they begin to pull further apart. At a rural café—the kind of part-hipster, part-authentic country establishment that one comes across often in Thailand—they slip into an awkward conversation with the young woman who works there. That young woman’s line of questioning is direct and guileless. Why are you writing a film on Taew’s life? It’s not your life, it’s hers, she should be writing it. Still, Ann persists in her project, and one evening Taew herself interrogates Ann on her motives: Why does Ann want to make the film?

As I listened to their exchange I felt as though I’d heard Taew’s questions many times before, perhaps paraphrased but essentially meaning this: Why bother dredging the past, when you have so much to live for in the present? Why turn your gaze backward to shadowy pain when you could be peering into a bold, brassy future? It is a conversation that much of Asia continues to have with itself—a tussle between generations old and new, if we want to be reductive about it; a struggle to define a modern identity that isn’t yet sure how to process the trauma that has pockmarked its recent history.

Ann’s response is that she simply wants to tell a meaningful story. Her own life has been uneventful and inconsequential compared to Taew’s. She is young and inhabits a self-regarding world of filmmakers, actors, and celebrities—a world to which we are transported through a separate storyline that follows the fate of Peter, a glamorous Bangkok actor whose days are filled with a troubling insouciance. How can life be so easy for anyone, even someone as gorgeous and charming as he is? He is offered a role in an indie film that sounds as if it could be Ann’s project, though we never find out for certain. Elsewhere, the girl at the country café reappears as a waitress in a Bangkok restaurant and a cleaner at Peter’s luxury condo block. We see Ann and Taew arriving at the house in the northern countryside—only now they look like movie stars, with movie-star hair and makeup. All these lives intersect without truly connecting, the stories layered on top of each other, repeating in ways we can’t fully comprehend.

I first watched the film with Thai and Malaysian friends who thought it was about Buddhist destiny. We are only living out the life that was written for us, full of pockets of pain trapped in our pasts. Watching the film again, I felt it managed to be at once accepting and questioning in its notions of fate, challenging the way we have been taught to accept suffering as a necessary element of our histories, both national and personal. Taking a break from the difficult interviews with Taew, Ann goes on a solitary walk through the forest, where she sees a mysterious young girl dressed in tiger-suit pajamas. She desperately pursues this vision of innocence but eventually loses sight of the child and collapses in tears without knowing exactly why. Maybe it is because the story of our countries’ trauma is entwined in that of our own intimate conflicts. We can try to consign one part of that pain to the dim margins of history, but what do we do with the hurt that lingers on?

 

Tash Aw’s most recent novel is We, the Survivors.

Staff Picks: Punctures, Punishers, and Podcasts

Film still from Florian Heinzen-Ziob’s Dancing at Dusk—A Moment with Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring.” © polyphem Filmproduktion.

In March, a formidable troupe of thirty-eight dancers from fourteen African countries was preparing for a world tour of Pina Bausch’s 1975 The Rite of Spring. The pandemic interrupted plans for international travel just before their opening night in Dakar. But the group nevertheless made the best of the situation, moving operations to a neighboring beach for a final run-through before cameras. The result: Dancing at Dusk, a thirty-nine-minute dance film available on Vimeo through July. Bausch’s Dionysian choreography, with its invigorating and relentless rhythms, unearths dark truths about human relationships and suffering—themes only intensified by the prelockdown timing of the performance. While the entire ballet is an athletic feat, Anique Ayiboe’s performance as “the chosen one” is particularly impressive, her rhythmic convulsions giving body to the tresillos and syncopations of Stravinsky’s score. At the end of her solo, she leans forward on a dangerous incline, her arms outstretched. As if pushed by the last spattering of chords, she collapses, and the ballet ends. The sun is nearly set, and a thin sliver of ocean delineates sand from sky. The film crew erupts into slow applause as the tired dancers limp toward one another, laughing and embracing. On the day of this performance, the world, too, was on the precipice of a collapse. But as I watched the dancers embrace, I was reminded that there may yet be some hope, some eventual time for shared recovery. —Elinor Hitt 

I think that saying “I love history” is a bit like saying “I love art”—a generic “about me” statement from a college student’s 2005 Facebook profile—but damn it, I do love history, particularly when it’s combined with my favorite art form, fiction. So when the writer Kaitlyn Greenidge says she began writing novels as a way to democratize access to history, I am, as I believe is still said, here for it. When she goes on to talk about exploring absences in the archive through fiction, I am even more emphatically so. Greenidge says all of this and more on the most recent episode of BOMB’s excellent podcast, FUSE, in conversation with the artist and filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary. Gary, in turn, describes an approach to film that brings pieces of history directly into contact with the present to probe the idea of inheritance; she mixes footage she shoots herself with archival film, including segments that she alters to make her own by scratching, bleaching, and painting them. The two talk about the work of identifying and unsilencing stories—Gary’s within her family and Greenidge’s from American and Haitian history. Their exchange leaves the listener impatient to experience their works in progress but, in the meantime, inspired. —Jane Breakell

 

Still from Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen.

 

There were so many small things to mourn when the world came crashing to a halt this spring—weddings postponed and trips canceled. Among them, for me, was the ability to see my friend Sam Feder’s documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen play at the Tribeca Film Festival. Luckily, it’s now on Netflix, and it’s perfect viewing for this strange period, when our attention flickers between the television shows that evaporate into our changeless days and the disintegrating country outside our windows. Ostensibly about the history of trans representation in cinema, the documentary, like any unassailable thesis, folds in so much more: questions of race, of the strange yet indelible desire to see people who look like us on screen, and of how the culture we consume shapes our understanding of the world. Anyone who is not a white cis man in this country has taught themselves, perhaps unconsciously, to read between the lines of Hollywood films. In exchange for the chance to see people who look like us, or love like us, experience joy, we have learned to block out the tortured, Hays Code–inspired endings that befall characters who transgress society’s rules. Disclosure explores how these transgressions of gender have been coded into moving pictures for as long as the pictures have moved—and how our beliefs and laws have, in turn, been moved by them. One gay friend, after yet another difficult conversation with his conservative mother, sent her a link to Disclosure along with the note: “I’m not trans, but I experienced a lot of these same things, and this will help you understand me better.” It is a film that might help all of us understand ourselves better. —Nadja Spiegelman

God, do I love Phoebe Bridgers’s debut album, Stranger in the Alps. I fell for it hard when I was working on bringing her into the studio so she could record a piece for the next season of The Paris Review Podcast (more on that when … well, when people are able to gather in places like recording studios again). Then I got deep into her other projects and began eagerly awaiting her second solo record, the just-released Punisher. Here’s the thing: musically, Bridgers is not reinventing the wheel, but it’s a great wheel, and she’s a melodic virtuoso with a songs-of-innocence voice that delivers grown-up songs of experience. Bridgers is, to my ear, among the best contemporary lyricists, keeping company with Ani DiFranco, Richard Buckner, Sufjan Stevens, and her collaborator Conor Oberst, all while looking back toward Joni Mitchell. After about ten listens, I’ve fallen hard for Punisher, too, but I’ll admit I was initially put off by the slick production. On Alps, every song feels mostly like a person played it in front of a mic; Punisher is awash in layers of Pro Tools and keyboards and inarticulable effects. But the same simple, bottomless songwriting is at work. My current favorites are “Garden Song” and “I Know the End”—the first and last tracks—and maybe “Halloween,” a soft, dreamy song about the freedom of disguises. I suppose I would have preferred another record like Alps, without the next-big-thing costume on, but Bridgers is a real and profound artist, and I’ll gratefully follow her wherever she’s going. —Craig Morgan Teicher

You sit in the theater, waiting for the play to begin. As the audience grows impatient, an actor appears and announces a delay. They reassure you: the play will begin soon. Five minutes later, “one thousand men” enter and attack the audience. The play is called Intolerance. The sequel follows the same pattern, except it is called The French Revolution. The tickets “are priced at a figure accessible only to a particularly well-to-do class of theater-goers,” and the audience is attacked as they stream out to the lobby, “where the usual French Provincial furnishings will be appropriate.” Such are the barbed twists to be found in the knockout Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas, edited by Aldon Nielsen and Laura Vrana, which puncture the “polished surface of civility.” Along with Calvin C. Hernton and Ishmael Reed, Thomas was a young member of the Umbra Workshop, and he straddled, or was claimed by, various avant-gardes: the Black Arts Movement, the Language poets, and the New York School. However, Thomas plays with and confounds his labels; after one of these titles, Harryette Mullen called him “the definitive poet of the Marvelous Land of Indefinitions.” Thomas is “a collector / Of tones,” and the five hundred pages of his collected poems cover such ground, such range, that I am left with a contradiction of adjectives. These poems ring with the thunder crack of wit and invention. They are “a housecall on a troubled century.” Thomas mocks the veneers of Western literature, of “thinking in strong but well-scrubbed Germanic / Words adopted by romantic conversation … to counterfeit a long melodious decay / We might call Art or serious concern.” It is dull and violent and cruel, “living under a weird tradition / of Europe’s stifling conceit,” and Thomas’s restless experimentation and strange shifts embody these disjunctures and come with a “vow to concoct new mythologies / That wouldn’t / Forge us such raw cruelties.” “Ancestors do not go away / You say they are here / It is not even a question / Of return,” he writes. “All silence says music will follow.” —Chris Littlewood

 

Lorenzo Thomas, center. Photo courtesy of Kelly Writers House, via Wikimedia Commons (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...).

The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

—Translated from the Japanese by Ryan Holmberg

 

Kuniko Tsurita was born in 1947 in Japan. In 1965, at age eighteen, while still in high school, she debuted in the legendary alt-manga monthly Garo, where she was the magazine’s first and only regular female contributor until the late seventies. Tsurita’s early work reflects her interest in bohemian youth culture, while her later work is more surreal and dystopian, with influences ranging from modern French literature to the manga of her peers in Garo, including Yoshiharu Tsuge, Seiichi Hayashi, and Shigeru Mizuki, for whom she worked as an assistant for a short time in the late sixties. In 1973, Tsurita was diagnosed with lupus, at which point specters of death began to heavily shadow her work. She died in 1985 at age thirty-seven.

Ryan Holmberg is an arts and comics historian. He has edited and translated books by Seiichi Hayashi, Osamu Tezuka, Sasaki Maki, Tadao Tsuge, Yoshiharu Tsuge, and others.

The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud , by Kuniko Tsurita, translated by Ryan Holmberg, was published earlier this month. Excerpt courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.

Re-Covered: The Orlando Trilogy

In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

 

The Orlando Trilogy—which has just been reissued in the UK by Bloomsbury (under the title Orlando King)—is British novelist Isabel Colegate’s masterwork about personal, political, and public mythmaking. Colegate takes the scaffolding for her tale from Sophocles’s Theban plays. Her Oedipus Rex is Orlando King, a young man who scales the greasy pole of power and privilege in the thirties. “We know the story of course, so nothing need be withheld,” she writes on the opening page. “We choose a situation in the drama to expose a theme: passing curiosity must look elsewhere, we are here profoundly to contemplate eternal truths. With ritual, like the Greeks. With dreams, like Freud. Let us pray.” The trilogy spans the middle of the twentieth century. By the end of the thirties, Orlando is a wealthy businessman and respected politician; he’s also inadvertently killed his biological father and married the dead man’s widow, and she has borne him his beloved daughter, Agatha. But the Second World War brings with it our hero’s downfall. Agatha, like Antigone before her, stumbles around in the wreckage—that of both the wider nation and her individual family—and finds herself forced to choose between her country and her kin.

Originally published as three separate novels—Orlando King (1968), Orlando at the Brazen Threshold (1971), and Agatha (1973)—this is the third time that Colegate’s trilogy has been reprinted in a single volume. Penguin got there first in 1984, followed by Virago in 1996—so it’s certainly not a straightforward case of overdue reappraisal. As her latest publishers rightly point out, Colegate—who’s still alive today, age eighty-eight—has been ranked among the likes of English literary heavyweights Penelope Fitzgerald, Anita Brookner, Penelope Lively, and Elizabeth Taylor, yet until now, only two of her thirteen novels remained in print: her debut The Blackmailer (1958) and The Shooting Party (1980), which won the W. H. Smith Annual Literary Award and was swiftly adapted into an acclaimed film. Though other novels with which The Orlando Trilogy might be fruitfully compared—Lively’s Booker-winning Moon Tiger (1987), for example, or Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy (1960, 1962, and 1965)—have long been claimed as bona fide masterpieces (the former is a Penguin Modern Classic, and the latter an NYRB Classic), Colegate’s trilogy seems to find itself snared in a frustrating loop of rediscovery and neglect.

One can’t help but wonder if this has something to do with the boldness of the triptych. Could it be that there’s almost too much here for readers to grasp? If I were asked to describe the trilogy in only one line, I’d call it an impressive historical family saga that critiques the intertwined evils of hereditary privilege and capitalism. A mouthful of a sentence, to be sure. But these novels are also richly drawn, psychologically astute character studies. They’re novels that showcase distinct stylistic innovation in the form of Woolfian interior monologues and cinematic jump cuts. And we must not forget their mythic underpinnings, which, as Aileen Pippett observed in her 1969 New York Times review of Orlando King, never swamp the text but instead helpfully offer readers a route in to the narrative. With these clues in place, Pippett argues, “the story becomes more comprehensible and compelling.” Or, as Melissa Harrison puts it in her introduction to the new edition, the mythic “lends the domestic, the social and the political aspects of all three novels a kind of archetypal significance.” This is key. The Orlando Trilogy is very much a story about a particular period in British history, but in shining a light on the past, Colegate also illuminates the present.

When it comes to her depiction of the English upper classes, Colegate has no equal. Time and time again, her novels expose the corruption and hypocrisy that lies at the heart of the British establishment. As one of the characters in Statues in a Garden (1964), the novel she published immediately before Orlando King, angrily educates another: “They’re corrupt, inefficient, money-mad, immoral, unjust, based on falsehood. Their whole creed’s a pack of lies.” Despite any notion we might have of the twentieth century as an era of social progress, the upper classes have, for the most part, maintained their stranglehold on politics, commerce, and business. We need only look to British Parliament today to realize that, tragically, very little has changed. As Agatha’s stepbrother Paul writes in the final volume of the trilogy, “English and smug are synonymous words.”

*

From the Great Depression through Appeasement and the Second World War, and on into the postwar world, Agatha draws the trilogy to a close with both the Suez Crisis and the ongoing scandal of the Cambridge Five—the British spy ring who passed information to the Soviet Union—hanging over the country. Colegate’s concerns are the huge shifts—societal, political, and economic—that took place in Britain in the wake of World War II. “Caught up in the course of history,” her protagonists, whose interior landscapes she burrows deep into, are prisms through which we see these vicissitudes play out.

Orlando, the illegitimate son of two unmarried Cambridge students, is adopted by a man named King, one of the lovers’ kindly tutors. King takes the baby with him to France, where he settles in Brittany. When his adopted son comes of age, after an isolated but idyllic childhood, King sends him to England. The older man writes the younger one six letters of introduction—including one to Orlando’s biological father, Leonard, now a successful businessman and aspiring politician. Neither father nor son is aware of their blood ties; Orlando’s mother never told her lover that she was pregnant, and King hasn’t told Orlando the identity of his biological parents.

The England on which Orlando King opens—and the one to which twenty-one-year-old Orlando is first introduced—is a world of hunger marches and unemployment, but also of the excess and frivolity of the Bright Young Things. “What would you think he might have thought?” Colegate asks of her wide-eyed hero when he first arrives in London.

It was December. Nearly 1931. That’s a year we’ve heard of. Would he have seen dole queues, hunger marches? Would he have sensed the shabby political comings and goings, the presence, subdued, of the possibility of panic, the earth tremors beneath the civilization in decay?

None of this, however, makes its mark on Orlando. He’s preoccupied by the women, “and after that the luxury, the ease, the things to do and see and eat and say, the quickness, cleverness and beauty.” No doubt this has something to do with the seclusion and simplicity of his upbringing, but it’s also indicative of his key failing, the one that will eventually contribute to his undoing: his lack of heart.

Still, at first Orlando’s future looks bright. King’s introduction is all that’s needed to admit him entry into the old boys’ network. Orlando is charming and good-looking: he attracts women and impresses men. Swapping his baggy corduroys and fisherman’s jerseys for spats and a cigarette holder, Orlando isn’t so much indoctrinated by these men as smoothly assimilated into their world. And once there, he immediately makes himself at home: “admiration he took for granted wherever he went.” As his friend Graham keenly observes, Orlando is clever and articulate, but perhaps most important of all, he’s young: “Youth sits on Orlando like the dawn on the mountains, religiously immanent, lending him the illusion—if it is an illusion—of warmth.” Certainly it’s an illusion. Artifice, in all its guises, stalks Orlando’s rise to power and success, especially when it comes to his entry into politics. Copying the men around him, from whom he takes his lead, he treats politics like a game. It’s Lord Field (Conrad), Leonard’s landowning brother-in-law and Orlando’s mentor, who first floats the idea to the younger man. “I’m not holding out to you any idea of your duty,” he tells his protégé, “or of glory or renown or anything like that. I’m just holding out to you the sheer fun of the thing.”

There are some who are battling for a fairer world. Graham, who’s a communist, is a case in point, but he’s a rare exception to the money-grabbing Tories who make up the vast majority of Orlando’s associates. These are men content to double down on England’s still class-riven status quo and protect their own interests, and to hell with any notion of the greater good. This, of course, is one of the factors that leads to the popularity of Appeasement, of which Orlando—who, by this point in his ascendance, is a Conservative MP as well as the chairman of a company that produces armaments—is a key proponent. He’s “not above making a packet out of the manufacture of bombs,” as one of his stepsons observes to the other.

Orlando gives a speech to Parliament in which he claims that the Nazi Party’s exploits, although troubling, are “nothing to do with politics.” It is, as Harrison shrewdly asserts, “a breathtaking piece of ideological equivocation to rival anything we have recently witnessed at the dispatch box.” This is part of a larger argument that runs through Harrison’s essay: the strange uncertainty of our current time makes these books more pertinent today than ever before, regardless of their historical specificity. To read The Orlando Trilogy now, Harrison suggests, “during another period of seismic change, lends it particular resonance, for the questions Colegate’s characters struggle with echo clearly today: how should we balance individualism with the good of the collective? Is real change desirable, or even possible any more? What of duty and patriotism and religious faith—do they have any currency? Has capitalism disrupted our moral instincts? Where, if anywhere, might hope lie?”

As Colegate so brilliantly illustrates, class, politics, and power are inextricably entwined—as they still are in Britain, and so many other Western countries, today. The men in charge like to talk about duty and responsibility, of the loyalty one owes one’s country and how important it is to play by the rules; but they’re also the ones who’ve set—and can shift—the parameters of the game. “You’re always climbing up the ladder, that’s your world,” Agatha says when she angrily confronts Conrad in the final book, “that’s your world, the ladder with the rungs in it and everything according to the structure of rules which you’ve made, respect for the man who climbs the ladder fastest.” It’s Graham who, very early on, sums the situation up most plainly and pithily: “Mr Orlando is a perfect gent. In other words a perfect shit.” Conrad, for example, has no trouble squaring the regular visits he pays to a certain Mayfair establishment with the notion he has of himself as a gentleman of honor and scruples. We know he’s a hypocrite. But when, toward the end of Agatha, he unhesitatingly betrays one of his closest family members, there’s still something shocking in the full revelation of just how cruelly misshapen the so-called morals he claims to hold really are.

*

This is what Colegate does with excellence: she never resorts to the cheap and easy option of poking fun at her subjects, the route so often taken when it comes to the depiction of the English upper classes. Instead, she takes them just as seriously as anyone else, but in doing so, she strips them bare, exposed for all to see. As the screenwriter Julian Fellowes puts it so perspicuously in his introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Shooting Party—which is set on a country estate on 1913—“By 1914, Colegate is saying, ‘being a gentleman’ had more to do with choosing the correct shirt studs than honour, more to do with shooting well than truth.” Fellowes cites The Shooting Party—both the novel and the 1985 film adaptation—as an important inspiration for both the film Gosford Park and the hugely popular TV series Downton Abbey. Though Colegate herself has been sidelined, there’s no question that she’s played an integral part in the popular culture’s notion of early twentieth century upper-class British life.

Colegate’s novels offer readers clear-eyed, illuminating windows onto this now bygone world. As an interview with her that ran in Country Life magazine in 1998 pointed out, Colegate’s insight into this particular “strand of English society associated with the landed gentry will be of interest to future social historians—in the way that Trollope, say, is today, as evidence of the society he knew.” And indeed, it’s a world she knows—or once knew—firsthand. Her father, Sir Arthur Colegate, was a Conservative MP, and both he and his wife came from families with country seats. On the other hand, however, one could just as vehemently argue that her novels aren’t so much depictions of a long-dead world. They are portraits of an all-too-recent past, the tenacious vestiges of which are still hugely influential in contemporary Britain. This, after all, is exactly how Colegate herself thought of the trilogy when she was writing it in the late sixties and early seventies, an era more commonly associated with free love, feminism, and social change. She was under no illusions that she was writing historical novels. She was merely unpacking the early years, the echoes of which she still saw playing out around her.

 

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here . 

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the NYR Daily, The Financial Times, The New York Times Book Review, and Literary Hub, among other publications. 

You Have the Right to Remain Silent

French postcard, c. 1910

The other night I was doing what I do all too often after a long day: watching crime shows on TV. My tastes run fairly low. CSI, Criminal Minds, NCSI, and, my personal favorite, Special Victims Unit. I am capable of marathoning any of these shows, but that night was the nadir. On Wednesdays my husband works late, and there’s no one to stop me. I’d already spent two or three hours watching heinous crimes depicting women in various states of torment and decay. My excuse to myself was that I was mulling something over—something that disturbed me more than threats of bondage and mutilation.

That afternoon I’d been working on a short story that I was enjoying, but it contained a problem. It was loosely based on an argument I’d had with a neighbor regarding the pruning of our backyard tree. It seems that I had miscalculated what his share should be in terms of caring for the ancient oak tree whose branches and shade we both enjoyed. I’d proposed an even three-way split that included the family in whose yard the tree actually sits. The wife in that family was ill and so I’d taken this financial task upon myself. And then I received the email.

I liked this neighbor and was stunned when he sent me a three paragraph harangue for setting a precedent regarding the oak as communal property that required equal fiscal responsibility. It seemed that I had assumed powers that were not mine to assume. He’s an accountant and I’m not. Enough said. Why not pick up the phone? Or talk to me in person? Instead he’d thrown the book at me. After my initial shock, I did what I normally do when someone sends me something of this nature. I filed it away. I have a special folder for such matters. It’s called “MISC IDEAS.”

Now, I was faced with a moral dilemma. This neighbor, with whom I’ve gone holiday caroling, voted for the same political candidates, swapped recipes, and become Facebook friends, had inadvertently given me the germ of a story and, the closer I got to feeling good about the story, the worse I felt about writing it. How could I draw from what had transpired between us—even if it really wasn’t about us anymore at all, but merely a springboard to say something about love and loss, mortality and the human condition? I tried changing tree pruning into sidewalk repair or loud music, but the impact just wasn’t the same. It had to be a tree. And the accountant really couldn’t become a dentist, could he?

The previous Sunday, I’d voiced my concern about the story with another neighbor, a good friend who also happens to be a reporter at a major metropolitan newspaper. I’d already shown him the angry email. Over brunch I told him that I was going to write a thinly veiled story based on the incident. “Oh, no,” he said. “You can’t do that. You’ll have to move away.”

That Wednesday evening, guilt and fear were getting the better of me. I lay on my couch, paralyzed, watching body after body being sliced and diced and reassembled on a coroner’s metal table.  I was pondering my dilemma as Detectives Stabler and Benson collared a rape suspect and Stabler read him his Miranda rights.

You have the right to remain silent.

Anything you say can, and will, be used against you.

This time those words struck a chord. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. This is what I needed to explain to my neighbor in a language he’d understand.

 *

Most civilians don’t really grasp what writers do. They think we stare out the window and make up things in our heads. It doesn’t occur to them (until it’s too late) that we are scavengers. We pick at any flesh on the bones that will feed our stories. We gather scraps and junk, detritus of what others discard. We are hoarders of the gritty details of people’s lives. That snippet about the family with the color-coded towels. The woman whose million-dollar home, carved into a cliff, didn’t contain a single item of food. The husband whose wife caught him cheating when she saw their E-ZPass bill. (How many times do you need to cross the George Washington Bridge in a week anyway?) We may as well be going out on a Sunday morning with a metal detector, scouring the playground for any tiny treasures left behind.

But it isn’t the object we cherish as much as our need to transform it. Much as the visual artist finds objects on the street that work their way into a collage. This is at the heart of the very process of writing. We aren’t just appropriating people’s lives. Recently I received a letter about a short story I’d published. The writer said that he was impressed to see that my father was such a patient man. He wasn’t. If my father had morphed into a patient man in my story, then that was because it suited my needs. My father was anything but patient.

But if, God forbid, a reader finds him or herself in your story, they are rarely understanding. It’s not really you, the writer protests. It’s just somebody who looks and acts a lot like you, and maybe lives not that far from where you grew up and majored in college in essentially what you majored in. But it’s not really you. It’s a concoction of my imagination. All of this, usually, is to no avail. How can we explain to those whose lives we pilfer that a story, no matter how close it may feel to truth, is a made-up thing?

Tell this to my cousin, who stopped speaking to me when I referred to her as “wild in her youth” (she was, at the time, in her fifties) in a short story. Or to my late father, who found some of his tirades pop up in an article in New Woman magazine that his secretary thought he’d enjoy, so she put it on his desk. People do recognize themselves in our stories. Maybe they don’t see their whole selves but they’ll see someone who has blue eyes and a round face, or is left-handed and who maybe drinks a little too much after work, or is having an affair with one of his students, and bingo. The reader will have a eureka moment: Ah, that’s me.

What’s a writer to do? In life we are all told to go get some experience. Join the merchant marine. Sail around the world as Melville did. Go to war. But some writers have their experiences at home in the safety (or danger) of their families, among neighbors and friends. Shouldn’t eavesdropping be a legitimate research tool? If someone is talking loudly near me on their cell phone, I have no compunction about writing that conversation down and labeling it “for future use.”

There’s a sad anecdote I recall hearing about Marilyn Monroe. When she married Arthur Miller, the playwright, she made him promise to never write about her, and he swore he wouldn’t. Then one day, when she was pregnant with their child, she went to his desk during an argument and found reams and reams of pages—all things she had said to him. Dialogue he would later use in the play he wrote about her after they split up, After the Fall. It is said that reading those pages led to her falling down the basement stairs and having a miscarriage.

We all have fights or experience weird betrayals or are told things in confidence. We promise we won’t tell anyone; but does that mean we won’t write about it? Can a writer really be forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement with the universe? Some of the writers I admire most in this world—Alice Munro, John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Joyce Carol Oates, to name a few—have drawn very specifically from the places where they live and from those who live around them. They might have shared a mint julep or a beer with their characters on their front porch.

I doubt that Queequeg would show up on Alice Munro’s doorstep, but the lady from the church who makes very good butter tarts could. I wonder if that lady knows that if she tells Alice Munro a secret, some form of it might appear in a major magazine. It is the occupational hazard of being friends with a writer.

 *

I’ve been on both sides of this coin, and I have to say I prefer that of the author. It’s definitely the more privileged spot. Better viewing. During a difficult time in my life, a well-known writer became my best friend. It’s not that we weren’t already friends, but now she was what some might call my BFF. I’ll call her C. Because this was before email, and I was living in another part of the country, C wrote me long letters almost every week, expressing concern for my well-being.

I replied in kind. I told her of my troubles. I spared no details. C was so willing to listen and offer her advice. I shared it all: the sordid relationship, the fatherless child, an unbearable job, the city where I had no friends and where I spent the better part of days wondering if couldn’t just fling myself off a nearby cliff.

And C wrote to me of life back in New York and of the man in my life. She knew him and she knew what he was up to. She felt the only honest thing was that I should know. So we wrote and I felt somewhat assuaged and lifted by her concern. Then I moved back to New York. I called C, but got no reply. I sent postcards; no answer. Then one day a friend mentioned in passing that he assumed he’d see me at C’s holiday party, to which I wasn’t invited. What had I done? Had I betrayed some trust. Transgressed some rule?

Six months later, a book appeared. A very good novel, I might add, one I’d truly admire if it did not contain, albeit in an expertly rendered version, my life. I should have seen this coming. All writers, including myself, commit these betrayals, and C was a writer known for such appropriations. A mutual friend once told me that C asked to see her horse. C had never been near a horse. And so C went to the friend’s and the horse was produced. “May I pet it?” C asked. C spent half an hour with the horse. Then a year later a novel about a woman and her horse appeared. In hindsight, of course, I should have known that all those letters were just grist for the mill. But in the end, I had to tell myself: It’s just a story.

I responded in kind. I wrote my own novel about an artist who tells a secret to a novelist in the hopes that the novelist will tell her story. I called that novel Revenge. Though we’ve never discussed it, I’m sure C is aware that it’s about her pilfering from my life. Writing well, after all, is our best revenge. I would never resort to violence and I don’t normally fight back. But that doesn’t mean I won’t write about it. The pen, as we all know, is mightier.

 *

Philip Roth once said that if you don’t offend your family, your friends, and your country, you aren’t a real writer. I recall a beloved friend with whom, years ago, I spent the holidays from time to time. One afternoon, she asked me to follow her into her basement, where she thrust her husband’s laundry in my face. “What does this smell like?” she asked.

I was stunned by the gesture. “Perfume,” I told her.

She nodded. “I am allergic to perfume.”

She didn’t say more. She didn’t add, “Don’t you dare write about this.” She didn’t tell me I couldn’t have it, or, as fellow writers will say, “it’s mine; not yours,” as if we’re talking about toys in a sandbox. She just told me that she was allergic to perfume. And, after her marriage broke up, when I found the right story and place to plug it in, I did.

Later I signed a copy of the book to her with that story in it. I’d actually forgotten that I’d drawn from her life. But when she read the story, she called me. “I’m never telling you anything again.” She wasn’t exactly angry, but she also never shared much more with me again, beyond her recipe for green-bean casserole and the name of her colorist.

Looking back, I wish I’d read some of my friends, my cousin, my parents, their Miranda rights. I’m a writer. I have to write and, as a teacher of mine once said, writers don’t read; they ravage. Or as short story writer Charles D’Ambrosio has said of himself, he’s a nice guy. He gives to charities; he relinquishes his subway seat to the disabled. But he’d steal a crumb from the lips of his starving grandmother for the sake of a story.

I share in his struggle. Many of us who draw from life do. But shouldn’t we also draw the line? For example, the writer who stole an incident involving a dildo from his former girlfriend’s life, then published it in The New Yorker. Shouldn’t some things be sacred?

What is this compulsion that makes every twisted mishap, every weird, funny, sad event or odd bit of information grist for our mill. We take. We steal. We pillage and ravage our lives and the lives of all those around us. What are we making anyway? Who knows? And who cares? It’s just what we do.

 *

The novelist John Berger once said that writers draw their material from three sources: experience, witness, and imagination. What happens to us, what we observe or learn, and what we make up. For most of us I believe our raw material comes from all three of these sources, and, on its way to becoming a story, gets heated in the cauldron of our creative minds. Most writers understand when something is free game and when it isn’t. “I’m going to tell you this, but you can’t use it,” my friend Dani Shapiro likes to say. In journalism speak, it’s off the record.

But the unspoken agreement between writers is often misunderstood by civilians. They do not grasp the particular alchemy we perform. Yes, we take from what is around us—the detritus and dross of everyday life—and then we concoct it into something quite different. Which is why I was never really angry with C. What she did was no different than a dog burying its bone. Instinct, pure and simple.

I think that what is perhaps hardest for people to understand is this: What one person considers the sacred truth of their life is, to a writer, more or less a slag heap. A junkyard through which we pick and choose. I might find myself fascinated by some small betrayal. For another writer, it might be a crime in his family. Whatever makes a detail resonate for one writer while it falls flat for another is a mystery. As my mother once said, quoting someone else, everyone has his own poison.

What is the impetus for a story? What makes it take hold inside of us so that we can’t let it go? Let’s go back to my neighbor and the pruning of the tree. I hadn’t planned to write about what happened between us. Not exactly. I had found the incident curious, but it didn’t set me on fire. But then a convergence of things occurred. My father died; my dog died. And then the tree pruner came over and told me that he’d prune our tree, but he’d only take out the obvious dead.

The obvious dead.

The phrase rippled through me. The dead. All that had died. Father, dog, friendship, tree branches. And so the narrative wheels began to churn and once they started, who was I to stop them? Which led me to my moral dilemma.

 *

Of course by the time the story was written, the character was closer to Mr. Potato Head than to the person next door. But most readers who have gone into the equivalent of Superman’s phone booth and emerged as protagonists don’t see it this way. My friend with the dildo episode didn’t. They see themselves. I doubt that their claims would hold up in a court of law (though there was that infamous Terry McMillen slander trial in which her former lover won), but it might give The New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist pause.

When I am at my desk, tempted by something I’ve seen or been told, I say to myself, “I can’t use this, can I?”

And then the voice of the writer takes over inside of me. “How can I not?”

For Christmas a couple years ago, a family member gave me a T-shirt that reads “Be careful or I’ll put you in my novel.” I wear this when I am walking my dog, hoping my neighbor might see it. I hope he might catch the hint before the story appears in print. Until then, all you perps on your way to becoming protagonists, all of you who offer up your raw material, don’t be surprised.

You have the right to remain silent.

Anything you say can, and will, be used against you.

Consider yourselves warned.

 

Read Mary Morris’s stories “Holland“ and “Orphans of the Storm“ in our archives. 

Mary Morris is the author, most recently, of a memoir, All the Way to the Tigers. The recipient of the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Award for fiction, Morris lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

The City Has No Name

Juan Cárdenas.

In Juan Cárdenas’s novel Ornamental, the city has no name. It could be here, or anywhere. Its location in time isn’t specified either. There’s a faintly futuristic overlay, but the narrator’s diction swings between antiquated formality and present-day slang, and, among other anachronistic details, there are both spider monkeys and henchmen on the security team. Characters, too, are referenced only by generic designation. “My wife,” “the directors,” “the taxi driver,” “the architect.” Even descriptive nouns of that kind are withheld from the study participants, who have volunteered for the trial of a new recreational drug that exclusively affects women. They’re granted only numbers.

The choice to leave those coordinates unfixed suggests universality, as if this same story might have played out (might be playing out) in any number of labs, in any number of cities. But it also enacts the social and political repression of a certain kind of anonymity. “A city can’t be talked about without names, it’s impossible,” number 4 says. “It’s all been worked out so the story stays neatly inside the mute numbers.” How, Ornamental asks, do the nameless—disembodied voices, unattributed speech, figures “emancipated from any arithmetic”—participate in meaningful discourse, find a place among others, work toward common interest, tell their stories? And when do we encounter those stories, as readers who live in named cities and bear names ourselves?

Once, Juan pointed out that architecture can function as “a sculptural representation of failed futures.” In this city scarred by absurdities, crises, injustices, our surroundings offer clues, to where we’ve been, to where we’re going. There are “forsaken relics of late-fifties Creole functionalism” in the old financial center. The exploitative hacienda has been repurposed as an equally exploitative pharmaceutical lab. The “prodigious, lost-era” skyscrapers were abandoned “on the brink of rationalism.” Buildings—their designs and locations, the condition they’re in, what they replace and what they conceal—record histories and gesture toward onetime paths forward. Even the most “gleaming and beautiful” ones, the ones once symbolic of “prosperity” and “progress,” recede into the unchanging chaos of the landscape, just as “yesterday’s political discourses [become] today’s collective unconscious.” Ornamental can be read as a building can be read: as an object that records, with its highly stylized language and form, an interplay between ideologies. Its material details (language, texture, composition) tell us as much if not more than what would traditionally constitute plot.

A doctor’s self-consciously formal discourse is interrupted at intervals by number 4’s elaborate poetic outpourings. It’s interrupted, but never wholly consumed. The doctor’s wife, an artist whose works are overpriced “ornaments,” is moved by number 4 to interrogate her practice, but only before fleeing back to the comfortable “fortress” of her taste. The excess, ephemerality, and exuberance of number 4’s monologues are set alongside a sanitized and selective reality. They’re the glints of the baroque against Loos’s white walls. On the level of plot, the conflict is won by those walls—by rational, ordered discourse, smooth and functional surfaces, the conditions called for, in this case, by those who hold power. The novel ends not with any comforting resolution but with a return to the vortex of late capitalism. The scales tip back in the direction of privilege, or they never tip away. Evil can be observed but not upended; our irredeemable characters can’t right a world gone wrong.

But that’s not to say there’s no relief. Because on the level of the sentence, there’s still some room for astonishment: in the reactions sparked off when two lexicons are pushed up against each other, in the interplay of linguistic subtleties. There, the winner of this conflict doesn’t seem to be determined from the outset. Because if education and upbringing are a prison, as Ornamental suggests, then so is language, which turns moments of rupture or linguistic difference into alternate paths of significance. When the study participants speak for themselves, contrasting styles puncture the doctor’s grandiose and often classist rhetoric. Their survey responses are discrete poems that show what shape expression can take outside of narrow conventions. They’re open to interpretation, vivid beyond the homogenizing constraints of grammar, unselfconscious and instantaneous. In these brief moments of potential, language that doesn’t conform to certain imposed expectations proves as powerful and expressive as language that does. Both the doctor and his wife return to their lives of ease after number 4’s departure. Both reassume the narratives they’ve carefully crafted for themselves. If number 4 has any visible or lasting effect on their lives, it may be only in the way the collar of the doctor’s prose loosens, the naturalness and idiomatic expression it occasionally admits.

With whom do we empathize in such a book—a book described as an exploration of art’s potential “for the examination of evil”? For our characters, there is no redemption, no lesson learned, no call to action. Each one is, as we are, “prisoner of [an] upbringing.” And their world, like ours, is deeply flawed, deeply violent, deeply unjust. But with them, we see things we might not otherwise see, go places we might not otherwise go, witness our own circumstances drawn out to their logical conclusions. How do we look and listen from now on? Do the stories remain “neatly inside the mute numbers”? Perhaps, as readers, that’s for us to say.

 

Lizzie Davis is a translator from Spanish to English and editor at Coffee House Press. Her recent projects include works by Pilar Fraile Amador, Daniela Tarazona, and Elena Medel, and her cotranslation of Medel’s Las maravillas with Thomas Bunstead is forthcoming from Pushkin Press. She has received fellowships from the Omi International Arts Center and the Breadloaf Translators’ Conference in support of her translations.

Used by permission from Ornamental (Coffee House Press, 2020). Copyright © 2020 by Lizzie Davis.

The Many Voices of Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Bobbie Louise Hawkins.

Like her good friend the writer Lucia Berlin, Bobbie Louise Hawkins was an excellent observer of others. Like Lucia, too, she was wise and damn funny. Her stories are vitamin-packed, full of her own specific and inimitable possibilities of voice. Or maybe we should say voices, or voicings, because the singular doesn’t quite do it justice. Her voice could take on multiple angles and colors, depending on the setting and time of day, the interlocutor, or, more accurately, the listener, and the number. It wasn’t unusual to hear her with a Texas drawl in the morning in her garden (this voice said “honey” a fair amount, and unfurled like a smoked tumbleweed just rolling out of the fire), a soft New Mexican clipping of word endings in the afternoon, and a British tilt at a party in the evening. Her voice could even take on several aspects at once, especially when she was giving a reading. Voicing was important enough to Bobbie that she offered classes on how to talk (and not talk) into a mic. Don’t pop those p’s! Make sure you cut the mic! No heavy breathing between words!

And while the novella One Small Saga is not as voicey as some of her other work, her marvelous capacity to listen and deftly mimic is acutely on display. She speedily gets her world and her characters “in,” as E. M. Forster, a writer whose prose she admired, put it. Consider one quick sentence early on, the short passage that takes place in Mr. Collins’s sitting room. Bobbie builds this Englishman’s whole character out of just a handful of syllables. The narrator has just noticed the wall hangings, “patterned blue and white cotton to match the drawn drapes … ‘Nigerian,’ Mr. Collins told me, seeing me looking, ‘handwoven native.’ ” In three tight-lipped words we get the tone of the whole of the British empire circa 1950, from the mouth of one of its servants.

Still, in this autobiographical work (Bobbie claimed not to have done any other kind), what’s mainly going on is an attempt at taking the measure of the life the narrator wants to live. She starts that process by recounting a mistake that isn’t a mistake at all. She does something stupid (marries Axel) to get to the next thing (the story of her life). How else would a ferociously observant, intelligent, original young woman born into poverty in the thirties get out of the fix she is in? She has plans, inchoate as they are, and takes the ship that will get her started, pointed firmly in the direction of elsewhere. That the ship she travels on has a “green marble swimming pool” hidden in its depths, which she soon finds herself plunging into daily, seems emblematic. Like Bobbie, the narrator of One Small Saga has an unerring ability to sniff out the unlooked-for and the exceptional.

“You want to put yourself adjacent to the most interesting person in the room,” Bobbie liked to say to her students (we were two of them). Bobbie herself, of course, was very often that most interesting person, but if she was never under-cognizant of this particular fact of the matter—and why should she have been?—that discerning eye of hers turned ever outward. You can see the narrator looking for compelling adjacencies all though One Small Saga. If at first she has to contend with bipedal oafs like Axel’s insufferable sister—“I smiled at Birte. It was very like smiling at a locomotive”—the circle expands as the story takes us and the narrator through London, Jamaica, and elsewhere, and by its end a critical mass of interesting acquaintance has been achieved. Along the way, both the novella and its narrator have expanded their capacities to accommodate. The last sentences, in fact, deftly, brilliantly present us with several stories at once. There is the woman doing the remembering and the woman being remembered. Against these two, who are at once the same and different women, is thrown, in excruciating relief, the major’s wife. She is not so much a character as an apparition: a woman who did not grok what her own next thing was or how to get there. She is stuck there in the past with her choices and her bandaged wrists.

The narrator, however, has made more than several lives for herself since that juncture. She doesn’t need to go into them. We know it because she is elsewhere, in a state of remembering. The doubling and tripling of meaning, the deep care for both herself and for the major’s wife that is encapsulated in that final sentence—“How could I have forgotten?”—is nothing short of stunning.

Included in the reissue of One Small Saga is the short story “En Route,” which is an episode from her later marriage to the American poet Robert Creeley. Here, Bobbie has clearly put herself adjacent to the most interesting persons in the room. However difficult that marriage also proved, she enormously relished the conversation and mind of it and spent a significant part of the years after its dissolution untangling its many stories.

Bobbie was, above all else, a storyteller, a potent one. One who could stick her landings and shape the hell out of her sentences: “The desires of the heart do rise up at the least jogging. The heart stands high and looks for miles at the least excuse.” One who developed, as she turned to teaching, violent antibodies to infelicitous utterance. Once I (this is Laird) gave her a story to read that was full of short-i sounds. Think pin, gin, and sin. “Oh, good Lord, honey,” she said. She looked both anguished and angry as she smashed her pen through each offensive instance. Was it that there was too much complaint in all that ih, ih, ih sound? Not enough of the round, full vowels of creation?

To the ancient Greeks, being a storyteller meant you could weave the opening stuff of the world, which was chaos, into muthos, also known, Bobbie’s friend Charles Olson reminds us, by the term myth. This is not any Christian sense of that term, but a self-making. If you don’t believe in heaven and hell, Bobbie tells us, “then you don’t get the simplified up and down. The pattern is instantly random and the options are more like something hit the floor and splattered.” What you do with the splatter is up to you.

Some storytellers are also talkers, and Bobbie was one of those. She talked about gardens and flowers, because besides being a storyteller and a talker and a fierce editor she was a world-class gardener. Why have I (this is Eleni) jotted down, in an old note about Bobbie, “the hero of her own journey”? I guess because, like the narrator of One Small Saga, she was. For example, she wasn’t afraid to rip everything out and start from scratch; there would be murdered daylilies strewn across the walk, much to everyone’s shock, and no one believed she could make a better garden than she already had, but then she did. When we moved to Boulder to teach at Naropa, one of the first things she said to me is, “Cleomes. You’re gonna want cleomes.” I soon learned she was not wrong.

 

Laird Hunt is the author of seven novels, with an eighth, Zorrie, forthcoming from Bloomsbury USA in early 2021. He is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and the Bridge Prize, and was a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner and the Prix Femina étranger. His reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. A former United Nations press officer, he lives in Providence, where he teaches in Brown University’s literary arts program.

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of two hybrid memoir/family histories (The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine) and eight books of poetry, most recently What I Knew. Sikelianos is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and the National Poetry Series, among other awards. She was Bobbie Louise Hawkins’s student in the late eighties and early nineties, and her colleague at Naropa beginning in the early aughts. She currently teaches at Brown University.

Introduction © Laird Hunt and Eleni Sikelianos, first published in One Small Saga , by Bobbie Louise Hawkins (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020).

What Is the Word for Sky?

Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next several weeks. 

Antonio Correggio, Jupiter and Io (digitally altered), 1540

How many languages does the rain speak? Is anyone fluent in all of them? Are all of us fluent in all of them?

Have you also suffered not being able to balance language with non-language? When we’re not with each other in the usual ways, not in person, so much of what we communicate—with a tick of the shoulder, the slight bow of the head, the hand through the hair, the cross of a leg, blood rising to the neck, the hand upon another’s knee, or chest against chest in embrace—is unavailable, muted. We have words, which we toss back and forth to each other, through screens, through phones, now and then through letters in the mail. For so long I thought of words as distancers, approximations. So much gets expressed when we sit together in the same room, vibrating at each other. Peter Matthiessen writes of the meaninglessness of trying to express the inexpressible in words:

The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.

The time has come for a new language. We can vibrate with the tulip petals, the sunset, the morning light in the asparagus fern on the windowsill. We can share that ring. Between us, though, for now, words are what we have.

Sky. Rhymes with high and fly and why. Rhymes with eye and bye and die. Stay with me.

There’s breath in the word. Each one of its three letters makes itself known. S hisses with space and air, curves like clouds, like the paths of the wind, the sound of shifting leaves against streets and sidewalks. Which leads to the tall stalk of K, like the edge of a cliff falling into the sky. K—every edge that the sky comes up against. Skyscrapers, peaks, the bark on all the trunks, each rock. K—the craters where the sky sinks in. K—the kaleidoscope. The cliff and the kaleidoscope, the hard edge and all the colors spinning. And Y, eye, I. Like the S, the Y keeps coming. It lasts out the mouth, cold and hot at once. Eye for all-seeing sky, eye that absorbs its light, its sun god, its glowing, pearly moon. Eye that strains to see as far as the eye can see. And also I. I and sky. I and all. I am yours, Sky. I belong to you. I am in you.

Ég is the word for sky in Hungarian. My English-speaking mind adds another g and the sky becomes a whole, huge, endless egg, we inside suspended, hung in the albumen (from the Latin albus, white), also known as the glaire (from the Latin clarus, bright or clear).

Galaxy, from the Greek γαλαξίας, means milky circle. Via lactea in Latin, which sounds so lovely I just whispered it aloud. We’re held in a milky circle in the great big breast of the universe, trying to find yolk-and-milk meaning, an eggshell out there somewhere holding it all in. “To see the egg is impossible,” writes Clarice Lispector, “the egg is supervisible. No one is capable of seeing the egg … Only machines see the egg … Only someone who has seen the world can see the egg. Like the world, the egg is obvious.” See that last sentence in her native Portuguese: como o mundo o ovo e obvio. All those o’s like globes, like yolks, like the milk circles and the uncracked egg. What’s beyond the egg?

In Italian, the word for sky is cielo; in French, ciel; Galician, ceo; in Albanian, quiell; in Czech and Bosnian, nebo; in Persian, آسمان; in Japanese, 空; in Zulu, esibhakabhakeni; in Lithuanian, dangus. In German, Himmel is sky; in Dutch, hemel is sky. My favorite is the Welsh: awyr. The breathy vastness of it. Scuwo in Old High German, scua in Old English, and skuggi in Old Norse, all meant shadow. In Sanskrit, skunati means “he covers.” The Proto-Indo-European root skeu means to cover or conceal. The roots are the same for the words: house, hide, hut, shoe.

Shoe and sky are born from the same root sense of covering. Shantideva, an Indian Buddhist scholar of the eighth century writes of cover, of shoes: “Where would I possibly find enough leather with which to cover the surface of the earth? But wearing leather just on the soles of my shoes is equivalent to covering the earth with it.” He goes on to give the takeaway: “If I could restrain this mind of mine why would I need to restrain all else?”

We can’t always alter what’s outside, but we can alter our perspective on it. I thought of words as distancers, approximations, but I had to change my thinking. I could not feel the press of your chest against my chest, so how could I touch you this way with words? Words as biological. Language from the body.

It had to do with the vibration below the words, not the words themselves but the silent resonance behind them. The sky behind them. The electricity in the blood behind them. So I wrote about breakfast or birds or a dream, and there were the words, but there was something below the words, the hum, I let it come from a deep place. It felt first like innuendo: I am saying this, but implying this. But it had to change from there. It had to go deeper. Words were the only way. They came from my body.

How to make words as though the language is being expressed by a silent mouth. Is it possible? I tried to make it possible because I wanted, and was suffering.

It comes through the unspoken behind the spoken, it comes from allowing the words to hold layers and from allowing the layers to come from a place so deep in the mind it’s not the mind anymore, it’s the body. It comes from listening closely, attending, paying deep attention, listening to the hum beneath, and letting one’s own hum respond. This changes everything.

I don’t always understand what I’m saying. Or, no. I don’t always understand what I am communicating below. It is a mystery, but each collection of words is an offering, a way of communicating in words something without words. I cannot touch your knee, after all. You cannot see the way my shoulder moves. As Inger Christensen writes, “the cells are words / when the body / is a muteness …

the cells are words

when the body

is outside

itself

and inside

another

Inside, the place where the underwords come from feels as boundless as the sky.

Some days, it is enough.

Some days, the sky is enough. Or the morning glory with the small bee in the center leaving tiny pollen paw prints on the blue-purple petal, white glow at the center like the sky. Some days that is enough. Some days the honeysuckle bush and the hydrangeas are enough. Some days a big laugh with Jenny is enough. Some days the right foods are enough. Two beers on an empty stomach are enough. The garden on the hill on Appleton is enough. Some days. Some days a run along the river and the Queen Anne’s lace along the river is enough. Some days catching eyes is enough. Some days Lisa’s energy is enough, her voice, her gray-green eyes, her erotic mystic force. Some days a peach and its juice are enough. Some days emails are enough. Some days daydreams are enough. Some days thinking about you is enough. Some days the sky and its shifts and the clouds and the wind on my legs and under my shirt and in my hair are enough, the stars and the light are enough, the moon is enough. Some days. Some days! Some days the sycamores, God the sycamores, the thick sycamores along Memorial Drive, some days they are enough. Some days the coffee with hot milk is enough. Some days the words are enough. Some days language is enough. Some days the effort of putting the words together is enough. Many days, this is enough. Many days, this is all. The words are all. Our words have to be our bodies. The language is biological is bodily is bodied forth. I body it forth. Some days it is enough. I did not expect this. I can justify it and say, I would not know the sky the way I know it, if it were not for this aloneness, if I were sharing my body with another body. So I body forth the words on the sky. Some days it is enough. The surface and the underwords, text and subtext, text and subsex. I tell myself, you learn. I tell myself again, you learn. I can believe anything. Some days the sycamores are enough. Some days the words are enough. Some days the sky is enough. The morning glories the small bees the stardust pollen. The honeysuckle the coffee the clouds, Lisa’s voice, laughing. Some days the imagining is enough. Some days it is enough because it has to be enough. I tell myself and sometimes deeply truly feel it is enough. Because it is all there is. But some days it is nothing and my body my whole body made of words becomes a body that aches for your body. I live in the sky. I share my body with the sky. And some days my whole inside is an empty sky and I wonder if the sky aches the way I do and wants to share its emptiness. Do you ache, Sky? Do you want to be a body and lean up against another body, not made of space but made of body, not made of words but made of body, do you long to be just a body against the chest of another body? Do you want that, Sky? What is enough for you? You have everything in you and you are emptiness. I use words as though they are shoulders lips cheeks. As though they are blood and heat. And it is nothing like the sky. Everything like the sky. Holds everything like the sky. Nothing in everything. Fill me up. Please fill me up.

 

 

Read earlier installments of Sky Gazing.

Read Nina MacLaughlin’s series on Summer Solstice, Dawn, and November. 

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Summer Solstice. 

An NDN Boyhood

Billy-Ray Belcourt. Photo: Tenille Campbell.

My twin brother, Jesse, and I were born marked by a history of colonization and a public discourse of race we can’t peel from our skin. We were made to take on a mode of embodiment that erodes from the inside out with vicious precision. At the same time, we came into being because love is mathematical: when two people desire each other, they multiply, in various shapes and forms. In our very corporeality we are thus a container for the terror of the past and the beauty that it can’t in the end negate. In this way we, like NDN boys everywhere, are subliminal.

The first year of Jesse’s and my life was a hotbed of decisions, desires, and disavowals that would hover above our shared emotional worlds deep into adolescence. This isn’t my story to tell in painful and careful detail, so the picture I paint now is one that’s rehashed from a handful of sources, including something like intuition.

Here goes. My mom and dad loved while coated in the ash of history. Twentysomethings entranced by the ecstasy of optimism, they made a family out of nothing but the human need to be a part of something less resonant with toxicity than solitude. They didn’t know how to ask the question Sheila Heti poses in Motherhood: “Who is it for me to bring all this unfolding into being?” Perhaps the philosophical basis for their children’s lives was that they no longer wanted to exhale smoke.

*

If we subscribe to the idea that we inherit bits and pieces of the psychosocial habits of our family, then my parents’ approach to life-making might also be descriptive of mine today, in their aftermath. Perhaps this pressurized orientation to memory—one by which we understand the past as a trace that pulsates in a body in the present—is always the case with life-writing. The writer is called on by others to do the politically significant and ethically charged work of construction and then documentation. This is my job: to report from the scene of an undead past colliding with a still-to-be-determined future.

*

By the age of twenty-three, my mom had four children, two girls and two boys, between the ages of three months and five years. My dad says Jesse (his legal name is Jesse-Lee) and I were named so as to usher us into the world of rodeo. I’ve seen the pictures of toddler-me dressed up as a cowboy, my dad positioned in the corner of the frame, smiling, perhaps bathing in the scene of self-recognition before him. Names are worldly, and it was with that knowledge, that emotional and maternal knowledge, that my mom gave us her last name, passed on to her from her dad. I imagine this was a rare practice in the nineties in northern Alberta, which was unshakably conservative. I like to think my mom did this to foreground our enmeshment, how irrevocably hers we are, how even outside of the womb we populate the affective house of her, then and now.

The story goes, my mom and dad fell out of love, hard, with an always-accelerating speed, shortly after our birth. A forest fire can’t be a refuge. My mom wanted to live in a land without a dangerous weather—in this way, we’re profoundly alike. According to my dad, he went about the drama of raising twins on the reserve, enlisting the aid of a similarly inexperienced nephew. Six months slowly inched by as his sense of maternality disintegrated. On our first birthday, having lived twelve months in an ecology of complicated love, of sociological forces that elided our awareness, we went under the care of my mom’s mom, nôhkom. It’s impossible to deny that this reorganization indelibly ordered Jesse’s and my future, those collectively and individually lost and those newly birthed. Language is inadequate here to bring into focus the communal effort, involving an extended family unit that included my parents and their parents, that went into raising two NDN boys not in a way that would ignore the coloniality of the world but so as to engender life that might breach its grip. This is the old art of parenting in order to keep NDN kids safe from what lingers of a governmentally sanctioned death wish against them.

*

NDN boys are ideas before they are bodied. Our lives are muffled by a flurry of accusations that outrun us. Ideas of this vexed sort leave a burned path in their wake. Feet like ours are singed with a history that isn’t done with us. There is a point—call it a turning point—at which NDN boys can become angry men of at least two types (I’m not suggesting that this is fatalistic; the norms of gender and race fail to regulate us completely, to paraphrase Judith Butler): one that is imprisoning and riotous at once, a mode of being that sucks the air out of the room, and another that is quieter but equally denigrating, a slow injunction on happiness and possibility. Both beget a sense of immobility—these are ways of life at the heart of colonialism that cut along gendered lines. There is a host of violent acts done as a symptom of these performances of racialized masculinity. This is a well-documented facet of NDN life: the trauma of colonialism erupts in the minds and bodies of men, who then bombard the lives of women and girls, two-spirit peoples, and queers. Today, we are beholden to the work of feminist mothering and fathering to repair what has been done and to bring about boys and men who answer the call of democratizing the labor of care.

What is it to live, to suffer, and, above all, to love in an emotionally inflexible world fashioned to produce men who eat “too much of the sunset”? We are haunted by that turning point, brought back to it again and again. But it doesn’t once and for all consign us to a ravaged life. There is more to be said; there is another mode of life to inhabit.

*

In my first memory of nôhkom, she and I are on the couch in our home in the hamlet of Joussard, only a few kilometers from the place of our political and social belonging, Driftpile. What I remember most is a feeling of childish liveliness, which orbits nôhkom, and her enduring attentiveness to the ebb and flow of my behavior.

I’ve found myself unable to properly go about the task of articulating the infinitude of nôhkom’s care. How does one thank another for manufacturing a world to experiment with the precarity of aliveness? I might spend the rest of my life inching closer to that place of articulation, to a place where her act of giving in to the demands of care are made visible, celebrated. How could I strive for anything but this unfinishable avowal? How does one remain unwaveringly answerable to this call from nowhere and everywhere? On the other hand, how do I resist enfleshing a writer-me that is obsessed with bringing into view this unrepayable debt while the world-me idles by? Too much can go missing in this space of translation. Maybe the onus isn’t to sputter out in the ruts of the abstract, of the textual, but to live in a manner that cites those dear to the heart. Butler claimed that language and styles of behavior are citational, that they echo from a history of use. Joy, then, is a politics of citation.

*

Like most twins, Jesse and I were inseparable. We were Pokémon trainers and baseball players, boreal forest foragers and amateur engineers. At times, however, I strain to call up shared memories; I suspect this is because our senses of selfhood were intertwined, that we were bound up in a “you” and an “us” and a “we” that hardened into a singular entity over time, having begun in utero. What I do know is that many, relatives and otherwise, made us out to be opposites, good and bad, feminine and masculine, academic and unruly. Perhaps they were simply pointing out the parts of us that bifurcated, in opposition to our drive to enact a sameness that upset liberal norms of individuation. Maybe it’s a mere psychosocial fact that the lives of twins are labyrinthine, like any other social form. There’s a photograph of us from a Halloween in the late nineties; I’m dressed as Tinky Winky, the purple Teletubby, and Jesse is dressed as the blue Power Ranger. This artifact is regularly invoked as evidence of our disparate identities (and my nascent queerness). Nevertheless, Jesse and I were collaborators and accomplices, best friends and sometimes rivals. Which is to say that we too were key architects of the world of care that brought and is still bringing us into being, against the odds, in opposition to the insufficiencies of gender that colonialism yields.

*

“maybe i am here in the way that a memory is here? now, ain’t that fucking sad and beautiful?”

*

It is likely impossible to trace when, where, and under what conditions those who arrived with enmity on the shores of what is now improperly called Canada inaugurated a modality of gender that produced men who self-destruct. Surely a historian more disciplined than I has tried, but my suspicion is that one would end up again and again with an incomplete bag of events, theoretical inclinations, and emotional responses. That this blow to subjectivity doesn’t invite curiosity from those outside our communities doesn’t, however, lessen its cruelty and longevity. We might look to the testimonial record that burgeoned from the atrocities of the twentieth century bathed in the language of state care and fiduciary obligation. Here, for example, is the public testimony of a woman who was made to attend a residential school on Vancouver Island:

I remember entering through the front doors, and the sound of those doors closing still haunts me when I go to places that look like … that building … when the door closes … The fear and the hurt … there’s nothing you can do once you’re … once you’re there.

Though not explicitly vocalized, we might hear in this harrowing account of the reverberations of the trauma of state education a nodal point in the history of colonization that has to do with the brutalization of NDNs at every conceivable level. This is to say that throughout the long twentieth century, Canada incubated death worlds where meaning was made to injure via the categories we have come to inhabit with ease. Part of what is ghoulish about the fungibility of those doors, those facades that lived on in horror-filled memories, is that they bear too the experience of gender as it was traumatically unmade and remade in the bodies of NDN children.

*

It’s sometime in the early aughts, and the wretchedness of history is still revealing itself, testimonial by testimonial, angered and shaken voice by angered and shaken voice, until there’s a pileup of words and tears that Canada can’t obliterate from its cultural memory. I can’t identify the source of my curiosity, but I ask nimôsom if he’d been made to attend the Indian Residential School at Joussard. Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it, he says without looking up from his plate.

This “yes, but I don’t want to talk about it” floats above our family like an open secret. I watch nimôsom struggle against emotion, against gender, but never waver in his drive to break from the spell of that haunted door, that omnipresent and cursed doorway, in order to provide for our family. Everywhere NDN men are in a struggle against gender.

*

There are cavernous gaps in my memory in which people I love with fortitude today, those without whom being in the world would be a taxing affair, don’t exist, as though my brain has been surgically hampered. Rather than let those gaps swallow me up, I plant flowers of all sorts there. Daisies and prairie crocuses. Northern Alberta flowers that grow in the wild, ones that hold a firm place in my childhood psyche where bodies should be. There is no use marinating on the thorny question of how and for what reasons there is nothingness where there should be a haze of good feeling. A thick opacity is missing. Again, it isn’t mine to estimate who or what was the thief in the prairie, subarctic night. Perhaps I write now, in the mode of autobiography, to stimulate the conditions that might call up that opacity, the fragile and engrossing density of memory. In this way, I’m an archaeologist of the disappeared.

*

Nôhkom worked full time as a receptionist at the health center on the reserve, so when nimôsom, a mechanic, had an uncompromising string of repairs to attend to at his garage, Jesse and I would stay at my dad’s house, also on the reserve. In and out of his house flowed a host of relatives and family friends, all irrevocably thrown into the orbit of softness and openness that was my dad. To this day, his house is something of a brown commons, an ideational and affective infrastructure that, to use José Esteban Muñoz’s language, “holds and shelters brown life within its walls,” one that dissipates the governing power of the male property-bearer and proliferates space for other forms of life, other ways of togetherness. For the untutored eye, for the normatively socialized onlooker, my dad’s house, his houses, might be best aestheticized as a disorderedness, one without law or social norm. It is, however, this antiauthoritarian rhythm that irradiates a more politically radical geography of care. In retrospect, this is likely why Jesse and I rarely wanted to leave when nôhkom came to retrieve us after work. This is what I want my home to make possible, the shelter for brown life I want to prop up, wherever I end up. This, then, is part of a feminist project that Maggie Nelson describes as a socialization or democratization of the maternal function, which is to ask: How are we to architect places through which NDN life flows, through which it isn’t slowed down or disappeared but embraced and therefore multiplied?

*

I never felt the pressure to actualize my parents’ dreams. Not one. Or, if any, it was the dream of making a life unhampered by the strictures of indecision and ignorance, which is probably something we all want for ourselves anyway. One time my dad said I was living the life that he could’ve had, had he refused to let anyone be the bearer of his optimism. I wonder what it is about my life now that he wishes for his past self, the self-that-could-have-been. Like most parents, he inspects me through the rosy filter of unconditional love, but he doesn’t have enough material to develop a complex idea of the intricacies of Billy-Ray Belcourt the adult, who is different from Billy-Ray Belcourt the child. I don’t mourn this lack of expectation, this absence of narcissism, which is the narcissism of wanting to see oneself in one’s child, to have them bloom into another you. On the contrary, without a mirror held in front of me at all times, I felt without skepticism the platitude that anything was possible.

Maybe I spoke too soon. I remember the worrisome responses from a number of relatives upon the declaration of my queerness. Despite establishing in clear yet sparse wording that their happiness was contingent on my happiness, there was also a fog of grief. This was the grief of childlessness. In my vocalization of a non-normative sexual identity, they heard too a disavowal of futurity, that I had relocated permanently to a land emptied of fathers, one inhospitable to the customs of fatherhood. Perhaps in those seconds and minutes I became less like them, less theirs, less bound up in the ticking time bomb of social reproduction, so less beholden to the continuation of a name, a history. In the quiet variations of tone and tempo I heard the world rearrange in their minds. I watched their language ache and falter as I myself ached and faltered.

Regardless, I forgive them just as I forgive naive versions of myself. I choose instead to appreciate the vastness with which they think of my future self, however tied it is to a fiction over which I don’t hold sovereignty. I can’t blame my kin for forgetting that the form for my life’s emotional content isn’t, as one might expect, a family but an entire world, a wilderness ruled by unknowing inside which I’m a future relic. What binds us is the knowledge that it can be devastating to discover that a loved one has forfeited everything to that which you’ll never fully see for yourself. To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.

*

The noise of everyday life rings inside my head. This essay sits at the center of the multisensory labyrinth that is memory recall. When not distracted by other business, I, like a janitor, scan the darkened building of me for detritus and misplaced things, something to put me to work again. When nothing jolts me out of a stupor, I stare up at the ceiling, hoping something will drop onto my face, something with which to make a mess worth looking at, worth showing to others.

*

I didn’t ever think I would write about this, but here we are. The conundrum is that the data that is the past isn’t a block of clay we can, like an artist, press our hands into. Some of us might seek to be one step ahead of memory, to whittle the loose ends of our personal histories down to a single knowable object (a block of clay or a diary or a memoir), to expose a kind of hidden or suppressed truth, to give it a form, to contain it, to master it. It is difficult to discern when I’m doing this and when I’m not.

In my case, the memory is one I’ve let slip from my mouth only two times. Even now I won’t divulge all the details. The first person with whom I had sex was a dear friend. He and I spoke few words and no complete sentences. In the absence of language, we activated the textuality of gesture and emotion, of sense and sensation. This repeated in the thick of one hot summer. It matters what I call this now, so I hesitate to call it anything. Perhaps if it were a performance art piece I could call it My Subjectivity or Becoming a Subject in the Shadow of Language rather than having to make do with the tropes of the coming-of-age story. That this encounter has seldom lived in the world of speech, hasn’t grown a skin of its own, perplexes me still. Memory, it seems, isn’t always material out of which to make art. Sometimes remembering refuses us. Sometimes I’m a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across.

*

It’s August 2012. I give the valedictory address in a church behind the high school. In it, I spend a great deal of time thanking family and friends for their contributions to my upbringing, to my becoming-human. During the softly named “rose ceremony,” I cry as I hug a number of my relatives. As the graduates empty out of the room, I hug my dad, who is sitting with his partner and their kids near the altar. I realize everyone is taking in the spectacle of two NDN men in a familial embrace, both of us overcome with emotion. In those piercing seconds, we were possibility more than anything else, a mode in which NDN men rarely exist. In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to hold. In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to be held.

At night, I turn down the lights with this image. It gives me a nocturnal language—something with which to go about the unglamorous work of survival.

 

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes scholar. He is the author of the poetry collections NDN Coping Mechanisms and This Wound Is a World, which was awarded the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. A History of My Brief Body marks his nonfiction debut.

From A History of My Brief Body , by Billy-Ray Belcourt. Copyright © 2020 by Billy-Ray Belcourt. Reprinted with the permission of Two Dollar Radio.