Apostrophe

Lost lists and silences.

1.

I’ve been thinking about lists— particularly the lists one is asked to assemble after the death of a loved one. The legal system frequently requests an “inventory” of the items which belonged to the loved one, a list of things which can be contested by beneficiaries and inheritants.

Lists have their silences. I did not include my mothers’ shoes in the inventory of her estate. But my mother loved shoes; she preserved her 30-year-old boots from Romania carefully in her closet. The boots were useless in Alabama, where sorority girls sport Uggs with shorts all over campuses that never see snow. Why did my mother keep those boots near the black heels she wore to work?

2.

Is silence listed or unlisted? I don’t know.

In contemporary memoir, in the industry of unpacking wounds, silence often appears as the enemy, the erasure one writes against. Silence is violence, and the text serves as indictment. But silence is also protective, a way of preserving the sacred, a way of acknowledging the unsayable. Marguerite Duras hints at this in her “Letter to Centro Racchi,” where she bows out of an invitation to speak at conference, due to fear of being asked a question which would ruin a silence central to her life. 

Duras fears being asked why her characters are always Jewish, a question she cannot answer; the possibility of speakers or audience members theorizing on an answer to what feels unanswerable, the chance " that someone might tell me why" is "intolerable" to her. She speculates that silence is what binds her and her characters to Jewishness—"We keep silent together and that makes the book."

Waking up at 16 to a world that included disaster, Duras says:

"What happened to me in between, the war, the children, love, everything fades. The Jews remain. Which I cannot speak about."

3.

"I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.....for it runs in my head we shall all die young.."

[ John Keats to Charles Brown, 30 Nov. 1820]

4.

In court, this refusal to defend oneself is often interpreted as an admission of guilt. To refuse to satisfy the answers of others is to deny the world's claim on justice, or to complicate its relation to reality. More than anything, silence challenges our ways of knowing the world. And a kept silence, an impermeable, living silence, cuts off our access to the sacred, or that which is set apart.

5.

Excerpt from Ryan Bradley’s “The Lost List” (as found in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee)

I love Ryan Bradley’s essay, “The Lost List,” which touches on the inventory of absences compiled by the mind. It prompts notebooks.

Reading Bradley, I thought of Judith Schalansky’s marvelous book, An Inventory of Losses (translated by Jackie Smith). In it, Schalansky invokes what archivists know, namely: "chronology—the allocation of sequential numbers for each new addition--is in its banal logic the most unoriginal of all organizational principles, being only a simulation of order," as "the world is a sprawling archive of itself."

The world is a sprawling archive of itself. Everything depends on what is selected as worth remembering. Or what it determined to be forgettable. What we consecrate with legend.

6.

Joan of Arc's trial is notable for its silences —- she is, after all, being tried for heresy against a god administered by rulers, or the power of those on the podium.

And she responds with refusals: "I won't answer that.... Even fire won't change my mind..... The voice has forbidden me”—-the voice being God; fire being the way she would die, condemned for relapsing into heresy, exposed to a public recitation of her countless sins, and the response: silence. Like suicide.

The film still as quotation.

3:37

Tobias shares a photo of a girl with blonde hair surrounded by a golden nipple of light, a dusky illumination – this gilded creature keeps appearing in his Instagram photos, and then disappearing when he clicks on the photo. He has no idea who she is.

The days of muskrat Twitter have dawned and even this angelic pixel-host seems seems connected to the present uncanniness—- an uncanny knit further from the eerie than the commercial.

Mystery has changed. Even mystery feels slant, invisibly calculated, algorithmically-inclined, in the spaces of social media, those mediums which mythologizes us to ourselves.

3:39

A DM from a bitcoin miner followed by a DM from a writer expressing concern about our role in the systems of dominance. My dog Radu barks at a squirrel.

4:01

X confesses: “I like myself better on screen. Being away from Twitter reminds me of how despicable I find myself in real life. The real me screams at her kids and fails daily. I am an actual failure.”

The way social media defines time, or infects our relationship to temporality, feels so loose, so wrong, so—to use a twitter expression — unhinged.

I console myself with the fact that my work originate there – in that hustle of headshots and fake luminosity.

4:08

Maël Renouard’s Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet, as translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty, arrives. I get sucked into it quickly…

5:18

“The Internet has rung in the revenge of the archive and sounded the death knell of the show, which used to set the beat for the triumphal march of the present,” Renouard writes.

The show-and-tell of tweetland— the instability of our attachments to it. One would have to be mindless not to consider the effects. Purisms aside, Renoaurd’s critique is right. And yet, I hope Twitter doesn’t die before I do, since I scheduled tweets for the year 2031, which I can’t imagine actually seeing.

We all have our dubious experiments; each manuscript invests in the variant dubiousness. On restless writing days, I inventory conditionals and fondle the dream of my posthumous bird voice carrying on without me.

One conditional: If Twitter dies, the ghost I wanted to be will die with it.

9:32

Revising an essay on Celan alongside a book about files, truth, and surveillance. Staring at photographs cut from family films. Thinking how quotation resembles the film still—the scavenged screenshot.

Addressing the shadow gives it weight.

One cannot read Paul Celan without absorbing this somehow. He says it directly:

the words
I address to you, shadow,
to give you weight.”

I speak to you in order to give you substance, to point to the thing attached.

As I remove these lines from the palm, I set them apart. Like S. Cavell, my interest drives me to write what arrests me. In turn, I arrest the image in a manner that turns it into a still from a film. I rip it from the context of its motion, of its life. Because I have isolated this photo—these lines, this particular shadow—I read it differently, there is no longer movement, the frame is reduced to the intensity of these lines.

The critic uses the imperative when they elect to quote or phrase a section of a poem. I want you to look.

9:43

The shade is the name for the ancient ghost. The lampshade changes the light. The order of life versus the disorder of death. Fourteen DM’s from friends trying to figure out whether they should migrate to another platform. Twitter slows fills with Muskrat experts and Muskrat reportage to reflect the new contagion. “Hyperbole is everything,” my teen daughter announces in her book report.

9:49

Order. Disorder. Simply put: I want twitter to die after me. I don’t want to witness the death of a book published posthumously. It seems rather wretched for logic to ask such things of the mind.

12:51

Renouard mentions “the aura of things glimpsed once and then lost forever” with respect to a book manuscript he lost. This missing book is the one which haunts him (I think of Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident).

The sad lovers crawl into my mind near midnight with their furious foreheads, their rage-curved shoulders, the books I have seen and lost. Projected books that come back like the ice pic of a migraine. As Renouard misses the written book, I miss the unwrittens—-the stories half-lived, half-remembered, the poem’s sharp clip, the shadow—-not a plot I’d wish to inhabit again but something I treasure like a lost tooth or a lock of hair cut from a corpse whose skin hasn’t betrayed its pastness yet.

Notebooks: the end of November.

Background: Tony Morrison, George Steiner, Danilo Kis, Elias Canetti, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Roland Barthes— all eventually wrote towards the aesthetic and ethical value of openendness.

Discursiveness, theory, worry – the mind alone with a book in a room at night.

Point of origin: There must be a starting point which isn't loss.

Cosmology: Heidegger said "questions are paths toward an answer"; each path will be unique to the mind who sets off asking it. Schools turn paths into highways by sending us to chase the same question and to compare our responses.

Being able to ask questions is more important than being able to answer them. And the belief the answering questions is a measure of intellect diminishes the range of thought, both formally and institutionally.

We cannot dismantle the house in which we live by coming up with new answers. Dismantling requires undoing, reformulating…

The right answer – the one directed by the textbook – testifies to its own idolatry, or to the belief that one answer can stand for eternity.

Technical considerations: Good criticism reveals the supple shoulders and strength of an idea, its gait, its range, the terrain it travels in a landscape of inter-textual topography.

How steep is the slope of the gradient away from convention in comparison to other ways of knowing?

What is the degree of this gradient, its effects?

The ways language fails those who put their faith in it.

The aesthetics of idolatry uncovered by the author, whether personal or cultural. The particular lineaments of loss — not to start in that space, but to acknowledge its potential dominance.

Subjects: Amatonormative relationships.

Class as construed by the cognoscenti. Power.

The nature of belief and its relationship to the vatic voice.

Memory as elsewhere or otherwise.

Longing as a failure of markets.

The apocalyptic heart of modernity. 

To seek the metaphysics of how language changes, and how unstable the world conveyed in a word, whether we read it from experience, cultural limitation, or time.

The insight and the apercu, the personal portrait set against the pain of the text.

The posthumous voice on trial for what it failed to anticipate, and dialogue with her grief continues to challenge semantics.

Barthes quotes from Gide's 1927 journal: “They want to make me into a dreadfully anxious being. My only anxiety is to find my thoughts misinterpreted.”

Abstractions: You don't know what you don't know until you've built a house which must be undone by it.

The hunger for purity rationalizes violence.

Therapy doesn't provide solutions to social problems – it merely offers attention to those who can afford it.

Social problems are not resolved by privatized solutions.

Asides: We mistake citations for rigorousness, just as we mistake the use of complicated lexicons for intelligence.

Neoliberalism offers to each the opportunity to each be the hegemon of our own hallway.

Storyline: Someone wants to rule the world so they run for local office. 

Poem: The sapling stripped by winter. 

The rawness of the leafless thing.

The incongruency of raw evoking meat when I mean is a bone.

Distractions: Piranesi, piano tuners, baroque variations. 

Samuel Beckett saying to A. M.: “It gets harder and harder to write a line that’s honest. It’s very painful, very difficult.”

Contentions: Modernism relies on the sense of observable time as a form of authority.

Schools tell us a statement is true or false but life reveals the truth or falsity depending on its moment of utterance and its situation.

Tempo: The velocity of engagement and the language which enacts this. 

Cigarettes in the bathroom: Memory is elsewhere or otherwise.

The moment of utterance.

Counterfactuals. Sincerity and good faith: both require a commitment to error.

Mysteries: The way ideas are used to explain a perception, and what it triggers in the reader. What sort of re-cognition is involved.

How a poem has its own landscape and selects its own characters.

The specifics, the details, the blitz.

The visibility of voice. ….Is the poet whispering to someone else in the room? Why not?

“Resonance” rather than “reference”, Daniela Cascella calls it in Chimeras, this decentering of academic citation and direct quotation.

Non sequiturs: The discourse of great seriousness may not be serious.

Language doesn't become a god just because we put our faith in it.

Moral choices require the existence of other people; ethics exists outside of the closet of our personal feelings, in the space which is social, in the cafeteria.

How a book creates a sense of reality.

How a poet encounters temporality.

You don't know what you don't know.

And yet, one hopes to somehow build a house which is undone by it. 

Black widows, embodied cognition, and memoir in confessional culture.

"The observer stands outside the landscape, for were this not the case it would not be possible for nature to become a landscape at all." 

-Gyorgy Lukacs

“Ideology may appear clear to its proponents as long as it remains abstract, but when it is put into practice it takes the shape of a crime.”

-Mahmoud Darwish

1.

Black widow webs resemble messy tangles tucked into corners and crannies of things, under logs, sometimes littered with leaves; splashed by the surrounding spiders' white urine that attract scavengers with its strong scent. Often on the face-down side of old car wheels.

Sometimes she eats her lover. He plays her web like a lyre.

She may eat him before even copulating, or she may decide to not eat him after sex and then he dies alone.

When torn with a stick, the widow's web sounds like paper crackling in fire.

2.

The black widow spider benefits from what Ed Yong calls “embodied cognition”, so the web, itself, is part of the spider’s body:

Earlier, I described this as a postural squint. That’s close, but the analogy isn’t quite right, since squinting helps us focus on particular parts of space. Here, the spider is focusing on different parts of information space. It’s as if a human could focus on red colors by squatting, or single out high-pitched sounds by going into downward dog (or downward spider).

The ability to sense vibrations that move through solid surfaces, as distinct from sounds that travel through air, is “an often overlooked aspect of animal communication…..”

She may even eat him before copulating…..

3.

Which brings me to memoir, confession, webs, network-weaving, corporate malfeasance, the vacuity of authenticity in the never-ending hustle to keep our work separate from our personal lives. Or, at the very least, to be able to maintain control of our information space.

Eda Gunaydin’s “Tell-All” approaches the challenges of memoir in a confessional culture:

A friend who is a memoirist and I talk about the compulsion to disclose. Like her, I want to make disclosures – build intimacies to overcome the sense that this is so fucking mundane, that we, freshly emotionally regulated full-time job holding perfect subjects of neoliberalism, are now trapped in a prison of pretending like we don’t want to talk incessantly about one of three things: trauma, sex, anti-capitalism, that we are ever thinking about anything but these things. The way that any sleepover builds this heterotopic space which devolves and opens up necessarily into a conversation about fucking. The way that every game of Never Have I Ever is about fucking. The way that we all want to say to each other what the worst thing we’ve ever done is, and be forgiven.

Her observations on “communicative capitalism” will not sound strange to poets marketing their books, struggling with the blur between persona and human, and the ways in which confessions, themselves, have been a shock-market. With disgust, a part of me is forced to acknowledge that Trump knows this his market; his victim-centered memoir of his time in the White House will net millions.

For the Right is milking the teat of white male victimhood in earnest. It is doing this by constructing its own reading lists and special canons. And this confessional often involves some intense bootstraps, as Andrew Marzoni observes:

The frontier archetypes of Republican discourse – the antiestablishment maverick, the lone-wolf vigilante, the rebel, the patriot and the self-made man – draw most explicitly from the bootstraps myth of the rugged individual at the heart of American exceptionalism, which conservative authors exploit wholesale….

The pro-life thriller Gideon’s Torch (1995) by Charles Colson, formerly Special Counsel to Richard Nixon, is representative of this literature in that its depiction of ‘Christian white men in a persecuted light demanded,’ as Mason writes, ‘a deft appropriation of oppressed peoples’ actual histories and a revisionism that ranged from outright Holocaust denial to comparisons that likened antiabortionists to abolitionists.’

The current trend of far-Right literature presumes itself academic (i.e. operates to dominate the conventional elite) while lacking its own innovations. As Marzoni notes, it is characterized by “its Romantic environmentalism, neoclassical worship of the male physique, and its fixations on technological determinism and irony recall literature of the early 20th century….The narrative function, too, has remained the same: to stoke feelings of bitterness and solitude into a politics of reaction that is intellectually justified only after the fact.”

4.

Carol Mason’s “Right-Wing Literature in the United States since the 1960s” is a must-read for anyone tracking reactionary literature. To the degree that living in the South involves constant Civil War Reenactments, which I take as theatrical, nostalgia-inflected confessionals rooting the hearts and mounds of countless men in confessionals, Mason points to the sort of “rough agrarian” xenophobia that still exists in Alabama on both sides of the political spectrum, often eager to shame or reject those who don’t “sound” southern enough:

Less documented than the proliferation of right-wing serials in print, or the love of a conservative tradition of great nonfiction books, is how the reading of fiction and poetry compels right-wing movements. Five literary journals helped shape not only what to read but also how and why literature played a role in conceiving a conservative society. These literary reviews were heavily influenced by the Agrarians, a group of scholars trained at Vanderbilt University who promoted a radical conservatism. Beginning in 1930, with their manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, the Agrarians responded to the rise of modernism as a challenge to Victorian values and to the modernization that rendered the Southern economy more industrial, forever changing society with it. Throughout the mid-20th century, writers such as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Richard Weaver, and Paul Viereck presided over or engaged with the following five literary journals that were important to conservative thought.

All of this remains complicated, and if one pulls a strand of the web, the entire edifice quivers.

5.

Kate Manne has written extensively about media that constructs "himpathy", as in Fargo: we don't see the violence because we identify with the male, and worry about his future.

Misogyny is a problem women face "not because they're women in a man's mind, but because they're women in a man's world." Misogyny enforces patriarchal norms while sexism rationalizes them. 

“There's no control group in a patriarchal culture….”

6.

Simone, Sartre, the relationship of loyalty which resembles forgiveness on the part of female intellectuals. We want to imagine more from Hannah Arendt. We want their intimacies and loyalties to align with our own descriptions. We want, I think, an extreme option that caters to Western feminism, or to the abrupt ending. The divorce. 

I have always mistaken loyalty for what might be freedom, or the commitment of engaging the ideas which failed us, but the ideologue's promises of liberalism and liberation are not separable from the anointment of their eyes. To be chosen as a partner in thinking - for some women, this is greater than marriage or birthing children.

Sexual freedom is not separate from intellectual freedom, or the ability to reflect on the desires and fascinations of one's life. When torn with a stick, freedom sounds like a letter being dropped in a shredder.