Pushcart XLI: Elizabeth McCracken, “Mistress Mickle All at Sea” from Zoetrope 19.4

New Year’s Eve in a Rotterdam garret, the whole block blacked out, bottle rockets rattling the casements: Mistress Maggle, villainess of the children’s game show Barnaby Grudge, off duty and far from home, ate a cold canned hot dog in the dark and pronounced it delicious. These were the last minutes of the old year. She’d come from Surrey to visit her half brother, Jonas, whom she’d last seen in Boston just before their father had retired to Minorca. Expatriation was the family disease, hereditary: thanks to an immigrant ancestor, they all had Irish passports. The world was their oyster. An oyster was not enough to sustain anyone.

The question that most perplexed me about this story was answered when I found a short excerpt of the first paragraphs in an online teaser by Zoetrope. In my copy of Pushcart, the title remains “Mistress Mickle”, but throughout the story the name used is Mistress Maggle. I spent far too much time wondering why that was so, hunting for a hint. Turns out it’s one of those weird copyediting changes that sometimes happens with reprints, I guess. But it did rather distance me from the story. Then again, my concentration has been pretty compromised lately.

So, Mistress Mickle, or Maggle, whose real name is Jenny Early (“though 49 seemed too old to be Jenny and too late to be early”) is definitely at sea, literally as well as figuratively, going way beyond her discomfort with her own name. She starts out visiting her half-brother in Rotterdam, then takes a boat home to England – or, rather, back to England where she lives, since she’s from Boston, or Ireland, or I’m not sure, really, and I don’t think she’s sure, either. Along the way she seems to feel more lost by the minute. The encounter with her brother, complete with the news that his girlfriend is expecting, sends her down memory lane revisiting an old romance that didn’t work out. On shipboard, she encounters another children’s entertainer who genuinely enjoys entertaining children, and plays a much friendlier character rather than the scolding shrew she portrays; a mirror image of sorts. I get the sense that she’s desperately unhappy, yet unable to figure out just what to do about it.

The narration is a slightly odd voice, extremely close 3rd person, so close it almost reads like she’s the one narrating herself in 3rd person. The ending makes that narration crucial, since, well, she dies. Maybe. She is a bit of a hypochondriac, after all. But in that last paragraph the narration turns into direct address, zooms out, and interpret however you like.

In any case, it’s a sharp and very witty story, lots of clever jibes and twists of phrase that make it fun to read. I’d like to read it again when (if?) my focus returns.

Marcelo Gleiser: The Island of Knowledge (Basic, 2014)

Consider, then, the sum total of our accumulated knowledge as constituting an island, which I call the “Island of Knowledge”….The Island’s growth has a surprising but essential consequence. Naively, we would expect that the more we know of the world, the closer we would be to some sort of final destination, which some call a Theory of Everything and others the ultimate nature of reality. However, holding on to our metaphor, we see that as the Island of Knowledge grows, so do the shores of our ignorance – the boundary between the known and the unknown. Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a point closer to a final destination – whose existence is nothing but a hopeful assumption anyway – but to more questions and mysteries. The more we know, the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask.

This past Spring, I took Prof. Gleiser’s science/philosophy mooc that focused on the question, Can we ever know the very essence of reality, or is there some knowledge that can never be within our grasp? Is it all a matter of developing technologies and learning how the universe works, or are there some things that simply can’t be discovered by reason, observation, and scientific method? This book was the basis for that course.

Prof. Gleiser has an eclectic approach to science. He’s a theoretical physicist, but the book is far more. I noticed a brief comment about his training towards the end: “I was twenty-seven and in search of ways of connecting the rational scientific approach that I was learning in school with a strong sense of spirituality I had nurtured since an early age.” That willingness to look beyond science, to philosophy, to human emotion and interaction, shows up clearly throughout this work. “If reason is the tool we use in science, it is not its motivation,” says Gleiser. While it’s mostly science, there is a strong thread of philosophy as well; this is a scientist comfortable with ideas of divinity. This was the course that inspired me to read Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, a historical/philosophical work I enjoyed tremendously (and blogged about here).

Gleiser’s opinion is that we can’t know certain things, not because we don’t have good enough instruments or don’t have string theory nailed down yet, but because some things are simply unknowable. The “brain in vats” question is the classic example – how could we know? – but there’s also the limitation of the time horizon of the universe, and it seems there are most likely distance limitations at the small end of the scale as well. The more we know, the more we know we don’t know.

The book starts off with the pre-Socratics and the first inklinks of atomism. I discovered Ernst Mach, of Mach-1 fame, never accepted the existence of atoms, though their existence was theoretically proven during his lifetime; as I understand it (take this with a large shaker of salt), he didn’t say they didn’t exist, simply that he didn’t accept the existence of something that couldn’t be seen (he’d have changed his mind if he’d lived long enough to watch “A Boy and his Atom” on Youtube, a movie made with atoms). The first chapters move very quickly to Einstein, and the early 20th century forms a large part of the book as more and more questions arose for every answer. Once the quantum door was kicked in, everything was up for grabs, and we moved right along to the present.

While I’m sure I didn’t fully understand all the material on even an introductory academic level, it’s a very readable book, with good explanations and analogies that made most of the technical material at least partly understandable. For example:

[Q]uantum theory implies that there is a natural fuzziness to matter, a finite “smallness” to all things…. If we apply this notion to space, it is natural to expect that the same will be true: that there is a smallest distance of space beyond which nothing can be smaller. According to this view, space is not really a continuum but fuzzy, so that motion cannot proceed smoothly from point to point…. A competing view is to consider that it is not space that needs to be “quiltized” but the notion of point particles that needs to go.

When I was young and even more foolish than I am today, my then-boyfriend and I used to argue about whether the universe was fundamentally analog or digital (oh, come on, who hasn’t had those arguments). And when I read Euclid’s Elements, I was almost disappointed to find a proof that a plane must be continuous, thus analog. But maybe I was mistaken about that interpretation, since it appears scientists are still arguing about it.

I also enjoyed reading “But we do not know what electric charge or mass is…. Mass and charge do not exist per se; they only exist as part of the narrative we humans construct to describe the natural world.” I asked once in some course just what “charge” meant, since I can’t describe it without referring to electric charge, which of course is circular reasoning. So I’m always happy to find out that no one actually knows what “charge” is, beyond that it’s a quality some particles have that causes certain behaviors. This seems like the opposite of Ernst Mach’s problem with atoms: we can see it, feel it, but don’t know what it is. Mass seems to be in the same category.

How much can we know of the world? Can we know everything? Or are there fundamental limits to how much science can explain?…. From our past successes we are confident that, in time, part of what is currently hidden will be incorporated into the scientific narrative, unknowns that will become knowns. But as I will argue in this book, other parts will remain hidden, unknowables that are unavoidable, even if what is unknowable in one age may not be in the next one. We strive toward knowledge, always more knowledge, but must understand that we are, and will remain, surrounded by mystery.
This view is neither antiscientific nor defeatist. … Quite the contrary, it is the flirting with this mystery, the urge to go beyond the boundaries of the known, that feeds our creative impulse, that makes us want to know more.

It was this attitude that made this book so enjoyable for me. Back in the days when I argued about the nature of the universe for fun, I read a lot of general-readership science books, particularly Asimov. I somehow got away from that. Gleiser has written several other books on various aspects of physics and cosmology, and of course there are many other scientists writing for non-scientists these days. Maybe it’s time to get back into it again.

Pushcart XLI: Jean Valentine, “Hospice” from Shirt in Heaven

I wore his hat
as if it was the rumpled coat
of his body, like I could put it on.

At first I was worried: it’s a poem about death, obviously heartfelt and personal, by a highly distinguished poet, and I wouldn’t be able to do it justice. I wondered again if I should be doing this, blogging every poem like I have any idea what I’m doing. But that’s the deal, because otherwise it’s too easy to turn the page and do something easier, and what way is that to do anything worth doing. And as sometimes happens (which is why I’ve stuck by the deal), while no doubt there are subtleties beyond my reach, I found more was accessible than I’d expected.

First is the repetition of words: hat, hand, water, life, rumple. Rumple, of all things. The others are grand words, but rumple? It’s the rumpling that makes the hat, the hand, the water, the life, all beautiful and meaningful. The repetition unites the poem, keeps reminding us why we are there in the hospice room with the dying… dying who? Friend, lover, spouse, child, rival; the details of gender, age, and relationship are omitted so the figure is vague. All we can see is the speaker.

Embodiment again: that familiar recent theme, the body as the medium of experience. Here it’s the medium of goodbye, not grief exactly but more like the presence at a ship’s launching; more like anticipation. I’ve been encountering embodiment in many diverse areas while reading these pieces, in physics and philosophy (which again twine together as they did in ancient Greece). The observer is part of the observed. To measure is to affect what is measured. That must be just as true of watching someone – someone beloved – die as it is of measuring the velocity and position of electrons. Truer, no doubt.

And embodiment, in poetry, turns to typography as form becomes function:

I remembered

like an islander           my island

 

like a calving iceberg, air

The island, the I- land, as he-land slips away from sight: isolation. Just yesterday I learned, courtesy of lexicographer @JesseSheidlower, that island and isle are linguistically unrelated, one from Latin, one from Anglo-Saxon. And now I’m self-conscious about every I that I type, which maybe isn’t a bad thing.

And at the end, after an asterisk (A star? A sound? Or just typographic direction?) there’s a turn. Poems frequently feature turns as part of the semantic structure; sonnets and elegies depend on them. This poem doesn’t have the surface structure of either sonnet or elegy, but maybe it’s an elegy in a deeper way. The turn is one of the most dramatic I’ve read recently; I actually see the speaker physically turning after the death has occurred:

I thought I’d have to listen, hard,
I didn’t even swallow.
But nothing from you stopped.

In prior lines, the speaker used third person to refer to the he; now she promotes he to second person, to you. I can’t help but see this as a step closer to first person, to the I of the island. I see it in my mind, this scene, a companion/comforter/witness at the bedside facing the dying, then rising and turning outward back to the world with that you. Or maybe it’s a different turn, an embodiment not of the hat but of the spirit, a more conceptual turn. And suddenly I wonder if I have it all wrong, if the speaker is the dying, the he/you is the friend/comforter/visitor/witness, the turning not from losing to loss but from embodiment to release.

Of course, it’s entirely likely I’ve missed a larger point about relationships or grief or death while I looked at typography and grammatical persons. But I’m glad I stuck with the poem, that I didn’t let it scare me away, because if nothing else, I know other ways of turning.

Pushcart XLI: Barry Lopez, “The Invitation” from Granta #133

Granta art by Nick Clements

When I was young, and just beginning to travel with them, I imagined that indigenous people saw more and heard more, that they were overall simply more aware than I was. They were more aware, and did see and hear more than I did. The absence of spoken conversation whenever I was traveling with them, however, should have provided me with a clue about why this might be true; but it didn’t, not for a while. It’s this: when an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences, there’s a much greater opportunity for minor details, which might at first seem unimportant, to remain alive in the foreground of an impression, where, later, they might deepen the meaning of an experience.

Complete essay available online at Granta

As I read this essay, I kept thinking, “I’ve read about something like this, recently.” It took me a while to pull it out of my overloaded and sometimes unreliable memory. The Chinese Thought mooc, of course! Confucians see language – including the behavioral language of ritual – as the means of perfecting the individual to full humanity, whereas Daoists feel it’s a distraction from what is essential. “The Way that can be spoken of is not the enduring Way,” wrote Lao Tzu in the Dao de Jing in the 4th century BCE. “He who speaks does not know.” Yes, Prof. Slingerland pointed out the irony of a book dissing language, but that’s how Dao rolls.

Most importantly, he didn’t stop with examining ancient texts, but related the concepts to contemporary neurological, social, and behavioral science. In this case, that meant a guest lecture from UCSB psychology professor Jonathan Schooler on his theory of verbal overshadowing: attempts to describe nonverbal experiences tend to make the experiential memory less accurate on subsequent recall. In its simplest form: if you show someone a face, and ask them to describe it in words, they will be less likely to recognize the face a few moments later than if they did not need to put language to the impression.

Lopez goes beyond this in a paean to the primacy of experience Lao Tzu would appreciate: a broadening of pertinence from the immediate event to what was seen a half hour, or three days, before (tracks of a caribou, for instance), and to later events. The event of seeing a bear isn’t over when the bear is no longer seen; it might never, technically, be over, in much the same vein as the Butterfly Effect.

He also advocates grounding experience in a place. It’s too bad Orion didn’t get to publish this article; it’s exactly their “Nature, culture place” brand (and may the Universe forgive me for using the word “brand” in that sense, it just happens to be appropriate to syntax and semantics).

A grizzly bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket is more than a bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket. It is a point of entry into a world most of us have turned our backs on in an effort to go somewhere else, believing we’ll be better off just thinking about a grizzly bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket.
The moment is an invitation, and the bear’s invitation to participate is offered, without prejudice, to anyone passing by.

I’m not sure I want to participate in such an event, apologies to Lao Tzu and Lopez; I’m not much of a nature person to begin with, and the bear’s a dealbreaker. But I understand the point, the distancing of us from not only nature, but from reality. And again, we have this triad of will, nature, and body that’s been humming around for the past several pieces: the will to experience nature without culture’s safety nets around the body. The willingness to experience.

Pushcart XLI: Kate Levin, “Resting Place” from River Teeth, Sept. 2015

When we arrive at daycare, I step out of the car and close my door gently, hoping not to startle my son awake. As I open the back door to retrieve him from his car seat, I see the bird.
 
I gasp, but only its stillness is gruesome.

Complete piece available online at River Teeth Journal

The first year, maybe two, that I blogged Pushcart, I only did the fiction. Then I added the nonfiction, and a year later, one post for all the poetry, reading it separately. I think I missed a lot skipping around that way. Case in point: we have a second piece about a child, and a bird. A very different piece in tone, theme, and genre – I’m not sure if this is poetry or nonfiction (I would call it poetry), but I’m sure it doesn’t matter – to show us the wide-ranging possibilities of a single combination.

Again, we have a frightening intrusion into an everyday moment, nowhere near as tragic as in “The Raptor” but alarming nonetheless: Life and death, protection and destruction, innocence and guilt, side by side. But mostly there’s the sense of fragility: not just of the sleeping child or the trapped bird, but of the possibility of tragedy under the most pacific scene. Maybe it is the same theme, or at least a similar one: danger lurking everywhere, revealed at the most innocuous, routine moment, and the effect that has on a parent. “There is my sleeping son, and there is the dead bird,” says mom.

But that’s just the first act of this one-page play; the scene doesn’t end there.

But then I would look at him, breath muscle bones, humming in motion; a system insisting on itself. Who was I to doubt it?…. Through the windshield I can see my son, eyes still closed. Beneath a buckled harness, his chest rises and falls, rises and falls, rises and falls.

And we come to the question of will, also raised in “The Raptor”. Both involve the will of a very young child. But here, the will is more the will of the body: the will of “a system insisting on itself.” The rise and fall of the chest (echoing the open and close of the car door?), even in sleep, even next to death.

I’m taking yet another biology mooc, and I continue to be in awe of this bundle of atoms we call our bodies, of the billions of things that happen every second to keep our chests rising and falling, to keep us working and playing and loving and laughing and writing blog posts. Is the will to live the will of the body? Maybe it’s the will of nature: like charges repel and opposite charges attract, ions pump, cardiac muscles contract, nerve cells signal the diaphragm to take another breath, even in sleep. “A system insisting on itself,” and mom sees her world isn’t quite as fragile as she thought.

The juxtaposition of these two pieces is marvelous. Either one alone has power, but together, they hold a conversation.

Pushcart XLI: Charles Holdefer, “The Raptor” from Chicago Quarterly Review #21

Photo by Christine Dibble

Cody was the only one to see the raptor descend. What to believe. On the second day of their vacation, Lisa had put Ronny – barely three weeks old! – on the picnic table in his baby seat while she paused to apply sun cream to his soft, wrinkly knees…. “Happy Ronaldus!” Lisa straightened for a moment to apply some of Ronny’s protective cream to her own face. Up here in the mountains you had to be careful, the ultraviolet rays were more powerful.
Cody sat on a nearby rock, looking up at the pines, the fleecy clouds, and a black dot that was growing bigger.

I see so many threads running through this story: faith, religion, sex, danger, loss, family, human frailty. Yet I can’t get a firm hold on it, or organize it in a way that makes sense to me.

First, the word “raptor”. It’s not an uncommon word – technically, it’s any bird of prey, such as a hawk, vulture, eagle, falcon – but if a bird swooped in and flew off with a baby, I’m not sure I’d describe it as a raptor. I’d be more along the lines of “some big bird”. Given the religious twist of events, and the similarity of “raptor” to “rapture”, I have to wonder if it’s a symbol for divine plans. Or maybe it’s about finding rapture in various ways: in sexuality, booze, or intense religiosity. Maybe the word is just to link it all together linguistically. Even the playful family nickname “Ronaldus Magnus” reminded me both of medieval kings and popes, and of Seinfeld’s Festivus, at least until I discovered it’s an occasional right-wing nickname for Ronald Regan.

Then there’s the second sentence: “What to believe.” There’s some trick of narration there. Though five-year-old Cody was the only one to see the actual abduction, the parents saw the raptor flying away with Ronny, so they would believe the child. This is an outside narrator commenting with the view of those outside the family. And suddenly we’re in “The dingo took my baby” territory: ornithologists offering opinions about raptors’ capacities to carry off tiny babies, interviews for Cody and the parents. Although much of the story appears to be close third person from within the family, this more distant narrator introduces several crucial transitions, including a series of “Even if not for the raptor” examples of the changes that befell the family afterwards. But that early sentence left me a bit off balance.

Ronny found himself in a nest on a cliff ledge with two baby birds. Still looking up at the blue sky, inhaling the thinner, colder air, his cries competed with the screeks of his companions. Oh, he was hungry! As the blue air turned purple and then black and stars pricked the blackness and constellations whirled in the firmament above, he welcomed the warmth of the bodies next to him, and it was a comfort when the big, heavy body sat on him, with its stronger heat, its thicker feathers.
Ronny tired himself with crying and then fell into a doze, feeling the beats of hearts next to his. They beat very fast.

I felt a lot of distance between me and the characters. There’s a great deal of detail about their downward spirals. There’s also a great deal of caring going on: from the start when Lisa is careful to protect Ronny from sunburn with sunscreen, speaking to him playfully, to much later when Dan calls her in the middle of the night to ask if she ever thinks about him, even to Cory’s concern over his mother’s drinking. Yet it all felt so removed. No one ever become more than a fictional character. I wonder if I’m callous, or if that’s deliberate, a distant narrator’s analytical eye, seeing but not feeling, or at least not conveying feeling. I have to wonder, too, if this is dark humor, something I often miss completely.

When he fell, rolling into the open air, he felt surprised and, at the same time, affronted. What was happening to him?
Ronny bellowed headlong into a vast and hideous deep. There was no time to think of who could hear him. His heels moved eagerly for traction against the retreating sky. This missing sensation seemed precious, but it was also like an insult to him and to the place from which he fell.
Darkness in a hurtling tract, the rub of cold. His voice split the air, refusing to submit or yield. This much felt right. His will was still untouched, his own.

The story deals with two time lines, one in the period immediately following the raptor’s theft sandwiched in between longer segments about the fourteen years that followed. I get the distinct sense that the timelines converge. Cody, having had his personal conversion experience and on a camping trip with the girl who brought him to Jesus, masturbates on the spot, perhaps, where Ronny fell out of the nest so long ago. The text is ambiguous. The end is ambiguous as well, though the idea of sudden danger – whether from his girlfriend discovering his nocturnal activities, or from a raptor, a feral Ronny, or a wild animal – striking without any warning, might be an obvious conclusion.

It’s that mention of will that really feels like I missed something along the line. Again, I end up back at religion. A major part of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic triad is that God has a purpose and we need to make our wills subordinate to his. Many Eastern religions advocate a release of desire to achieve happiness, or following a path set by the universe rather than taking matters into our own hands. But then, there are many people who are just aimless. Again, I’m not sure how any of this fits in, but I heard the note.

That’s really my overall experience with the story: I heard a lot of notes, but I can’t figure out what key we’re in.

Pushcart XLI: Leslie Johnson, “Midterm” from Colorado Review, Spring 2015

Art by Annemeike Mein: “Whirlpool Frog”

Midmorning in mid-October, in the middle of the campus, Chandra stopped in the center of the crisscrossing sidewalks. She pulled the phone from her handbag and pretended to be texting someone; she smiled down at the screen as if someone had texted her back. She felt other students brushing past her on the walkway, but didn’t look up at their faces.

Complete story available online at Colorado Review

I kept thinking of story classifications as I mulled this one over. Some stories are love stories, or war stories or sexual abuse stories or coming-of-age stories; this one seems obviously classifiable as an anorexia story, but I think that’s just the specific vehicle; the motivation is broader. The editor’s introduction to the Spring 2015 issue of Colorado Review nails it:

“Emerging from the grip of winter, when we’ve retreated from the cold, holing up in the warmth of our homes and for a time losing touch with the earth, with one another, sometimes even with ourselves, we long to reestablish ties once the green reveals itself again. The fiction and essays gathered here, in this spring issue, bring us stories of people seeking connection in its various forms.”

The voice, though somewhat off-putting to me, is perfect for the story: it reads like an emotionally unaware college student wrote it, little hints slipping out right and left almost deliberately in that passive-aggressive way of screaming “Why are you always looking at me please pay attention to me just leave me alone”. The anorexia angle, for instance: it’s so evident, from the professor’s remarks about “not another anorexia essay” to the obsession with Pop-Tarts and hip bones, yet that’s just the surface symptomology of the deeper intimacy issues that play out. Like pretending she’s texting someone, which is the new version of 1975’s “inventing lovers on the phone” – or the “I have plans that night” from the 50s. After all, if someone is texting you, that means you’re normal, right? But a cell phone is all the intimacy she can handle.

The story has strong bone structure underneath that deliberately ravaged skin. It’s fascinating to watch as Chandra reveals a tiny bit, gauges the response, and moves a bit closer to Eli (and, literally, farther from her phone and into hot water). She starts off making up lies just to agree with him: she sees the single red leaf he sees, about to fall (now there’s a genuinely good pickup line if ever I heard one), and things go downhill from there. She’s new at this, so it’s natural she doesn’t interpret the signals well: he’s dismissive of nearly everything she says. The final revelation is inadvertent. In the context of an actual nascent relationship rather than pretense, it would be possible to get back on track. But it’s just too much for Chandra.

Approach-avoidance: that tug of war between the guy in real life or the phone in the tree, the fear vs pull of relationship, the anorexic woman who enrolls in a gender studies class than won’t show up. All the usual coming-of-age crap here in Body Week XLI, dialed up to a pathological 11 and covered over with an Everything’s Fine, Fine veneer. The resolution almost doesn’t matter. Almost.

Pushcart XLI: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, “I Dream of Horses Eating Cops” from Nepantla #2

Art by Ulrike “Ricky” Martin

 
i name my body girl of my dreams
i name my body proximity
i name my body full of hope despite everything
i name my body dead girl who hasn’t died yet
 
i hope i come back as an elephant
i hope we all come back as animals
and eat our fill
 
i hope everyone gets everything they deserve
 

Complete poem available online from LitHub

The ordering of Pushcart pieces, unlike BASS, is up to the editors. This year we opened with a cluster of art-themed stories, a theme that’s echoed from time to time throughout. I sense a distinct pocket of body-themed works, going back to Charlie, or even to Slocomb County, though now the theme takes precedence over other threads. The body as male or female, brown or white, me or not me, human or animal, cop or civilian.

I read a poem that starts out with elements of bitterness, but turns towards hope. I’m enchanted by the idea of wanting to come back as an elephant; I keep wondering what it is about the elephant that is so appealing. Its size? Its reputation for memory? Its thick skin?

I also spent some time wondering about all of us getting what we deserve. I think nearly everyone wishes that, yet I suspect most of us will be disappointed with our deserts, a kind of moral Ikea effect.

Pushcart XLI: David J. Unger, “Fail Again” from The Point #10

FAILURE FESTIVAL is an invitation. An invitation for you to help us engage failure in a public setting. We need you because we don’t know how to do it on our own. We don’t know whether to barrel towards it, argue with it, or sit on its lap. We don’t know if we should give it keys to our apartment, or ask it to apologize. Sometimes we cower in the corner. Sometimes we lie down and try to convince it that we are asleep… or dead.
We want to know what failure reveals about our world that success masks. We do not expect easy answers. We may find none at all. This is a celebration and acknowledgement of the fact that when things inevitably don’t go as we plan, somehow, we must adapt. Please help.

Complete essay available online at The Point

I’ve learned, in the past three years, to embrace failure, mostly through the influence of a bunch of math teachers who are convinced if you aren’t getting things wrong, you aren’t learning anything, and that learning to tolerate frustration and persevere is more important than memorizing trig identities. One thing I can always succeed at is failing at math, so I’ve finally found a way to, um, succeed?

This isn’t a unique approach. Every writer, every dreamer who ever poured out her heart on paper knows at least one line from Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”, a line celebrated in 2014 by Trinity College in Dublin with “a free exhibition of beautiful, heroic and instructive failures” in its Science Gallery. And just last month, MIT’s Technology Review published a story on Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman – and PhD candidate in math – John Urschel, who says “In math, you have to be comfortable with failure.” And the Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm 500 Startups is all about failure: “The alternate name we came up with for 500 Startups was ‘fail factory,’ says [founding partner Dave] McClure. ‘We’re here trying to ‘manufacture fail’ on a regular basis, and we think that’s how you learn.’”

Before we were all about “winning”, failure was a recognized route to success.

So I was really eager to read this piece, a journalistic look at the Failure Festival presented in Boulder, CO back in 2014.

I got a bit lost in the description of the festival itself. Apparently it was a three day audience-participation dance-and-performance-art thing. Garbage bags served as ponchos, tomatoes were provided for throwing and carrots for carving. It was probably much better in person than it was to read about. But I must admit, sadly, the piece didn’t work for me. But if an article about a failure festival fails, does that make it a success?

Pushcart XLI: Richie Hofmann, “Idyll” from Second Empire

Fernando Vincente: “Atlas” series

 
Cicadas bury themselves in small mouths
of the tree’s hollow, lie against the bark tongues like amulets,
 
 
though it is I who pray I might shake off this skin and be raised
from the ground again….
 

~ Complete poem available online at TNY

 

 
 
My initial impression of the poem was of rebirth, of an emergence from a life of repression and fear into a more free existence. But when I’m uncertain, which is most of the time (particularly with poetry), I go researching. And in my research I found gold.

First, cicadas. I have a vague idea of a cyclical existence, of an emergence every so often in a loud frenzy of insect celebration, but I didn’t know if that was folklore or fact. Turns out, it’s both:

Cicadas begin life as a rice-shaped egg, which the female deposits in a groove she makes in a tree limb…. Once the egg hatches the cicada begins to feed on the tree fluids…. Once the young cicada is ready, it crawls from the groove and falls to the ground where it will dig until it finds roots to feed on. Once roots are found the cicada will stay underground…. After the long 2 to 17 years, cicadas emerge from the ground as nymphs. Nymphs climb the nearest available tree, and begin to shed their nymph exoskeleton. Free of their old skin, their wings will inflate with fluid and their adult skin will harden. Once their new wings and body are ready, they can begin their brief adult life.

~~ CicadaMania

This fits beautifully into the poem: the mouth and feeding imagery, a life cycle of becoming, “one life / abrades another”, the sense of rebirth even I could not miss on first reading. We all pass from the truths we believed in childhood – truths about ourselves, about the world, generated from unquestioned pronouncements of authority figures or merely from perceptions in a very limited frame of reference – into a more complex, nuanced, and fact-based truths that withstand critical examination as contradictions are encountered.

Yes, of course it’s a coming-out poem, mixing the literal coming out of the cicada from the nurturing protection of the tree to the world, and the more figurative coming out into self-acceptance and freedom to own one’s space in the world as one is, scraping off the criticisms and fears in favor of “a body built for love”. Specifically aiming towards queer metaphor, it could also be applied to any kind of emergence from a poorly-fitting set of imposed norms into a life that fully celebrates one’s existence and understanding of reality, a more nimble and authentic way to progress through the world: feeling what we feel, rather than what we’ve been told to feel.

I was surprised to see a poem from The New Yorker in Pushcart – the champion of small presses ignores the glossies – but the nomination came instead from Hofmann’s premier collection, Second Empire. Soren Stockman’s Kenyon Review analysis gave me a greater appreciation of this metamorphic theme that runs through both the collection and this individual poem:

Richie Hofmann’s debut collection, Second Empire,contains the fierce construction of a life saturated with love. Hofmann’s speaker looks closely at the world he is born into as well as at the world he would create in its place, the former existing as a battlefield whose rules have not been proclaimed widely enough and the latter being forged from a sensual and uncompromising imagination. These two worlds often appear in the same moment, line, sentence, or poem, like two opposing emotions gripped simultaneously in the mind. Over the course of the book, they move closer, tentative as new lovers. Hofmann builds a steadying cord between the eyes and what they view in both his speaker and his reader. He grants us a tightrope and we walk out of ourselves into what eventually become our lives.

~~ Soren Stockman for Kenyon Review

Many of us are right now walking a tightrope of truths: loud voices, some of them supposed authority figures, are telling us, and the truth of what we experience in our own lives and know from however many years of our lives. Can there be a reverse metamorphosis, back into the childhood of uncritical acceptance of authority merely because it has power? I hope not.

I was particularly struck by Stockman’s observations about the cover image of the book: “We see finally the map on the book’s cover to be a torso, then the cords of someone’s neck, and then a mouth opening.” Yes, I had noticed, on the KR page, an intriguing image that looked somewhat like a 19th century anatomical drawing of a torso. His chronology is spot-on: then I noticed the map, then the neck, then the mouth. It’s a carefully cropped version of a work from Spanish painter Fernando Vincente’s “Atlas” series; I’ve used the uncropped version as the header art for this post.

The purists will tell you a poem must be taken on its own, that it’s a weakness of analytical and aesthetic skill if the reader can’t recognize what’s going on based purely on the text of the poem. That may be true, but some of us need some guidance to develop those skills. Sometimes my guidance comes from more experienced and knowledgeable poeticists; sometimes it comes from separating myth and reality to better understand cicadas.

Pushcart XLI: Lydia Davis, “After Reading Peter Bichsel” from Paris Review #215

Yevgenia Nayberg: “Alarm Clock”

Last spring and summer, I was reading the stories of the Swiss writer Peter Bichsel. I began reading them in Vienna. The little book—a hardcover, but small and lightweight—was a gift from a German friend at the start of my trip, to provide me with something to read in German…. I continued reading Bichsel’s stories on the train from Vienna to Salzburg, and then in Salzburg, and then on the train to Zürich, and then in Zürich, Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne, and on each train I took to go from one city to the next.
In fact, Peter Bichsel regularly writes about reading and about train journeys. He will also sometimes begin a story, or remark in the middle of a story, “There are stories that are hardly worth telling,” or “There is almost nothing to say about X,” and then sometimes follow that with a “but”: “But I have wanted to tell this story for a long time now,” or “But it has to be told, because it was the first story in my life, the first one that I remember.” He then goes on to tell a lovely, quiet, modest story, a story that glows with human kindness, or love, or some combination of compassion, understanding, and honesty. (Or am I, these days, finding this quality so marked in his stories because I am seeking it?)

I have no idea who Peter Bichsel is, or what kinds of stories he writes, other than what we’re told in the text. It’s possible if I were more familiar with this writer, I’d have a more sophisticated understanding of the story. What I notice – beside the inclusion of at least two of the dismissal/but constructions – is a kind of mirror structure: not just the opening and closing frames of train travel for the main story, but within the story itself, there is a repetition that could be viewed as signalling a return track. Or maybe it’s the odd nature of the writing itself that has me looking for tricks where none are intended, that this is a simple telling of a tale: I was reading this writer, and I decided to write out these events in his style. An homage, that is, to Peter Bichsel.

Lydia Davis sure knows how to write restaurant scenes. About four years ago I read her very short story/essay “Eating Fish Alone” (as part of a food-related mini-collection from Madras Press) and wondered why a piece about choosing a meal was so engrossing. Now I have to wonder if that was a practice sketch for this story (if it is a story). I suspect this is related to an Ishiguro story that I later found out was a practice sketch of “dream grammar” for his novel The Unconsoled; Davis’ story here too, seems to me something along the lines of a dream, not for the illogical sequence of events or sudden shifts in time, but for the extreme close-up on details that seem rather trivial.

The story within the frame consists of the author’s observations of fellow diners at lunch the first day of her Salzburg sightseeing, then of another lunch on the second day after a pilgrimage to Mozart’s birthplace. I can’t see any reason in the text for the Mozart connection specifically, but it still seems significant. Maybe it’s that in a story as packed with seemingly random details as this one, I assume everything is significant at some level I just can’t perceive.

It was the woman at the table to my right who came to interest me the most during that lunch hour, although at first, in my preoccupation with settling into my seat, putting my bag down beside me, bringing out something to read, and looking around to take in the sights and sounds of the room, I did not pay particular attention to her. It was only as I became used to my surroundings, having examined the features of the room, the customers in my part of it – the larger part – and those beyond the partition, having absorbed the particular characteristic sights and sounds of this place and taken note of any more unusual features were occupants, that my attention was more and more drawn to my neighbor.

Our narrator is quite interested in the woman at the table to her right, first because she is eating so quickly, while seemingly in no hurry to finish lunch and leave, and second because of an alarm clock on the table. This is the kind of detail that reminded me of a dream sequence. As the story notes, the alarm clock seems to serve no purpose, but reinforces the notion of time associated with this character. Maybe this is what made me think of a mirror story: a reversal of time.

While in general the story is all about observation, there are some incidents of note. The time woman asks if anyone has a pen she may borrow:

When she did not find a pen, she looked up and around at the people near her, including those in my direction, and asked us all generally if anyone could lend her a pen. I hesitated, waiting for someone else to offer. I had been writing in my own notebook, though I had put it and my pen away. I did not want to lend her a pen, even though I had more than one.

I have to wonder: why did the narrator not want to lend her a pen? I think it has to do with story function, with maintaining a distance; if she interacted directly, subject and object would merge, and the preference is to maintain the pre-modern distinction. Of course, that’s reaching, but I’m generally interested in subject/object interaction, so that’s where I go when I have the opportunity. Whether or not that’s where Davis was doing, I have no idea.

Another character of interest sits at the narrator’s table (apparently this is a semi-communal lunch spot, similar I imagine to the old Durgin Park in Boston before it decided to be an upscale restaurant), and while she is examined in detail the narrator’s interest in her is clearly less than in the time woman. I have to wonder if that’s because there is interaction between subject and object, and thus the narrator loses interest in her as a character.

For a time, I felt that we five, in that corner of the restaurant – the silent but contented married couple, who had now finished their palatschinken and returned to their former activities, he reading this newspaper, she gazing at the room; my new table partner with her pale wrinkled face, her little bun of white hair, her somber curiosity; my large-framed energetic neighbor to the right with her firmly planted feet, her wheeling elbows, and her alarm clock; and I – were an odd group, and in our variety reminded me, more than anything, of a group of the more harmless patients on a mental ward at mealtime, each with his or her own difficulty in the face of the food.

That’s a strange observation, but it seems spot-on. I wonder if the narrator is referring to actual experience of having observed patients on a mental ward, or is surmising reality from descriptions in books.

The final event of interest – in a sea of acute observation and speculation – comes at lunch the next day in another restaurant when the time woman again is a fellow diner. The narrator spends a great deal of time trying to figure out how that event, unlikely to occur by chance, has happened; she considers asking the staff about the woman, but isn’t willing to breach protocol simply to satisfy her curiosity. This reminded me of the kind of writing I hear about, a projective technique where the writer considers that the character has a mind of her own and the author’s job is to follow and shape the story to accommodate her.

It’s an odd story, written in slightly odd style, but one I found to be unexpectedly engrossing, as I did Davis’ earlier fish story. Maybe that’s why I’m working so hard – overworking? – to find a more conventional significance and meaning. Maybe I don’t need to find a symbolic structurization (the world as a mental ward; compassion and honesty as something observed but not done); maybe it’s enough that it be an interesting little piece that held my attention for twenty minutes. Maybe it’s more of an appealing wallpaper image or catchy tune than the Key to Human Existence.

And, by the way, my favorite part of the story has little to do with the story at all, but with the blog post written by Jake Weber as part of his continuing WIHPTS series. He makes a wonderful observation about the closing section of the story, something that fits in with my narrator-distance idea. But for the first time since he started the approach, he decides, “No I would not have published this story.”

At first, I took umbrage at that verdict, but I can’t really disagree with his reasons. They’re the sort of thing every beginning writer knows about literary magazines: “Not very promising to be warned early on that there isn’t really much of interest in the story….It’s adjective heavy… so much of this right at the outset of the story, after first being waylaid by a lengthy framing of the story….” Yes, and yes. These are things they warn you about. I don’t disagree with the observation, merely that those are disqualifying factors.

And then there’s the slow pace, anathema to contemporary editors who insist you grab them from the first sentence and never let them go (a quality that nevertheless seems quite lacking to me in most stories, which I’ve always chalked up to my own odd sense of what is interesting). But Jake admits:

I actually somewhat liked the non-hurried pace of it. So many literary magazine stories are frenetic, because we writers are told how critical it is to keep the story moving. This has a feel to it like a story from a century ago, when writers were still self-assured of their own raison d’etre they weren’t always in a rush, didn’t always have to have explosions.

I loved this comment, because it pointed out 1) a need for variety; if every story “grab the reader”, the slower pace stands out, feels like a relief; and 2) the explosions. I once wrote a story – it was written around a single line (“We say, but we don’t always mean”) that was highly personal to me at the time, a story about two boys become two men, with the crucial reunion scene in a coffee shop, a scene I choreographed down to with what words one leaned forward or back, featuring a trash bin with a flap that waved goodbye. In workshop I was told, “Have them meet in a forest, where there’s a fire, and the helicopters come in to save them, and he’s shouting over the noise; Or maybe explosions, a bomb goes off in the coffee shop”. The story did eventually find a home, but this is why I gave up fiction writing. Well, that, and I could never really construct a plot that interested anyone but myself; writing as therapy is great, but doesn’t create art. As opposed to blogging, where I can put a huge digression here in the middle and not worry about it because no more than two people will ever read this. The blessings of obscurity.

In any case, Jake makes a fantastic case for a story he enjoyed but wouldn’t have published, and I have to wonder if that’s what’s why I’m more drawn to Pushcart, which lets the lines be blurred between fiction and memoir, between prose and poetry, which includes pieces I don’t understand and don’t always like, but also pieces that show what is possible beyond the traditional edicts like “Grab the reader from the first sentence and put in helicopters and explosions”.

I do have to agree with Jake’s final assessment: “I’m pretty sure an unknown author would have had a very hard time publishing this story.” Oh, yeah. But what’s the point of being Lydia Davis if you have to climb your way out of the slush pile? Is it fair that others may do this and be dismissed because they aren’t Lydia Davis? No – but that doesn’t mean Davis should be more restricted, but that these rigid requirements have become the antithesis of art and that too many litmags are more about entertainment, about meeting expectations, than shaping them, about following the status quo than challenging it.

/end rant.

Pushcart XLI: Melissa Broder, “Forgotten Sound” (poem) from Last Sext (Tin House 2016)

Photo by Martin Stranka: “Rejected”

I pretended the lust was voices
And I wrote down the voices
And sometimes the voices spoke as I had written them
To confirm what I already knew
Which is that I am a child and ready for petting

Complete poem available online at The Rumpus

I confess that I’ve been a bit puzzled, maybe even slightly put off, by the Broder phenomenon. She earned her MFA, has published several poetry collections since 2010 (including the one featuring this poem), and her bio at Poetry Foundation lists leadership work with literary magazines and organizations. Yet she became a sensation because of her melancholic tweets (@sosadtoday) and her same-titled book of essays about vulnerability and insecurity and, well, being sad – a book she herself felt might make others take her less seriously as a poet, a book that ended up enshrined in everything from Rolling Stone to Elle to The New Yorker. In the film Broadcast News, dysphoric reporter Allen Brooks whines, “Wouldn’t this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If “needy” were a turn-on?” Turns out, in the right hands, it can be.

I can’t dismiss this poem, and not only because Broder was a prolific and respected poet before her Twitter fame. There’s a powerful haunting quality to it that touches me: the build to the last line, the echo after the words go silent like the click of a closing door, a hollow openness reminiscent of the quality Sinéad O’Connor brought to “Sacrifice”. My admiration for Elton John knows no bounds, but it took O’Connor to expose the emotion, as Broder does with Brooks’ well-defended comedic lament.

Maybe it’s a new confessionalism. Maybe it’s just relief that someone else gets it. I’ve said often I don’t pretend to know what’s “good” and what isn’t; sometimes I don’t even know exactly what it is I feel when I read something; but I still know when I feel something intense, something important, and I did. Isn’t that what a successful poem does?

Pushcart XLI: Kendra Fortmeyer, “Things I Know to be True” from One Story #209

“Troubled Mind” by Chris-Archetypes on DeviantArt

I am leaving the library when Miss Fowler stops me, peering through her glasses like they are windows in a house where she lives alone. She says, “Charlie, a patron saw you ripping up books.”
“I didn’t,” I say. These words sound true, but Miss Fowler holds up The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Bits of paper flutter from its edges like snow.
I know a man in that book. He was trapped underground, dying in the dark and the antiquated language. He coughed then. He rustles in the pocket of my windbreaker now.
From elsewhere, Miss Fowler says, “Give me the pages.”
“I am going to take him outside,” I announce. I declare. Declare which is like clarion call which is of trumpets. “I am going to take him into the light.”
“Look,” Miss Fowler says. Her lips blow bubbles of words into the air: crisp, faceted ones like replacement and thin-filmed ones like expensive. She speaks to me like I am a child. Like operations can smooth these cracked, dark hands, like damages can topple the twenty-seven precarious years stacked in my name.

Oh, this one’s a heartbreaker – perhaps because Charlie is so familiar.

In her One Story introduction, editor Hannah Tinti talks about her mother’s assertion, as a librarian, that a library is a “lifeline to the community”. I spend a fair amount of time in my local public library, and I’m amazed at how patient and helpful the staff always is, no matter what my problem: a book isn’t where it should be, the photocopy machine is out of paper, can I get a copy of this article from a 1955 journal out of print for 40 years (a PDF was in my inbox the next day). But they also are very good at ignoring people who are a bit off-kilter. People like Charlie. There’s a Charlie in every library, I think; sometimes, it’s me.

Charlie is a 27-year-old Vietnam vet (the story is set in the 70s, the Carter administration per the newspaper headlines Charlie reads) with wounds both visible and unseen. PTSD wasn’t much of a thing back then; unfortunately, it’s still often overlooked, or misdiagnosed, or ignored, even today. I’m not sure if that’s Charlie’s problem, if he has brain damage or some kind of other issue (this isn’t a diagnostic story), but his reality is made of words. Words become real. Fortunato is trapped in the pages of Poe, begging for release. Without words, Charlie collapses on the floor.

I go to the library because it is full of words, and I trust words. They make things real.
…
These are the things that I know to be true:
1. The past and future exist through stories
2. The stories are made of words
3. Words make the future and past exist

This means: if I went to the VA clinic yesterday I can say, “I went to the clinic yesterday.” Then there it is, in your head, like a real thing: a little image that is me at the clinic. I could also say, “I went to the zoo yesterday,” and then that would be real in your head instead. You would not know the difference. I might not know the difference. I couldn’t believe the words I went to the zoo or I could believe the words I went to the clinic. Maybe both are true.

The conflict ratchets up when a librarian confronts him about tearing Fortunato from the book; things escalate, and he ends up in jail for a day and a half, but worse, he’s banned from the library. He has no more words. Charlie’s pain is very real to me.

I found the resolution to be beautiful: he is reunited, by the grace of another librarian in another library, with the original book, Catch-22, all that was left of his friend from combat:

The pages flutter like crazed butterflies. I look down and see through the high whine in my ears that my hands are cracked and through the cracks I see names. Jimmy Metcalf. Lucas Johnson. I see the way the light reflects on the water where they found that little bathing. I see the song Joe Crispin played on his guitar in Quang Tri, and how it got stuck in everyone’s head for days…. And I see the way the air gleamed pink after Jimmy stepped onto the mine – the tiny click and then the sky blown apart and the whole world set singing, flashing white in the sun, pieces of flesh against the green like cherry blossoms in the first light of spring: so pink and bright that your heart ripped in half at the beauty.
One half says, the trees on fire
The other half says, the trees are not on fire.
Maybe both are true.
I see this book inside Jimmy’s hat and then me taking it and writing down these words, a story hidden inside another story. I see the pages fill while the doctors patched up my leg and the skin scabbed over my arm.… And I see the book on the plane, carried all the way home until I landed on American soil, and the chapter ended and I closed it.
But then, here it is. On the table. In the library. And here I am.
“This book is gone,” I say again.
“No,” the librarian says, slowly. “It was just misplaced.”

If only the rest of what has been misplaced can be so easily remedied. The implication, I believe, is that it can be. But it may take time for the pieces to be found.

The notion of words becoming reality is something akin to the philosophical school of idealism, where reality consists, not of things, but of our perception of things, our ideas about things. I just happen to have completed a mooc that included a bit of work on idealism, so it was fresh in my mind. Carried to the extreme, as in Borges, it can lead to absurdities (yet I see a great deal happening recently that reminds me strongly of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”; absurd, no?). At one point, Charlie demonstrates this for us:

I fling my notebook into my bag and dash for the door. I catch a blush of autumn in my periphery, and my steps to not falter. I vanished into the late afternoon light.
 
You believed me, didn’t you? You saw me in your brain, vanishing. Which means that for one minute it was true, and now it exists, and will be true forever.
But what also happened is this:

I believe the now-discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis might also come into play here, a theory that one’s language determines the concepts one has available; that is, one’s reality. This was also the underlying premise of the recent movie Arrival, based on Ted Chiang’s short story “The Story of Your Life”. I’m also unable to forget the “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” adage when I think of Charlie; he knows a great deal about sticks and stones, but he also knows about the power of words. As in, the first librarian’s ability to say “You can’t come back to the library” (in linguistic terms, a speech act).

But none of that academic stuff has anything to do with Charlie; he’s connected to words, to a particular book, as a way of coping with horrific trauma, as a memorial to his friend. And while all the language and philosophy is more than interesting, it’s still the emotional punch that makes this story work so well for me.

My blogging buddy Jake Weber looked at the story from the viewpoint of a litmag editor in his Would I Have Published This Story? series (WIHPTS) on his blog “Workshop Heretic”. His comments are very much worth reading for good insight into Charlie’s struggles and growth, and how the story incorporates them.

Pushcart XLI: Cecily Parks, “Hurricane Song” (poem) from O’Nights

“After the Hurricane” by Wayne Rogers (detail)

The pines dizzying for a hurricane, the wind
so hotly twirls their skirts and underskirts,
unnerves their pinecones, ratchets up and up
their branches into needle-spangled, needle-spraying
plumes. The white running sunlight falls and tumbles
through the meadow, rattling the grass. The meadow
sweeps me up in its arms so that I lose track of east
and feel that little kidnapped thrill that comes with drastic
weather.

Complete poem available online at Kenyon Review

Imagine a forest as a community filled with the sentience of nature: trees, grass, deer, birds. Now imagine that community dancing in the storm, not fearing it but playing with it. That’s the kind of personification I see in this poem. Pine trees as skirts particularly strikes me as particularly nice imagery; that is how the branches move in a stiff wind. I hear a lot of sibilance – grasses, guess, yes – in several parts of the poem, imitating the sound of wind.

Hannah Fries of Southern Humanities Review points out, in her review that O’Nights, the title of the collection containing the poem, comes from an entry in Thoreau’s journal reporting a friend’s comment: “He thought that Emerson was a very young-looking man for his age, ‘But,’ said he, ‘he has not been out o’ nights as much as you have.'” Being out o’nights has its costs, perhaps, but also its benefits in experience.

The forest has loved itself long enough to do this.
Is now when I should love myself into a safer place,
or is this the place where love makes me safe? I guess yes
and yes.

The idea of being safe from the storm in the forest seem odd, doesn’t it? I’ve experienced hurricanes in Florida and New England, and I’m not trusting enough of the forest to keep me safe. I wonder if Thoreau ever did.

Pushcart XLI: Jenn Shapland, “Finders Keepers” (nonfiction) from Tin House #65

Tin House Art by Martin Wittfooth

A library is not a list. A library is dirty, has smells. I know this because I interned in a special collections library. It’s a special collections library that happens to house, along with its First Folios and signed copies of The Waste Land, a larger assortment of socks than you might guess.
Personal effects generally arrive at the Harry Ransom Center’s loading dock on the University of Texas campus via happenstance. They get stuck into boxes of manuscripts and books for reasons unknown. They’re stowaways. That is why I’m so fond of them….
It was in 7B, before my long afternoons itemizing and categorizing the socks of the dead and famous, that I began to collect certain stories. Stories about wanting and having, giving and taking, even stealing…. Yet as I poked and prodded into what began to seem like the dusty broom closet or unexamined under-the-bed of culture, it was my own relationship to objects that began to feel illicit.

What does it mean to own something? Not the legalities – those are easily determined by consulting a list of conditions that must exist. But what does it mean to us, psychologically? Is it purely for the practical reasons of economic advantage or control over disposition that we want to own a house or a plot of land or a business – or a letter written by Einstein, or the socks worn by someone powerful or famous – or is there something more, a kind of closeness? If it turned out the socks were mislabeled and were just thrown in the box by a packer with sore feet, what would that mean – that it is knowledge that determines value? Would we even want to know? Does that make the determining factor something more like faith?

Shapland’s essay about her internship at the Harry Ransom Center focuses on her work with a molecular model kit owned by Einstein (I was just looking at a similar kit the other day, available on Amazon for less than $20), but branches out to consider motivations behind thefts from the archives, and the human relationship to property in general, a relationship that is, in some crucial ways, fundamental to the spectrum of capitalism and communism but remains fundamentally illusory, as her last paragraph makes clear:

Maybe this desire for communion, for identity – the longing in belongings – is what Walter Benjamin means when he says that collection is a renewal, acquisition a form of rebirth. And isn’t it funny, the big lie at the heart of the enterpriser. All of this stuff is ultimately just that. No apparatus, no matter how meticulous or expensive or careful, can protect a collection from the inevitable slippages, losses, thefts, whether the perpetrators be people, bugs, mold, disintegration, or time. Acquire it, collect it, steal it, forward it, conserve it, preserve it, store it, house it, box it, hold it, wear it, but there’s just no keeping it.

The essay triggered a great many thoughts I’ve had floating around for a long time. So this post will be even more self-indulgent than usual: less about the essay, more about me and my reactions, which float around the fringes of ownership, since Shapland does such a good job with the center portion.

I live near the Maine Historical Society, which includes “the boyhood home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, a phrase I’ve heard so often it’s implanted in my brain. Why is this home so special, why is the Rainy Day Room a place people visit in hushed awe, why is it so special to look out the same window where “it is thought” he wrote, “Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; / Behind the clouds is the sun still shining; / Thy fate is the common fate of all, / Into each life some rain must fall, / Some days must be dark and dreary” in response to a rainy day? Do they hope to be graced with the same inspiration? Is it an homage? An attempt to own something? I wonder if someone has tried to buy the property, simply to own it. And I wonder: if some document were discovered that proves he wrote the poem elsewhere, how would the room change?

Transference. That’s the psychological function at work here. It’s a combination of projection, ascribing some aspect of yourself – fantasies, desires, imagination – to the object, and introjection, taking some part of it unto/into yourself. For William James, this is the way objects (which, importantly, can also be whole people) become extensions of the self.

I wonder if that’s what’s behind my occasional obsession with songs: I’ve been known to play a song over and over, then I suddenly stop. I’ve called it ownership, though it has nothing to do with purchasing anything. It’s more than the point of memorization, but less than understanding (I never feel like I fully understand anything), so that’s not it. I don’t know what it is that happens, but it’s like an orgasm without the burst of pleasure: a sudden sense that I’m done, and I don’t want any more. The song is mine, in a way I can’t define, a way that has nothing to do with legalities.

The thefts Shapland describes (the essay appears in the issue of Tin House named “Theft”) are again puzzles on the fringes of ownership. A page of an original Einstein manuscript was stolen, and carefully protected – locked away, self-archived – by the thief (who was eventually found). Was it just the illicit thrill? Again, was it a hope to be inspired, a wish that genius could be transmissible through century-old paper? Or again, are we back to homage, communion? Or is it just a way for a poor schlub to feel special?

Shapland tells of processing a set of papers for the David Foster Wallace collection, and of being unable to part with some of the clips she was authorized to discard. Other paper clips, labeled and sorted, are kept in a locked archive box. “Once we decide objects are worth collecting for reason apart from monetary value, where do we draw the line?” I don’t fully understand the need to archive paper clips – or socks, or Andy Warhol’s gas bills – yet someone does, as these activities are funded somehow. Why are Warhol’s bills items of importance, whereas mine, hell, even my best creations, have no value at all to anyone but me? What makes someone’s paperclips a big deal?

It’s interesting, as I wander around these fringes, that in current gaming and internet vernacular, to own someone is to defeat them or make them look ridiculous in some way. This particular usage has technical roots (I understand the term originated with hackers successfully breaking into a system, thus owning it), but ownership of people has a long and horrible past (and I use the term “past” with some caution, since that past extends to the current moment) in America. I wonder if that past adds to the sense of humiliation a mocking own conveys.

Is there something wrong with me, that I am missing this urge? Given how common collecting is, perhaps it’s a normal part of human behavior – so what’s wrong with me, that things hold so little interest? I do crave owning books, but only for practical purposes, so that I can write in them and crack the spines and dog-ear the pages and love them in my own way. I’ve become fiercely interested in old books and manuscripts, but again, not to own, but to learn about, to understand who made them. Am I missing the ownership gene? Is this why I’ve always been an apartment dweller, and view major ownership – a house, a car, a business – as a burden? It feels like a major failing, almost feels unAmerican, to lack this ownership urge.

I started to write letters to the personal effects I itemized in 7B. I wrote them on the HRC’s yellow paper, on which I was supposed to be recording details about the collection for the finding aid. That’s one reason I’m not a librarian. And one reason the librarians started to give me some side-eye. You’re not supposed to have all these feelings when you’re working behind the scenes. Or if you do, I guess you’re not supposed to write about them. You’re not supposed to commune with the objects. That gradually became clear. It now occurs to me, at the distance of several years, what I brought to this job as a twenty-five-year-old graduate intern, and what gets me in trouble at most of my jobs: unlicensed perspective.

I don’t have the same unlicensed perspective (I love that phrase) as Shapland, but I have my own. I can commune with a 15th century manuscript from my living room via a cable connection. I own songs via memory. I own books of wisdom and unique ideas through cheap used paperbacks. I have my own unlicensed perspective.

Pushcart XLI: Taije Silverman, “Spiritual Evaluation” (poem) from Massachusetts Review #56.2

If You Think You Have Been the Victim of Witchcraft,
Envy, the Evil Eye, or Bad Luck, Come Inside
and Get a Spiritual Evaluation.

—sign on the Church of Jesus Christ in the Lord, Philadelphia

 

Did you want this baby?
There are a certain number of questions you may pass over
without forfeiting your score on the test.
Do you understand that metaphors involving hummingbirds
are not useful? Do you understand
that you are in no way related to hummingbirds?
If this baby is the size of an a) eraser or b) apricot
or c) memory, will you be able to determine
whether on the day after the hurricane,
the river was as full as a river can be
without flooding the ramp to the bypass?
 

Complete poem available online at Massachusetts Review

That first line is possibly the most meaning-per-word sentence since Hemingway. Yet, because it places the baby in past tense, it’s difficult to reconcile with the rest of the poem, which consistently looks forward in time from the present. I briefly wondered if it could be a backwards poem, but it’s not structured to make backwards-reading seem tenable.

At first, concrete symbols unify the poem and provide a certain momentum: the hummingbird, apricot, eraser, water. Then then there’s a relatively static moon section – interesting choice, since the moon is itself a symbol of change, of fluctuation, not to mention the original fertility symbol with its connection to the female menstrual cycle – followed by the concluding lines including symbols looping back to the beginning to reestablish the unity.

When you picture the moon,
do you see its surface or a not inhospitable orb
that alternates in size according to proximity with rooftops?
This problem is commonly referred to as moon illusion.
This theory is generally known as shape constancy.
With the shape of your body please prove
that the moon does not generate its own light. Do you like
charades? If this baby is a girl, what.
If this baby is a boy. Do you think
you have been the victim of bad luck?
Describe in five words what this baby will fear
if this baby is an apricot. List everyone it will love
if it is an eraser.

I’m trying to get some picture of this scene. My first thought was a woman who’s recently miscarried, seeing a “spiritual healer” to work out her grief. The metaphors seem to indicate someone with a more eclectic approach: shape constancy and the moon illusion, both recognized phenomena, along with apricots and hummingbirds .

But then I thought: what if that first line stands out because it is spoken by someone else, a nurse or doctor, or perhaps a friend trying to offer what she thinks is comfort? What if the rest of the poem is the woman’s response? That doesn’t really fit, however. Too many “you”s. What if it’s a woman talking to herself, conducting some version of a searching and fearless moral inventory while deciding what to do about an unexpected pregnancy? The last lines intrigue me as well: it must be important, this notion of loving someone more than the baby. It invites totally different scenarios, some a bit obscure, involving the father or other children.

So I ended up back where I started. I’m strongly reminded of Mary Ruefle’s “During a Break from Feeling” which I also found beautifully obscure. I’m not sure what the story is, but I love the imagery, and maybe that’s where I should stay on this one. Maybe the confusion, like the inconstant moon, is intrinsic to the poem. Or am I just making excuses, being lazy?

Confusion is my genre.

Pushcart XLI: Chris Drangle, “A Local’s Guide to Dating in Slocomb County” from The Oxford American #89

At half past ten the guy from the corner mart came into the shelter. Naomi had only seen him a few times, but he had a distinctive look, to say the least. He was young but rugged, with short-cropped hair and broad shoulders. It figured that the most attractive man in town her age was also a triple amputee. It was so hot out that even he was wearing shorts—red mesh ones with a faded Cola High School crest, below which were hi-tech black metal prosthetics inserted in grubby tennis shoes. He walked up to her and rested his elbows on the counter, and from that position looked normal, except for the one hand that was a carbon fiber hook.
“Morning, ma’am,” he said.
“Hi,” she said. “What can I help you with?”
“I’m here to pick up my dog. I talked to Dennis yesterday?”

 
Complete story available online at Oxford American

As bad as it sucks to be a twenty-two year old triple amputee veteran home from Iraq, it sucks worse when the guy’s war dog, wounded in the same IED explosion that took the vet’s hand and legs and brought home from Iraq as a best friend, gets accidentally put down at the shelter. The only thing that might suck worse is being the shelter employee who didn’t check the roster before putting the dog down. Especially when she’s lonely and the veteran is the only eligible guy in town.

If I sound flip about such serious matters, well, it’s because the dark humor flows thick and full here. These aren’t cynics, they’re realists. That’s how Fisher ended up in Iraq in the first place:

His senior year, Fisher attended the Slocomb County High School career fair. He talked to a bait shop owner, a welder, a newspaper ad salesman, a pig farmer, a rice farmer, and a soybean farmer. The rice farmer in particular radiated disappointment, and Fisher, looking at the man’s gnarled hands and hangdog face, felt the future closing around him like a fist. Then, in the corner of the convention hall, he was waylaid in his attempt to get a free keychain and ended up talking to an Army staff sergeant for half an hour. The sergeant had perfect teeth, a maroon beret, and a fine white scar on his temple, which he said he got rappelling. He was only six years older than Fisher, but from some other world where people wore polished shoes and knew how to break necks. He had been to thirteen countries. They looked over some forms, just to get an idea. Fisher agreed to take the ASVAB, to see what he might qualify for.

Before he was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a Cornell writing professor, literary magazine editor, and Pushcart Prize winner, Drangle was a kid in Arkansas and New Orleans. I have the sense he knows the territory of job fairs featuring bait shop owners and soybean farmers. He knows how to write heat, and the absence of heat, as he shows us during a sweaty sex scene. Yes, Naomi and Fisher end up in bed. There’s something disturbing about all the parallels: soldiers wearing dog tags, dogs without tags getting dead, Naomi replacing the dog, the persistent sense that both of these people feel like they’re settling for what they can get because they don’t have a lot of choices, and they figure that’s just the way it is; they’re drawn together by the intersection of their hard-luck lives. While I feel an overall sense of resignation in both of them, they both show initiative:Naomi in inviting Fisher for a drink, and in debating which top to wear, and Fisher in clearly stating, “I don’t want a pity date. I want to get pity laid.”

The final line really puts a button on the tone of the story: she heads for his kitchen to get some water, sees the dog’s water bowl, and for some reason decides to fill it:

The water came out in a smooth stream that sparkled in the light, splashed off the lip, and spilled onto the floor.

That’s the sense I get about the future of this romance, too. There’s gonna be a lot of spilled water, but they’ll mop it up and carry on. And probably throw the dish away, since it’s not doing much good any more.

Stephen Greenblatt: The Swerve (WWNorton, 2011)

To all but a handful of people in Germany, this quest, had Poggio tried to articulate it, would have seemed weird. And it would have seemed weirder still if Poggio had gone on to explain that he was not in fact at all interested in what was written four or five hundred years ago. He despised that time and regarded it as a sink of superstition and ignorance. What he really hoped to find were words that had nothing to do with the moment in which they were written down on the old parchment, words that were in the best possible case uncontaminated by the mental universe of the lowly scribe who copied them. That scribe, Poggio hoped, was dutifully and accurately copying a still older parchment, one made by yet another scribe whose humble life was equally of no particular consequence to the book hunter except insofar as it left behind this trace. If the nearly miraculous run of good fortune held, the earlier manuscript, long vanished into dust, was in turn a faithful copy of a more ancient manuscript, and that manuscript a copy of yet another. Now at last for Poggio the quarry became exciting, and the hunter’s heart in his breast beat faster. The trail was leading him back to Rome, not the contemporary Rome of the corrupt papal court, intrigues, political debility, and periodic outbreaks of bubonic plague, but the Rome of the Forum and the Senate House and a Latin language whose crystalline beauty filled him with wonder and the longing for a lost world.

This book was mentioned in Dartmouth’s science/philosophy mooc Questioning Reality, a course exploring the limits of knowledge: can we know everything, or are some things beyond science no matter how far we advance? The first week of the mooc looks at ancient Greek and Roman concepts of natural philosophy, what today we’d call physics, concerned with the question “What is the world made of?” Lucretius, a follower of the Epicurean tradition (which has nothing to do with feasting and partying) believed the universe was made of atoms, and the void, and while atoms typically fell in a straight line through the void, once in a while they would, out of random chance, swerve, collide, and create matter. This random chance was eventually theorized by 20th century physics as the Uncertainty Principle, and becomes handy as the escape clause from determinism.

The book starts with Poggio, 15th century manuscript hunter, on his travels through Europe in search of works from classical Rome. He stumbles on to Lucretius’ magnum opus, De Rerum Natura, a work only hinted at by extant documents of his age.

This book didn’t sit well with a lot of people, people like religion reviewer Jim Hinch (LARB), literature professor Colin Burrow (The Guardian), and historian and professor John Monfasani of SUNY (IHR/London). None of them feel Greenblatt’s conclusions are strongly supported in the text. But they all agree that it’s a thoroughly engaging, eminently readable book. While I might lean towards agreeing with them on the first point – hesitantly, since I am not qualified to judge historical writing – I’ll agree wholeheartedly with the second: I loved reading this book.

Not only is Poggio’s story wonderfully told, particularly when the text branches off into interesting digressions about manuscripts, philosophy, history, archaeology, and ecclesiastical intrigue. Each branch works together so smoothly, there was no sense of disruption; I was immersed in a scriptorium, in Pompeii, in ancient Rome or Greece, and heartbroken as Poggio witnessed the execution of his humanist friend for heresy. I’ve come to admire how, in some pieces, digressions create a sense of confusion and disruption, while other writers, as Greenblatt does here, blend things together seamlessly and allow the reader to expand whole networks of knowledge.

So what of the complaints about the thesis of the book?

I’ll admit I was wondering if I missed the part where the world became modern because of Poggio’s find, even before I read a word of commentary. It always seemed to me that the Renaissance had a lot more to do with the printing press than with any single work. The book ends with the oh-so-casual mention of De Rerum Natura in Thomas Jefferson’s library. I have to admit, it’s a goosebumpy moment, reading that and all it implies, but that’s part of the spell of a great book; it needs to be evaluated, much as Wordsworth wanted poetry written, not in intense emotion but in tranquillity.

It’s a bit hypocritical to love a book, yet doubt its primary claim. And yet here I am, contradicting myself, containing multitudes. Would Whitman be proud, or disappointed?

Greenblatt’s specialty has been the Renaissance and Shakespearean era; he was, in the 80s, perhaps the primary founder of The New Historicism; I suppose a lot of folks weren’t quite done with the old historicism yet. I vaguely remember reading an essay of his while in college, but that was a long time ago and I wasn’t paying as close attention as I should have; I’d like to try that again, based purely on his writing style.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the controversy, I’m very glad I know a little more about the middle ages, about Epicurianism, and about manuscripts. And about a guy named Poggio, who had a passion for understanding where things came from.

Pushcart XLI: Patricia Spears Jones, “Etta James at the Audubon Ballroom” (poem) from A Lucent Fire

Someone knocks over a chair (drunk one)
Fight ready, but this vivid sound stops
fists—who let them big black birds
In? Again. This night. What
 
Flight. Fight. Let’s try dancing the blues
to SMITHEREENS….

 

Audio of the poem available online at PennSound

Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes, a poem just happens to be part of the PennSound archive from the Kelly Writers House at Penn. Then you can not only listen to the poet read her work, but hear her discuss the poem, and her poetry in general, with poet and professor Charles Bernstein.

Maybe you would’ve guessed that the Etta James performance is imagined rather than factual. And maybe, given the historic significance of the location, and the break in the poem, from chaos to order, from abandon to attention at the line “There he stands”:

Your skin beams sweetness while your voice screams
Where’s the fucking fun house?
Your chest blossoms possibilities/ hips thick enough to swing
Which way and oh my
There he stands
In suit sharp as steel and shoes patent leather,
squarish frames/that wiseguy demeanor, the tipped chapeau

that it’s Malcolm X who has the tipped chapeau, whose appearance changes the tone of the Ballroom from chaos to order. But probably not. And in any case, it’s nice to know, not guess. And then you’re ready for that last poignant line.

Jones resists being categorized as a blues poet; she thinks it’s broader than that, encompassing more music, more of the culture of her home and travels, a kind of testimony to her life, heard through a filter and written through a musicality of her own. Imagination is her finest poetic tool, and she uses it well.

Pushcart XLI: Jenny Hendrix, “The Physics of Turtles” (non-fiction) from Orion #34.3

For all the talk about this city’s action and energy – “So much to do!” people say, “The best place in the world!” – I’ve had the feeling, this spring, that there’s really very little going on.
Oh, there is, I suppose, a form of energy that’s traded around, expended as stress, frustration, rage, or, for the more sensitive, used as shields against these things. But nothing of significance, I find, truly happens here most days.
… True, there are in between these moments frights and irritations, careless jostlings and accidents and forthright ugly acts – the resplendent oddities and solipsisms so common to city life. Yet I seem to find myself in a state of constant ground-standing against their effects, resisting the impulse to be porous to them. And so I proceed instead under a hard shell, the days passing in a kind of inertia.

“The editorial impulse of Orion lies at the nexus of ecology and the human experience”, says the submissions page, and this short essay fits the bill precisely. Hendrix shows us a slice of nature in the city, and uses it to break free from what city living has become. No, “uses it” isn’t correct; it’s more something that happens to her, unasked: a stack of map turtles falls over.

It’s hard to explain why this had the sensation of an event, of something’s having happened indeed that day, for perhaps the first time. Yet it did. Somehow, the sound of falling turtles and the seven wary heads that regarded me from the brown water broke through the day’s sense of sameness.

Something I noticed: too many exclamation points. At least, that was my first reaction. A lot of writing teachers and workshop participants would squawk over four exclamation points in such a short (2 pages) piece. But forget the rule book and pay attention to what the writer is doing: the exclamation points are entirely functional and signal a shift in enthusiasm: from others, in the beginning, who rave about the wonderful city to our emotionally blunted narrator, to the narrator herself, who by the end of the piece, has found her own enthusiasm thanks to the collapsing turtle stack.

And again I’m reminded of the Joyce Cary quote, first brought to my attention by Charles May: “Every professional artist has met the questioner who asks of some detail: ‘Why did you do it so clumsily like that, when you could have done it so neatly like this?’” Hendrix didn’t include the exclamation points out of carelessness or poor technique; she did it because they serve the story.

I’m quite fond of turtles, at least in the abstract: I’ve never had a turtle as a pet, nor do I wish to, but my online twitter avatar and quote last year was turtle-based. I’m not exactly sure what Hendrix means by sameness, or the sense of something happening, but I believe that she experienced something positive, and that’s good enough.