June 7, 2018

Miracles

There are many miracles attributed to Cheikh Amadou Bamba, the great Caliph of Touba. Of all, none is more fabled than one performed aboard the ship deporting him from Saint-Louis to Gabon in 1895, where he was to begin his seven-year exile. Kept from praying, he broke free from his chains and cast a prayer mat towards the sea. Then descended to affirm his submission. Once he was done he rolled the mat and returned amidships. Each year, one prayer out of a day’s five, during the annual pilgrimage to the city he founded, pilgrims honor this miracle by turning their backs to Mecca, facing the sea. But he’d also authored an estimated twenty thousand mystical verses in Arabic. “My writings are my true miracles,” he wrote.

June 6, 2018

Limicole

A few things to note about “limicole.” In a literal sense, as suggested by a standard dictionary, it refers to a worm. Take that further, and, since worms classified Oligochaeta live in mud, you might consider “a limicole realm,” where water and land meet. Even further, you arrive at the word limen, a “threshold.” And past that, “liminal.”
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I take stock of my recent, geeky obsession with old English words. If I’m serious enough I could discover what words in Modern English are rooted in Celtic, Old English, Old Frisian, and Norman French. But if I were radical enough I’d equally uncover, with the regimen of a lexicographer, the Igbo inflections in mainstream English.
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Not that I care to write in a language other than English. That is work for someone less cynical about the impact of such an endeavor.

May 28, 2018

Bathos

You know the word “pathos,” but what about “bathos?”
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Achieving bathos is often without intent. It is the sudden drop in the mood of a piece of writing, from the sublime to the trite or ridiculous. Bathos is phony pathos.
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Bathos haunts me. When I write stories drawn from real life, I accept that the details my memory has furnished is suspect, and proceed with caution. But I also accept the emotions I express as incomplete. How many more degrees before the arc of emotion bends towards truth?

May 22, 2018

Solidarity (II)

Yesterday a person I recently befriended said, “I think that if all my writing were to be summed up, it would be as a response to the word ‘encounter.’” I almost fell off my chair with glee. A long lost kin!
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This morning I read a passage from “Poetics of Relation” (that book is inexhaustible, my debt to it inexpressible). “On every side the idea is being relayed. When you awaken an observation, a certainty, a hope, they are already struggling somewhere, elsewhere, in another form.”
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Some obsess about originality, the ingenuity of a debut book, the particular brilliance of an author, or celebrity that accrues in a lifetime. Me? I obsess about the connection of my observations and certainties and hopes to a wider intelligence. It is squarely a question of solidarity.

May 16, 2018

Personal Pronoun

Every year for six years, she chose a word to omit from her vocabulary. Once it was “my.” All year she stayed free of this personal pronoun. She’d avoid saying “my house,” “my book,” “my child,” “my mother,” “my self…”
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The audacity of this exercise lies in her incredible restraint. But also in the courage to accept the frightening possibility that each word in use stands in place for another held back.
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The same potential of a ritual informed by deep belief, small and intense gestures that enlarge to take on grave significance.
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Months of holding back the personal pronoun—like a word left so long on the tip of your tongue it tastes stale.
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How much longer must I stay with precious words I can dispense?

May 15, 2018

False Form

Aged seven or eight, I asked what a word meant, and my father staged a mock fight between us. Then proceeded to hold me in an embrace. “Reconciliation.”
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The value of a word is determined by the solidarity it expresses with other languages. Those who comprehend only one language are in danger of forgetting this. I consider it a secret cargo of hope smuggled across bigoted borders.
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Could you estimate the number of words that, daily, reach us in false form, occluded by prejudice or dogma or propaganda? Alas, how much effort it takes to suppress the memory of the first meaning of a word.

May 14, 2018

Echo

“Am I in my life’s story or outside of it, does it enfold me or do I watch it unfold?”
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When the force of these questions become unbearable, she thinks of her mother. Then, in ‘80s Uganda, and now, over the phone, she listens to Ma recount stories from books. They advance chapter after chapter, for weeks or months, as long as it takes the older woman to complete her reading. If her mother is too slow to finish and she dares read the book by herself, the experience is shopworn, a bad attempt at translation.
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Suppose we didn’t have the stories of others to consider. Could our lives advance with little complication, like strands of an unfastened knot?
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No life is a single story. No action is without an echo. Remembered or imagined, the stories of others inflect ours in dreams and thoughts, bearing consequence. Like this we regard the pain of others. Like this we aren’t alone.

April 25, 2018

Imaginary Lives

We met at a bookstore across the street from the venue. My talk this evening, he said, would simply relay my constellational thinking.

What book did I think I would buy? Perhaps this one by Marcel Schwob, I replied. Imaginary Lives.

By its title I recognized it as distant relative to another book on the upper shelf, Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives. I owned it from a previous purchase. Then I turned to its contents, to describe to him why I felt Schwob and Jaeggy were fraternal. I gasped at the coincidence: Jaeggy had written a fictional biography of Schwob in her book, and the book of Schwob I intended to buy contained fictional biographies of twenty-two ordinary people—“whether they were divine, mediocre, or criminal.”

Coincidence. Lazy phrasing of the collision of possibilities. How could it be? I’d read and marveled at Jaeggy’s little book; I must have thought for days about her incandescent portrayal of Schwob (“His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold.”) It could be that in the bookshop, as I browsed shelves where ideas traipse like stars that leave their cluster for a little while, I became open to the auspicious.

April 24, 2018

Prédicateur

I’ve just read that “preacher,” comes from the old French “prédicateur,” same word for “prophet.” It would seem to me that, given the fact of my time in church (Ephesians 4:11,12) and what remains of those convictions, I misconceived both words as founded on separate etymologies.
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I’d thought the disposition of a prophet was entirely at odds with that of a preacher. The prophet is always in the eye of the storm, stoking the flame, warning of the end of days, comparing the democracy of God’s grace with a prodigal human nature. The preacher gathers the bones when the embers have cooled, lives in a small town, baptizes the young and sends-off the old to eternal consolation.
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One learns with time to make finer and subtler distinctions between what seems, on the surface, unvaried.

April 22, 2018

Medium

Some days are good, some aren’t. On good days I write an average of hundred words an hour, and my staying power is shy of three hours. Three hundred words on the most promising day. Small by small. Medium might be message, but medium is unsparing.
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When the going is good I feel like I am descending. No, that’s the wrong image. While the hours accumulate I do not feel I have taken leave of the world, and so it isn’t descent but immersion. My room takes on the character of a baptismal font.

April 21, 2018

Conversation

Each time we have a conversation (this happens often, and for hours), we exchange the indiscernible, the unfathomed, maybe the preposterous. Where others might consider this indefensible, I find it promising.
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Biography, the poet says, is an iceberg. “A life is mostly submerged beyond our knowing.” I’m not interested in the savory details of your daily life, or in mine. This is hard to explain without seeming insensitive or impractical, but let me try. How our lives unfold is pitiably minor when we consider the light our ideas might cast on the world, a slight hollow on an emotional plane. And that’s hard to explain without seeming braggadocious. Well then.

April 16, 2018

Mirror

What are these mirror notes?
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The Bassa of Liberia tell a story. A carver, enamored of his young wife, went with her to a secluded place. He kept his eyes on her while he carved a mask. The result was a likeness of the woman so exact it created a furor when the mask was revealed for the first time. The people were unsure whether to exclaim in wonder or escape in fright. But the elders, appalled, explained the gravity of the situation. By his lack of self-control, the artist had betrayed the myth of the mask: masks, after all, are made by hand, subject to the ebb and flow of human emotion.
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I do not mean to appear conceited, although this is in fact a conceit—I face the page as I face a mirror. On both surfaces, reality is approximated to the highest possible degree of belief.
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Yet. Keep the gaze long and tender enough, and the shadow might become substance.

April 11, 2018

Solidarity

The sun is out. I light a candle, I draw the curtain. Light within light.
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The mellow glimmer of solidarity one book expresses with another, shards of soft light a candle throws towards the sun:
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First it is book by Daša Drndić, Trieste. It contains the names of about 9,000 Jews who were deported from Italy, or killed in Italy or in the countries Italy occupied between 1943 and 1945.
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Then, in a little book on writing by Marguerite Duras, published three years before her death:
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“I would like to ask the people reading these lines to help me with a project I’ve had for three years, since they announced the closing of the Renault factories in Billancourt. It would be to record the first and last names of all the women and all the men who spent their entire lives in that national, world-renowned factory…It would be an exhaustive list, with no commentary whatsoever.”
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Finally, after my friend D. returned from travels in Europe, he told me of young boys encamped behind a hill, possibly in Ceuta, waiting for the right time to make a run for the fence. There is a list with their names, ages, and countries of origin. This document hasn’t been shown to the public. In my forthcoming book I have outlined a possible list, with gaps, in place of all the present and future boys of that Ceuta encampment.
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The mellow glimmer of solidarity one book expresses with another.

April 4, 2018

Reading

But, what does it mean to read a novel? Wading in the consciousness of a character—an argument, idea, moment, experience—the world beyond narrative recedes from the tideline, as you’re dunked in the deep. This is a bold thought, and I think it recognizing how little I do with all I read. Much meaning is saved up in notebooks to which I seldom return, and in obscure words I am yet to investigate. What lies fallow in the margins of books I have amassed?

(“In fact,” writes Reverend Ames in Gilead, “I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly.”)
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I think this and quiver with a little expectation, like a gill net held amidships, cast seaward.

April 3, 2018

Story

Write about waves and receive an email from E., who, this morning, must attend to her boat. The season is about to start. “I’ll row to the mooring in a small and quite unsteady rowboat. It fits only two people and some cargo.” She adds: “You’ll have to tune in to the motion of the waves, when you put the dinghy line on one of the sailboat’s cleats. The current and wind are fighting, and you are almost there but not yet.”
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Write about waves and receive, in the mail, A.’s book about a West African community at sea. “In stories, as at sea, boundaries are malleable, begetters and destroyers both.”
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Our lives, soaked in what we read, and what we write.
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It is the noblest of aspirations for a life’s contours to be outlined by literature. The stories we choose to tell; stories that, in their telling, choose us.

February 17, 2018

Future Tense

If your grammar is at home in time, it is inappropriate to use the future tense in a subordinate clause when the verb in the main is in the future tense. It is incorrect to say, “I will let you know when I will return.” One should say, “I will let you know when I return.”
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S. told me:
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In 1997, my brother, twenty years at the time, left home without a trace. This year he is forty-one. When I send you an SMS, and write, “bros,” I am calling out for my brother. Bear with me as I romanticize this. All my life I have been in search of brothers.
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At home, we now manage to speak of the possibility that he might not return. As if, to speak about him in the past tense would scuttle the prospects of his return. And even then, we are careful to keep the tense vague.

February 15, 2018

Perfective Verb

Yesterday she told me of three documents in her life that, taken in sum, could be tendered as evidence of everything she knows of herself:
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1. A poem she wrote as a five-year-old, on her parents’ bed. While they entertained guests at a dinner party, she wrote of carrying a box in her heart. In her later life her paintings began to contain box-like forms.
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2. A letter she wrote to her grandmother, sent back once the matriarch passed away. She remembers writing this around her eighth birthday, lying on a terrazzo floor. At the moment of recollection the words of her letter were out of reach. But they’d found it on her grandma’s desk the day she died.
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3. An undated letter she sent to her grandma’s sister, after whom she had been named. “When I think of your husband’s death, I cannot eat.” Her grandaunt sent back the letter to her when her partner died. Think about it, she said to me. I sent a consolatory letter to myself even before I was bereaved.
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A perfective verb denotes completed action. Suppose a life is structured as one. Expressing an action, yet considering itself in retrospect, nothing deferred, complete each instant. Life lived as in a prophecy. What she knows of herself, she has always known.

February 7, 2018

Keystroke

To a writer, the keystroke is a unit for measuring the possible. Watch the fingers as they move to mimic the image in the head. Head entrusts ideas to hand in grumbling acquiescence. Sometimes hand tries to free itself from head’s insolence—hovering over the keyboard, typing up, deleting, cutting, pasting, reformatting, or highlighting. Head is not entirely sure hand is doing the right thing. How much longer?, stop fussing over unwieldy letters, head says to hand. They continue like this until there is “a murmur of provisional consent.” They are agreed on one thing, however: Urgency. This does not mean they would end their collaboration soon. The urgency of their work, in the milli-millisecond it takes for a keystroke to occur, will be determined by the degree to which their imagined reader is patient.

February 1, 2018

Tense

When a verb changes in form, it denotes a certain tense. A tense might be present, past, continuous, future, perfect, imperfect, progressive, or perfective. That is, range of times to indicate a moment, an action, or an experience. This knowledge is passed on early to students of any language, in order that they master, somewhat, how to better communicate their hopes, anxieties, or regrets. Tell me, then, the tense with which you may express an unfulfilled prophecy? What tense is the forlorn eye?

January 27, 2018

Meanwhile

Meanwhile, the woman said, I am living in my name as in a prophecy. When he named me, my father was casting about for a word or two that testified to the circumstances of my birth. When I look back at how I have lived, and when I imagine how I might live, I cannot escape the meaning of my name. But, pay little attention to that, for my mind is weakened by reflection. I must incline you towards a “meanwhile,” a moment I cannot defer. I speak of, how else to put it, an interregnum between when I was named and when my destiny catches up with me. How do I live in this time?

January 22, 2018

Between

In the moment which separates:
...the first word a child says to his mother, and the last word she says to him...
...when the Old English word “betweonum” was heard by a Mercian merchant, and when he pronounced it “betwinum...”
...a sentence in a first draft, and another in the final one, reworked ad nauseam...
...a ruling in favor of a stranger, and one against, the latter by a judge aiming to please his superiors—both judges sitting mere inches apart...
...cradling a phone, and throwing your head backwards, benumbed both by desire and an aubade recited to you moments ago...
...a mother seeing her son for the first time, and a father deciding it is most appropriate that she names him...
...the stutter of shy lovers, and the confidence they gain when they realize what they feel is matchless, maybe total...
...the babble of a prophet in the throes of a revelation, and the congregant who is suddenly thrown in the air, hitting the floor in complete surrender...
...a self-portrait of a man covered in the sheen of youth, and that same face, now weathered, yet appearing as confident and inviting, no promise lost.

January 20, 2018

Semi-colon

Not guile; clarity.
Not theft; reclamation.
The trifecta of kindness, knowledge, and generosity.
Not to display intellectual confidence; to proffer it.
Not introversion; a word left on the tip of a tongue.
Not laziness; disaffection.
Not unbelief or loss of faith; a believer in search of proof.
The distance between a word and the memory it conjures.
Not a literary genre; a calisthenics of forms.
Not darkness; waiting for light to arrive.
Not a lack of information; an exercise in restraint.
The precise space a semi-colon occupies on a page, the meaning it encompasses.

January 14, 2018

Synecdoche

This morning I darted between books—a preface, introductory paragraphs, passages between chapters—wondering what ideas would settle, a glimpse of my mind's state in true form. A reader touches a multitude of proximate strangers. I suspect I am my truest self in light of another’s perception. Cast in vicarious light, held under the scrutiny of a definite pronoun. When I read of Milkman in the third person, when his life enters mine as one of many, I weigh all the claims made of him against those I make for myself, in search of middle ground. Could I become, have I become, when would I become?

January 12, 2018

First Person

She wrote: “Milkman looked in the mirror and glanced, in the low light of the wall lamp, at his reflection. He was, as usual, unimpressed with what he saw. He had a fine enough face. Eyes women complimented him on, a firm jaw line, splendid teeth. Taken apart, it looked all right. Even better than all right. But it lacked coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self. It was all very tentative, the way he looked, like a man peeping around a corner of someplace he is not supposed to be, trying to make up his mind whether to go forward or to turn back.” The words “lacked coherence” and “total self” are circled in my copy of her 1977 novel. Who hopes for what they already have? Who argues for what is already adjudicated? I use possessive and personal pronouns to make up my mind, whether to go forward or to turn back. With tentative conviction. Writing “I” or “me” or “mine” is like making a sketch of a revelation.

January 5, 2018

Cliché

As far as resolutions go, if it matters on the fifth day of the year, I’d like to be less terrified of clichés. The overfamiliar and overused, the banal and trite, the commonplace, an idea lacking in originality—could we save a cliché for keep? I consider the possibility that an overfamiliar statement, one used for moralizing, might be based on a false claim. The cliché, so to speak, establishes an experience with no protagonist.

I think of all the clichés I know, and imagine each as the final sentence in a story. A commonplace idea, upon completion of such activity, turns original. If this is possible, it would suggest a further possibility: the cliché as nucleus for subjective truth. Around this nucleus is, in Svetlana Alexievich's words, “a miniature expanse.” And that expanse is interior, and individual.

December 30, 2017

False Starts

Dear Dominique,

I am writing an essay. I would like to interest you in the time between my false starts, the way the ill-fated find consolation in little reprieves, in the scent of a good story. I would like to interest you in the fear and trembling that attends those who live in the wake of a curse; pursued by despondency, they hope for a bone glinting in the debris. For yes, as my essay-in-progress is damned by the forceful yoking of dissimilar ideas, our world is damned by the despair of more lives than we care to admit. Let 2018, then, be the year of learning to grieve the grief of many. Let us write with such tremble our mongrel prose is published in its gnarled state. I write this so your joy may be complete!

December 17, 2017
Analogy

I see how a sentence might arrive with a limp, missing its other leg. I strive against this. To use an analogy, and to do that without sliding into cliché, is to achieve the ultimate aim of great, transcendent prose. Why transcendent? Meaning is on both sides of the fence, and one term of an analogy reaches out to its fellow, vaulting across.

In this room where I have lived for three years, it seems to me that most objects I own belong to any memory but mine. I know when each item came into my life, after a purchase or as a gift. Yet in the manner in which they have become a standard feature of my daily vision, I trust them less and less to indicate who I imagine myself as.

Would this explain my indifference to taking photographs? Is an image made by my hand one term of an analogy that never finds its missing counterpart?

December 10, 2017

Metaphor

Directions to a metaphor: Take the detour that leads you to rhythm, not only meaning. A minor word forks left into a major clause. Great prose can be measured in mileage, one day’s worth of journey. A single motel on the highway is as sudden as a period, after hours of revised, perambulating commas. And once the fog has lifted, if it ever will, the windshield must be kept clear of mist. For the moment when, as in the sudden appearance of a deer, only brakes can prevent the murder of a darling.

A SUM OF ENCOUNTERS