Le Bateau Ivre 1

Rimbaud seems to be one of those super-translatable writers, a fact that I didn't understand until last night when, after reading Paul Schmidt's version of "The Drunken Boat" next to Wallace Fowlie's, I began to experience a strange, stereoscopic blurring. It was like I was trying to listen to two men tell me the story of a trip they'd taken. One of the men (Fowlie, who appeared before me in a pastel-blue vest), was bearded and dour and obsessed with telling me exactly what had happened; while the other (Schmidt, who was also wearing blue, but who looked like an older, somewhat-less-androgynous Stevie Nix with his ridiculous menagerie of scarves and bangles), was trying to entertain me. I listened to them both; but after a few minutes I realized that I wasn't really listening to either. The story itself faded into the background, transforming their flailings into a sort of dance, though one whose gestures served a purely decorative and abstract purpose. I watched it hypnotized - and then as I watched, I began to notice something moving behind these patterns: something coiled and mangy, like a sick zoo animal. The whiffs I caught of this strange beast were so pungent that I immediately focused on it exclusively, ignoring the dancing men despite the fact that they had redoubled their efforts in the face of my obvious boredom. Their arms whirled to the point that it became almost impossible  to see what they were hiding behind their backs. Or was it whom? At this point I couldn't be sure, though of course as soon as I realized that I couldn't be sure, I was. I was completely sure in fact, for I could see now that the flashes of snot covered-tunic I'd been glimpsing belonged to the man himself, or rather the Boy himself. I shoved the other two aside testily (a reader's work is never done!), and grabbed his arm. What happened, I asked him? His velveteen jacket had the disastrous heaviness that all fine fabric does when wet, but his candy-cane pantaloons were dry as bones. Holding my palms out, I could feel the heat radiating off them: an impossible heat, as if they'd just been taken out of his mother's machine. And now he was talking, too: automatically, like an athlete running an obstacle course that he's done so many times he dreams about it. I, I, I he said; but by this point, I wasn't listening to him anymore. I wasn't listening to any of them: I was sailing or floating, or anyway just sloshing side to side, like the inch of bug-juice and gasoline that floods every boat no matter how clean. And I was sailing too. I had cast off, or was cast off, to go looking for the poem I'd read. Did I think I would find it? Not really, no. Not at all, actually. But it didn't matter. I was gone like Cortez - almost exactly like him, in fact. Cortez, Cortez, I hummed, as the wind plucked vacantly at my rigging. As for my companions, I found out later that they'd been stapled to my masts like children's drawings on a refrigerator. What music they'd had was used up, and though they thought that they'd escape, they hadn't. It was a crying shame, really; at the same point it was my only hope - for in the pit of my heart, I knew that I knew something they didn't. I was safe, even in the storm's heart, for I had God's arms around me like a lifejacket of love. So I sailed on, pinned like Sebastian in my rigging - of happiness or sadness, I repeat, it didn't matter. I had everything I need, and I couldn't stop, so I didn't. Until suddenly, one blood-red morning, I did.

Walserology

Been reading a lot of Robert Walser these days and even writing a little about him (in this review of his Microscripts, for the Collagist, and a just-finished review of the Berlin Stories coming out in the next issue of the wonderfully-named The Literary Review). To my mind, two questions naturally follow from this: 1) Why Walser, and 2) Why reviews?

Let's start with Walser, a writer who I was initially excited about, then disappointed in, then gradually re-excited about. In this way, I think I'm like most people, who probably heard about his wacky life (last 25 years spent in a mental institution in the Swiss countryside) and bizarre literary output (a veritable ocean of unclassifiable story/essay/prose-poems, which grows significantly thicker and more gnarled during the sanitarium years, when Walser began writing exclusively in code, on the backs of beer coasters and envelopes, etc. These form the aforementioned Microscripts), and then read him, only to discover that his voice is insanely straightforward and therefore almost impossible to read. Children would probably get, and love Walser. Children and horses. For poor convoluted lit majors like myself, however, his little hymns are disconcertingly shiny. They lack the handholds I've been trained to expect in fiction: the puzzles and ambiguities that I expect to find under every book and usually do. So reading them is either like trying to walk on ice without my skates on (I slip all over the place), or wearing skates and trying to walk through a parking lot (I herk and jerk through the stories without any real fluidity). 

Nevertheless, being a true literary masochist, I persist. After reading pretty much all his books over the course of the last three months, (I think the only one I haven't opened is The Assistants, an early novel),  I'm getting the hang of it. I'm starting, not only to be fascinated by Walser, but to actually enjoy reading him. And of course, now that I can actually get something out of him, I've decided that he really is one of the great marginal authors: a mini-talent of epic proportions (everything in Walser is both mini and epic: he's like a Joseph Cornell box in this way, as many people have remarked, or like a Yuri Norstein film, as I believe no one has). 

Some tools for access that have been useful for me, and which I offer to the aspiring Walser reader (in no particular order):

1. Proximity. More than any other author I've ever encountered (except maybe Bachelard), Walser benefits, or suffers, from the actual physical distance between his books and the reader's face. I know this sounds goofy, but I swear it helps. You cannot read Walser standing up, or at a desk, or at arms' length: like an optical illusion, he seems to snap into place somewhere around four to six inches from the nose. Ideally, I think he needs to be read with your cheek on the opposite page, so that the letters begin to stand up off the page like tiny trees. In this way you immediately get the strange balloonist's intimacy-with-distance thing, which is one of Walser's most beautiful effects. 

2. Speed. Walser should be read in third gear. Any faster, and you'll just glide down the page; any slower, and you'll start sinking through it. Above all, don't savor his metaphors: their doors don't open, they're like model train sets. They run and look beautiful, but don't really benefit from exploration or pressure. In this way, they are the exact opposite of Gogol's tiny animals, which they superficially resemble. 

3. Ballooning. I touched on this before (and in the Collagist article), but Walser is a balloonist. He's also a walker - except that, somehow, he turns walking into a sort of human-sized ballooning, as if his head were the pilot and his body the jumble of air and strings. I like to think that anyone who has ever been in a hot air balloon (I have not) will get a physical sense-memory reading him.

4. The English Romantics. In the Literary Review review, I compare Walser to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both were depressives, walkers, and attentive noters, and in both cases, this combination of emotional instability and the very crafty use of vocal instability as a styistic tactic can be both confusing and illuminating. We want to say that Walser wrote to be happy, and that when he stopped being able to write, he became insane - and I think, in an interesting way, that this is both true and not true at the same time. Like Coleridge, Walser was (sometimes dismally, sometimes ecstatically) aware that his true subject was himself, and that use could and should be made even of his difficulties.

5. Flaneurie/The Dandy. Readers of Beaudelaire, Walter Benjamin (especially in One-Way Street and the Arcades Project), Ammons, Thoreau, Will Schofield, or any of the other great literary dandies will recognize immediately what he's up to. Basically, the trick is to put down your book, or pipe, or Wii and go outside. After that, the world begins coming to you, and if it doesn't, you're still fine, since the lack of inspiration is one of the central tropes of late dandyism. 

6. The Prose Poem. Walser's works make this category pointless. 

7. Diaries. Unlike Kafka, Walser didn't keep one. 

8. No irony. There isn't any in Walser. This is maybe the hardest thing a prospective modern reader has to get over. 

Silly and juvenile as he occasionally sounds, Walser is a sharp, sometimes frightening author. The Berlin Stories can sound like Triste Tropiques occasionally - there's this feeling that the narrator is standing in the middle of a crowded street, not alienated at all but rather completely immersed: dreaming the same dream as everyone else. In this way, he shows just how much of an outsider he is. 

Anyway, a wonderful, pantheon-level writer, and one that I'd recommend. Start with the early stories, either in the Berlin Stories or elsewhere. One of the other unique things about Walser is that he appears to have been translated solely by translators of genius, particularly Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky. I haven't found a bad edition of his work in English. 

I think on second thought I'll save reviewing for next time. 

(Drawings both by Guy Davenport, who wrote the greatest single piece of criticism about Walser, which is actually a story)

The Worrier

Worry and stories: the pit and meat of a fruit that I've been gnawing my entire life.

I have no idea when it started. Young. Self-mytholigization (which I practice constantly) is great for braids but tricky about origins, since who can really tell where things start. On the one hand, there are the obvious culprits. I'm an oldest child, which means that I saw my place as the center of my parents' universe be completely disrupted when my brother came along. When I was six, my family moved from small town Vermont to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, where we lived for the next four years of my life. I did not see this coming. After PNG, we moved to Lusaka, Zambia for three years; then I went to boarding school in Connecticut; then to college. At this point in my life, I'm 31 years old and have never lived anywhere consecutively for more than four years. Anywhere but Vermont, that is, for those first six. 

Being an expat teaches you two great lessons: gluttony, and the importance of stories. The first of these is more fun, but leads to terrible habits. In Zambia, for example, we had three household gods: light, water, and the telephone. Capricious and playful, they ruled over our lives with high-handed glee, frustrating our efforts at stability and sending my mother into fits of rage so terrible that the rest of us huddled for mercy, waiting for the thunderbolt. Stop, shhh, don't anger them, we whispered at her from under the kitchen table. But mom didn't care. A major deity in her own right, she envied these third-world interlopers their freedom. When the power returned to our house after three days of absence, she sniffed slightly before returning, unimpressed, to her Laurens Van Der Post. She wanted to convey a sense of our dignity as human beings to these despots; but as usual, she was thwarted in this by the rest of us, who were not as strong. We whooped with joy the minute the first flicker caused our massive refrigerator to hum to life and continued celebrating throughout the night, cheered on by the happy mutter of whatever appliances we could find. My brother ran through the house turning on all the lights as my father thwacked the television, causing a dim, static-infused image to waver there. You could barely see anything of the picture itself - but then there, in the corner, the chubby little CNN logo stood unmistakably, along with the time and date - in New York city, of course. 

We had been there, allegedly. When school or the simple loneliness of being 12 got me down, I asked my brother, who my mother called a "pack rat", to get out the placemat he'd kept from one of our last MacDonald's visits. It was wrinkled slightly, but could still be counted on for a faint, ever-alluring whiff of grease. We examined it for hours, luxuriating not just in its word scrambles and mazes (which my brother traced out lovingly each time, despite the fact that we'd crayoned in the solutions long ago), but in the marginalia: the copyrights and directions and promotional codes. Though less immediately satisfying, these offered a subtle and completely thrilling reality that the more obvious material could not match. We poured over them like archaeologists, hypothesizing and explaining our way towards the fantastic civilization that they represented - that we ourselves would be a part of, some day!

When exactly that day would come was contested - but its existence was unshakable. My father and mother debated its precise date with the passion of medieval theologians debating the Apocalypse, while my brother and I listened quietly. We had our own theories, of course, which deviated from the family story in detail while following it in bulk. My brother thought we would return through Heathrow, I was sure it would be Charles De Gaulle. My sister, who had been born in Papua New Guinea, and whose status as a bonafide American we therefore maintained was suspect, wanted to know if Moses, our gardener, would come on the same airplane as us, and if she could carry our beloved family calico, Kitty Waddy Doo Doo, in her backpack. I told her that Moses hated snow, and that Kitty Waddy would suffocate in her backpack. As the oldest, it was my job to break the hard truths to my siblings, who I knew had absolutely no idea what was going on. 

In private, I had my doubts, which I brought to my mother. "My little worrier," she said, smiling - assuring me, as only she could, that everything was going to be alright. But my worrying was relentless: a force that I could neither control nor harness. A year earlier, when my family had travelled the remote Cook Islands (my dad was trying to decide between moving us there, or to Zambia), I'd spent a week's worth of nights camped outside my hotel door, waiting for my parents' feet to appear. They were in a different room from us - which fact had convinced me, or my Worry at least, that they were going to slip out one night and disappear, abandoning my siblings and me to this paradise. I still remember that feeling: the intense, overpowering physicality of it. Despite everything that my mind and heart knew to be true - despite all the evidence of twelve years of familial love  - I was convinced they would leave us. It was just a matter of time, before sleep-deprivation overcame the uncomfortableness of the hotel pillow, and I fell asleep at my watch, and then woke up (as one always wakes up, when Worrying) alone. 

Writing this now, I'm not sure how to put it. I don't know if my mother stroked my hair like in a movie (I do remember her stroking my hair), or snapped at me (sometimes she snapped at me), or just stopped whatever she was doing and told me straight that nothing like that was going to happen. However she did it, I am sure I emerged from the kitchen, or bedroom, or wherever we were, refreshed: ready to spread the Good News. Anxious to, actually - for like all converts, I was insecure in my confidence and so desperate to hear it echoed by those around me. I told my brother and sister that it was true: we were going back, it was just a matter of time. A matter of months - weeks, even, which we could count on a calendar or make a snake of construction paper loops to measure, as my mother had advised. She believed in looking at one's fears directly, which is one of the reasons my shifty worries drove her so utterly crazy. But I dove to it, cutting and stapling a long chain that I drooped around my bedroom walls like the carcass of some gigantic beast that I had slain. It wilted in the intense moisture the sub-saharran rainy season until, a few weeks later, I threw it away. 

There was, however, another way: a spell so secret and unpredictable that I kept it from all of them, even my mother. I'd discovered it myself, on one of those long nights that I spent begging God to protect my family from harm. I pictured Him listening intently, with a the tricky smile of a Arabian Nights djinni. He would grant my wishes; but in order to prevent him from slanting them into horrible lessons, I had to be specific. I had to tell him, not just that I wanted my mother not to die, or to be seriously injured, but that I wanted her not to die the next day, in a car crash, caused by a careening truck like the one we'd passed earlier that day. The truck would not be blue, yellow, white, black or red. Or orange. It would not be driven by a man drinking a Coke, or smoking, or with a hat on. For each calamity that I named, four more seemed to appear - but I tracked them down ruthlessly, exhausting myself with disasters. By the time I fell asleep (almost always mid-prayer), I'd imagined everything: I'd seen my mother die horribly, crying, her heart crushed, her eyes raised in desperation. The word God, repeated incessantly at the beginning, had disappeared now, subsumed by the tide - but it didn't matter, for I wasn't talking to God anymore. I was chanting, talking my Worry into a words so terrible that I'm sure they would have caused the rest of my family to pale.

It worked, too. Like a pipsqueak Scheherazade, I turned my worries into stories, which, as all skeptics (whether adults or children) know, never come true. I saved my life for one more night - saved all their lives. After three years in Zambia, we went back. Our house was still there. I went to school, grew up. Then, in 2005, my mother died of brain cancer. Something none of us saw coming. 

Nature Writing

Another chapter of Eugene, OR. I'm letting them land pointillistically, which is a fancy way of saying cut me some slack for this having apparently nothing to do with the last one. The title has a "II" at the end of it because this is the second chapter of the novel "Nature Writing" (one of eight novels in the cycle). Don't worry: I am fairly certain that this will all make sense, at some point. Or worry. That would be refreshing. 

Nature Writing (II)

Then I made my body into a bear’s body – for her, I said. It happened after one of our terrible dreams. My wife was lying in bed thinking about the fight we’d had, about the silverware, which I could never get clean, and about the correct way to floss teeth. Her long thumbs made her a natural at the serial pick-and-slide; but the rabbit, who was also there, found faithfulness of any kind bourgeois. He believed that a true flosser – an artist in other words, displaying an artist’s playfulness with the limitations of his medium – would gravitate naturally towards risk. One of his more popular demonstrations of this hypothesis was to spool an entire box through his lower jaw and then jerk it out, like a magician removing a tablecloth. He called this trick “Tullaine”, after a lost love. But my wife was skeptical. “What does a rabbit know about flossing teeth?” she asked, meeting his eyes in the mirror. 

That was the dream; but then later, while I was taking a shower, I noticed that my shoulders had developed two thin ridges of fur on them, right along the top. I knew I had to think fast; so I focused on my right arm, which is my brave arm. “Epaulettes!" I shouted at the showerhead, which in our apartment is even better than a tin can. Sure enough, in a few seconds my wife’s voice came trickling out of it. "Epaulettes?" "Epaulettes," I repeated. "I’m sorry about the silverware." “No you’re not," said my wife. "You just don’t want anyone to be mad at you." The dripped syllables sounded distant: as if she were stuck in the plumbing somewhere. I wanted to twist the shower-head off and shove my paw down it until I felt the soft water of her hair. But I was too big now to do something like that, which meant that all I could do was tell her to wait. "That's what I'm doing," she said. "I'd be down there now, but bears hate water," I said. "Cat's hate water. Bears love water." "I'm changing," I said. "Well then turn the water on," she said. So I did. It rushed over me like an embrace, and I howled for my life; but this, as my wife explained in a letter she sent me after it was all over, only proved that she was right. I hadn't changed a bit. 

Wait

The biggest feeling I get from not working on my novel is dread; ironically, this is almost exactly the same feeling I get from working on my novel. Still, this non-work dread seems slightly more dreadful than the working kind. It's like having a staff or seal of office taken away from me, so that suddenly there's no difference between me and the next guy. How strange! How deeply terrifying, to go overnight from an aspiring member of the elect to someone whose life is not in any way connected to a deeper narrative of work and progress! And is there a writing beyond this kind of narrative? Or am I "giving up", and betraying a dream I've had since I was a kid (though now that I think of it, my dream was initially to make video games, then role playing games, then poems, and finally, novels)...?

The question seems to turn around the word "patience", which Kafka called, not just a virtue, but the virtue. I agree with him; but I think that the real problem for the patient man comes a few steps earlier, when he has to decide whether or not a particular trial is worth being patient about. Let's take a hypothetical: a man is told that he'll inherit a million dollars if he can refrain from drinking alcohol for ten years. In this case, to me, "patience" seems like it would be one of the easiest things in the world to display. The reward is there, the time is definite. Beset though it may be by difficulties and hardships, success becomes essentially a matter of muscle. Will prevails over circumstance or doesn't.

But can we really call this patience? I don't think so - and I don't think Kafka would either. In Kafka's (deeply patient) universe the hypothetical runs more like this: a man is told that he must refrain from drinking alcohol. He is not told why, or for how long, or what the reward for his abstinence will be. Nevertheless, the messenger who tells him this assures him that his task is a matter of the greatest importance - that it is, in fact, the single event that his life has been building up to. He departs in a flurry of what could be wings, or a duck that he's hidden under his trench-coat. He does not pay for his beer.

Putting these two scenarios together, we get a sense of how difficult real patience is. It has nothing to do with willpower; if anything, it insists on the kind of anti-willpower displayed by stones and peasants in Italian movies. To talk about it "requiring" faith sounds wrong: it imposes faith, demands it, in many ways creates it, in reaction to the overwhelming miasma of doubt that it dumps over the patient man's head. In order to counter it, people evolve systems and stories; but this is a last-ditch and somewhat pathetic - if ubiquitous - response. For the world of patience, unlike Harry Potter, will always be there.

I think - and it's true, I could just be blowing smoke up my own ass here - that by putting the novel away after a solid year of hacking at it, I'm trying to exchange my will for a little patience. Does that make sense? I don't want to make it sound neat: it's not neat, or at least I don't think it is. I'm trying to burn my house down so that I can take it with me. My intuition/guess/wager is that the story I've been telling myself about what writing is has become so huge that I can't see whatever is, or isn't, behind it. And I don't think I can write if I can't see.

The next question is, who cares if I write or not? Do I? Or do I just want to be different from everybody else, in a way that my mind knows I've never been and never will be, but my stubborn and human and deeply juvenile heart insists is still possible? To be absolved, and the world alibi no matter where you look...

Li r e s Mut t

The history of literature is full of if onlys. Two of my favorites are Emily Dickinson and Robert Walser. If only they'd been recognized in their own time, two lives of loneliness and mental illness might have been averted, and the histories of American and German and World literature invigorated a hundred years earlier. Plus, we would probably have the cure for cancer and a black president and new iphones....for everybody!

Thinking of this, we moan and weep about the waste that is human life...But what if, between Kleenexes as it were, we put the problem to ourselves in a completely opposite way, and say that Dickinson's and Walser's lives occurred exactly as they had to in order to produce the works that they did; and that therefore, the hypothetical "fulfillments" that we wish for them would actually have been disasters, which would have prevented these writers from creating the works they did?

Viewing a writer's life this way - that is, as less a success and more a complicated, elaborate mistake - is itself problematic, since it takes the capacity to write out of the creator's hand and diffuses it into that strange and unreliable god Circumstance. But then isn't every writer simultaneously an autonomous creator AND a sort of conduit to his/her times? And following this, aren't the snakes that the world puts between a writer and his/her goal at least as important as the ladders, since they force him/her beyond a willful expression of intention and into the strange, dangerous, quasi-improvisational space that is creative reaction? 

In order to get a picture of this, close your eyes and imagine you're an aspiring writer (if you're already an aspiring writer, don't bother to close your eyes). As an AW, you've grown up reading or hearing or seeing works of art that you admire, and this admiration leads you to want to create works of art of your own. Naturally, your first attempts at this are imitations of those works that you admire - imitations that succeed or fail to a varying degree (both in your own eyes, and in the eyes of others). With every success, you gain confidence and ambition; with every failure, discouragement, and an appreciation for the successful works that others have pulled off. Eventually, you get to a point where you are either succeeding more than you're failing, or failing more than you're succeeding. Both of these possibilities have their own satisfactions and problems - but it is only in the latter's case that you are gradually pushed towards a difficult question. The question is, very simply, Are you ever going to stop failing and succeed at this? A Yes to this question means back to the drawing board for more work; but what does a No mean? Does it mean Stop writing? Or does it mean, perhaps more strangely, Stop writing these things that you've been trying to write, that you love, and that have for so long been associated in your mind and heart with any future you might have as a writer?

Putting it this way, I want to suggest that the urge to write, to create, is less an aspiration (with its airy connotations of rising) and more a drag, a sinking towards oneself, so that certain writers' "careers" can resemble the movement of spilled water towards the edge of a table. Along these lines, inherited conceptions of what successful writing would look like can act like cards or hands placed in the path of the water, causing a build-up of mass that may at first seem like a failure to move but is in fact nothing more than the accumulation of potential movement that will express itself, and in gushes, the minute said conception disappears. 

In other words, by failing to write like Faulkner, Welty learns to write like Welty. By failing to write like Browning, Pound learns to write like Pound. The writer shoots for something that he loves and falls short, and again and again, until eventually he falls so short that he relinquishes his goal - at which point his idol cracks and he sees what he's been missing this whole time, which is not just his own possibilities, but the real object of study, life. 

Seen this way, failure is a key mechanism of an artist's development - maybe the key mechanism. So we might profitably bogue a page from David Foster Wallace's essay Authority and American Usage, in which he suggests that SNOOTlets (DFW's neologism for budding grammar nazis) develop their hypertrophic linguistic abilities due to an inability to mimic other kids: 

"Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. They're learning about Discourse Communities. Little kids learn this stuff not in Language Arts or Social Studies but on the playground and the bus and at lunch. When his peers are ostracizing the SNOOTlet or giving him monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there's serious learning going on. Everybody here is learning except the little SNOOT - in fact, what the SNOOTlet is being punished for is precisely his failure to learn... He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for 'peer rapport'..." (Consider the Lobster, p. 103)

Culture here reminds me of biology: adaptations evolve due to a weakness in the organism with respect to the pressures of its surrounding environment. Ergo, if you adapt perfectly, there's no need for the claw or tail or eyespots to be called from the depths of their cells.

So far so good... But what about that second group we mentioned above, the Successes, who set out to imitate, and do? To those of us getting spat on, their lot seems pretty sweet. But I wonder if there isn't more to it, at least in some cases. To adapt is one thing, but to be born into a world that seems to have adapted itself to you, before you even got there? 

The self-mutilation that this fit might demand returns us to that old saw, the Prodigal Son. His story was a favorite of Walser, who also achieved a fair amount of success as a young man. His first essay-stories and novels floated into the world to critical acclaim and then disappeared, as he eventually did, to a Swiss sanitarium. The rest of his career can be seen as a series of increasingly-drastic obstructions, both literal (the sanitarium, an aggressive abhorrence of self-promotion) and literary. Of these latter, the most famous is Walser's habit - adopted around the time he entered the sanitarium where he would spend the last two decades of his life - of writing his stories out in stenographers' shorthand on whatever scraps of paper came his way. These included beer coasters, bills, envelopes, postcards. Sometimes the story filled the frame, sometimes it didn't. 

Fans of the Microscripts (as these collected stories are called in English) usually praise the product, while lamenting the (diagnosed) schizophrenia that caused Walser's life to be so strangely, severely mangled. Rightly so... But behind these lamentations is the question of whether the Microscripts could exist without the weird panoply of obstructions that their author adopted, or felt the need to adopt, in order to call them into existence. The question, difficult and unsolvable, turns around our conception of happiness. What is it? And what about those strange individuals who seem to run, not to it, but away from it - as if in terror of the nightmare of perfect adaptation? 

The story of the prodigal son contains a great mystery, which is why someone with a happy life would decide one day and seemingly out of the blue, to exchange that life for wandering and unhappiness. Why would anyone do that, we wonder? And yet, we exchange our happiness for unhappiness everyday and in a hundred different ways. Walser and Dickinson write in ways that they "shouldn't", live in ways whose invisible logic we describe as tragic and impossible - as if it weren't logic at all but a sort of super-human, sub-human force, like gravity. 

Literature as Self Mutilation

The history of literature is full of if onlys. Two of my favorites are Emily Dickinson and Robert Walser. If only they'd been recognized in their own time, two lives of loneliness and mental illness might have been averted, and the histories of American and German and World literature invigorated a hundred years earlier. Plus, we would probably have the cure for cancer and a black president and new iphones....for everybody!

Thinking of this, we moan and weep about the waste that is human life...But what if, between Kleenexes as it were, we put the problem to ourselves in a completely opposite way, and say that Dickinson's and Walser's lives occurred exactly as they had to in order to produce the works that they did; and that therefore, the hypothetical "fulfillments" that we wish for them would actually have been disasters, which would have prevented these writers from creating the works they did?

Viewing a writer's life this way - that is, as less a success and more a complicated, elaborate mistake - is itself problematic, since it takes the capacity to write out of the creator's hand and diffuses it into that strange and unreliable god Circumstance. But then isn't every writer simultaneously an autonomous creator AND a sort of conduit to his/her times? And following this, aren't the snakes that the world puts between a writer and his/her goal at least as important as the ladders, since they force him/her beyond a willful expression of intention and into the strange, dangerous, quasi-improvisational space that is creative reaction? 

In order to get a picture of this, close your eyes and imagine you're an aspiring writer (if you're already an aspiring writer, don't bother to close your eyes). As an AW, you've grown up reading or hearing or seeing works of art that you admire, and this admiration leads you to want to create works of art of your own. Naturally, your first attempts at this are imitations of those works that you admire - imitations that succeed or fail to a varying degree (both in your own eyes, and in the eyes of others). With every success, you gain confidence and ambition; with every failure, discouragement, and an appreciation for the successful works that others have pulled off. Eventually, you get to a point where you are either succeeding more than you're failing, or failing more than you're succeeding. Both of these possibilities have their own satisfactions and problems - but it is only in the latter's case that you are gradually pushed towards a difficult question. The question is, very simply, Are you ever going to stop failing and succeed at this? A Yes to this question means back to the drawing board for more work; but what does a No mean? Does it mean Stop writing? Or does it mean, perhaps more strangely, Stop writing these things that you've been trying to write, that you love, and that have for so long been associated in your mind and heart with any future you might have as a writer?

Putting it this way, I want to suggest that the urge to write, to create, is less an aspiration (with its airy connotations of rising) and more a drag, a sinking towards oneself, so that certain writers' "careers" can resemble the movement of spilled water towards the edge of a table. Along these lines, inherited conceptions of what successful writing would look like can act like cards or hands placed in the path of the water, causing a build-up of mass that may at first seem like a failure to move but is in fact nothing more than the accumulation of potential movement that will express itself, and in gushes, the minute said conception disappears. 

In other words, by failing to write like Faulkner, Welty learns to write like Welty. By failing to write like Browning, Pound learns to write like Pound. The writer shoots for something that he loves and falls short, and again and again, until eventually he falls so short that he relinquishes his goal - at which point his idol cracks and he sees what he's been missing this whole time, which is not just his own possibilities, but the real object of study, life. 

Seen this way, failure is a key mechanism of an artist's development - maybe the key mechanism. So we might profitably bogue a page from David Foster Wallace's essay Authority and American Usage, in which he suggests that SNOOTlets (DFW's neologism for budding grammar nazis) develop their hypertrophic linguistic abilities due to an inability to mimic other kids: 

"Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. They're learning about Discourse Communities. Little kids learn this stuff not in Language Arts or Social Studies but on the playground and the bus and at lunch. When his peers are ostracizing the SNOOTlet or giving him monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there's serious learning going on. Everybody here is learning except the little SNOOT - in fact, what the SNOOTlet is being punished for is precisely his failure to learn... He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for 'peer rapport'..." (Consider the Lobster, p. 103)

Culture here reminds me of biology: adaptations evolve due to a weakness in the organism with respect to the pressures of its surrounding environment. Ergo, if you adapt perfectly, there's no need for the claw or tail or eyespots to be called from the depths of their cells.

So far so good... But what about that second group we mentioned above, the Successes, who set out to imitate, and do? To those of us getting spat on, their lot seems pretty sweet. But I wonder if there isn't more to it, at least in some cases. To adapt is one thing, but to be born into a world that seems to have adapted itself to you, before you even got there? 

The self-mutilation that this fit might demand returns us to that old saw, the Prodigal Son. His story was a favorite of Walser, who also achieved a fair amount of success as a young man. His first essay-stories and novels floated into the world to critical acclaim and then disappeared, as he eventually did, to a Swiss sanitarium. The rest of his career can be seen as a series of increasingly-drastic obstructions, both literal (the sanitarium, an aggressive abhorrence of self-promotion) and literary. Of these latter, the most famous is Walser's habit - adopted around the time he entered the sanitarium where he would spend the last two decades of his life - of writing his stories out in stenographers' shorthand on whatever scraps of paper came his way. These included beer coasters, bills, envelopes, postcards. Sometimes the story filled the frame, sometimes it didn't. 

Fans of the Microscripts (as these collected stories are called in English) usually praise the product, while lamenting the (diagnosed) schizophrenia that caused Walser's life to be so strangely, severely mangled. Rightly so... But behind these lamentations is the question of whether the Microscripts could exist without the weird panoply of obstructions that their author adopted, or felt the need to adopt, in order to call them into existence. The question, difficult and unsolvable, turns around our conception of happiness. What is it? And what about those strange individuals who seem to run, not to it, but away from it - as if in terror of the nightmare of perfect adaptation? 

The story of the prodigal son contains a great mystery, which is why someone with a happy life would decide one day and seemingly out of the blue, to exchange that life for wandering and unhappiness. Why would anyone do that, we wonder? And yet, we exchange our happiness for unhappiness everyday and in a hundred different ways. Walser and Dickinson write in ways that they "shouldn't", live in ways whose invisible logic we describe as tragic and impossible - as if it weren't logic at all but a sort of super-human, sub-human force, like gravity. 

Progress

Here's something from a poem in novels I'm writing called Eugene, OR. It's in progress, of course. Actually, I just spent the last hour writing it.

The Prose Poem

One night, when the moon was in the sky and the smell of wet grass clinging to the earth like a torn shift on the body of a drowned girl, the prose poem went down to the river. Behold me, said the moonlight! Beheld, said the prose poem irritably; only in truth this answer had less to do with the transcendental qualities of moonlight than with the darkness and uneven earth. We can assume there was a woman in it somewhere: not the drowned girl, we’re not talking about her at this point, but a woman, meaning a consummation. Something devoutly to be wished, as the prose poem described it while dipping its feet into the river’s edge. What do you mean “devoutly”, asked the moonlight? I mean devoutly, like on your knees and with your eyelids droopy, almost asleep. Your remember Sunday mornings? (Of course the moonlight remembered Sunday mornings) Well, there is a certain feeling that one gets, no matter what one’s spiritual orientation. There’s the left side of the sky looking bright and the right side dark beneath a quilt of clouds. Do you follow? Behold, whispered the moonlight, more insistently now (for it was nearly dawn). Behold, behold! But by this point the prose poem was starting to see it. You never washed my dishes, you never cared – or rather, you did these things, but without any of the sexually-suggestive aprons that men secretly expect from a lover. Your complaints became verbose, dead on, to the point that soon I watched you like a man watching his house burn down in the middle of the night. Literally burn, asked the moonlight? But the prose poem shook its head. As usual, he was getting tired of explaining himself. There are stellar bodies – stars, so to speak – and then there is this moon, this hole in the sky. The light drains through it until it’s all gone, at which point god takes the waist and turns, like this. Moonlight: Well, ok, that works, but now you've missed her. Prose poem: But I always miss her. That's what she loves about me. 

Russian: A Love Story

A dangerous admission: I am actually not that good at Russian.

No doubt this sounds odd coming from a self-identified translator, but it's true. At best, I'd put my language abilities at "low-advanced" to "high-intermediate". My favorite and strongest skills are interpretive: reading (which I do all the time, with a dictionary at my elbow) and listening (which I don't do that much). According to a Russian friend who I have tea with every once in a while, my speaking is about on the same level as a 17-year-old. My writing is awful. Altogether, I have a pretty solid vocabulary and a sound, if not totally intuitive knowledge of Russian grammar. I'm certainly not hopeless, but I recognize that there's huge room for improvement.

How, given these limitations, can I possibly have the cheek to translate Russian books - and not just any books, but the classics, the high points of pride in one of the most religiously bibliophillic countries in world history? How could I have I presumed to write an English version of Pushkin, the greatest and in some ways most subtle Russian prose writer? Have I no shame?

Actually, shame has been one of the ground-notes in my relationship to Russian since I started learning it 17 years ago. A snotty and distractible student, I had little patience for the memorization and painstaking work that all language-learning requires (I still don't, which is probably one of the reasons my Russian's been stuck at this level for years). What I did have was curiosity - a curiosity that was only increased by my wonderful high-school Russian teacher, Keith Moon. Anyone who's been in school long enough has had (or should have had) a teacher like Mr. Moon. From the first minute of the first day of class, he bounced around the room, pulling answers from our tiny class (there were five of us in Russian 1 and barely twice that in the entire four-year Russian program, maybe a twentieth of the recruits for French and Spanish). On that first day, without speaking a word of English, he taught us the Cyrillic alphabet and a dozen vocabulary words. Walking out of his classroom, I felt like my head was going to go flying off at any minute. 

The scant gifts I have to offer the world of Russian translation can all be traced back to that class. In my opinion they boil down to a passion for something that I have come to understand as "Russianness", in all its various forms: music, food, language, people, and of course, literature. 

What to say about Russian literature? After I graduated high-school, I took the not-that-unorthodox step of going to live with a family in Moscow for the fall and winter. The Lyubopitovs (whose name means "curious" - I am not making this up) were warm and welcoming, eager to share their culture with me. The father, who worked for the military and had therefore not been paid for over three months (this was smack in the middle of the huge currency crash of 1998, during which the ruble was devalued drastically), had neat grey hair and sad eyes. One night, while the rest of the tiny apartment was asleep, he asked me which Russian writers were my favorite. I answered Tolstoy (I'd read Anna Karenina through cover to cover earlier that year, on a three day bus trip from Connecticut to California) and Pushkin (whose Eugene Onegin I was reading in Charles Johnson's acrobatic translation). He smiled and recited, effortlessly - though with a fair amount of eyebrow waggling - Tatyana's love letter to Onegin. 

If I wrote a novelization about my experiences as a young expat in Moscow, this scene would probably not make the cut. It's too obvious - too stereotypical and predictable. But it happened, in that small, dimly-lit kitchen, with the Lyubopitov's electric-blue budgerigar Keyasha watching from behind Mr. Lyubopitov's shoulder. When we finished our tea, I went back to my bedroom (by far the biggest in the apartment, with a huge picture of mid-scream Freddy Mercury hanging above my bed) and, after reading a few stanzas of Johnson's Pushkin's Onegin to get my juices going, wrote three terrible Pushkinian stanzas about the experience. 

I wrote a lot of those while I was in Russia - more than I'd ever written before, about anything. In fact, looking back I think I can say that Johnson's Eugene Onegin was the book that prompted me to take that first step from wanting-to-be-a-writer to writing. The regular, rhymed stanzas just seemed so unassuming - so flexible and attractive. Pushkin applied them so liberally to his world (and that's really what EO is: a world) that it encouraged me to try and create my own tiny planet. Poetry could be fluid, witty, light. It could cover everything, animating memory and experience and transforming the thousand-thinged world into a gigantic, glistening chandelier. And I could do it. Badly, but I could do it. So what if I didn't do it a fraction as well as Pushkin, or Johnson, did. I could try. And there was something worthy in that. 

Twelve years later I am still trying, and failing, to write like Pushkin, like Kuprin, like Zabolotsky. Translation is a losing proposition, especially for someone like me, with less-than-prodigious linguistic abilities - and though I understand and agree that the coin of great literature should not be debased unnecessarily, I am wary of voices who would deny people like me (that is, essentially, amateurs, meaning lovers) the chance to add something valuable to the constellation of Russian-in-English. Translations are not monuments - not even great ones, like Johnson's Onegin or Volkonsky-Pevear's Karenina, or Nabokov's Lermontov. They are attempts, doomed at the outset, to make express in one language what was originally expressed in another. 

I approach my own translations with humility, excitement and, yes, shame. I know I won't be good enough. At the same time, I have too much respect for the human spirit of curiosity and passion to simply give up the race before it's been run. Translation is failure - but that's what makes it so wonderful. Like marriage, it's a process that can seem doomed at the outset - to the unsympathetic viewer, at least. Which is what makes both marriages and translations so quixotic - even heroic. 

I pray that I'll be given more opportunities to publish my translations, not only because the process has become so important to me, but because I honestly believe I am a good translator. Russian has been one of my great, hopeless loves since I was a young teenager. No matter which book of hers I open, she's there, floating seductively in an area whose accessibility I can't determine for sure. Is she beyond my reach, within it? Will she ever be? Who knows. But I know she's there. 

WHIM

No essay today: I'm just too beat, which is something that I feel reluctant to mention but want to, if only to ruin this past week's "streak". I'm suspicious of streaks. They're superstitious and inevitably lead to non-streaks, especially for worriers like me. Anyway, blogging is (god willing) a complicated and ongoing failure and I'm really just shooting myself in the foot by pretending otherwise. So there it is: WHIM (on my forehead).

We can even imagine that Mr. Hulot himself disappears for ten months of the year and then reappears spontaneously, in a kind of jump cut, on the first of July, when the alarm clocks finally stop and, in certain privileged places on the French coast and in the countryside as well, a provisional time creates itself, between parentheses as it were - a duration softly whirling, closing in upon itself, like the cycle of oceanic tides. This is Time for the repetition of useless gestures, for minimal mobility, and especially for stasis at the siesta hour. But it is also ritual Time, given a rhythm by the vain liturgy of idle pleasure more rigorous than the work of any office hour. (Andre Bazin writing about Jacques Tati's Les Vacances, as translated by Bert Cardullo)

I'm excited about this week of blogging and have a few ideas for the blog going forward. Ideally, I'd like to continue with the poetics and add more personal stuff, while at the same time working in more discussion of translation as a process, not to mention translations themselves (my own and others). Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments, either by leaving comments on the individual posts or contacting me via email at josh.billings@gmail.com. And of course thank you for reading, whoever you are.

Oh yes, and I did some heavy edits on yesterday's essay on parody, which I think improved and deepened it. Have a look!