Where I’m Writing From

“Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that [others] have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.”  —Thoreau, “Economy”

“There's no such thing as knowing what you are going to say and no such thing as having said it.”— Lyn Hejinian, “Ring Burial”

“the break experiment with beginning, shift for apprehension, till it show up gone, but we didn’t believe in it anyway.” — Fred Moten, “block chapel”

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To begin by reading, making a me by making meaning, to enter the moving field.

To begin in writing, the fingers groping forward, toward the long I, finding the root.

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I’m writing from Berkeley, California, a city deeply imprinted by histories of experiment: in literature as in politics, the personal, the social. A city named after the philosopher George Berkeley, who, upon finding that reality as such was unprovable in the language of truth he had available to him, decided this proved its unreality. But he offered this balm—that the presence of another observer, by making perception social, might keep the shared dream from blowing away. (This summer is drier than ever, and we remember again how tenuous this colonial settlement is.) There is a parable here, about the quixotic, persistent power of the ideal to shape the concrete, about the making of forms and the ways immanence, living in those forms, reacts upon them. Is here a made thing? A sentence is a locus; can it be a place?

I’m reading Thoreau and Robin Wall Kimmerer for the class I’m teaching, Writing American Nature; then Lyn Hejinian, Fred Moten, Renee Gladman. What I like about all of them is their ceaseless beginnings, a here and a now that, like dawn, remakes itself utterly with each instantiation. (This post is about beginnings.) Thoreau looks for morning in every hour; his digressions are broken up by sentences that burst through their context like suns, waking us up when we don’t know we’ve been asleep. I’m here, he tells us; where are you, he asks. Gladman, especially in Calamities, shows me how writing, as a process, as embodied motion, can be its own ground, rooting a life in precise uncertainties, declinations of space, and the increments of becoming. Her refrain: “I began the day.” Each instance of putting pen to paper becomes an opportunity to open not just the writing, but the writer, to time and society and chance; the world, in its numinous ruins, flows in. This is, in part, what the epigraph from Hejinian asks: a certain humility before the mystery of language production. Each tracing of a letter or opening of the lips, unpredictable beforehand and unrecoverable thereafter, becomes an ethical act, a one-off performance. (I think of how José Estaban Muñoz asked me to resee objects I had once understood as more or less stable, as iterated performances, ephemeral and fugitive, therefore precious.) Hejinian’s poetics can be read as a long preparation for the turn back to the inherited world and other people; the page’s highest aim may be to elicit a new alertness and sensitivity, and a concomitant ethos of care.

Precision, these writers wager, produces the archive that can ground a resistance to coarse political language and the distortions inherent in any act of concept-making, any ideology (“the violence of the coping strata is specific and seasoned” — Moten). Precision, and the vigorous interpretive exercise reading such work demands, necessarily also leads to a renewed appreciation of possibility, the fulness of a sensorium which so wildly exceeds anyone’s ability to transcribe it (“In bed I said I liked the flowing of the air in the cold of night / Such sentences are made to aid the senses.” — Hejinian). This is writing that makes the reader a co-performer: its success, the communication of its values, depends entirely on us pushing back, asking it questions, trying to make it make sense. The tough sociality I find in such writing, which bears in each of its many impasses an invitation, has been one of its most important lessons for me, about how to live alongside and in my own writing practice. Fallibility, and instances of failure, in, say, Midwinter’s Day, are the signature of trustworthiness, of an ethical commitment to recording the messiness of being in the world.

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“The world,” however, always has the flavor of where one’s standing. In contrast to the semi-anonymity of large national ecosystems, the tight circuits of experimental publishing and, more importantly, reading, give the lie to the conceit that literary activity produces independent objects; the poem is always a metonymy of the person and people that made it. (The poet Daniel Poppick argued, in conversation, that "there are plenty of great poets who have never written a great poem.") Tongo Eisen-Martin’s situationist soundscapes, for instance, punch so much harder when you glimpse in them the pavement-pounding of his organizing work and the depth of his political commitment. I once heard Eavan Boland talk about the vertical sociality of lyric, small at any moment but claiming a three-thousand year continuity. The social field of experimental writing may be equally small, but its self-conscious horizontality necessarily asks more of the writer and reader, indeed, as I’m suggesting, collapses the categories. While experimental work often advertises its epistemic virtues, its objectivity, its commitment to formal invention and ethical intervention and a canny historical contemporaneity, less frequently talked about is how such work makes visible the tight circuit between how you live and how you make language. At least, such was my experience. I felt, when I knew no one and bumped around cities writing little shard poems that I sent to journals I’d never read, falsifiable to myself; what mattered was the object.

It is in the interest of a certain candor with respect to who I’m writing from, that I end this first staccato in the left field, with Thoreau. (My academic work is on description in the 19^th century). “Experiment” is a frequent, and I think half-ironic word in Walden. Whereas now its connotations are roundly positive (hence the whiff of virtue in contemporary usage) in the 1840s utopian communities were mushrooming up across New England and the Midwest, and “experimental” was often a pejorative. So when Thoreau writes at the beginning of his book, “Here is life, an experiment untried by me …,” the sentence helps me see how the deictic “Here” can denote at once the infinitely reproducible text, a physical place within the town of Concord, and a projective idea of “life” — both Thoreau’s and the reader’s, as they are bound into relation by the reading of Walden; both “life” as it is experienced prior to its narration, in the search for simplicity, and as it is transformed in the telling. The simple present tense, “here is,” that skips into a horizon of futurity, “as yet untried,” is a door that the reader has to enter with their whole body. For if the experiment of Walden is to be valid, someone has to inhabit it, quarrel with its premises, and in so doing perform their overlapping social, intellectual, ethical, and animal lives. It’s possible that what we call the present, so often just a temporal and spatial value, may be most deeply a metaphor for that fullness we feel when much is asked is of us and much is given, when all our commitments are on the line.