A Pasture Of Thought: On Reading Amina Cain
A Horse at Night: On Writing | Amina Cain | Dorothy, A Publishing Project | 2022 | 133 Pages
For a long time, I wished to write. But the scene wasn’t yet set. There was no furniture and no heat, no money, and no time. Gradually, then suddenly, the opportunity presented itself. I had recently separated from a man I had hoped to love the whole rest of my life and flagrantly thrown away a reputable career. I moved to an apartment with many french sash windows and high ceilings. The light was good—evocative and absorbing. The kitchen cupboard rattled like an old witch in a folktale. My toaster so often tripped the breaker that I learned the dark texture of the hallway wall to its switch like a face. I arranged all my books by genre and stacked them in piles according to interest or theme. In a corner there was a large desk with drawers and pencils and several potted plants. It was in this spot where I wanted to write. I stalked through the silences of the rooms like an animal.
In her newest collection of essays A Horse at Night: On Writing, Amina Cain writes: “When I start writing a new story, I often begin with setting. Before plot, before dialogue, before anything else, I begin to see where a story will take place, and then I hear the narrative voice, which means that character is not far behind.” Like Cain, I must describe the setting of the scene in my prose before arriving at the narrative. I have set the scene of me writing this review. Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say I’ve set the scene of me reading this book. As I write the words you’re reading, I recurrently hover over Cain’s sentences as carefully as Mary Helena Clark’s camera traces windblown calla lilies shot from above in her film Figure Minus Fact.
Cain essays around the act of writing. Her other books are also about close reading (other people or paintings) and the writing process, including her short story collection Creature and her novel Indelicacy. Yet, A Horse at Night opens out to the indeterminacy of genre like light through a barn: square on and aslant. Cain considers the place of the “I” in reading and writing, and some of her most formidable literary influences.
She writes in the opening lines, “Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts… A diary of fiction. Or is that not what this is? I wrote about reading fiction, and about writing it.” This question (“is that not what this is?”) underscores the precarity of strict delineation or classification when it concerns art. Instead, she embraces a promiscuity of references including Chantal Akerman, Elena Ferrante, and Clarice Lispector, elucidating, “Things combine to become other things, other kinds of experiences” when brought into conversation with one another. For her, the experience of a hike through desert mountains becomes infinitely more textured while listening to music. She can conjure Bhanu Kapil pouring hot water over red ice cubes only after reading How to Wash a Heart. To think deeply, and to write well, necessitates cutting together a montage of varied references and experiences. From each seemingly disparate frame, a new image and understanding emerge.
One might also say that this montage of references is a form of editing, both of writing and of self. In the coldest months of winter, I read Rosmarie Waldrop’s poem “Coupling,” where she begins, “I often feel I am a different person depending on whom I am with. As / a word in a sentence may be felt to belong first with one word and then / with another, and will be different.” Gripping Waldrop’s worn book in my chapped hands, I consider how it is not just who I am with, but also who I am reading, that (re)shapes me in perpetuity: in taste and style, in prosody and in form. It is only after reading Cain, and then Waldrop, that I intuit how their language’s embroidery with my own “will be [a] different” experience from one another, as it will be with who I read, or meet, next. A swath of references for Cain becomes both her archive and her coterie. While she is not aware that I have joined that archive by “tak[ing] on someone’s intonation, without even trying,” I replicate in this piece Cain’s desire both to align, and bring myself into conversation, with those who move me to see and write the world anew: “I wanted to write to something in the work, or I wanted to reproduce in writing some quality I had seen there.”
For Cain, there is no threshold, no barrier, between lived experience and literary associations. Her interactions with her cat Trout evoke an assortment of references in her text: the relationship between narrator and dog in Kate Zambreno’s Drifts or Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend; a description of Cain’s other cat, Albertine; a short passage on Andrew Wyeth’s Wild Dog (1959). Just as I have inserted myself into this essay, both in relationship to and inspired by Cain’s oeuvre, so, too, does Cain consider the interplay between perceiver and perceived, reader and writer as a dynamism always already at work. She writes, “I graze at my writing. I want to withdraw into it, but of course I also want to live. Mostly I want to go too far, but with a light touch. NDiaye does that.”
This tension, between the art and the life, is one that Cain parses in Indelicacy when her protagonist Vitória attempts to explain to her cleaning woman the premise of her book.
‘I’m writing about myself looking at paintings,’ [Vitória] told her. ‘And sometimes at plants.’
‘Is there an audience for that?’
‘I’m sure there is not.’
‘What makes you do it, then?’
‘My soul,’ [Vitória] said boldly.
For Cain, there seems to be a similar impulse to write that exists outside of the appetites of audience, logic, or marketing:
Am I ‘pure’ when I write, am I real, am I my true nature? It’s one of the times when I am not alienated from myself; maybe that’s why I like writing so much. If you are not alienated from yourself, you are more likely to go further into the thing on which you are working. At least I think that’s right.
Cain is not interested in certainty or conclusion. Rather, she is interested in the process, writing and reading as a lifelong action, the “grazing at writing,” venturing further into its pastures. Call it “nature” or “soul,” there is a loosening in the body when we write, “a kind of falling apart, a refusal to keep things together” that eventually, with practice, tightens its reins.
In this way, A Horse at Night is not an edict on how one writes or an analytical exploration of a certain sect of authors and artists. Instead, this book is about the moment “when one closes a book it doesn’t mean the feeling of the book closes too.” There is an impression left on us by others’ words and images. These traces shape our quotidian lives. It is an impression not unlike Roland Barthes’ ‘blind field’ in Camera Lucida where he argues that a punctum in a photograph allows for a whole world to open up, and be imagined, beyond the confines of the frame. The punctum ignites the possibilities of world-building for the spectator, beyond the static world of the photograph: “I animate this photograph and it animates me.” Similarly, Cain confesses, “the thought of what is beyond the frame of a painting has always been appealing to me.” In the embodied experience of reading, what exists beyond the frame of the page is the interior life of the person. The reader animates, imagines, and expands upon the words before them, as if in communion with the author.
The idea of what lies beyond the frame or the page also becomes a fecund place to think about the self and its relationship to others, whether fictional or real. As Cain writes, “the self changes, always; we can’t keep it in place. So, instead of self—selves.” In anticipation of writing this essay, I read a stack of fiction in an attempt to bring myself closer to Cain, including Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark where the distinction between protagonist Kate Ennis and Adler collapses briefly and brilliantly like a paper lantern on fire. “Traveling under a false name might be a crime of some sort,” Ennis muses as she assumes a pseudonym at an airport. “I should make the name as like my own as possible to account for the mistake. Alder, I thought.” Ennis and Adler sound nothing alike and yet Adler insists on them as homonyms in the novel, raising similar questions as Cain to what constitutes fiction, nonfiction, and the borders between self and selves. I fleetingly consider casting myself as Cain in this essay, writing as her and not just alongside her, adopting her “I” as my own.
The “I” in Cain’s book nestles within the space between object and subject, the spark of affective touch in their meeting. As Barthes writes in his earlier book A Lover’s Discourse, “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other: It is as if I had words, instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words.” Cain touches and is touched by the books or art that surround her, just as her book touches me. After visiting Bill Viola’s retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, she writes, “I went home and immediately wanted to write… I wanted to write to something in the work, or I wanted to reproduce in writing some quality I had seen there.” What is writing after all if not an ongoingness? The dialogue between what we have seen or read is always already at work in our own making.
When I am stuck on a sentence, I walk at night, and in this way, the world impresses upon me just as I impress myself on it. This, too, is writing. As Cain observes, “darkness captivates, holds its own kind of sovereignty.” There is the exquisite charge of sensing the world, rather than seeing it, that thrills a writer like an almost-formed thought at the precipice of existence. At night, I perceive shapes and shadows shifting all around me as the word, the idea, or the sentence flickers into being. I could be any living thing in this darkness, any version of myself. Like Frances Morgan writing on Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles in My Mother Laughs, there is agency for women in darkness who are not objects of sight, but subjects deliberately choosing when and how to hide from view. Sometimes on these night walks, I’ll stumble on a family of deer in the prairie, and it is only then that another bears witness to me. The clarity, the wonder of them, also astounds me, like a blank page, bright and beckoning. Cain describes writing as a “constant,” as a “return,” like her repeated visits to the Huntington Garden were for a brief stint, like these night walks are for me. These ideas and these singular spaces draw us both back again and again. It was reading Amina Cain’s book that led me to her pasture of thought—and, subsequently, to my own. I am still here, lingering. Like Amina Cain, like Virginia Woolf: “I feel myself shining in [that] dark.”