Lyn Hejinian
Lola the Interpreter: Book 5
Introduction
Poetry’s ability to contribute to the work of doing philosophy is intrinsic to its medium, language. Every phrase, every sentence, is an investigation of an idea.
- Lyn Hejinian, Happily
In November of 2023, I reached out to Lyn Hejinian to solicit writing for the Washington Square Review. I should not have been surprised when she responded — should not have been surprised because her unwavering generosity of time and spirit is well known, and heralded by all those who knew her throughout her life. Publishing the work that Lyn entrusted to us, Lola the Interpreter: Book 5, comes with particular weight after her devastating passing in February of 2024. At any time it would be a profound and deep honor to bring her essential writing to readers; the honor, while bearing a certain soberness, is all the more in now in her absence.
What defines a text by Lyn Hejinian? It is difficult, or perhaps impossible, to settle upon a single characteristic. Pre-ordained genres are certainly the wrong starting point, as her writing has always acted between and through the confines of prose, poetry, prose-poetry, poet’s prose… Or any permutation of anything existing already. Hers is a corpus which defines itself, outside of the scaffolding provided by known forms. Perhaps one could begin with the quality which Hejinian defines as open. An open text, in her terms, upsets a relationship of author and reader that originates from a hierarchy — a hierarchy in which the author bestows a formed idea unto the reader who then, in the act of reading, comprehends it in linear correspondence to that which was intended by the author. Instead, in any open text, meaning is constituted in a synthetic act of participation between the author and reader — a pas de deux between the two in which a reader’s experience in taking in a text holds as much weight as the writer’s production of it. Reading is an act of writing. Comprehension is a mutual activity, which motions away from authorship’s function as fixative. From Hejinian’s seminal essay The Rejection of Closure:
The “open text” often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification.
Lola the Interpreter: Book 5 is beyond commodification, strictly irreducible, and beyond all else, open. What does Lola, as a text, look like? Not quite like poetry. How does it read? Certainly not like prose oriented towards narrative, or towards advancement of a singular argument. Across Lola, Hejinian catenates strings of language with analyses of secondary texts, with glimmers of narrative, with a barrage of named characters, with brief incursions of the author as “I,” all throughout informed by Hejinian’s engagement with the self as a site of material critique. Perhaps one fundamental project of Lola, and Hejinian in general for that matter, is to suggest the frangibility of anything considered to be firmly constructed; events, ideas, words, the position of the narrator. It is a kind of writing that beckons a new method of reading, one that values disjunction as much as continuity, one which is capable of accepting a superposition of meanings that settles onto a single word or image. From Lola the Interpreter, Book 5:
Our thinking is hardly tidy, it’s a jumble of letters on a Mobius strip, a phonic blur on Flats Ave, a shift of phrases as the breakfast menu is replaced by the menu for lunch. Someone means bells when somebody says helicopter, winner when someone says nudge. Just for the pure pleasure of quotation, let’s call this “somebody whose voice everyone says appears to be standing still on one pitch then another.” But concepts aren’t mere distractions; the matter versus metaphysics dispute is as inane as the form vs content distinction. Behold the thousandth bold uncertainty: a marigold! Or maybe a zinnia?
Thinking is not tidy, and nor is reading; words may as well be swapped with other ones along associative chains hidden from us. Much of Lola and Hejinian’s writing at large is focused on identifying the social forces which move “[jumbles] of letters” and “phonic [blurs]” towards something that can be deemed intelligible; or, if perhaps not identifying the forces, mirroring the processes which wrangle isolated items (words, single events) into more totalizing structures (coherent sentences, historical narratives). Continually, Hejinian asks: What forces herd words, bearing no intrinsic meaning, towards a “productive” state of sense? Ultimately, she reminds us that the meaning of anything is socially constructed, and under capitalism, exacted by repressive forces — from Lola: Book 5:
Labor white plight stick of pencil ink and sponge in the mug of rules: this is full of semantic potential but what comes of it depends on the local circumstances, how the words are arrayed, the facts functioning, what those bent on utilizing, seizing, appropriating, monetizing, weaponizing, and exploiting do next. Lagging plastic, it says, or rising bread pamphlet and wet sleeve. Through no fault of its own, it’s nonsense. But, making a return, realism could sweep all of this away and who could blame it, even if it were sometimes wrong?
Hejinian, like few others, is able to denature the coherent sentence — placed abreast, it’s not much different than one which bears little-to-no semantic content. In Lola, sentences are equalized across their gradient of semantic functionality — coherent or not they are strings of words, but some have been pushed towards “functioning” by those social forces bent on “utilizing, seizing, appropriating, monetizing, weaponizing, and exploiting.” Meaning is an artifact of power. It is a product, existing in the wake. So too she frequently denatures the real, that which exists as a consequence of semantic sense — again, from Lola: Book 5: “A successful performance of realism must look and sound like the real thing, it must fully resemble what our observations, education, and social milieu have led us to believe reality is.” As a word’s meaning suggests the forces which have produced it, attempts at realism do more to suggest the social factors (milieu, education) which construct such visions than to present any conception of “reality.”
What can one do, and how can one write, outside of meaning? Perhaps that’s approaching the question from the wrong side. In Lola: Book 5, Hejinian quotes Anthony J. Cascardi, discussing Goya: “‘There were things needing to be acknowledged that were outside the scope of what could be represented and indeed that the conventions of representation served to conceal.” Perhaps it is, instead, the architectures which define meaning which ought be questioned. Hejinian, across her work, is in search of that which lies outside of such auspices of representation — and in turn, in search of writing which reveals the unseen “conventions of representation” which inform any denotative product. Hejinian continually asks: How can one write beyond language through language itself? As if to crawl down the endless chain of signifier that follows each sign, Hejinian seems to accomplish this impossible task; to seek the wellspring, the source, the origins of an infinitely linked braid produced by each word. And what is it? It’s right there, in the writing — but just beyond sight, built from an endless web of characters and their relations. From Lola the Interpreter: Book 1, published online in e-flux:
Why does a poet insert characters into an essay? The answer is obvious: characters are everywhere, just look around. The human is a creature that cognition can’t codify and understanding can’t close.
Understanding can’t close; meaning is set in motion, each character a carrier of a portion which accrues to something which then recedes from view. In Hejinian’s work, the answer is obvious, yet hidden; just when you have approached grasping it, it turns away. And it is in this turning that the writing — and reading — occurs.
In an email to me, leading up to publication of Lola: Book 5, Lyn wrote:
There's a lovely remark of Foucault's in which he comments on "texts that play a part in the reality they speak of"—I'm not sure that's an exact quote, but it's close enough. I suppose most, or at least many, writers want their work to play a part in the reality around them. It's wonderful to me that my work has played a part in your reality as a fellow writer.
As it has played the part in the reality of countless others, and will continue to, through era, through selves, and through the endless admixtures of selves & others which create and alter the fabrics of our expressions, of our beings, of our language, of our times. To quote the seminal My Life — “Undone is not not done.” — by Elijah Jackson
***
Matter never leaves meaning untouched.
James I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece
To a name, more or less barred from detours—some particular you or he or she or I—what can we add? Humans, memories of love and fucking (the latter of which is carried out under the auspices of love in the excellence of banal darkness)—each of us are the product of a fuck. Names, on the other hand—names and, if and when they appear, characters—leap from the imagi- nation. Zander Blue Dallas, Reggie Clara Toss, Aquo Thomas Koury—and in better works Dorothea Brooke, Janie Mae Crawford, Charles Swann—these aren’t predicates (characteristics, characterizations). May 1—International Workers Day; it’s easy these days to get a sense of a seemingly sudden dehumanizing unreality. Cement hardens as the sun descends behind the commercial buildings on Angle Avenue; a red and white sign on a sandwich board stands at the Flutter and Angle crosswalk: “Sidewalk Closed.” It occasionally seems that we still live haphazardly according to the seasons: no matter how great the distance is between us and the ancient first days of May, for example, on which demands for dance were made, here and there groups of schoolchildren today skip or pommel around a pole, interlacing colored streamers which, now already tattered, flutter in the fog—the seasons: each a playing time and field with players.
Even before the infant can crawl, he or she discovers borders, brinks, edges, sides, and then, once he or she is on the move, others: friends, enemies, comrades, playmates, competitors, lovers. With these, with their respective logics of adjacent things, a person is living a life, its moments variously strung. Is this how we discover time, retrospectively, as an accumulation of moments, or do we discover it anticipatorily by feeling about for moments ahead? Moments? The accretion of stuff, rather, people, places, activities, and things—the makings of moments at eventful intersections: glowing ochre concavities pocking a ledge of sandstone, five motorcyclists threading traffic on a highway, a plover’s nest at the edge of a picnic site near the city shore line, Micah Andre Blake beside me in the stands at the first gymkhana of the spring in, he says (gesturing toward his flipflops and shorts), the “wrong clothes,” “and you think these are the right ones?” Noor asks (she points to her sandals, she’s perpetually irritable), “just don’t get stepped on.”
It should be easy to keep going and even to stay lively, there’s always a lot to do and there’s reality everywhere, but all speculative propositions, all statements of intention, all promises, all narrative “realisms,” are absurd given the narrow scope of humanity’s temporal consciousness, its fixedly short-term imagination. Our anticipations are for the all but immediate. Time is lost not only because of inattention or forgetfulness but also by virtue of failed expectation and the failure of expectations. But we lose time, too, simply because of the limits of the future—or because the future doesn’t (by definition) exist at all. It’s not always our fault that we lose.
Life propels itself, moving to move, engaged in pure motion. Fragments of narrative are scattered about, undistributed, willy-nilly, indeterminate; the assemblage exists but unintentionally; it depicts nothing, lacks pattern or design though we can hope that it will produce effects. However does one indefatigably exercise skepticism without falling victim to laughter? To quote Lola: the more a person learns, the sharper her wit. Original thought—it’s a matter of infinite regress, the memory of everything. Instead of the link-by-link associative formation typical of montage we come face-to-face with disparate multicontextual and polysemous matter with no discernible purport—a disarrangement, maybe even a derangement, judged to be a manifestation of nonsense or even madness, weakening if not entirely destroying the mechanisms customarily used for sense-making. But all’s not lost: the shaping power of memory may serve to counter the chaos, though in doing so it inflates one with self-aggrandizing nostalgia, making an almost irresistibly flattering appeal to one’s subjectivity, singling one out as a secret but transcendent center of experience.
As Nietzsche said, “There are no isolated judgments!” We very well might experience subjectivity as an interior presence, but it’s not a single one. As for personality—how variably it plays about when others are around and even as occasional (contextual) disappointments flash. Julia Xanthe Jones is an artist only for the sake of Art, says Tony van Heuvel, subsuming Jones’s amorphous works into a category for which his best definition is you know it when you see it. You think art is just a ball thrown into the air until it falls so we can kick it down the road to give us aesthetic distance?
The dictionary is a grand and truthful masterpiece even when it’s responsible for the lesser works we call autobiographies. Can one characterize mortality as the inescapable condition of separability, dividing nonexistence from existence, individual particular from the collective (and collecting) phenomenal world? We can’t prevent the meaning structures of our contexts from total breakdown. Happily, in less time than it takes to bake a potato, the dictionary stirs up another tumult of language with its loudest vowels and most raucous consonants sending waves of polysemy rolling through even the most quotidian, banal, pedestrian, and seemingly inconsequential of situations. And so I mock my vanity and even my presence with its illusory faces and fantasy ideals, as if my mockery could assert my superiority over them.
I may sometimes sound like a modern pop singer here but she will not demand that the public be interested in my personal condition, unlike those individuals who force their personality into their poetry—poetry is not for my concealed autobiography any more than it’s for hers or for yours. Tragedy requires heroic tones, comedy the sounds of everyday life, as federal officers sneak about, seizing children who have taken off their shoes to run barefoot in the playground sand, rounding them up, loading them into a bus and handing them over to a private-public partnership for sorting, reshoeing, and release to the custody of year-round boarding schools for shearing and education: preparation for bleating and rage. “The body aches,” Maria Stepanova writes, “it itches, it is full of fear, it tries and fails to forget itself, but the beholding eye moves freely and without haste, as if it were the air itself with its unlimited reserves of time.” But we are really just watching blue marks on a grid: racism, bay leaves, bed sheets, unemployment, bruised elbows, hypochondria, yard sales, droughts, rice cookers, email messages, burn out, mental health crises, corporatized education and for-profit prisons, melting glaciers, toothpaste, pandemics, pine trees, salt, white vernal clouds, hand cream, peanut butter, tents, ATMs, gender violence, turnpikes, robins, mass shootings, home repairs, indexes and lists and inventories. It’s a given world, but whether it’s proffered as a gift or as a joke or as a trick to fool us is hard to determine, and what or who would do the proffering in the first (or in any) case? It’s just one thing after another, without explanation or justification and without much definition. As for Materia Tamayo-Cole, the detective—she’ll just opt for what Charles Altieri calls “the pleasure of embracing necessity.”
* * *
What games they play in the supermarket arena! Floka parks her cart to one side in the wide space between the onions and the tiered display of tomatoes and avocados to ponder the aesthetics of the produce display, the bouquets of curled bananas, the carefully outspread carrots, tops removed and fanned between untopped beets to the right and rutabagas to the left, yellow onions in a stable heap beside white onions on one side and red onions on the other with shallots and heads of garlic in baskets leaning against the onions and slightly tipped in her direction: a controlled abundance, surreptitiously spotlit. This is ideology in performance before ranging shoppers, a demonstration of plenitude, perfection, and (for those who can pay for them) availability; ideology as good as captions it: National Bounty, Nature’s Wealth, or Life’s Riches, embedded in melancholy, a growing blur of smudges and marks depicting something indecipherable, obscure, and forestalling interpretation. What’s there to see? One looks at a photograph in anticipation of what lurks behind or below its surface, the very thing it can’t show: animation, action, personality, life. Major theorists of photography (Eduardo Cadava, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Jérôme Thélot among them) consider a photograph to be a site of death—“cadaver is the other name of photography,” as Jérôme Thélot puts it—but four pages before quoting that comment of Thélot’s, Cadava suggests something quite different by proposing an affinity between photography and motherhood: “mothers are always another name for photography—mothers and photography are both means of reproduction.” Humans put their hands everywhere—Floka Claire Gregory adds two red onions to the items in her cart and pushes it into the aisle between berries imported from Mexico in plastic “clamshell” containers and piles of citrus fruit, the oranges jubilant, the tangelos belligerent, the grapefruits paunchy.
“There were things needing to be acknowledged that were outside the scope of what could be represented and indeed that the conventions of representation served to conceal”—this is Anthony J. Cascardi summarizing the challenge that Francisco de Goya faced as he set about depicting things of his time in the contexts of the time. Appearing as a name in, say, a book provides the named with a textual life, which, somewhat like the life of a being that appears in a photograph, is a past life arriving now from the dead zone that is the full context in which that being lived, except that a name in a text may have no other being than that provided by the letters of the name, viz. Lola, Tina Madhurmita Skye, Enrico Wren Roberts, Cyrus Ratad, Milly Margaret Willis, Tamarind Magee, and I. We assign names to persons to facilitate their discontinuity; their names produce their appearances and their names allow them to disappear. Or, to put that another way: a name is a machine of repetition, facilitating absence just as much as it summons appearance. As for I—I can be dead but still writing. Voilà: you could interpret this as another of the machinations of capitalism as it carries out the monetization of eros and the erosion of hours: “part of the history of absence.” And think of all the things—new or surprising—that are underway as I write: self-driving cars, AI, socio-political polarization and first world governmental corruption and dysfunctionality, privately-owned spacecraft, massive worldwide reduction in biomass of flying insects, murder by cops. As for “this tribunal”—under what auspices does it have authority? Lola saddles Night on a weekend morning, Freya Cyprian Slight walks up the three cement stairs to the library, Leo X. Lee plays scales in his garage.
“The entire world entered the posthistorical phase when [. . .] it lost its faith that history could be overcome.” What Boris Groys is referring to is human history or, more pointedly, a history of human ambition, greed, injustice, and cruelty—conscious human viciousness. But Groys is referring to something else, too, something entirely different and counter to history as one of human atrocities: history not as a record of what’s happened but, rather, history as a force that “strives toward consummation.” History doesn’t achieve consummation (whatever Groys or his translator means by that term), history strives toward it. “And when history no longer strives toward consummation, it disappears, ceases to be history, stagnates.” The point here is that the history humans produce is vicious but that very history is produced in the course of a quest for utopia: humans seek utopia in order to put an end to their cruelty and they are cruel in their pursuit of it. I think I prefer coincidence to causation in real life, Samantha Jane Jenkins says to Jovanna Tupac Milton as she rings up the sale of the book Jovanna Milton is buying, but detective novels can be great. Jovanna Tupac Milton wants to find constructive principles in irrational thought, a logic in (not of) unreason, she wants to intensify a feeling for life (her feeling, our feeling) by exposing the inevitability of reason’s loss of command, the loss even of its possibility. Especially, Jovanna Milton says as she passes her credit card to Samantha, when the detective and his family eat really good food. Consciousness, even if only as a sorting of sensations, exists prior to reason, but without reason consciousness would be immobilized, static, incapacitated. What then, in this state of maximal unfreedom, would be subject to remembering? We come to know ourselves imaginatively rather than rationally, however, utilizing the fictions we declare, founded on histories we concoct to verify the stories and the characters we think we are or want to be. To achieve this, and it’s no small thing and requires the complicity of others, we have to start early and often and know when to lie. As Adorno says, “[W]hat once seemed to be reality emigrates into imagination, where it survives by becoming conscious of its own unreality.”
I realize that I should try beginning yet again, interpreting, but interpreting what—interpretation? It’s perpetually disturbed, or both of them are: the beginning and the interpreting. And on what grounds are either possible, on what grounds is possibility possible? There are nothing but material grounds; all around us matter exercises its erotic attraction—to that even the dead respond as their atoms and molecules shift, disperse, dissolve. If we take this proposition seriously, it follows that the dead don’t—or don’t necessarily—stop. That said, all question of progress is moot. The second hand on the analog clock with hypnotic regularity takes its tiny jump from spot to spot and beguiles one into forgetting time.
A successful performance of realism must look and sound like the real thing, it must fully resemble what our observations, education, and social milieu have led us to believe reality is. To engage with fiction (literary or cinematic)—to engage through enjoyment or curiosity or out of scholarly interest, et cetera—entails the adoption of certitude, the famous or infamous willing suspension of disbelief. In effect, meanwhile, realism may have as much scope as reality, though they include different things. Meaning casts music, sense propels sound. Turn up the music! Here’s the thing (Cyrus Ratad is free of doubt), here’s the thing (he continues, finger pointing, not like the Lenin we see in statues but with elbow bent and arm only chest high), you live in Lalaland, not in the real world. And (I think) you do? Because (he wags his finger and lowers his arm)—put it like this: I have taught myself to ignore my feelings. The technocratic takeover of reality and the transformation of reality into a battleground—it would indeed be deafening, it already is—even realism would gone from reality.
Labor white plight stick of pencil ink and sponge in the mug of rules: this is full of semantic potential but what comes of it depends on the local circumstances, how the words are arrayed, the facts functioning, what those bent on utilizing, seizing, appropriating, monetizing, weaponizing, and exploiting do next. Lagging plastic, it says, or rising bread pamphlet and wet sleeve. Through no fault of its own, it’s nonsense. But, making a return, realism could sweep all of this away and who could blame it, even if it were sometimes wrong? The names of birds, says Tamarind Magee—robin, finch, pigeon . . . (every-one knows robins and pigeons—ob-viously, says Pilar Piana Lye) . . . give us birds to see. Pilar is certain but not wrong; there are some propositions that, as Witt- genstein puts it, “lie apart from the route travelled by enquiry.” They provoke feeling, not emotion but an a priori sense of something, an initial and immediate intuitive comprehension. It can be the shelf of a store and a wind turbine too—the whole elastic, so to speak—generating platitudes (“to entertain is to be entertained,” “to appreciate is to gain in appreciation,” and the like). There is more to where there is less than you might think—ob-viously, as Pilar would say.
The produce market on Flats Ave has fresh English peas again, and Enrico Wren Roberts is adding some—podded and rinsed—to the leek risotto he’s making; a chunk of Parmesan and a flat grater are already on the table, the green salad is lightly dressed, and six sea scallops, patted dry and sprinkled with black pepper, are on a plate ready to sear in butter as soon as the skillet’s hot. Reggie Clara Toss looks up from the table where she’s been sewing and asks, “What’s for dinner?” and when in response to his answer she says “Amazing,” Enrico lifts his wooden spoon and waves it like a baton, conducting her into rising from her chair and doing a plié. The violin arches, the quotidian is meaningless, somewhere in fields cows rest, and syllogistic logic comes up blank. For Enlightenment philosophers (Kant is the one most often cited in this context), ethics was to “rest on rational grounds” and “have universal scope,” as the art historian/philosopher Anthony J. Cascardi puts it. On the other hand, for Francisco de Goya, about whom Cascardi is writing, “questions of ethics are inseparable from affect, which is to say,” Cascardi continues, “both that they communicate by appeal to the emotions and also that they regard the emotions as integral to ethical life.” The trick here is to regard the quotidian as an instrument and not just a theater for ethical life. Admittedly, limits to personal agency are set by the number of available options for action but also by the purported agent’s uncoordinated desires and incommensurate motives which, without one’s full knowledge, prompt one to act as one does. As an agent, one is poorly defined. Antonia Alice Martin, Max Marie Ritter, Cornelia Katrina Cabanatuan, Ulysses Theo Upton, Bonnie Rose Roberts—they carry on by dint of mobility and are all but invisible (like wind in still, dishonest air).
Both discord and harmony prevail in the quotidian cosmos of stuff: can opener; Knudsen’s nonfat cottage cheese; Paper Mate SharpWriter #2 pencil; size 7½ Baflinger Reine Schurwolle slippers; emery board; packet of 140 Post-it flags (languettes, banderitas); square, striped box of Signature Select tissues; dust bunny in corner; cat on bed; and so on—stuff for those who love the incontestable necessities and the inessential deadwood, extraneous, superfluous, merely handy. But let’s accord some justice to the useless and so-called trivial and grant some efficacy to the things that seem hardly worth noticing. Let’s take a breath. Here lies the given world with its many simultaneities, rich with amiability as well as strife, stress, and discord. But justice—justice for field guides and for dirt, ferns, succulents, sands? Anaximander’s variously interpreted comment, recorded by Simplicius one thousand years after Anaximander’s time and based on the only extant fragment of his writings, puts it this way: “The source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens ‘according to necessity; for they pay penalty and ret- ribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time’ . . .” The classicists Kirk, Raven, and Schofield provide this with a plausible interpretation: “the prevalence of one substance at the expense of its contrary is ‘injustice,’ and a reaction takes place through the infliction of punishment by the restoration of equality—of more than equality, since the wrong-doer is deprived of part of his original substance, too,” and less than a page further they add, “The idea of a time-limit is appropriate: the injustice of summer has to be made good within the roughly equal period of winter, that of night during the period of day, and so on . . . ; Time makes the assessment to meet the particular case.” But in the short term, the only term humans seem to comprehend, what do we get—a crone crooning ballads to a diamond-backed rattler on a stool, a mathematician with an ivory spoon savoring slices of grapefruit sprinkled with sugar, a jazz band performing in a basket under a hot air balloon over the financial district, a collection of ornately framed ads for cat food displayed on the wall behind a bowling alley bar. Time is not without wit, but a crow born as a crow will die as a crow.
Person, group, neighborhood, landscape—each has its ways, automatically maintained. “My habits have their home territory,” Tony van Heuvel says, aimlessly giving the cork beer coaster a counter-clockwise quarter turn, “far from Certitude; it’s more like Confusion, but that’s better than Rigidity.” This is allegorical thinking, something impossible without a penchant for picturing— “explaining the facts of the world in terms of the things of the world,” Byron D. O’Farrell adds. Zander Blue Dallas laughs; “There was no first decision,” he says, “though maybe there was a first problem. Or a first perception of a problem.” Jubilantly Byron D. O’Farrell continues: “The product of strife or time or water or justice or fire or freedom or chaos—or perhaps the first problem was that of absurdity.” Off in a crowd of pedestrians crisscrossing the late afternoon shadows softening the cement, Placo Paris Wang says something to Materia Tamayo-Cole, something about two tents or two dents.
Losses are real in the phenomenal world where dogs and cats, bread and butter, celery and peanut butter, ice cream and cake, apple pie and automobiles, roots and branches get paired, by association if not always of necessity, though the pairings often enough feel fixed if not inescapable. And since meaning accrues in increments, each detail can only signify somewhat and every detail ultimately gets subsumed (though not obliterated). And always there’s the quivering potential for new pairings, both reproductive and productive: AI and jelly, granite and the ace of spades, athlete and cutlery, ballgown and persimmon, emerald and skillet. Many things converge at (or with) names to form a single (and, let’s not forget, singular) congregation. Meanwhile, a single language in being shared becomes many. Myriad thoughts get propelled by grammar gears. The comedy of coupling plots continues on, with “jarring juxtapositions and miscommunication,” “mighty patches of incoherence,” “layered, inconsistent, and jumbled ontologies”—anything might crop out or up.
Ghosts hate to be bothered, and so we are tossed in and out of dreams patched together from the “hours, days, months” that John Donne called the “rags of time.” Dreams lie in the dark like banners tattered by the sun, signals from a zero-point in phenomenal space. It seems that imaginative fulfillment is impossible, perhaps precisely because it’s the stuff of mortality and, like ev- erything mortal, it’s timed. But ultimately and primordially, space and time are not only inseparable but the same, maintaining the cosmos, the infinite finitude keeping things grounded, holding in the ghosts. And with similar reciprocity, though perhaps on a vastly smaller scale, every state of knowledge is a state of feeling and with every feeling we encounter knowledge along with concomitant affective and epistemological doubt. It’s not the task of reasoning to reason us out of feeling; intellect without sensibility is not what it takes to be rational. So what are these ghosts? Or, rather, how is it that they are as impersonal as beauty while nonetheless being far from indifferent? Beauty is too stodgy, it can’t cope with the plethora of appearances, it can’t cope with all that’s presented as the present (say, dead bodies under rubble, reptilian lava curling around cars, a broken bicycle below a cliff, a hospital in flames), it can only tear it narcissistically from time in the name of art or perhaps in the name of justice, shame, social critique, grief, virtue. Or whatever. Imagine a painting, its primary structuring clear: it’s considerably higher than wide. Or let it be a doorway into a room—the evidence suggests that it’s early morning but it might be late afternoon, the hour depends on the actual use of it, pinot noir poured into the glass of evening, a building manager’s broom at 8:15 a.m. swishing across a band of sunlight zigzagging up the short flight of stairs from the sidewalk to the front door. Somewhere along an uninteresting inland intercity highway, the present tense has surreptitiously slipped into the past with a spectral peach tree, the widespread glow of wild mustard, a small collapsing wooden shed. Happily, there’s no grammatical confusion, that perpetrator of fear.
If only I wrote quickly, fashioning phrases, forming sentences, moving words, with thoughts in a frenzy, matter gyrating, matters at hand: spoons and broken trade agreements and gravel and Google searches and toddlers at play and identity theft and deer droppings on an urban path and the recovery of a stolen Vermeer. Everything would accrue the coherence imposed by hurry and a restricted amount of time, a time of mind in an epistemological mood catalyzed by touch typing expertise and an aphoristic method, each scrap or shard or splinter or shred drawn into a wild and subversive haven for a festival of misunderstandings. Onto the page, across the screen, into the mind there might appear a tall pine tree captured in a red dress—why not? Stars on a trip, boys baking pies, flamboyant rain, textual seas. I could write about anything; knowledge might be sporadic, intermittent, cast in fragments, each “fierce, declarative and self-cancelling, not edging toward the truth of consciousness step by qualified step.” Carpe diem—apples and atheists are on parade. Pumping a playground swing with sedentary verve and situated understanding, Pilar Piana Lye defies gravity even as she bends and draws and bends it again to form something like a gravitational cocoon around her, a hemisphere through which, back and forth, she curls and rides. Pilar goes as high as she can until she tires and gravity subsides. Surely there’s room for philosophical skepticism in fantasy, making a mess of the rule-abiding drama of cause and effect. The alphabet may indeed invite play (A is for Artichoke, Z is for Zilch, et cetera), but the role it plays is like that of an MC or DJ, calling up a strange assortment of presentations. As Sextus Empiricus puts it, “We use the term ‘are’ for the term ‘appear.’” Just check out the grammar school playgrounds at recess time on a Friday in May. Samantha Jane Jenkins does so as she walks north on Mount Foot Avenue, one step at a time—a game in which she too defies gravity in a sequence of plays—a material sequence, a model of logic, a matter of course. If all logic is sequential, it’s only because matter is in step with time.
There are things I’m choosing to know and things I’m definitely choosing not to know, knowledge I’m seeking or am turning away from. But inevitably thinking wanders off, drawn perhaps by beauty (which knows nothing at all) or love (whose attractions are scarcely epistemological). The comedy of modes moves on. The turning shadow of a tree, the turning of the tuning peg on a guitar, the incoming roll of quasi-white clouds, the slowly moving wheels of a gravel truck climbing a hill, the churning legs of dogs in the park: there is no place for missing limbs in an anatomical study of temporal display. When asked about acting, the actor says that the act is nearly impossible, the outcome unknown every time, the physical risks inescapable, the social residues ineradicable—“for better and worse,” adds the actor.
“The impossible is made possible in context.” For this to be true, a context has to be made possible. It’s not by chance that I pull a copy of Jacques le Fataliste from the bookshelf—I go to the bookshelf precisely for the purpose of looking into the book. “If you aren’t paying attention, it’s either because you aren’t thinking about anything at all or because you are thinking about some- thing other than what’s in front of you”—this, more or less, is the sentence that catches my eye (as if it were a wren on a rock) when at random I open the book. It’s Jacques who’s speaking: Get back in context—that’s what he’s saying—or Get yourself into my context. The trouble with elevating the power of reason to a preeminent position and giving it ultimate authority is that it is always someone’s reason. But why this obsessive thinking about thinking, the inner silence of language?
My lap is clear. But that’s not true: the cat jumps off my lap and with that I open my notebook on it, black jeans overlapped by the gnarled, mottled wool of a drooping sweater. Lying is only one of the many devices to which writers stoop (or rise like a ballet dancer en jeté). You might ask to what purpose the writer lies or disorders his, her, or their phrases, or deflates an idea, or contra- dicts their, her, or his own propositions, or comes to no conclusion. You might ask my name. Come on—use your imagination. To get you started I’ll say that it’s neither Teresa Lisa Tan nor Guillermo Jack Pelliet nor Natalia Lakshmi Nelson nor Travis Butch, and with that I’ve reached an autobiographical limit beyond which I won’t go.
It continues to astonish me that things of the phenomenal world show themselves—but of course that’s precisely what they do: appear! Voilà—and with that, as they make themselves present, we launch into interpretation, judgment; we make adjustments to our cognition. And we come up with names. But hasn’t it been proven, meanwhile, that names can prompt things? What is this—a pudding? It’s just the latest, but far from the last, thing to appear, and it might not be a pudding but, rather, something like a pudding: a mound in a dish, a dune in a bowl—finely swirled sand, or mud. A simile is like the happy smile with which Narcissus comes face to face with his beautiful self at a woodland pool.
Now past, what was a tableau is now an event, though only minor, momentary, and one of many. You can’t untell a tale, you can’t undream a dream; even forgetfulness remains incomplete. What might the future bring, beyond evidence, that is, that something happened or, at least, existed? And after that— fingers on lips, the body for pleasure, beautiful nonchalance, ginger snaps and chocolate ice cream, or myriad things far worse which we’d experience with fear, sadness, or horror. With every passing moment the scenario from which we begin our long departure into the futures changes, each with its own materials for consumption, few of which we refuse.
Enrico Wren Roberts holds an egg in his hand; suddenly he fully recognizes what it is. I won’t say he realizes what it is—the egg carries out its own realization; it sits in his hand being real and he’s afraid of it, his fingers are too small for it, his thumbnail looks at him, timorous as a child or a mouse. Is nausea really the right term for what Antoine Roquentin experiences when he’s face to face with the impervious quiddity (one might even say the perverse actuality) of physical things; wouldn’t revulsion be the better term? Sartre, of course, would know, but Jean-Paul Sartre was a ponderous thinker, not a graceful one. Roquentin doesn’t wretch, doesn’t vomit. Enrico Wren Roberts is erecting a barrier between himself and the egg in his hand. He cracks the egg into a skillet and turns the flame down to prevent the butter under the egg from spattering onto the stove top; his irritability increases, strengthens, then it branches. Without conceptual constructs—without categories and the practicalities they sustain—there’d just be us, or rather you, me, Enrico Wren Roberts, and things—a melee, madness, absolute alienation, a plethora of disjunct particulars stripped of association, unlinked—a universe of estranging plenitude. We’d have no way to think about it.
My school is a perfect system, Pilar Piana Lye says to her grandmother; every Monday my teacher (Pilar says it precisely) delegates tasks and this week I’m in charge of setting out the morning snack, they rotate. The long term repetitive present tense of the system is reassuring: to be dependable is a sure sign to Pilar Piana Lye that what’s happening is logical, grammatical. And she’s not wrong: such and such is the way we do things as we engage in recurrent acts of verification. With just a few words, Pilar Piana Lye is produced and here, too, is Milly Margaret Willis, timely, she thinks, when with unflappable sincerity Pilar lays out the snacks: cauliflower crackers (gluten-free), strawberries (rinsed), and half-pints of milk (already open and each flaunting a biodegradable straw). So much for narrative action, social observations, and doing literary justice to the facts. If a sentence makes sense, then other things do—public transportation, jokes, kickball, history. A work of art is always social and always necessarily a product of its epoch but other epochs (and other places) enter into its making as forces, influences, and materials and also as outcomes and alternatives—futures.
We encounter urban neighborhoods, weary city parks, classrooms, the impatient bay swept into fog, the reading room of a public library, the subterranean system of pipes and wires threading through the dark, all thick with impassible contradictions; we accept or even embrace them with melancholy. Impossibility guarantees our right to melancholy. But I’m no lyric melancholic. There’s no Freudian melancholy here, by the way, though things must be different in German. Blondie Jane Carter, hunched under a torn overstuffed laundry bag and trying to manipulate a stroller heaped wide with belongings including a blue tarp and a doll off a crowded bus, shrieks at someone—real or imaginary—on the bus behind her as she gets her stuff down. Let’s call her mood grungy melancholy: Blondie Jane Carter—solid, sullen, and undefeated. Still, melancholy is the weakest form of affirmation, an exhausted form of vitality.
We’ve long been abroad in the fields of unverifiable propositions—territory, some would say, through which we can only feel our way. Individually and collectively, beings are going about their business interpreting appearances, dreams, ideas, and every interpretation complicates what appears. Most of the time for humans it’s in language that interpretations make their appearance— language, the medium of complication, sensing appearances, spinning concepts like “the spider that crouches, forever silent, listening to the gay chirping of autumn insects,” but never silent, so not like the spider, more like white noise trying to obliterate pain. Our thinking is hardly tidy, it’s a jumble of letters on a Mobius strip, a phonic blur on Flats Ave, a shift of phrases as the breakfast menu is replaced by the menu for lunch. Someone means bells when somebody says helicopter, winner when someone says nudge. Just for the pure pleasure of quotation, let’s call this “somebody whose voice everyone says appears to be standing still on one pitch then another.” But concepts aren’t mere distractions; the matter versus metaphysics dispute is as inane as the form vs content distinction. Behold the thousandth bold uncertainty: a marigold! Or maybe a zinnia?
What is this, then, a work of art placing phenomena before us, me as much as you—or anyone? Words—a dog!—and we see one. Every linguistic construct— every turn of phrase—involves an artistic element, even if it’s not intentionally or properly presented as a work of art. And we are deceived; the language may be a material fact, but a “roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep, / And only speckled by the mid-day sun”? It’s dubious that we’re perceiving anything more than the shaken shadow of a perforated scene inviting our presence. But of course the sun casts contradictions: sunlight is an aid to appearance. Or is it just that a phrase, as an aid to prophecy, is self-fulfilling?
Humans like to make stuff. I suppose we could ascribe this to an underlying impulse to generate appearances—to the artistic impulse, say, or the need to make (up) a world—but making stuff seems to be what the busy world, producing and reproducing, does all on its own. Applying the term art to this activity is little more than granting it a seal of approval from culture monitors and monumentalizers. The Rape (or, more properly, the Abduction) of the Sabine Women: I suppose we could consider Livy’s account of it and perhaps also Rubens’s and Poussin’s paintings of it, as monuments to gender, celebrating (if that’s the right word) a landmark event in the struggle for human reproduction (or the male right to it). What would Rome be without those abductees? Making stuff has survival value—take nest-building, hive-building, web-building, et cetera, not to mention roads, wheels, huts, houses, and then cars, rockets, robots, and rubber bands. Alas, as Diderot pointed out long ago, “The person who makes our prosperity is condemned to die in poverty.” Every monument is an irritable allegory, reaching at considerable expense for a story—the story, with plot and protagonist, crisis, blood, noise, and nudity. We’re more than halfway through spring and we’re summoned by an unarticulated thought to what we hope will be a satisfying event, as a horse might be to the far end of a field by the sound of a call and rattling oats in a bucket or as a bee might be to flowering sage, to discover the unconscious wish and “the phantasy in which this wish is embedded.” So let’s not forget war: every dead soldier honored as a hero here was the protagonist in an inevitable tragedy. Andre Micah Blake on the rodeo grounds turns to Aquo Thomas Koury and explains the stolid cloverleaf configuration in the arena while astride their horses outside the ring the contestants mill about or scrutinize the barrels and the course. This too is part of the memorial or of the day devoted to it, a mobilized festive competitive performance that, like immobile somber statues, monumentalizes what’s commonly held to be the public’s sense of brotherhood and battle—does it satisfy some self-perpetuating civic need without imposing the implacability of a massive but vague monument on the landscape—an embodiment of a national paradox, an imperious riddle? Well, questions like these are just propositions in disguise. The Sphinx did not have anyone’s well-being in mind.
How delicious absurdity once seemed—present, resonant, and full. Now absurdity is withered—dulled. By sadness? Well, if we can’t feel happiness, at least we can mime it. I can do that certainly, since even until recently I thought that life in all its plenitude and power was full of merriment, joy, beauties, vagaries, wonders—a panoply of distributed and redistributed realities, all more than merely apparent. Don’t I still? And shouldn’t I, at least for all practical purposes?