Rupture, Verge and Precipice, by Carole Maso

by Carole Maso Be not afraid. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and Sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. -- William Shakespeare YOU ARE AFRAID. You are afraid, as usual, that the novel is dying. You think you know what a novel is: it's the kind you write. You fear you are dying. You wonder where the hero went. You wonder how things could have gotten so out of hand. You ask where is one sympathetic, believable character? You ask where is the plot? You wonder where on earth is the conflict? The resolution? The denouement? You imagine yourself to be the holder of some last truth. You imagine yourself to be in some sinking, noble, gilt-covered cradle of civilization. You romanticize your fin de siecle, imbuing it with meaning, overtones, implications. You are still worried about TV. You are still worried about the anxiety of influence. You say there will be no readers in the future, that there are hardly any readers now. You count your measly 15,000-- but you have always underestimated everything. You say language will lose its charms, its ability to charm, its power to mesmerize. You say the world turns, spins away, or that we turn from it. You're pretty desolate. You mutter a number of the usual things. You say "...are rust," "...are void," "...are torn." You think you know what a book is, what reading is, what constitutes a literary experience. In fact you've been happy all these years to legislate the literary experience. All too happy to write the rules. You think you know what the writer does, what the reader does. You're pretty smug about it. You think you know what the reader wants: a good old-fashioned story. You think you know what a woman wants: a good old-fashioned-- You find me obnoxious, uppity. You try to dismiss me as hysterical or reactionary or out of touch because I won't enter that cozy little pact with you anymore. Happy little subservient typing "my" novel, the one you've been dictating all these years. You rely on me to be dependent on you for favors, publication, $$$$$$$$, canonization. You are afraid. Too smug in your middle ground with your middlebrow. Everything threatens you. You say music was better then: the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac. You're boring me. You say hypertext will kill print fiction. You pit one against the other in the most cynical and transparent way in hopes we'll tear each other to bits While you watch. You like to watch. Hold us all in your gaze. Just as you try to pit writing against theory, prose against poetry, film against video, etc., as you try to hold on to your little piece of the disappearing world. But I, for one, am on to you. Your taste for blood, your love of competition, your need to feel endangered, beleaguered, superior. Your need to reiterate, to reassert your power, your privilege, because it erodes. Let's face it, you're panicked. You think an essay should have a hypothesis, a conclusion, should argue points. You really do bore me. You'd like to put miraculous, glowing glyphs on a screen on one side and modest ink on pretty white paper on the other. You set up, over and over, false dichotomies. Easy targets. You reduce almost everything, as I reduce you now. Tell me, how does it feel? You're really worried. You say sex will be virtual. The casting couch, virtual. But you know as well as I do that all the other will continue, you betcha, so why are you worried? You fear your favorite positions are endangered. Will become obsolete. You believe you have more to lose than other people in other times. You romanticize the good old days-- the record skipping those nights long ago while you were making love, while you were having real sex with-- Hey, was that me? The Rolling Stones crooning: "I see a red door and I want it painted black, painted black, painted black...." Want it painted black. Or: "Brown Sugar, how come you dance so good, dance so good, dance so good...???" You want to conserve everything. You worship false prophets. You're sick over your (dwindling) reputation. You're so cavalier, offering your hand.... Jenny Holzer: "The future is stupid." I remember the poet-dinosaurs that evening at the dinner table munching on their leafy greens, going extinct even as they spoke, whispering "language poetry" (that was the evil that night), shuddering. You fear the electronic ladyland. Want it painted black. You're afraid of junk food. The real junk food and the metaphoric junk food the media feeds you. Want it painted black...painted black. You fear the stylist (as you have defined style) will perish. You consider certain art forms to be debased and believe that in the future all true artists will disappear. Why do you believe other forms to be inferior to your own? You consider certain ways of thinking about literature to be debased. You can't decide whether they're too rigorous or too reckless, or both. Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Harold Bloom et fils--make my day. You think me unladylike. Hysterical. Maybe crazy. Unreadable. You put me in your unreadable box where I am safe. Where I am quiet. More ladylike. In your disdainful box labeled "experimental." Labeled "do not open." Labeled "do not review." You see a red door and you want it painted black. No more monoliths. You who said "hegemony" and "domino theory" and "peace with honor." All the deaths for nothing. All the dark roads you've led us down. No more. The future: where we're braced always for the next unspeakable monstrous way to die--or to kill. All the dark deserted roads you've led me down, grabbing at my breasts, tearing at my shirt, my waistband: first date. Second date: This is how to write a book. Third date: Good girl! Let's publish it!!! Brown Sugar, how come you dance so good? Fourth date: Will you marry me? You fear the future, OK. You fear anything new. Anything that disrupts your sense of security and self. Everything threatens you. Where is the change over the course of the thing in the hero? Where is the hero? Where's the conflict? Where the hell is the denouement? I see your point. But haven't you asked us to write your fiction for just a little too long now? Couldn't we-- Couldn't we, maybe just possibly, coexist? Why does my existence threaten yours? It's been too long now that you've asked me to be you. Insisted I be you. Lighten up. Don't be so afraid. Put up your hand. Say: Bunny, Alfred, Harold, bye-bye. You fear. You fear the television. You loathe and adore the television. You feel numbed and buzzed by so much electronics. Numbed and buzzed by so much future. I'm getting a little tired of this "you" and "I." Still I am learning a few new things about you--and about me. The future of literature. The death of the novel. You love, for some reason, the large, glitzy questions and statements. And now we've all been gathered here, in this nice journal, to write on the assigned topic. But the question bores me-- and all the usual ways of thinking and speaking and writing anymore. I'm sorry you are so afraid. You want it to be something like the movie 2001, the future. You want it to be ludicrous, the future, easily dismissable. Like me. If only I didn't dance so good. You demand to know, How come you dance so good, dance so good, dance so good...??? You can't see a place for yourself in it and it frightens you. You dig in your heels as a result. Spend all your considerable intelligence and energy conserving, preserving, holding court, posturing, tenaciously holding on, now as you munch your last green leaves, yum. Where is the resolution of the conflict? Where the fuck is the conflict? What if a book might also include, might also be, the tentative, the hesitant, the doubt you most fear and despise? Lyn Hejinian: "Closure is misanthropic." Fear of growth, fear of change, fear of breaking one's own mold, fear of disturbing the product, fear of ridicule, fear of indifference, fear of failure, fear of invisibility, fear of, fear of, fear of.... You say that language will cease to be respected, will no longer move us. But we're already becoming numb thanks to what you are afraid to give up. What you flood the market with. Soyinka: "I am concerned about preserving a special level of communication, a level very different from Oprah Winfrey." Wish: That all Oprah Winfrey fiction be put to bed now. Its fake psychologies, its "realisms." Its pathetic 2 plus 2. Language of course has an enormous capacity to lie, to make false shapes, to be glib, to make common widgets, three parts this and two parts that. Wish: That all the fiction of lies be put to bed. That the dishonesty running rampant through much contemporary fiction be recognized as such. What deal must I strike in order to be published by you? What pose, bargain, stance, is it I must strike with you now? What mold do you make of me to pour your elixir, your fluid into, and then reward? The bunny mold? The kitten mold? The flower mold? The damaged flower mold? Pregnant at twelve, illiterate, but with a twist? The gay mold? The white trash mold? The battered child mold? The bad girl mold? Paint me black. Paint me Latina. Paint me Native American. Paint me Asian and then pour me into your mold. Use me. Co-opt me. Market me. Debase me and in the future I shall rise anew out of your cynicism and scorn--smiling, lovely, free. I know a place that burns brighter than a million suns. Wish list: That the business people who have taken over the publishing houses will focus themselves elsewhere and leave the arts alone again. Not to own or colonize or dominate.... Despite all efforts to tame it, manage it, control it, outsmart it, language resists your best efforts; language is still a bunch of sturdy, glittering charms in the astonished hand. A utopia of possibility. A utopia of choice. And I am huddled around the fire of the alphabet, still. Even though you say one word next to the other will cease to be cherished. You say rap music is poison. Hypertext is poison. You want it painted black. Even though you call me sentimental-- on the hand girly-girl, on the other hand loud-mouthed bitch, on the one hand interesting and talented writer, on the other hand utterly out-of-touch idealist, romantic--it is you who wants the nineteenth century back again. When things were dandy for you, swell. You want to believe in the old coordinates, the old shapes. To believe in whatever it was you believed in then. You were one of the guys who dictated the story, sure, I remember. Who made up the story and now go teaching it all over the place. But even then, when you sat around making it up, even then, my friend, it had nothing to do with me. With my world. With what I saw and how I felt. Wish: That all graduate writing programs with their terminal degrees, stop promoting such tiresome recipes for success or go (financially) bankrupt. Your false crescendos. Climaxes. False for me, at any rate. The future is all the people who've ever been kept out, singing. In the future everything will be allowed. So the future is for you, too. Not to worry. But not only for you. For you, but not only for you. Not to discard the canon, but to enlarge it. No more monoliths. No more Mick Jaggers. No more O.J. Simpsons. No more James Joyces. No more heroes. Everything threatens you. Hacks, hackers, slacks, slackers, cybergirls with their cybercurls and wiles, poets of every sort. Rock bands with girls. You believe your (disappearing) time represents some last golden age of enlightenment, to be guarded, protected, reproduced against the approaching mindlessness, depravity, electronic states of America. But maybe as you become more and more threatened, you'll take a few more risks yourself. Who knows? Anything is possible in the future. Wish list: That the homogeneity end. That the mainstream come to acknowledge, for starters, the thousand refracted, disparate beauties out there. That the writers and the readers stop being treated by the mainstream houses like idiot children. That the business people get out and stop imposing their "taste" on everyone. Wish: That as writers we be aware of our desire to incorporate, even unconsciously, the demands and anxieties of publishers and reject them, the demands and anxieties of the marketplace. That the business people go elsewhere. Market me. Promote me. Sanitize me. Co-opt me. Plagiarize me. Market me harder. Wish list: That the grade inflation for a certain kind of writing stop, and that the middlebrow writers assume their middle position so that everyone else might finally have a place too. Be considered seriously too. Be read, too. Paint me black. Paint me Latina. Paint me Chinese. Pour me into your mold and sell me harder. Fuck me (over) harder. Those of us jockeying for position in the heavens, intent on forever, major reputations, major motion pictures and $$$$$$$$, life after life after life after death, forget about it. Wish: That straight while males consider the impulse to cover the entire world with their words, fill up every page, every surface, everywhere. Thousand-page novels, tens and tens of vollmanns--I mean volumes. Not to own or colonize or dominate anymore. "We'll we've been kept from ourselves too long, don't you think?" an old woman in Central Park says to a friend. Two women in the park at dusk. Turn the beat around: The pauses and rhythms and allowances of Laurie Anderson. The glow of Jenny Holzer. The ranting and passion of Courtney Love. Brilliance of Susan Howe. Brilliance of Erin Moure. Theresa Cha. Visionary P.J. Harvey. The future is feminine, for real, this time. The future is Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte and Gertrude Stein still. The future is still Maya Deren and Billie Holliday. Language is a rose and the future is still a rose opening. It is beautiful there in the future. Irreverent, wild. The future is women, for real this time. I'm sorry, but it's time you got used to it. Reading on a train by the light the river gives. The woman next to me asleep. Two plastic bags at her feet. Lulling, lovely world. And I am witness to it all--that slumber-- and then her awakening--so vulnerable, sensation streaming back, the world returned, the river and the light the river gives, returning language, touch, and smell. The world retrieved. I am privileged to be next to her as she moves gracefully from one state to the next, smiling slightly. I recognize her delight. It is taken away, and it is given back. The miracle and mystery of this life in one middle-aged black woman on the Metro North next to me. The Hudson River widening. Let all of this be part of the story too. A woman dreaming next to water. The future: all the dreams we've been kept from. All the things yet to dream. An opening of possibility. A land of a thousand dances. I want sex and hypersex and cybersex, why not? The river mysteriously widening, as she opens her eyes. We can say, if we like, that the future will be plural. Our voices processed through many systems--or none at all. A place where a thousand birds are singing. "The isle is full of noises..." A place without the usual dichotomies. No phony divisions between mind and body, intelligence and passion, nature and technology, private and public, within and without, male and female. May we begin a dialogue there in the future. May we learn something from each other. Electronic writing will help us think about impermanence, facility, fragility and freedom, spatial intensities, irreverences, experimentation, new worlds, clean slates. Print writing will allow us new respect for the mark on the page, the human hand, the erasure, the hesitation, the mistake. Electronic writing will give us a deeper understanding of the instability of texts, of worlds. Print writing will remind us of our love for the physical, for the sensual world. And for the light only a book held in one's hands can give. The book taken to bed or the beach--the words dancing with the heat and the sea-- and the mouth now suddenly on my salty neck. Electronic writing shall inspire magic. Print writing shall inspire magic. Ways to heal: "Intoxicated with Serbian nationalist propaganda, one charge is that X took part in the murder of a Muslim civilian, F, by forcing another Muslim to bite off F's testicles." What is a book and how might it be reimagined, opened up, transformed to accommodate all we've seen, all we've been hurt by, all that's been given, all that's been taken away: "...deliberately infecting subjects with fatal diseases, killing 275,000 of the elderly, the deformed and other 'useless eaters' through the guise of euthanasia, and killing 112 Jews simply to fill out a university skeleton collection." No more monoliths. No more gods. "Let us go then, you and I...." No more sheepish, mindless devotion. No more quiet supplication. All the dark roads you've led us down no more. You will call me naive, childlike, irreverent, idealistic, offensive, outrageous, defiant at times, because I do not believe in a literature of limitation, in a future of limitation. I annoy you with this kind of talk, I know. You've told me many times before. You'd like me to step into my quiet box. You're so cavalier, as you offer your hand. It sure looks like prose, but it's poetry. It sure seems to be poetry, but I think it's a novel. It just looks like a mess, really, a lot of ranting and raving and discontinuous sad and happy stuff-- but it's an essay--about the future. The future. Possibility will reign. My students poised on some new threshold. We're too diversified, we're too fractured, all too close in proximity suddenly--one world. One wild world, Free of categories, free of denominations, dance and fiction and performance and installation and video and poetry and painting--one world--every hyper- and cyber- And in upstate New York a woman sees fields of flax and iris and cattails and dreams of making paper. And dreams of creating an Art Farm--a place just for experimenting with unusual indigenous fibers, a real space for bookbinding, an archive, a library, a gallery. Dream: That this new tolerance might set a tone, give example. This openness in acceptance of texts, of forms, this freedom, this embrace will serve as models for how to live. Will be the model for a new world order-- in my dream. A way to live together better--in my dream. Godard: "A film like this, it's a bit as if I wanted to write a sociological essay in the form of a novel, and all I had to do it with was notes of music. Is that what cinema is? And am I right to continue doing it?" But I do believe, and no doubt childishly, unquestioningly, in the supremacy of beauty, in pattern, in language, as a child believes in language, in diversity, in the possibility of justice-- even after everything we have seen-- in the impulse to speak-- even after everything. "Peder Davis, a bouncy, tow-headed 5-year-old, shook his head and said, 'I would tell him: You shoot down this building? You put it back together. And I would say, You redo those people.'" One hundred and sixty-eight dead in Oklahoma bombing. "Peder said he drew 'a house with eyes that was blue on the sides.' He explained, 'It was the building that exploded, in heaven.'" Wish: That writing again, through its audacity, generosity, possibility, irreverence, wildness, teach us how to better live. The world doesn't end. The smell of the air. The feel of the wind in late April. You can't have a genuine experience of nature except in nature. You can't have a genuine experience of language except in language. And for those of us for whom language is the central drama, the captivating, imaginative, open, flexible act, there can never be a substitute or a replacement. Language continually opening new places in me. A picture of a bird will never be a bird. And a bird will never be a picture of a bird. So relax. The world doesn't end, my friend. So stop your doomsday song. Or Matthew Arnold: " The end is everywhere: Art still has truth, take refuge there." All will perish, but not this: language opening like a rose. And many times I have despaired over the limits of language, the recalcitrance of words that refuse to yield, won't glimmer, won't work anymore. All the outmoded forms. Yet I know it is a part of it, I know that now; it's part of the essential mystery of the medium--and that all of us who are in this thing for real have to face this, address this, love this, even. The struggles with shape, with silence, with complacency. The impossibility of the task. You say destined to perish, death of the novel, end of fiction, over and over. But Matthew Arnold, on the cusp of another century, dreams: art. And I say faced with the eternal mysteries, one, if so inclined, will make fictive shapes. What it was like to be here. To hold your hand. An ancient impulse, after all. As we reach, trying to recapture an original happiness, pleasure, peace-- Reaching-- The needs that language mirrors and engenders and satisfies are not going away. And are not replaceable. The body with its cellular alphabet. And, in another alphabet, the desire to get that body onto the page. There will be works of female sexuality, finally. Feminine shapes. All sorts of new shapes. Language, a rose, opening. It's greater than we are, than we'll ever be. That's why I love it. Kneeling at the altar of the impossible. The self put back in its proper place. The miracle of language. The challenge and magic of language. Different than the old magic. I remember you liked to saw women in half and put them back together, once. Configure them in ways most pleasing to you. You tried once to make language conform. Obey. You tried to tame it. You tried to make it sit, heel, jump through hoops. You like to say I am reckless. You like to say I lack discipline. You say my work lacks structure. But nothing could be farther from the truth. In spite of everything, my refusal to hate you, to take you all that seriously, to be condescended to-- Still, too often I have worried about worldly things. Too often have I worried about publishing, about my so-called career, fretted over the so-so writers who are routinely acclaimed, rewarded, given biscuits and other treats-- this too small prison of self where I sometimes dwell. Too often I have let the creeps upset me. The danger of the sky. The danger of April. If you say language is dying.... Susan Howe: "Poetry is redemption from pessimism." April in the country. Already so much green. So much life. So much. Even with half the trees still bare. Poking up through the slowly warming earth, the tender shoots of asparagus. Crocus. Bloodroot. This vulnerable and breakable heart. As we dare to utter something, to commit ourselves, to make a mark on a page or a field of light. To incorporate this dangerous and fragile world. All its beauty. All its pain. To not only tolerate but welcome work that is other than the kind we do. You who said "hegemony" and "domino theory" and "peace with honor." To incorporate the ache of Vietnam, the mistake of it, incapable of being erased or changed. To invent forms that might let that wound stand-- If we've learned anything, yet. Summer 1885 Brother and Sister's Friend-- "Sweet Land of Liberty" is a superfluous Carol till it concerns ourselves-- then it outrealms the Birds... Your Hollyhocks endow the House, making Art's inner Summer, never Treason to Nature's. Nature will be closing her Picnic when you return to America, but you will ride Home by sunset, which is far better. I am glad you cherish the Sea. We correspond, though I never met him. I write in the midst of Sweet-Peas and by the side of Orioles, and could put my hand on a Butterfly, only he withdraws. Touch Shakespeare for me. "Be not afraid. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not." Fifty years now since World War II. She sits in the corner and weeps. And hurt not. Six million dead. "Well, we've been kept from ourselves long enough, don't you think?" We dare to speak. Trembling, and on the verge. Extraordinary things have been written. Extraordinary things will continue to be written. Nineteen ninety-five: Vinyl makes its small comeback. To the teenage music freak, to the classical music fiend and to the opera queen, CDs are now being disparaged as producing too cold, too sanitary a sound. Vinyl is being sought out again for its warmer, richer quality. Wish: That we be open-minded and generous. That we fear not. That the electronic page understand its powers and its limitations. Nothing replaces the giddiness one feels at the potential of hypertext. Entirely new shapes might be created, different ways of thinking, of perceiving. Kevin Kelly, executive director of Wired magazine: "The first thing discovered by Jaron Lanier [the virtual reality pioneer] is to say what is reality? We get to ask the great questions of all time: What is life? What is human? What is civilization? And you ask it not in the way the old philosophers asked it, sitting in armchairs, but by actually trying it. Let's try and make life. Let's try and make community." And now the Extropians, who say they can achieve immortality by downloading the contents of the human brain onto a hard disk.... So turn to the students. Young visionaries. Who click on the Internet, the cyberworld in their sleep. Alvin Lu: citizen of the universe, the whole world at his fingertips. In love with the blinding light out there, the possibility, world without end, his love of all that is the future. Let the fictions change shape, grow, accommodate. Let the medium change if it must; the artist persists. You say all is doomed, but I say Julio Cortazar. I say Samuel Beckett. I say Marcel Proust. Virginia Woolf. I say Garcia Lorca and Walt Whitman. I say Mallarme. I say Ingeborg Bachmann. The Apu Trilogy will lie next to Hamlet. Vivre sa vie will live next to Texts for Nothing. These fragmented prayers. Making love around the fire of the alphabet. Wish: That we not hurt each other purposely anymore. A literature of love. A literature of tolerance. A literature of difference. Saving the best of what was good in the old. Not to discard indiscriminately, but not to hold on too tightly either. To go forward together, unthreatened for once. The future is Robert Wilson and JLG. The future is Martha Graham, still. The vocabularies of dance, of film, of performance. The disintegration of categories. If you say that language is dying, then what do you know of language? I am getting a little tired of this you-and-I bit. But it tells me one important thing: that I do not want it to have to be this way. I do not believe it has to continue this way-- you over there alternately blustery and cowering, me over here, defensive, angry. Wish: A sky that is not divided. A way to look at the screen of the sky with its grandeur, its weather, its color, its patterns of bird flight, its airplanes and accidents and poisons, its mushroom clouds. Its goldfinches frescoed against an aqua-blue dome. Wish: That the sky go on forever. That we stop killing each other. That we allow each other to live. April 1995 in New York City and the long-awaited Satyajit Ray Festival begins. For years he's been kept from us. Who decides, finally, what is seen, what is read, and why? And how much else has been deleted, omitted, neglected, ignored, buried, treated with utter indifference and contempt. And in conversation with the man, my friend, a famous poet in fact, and the topic moved to someone we both knew who had just been operated on; and he said "masectomy," and I said back, "Yes, a mastectomy, a mastectomy," and he said "masectomy" like "vasectomy," and I said only under my breath, "It's mastectomy, idiot," ashamed, embarrassed and a little intimidated, that was the worst part, a little unsure. That it made me question what I of course knew that was the worst part-- because of his easy confidence saying "masectomy," his arrogance, he hadn't even bothered to learn the right word, a poet, for God's sake, a man who worked with words, who should have known the right word for removal of a breast, don't you think? Mastectomy. The undeniable danger of the sky. Adrienne Rich: "Poetry means refusing the choice to kill or die." Wish: That the straight white male give in just a little more gracefully. Call in its Michael Douglases, its suspect Hollywood, its hurt feelings, its fear--move over some. After your thousands of years of affirmative action, give someone else a chance--just a chance. The wish is for gentleness. The wish is for allowances. "What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use...." Wish: That the typical New Yorker story become the artifact it is and assume its proper place in the artifact museum, and not be mistaken for something still alive. Well we've just about had it with all the phony baloney, don't you think? That the short story and the novel as they evolve and assume new, utterly original shapes might be treated gently. And with optimism. That is the wish. That hypertext and all electronic writing still in its infancy be treated with something other than your fear and your contempt. That, poised on the next century, we fear not. Make no grand pronouncements. You say that language is dying, will die. And at times I have felt for you, even loved you. But I have never believed you. The Ebola virus is now. The Hanta virus HIV. And that old standby, malaria. Live while you can. Tonight, who knows, may be our last. We may not even make the millennium, so don't worry about it so much. All my friends who have died holding language in their throats, into the end. All my dead friends. Cybernauts return from time to time wanting to see a smile instead of a colon followed by a closed parenthesis--the online sign for a smile. When someone laughs out loud they want to hear real laughter in the real air, not just the letters L.O.L. in front of them. Ah, yes. World while there is world. A real bird in the real sky and then perhaps a little prose poem or something in the real sky, or the page or the screen or the human heart, pulsing. "I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes. The blackbird whistling Or just after," One world. The future of literature is utopic. As surely as my friends Ed and Alan will come this weekend to visit bearing rose lentils. As long as one can say "rose," can say "lentil." Gary dying, saying "Kappa maki." You say, over. But I say, no. I say faith and hope and trust and forever right next to wretched and hate and misery and hopeless. In the future we will finally be allowed to live, just as we are, to imagine, to glow, to pulse. Let the genres blur if they will. Let the genres redefine themselves. Language is a woman, constantly in the process of opening. Vibrant, irresistible, incandescent. Whosoever has allowed the villanelle to enter them or the sonnet. Whosoever has let in one genuine sentence, one paragraph, has felt that seduction like a golden thread being pulled slowly through one. Wish: That forms other than those you've invented or sanctioned through your thousands of years of privilege might arise and be celebrated. "Put another way, it seems to me that we have to rediscover everything about everything. There is only one solution, and that is to turn one's back on American cinema.... Up until now we have lived in a closed world. Cinema fed on cinema, imitating itself. I now see that in my first films I did things because I had already seen them in the cinema. If I showed a police inspector drawing a revolver from his pocket, it wasn't because the logic of the situation I wanted to describe demanded it, but because I had seen police inspectors in other films drawing revolvers at this precise moment and in this precise way. The same thing has happened in painting. There have been periods of organization and imitation and periods of rupture. We are now in a period of rupture. We must turn to life again. We must move into modern life with a virgin eye." Jean-Luc Godard, 1966 Wish: that Alvin Lu might wander in the astounding classroom of the world through time and space, endlessly inspired, endlessly enthralled by what he finds there. That he be allowed to reinvent freely, revel freely. My professor once and now great friend Barbara Page, out there too, ravenous, furious, and without fear, inventing whole new worlds, ways of experiencing the text. New freedoms. The world doesn't end, says Charles Simic. Engraved on our foreheads in ash, turned into a language of stars or birdsong across a vast sky; it stays. Literature doesn't end-- but it may change shapes, be capable of things we cannot even imagine yet. Woolf: "What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up the scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry." Charlotte Bronte: "My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in the livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was--liberty." The future will be gorgeous and reckless, and words, those luminous charms, will set us free again. If only for a moment. Whosoever has allowed the language of lovers to enter them, the language of wound and pain and solitude and hope. Whosoever has dug in the miracle of the earth. Mesmerizing dirt, earth, word. Allowed love in. Allowed despair in. Words are the ginger candies my dying friends have sucked on. Or the salve of water. Precious words, contoured by silence. Informed by the pressure of the end. Words are the crow's-feet embedded in the skin of the father I love. Words are like that to me, still. Words are the music of her hair on the pillow. Words are the lines vibrating in the forest or in the painting. Pressures that enter us--bisect us, order us, disorder us, unite us, free us, help us, hurt us, cause anxiety, pleasure, pain. Words are the footprints as they turn away in the snow. There is no substitute for the language I love. My father, one state away but still too far, asks over the telephone if I might take a photo of this bluebird, the first I have ever seen, because he hears how filled with delight I am by this fleeting sighting. But it's so tiny, it flies so fast, it's so hard to see. So far away. Me, with my small hunk of technology, pointing. With my nostalgia machine. My box that says fleeting, my box that says future, My pleasure machine. My weeping machine that dreams: keep. This novel that says desire and fleeting and unfinished. Unfinished and left that way. Unfinished, not abandoned. Unfinished, not because of death or indifference or loss of faith, or nerve, just unfinished. Not to draw false conclusions anymore. Not to set up false polarities. Unfinished and left that way, if necessary. To allow everyone to write, to thrive, to live. The Baltimore oriole returned from its American tropics at the edge of this frame now. I wait. On this delicious precipice. And nothing replaces this hand moving across the page, as it does now, intent on making a small mark and allowing it to stand on this longing surface. Writing oriole. Imagining freedom. All that is possible. April in the country. My hands in the dark earth, or the body of a woman, or an ordinary, gorgeous sentence. Whosoever has let the hand linger on a burning thigh, or a shining river of light.... Whosoever has allowed herself to be dazzled by the motion of the alphabet, Or has let music into the body. Or has allowed music to fall onto the page. Wish: To live and allow others to live. To sing and allow others to sing--while we can. And hurt not. Fleeting and longing moment on this earth. I close my eyes and hear the intricate chamber music of the world. An intimate, complicated, beautiful conversation in every language, in every tense, in every possible medium and form--incandescent. --for Alvin, Barbara, and Judith 1 June 1995 Like the clarinet with the flute, like the French horn with the oboe, like the violin and the piano-- take the melody from me, when it's time. 25 April 1995 Germantown, New York A walk around the loop and I notice the bloodroot has begun to bloom. A bluebird, two bluebirds! the first I've ever seen, over by the convent. Before my eyes I see an infant clasping a small bird as depicted in the Renaissance painting and sculpture. The world begins again. In this vision. In the words bloodroot and bluebird. And the goldfinches too are suddenly back. Today I saw three enormous turtles sunning themselves at a pond. The bliss of being on leave from teaching is beyond description. I recall Dickinson when someone mused that time must go very slowly for her, saying "Time! Why time was all I wanted!" And so ditto. Blissful time. Writing, walking every day. I am keeping depression at bay, mania in check. All private sufferings and hurt are somehow more manageable here in solitude. The moment seems all now. The imaginative event, the natural event (two wild turkeys in the woods), the sexual event, and the constantly changing and evolving forms in language for all of this. John sends a note to remind me that my essay is due for the Review of Contemporary Fiction on May 1, but that I may have a small extension. I should be finishing up Defiance but all I can think about are my erotic etudes-- again feeling on the threshold of something amazing and out of reach. I'm extremely excited--hard to describe-- my brain feels unhinged.... I must make a note as to where to move the daffodils, the iris. The earth in my hands. A wand of forsythia like a light in my hands. I think of Barbara an hour away, the glowing glyphs coming off the screen in her study. The whole world--luminous, luminous. We were lucky to be here. Even in pain and uncertainty and rage and fear--some fear. In exhaustion. Too much energy has gone into this Brown/Columbia decision. Where shall I end up? I have only partially succeeded in keeping it all in its proper place. I've had to work too hard to keep my mind at the proper distance. It takes its toll. I've needed the space to think, to dream other things. It hardly matters today though; another etude brews. The RCF essay now in the back of my head. What to say? What can be said? How to use it to learn something, explore something I need to explore. When thinking of literature, the past and the present all too often infuriate me: everyone, everything that's been kept out. The future won't, can't be the same and yet...one worries it. What I wonder most is if there is a way, whether there might be a way in this whole wide world, to forgive them. Something for the sake of my own work, my own life I need to do-- have needed to do a long time. Perhaps in my essay I will make an attempt, the first movement toward some sort of reconciliation, at any rate. If it's possible. To set up the drama that might make it possible. This breakable heart. April. How poised everything seems. How wonderfully ready. And I, too, trembling--and on the verge...."