As part of the series I curate, Breaking the Rules, Lawrence Lenhart was kind enough to answer a vatful of questions I asked him about his forthcoming book, Isolating Transgression, forthcoming from Outpost19. Previous iterations of this series can be found here: Part 1 with David Legault, Part 2 with Alison Stine, Part 3 alone with my own thoughts and Part 4, with David Carlin.
When you set out to put this collection together,
what sorts of rules, either structural or ethical, did you set for yourself?
I started working on this
collection last October just after moving to Sacramento. I didn’t have a job
yet, so it was my way of hiring myself. I was trying to be optimistic about
unemployment. Don’t pet owners always claim it’s unethical to leave their pets
all day while they’re at work? Well, there I was: with my pets for ten hours a
day, a stay-at-home pet owner. I was making up for lost time, really studying
the tortoise’s carapace and the bird’s feathers—realizing how much they’d physically
aged since I had last given them that kind of attention. The essays about the
dog, ferret, and chameleon became resuscitation, taxidermy, and eulogy,
respectively. The essays about the bird and tortoise (both are still living) act
more like cryopreservation. I made it a rule to limit anthropomorphism. (I
break that rule at least once in this interview, though.) I was interested in
the nature of the (capture) bonds I have had with these animals, from biophilic
to zoophilic (more on this later); the farce of trying to create elaborate
habitats for them; and the ways in which I occasionally project their feral
others onto them. They’re all case studies in Stockholm’s Syndrome with me as their
bumbling captor. They’ve always known I’ve held the key. Somehow, it took until
these essays to really understand it myself.
I also spent part of that
Sacramento year abroad. When I go to another country as a tourist, I manage to
see a lot; when I go as a writer, though, I mostly unsee. I have to learn to
relinquish Henry Kissinger’s vision of Bangladesh as “basket case,” for
instance. Naturally, I end up being both tourist and writer, and it’s important
to be self-conscious about this duality. The ethical and structural concerns of
writing essays abroad are complementary. For example, the Bangladesh essay is a
braid and the Cambodia essay is a collage. These are preventative forms that
are inherently decentralized. They disallow me from offering a singular vision
of a country and its people. These forms prevent essentialism (a mechanism for
colonialist inscription), or at least they diffuse it. Too, these essays have a
different time signature than a linear essay. When I travel, I know I’m not
just visiting a place, but also a time. How many travel shows begin with the
phrase “a country frozen in time”? This is a very restricted and inaccurate phrase:
if we don’t see the emblems of multinational corporations in a developing
country’s urban center, is it really a country really frozen in time? The last
time I checked, physics still hasn’t had its initial public offering.
For me, my Sacramento
year was the year I became intentional about my effect on others’ lives. This
can be domestic: a pet owner speaking to his parrotlet through the bars of a
cage. And this can be global: the great-grandson of a coalminer coming
face-to-face with a climate refugee in a slum complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Do you feel like there are some rules about
nonfiction that you received in your writerly training that you particularly
enjoy breaking?
It’s funny how the mind
goes straight to genre. It still feels like the biggest line we can cross.
There are a number of literary journals and anthologies (like this one called Bending Genre—ever heard of it?) that
have installed turnstiles before the amusement park of hybridity. They have collectively
created an awesome infrastructure for this non-genre or composite genre, whatever
you want to call or uncall it. And I’m grateful for that. It may feel like
we’re merely negotiating with a literary politic when we talk about genre
hybridity, but that’s myopic. We must recognize the ways in which the writing
workshop (see MFA vs. POC) and publication industry (see the VIDA Count) can mirror political histories as well.
I can’t say that
“firmness of genre” was a rule I received in my training, though. At the
University of Arizona, hybridity was
more of a rule. Sometimes, I wish I had gotten my MFA decades ago, to see if I
would have had the courage (or even the notion) to participate in that kind of alchemy.
Oh, here’s one: Many
years before my MFA, I went to a Catholic grade school where I learned (among
other things) that nuns used to strike left-handers (like me) with rulers. Even
now, when I glimpse my left hand writing something for extended periods of
time—a lesson plan, for example—I can still conjure Sister Grace’s eyes glowering
at the knuckles of my left hand. I love writing with my left hand.
I think that would have
to be my personal masochistic writing fantasy: writing hybrid essays with my
left hand in a Catholic MFA program, circa 1972.
Your collection is called “Isolating
Transgression.” This describes the content of the book but also, to me, the
structure of the book. The transgressions are formal ones—yoking together Greek
myth with bullies, Susquehannock
with burglary, earthquakes with seizures. Do you consider these transgressions
against the readerly expectations of careful transitions and explicated
rhetorical logic? And, if so, how do you mitigate those transactions—I mean,
how do you help the reader out in other ways to weave together the subtle logic
of the essays?
The title comes from Rebecca Armstrong’s Cretan Woman: Pasiphaë, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin Poetry. Pasiphaë has sex
with a bull and gives birth to the Minotaur. Virgil’s Eclogues sympathizes with Pasiphaë while Ovid’s Ars
Amatoria is an ancient form of slut shaming. In her book, Armstrong
describes Pasiphaë’s zoophilia
as an “isolating transgression.” As an adjective, it feels passive. She has
been isolated as a result of her transgression. As a verb, though, it feels
more active, more forensic.
When I first sat to write the essay “Dogsucker,” I felt as if I had done
something redundant. I had already narrated this story hundreds of times. It
was predictable in its rhythms. I was being ventriloquized by my past. The
six-page essay I wrote in Spring 2013 felt more like a deposition than an
essay. It was very deflated because I had already outlasted that trauma. I had
already addressed that wound. I knew I had to find a more complicated structure
to make it “essay.” In my research, I could have never expected Pasiphaë’s
story would affect me so deeply. I had read of her husband (Minos) and her son
(Minotaur) and the inventor who incarcerated her son in the labyrinth (Daedalus),
but for some reason (the one we’re all suspecting) Pasiphaë has been all but
bleached from the common mythological record. I found her in a few library
books in Tucson. I took the books to my car, and I stayed in the parking lot
for a couple hours reading iterations of her story. It all felt so personal. Our
lives echoed—narratively, psychologically, linguistically. Every time I sat
down to write “Dogsucker” after that, I felt like we were holding hands. It
took 11 years for someone to legitimize my story. I like to think I was the
first to legitimize hers as well—unless someone in the past two millennia has also
been forced into a zoophilic act, shouldered the shame, and saved faced upon
encountering Pasiphaë many years later. It may have happened. Her experience, her existence reverberated mine. And the
essay is an account of that reverberation.
Sometimes, though, structures “find” you. The night of August 24, 2014
was a night of rupture and consequence. My cousin had a seizure in Pittsburgh,
my parrotlet had a night fright in Sacramento, and the South Napa Earthquake
attained a 6.0 on the Richter Scale. With coincidence, there is very little
yoking together; the events just belong to one another, and I sit to write the
essay in the midst of that convergence. The logic begins temporally and ends up
somewhere else.
A question about the essay “Dogsucker.” The first
is, when I tell people about your awesome essay about fellating a dog, people
are like, wow, that is disturbing. Do you, as I do, like to dismay your
audience?
I had sent the collection
out as Dogsucker: Essays. I can see
how it feels like a stiff arm to a certain kind of reader, so I wasn’t
surprised that this was the first thing my editor wanted to discuss. Is it worth the shock value, he genuinely
wanted to know. And the answer is: probably not. For me, though, it is a received form. I’m
desensitized to it. In my teens, strangers would know me by this epithet (Dogsucker, or Doggy
Style). They’d come up to me and say, “Aren’t you him?” And I’d have to affirm
before I got the chance to tell the story that upends or at least defends
against the preceding reputation. It’s a story that always got told
backwards—that’s kind of the trajectory with rumor and myth. This life
experience really set me up to understand the way an essayist can manipulate (a
harsh, but accurate word) their story. I realized that if I admitted the worst
of it right out of the gate, and my listener would just give me another sixty
seconds, then I could work my way towards the other, more nuanced (and
sympathetic) reality. Of course, some people never get beyond the veneer of the
story (or the cover or the title of a book), which is something you just have
to accept. Sometimes, you only achieve provocation.
In the end, it wasn’t the
right title for the collection as a whole. The transgressions in the collection
are more global and disparate than this one incident. Urs Alleman’s Babyfucker, though: that is aptly named
and way dismaying.
I go on to explain the background of the story,
that the narrator was bullied into barely touching the dog’s penis and that the
essay goes on to explore the connections between mythology and naming. The
great paragraph, “Years later,
Rushner shot himself in the stomach by accident. Years later, he was placed in
a juvenile facility. Years later, he set a barn on fire. Years later, he shot
his mother with a semiautomatic paintball gun in the parking lot of Giant
Eagle. Years later, he turned into a Juggalo and publicly freestyled to Insane
Clown Posse. I realize these are unfair details to include, and I am making him
impossibly unsympathetic, but this is my first attempt at making a record [26] of
why they called me Dogsucker, and I am not at all at ease. I succumb to
mythologizing Rushner because his story is inextricable with mine.” does an
excellent job revealing how self-aware the author is that he is the manipulator
now, that, although bullied by Rushner and transformed from person named Larry
to person named Dogsucker, the author is in charge of the naming now. Here, I
think you break the rules of narrative arc by destabilizing the authority of
the narrator but I think you also establish new rules about acknowledging how
we make myths, narrators, and antagonists. How do you see this whole collection
about that acknowledgement?
I often sidestep my role
as a narrator to become, momentarily, my own reader, and more importantly, my
own critic. It becomes “post-structural” insofar as I’m not just looking at the
text, but also the conditions that have made the text possible.
In Synecdoche, New York, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard (a
director) who is casting for an unwieldy theatrical production that is actually
a microcosm of his own life. He hires a directorial understudy. He hires an
understudy to follow that understudy around. There may even be another
understudy attached to that chain. I can’t remember. In one scene, they
imperfectly parrot each other. It’s this single-file style of method acting. In
many of my essays, I feel this way—as if I’m lined up behind myself, ready to
de-mythologize or re-mythologize, de-historicize or re-historicize, whatever’s
necessary to proliferate readings of the essay. Do you remember the cover of
that Michael Keaton film, Multiplicity?
In the “Well-Stocked
and Gilded Cage,” the narrator talks to Arni the bird. I have no questions of
my own I just love the narrator’s questions to the bird:
“What’s
wrong, Arni? Did you feel an aftershock? What is this place, buddy? Huh? What
woke you up? What caused your fright? Did you hurt yourself? Are you hurt? Do you
miss Arizona? Do you miss the desert? Do you, mister? You haven’t adjusted yet,
have you? Is it the moths? Is it the cat?”
Is this anthropomorphism? All the projection? The English language? I
can’t tell. It feels empathic in the moment.
What is your
feeling about citations? How much copying and pasting can we do from the web?
I used to teach the
Academic Ethics and Integrity (“Plagiarism”) Workshop at the University of
Arizona, so if any of my former students are reading, just stick with what I
told you. Otherwise, there’s this:
I still try to get to the
library for most of my research, mostly because it’s good exercise and I’m half-convinced
I’ll meet Borges there one day. It might sound weird, but I’m a lot more
diligent about citing when I’ve made multiple trips to the library for the
book. I just returned an inter-library loan on Maldivian Folklore, and the citation just felt like a really
important and automatic part of the ritual of the loan. Check it out.
Romero-Frias, Xavier. Folk Tales of the Maldives. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian
Studies, 2012. Print!
If I’m writing and
researching (online) simultaneously, though, citation can sometimes feel like reversing
onto tire spikes. So, I get cocky sometimes. I think, I’ll just take what I need for now, and I’ll come back later for the
citation. And then when I can’t find
it later, I have to remove the most important paraphrase of the essay. How
tedious.
I use the Internet
primarily to expedite my memory, to remind me of the actual word (rather than
the version that ends with “–majigger”), to become occasionally bionic. I also
use The Descriptionary (“the book for
when you know what it is, but not what it’s called), a reference book my
mentor, Ander Monson, recommended. Whoa: here it is online!
Is writing a
kind of motion parallax like Arni’s headbobbing? (I’m a little obsessed with
this essay?)
Exactly! Thanks to binocular
vision, we all have depth perception. Our eyes collaborate to perceive a
unified field of vision. It comes in handy when we’re driving (the pedestrian
is beyond the intersection) or watching theatre (the Delphic Oracle is upstage-center,
Oedipus Rex is center-stage-right). Writing dynamic sentences and adopting
multiple perspectives is definitely a way to replicate motion parallax in
writing. If the sentence doesn’t have the right curvature or the perspective is
too fixed, the essay’s vision is like a parrotlet’s or a chameleon’s, with each
eye (each field of vision) on its own. It’s just as the Oracle warns: “Though
you have your sight, you cannot see in what misery you stand, nor where you are
living nor with whom.” This is a good case for the visual essay. I mean, we’ll
never compete with the paintings (I call them essays) of Hieronymus Bosch in
terms of creating depth of field, but why not encourage a cerebral perception
(the image within the text) that’s simultaneous with our actual perception (the
text as image)?
How many
threads are weavable? Arni, earthquake, bird song, seizures? How do you see
cage, ground, brain-work tying together?
When I was in grade
school, I played flag football always used to ask to braid my girl
friends’ hair at recess. I was really bad at it. The problem, for me, was that I
loved their hair so much that I couldn’t distinguish the difference among
the strands. My friend, Sarah (an essayist too), often braids my fiancée’s
hair. These are probably her three two best skills, essaying and
braiding hair and throwing a party. Sometimes, I wonder if I would write
a superior braided essay if I had actually acquired this kind of kinesthetic
learning. To be able to tell the difference among the threads. To know when to
switch, and how. To know the way back. To not get manacled by all that hair.
Maybe when I have a daughter. Maybe if she grows her hair long.
Is it a
self-imposed rule of yours to limit declarative statements? Here is a rare
element of a definitive, an almost platitude: “E-commerce is a pilgrimage of
instant gratification.”
How hard is
it for you to leave those in your work? To come to those seemingly final
conclusions?
I’ve never thought of it
this way, but it’s true: I feel very skeptical of my voice when it has said
something final or conclusive. In the case of the anecdote, it doesn’t become
potentiated until I’ve rotated it a few times, allowed for it to be relevant in
several different ways. Without that, an anecdote becomes a fraudulent replica.
It might as well have never even happened.
Too, my reticence to be
final or conclusive is a symptom of the act of making a sentence. I love, for
example, Rikki Ducornet’s sentences. Or Bhanu Kapil’s. I strive for a dynamic
syntax, and when a sentence succeeds in this regard, the declarations also become
dynamic and open-ended.
It’s only when I’m so peeved
by a phenomenon—when it has become ubiquitous and somehow harmful to the
phenomenee—that I feel comfortable with (even liberated by) making a
declarative statement.
Is it legal
to compare bird hair to the Ramones, as in “but the dark feathers of his crown
drooped like one of the Ramones.”?
I think so. I can’t find
the exact orthologs between Johnny Ramone and the Gloster Canary. But while
their genres may differ, their hairdos are uncanny.
One of my
favorite elements of your writing is the way you adopt various stances in order
to re-see or revise your original understanding, as you do here, “How quickly
he would be ambushed by the North Huntingdon Police for suspicions of
voyeurism. In Durbar Square, though, it is a Nepalese police officer who
enthusiastically leads me to the spot beneath the girl’s window.” How important
is it to do this rhetorically? Politically?
It’s important to take various stances over the course of an essay—to
document and revise, to collaborate with oneself, and to acknowledge the
privilege of that fluid perception. This relates to what postcolonial scholar Gayatri
Spivak has called “practical politics of the open end” (see below). Or, in
rhetoric, it’s comparable to Gertrude Stein’s kairotic inventions. It’s
something the essay affords us: we can dilate the whole perceptual spectrum.
I’ve found that sometimes in my essays, I need to point in two directions at
once, and I don’t necessarily have to forfeit precision to achieve that.
Eventually, every stance I take over the course of a sentence, a paragraph, an
essay, a collection begins to cohere anyway. The stances superimpose themselves
onto one another.
Why are you
a genius? “Now, when I read it, the essay is a stethoscope, an acoustic
instrument pressed against the neck of the subaltern whose larynx has been
systematically removed. Spivak’s deconstruction explicitly states the subaltern
and her voice are mutually exclusive: should she find it, she ceases to be
subaltern.” (Rhetorical or not. You be the judge.)
I think I’ve only met two bona fide geniuses in my life: Noam Chomsky
and Gayatri Spivak. I’ll remember meeting the latter always. I have read her
critical essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” more than any other essay—the first twenty
times for the sake of comprehension, the next twenty times to internalize its
imperative. As summarized by The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism, the essay argues, “Even the most
benevolent effort” to give silenced others a voice “merely repeats the very
silencing it aims to combat.” This relates to several of your notes regarding
ethics. Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical
Interrogation of Strangers and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee participate in Spivak’s discourse (the systemic silencing
and/or violencing) of subjected bodies)—each from a very particular vantage,
both with a rigorous lyricality and penchant for collage. I suspect Kapil and
Cha might be geniuses too. There are so many invisible widgets up their
sleeves. It’s difficult to deconstruct the genome of a genius like that. Norton
goes on to say, “[Spivak’s] continual interrogation of assumptions can make [her]
difficult to read. But her restless critiques connect directly to her ethical
aspiration for a ‘politics of the open end,’ in which deconstruction acts as a
‘safeguard’ against the repression or exclusion of ‘alterities’…” I might need
to step away from this interview for a moment and read that essay again—or watch this lecture.
In the Egg
book I’m writing, I want to use images but I think it will be too big of a pain
to get permissions. How does Outpost19 understand the difficulties of
reproducing images? How much do you enjoy those difficulties?
Luckily, in the case of this book: all the images “belong” to me. In
“Kumari Amenorrhea,” I’ve typewritten the 32 lachchins (“physical characteristics”) of the Raj Kumari
(Kathmandu’s prepubescent living goddess), and pasted them into a silhouette of
Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine. In
“Too Slow Is How That Tortoise Go,” I took over a thousand photographs of my
tortoise’s carapace (shell) until I found 37 unique shots of his scutes
(shields), which I then lassoed and assembled as a composite carapace. In “Captioning Novitiate,” I took the three photos of child monks in Myanmar—the first as part
of a Shinbyu ceremony, the second while on a pilgrimage to Bago, and the third
during almsgiving outside of Yangon. There’s also a music sheet with notes and
lyrics to a song my dad used to sing to me (an homage to the New York School),
and a few other schematics I’ve created (e.g., “How to Clip a Bird’s Wings”).
Hopefully, because I own the vector graphics for the images, we’ll be able to reproduce
them satisfactorily. The only exception is the nineteenth century adverts and
diagrams situated in “The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage,” which I found in an
antique book called Notes on Cage Birds,
and which falls under public domain, meaning they belong to us all.
Permissions aside, I think it’s important to occasionally invite readers
to interact with the essay in a visual way (the lyric essay makes a case for
audition, so why shouldn’t the visual essay do the same with vision)? When I’m
teaching nonfiction, I call this ESP (extrasensory proseption). It’s a little
cheesy. Anyway, the visual essay feels more fully integrated into the way we
actually experience the world. It’s one of those moments where utilitarianism
and the avant-garde work well together. I should mention that at this year’s
NonfictioNOW Conference in Flagstaff, there were a lot of badass visual essays:
Lindsey Drager’s, Kristin Radtke’s, and Sarah Minor’s all come to mind. It’s
gaining awesome momentum.
The
beginning of “Too Slow:” “If when you slept on your chest, your spine became a
roof: a tortoise.” We talk a lot about
nonfiction when we talk about creative nonfiction but not a lot about
creativity. How do you make your brain make the leaps you want it to make? How
did you get from spine to roof to tortoise?
Yeah, that’s an important modifier. I always get a kick out of Sean
Lovelace’s bio when he writes reviews for us at DIAGRAM. “Sean Lovelace directs the creative program at Ball State
University,” it says. It should be emphasized on our websites and brochures: creative in bold.
In the case of an essay like “Too Slow,” the brain gets to leap a lot
because it’s collage. The leap in the first sentence (“If when you slept on
your chest, your spine became a roof: a tortoise.”) transforms the reader into
the mountain nymph, Chelone (who appears in Aesopica
and the Aeneid). Chelone’s myth
is a physical embodiment of this association. When she refuses to attend Zeus’s
wedding and says she’d prefer to stay at home, Zeus gets vindictive and replies,
“You like your home so much? I’ll fuse it onto your back.” Chelone becomes a
turtle of sorts (in the essay, I call it “the ultimate un-invitation”).
Biologists used to use Chelonii in
their nomenclature for the order of turtles. Too, this first sentence
establishes a zoomorphic (rather than anthropomorphic) precedent in the essay,
imagining humans as tortoises (/houses), and not vice versa.
There are a couple things I’m keeping track of when associatively leaping:
1) Varying the
modes of persuasion. I try to avoid consecutive appeals to ethos, pathos, or
logos. If they are consecutive out of
necessity, their proportions should be different. For example: ethos, logos,
small pathos, big pathos, logos, pathos, big ethos, small ethos. Something like
that.
2) Modulating
the lengths of the leaps. Sometimes, it’s a cliff jump (all adrenaline). Other times, it’s a long jump (all skill).
Occasionally, the leap just gets you off the escalator (all neurosis). Sometimes,
it’s important not to leap at all, but to linger: to harness the vertigo of what if.
In that
essay, "Too Slow Is How the Tortoise Go,” you seem to break some part of the
contract with the reader, asking them to read around, through, up and down,
around the essay. How do you renegotiate the contract with the reader, i.e. if
they get pulled out of the text, how do you bring them back?”
I must have spent a hundred hours or more on this essay. The designers
over at Fourth Genre have invested a
lot of their time as well. How grateful I am! The reading is still
left-to-right, top-to-bottom, so it’s intuitive in that sense. My friend Noam
Dorr wrote this essay, “Ants,” which follows the contours of an ant’s abdomen,
thorax, head, antennae, and legs. The screen follows as he reads. It’s a polite
performance of a fairly impolite (see: acrobatic) essay.
My tortoise has free roam of my office, meaning as I write, he’ll appear
beneath me at any moment and nibble at my toenails (he thinks they’re hibiscus
petals). He has these trajectories that are inexplicable to me, but common
sense to him. As I’m writing, I often get distracted by his movements. The
scutes are arranged to replicate his roving. When you arrive at them, they
obstruct; and when you bypass them, they become phantoms. I’d like to think
that in this essay, more than the others, text and image function as a gestalt.
No way!:
“The ferrets dragged lacing twine by which workmen pulled through a
telephone
wire. Those first magical telephone calls of the early 1900s were made possible
by industrious ferrets that rodded ducts connecting buildings’ phone lines.”
Just no way.
I know! Though: these were Mutela
peturius, not Mustela nigripes (the
black-footed ferret).
See the difference?
“I call it
Ex Isle.” Yes.
I probably have this recurring dream of “Ex Isle” because I don’t have
Facebook. All my “ex-stalking” (this parlance is problematic) happens during
REM.
I first
thought the essay collections cohered because of the kinds of
trespass/transgress we make when we own animals, when we travel, when we leave
our parents, when our girlfriends leave us. This paragraph made me change my
mind: “When we were finally home alone (a rarity because my Dad’s disability
kept him in bed, in house most days of the week), I noticed my girlfriend’s
discomfort, her gritted teeth, and I asked what was wrong. Apparently, she was
alarmed that Chaleido was watching us. I quickly covered his cage with a bath
towel, but there were others—the puffers, the dragon—so we stopped. Bedroom sex
would have to wait until college, where there the University of Pittsburgh had
“a strict no-pet policy within the residence halls and on campus apartments.” Now
I think the deeper connection is between intimacies. Does one have to trespass/transgress
to gain intimacy? And if so, what are the ethics of trespass and transgression?
What is the difference between transgression and trespass?
Our genre is steeped in
this moral lexicon. The word “trespass” for me still conjures the Lord’s
Prayer. “Confessional” writing transports me to the booth; it’s one of the
pleasures of reading confessionalism,
I think: we arrive on the priestly side of the lattice. We feel invulnerable.
As writers, though, we are ever the penitent. How many of us have stepped into
the workshop and felt like it was Judgment Day? It’s not always productive to
be constantly minding oneself in this way, though, because who can bend their
aesthetic to match the polygonal “boundaries” of this genre? It begs the
question: Who has posted all these “No
Trespassing” signs? And on whose behalf? And for whose benefit? If not for
my benefit or the benefit of the audience for whom I write or the subject I
write about, then fuck those signs. The reality is: it is often immoral not to break the rules. In the most
secular sense of these words, I think “trespass” describes a certain kind of
trajectory for an essay, a formal beyond (à
la Georges Perec) and
“transgress” is more substantive, a moral beyond (like the Marquis de Sade)—to
eat the cake, have it too, and then chew the cud to boot. Both remain domains
of the avant-garde.
I think we’re mostly
repressed as a species, so in order to be intimate, yeah, I think we have to
trespass the culture at large. Some people are genuinely oblivious of cultural
sanctions (there’s something utopic about that) and others are indifferent to
cultural sanctions (there’s something affected about that). I think in making
the commitment to be a writer, one has agreed not to be oblivious or
indifferent, but to be defiant of the culture (regardless of what they write).
Writers trespass the culture (see: arte povera) by pledging intimacy to language over capital.
Sometimes, we have to
trespass to even have a limbic experience of a word. I used to use the word
“prostrate” in the most flippant way. If a character in fiction was searching
for a remote under the couch, they “prostrated” themselves on the carpet. It’s
hard to use a word like that unless you’ve done it yourself—yoga not included.
Many years after I compulsively used this word, I was on a “pilgrimage” to
Vaishno Devi Temple in northern India. There were thousands of devotees
climbing this steep hill to behold the holy pindies, embodiments of the Durga. When
I got to the top at about 4 AM, after six hours of uphill hiking, surrounded by
thousands of other people, I saw an older woman flat on her belly, inching
forward along the pavement. Someone had told me along the way that certain
pilgrims don’t just begin in Katra like I did, but in Delhi. And some don’t
just stomp up the mountain like I did, but they spend 400 miles (six months or
more) prostrate, really earning the pilgrimage. When the woman saw me, she
invited me to the ground to share some of the last inches before the queue to
the shrine. I laid flat next to her, and for several meters, I was performing a
word (and understanding a word) in a way that I couldn’t have before that. To
have an intimate understanding of that word, I had to trespass the imaginary. I
had to go beyond remote-fetching and child pose. Now, I almost never use it.
How
acceptable is it to trick your reader into reading your thoughts? Sometimes, I
feel like I’m hooking my reader in, burying the lede, with confession and
narration, so they will listen to my protestations against mountaintop removal
mining or theories about the power of metaphor. Is this wrong (please tell me
it is A OK).
It is A OK. It is B OK. It is
D OK. If you can trick a reader into perceiving a letter without it ever having
been there, then you’re writing subterraneously. To create an afterimage out of
a void is the ultimate efficiency. Oh, and e-commerce is a pilgrimage of
instant gratification.
An ancillary
question to the previous: What sort of pattern do you establish. In “Of No
Ground” Are you a toggler? Back and forth back and forth between bigger story
and detailed narrative? Is there a third thread? Bigger picture, detailed
personal narrative, then detailed observed narrative? If there are three
threads, what qualities distinguish personal narrative (I am the lifeguard)
from observed narrative (I see the boy push the other boy under water?)
I’m a toggler, sure. I went to Bangladesh to finish a novel. In a novel
(at least the semi-traditional kind of novel I was trying to write at the
time), you don’t do much toggling. The novel is the detailed narrative, and the “bigger story” (climate change,
Islamophobia, etc.) is implicit. The intercalary chapters of Grapes of Wrath are an interesting
formal exception to this rule. And Rabih Alamedinne’s Kool Aids toggles. And in Midnight’s
Children, the way character is
“handcuffed” to history: that is a toggle. But usually, toggling between
character and the bigger picture within a novel ends up looking something like Philip
Roth’s American Pastoral, which is a
good, but (I think) monotonous book.
In the essay, one of the
important functions of toggling is ostranenie. The narrator inscribes the scene
with a disparate context as a way of making it seem (paradoxically) more
familiar. As an ocean lifeguard, it was my job to save drowning victims. Even
when I see two boys fake-drowning one another in a pond in rural Bangladesh,
the urge to take control is still there. Suddenly, the whole Atlantic Ocean is
superimposed on this small pond. There is whiplash in this toggling from the
Bay of Bengal to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It introduces a thread that’s
global, and I’m reminded that, in fact, it’s me who’s drowning these boys. As a citizen of a nation that
overconsumes, I’m the one complicit in generating the emissions that melt the ice
caps that raise the sea levels that drown the lands like this one. What they’re
doing is just play.
Love: “`It’s
too late for us… and so we are the canary,'” said i-Kiribati President Tong. It
is a powerful metaphor when considering the canary’s sacrificial utility in
service to coalmining, the same fossil fuel that has exacerbated sea-level rise
in atoll nations like Kiribati or Maldives. The latter’s average elevation is
1.5 meters (about the height of Danny DeVito)." I fear I am the height of Danny
DeVito. I fear the canary. I fear the water rising. What to do with that fear?
These peoples’ fear? You note that urbanization is the result of rising waters.
How long can even the cities last? Are you the canary?
Re: Danny D: Fear not, he’s five-foot flat. I think you’ve got a few
inches on him.
Re: the canary: “I am not afraid of life / but I get down on my knees”
—The Ramones
Re: the water rising: Me too.
Re: the fear, what to do with it: I have the privilege to record my
fears, to intellectualize my fears, to make metaphors of my fears. This is,
perhaps, what evolution had in mind: the prefrontal cortex is the shield of the
amygdala.
Re: these peoples’ fears, what to do with it: I cry a lot. I do not
know.
Re: the cities, how long they will last: Projection is a political
genre. There are several reputable models of paleoclimate records that have been pegged
as alarmist. Conservatives prefer to interpret these models as
hydrohyperbolism. Regardless of which model you use, it’s clear that AOSIS (Alliance of Small Island States) nations will be
affected first, a few of them within our lifetime. Their collective population
is something like that of the United Kingdom’s.
Re: the canary, are you him: I am not. I am the coalminer.
Never mind,
answered my own question: “33. There will be a last Bangladeshi. She who stands
up_on the peak of Mowdok Mual will earn the esteem of last citizen. Imagine
census as roll call: 'I remain,' a declaration of last presence. Then what?
Ankle deep in saline water, subaqua desh will dissolve her into flotsam
émigré.” (page 171).
Have you ever heard “Dear Matafele Peinem” by
Marshallese poet, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner? She read it before the United Nations a
couple years ago. It’s an epistolary poem—a promissory, really—in which a
mother pledges to her newborn that neither of them will become that canary.
Unfortunately, some would say there are already many canaries in the
global coal mine. I am currently working on a hybrid project called Of No Ground: Apocryphal Biographies of
Small Island States. Within each piece, climate change apocryphalizes the
real biographies of figures from Tuvalu, Seychelles, Kiribati, Maldives,
Belize, Vanuatu, etc. If we don’t bother to put faces on an impending HUMANitarian
crisis like climate change, then we don’t face it at all.
Otters! (pg 168) You should go back on Facebook so
you can send me otter memes!
Speaking of Face. I don’t plan on a return to Facebook anytime soon
(see: ever), but you can stop by my home office sometime to see my framed poster
of Audubon and Bachmann’s illustration of the black-footed ferret that hangs
above my desk. They get the illustration all wrong: the ferret’s stealing eggs!
Ferrets don’t steal eggs. People didn’t know a lot about the ferret in 1851.
Nor did they know a lot about eggs: that they’re noisy, for instance (Google
it!). I think the otter is your spirit animal the same way the ferret is my
dispirit animal. Mustelids rock!
If you could
establish one rule for essay writing, what would it be?
Write every essay as if it’s also a letter of resignation.
In his monologue, Swimming to
Cambodia, Spalding Gray admits it’s difficult for him to deliver technical
lines. “I can’t do stuff like this,” he says. “It’s like doing algebra.” In “Monologue About Bermuda,” Jonathan
Richman’s retrospective about his time with proto-punk band, The Modern Lovers,
he says, “After that trip to Bermuda, you know, that band never got along as
well. That was really the beginning of the end for us.” He cites the band’s
demise on the Lovers’ on-stage “stiffness.” In Spring and All, William Carlos Williams resigns from rhyme, and
from The Waste Land. Williams
advocates for “an escape from crude symbolism [and] the annihilation of
strained associations.” In all three instances, the artists articulate points
of artistic departure.
My rule is: stop talking about what you’re going to do, and start
talking about what you’re no longer going to do—as an essayist, as a person. This
is how the essay becomes the lingua
franca of resignation and liberation.
Works Cited
Ferret Polecat Hybrid. Digital Image. Wikipedia: Heads of a
polecat, ferret and polecat-ferret hybrid. Wikimedia Productions, Inc., 4
Apr. 2012. Web. 25 Feb. 2016.
Here's the Gloster Canary, the Bird With the Bowl
Cut. Digital Image. BuzzFeed Animals. Tumblr, 2014. Web. 25
Feb. 2016.
Untitled. Digital Image. Jess Should Talk
Less. Tumblr, 13 May 2012. Web. 25 Feb. 2016.
Lawrence Lenhart holds an MFA from The University
of Arizona where he received two Foundation Awards and the biennial LaVerne
Harrell Clark Award. His work appears or is forthcoming in Alaska
Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, Guernica, Gulf
Coast, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Sundog
Lit, Wag's Revue, Western
Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He is a reviews editor and assistant
fiction editor of DIAGRAM and a professor of fiction and creative
nonfiction at Northern Arizona University. His collection of essays Isolating
Transgression is forthcoming from Outpost19 in Fall 2016.
