wasteland

Essential reading.

“What do you do if you’re still here after the story of failure has already been written?” asks the Native American scholar Michael V. Wilcox, who teaches at Stanford University.

To know what is coming is to perceive control; and the mind is all about control, particularly in the cerebral, capitalist, goal-oriented Global North. We want to control, or, in neuroscientific terms, we want to exercise cognitive control, our mysterious ability to behave in accord with the goals we set. Put simply: if our cortex is informed, then (we think) we can establish a logic that can (ideally) help us predict the future so we can act in ways that (we hope) will allow us to control it—for, ultimately, humans want to control the future, or to believe that they can. We may say we like to be surprised, astonished, but we like to be surprised in a particular way that is expected or suits our projected needs. This is why children like to hear the same stories. Their predictability is something to hold onto. This is why I am rereading the classics, which I first read as a very young child: it is like worrying a rosary or a wave-grooved seashell you keep in your pocket, something familiar for the fingers to run over and over. This is why we read projections for how long the pandemic will last, or who will win the election, or whether the global uprising against racism will prevail: we want to know when those of us who survive can go back to normal. We want to project that normal.

An artist who wishes to work with such a charged subject needs to approach with unmitigated rigor in order to succeed. In her body of work, Schutz does not demonstrate a rigorous sensibility. In her statements about the piece, she does not show any understanding that her own expression echoes Carolyn Bryant’s expression, and erases the story of the victim and his family. When Hannah Black and her co-signers call for the destruction of this painting, try not to interpret them as book-burners doing the work of censorship. Instead, hear their open letter as a call for silence inside a church. How will you hear the dead boy’s voice, if you keep speaking over him?

Given this history, it’s natural that we should fear and be suspicious of representations of us by those who are not like us. Equally rational is the assumption that those who are like us will at least take care with their depictions, and will be motivated by love and intimate knowledge instead of prejudice and phobia. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writing by women, and by oppressed minorities of all kinds, has wondrously expanded the literary landscape, ennobling griefs that had, historically, either passed unnoticed or been brutally suppressed and caricatured. We’re eager to speak for ourselves. But in our justified desire to level or even obliterate the old power structures—to reclaim our agency when it comes to the representation of selves—we can, sometimes, forget the mystery that lies at the heart of all selfhood. Of what a self may contain that is both unseen and ultimately unknowable. Of what invisible griefs we might share, over and above our many manifest and significant differences. We also forget what writers are: people with voices in our heads and a great deal of inappropriate curiosity about the lives of others.”

Found this charming Leonora Carrington novelty at my local library. The Milk Of Dreams is a children's book of short tales Carrington would make up for her own kids, based on doodles and illustrations she made on the walls of their home. 

The hedge was growing. I walked. I fed lost time along the way. “Eat up time, tell me a story.” Time kept eating, that was all. Large road, steep slope. A woman’s ass, one two, one two, many pass by here, one two, one two. “Not watermelon!” One two, one two, road there it goes. Belt road there it goes. Cry on her. Cry ten days and seven nights. Belt missing. Man calms down on her. Walking to and fro on the road that separates time from her. A highway won’t feed the time of one two.

I have a story for you. Which reminds me - I mean putting it like this reminds me - of the days when we wrote our first udder-warm bubbling verse, and all things, a rose, a puddle, a lighted window, cried out to us: "I'm a rhyme!" Yes, this is a most useful universe. We play, we die: ig-rhyme, umi-rhyme. And the sonorous souls of Russian verbs lend a meaning to the wild gesticulation of trees or to some discarded newspaper sliding and pausing, and shuffling again, with abortive flaps and apterous jerks along an endless windswept embankment. But just now I am not a poet. I come to you like that gushing lady in Chekhov who was dying to be described.

So many good parts in this essay - a lot of which I’ve been thinking about for quite some time.

“But I have to say that I write with greater dedication when I start digging into common, I would almost say trite, situations and feelings, and insist on expressing everything that – out of habit, to keep the peace – we tend to be silent about. I’m not interested in writing something new. I’m interested in the ordinary or, rather, what we have forced inside the uniform of the ordinary. I’m interested in digging into that and causing confusion, pushing myself to go beyond appearances. In doing so, I sometimes make myself set aside discipline and taste, because those, too, seem like blinkers. Restraint is all wrong if the task of the writing is to sweep away the resistance of the ordinary and look for words that will pull out at least a little of the extraordinary that is concealed in it. What is not suitable to say should, within the limits of the possible, be said.“

I can’t help it that the books which move me the most are like Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. Books riddled with poetry and digression, taking on a form of language and syntax that trembles and surprises. I feel like I only care about language but sometimes I think my obsession is so pointless. Who cares?

And so begins this baroque endeavour - a break from Kafka’ unrelenting The Trial.

I’ve been considering word usage much more rigorously of late.

All right, I said to myself, you will write about how altogether wanting first love is. But, as soon as I tried, the writing rebelled, it tended to fill gaps, to give the experience the stereotypical melancholy of adolescence. It’s why I said, that’s enough of first times. What we were at the beginning is only a vague patch of colour contemplated from the edge of what we have become.

Here’s to 2018.