Fall in Review: A Lightness on the Edge of Town
I’ve started meditating. Not apropos of the election or anything. No, it’s just a general desire for mindfulness. As in: seriously, I need to drop some kind of mnemonic anchor in the swift currents of time, or I don’t know what. I had my mom send my late father’s prayer cushion in the mail. It’s forest green, dense with some kind of grain, pleated in the round. A “zafu,” they’re called. Now I sit in the mornings, in a chilled, dark room. Outside: bare branches, a small town waking up, recalling its aches. Further off, along the highway, husked fields lie fallowed in shade and snow, their treelines graced by morning’s warm light. Sometimes, while meditating, one of my legs will fall asleep. When I rise it’s dissociative pins and needles, a somatic static-wash through the limb as I limp around. Gradually, it recalls itself, its obligation to support.
The last time I meditated was just before the pandemic. I was a teacher-in-training at a small Waldorf-y high school in rural Wisconsin. The kind of place where students called teachers by their first names and sat on each faculty committee. The town was in the “driftless region” of the state, a prehistorically unglaciated zone that was verdant and hilly and river-run and generally un-Midwestern. Its vibe was handmade clothes and biodynamic farming, everyone rosy-cheeked and a kind of stocky that was as if in preparation for a long winter, or complete social collapse. I was surrounded by high schoolers and married couples with children, and felt quite lonely. I remember it all like this, but my memory feels unreliable. The images blurry, as if seen through fogged glass.
Some mornings, in a long, darkened assembly room on the second floor of the municipal building, the faculty and student body meditated. We followed prompts. Like: imagine your heart turning blue when you breathe in, red when you breathe out. Or: picture yourself on a river bank, and let the river be your thoughts, and watch as the thoughts just go by, and appreciate how you’re on the bank and can just watch and not react at all. A model of equipoise that still compels me. Peace like a river.
I went there in October 2019 and things, as you may recall, fell apart the following March. When the announcement was made that the school would temporarily close for the pandemic, some of the students in the assembly room cried. I recall this being quite affecting at the time. An upshot of this development was that the teacher who was in the process of vacating her position for me chose not to relocate for a new job, deciding instead to hunker down against global shutdown. Meaning there was no real reason for me to stay in the lonely town. I didn’t exactly cry when this happened.
Five years on, the whole experience feels like a dream, like the person who lived through it is not quite me, somehow. For some of the details above, I’m referring to a short story I wrote at the time, or perhaps just after. About a teacher at a small, Waldorf-adjacent etc. It opens in a school’s assembly room, a group meditation commencing with a prompt to “imagine the morning in reverse.” The main character is a humanities teacher, and she recalls a part in Slaughterhouse Five where the protagonist experiences a war film in reverse. She paraphrases:
Cities piece themselves together from their own ruins. The fragmentations of bombs disavow their errant trajectories, reassemble, and are sucked back up into bomb-bays. The planes fly backwards, are tucked back into hangers to be taken apart and returned piecemeal to factories. Eventually, the metals themselves are unsmelted, the ore returned to Mother Earth’s bosom. That’s what this visualization exercise always reminds her of.
She imagines walking home backwards through wintry environs, observing what Emerson, whom she teaches to the sophomores, calls snow’s “frolic architecture.” Then she is in her kitchen, a French press weakening, the sky darkening towards night. She imagines herself standing so close to the sliding glass door that it “communicates to her face a weak intimation of the brisk cold outside.” A nice bit of phenomenology there, I think.
I have a little blue folder on my computer desktop full of fiction like this. Some stories are not much more than strings of vignettes, with nice bits of phenomenology, but no real narratives. Still, I cherish them. They’re existential time-stamps, populated with fiction-refracted versions of people I’ve met in all the different places I’ve lived: Texas, Maine, Iowa, Virginia, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wyoming. A minor character in the story above, the man who teaches Tai Chi elsewhere in the building and leads the morning meditations for the school, has a dash of my father in him. He tells a story about a thief in ancient China who used to steal from villagers and then run to the outskirts of towns, only to jump up and run across the crops with Wuxia film ease. I don’t recall if my father told me that legend or what. He did do Tai Chi, and at one point translated classical Chinese poetry. The little finger of one hand was jammed into a neutered curl from an Aikido accident. The right hand, I believe.
Remembering, the kind that really honors its object, can be hard. The cushion I sit on is his, the red-beaded bracelet on my left wrist too. I have books I hold dear, a weathered foot locker from his time in the army, a necklace-intended crucifix with a small, crudely articulated Christ. In one sense, the meditation is about mindfulness, about staying in the present and resisting the mind’s temptation to intend temporally backwards in regret or forwards in fear. But perhaps it is also an act of remembering. To think of him without doing so, in the unthinking.
As the years pass, and some of the people I have known aren’t around anymore, and some places are far, far away, and different one-off experiences pale into specters, these stories too come to seem like mnemonic anchors. Without that story, would I remember these things? Perhaps, but maybe less clearly. Without a premature claim to any kind of sagacity—that is, with all due humility, I begin to understand the epigraph to J. Salter’s final novel, All That Is: “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.”
Thankfully, on my hard drive there’s also a little blue folder of my father’s writings. Because he wrote too. A lot, in fact. Screenplays that won a few awards. A cycle of genuinely funny children’s books that my mother read to me when I was younger, set in Russia and starring a precocious girl named Ludmilla, the first a retelling of Bony Legs or Baba Yaga. A science fiction novel called Demon Run—a name I love—and its sequel, Palimpsest.
Perhaps my favorite is a slim book called Crusader; or, And On His Shirt a Cross. It’s about a young Muslim girl who is rescued by an ambivalent crusader during the sacking of Turkish-held Antioch. He takes it upon himself to escort her to safety, to Aleppo. It’s about the hypocrisy of religious conflict, and perhaps one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read, bias notwithstanding. It’s also an artifact of a man, one I’m able to return to when the memories are confused or lost. When the person I remember is hazy, and not quite him somehow. At these times, I can find him in the writing. The idealism and integrity there, that’s the real stuff. The rest is just a dream.
This year was pretty rough on most fronts. And it’s not exactly clear that nicer ones are coming down the pipes. Any time soon, that is. One thing meditation has me, er, thinking about, is the capacity we each have to make choices in thought. About what we attend to, what we get upset about.
We published a lot of good writing this year, and much of it speaks to, attends to, the modern condition of anxiety, strife, disquiet. Each piece of writing—each a piece of the “real,” per Salter’s distinction—represents a thoughtful positioning. You’ll find a sampling of them below.
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There’s a Deleuze quote I encountered somewhere, about the need for modern philosophy to be like the “axe that the nomad picks up as he moves across the plains.” (Admittedly, I can’t find this quote, so this might be a Borgesian fabrication.) At any rate, earlier this year we published an excerpt from psychotherapist Jonathan Foiles’s Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room, a work that blends memoir and philosophy, and his position seems consonant with maybe-Deleuze’s:
I realized I couldn’t offer some coolly worded guide to the fears of the impending apocalypse without writing about how often it has felt like my own world was coming to an end. I didn’t settle upon philosophy out of some dispassionate search for meaning; I turned to it because I felt like I was drowning and was desperately searching for a life preserver.
In the excerpt, he writes of the unease he can experience when considering his children’s planetary futures. Like when they see their first snowless winter come and go.
“It’s falling, Mother, snow in Ukraine:” is the first line of Paul Celan’s poem “Winter,” written in 1943 after learning of the death of his mother in the camps. The poet’s name graces the title of Yoko Tawada’s 2020 novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, reviewed by Duncan Stuart. Its protagonist is a literary researcher in Berlin who is supposed to present on Celan at a conference but is unable to get past the application’s first question. His existential situation is relatable:
Patrik is emerging from, but also still in, the ravages of covid isolation. His confusion has annihilated his sense of selfhood: he rolls dice to make decisions, and is stumped by a form asking for his nationality.
Celan’s legacy is a tragic one, his corpus, if indeed a kind of rejoinder to Adorno’s declaration of no poetry after Auschwitz, nonetheless a body of work disfigured by the camps’ horrors; both his parents died in them, and he took his life at forty-nine, drowning himself in the Seine. Stuart sets the linguistic projects of Tawada and Celan against each other, each writing in a foreign tongue to inverse yet consonant ends:
We can see in Celan and Tawada a shared outlook, just with a reversed polarity. Celan pushes what is light and human in his work into the background, to bring tragedy to the fore. Tawada does the opposite, pushing tragedy into the background to foreground what is light and human.
Bailey Trela reviewed J.M. Coetzee’s latest, The Pole, considering it as a work of late style and one concerned with the faultlines within and between languages. Its leads, Beatriz and Witold, Spanish and Polish respectively, conduct their relationship in English, so it too is a novel concerned with alien languages and (mis)translations:
At its heart, The Pole is a novel of misprision, of generative misreadings and fruitful misunderstandings—wisdom seeps in through the cracks in language.
Jaye Chen reviewed Vi Khi Nao’s The Italy Letters, an epistolary novel that takes the form of “a long, unsent letter from the narrator (Nao’s stand-in) addressed to a married woman living in Italy who never learns of the narrator’s affection.” Chen connects the novel to a contemporary trend, “tenderqueer diaspora fiction,” perhaps most famously exemplified by Ocean Vuong’s poetry and prose. There is a cultural logic to the form, when you consider its prevalence, “a confessional letter written from an ‘I’ to a ‘you’ that attempts to reconcile an insurmountable gulf of differences–unrequited love, generational trauma, or other things lost in translation.”
Here, communication is one-sided, monologic—the flavor of letter writing on display being the too-late or if-I-only-articulate-it-all-like-this desire towards clarifying connection. It’s thoroughly modern in its contradictions, the immediacy of communication and the intractability of geographic distance:
Like a spatial bait-and-switch, there is no Italy in “The Italy Letters.” Likewise, the mementos of the narrator’s love are intangible: PDFs sent through emails, poem recommendations, suggestions of places to go; reminders, celebrations, encouragements, texts, missed Skype calls.
We also published an excerpt from Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s No One Knows Their Blood Type, a Palestinian novel about identity, family, and colonization. A passage from a section set in 2011, otherwise concerned with the character’s relationship to her newborn, resonates today:
The television brings news of earthquakes and floods and revolutions. Death is on offer, on our screens, free of charge. Revolutions everywhere—Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria. I try to formulate my stance on each of them, but I can’t. I want to go out and declare a revolution against something, but I can’t.
I find that last sentence very compelling, that constrained desire.
Speaking of culturally constrained desires, Mitch Therieau reviewed Becca Rothfield’s All Things Are Too Small, a collection of essays. Broadly, the collection positions itself against a vision of the critical landscape where highbrow criticism has been knee-capped by a misplaced egalitarianism:
At some point in the struggle for equal treatment of all people, the doctrine of equality—vaporous non-thing that it is—broke containment and entered the world of art, where it does not belong. Maybe this was a simple matter of unchecked fuzzy thinking, or maybe it was a more complex process of compensation for what [Rothfield] calls “the Left’s dispiriting failure to equalize resources and political power in the public sphere.” With the prospect of a better world disappearing behind the choked horizon, at least we can make a little earthly paradise where all tastes are equal and all pleasures are inviolable.
The collection is subtitled “Essays in Praise of Excess,” and Rothfield’s desire is that we remember that some art is better than other art, and that good art should be “excessive” and transformational towards the Good. Seems reasonable (though Therieau incisively picks apart some flaws in her position). By way of illustrating, Rothfield also takes a number of “middlebrow” cultural objects and phenomena to task:
Marie Kondo–style minimalism (textbook denial of extravagance); the fragmentary fictions of Sheila Heti and Jenny Offill (the literary equivalents of a KonMari’d room); theorists who construe sexual consent as a rational choice (for discounting sex’s transfigurative power, its ability to surprise and fundamentally change us in ways we could never agree to in advance); theorists who consider sex to be a disenchanted means to some practical end, mainly procreation (for more or less the same reason); and most of all, the novels of Sally Rooney.
Hey, I kind of liked Sally Rooney’s latest. In general, though, I do sympathize with a desire for more elitism. As a card-carrying elitist, that is.
And, to conclude this round-up, contributing writer Leo Kim filed the kind of experimental criticism we like to mess around with, Ancient Jars, which takes the concept of the “container” and runs with it. It begins with a consideration of Pandora’s and opens out towards the present:
My mind has returned to Pandora and Elpis recently in the afterglow of spring. The taste of claustrophobia still lingers, and I want to make sense of what it means to live well with containers and containment. It’s both an impossible task and an unavoidable one. They are stark and oppressive these jars, boxes, storage units, cramped apartments, phones, frames, racial classifications, gender binaries, family units, national borders, and prisons; they reek of helpless determinism, bloated capitalism, rank fascism, all those -isms we’d rather avoid.
So, the essay is about the modern condition, about holding on and half-letting go, self-storage and landfills, and all those compartmentalizations of the self that make us feel a bit short of breath, a little trapped. But it’s also about one friend in particular, and about friendship generally, and about how hard connections are to maintain as time goes on. Its conclusion reminding me of Salter’s quote and our literary desire to capture the real:
In defiance of lost time, I started this piece to try to contain the memories and gratitude I knew my pottery couldn’t: a carrier bag for all those little seeds and stars I’ve collected for him over the years. Yet I still can’t get it all. Even this turned out too odd and misshapen. Things fall through the cracks, or overflow; they fail to capture how cramped and expansive it all is; how I want to hold it all together, and learn to let it go. The only hope is to leave plenty of space in between, to let the gaps do the hard work— to say it in as few words as possible.
Love you; See you soon.
Perhaps I’ll just end it there. Sorry. Like I said, narratives aren’t my strong suit.