Stop imagining that the architecture has real limitations. Stop imagining that you are building anything lasting. I mean, in the sentence. I mean, with words.
Perhaps not only here but in your head also. Perhaps here, in your head, and wherever words will follow you. Yes, you feel trapped by them. By their expectations.
Something is following you. And in the past when you have been followed by something your response has been to say—I am nothing, so how could anything be in my wake? I create no wake.
I don’t wish to have that response any longer. But it’s hard to know how that is done.
Last night I had many dreams, but I only remember one or a piece of one. And in this dream I was being shown a large pothos plant whose leaves were pinned in a fan up a wall. But all of the vines were withered and dead. Or dying. And in the dream I was told, “Be careful of overwatering, because too much water will cause them to grow larger than the pot can support.”
In my dream I thought “That isn’t true—I can just water them more frequently.” But I knew that wasn’t the solution. I knew I couldn’t keep that up, that I had to reduce the amount of water I used.
It’s late at the library, where nothing ever happens in the hours that I’m here. Which would be, if this was a different sort of report, the perfect scenario for something unusual to occur. Someone would come to the front desk and demand that I open the register—we don’t have a register, no one pays their fines with cash—or screams would be heard from somewhere deep within the stacks. Of course, I’m grateful that neither of those things are happening—it’s almost 11 pm and I’d rather be in bed. I don’t want any complications. It’s hard enough to work at the library from the hours of 10 pm to 12 am, even if I’m being paid a nice hourly rate. Before I came to work here tonight, I thought that would make an interesting topic—the fact that nothing happens—but now that I’m here, and tired as well as bored, I have to admit that I don’t quite see the appeal. Instead, I spy on the patrons. There’s a couple working on the computers near the front desk. Earlier, they had a disagreement, a mild one but without resolution. They were arguing about a math problem—one, the man, thought he had the solution, and might have, but was talking over the woman, and with condescension. Though in a light, friendly voice—which must have made things even worse. But it was obvious, from the outside, that even if she didn’t understand, she mostly wanted to be heard. And to understand. He was impatient to rush her to the finish line. Complicated by the fact that is so late at night, and he was also impatient to leave. But the solution to the math problem—if he even had it—was not whatever it was he was expressing to his partner. It was something else, something he’d entirely missed. They said nothing to each other for the last ten minutes they were here. Stared at their phones, their computers off. And then I heard him say, “Let’s get out of here.” And it was only reluctantly that she got up to leave.
It’s Wednesday and I’ve spent the last hour reading about messianic time, Benjamin’s thesis on the concept of history. On Monday at the desk at the library I read two stories, one by Cynthia Ozick and another by Antonya Nelson. I see today in looking up the correct spelling of Ozick’s name that the story I read was a famous one—“The Shawl,” which is also the name of a short book which contains that story and the novella continuing the story of one of the characters.
On Tuesday at lunch I told my friend Noor that this story, “The Shawl,” was a Noor story, without being able to, perhaps, entirely charactize what I meant by saying that, but thinking: recursive, poetic, mannered, redolent with meaning, and somehow not too twee. The story was about the holocaust and three women (two women and two children, placing the fourteen-year-old in both categories). A story about the holocaust is not a type of story that would traditionally interest me (because of the way these stories are typically told, a reassuring way, one that reinforces the bourgeois idea of the monstrosity of these events, unthinkable and utterly exceptional—which of course they are, even as they are also part of an unbroken chain of monstrous events stretching over vast chronological and geographic vistas).
Ozick’s story was not like that—in fact perhaps the opposite, just as the fourth part of Bolaño’s 2666 and his Nazi Literature in the Americas also present the opposite thesis, as well as, for Bolaño, so does The Savage Detectives and many of his short stories and novels.
On Monday something about Nelson’s story (“Naked Ladies”) bothered me. It was, of course, well-written, believable, in some respects unique, and in a style that made it easy to see why Lorrie Moore read it on a recent New Yorker fiction podcast (they have an affinity). The story was about a poor family attending to a rich one. I liked the things it had to say about domestic relationships, subtly radical as well as (perhaps) conventionally lazy, the latter because of the easy characterizations it seemed to make before an ending that redeemed the preceding (in terms of characterizations: a rotten husband to a fat woman, in love with the svelte or voluptuous female form chief among this story’s clichés).
But Nelson’s story also seemed, somehow, impossibly decadent, belonging too much to the century that it came from, and to a lazy erudition that I imagine of the readers (of The New Yorker) there; it seemed to miss, for me, the depth that Moore’s stories typically contain, a kind of depth that is I think also characteristic of Ozick and Bolaño and countless other authors: the feeling that at any moment you could be plunged into absolute darkness, placed at the edge of a yawning precipice from which you know no other way down than to jump (and knowing that that jump will not be easy but terrible).
Nelson’s story was decadent because it was too comfortable, content to note, for instance,the resentment of the catering staff as a mere detail, just as the vast grounds of the wealthy husband, the stacks of Playboys, and the poor father’s cramped studio were mere details. Content to provide a list of objects but not to interrogate the reasons for their arrangement. Content to inhabit but not to challenge. In other words, the story seems trapped in the discourse of its time, which is, why, perhaps, the collection it belongs to (and which was sent to me by a friend whose taste and judgment I trust!) has gone out of print. But I wonder, too, if it’s that discourse (because the story is far from bad, even far from totally conventional) which will “resurrect” the book for future readers in a time when challenging the contemporary moment will be somewhat less important than imagining ways to inhabit everything that the present has lost. (Although it is hard for me to imagine it—still—as ever offering more than the other works I have mentioned, which will remain, I think, for readers, in the present, even as the “events” they describe recede further and further into time.)
An epiphany on the walk to your appointment. No, it came the night before, running into your friend Kevin while you were nursing a Skor bar in your pocket outside the Shopper’s. You eat food wilfully, as a means of making space. Space for whom or what? In either case space you didn’t need to make. In your bag: fifteen cheesecake bites and a bar of sea salt and caramel chocolate. You bring out the latter when it becomes evident that the former doesn’t interest your partner. Over the course of the next day you eat twelve. Kevin famously lost twenty or thirty pounds just by switching from Budweiser to Michelob Light. It feels wrong to wave the chocolate in the air in front of him. Like he could hex you: give you the reverse fate, chocolate dooming you to fifteen or twenty pounds gained in a week. As easily as it came off him. You’re sick and you need the calories, you tell yourself, as you also tell him you’re delirious (he doesn’t understand why you would even bring that up). It’s true that you feel better today than you did yesterday or the day before, a difference you ascribe to eating all that desert—and the next day, a milkshake, a medium fry—but which just as easily could have been the body naturally healing itself, over time (perhaps you even retarded your healing). What does the body need? You aren’t sure. And now that you’re thinking about it, the epiphany came a week or two earlier, walking to meet her, but first passing through the Metro, where you bought a pizza bun and ate it quickly in the park.
It doesn’t matter who is in the right—there’s no such thing as “right.” It’s terrifying to find yourself in that moment, yawning over a gulf that you didn’t know could exist. “I’m sorry—” “No, I’m sorry—” Unsettling to see the ground trembling distantly beneath you. Suddenly no amount of reassurance could undo this uncertainty—but perhaps there isn’t uncertainty at all. You’re waiting for a sign, an indication that nothing has changed. But if nothing changed then you’d still be stuck in that span of time before, still subject to the drop you didn’t know was on its way. And then when it came it would be devastating.
It feels like a lot has been on my mind this past week, like I’ve been shifting unsteadily between many different states… Spiritually and emotionally, I’m exhausted… I keep waiting for clarification, for rest, for ease. But it will never come. I have to find it in myself. Of course, today, the day of a big presentation, I’m sick—it makes sense, given where my mind and body have been. (There’s been no place for rest—my body is giving up just as the finish line nears.)
Where have I been? I keep running into these moments at home where I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t want to leave my apartment, but I want to go out; I don’t want to watch TV or a movie, but I want to be remade completely by the ups and downs of a dramatic visual program. I want to be moved and changed by the flux and surge of music. Most of all, I want to read—I want to bite into the piles of unread books that surround me everywhere I turn. But I must not want to read, because I barely do it.
I feel like I’m carrying something I can’t put down. But I’m not quite sure what that is. And I don’t know where to put it. And if I don’t figure that out soon, I’m worried I’ll keep the burden until I forget that I ever picked it up.
