The Writing Kind: On Kate Zambreno’s “The Light Room”
Kate Zambreno | The Light Room | Riverhead Books | July 2023 | 256 Pages
Today I recall attending the Museum of Moving Image’s First Look Film Festival last spring and watching filmmaker Ben Balcom’s experimental documentary News from Nowhere (2020). In the film, a meditation on a public park in Milwaukee, Balcom quotes Bernadette Mayer’s “Utopia” when she asks, “what’s your idea of a good time?” Increasingly I ask myself Balcom’s question, which is Mayer’s question with limited reward or answer. I have not known what my idea of a good time is for some while. For an adolescent period it was drugs and drinking. For a longer period it was restrictions of all pleasures of any kind. Now I am 35 and at a loss for words or vices except for Succession and sex. I pull quietness over me like a pelt. The quotidian a frayed, familiar comfort. From my worn couch, I watch the April light branch through the oak outside my window. On the roof of an apartment across the street, a college boy shotguns a beer, shirtless and spartan. I shut the blinds when his music begins to blast and turn my light off before ten. I lie in the dark wondering, but not writing. Perhaps I am not the wanting kind.
Today I reread the previous paragraph and amend my admission. I am indeed an apostle of want. My wants are, to paraphrase Maggie Nelson, monstrous and large. But my central one is eternally fixed: to write and to write well. That thorny desire: piercing but bright. Yet, so often, I go weeks without writing. Does not writing confirm my lack of conviction in my abilities? In myself? Does not writing become the only content of my writing? Is this the last sentence I am ever capable of conjuring? I frantically text my friend Anna, the poet, that I am not writing. She reminds me swiftly, you are.
As I write the above passage I remind myself that my central want is bifurcated further: to write and to participate in the ongoing exercise of presentness. Sometimes pure presence is achieved through writing or reading. Other times, through walking in my neighborhood park, Hickory Hill, for a daily pilgrimage at dawn and at dusk. Lingering in nature for long stretches of time allows reentry into, or re-examination of, my thoughts and my prose. In The Light Room, Kate Zambreno observes a similar impulse in the filmmaker and visual artist Joseph Cornell who “writes often of ‘clearings,’ which [Zambreno] take[s] to mean moments when he could finally think, or see, have some space inside of his head, but that were also linked to his minute documentation of the weather.” Observing the weather, and being a part of the weather, sparks other ideas, emotions, and memories for me and my creative process. It incentivizes returning to the words of other writers more erudite than me.
In her newest meditation on motherhood, the COVID pandemic, and a coterie of creatives whose work she returns to again and again, Zambreno shares my want, which is Cornell’s want: to hone in on the shifting gradations of light and temperature throughout the day by being present to the world and those within it. Sheltering in place with her husband, dog Genet, and two small children, one of whom is an infant, Zambreno charts the expansiveness of time during a period in which all we had were the hours with which to organize our days. Within the “slow and then fast” movement of our collective grief, Zambreno observes, “That is how time seems to work now. Yet the seasons still cycle through, insistently.” Within the open-endedness of a world in lockdown, Zambreno depicts the monotony, labor, and joy of parenting, daily family outings to a park where her own “clearings” crystalize in the form of notes, musings, and fragmented research on embodied existence and the lives of other artists. Through the presentness required of parenthood and the natural world, Zambreno attends to the granular details of her daughter’s tangled hair or tulips in spring with unadorned prose, ardor, and care.
In spite of constant quarantine, The Light Room underscores how community is synonymous with care through Zambreno’s ongoing engagements and conversations with philosophers, family, and friends. In an epistolary exchange with a close confidant, Zambreno writes that “her friend mentions something she remembered [Silvia] Federici saying in an interview: that one reason for our sad depressed politics is that we exaggerate the importance of what we can do alone.” Even in Zambreno’s earlier book Heroines, where so much of her life was punctuated by solitude in the quiet town of Chapel Hill, she was never intellectually isolated. Then, as now, she surrounded herself with swaths of other writers and artists to understand the madness and melancholy of figures like Zelda Fitzgerald or Jane Bowles. “But what is the nuclear family,” Zambreno’s friend continues, “what is middle-class motherhood in this country, other than constantly exaggerating the importance of what you can do alone?” The Light Room refuses the cult of individualism and, instead, embraces living, parenting, and writing as communal work. Even when Zambreno’s narrator bickers with her husband or screams alongside her infant in the car on the way to the park, there are moments of blissful rapture in the baby asleep on Zambreno’s chest “pressing against each other through damp wool.” While American culture might celebrate the rugged self-made man, Zambreno knows that it is through community that we find our path forward, our light. Zambreno’s radical acts of acute attention (to a painting, to her daughter’s latch at her nipple, to the winter leaves mulching over) are an antidote to the Sisyphean struggles of a capitalist, patriarchal world.
Today, the light in Iowa City is diaphanous. The crows, loud and guttural at dawn. I wake and reach for The Light Room across the pillow on my bed. I read Kate Zambreno reading Yūko Tsushima whose book Territory of Light Anna talked about all of last year. In an interview, Tsushima says “she writes… as a way to confirm herself, to allow the days to exist in all of their ordinary beauty and awfulness.” I write this quotation down as Zambreno wrote it down, as if to affirm my own existence within the “ordinary beauty and awfulness” of daily living and of trying, once again, to write. Zambreno reflects on Tsushima’s mother characters who possess a “ghostliness. The ‘I’ is present,” Zambreno continues, “but almost translucent. That’s how I’ve started thinking about these notes I’m keeping, as translucencies.” Like Tsushima, like Cornell, Zambreno is also “record[ing] not only the physical light, but also an illumination” that arises from daily observances and leads to a plethora of notes. “I don’t know why I need to write everything down,” Zambreno confesses. “I have no time or space to keep a notebook anymore, so I write fragments and scraps, sometimes incomprehensible. I think that’s the desire—with digressions, with the day, to catch something that’s vital or sublime.”
And yet, as in her other books like Drifts or To Write as if Already Dead, the “fragments and scraps” about Rainer Maria Rilke or Hervé Guibert (or, in the case of The Light Room, Derek Jarman, Joseph Cornell, and David Wojnarowicz) become the finished book, “vital and sublime.” Zambreno’s prose is as much about process and the gathering of materials as anything else. In The Light Room, she describes encouraging her ecological writing students to “keep notebooks, to pay attention to their landscape, the weather, the creatures they encounter during their neighborhood walks.” She considers her own studies of writers, filmmakers, and artists through marginalia, diaristic digressions, and the chronicling of her body in pain, whether due to exhaustion, pregnancy, or nursing. Above all else, Zambreno privileges empirical and embodied knowledge. In describing clots of menstrual blood or shingles or hemorrhoids, Zambreno’s oeuvre never lets our attention stray from the living, breathing, sweating body that nurses babies while deftly synthesizing the work of philosophers like Foucault or Barthes in spite of financial uncertainty, marital strife, and nagging insecurity and doubt.
There is an elegiac elegance to the way The Light Room contemplates the precarity of life during a global pandemic coupled to impending ecological disaster, and Zambreno positions this contemplation alongside formative writers from her own archive who also suffered a health crisis: the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Zambreno’s literary community of influences includes the writer, painter, and filmmaker David Wojnarowicz. In response to the death of his friend Peter Hujar (who, like Wojnarowicz would, died of AIDS), Wojnarowicz generates a litany of images on Super8 as a way to process and visualize his grief. While Zambreno initially mourns the film’s unfinished state, she soon realizes “these fragments were less about a finished work and more about the private ritual, a longing to contemplate beauty and joy amid individual and collective crisis, including the loss felt by ecological spoilage and changes in the landscape.” This revelation surrounding Wojnarowicz’s clearings (as Cornell would call them) or sketches is also a summation of Zambreno’s own project. Like Wojnarowicz, she must make scraps of art through “sustained attention to the natural world.” Wojnarowicz and Zambreno are the writing kind.
Today, I think of this line as I walk through Hickory Hill in the first weeks of spring. Like Zambreno, thinking “is always easier [for me] when [I am] outside.” Anna has told me she is writing, and I feel guilty, having nothing to send her in return. In my ongoing exercise of presentness, I have left my phone at home as well as paper and pen. “What beauty can come out of mourning,” Zambreno ponders as I consider the midwestern crocus, shocks of blue in the telluric light. I wish I could put these flowers in a poem for Anna, who often writes of other blues, the ocean or moon. I think of Bhanu Kapil writing to Kate Zambreno of a bluebell wood she walked through, and how “The violet is still vibrating in my mind.”
Today it is raining, and I rewatch News from Nowhere since Hickory Hill is spackled with melting ice and mud. Balcom’s film consists almost exclusively of a slow, languid pan across a park, the overgrowth out of focus for much of the run time, but verdant, full of luscious lens flares, and green. “I like to wake up at noon in a leisurely way,” the narrator quips, quoting Bernadette Mayer. “I would like to talk and swim all day and read and write and have fun all night. That would be perfect.” The methodic pan distends like a physicalization of thought, the red flare outstretched and quivering as Balcom digitally slows the shot. I pause the film to write down this quote and thumb through The Light Room to where Zambreno watches Jonas Mekas’s film Walden, originally entitled Diaries Notes and Sketches. As she views the film that took Mekas four years to make, her daughters flank her, as well as her husband once he finishes the evening chores. This family tableau is one version of a good time; the act of writing about it is another. The shots of Central Park evoke for Zambreno the park where her family was just that afternoon, as Ben Balcom’s rendering of this Milwaukee park evokes Zambreno’s scene for me. Tree boughs outside my window tremulous and waterlogged, I read an intertitle from Walden that Zambreno quotes, “In New York it was still winter. But the wind was full of spring.”
“I’m curious about the connections you’re making,” Ben Balcom responds when I tell him I’m writing about his film and The Light Room. As I read his email, the Iowa wind rattles my own window again, and the wind is full of spring. There is a clearing again. There is light again. There are the notes and translucencies becoming something more than deeply felt digressions at the intersection of presence, observation, and thought. “I feel,” like Zambreno, “an overwhelming sensation of life’s fragility and eternity” in this overlay of references, weathers, and, yes, wants.
Today I text Anna, I’d like my own writing to begin at that sensation of fragility and eternity. She responds, Bhanu and I are out beyond the bluebells. Will you meet us here?