ABlog

This is going to be an exceedingly informal post because: I’m at the Goddard MFA residency, it’s a steambath outside and in, the only air conditioners are in rooms dedicated to the efficient functioning of photocopiers and printers, and I’m in a funk for reasons not entirely clear to me. So, what notes I can muster:

1. I’m thinking and thinking about form and the disaster of how things are. Juliana Spahr read two of her poem things, whatever she calls them, “pieces,” in block layout or so I imagine, structured around hypnotic repetitions. One was about a river in southern Ohio and in that one she did something I’ve heard her do in a different way in another piece, which was to pile on (and on) a list of names of threatened or vanishing species. Her reading had for me the effect of summoning into being the world that the names had been formed around, although the piece is not descriptive but simply incantatory, ritualistic. But as the repetitions went on, the world of the imagined stream vanished and the names became simply language once again; in fact, they became more abstract, emptied of their imagined content, than I ever could have heard them as being, before the process of filling and then emptying had happened before my ears. I began to wonder without actually articulating the question as such (I’ve only done that now) if naming wasn’t itself part of the problem. A wider and wider gap opened up between the names and what they meant. I ceased to feel so desolate. I had not been in the presence of a “threatened environment,” but only in the presence of names, sounds, containers.

Juliana's second piece is about Hawaii, which is never named in the poem but is called “the island”; Native Hawaiians are identified as something like “people with genealogical ties to the island before the whaling ships arrived.” English is identified as “the expansionist language.” The piece has a collective protagonist, and why can’t I remember for sure if it’s “we” or “they”? Probably because I know the piece about the river is “we” and then morphs into “I,” but I think the Hawaii piece (which is probably supposed to be spelled Hawai’i?) is enacted by “they.” What I love about this piece is how Juliana creates a structure that draws in more and more of the world, colonial histories, geographical linkages, “globalization,” on and on—a vortex of entanglements. (As I write this down, it occurs to me that Jamaica Kincaid's "Biography of a Dress" might be a sort of parallel; there's the same movement from detail to historical depth.) In Juliana's text, the more the collective protagonist attempts to sort out the asymmetrical and unjust relationships begun by colonialism, the further and faster it sinks into the quagmire. I find this hilarious, not because there is anything avoidable about it but precisely because I recognize the process of entanglement from my own life. What is funny, really, is the effort to get control of it by spelling it out. There’s a fundamental contradiction: the more ordered and methodical and thorough the language, the more chaotic the reality depicted.

2. In a panel discussion, Sarah Schulman spoke about “lying with form.” Maybe the biggest lie of received narrative form today is not even that it is predictable or that it ascends neatly to a climax followed by resolution but that it depends on unilinear simplicity. There is one principal line of development to be followed. This is my best guess as to why fiction of the Cold War era dealt frequently, even obsessively, with a certain version of the central political emergency people faced at that time (i.e. the threat that the two superpowers might wipe each other out and take everyone else with them). The potential for that to happen could be described using the unilinear tension-climax-resolution model, the same model followed in the religious story of Armageddon. Now the threats are way too complex for that, unless you are the authors of the Left Behind series. There is no readymade narrative format to encompass the many-horrored layers of our embedding. This is what the form of Juliana’s piece about Hawai’i achieves: the withholding from us of our fix of simple description.

3. There are redwing blackbirds here in Plainfield, Vermont. Talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve!

4. I know that I’m too pessimistic, that between my father’s “everything will work out” and my mother’s “the sky is falling” postures, I fail to strike a happy medium. I’ve noticed that smart men with a can-do attitude really do very often make everything work out, even when things do look dicey for a while. Nevertheless, I worry a lot and with reason, I believe, i.e. reasonably, about the inevitable instances of miscalculation. Somebody who commented on one of my posts a number of weeks ago said something to the effect that the U.S. and the Soviet Union never really planned to rub each other out anyway, that the only way there would ever have been a nuclear conflict during the Cold War would have been by accident—as if that were a plus! As if that somehow made the system rational! To that line of thinking, I offer the following anecdotal rebuttal, from a New York Times article published on June 14, 2005 under the headline “Just Before Dying, a Thrill at 41,000 Feet”:

Alone in their 50-seat commercial jet, the two young pilots decided to see what it could do.

According to documents released Monday by the National Transportation and Safety Board, they climbed so fast that they were pushed down into their seats with 2.3 times the normal force of gravity, summing toward 41,000 feet, the limit of their Bombardier CRJ200.

“Ooh, look at that,” said the second-in-command, Peter R. Cesarz, 23, apparently referring to cockpit readings. “Pretty cool.”

“Man, we can do it,” said the captain, Jesse Rhodes, 31. “Forty-one it,” he said, referring to the maximum altitude.

A few minutes later, though, both engines were dead, and the pilots were struggling to glide to an emergency landing at an airport in Jefferson City, Mo. “We’re going to hit houses, dude,” one of them said.

The plane crashed two and a half miles from the runway, missing the houses but killing the pilots.

6. While human beings have long had stories about the end of the world, up until recently those stories assumed that God would be the one to, to to speak, push the button. It is not at all the same thing to have to entertain the notion that we might do it ourselves.

Running Tab

6/28/05: At dinner, I say to Nicky: “At 8 pm, during the faculty reading, the President is going to be telling the nation that everything that’s going on in Iraq is okay.” Nicky says, “I hope he isn’t telling the nation that he’s gearing up for a war on Iran.” I make a face, thinking: nobody’s talking about that this week (except Nicky); I won’t think/can’t think about that now. It’s a kind of emotional rejection that’s so familiar to me I can’t tell you, it’s just the way I felt all that year before the Iraq invasion. I say to myself that just because I felt that way before the Iraq invasion and it happened doesn’t mean…doesn’t mean that now….