Tag: writing

A meditation on life and death: Beastlife by J’Lyn Chapman

Once I became aware that this book existed, I knew I had to have it. So I ordered it immediately.

When it arrived and I went down to the bookstore to retrieve it (that is, release it from the bookseller who could not refrain from glancing through it as if he was regretting having to let it go), trusting some odd intuition that it might hint at something I was looking for. But, to be fair, I had little idea what to expect.

J’Lyn Chapman’s Beastlife is very small, fitting into the palm of the hand, or better yet, a pocket. An ideal companion for a walk in a park or natural area. I bought it with the idea that it might offer an unconventional provocation for a process of loosening, prying open, the closed window between my loss and the grief that I cannot begin to touch yet. At this point, in the first months following my parents’ deaths, mourning feels more like an empty space. Written of the body, mine and theirs. Confused. Contorted. Corporeal.

2016-08-21 19.53.09Not everyone would look to a book containing photographs of dead birds (albeit small, grainy black and white images), to find a voice for sorrow. For me it makes a strange sort of sense. It sounds morbid, but hopefully, if I manage to put to word the images that haunt my memories of my mother’s last month and days, I will be able to illustrate the beauty. If I have learned anything yet in these early days following the first significant losses of my life, it is that making sense of the death of those closest to us is at once universal and specific. And I lost both parents. Two very different relationships, two different circumstances, two separate yet entwined experiences of grief.

Of course, there is much more to Beastlife than photographs of birds.

This collection of essays—poetic meditations—on life and death, birds and beasts, and our human interaction with the natural world offers evocative, yet insistent reminders that we should strive to observe, engage with, and exist in this world with grace and compassion. Not that we, as humans, always succeed. Sometimes we are careless. And sometimes we are unthinkably cruel—inhuman even.

Death is a theme throughout, up close and afar. And violence too. Chapman explores the ways we intersect with nature—as hunters, naturalists, observers of atrocities, and, most fundamentally perhaps, bearers of new life. This tiny volume challenges the readers to reflect on our place in the cycle of life, in the beauty and the pain.

For me, at this time, when death is very much on my mind, there is an odd comfort in these pages.

The volume opens with “Bear Stories,” a series of very short pieces; raw, visceral prose poems that draw on the intimate complexity of our connection to the natural world. Bound with water, blood, fur, and feather the beauty is shocking, brutal, sublime. Drawn from an earlier longer form chapbook, these “stories” invite us to consider the world at gut level.

In the dark, a body is a pond. The night birds make hollow sounds, and then there is a sound of the mouth, pulled back, curled out. And so on. Fur catches the moon as it comes out barbed and dark. A vertical cut whines under the ribs, and the long grass keeps it from you.

The micro essays and meditations that comprise the central portion of  Beastlife are remarkably rich, drawing on a range of literary and critical resources. “A Catalogue and Brief Comments on the Archive Compiled and Written by the Ministry of Sorrow to Birds,” for instance, takes inspiration from Ovid, Heidegger, Barthes, Sebald, Tennyson and more. Despite its seemingly whimsical name, this is a more explicit meditation on death and dying framed against images, photographic and descriptive, of dead birds. The ministry of the title is an imagined institution dedicated to a form of archival lamentation, an understanding of death and mourning through the collection of photographic specimens. They seek and gather images into a growing chronicle of sorrow:

We were stopped, and looked down, in the walk by the bird, flies, cigarette, glint of coin. We saw the futility in keeping—the ornaments in hydriotaphia and their obsidian speaking something of its keeper. But the detritus we die alongside or do not die alongside, the litter jettisoned from our death and dying bodies or we die too quickly to regard, utter the currency of living things.

And there is this discomfort: the spectacle. Its hard edges. We have bodies too, we say, and we want them wrapped in webby husk, a film, a membrane huddled into self. But our bodies are still over-looked by our own flânerie, in which the world, and its subtle schism of that which is alive and that which is dead, becomes our final coup for all we have lost in the leaving. All the unmeasured ether, it flames with our light.

In death we are confronted with the fragility of the body—the body of the one who has died and, in reflection, our own. In her next essay, “We Continue to Unskin: On Taxidermy,” following Truth’s advice to Petrarch to constantly meditate upon his own mortality, Chapman contemplates mortality and the miracle of immortality which, paradoxically involves an engagement with death. Structured along lines from a poem by Paul Celan, this journey takes us through the a more familiar archive of natural history. From the delicate art of the taxidermist, preserving the form and imitation of natural life in the animal’s natural habitat, to the narrator’s own relentless search to find her place in the urban spaces she inhabits, the promise of immortality lies, of course, in language.

And yet every sentence has its beginnings and each animal, posed as it is in flight or in fright has its past-tense. Beauty, eternal gesture. I want to write sentences that stretch on toward desperation, as in the fugal voices that become discordant but still lovely, then recollected in harmony. At the apotheosis of the desperation, the line would break into clause or new sentence and the break would be the point of discord rather than calm, and still the dissolution would be reprieve, as when the healthy mind refuses any more annihilation and in its descent decides to rest. But there must be sentences that travel toward the desperate one. There must be travel.

The last entry, “Our Final Days,” echoes in form the contained short prose pieces of “Bear Stories,” but here the brutality is decidedly human—dispatches of cruelty, violence, and injury are played against the hope that some semblance of beauty in nature may preserve us. It’s a faint hope, a lament of an entirely different order. It’s too easy to get wrapped up in the disheartening news that floods our lives through our TVs and news feeds. Sometimes I find myself relieved that my parents will not see any more of the potential darkness that seems to ever loom on the horizon. But then I remember that I have two children. Life goes on. I reorient myself to the future again.

There is a woeful inadequacy that washes over me when I read more conventional memoirs of loss and explorations of grief. I keep peeking into odd corners, turning over rocks to see what crawls out. Reading books like Beastlife.

I keep the other poetic evocations of grief, the books I am amassing, close at hand. I read them to stir up and open the gates that are still secured against the flood of choked tears, the barricades of numbed sadness, that do not seem to be able to allow more than a slow leak in occasional shuddered gasps. At the moment mourning feels more like emptiness. I feel a need to find a starting point with death, with these particular deaths, with watching each one on their deathbeds, before I can find and begin to work through the grief.

Beastlife by J’Lyn Chapman is published by Calamari Archive.

What we read: A reflection on gender, language and necessity

My astonishment – and what is really my anxiety (my indisposition) come from what, in fact, is not a lack (I can’t describe this as a lack, my life is not disarrayed), but a *wound*, something that has harmed love’s very source.
– Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

A comment made this morning on a post I wrote just over a year and half ago, has made me stop to consider what I am reading at this moment and why. The original post is called Gendering my bookshelves, a look at the gender of the authors I tend to read which were, at the time, and continue to be, predominately male. In the meantime I have read more female writers than I might have anticipated, but I have read more in general. So the ratio is perhaps closer to 80/20 than the 90/10 I figured last year.

This is Women in Translation Month, a project I respect and support, but I am unlikely to contribute with the same intensity as before. Truth is, despite a nice selection of titles that I had collected with this month in mind, I am not certain I will manage to read many. In fact I am close to putting my first effort Now and At the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques aside. Don’t get me wrong, this piece of experimental nonfiction about a traveling palliative care team in rural Portugal is quite wonderful. But not right now. These are portraits of death and dying. And to read it so soon after watching both of my parents die hurts like hell.

I am relatively new to the business of maintaining a book blog and, of late, much of my review focus has actually moved off of my blog to online magazines. But what is a literary blog if not an opportunity to write about what one is reading? Sometimes that includes review copies and new releases, but that type of reading comes with pressures and can cut into other reading that one is drawn to. Themes like Women In Translation, German Lit, Spanish Lit all offer opportunities to open up and encourage conversation about literatures that one may or may not otherwise consider.

But sometimes our reading is directed by the forces and idiosyncrasies and, of course, the tragedies of our own lives.

At the moment, I want to read two different types of books–those that offer total distraction, and those that say something about grief and loss. That is where I am at, pure and simple. July was absorbed by hospital vigils and then, once my father finally passed, the immediate business of beginning to organize paperwork, notify institutions and prepare to apply for Probate. We have not even managed to plan a memorial of any kind. Over and over others have commented about how well I seem to be holding up…

2016-08-07 19.03.15But I’m not. The other night, reading Barthes’ Mourning Diary I found myself thinking, but this is different, he is so focused on his mother, my mourning is different. Is it? My father was injured and his death was slow. In the midst of it, my mother took sick and was gone within three days. My mother’s death, is a loss of an entirely different order than that of my father. She was my best friend. I could talk to her about anything. Without her I have no one else, no partner, and no friend as close. Although I have two children, I cannot burden them as they are each bearing their own grief. I woke up yesterday to the harsh recognition that I was trying to roll these two events, these two losses, these two individuals, these two unique relationships into one experience to be grieved as whole. But I cannot. They are separate events and they are one. Suddenly the magnitude of the task ahead is overwhelming.

So I will read and I will write. I want to write and publish something before time has a chance to edit it… a task inspired by Barthes and by Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. Women in Translation may or may not figure in the equation. In fact translation may not fit into much of my reading at all this month. So be it. Aside from Barthes, I have a memoir called When It Rains by Maggie MacKellar, a memoir that deals with two intersecting deaths, and I have ordered Love’s Work by Gillian Rose and Simon Critchley’s Very Little… Almost Nothing. Each one of these titles was suggested by Twitter/blogging contacts. I am open to more.

Finally I must say that I have been deeply moved by those who have reached out by email or on Twitter, publicly or through Direct Message, to offer condolences, good wishes, suggested reading and writerly support.

I am in mourning.

There will be words.

In uncertain terms – Proxies: Essays Near Knowing by Brian Blanchfield

This is a book braver than I am.

I am not even certain where to begin to unravel my reaction to reading this collection of essays. Until recently I was resisting the dawning recognition that what I needed to say—the subjects I wanted to explore—would be best met through essay/memoir writing. Or to put it another way, I realized that I have neither the patience nor aptitude for fiction. But what of the essay and its personalized variant, the memoir? I wasn’t even sure I liked the form. So I have learned to approach reading essays with an eye to writing. I read not simply for the joy of encountering well-crafted, intellectually and emotionally engaging prose. A work that excites me, in style, content, or both, invariably sends me to my current notebook where I spin, inward and outward, a cascade of thoughts, images, and ideas… fuel for my own scribblings.

Proxies, by the American poet and essayist Brian Blanchfield, is one such work.

proxiesSubtitled Essays Near Knowing, the pieces that comprise this collection were composed under a particular creative constraint. Blanchfield decided to refrain from seeking any guidance from authoritative sources during the writing process. Thus these essays were written unplugged, if you like. Of course, adopting a learned tone without fact checking (and we all do it, especially in conversation), necessitates allowing for a margin of error. Consequently, pages of “Corrections” addressing many of the resultant inaccuracies and inconsistencies, close out the book. However, Blanchfield also gives himself a secondary challenge in this project:

Having determined that this would be unresearched essaying, analytic but nonacademic, I was almost immediately drawn to a second constraint—or better, invitation: to stay with the subject until it gives onto an area of personal uneasiness, a site of vulnerability, and keep unpacking from there.

As he hits these points of reflection that effectively bend the essay toward memoir, there is, he admits, a certain fumbling allowed, stimulating a transition that, in its sometimes sudden movement, creates an energy that is dynamic, emotionally raw. What begins as a focused consideration of a topic, a concept, or theme, seems to turn personal in a heartbeat, and works its way through to a resolution, however ambivalent that may be. No grand narrative arcs here, only furtive digging through the fragmented moments of life, each essay preceded by the same caveat: Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source.

Blanchfield’s starting points are varied. As a poet, it is not surprising that many start with language and meaning: “On Propositionizing”, “On Confoundedness”, “On Abstraction”, “On the Ingénue”, “On the Near Term”. Some have more tangible contexts at the outset: “On Minutes”, “On the Leave” (as in the game of pool), “On Dossiers”. He often draws on specific images from his own life to set the stage, but those musings typically lead him much closer to the bone as the essay takes shape. Relationships with his parents, the tenuousness of his chosen profession, and his sexuality—his queerness of being—are common themes that regularly surface as he ventures into those areas of private anxiety and susceptibility.

As personal as he gets, and he can lay himself bare, these essays are rich with fascinating intellectual ideas, with references to philosophers, psychologists and, naturally, poets. Some essays are simple and relatively self-contained, while others seem to mutate, in the reading, as the author reaches for a subject that expands, like a pool of liquid, resisting the ordered shape one might anticipate. At best, at their most intriguing, these are essays meant to be experienced as much as read.

Take, for the sake of illustration, “On Minutes.” This piece begins, objectively, with a discussion of meeting minutes, the recorded, dispassionate account of the details of a meeting—no place for embellishment, dramatic flair. Expanding on this basic subject, Blanchfield recounts his own experience working as an executive assistant at a performing arts organization in Tuscon at a time when he and his partner were struggling to make ends meet on one salary. It was a job borne of necessity not desire to say the least. He slides from the drudgery of typing up minutes into memories of accompanying his mother to her office job on weekends as a young child, occupying himself creating stories while she worked, reading them aloud to her co-workers at the end of the day. These childhood creations are then parlayed into a link to the remembrance of his return to his mother’s home for his stepfather’s funeral. From there he passes into a reflection on “Paraphrase”, a poem by Hart Crane that, for Blanchfield, “gets the sudden, lights-out fact of death right.” At this point, what has become a quick dip into the territory of memoir, turns again and, as it shifts, the language of the essay slides into richly poetic territory with a meditation on the closing stanza of Crane’s poem in which the white head of the deceased is observed as a “paraphrase” among the roses on the wallpaper:

The word choice is inexplicable, querulous, oblique, just right. A paraphrase among the rows of roses—a relief receding there—renders their locked pattern a kind of language, but what can it say?; and the head in the place where the living being lay is nominated as this titular hermeneutic tool, useless as such without its objective genitive of. It cannot be said what original locution this paraphrase summarizes. A case, I think, for Crane, of Flesh Made Word again. A reversion. Revelation withdrawn.

The essay winds down with thoughts of Crane who, fittingly, worked an office typist; and the speculation that the imagined head on the bed might have been that of his lover’s father. Some strange, small circle, elegantly wrought from very humble beginnings. The essays in this book move like this, through memories, reflections, ideas and poetic contemplation.

One of the most profoundly moving pieces in the collection arises from Blanchfield’s attempt to address his relationship with his mother—once loving, now long strained by her inability to accept his sexuality. “On Peripersonal Space” begins with the notion that an individual’s concept of the self includes all the space within reach around his or her body. He hears a radio discussion with the authors of a book on the subject, a mother and son team, a collaboration that, within his own scope of experience, is unimaginable. Yet he finds it difficult to approach his desired subject, as much he feels it is essential that he make the attempt. This is a challenge I understand—writing about those with whom our relationships are close but complicated, is an uneasy task:

Since I began this project, I have tried a number of times to write about my mother and me, and have abandoned a few attempts already. If these essays are, in part, inroads to disinhibited autobiography, as I have come to claim they are, and demand they be, I feel the imperative to address the subject above all others. But ours is a relationship so deep and damaged and (still) so tenuous it has defied emergence.

So how to start? He takes the peripersonal space as a cue, beginning with an account of the closely bound emotional intimacy and playful games that he, as an only child, and his then divorced mother used to enjoy when he was young. His description and the psychological implications of their connection is startlingly frank and triggers a concern that I also share with respect to writing about close family members:

It is more than embarrassing to relate all of this. I come up against the inappropriateness of, for one thing, sharing what is only half mine to share. But is that partiality, expressed by that proportion—half of one—ethical, or healthy for a grown man? Roland Barthes has famously said that to be a writer is, essentially, to violate a primal taboo, to “play with the mother’s body.” No, I love Barthes and he is a signal influence on my conception of this very book; but the remark presumes a class and level of literacy I was not born into.

The resulting essay achieves a surrogate catharsis of sorts, but not between the author and his mother. The roots of their (as yet) unresolved divide lie deep in the American south where Blanchfield was raised in a Primitive Baptist family. He had to leave to live openly as a gay man, moving to New York City in his early twenties. The years that have passed, and the miles that have separated them have not healed the rift. Honestly sharing the pain of rejection, the frustration at his mother’s inability to come to any terms of respectful disapproval, and the sting of hearing her say “I shouldn’t have to choose between my God and my son” leaves a deep sorrow that lingers on the page.

Essayists are no strangers to the practice of blending intellectual and literary observations with autobiographical reflections. What Blanchfield seems to approach here is a means of allowing himself, as a writer, to push his way inward, passing from the factual (more or less), the abstract or the sentimental into the territory of the immediate, the raw, and the real. He touches nerves (his own) but avoids falling into two traps that can snare those who venture toward autobiographical writing: the artificial narrative and the open air confessional. At the most personal end of the spectrum, what he is sharing are unguarded moments of naked emotional vulnerability, decidedly queer, but recognizable and resonant to anyone who has lived, loved, won and lost.

For prospective or developing essayists, Proxies is, as a project, idiosyncratic, bold and illuminating. Barthes’ essays, as he admits, are an ever present influence and Blanchfield demonstrates a similar natural ease with the form. To be able to unfold ideas and follow their course without fact-checking is an interesting exercise in itself, useful at the very least in drafting an essay in its early stages. Lifewriting in this format offers ample reward for readers and some significant points of interest for those of us who struggle to achieve the balance between a story we want to explore and the open wounds that may not have quite healed—the truths that give a personal essay its soul.

For me, this book generated a series of provocations, flash points for my own writing, current and potential. I loved the way Blanchfield focuses in on ideas and uses them as pivot points to make his way from concept to experience and back to ideas. It took me, I confess, over a month to read this collection of twenty-four short essays. But in that time I lost both of my parents, the outcome of two intersecting, but unrelated series of events. I sat long at the bedsides of both my mother and father, witness to their final days. I want to attempt to capture the immediate experience, in its unfiltered rawness, before my memories begin to become distorted by time. I gleaned some possibilities, some instances of inspiration, some ideas to bring into my own project which will be, in its own way, necessarily imprecise, emotionally liable, and queer.

And that, to borrow from the title of the final essay, will suffice for the near term.

Proxies: Essays Near Knowing is published by Nightboat Books.

Beginning to find my voice: Reflections on publishing a piece of essay/memoir writing

We should only believe in our feelings, after the soul has been at rest from them; and express ourselves, not as we feel, but as we remember.
– Joseph Joubert, Pensées

Late last month I wrote about voice, about how I have recently been focusing more attention on voice; not only in literature, but as it pertains to meaning, sounds, and silences. I was, at that time, anticipating the publication of my first piece of non-review writing–not the first that I have written, there is a related piece, a parable, that will appear later this year–but rather the first to be published.

I was extremely anxious in advance of the release. I knew that I would be laying forth an aspect of my experience of being in the world that few people were aware of. I am not talking about my queer identity, that is something I have spoken of from time to time although it rarely impacts the books I chose to read and write about. I am referring to the fact that this short essay addresses my complicated relationship with my body in very bold terms.

It can be found here. (The journal that published my piece is under reconstruction so I have reproduced the essay below.)

Now that the piece is out there, granting me the necessary distance, I am extremely pleased with the results. It is raw and honest, but I feel comfortable that I have touched the heart of my experiences while maintaining a healthy and comfortable boundary. I am not a fan of confessional memoir/autobiographical fiction that tends to the revelation of excessive, unguarded intimate information. It is a delicate balance to measure vulnerability and self respect when writing about the personal details of one’s life. And, I would argue, it is essential to remember that there are limits to what we can ever really know about ourselves and if we remember that we can more honestly write from the heart.

Solitary daisyI have found that I am most comfortable leaning toward a more spare prose the closer I come to the self in my writing. I am hoping that it is a style, a voice if you like, that I can build on. But a detailed account of my life is not my goal in writing–my interest is more philosophical in nature.

I have to say that I am overwhelmed by the positive response to this piece. It is far beyond anything I could have hoped for. And I feel very excited about where I can go from here with further explorations. So much of my reading and the conversations that I’m having in the virtual sphere seem to be converging at this moment. Or perhaps I am simply in a fertile state of mind. It is not, however, an overnight phenomenon, these ideas have been growing for a long time, knocking around in awkward, unfinished form. I am grateful to everyone who has offered inspiration, support and encouragement to this point. I trust they know who they are.

May the conversations continue.

As published on Minor Literature[s], May 6, 2016.

Your Body Will Betray You — Joseph Schreiber

“From the inside out, but from which inside to which outside?”—Róbert Gál, On Wing

This is not the story of my life but the story of my living it, of my being in it.

And that’s a different story altogether.

I am, for lack of a better term, a differently gendered man. No, maybe there are better terms, more common terms—transgender, or queer, perhaps. I use these too. At least, when it’s expedient to do so or when I choose to take my place under a larger umbrella. But by their very inclusiveness, these terms are rendered senseless. Defining the self for one’s self requires an explicit ownership of the language employed. The words I embrace are mutable, evolving, even in the act of committing them to paper or speaking them aloud. Labels can only take us so far.

History is subjective. We can only know what we think we know.

And that isn’t very much at all.

This is what I do know:

I lived, for almost four decades, defined by the parameters of the body in which I was born. I recall the sensation of harbouring a fugitive being—an early social memory (at four? Five? Six?) This someone inside me was not with me, he was me. I saw him in my eyes and I wanted him gone. I wanted to be the girl my mother longed for—the one whose gender mattered solely because her first child, the sister I never knew, was stillborn.

I was not a tomboy. I did not wish to be a boy. I wanted to be the girl I confronted in the mirror, the one whose authenticity no one else questioned. I imagined that feeling female was something you learned, like tying your shoes or riding a bicycle. Yet, although I passed in the world of girls and women, this passing was a measured performance. The rules remained opaque.

The company of boys and men became a refuge—the space where my otherness was validated, where no one would ever question whether I was really female. Sexual attraction to men was a precious counterpoint to my persistent gender insecurity. Never mind that the romantic encounters between men in Mary Renault’s historical fiction held a far more desperate appeal that anything encountered in the pages of a typical boy-girl romance.  I reasoned that if I had a boyfriend, I must truly be female after all.

I married young and disappeared.

You have to understand, when I was growing up, in the 1960s and 70s in rural Canada, no one talked about ‘gender identity’ at all. And they certainly never suggested that it could differ from biological sex. Even now many choke on the concept, quote Bible and verse. My upbringing was liberal, neither fundamentalist nor homophobic, but still, my ‘out of placeness’ was my own, the faint light in the dark room. An old story, but I had no idea that there were others like me.

Self-defined gender insecurity continued to haunt me. It prescribed my path. Twice I walked away from graduate studies, turned down admission to law school, all because the more I exercised my intellect, the less energy I had to devote to maintaining the fragile equilibrium of being female in the world. I retreated to the most unequivocally female spaces I could imagine. Eventually, against my natural instincts, I decided to have children, and that was the beginning of the end—the beginning of the end of my ability to hang on to any reconciliation of my internal identity with the life I had constructed.

I fell apart.

Only in cobbling myself back together, in the aftermath of a breakdown, could I finally openly face the two fundamental notions that had driven me into mania—sexuality and gender. I realized that they were not going away, and that one could not make sense without the other.

Please note, in today’s world where trans* is appended to all manner of identities, where sexuality is no longer narrowly delineated and gender is something to defy, it may seem impossible to imagine that I could crack my head against the wall for so long before the light broke through. But mine was a different time.

I found myself in the library with a copy of Transgender Warriors and learned, for the very first time, what a few years of testosterone could do to transform the outside and fuel the inside of a female-born man. I understood, in that instant, that there was no other option. I finally had a name, a label for myself, and everything else started to fall into place.

I am not reckless. I knew there would be compromises. I knew what surgery could offer and what, at best, it could only approximate. I knew that the scalpel exacts more than its pound of flesh, that healing well is not the best revenge, and that there would be limits to the choices I would make. But none of that was on my mind as I waited for my first injection of the right hormones, the ones I had been craving, body and spirit, for so long.

That was fifteen years ago now. I was forty years old. And in puberty—even when you are old enough to know better—everything seems possible.

Today: 

On the street, I am invisible.

To see me, you would never suspect the truth of my history, the convoluted path to the dream of my genesis. Even those who do know, if they didn’t know me before, don’t ever think of me as any different from any other man.

I just am.

And yet I am not.

I am at once more, and less, than the sum of my parts.

Always have been. Always will be.

For a long time I believed that what I had rendered visible was the true me, the authentic self made flesh, but it’s not that simple. There is an inherent groundlessness, an embodied inauthenticity at play.

I am always in the process of coming into being.

The (meta)physicality of it all: 

I hold a life contained within a life—a life disjointed and hybridized, receding and resurfacing against the passage of time. That other life never leaves me, but with distance I can touch it less and less, as if it never was mine. Now it feels as if it belongs to someone else. It belongs to those who hold it in their memories—my parents, my siblings, my children—but what, if anything, does it mean to me?

It’s as if I own the inside, but not the outside, of the first forty years of my life.

So what do I have now? A more coherent existence, absolutely, but with the knowledge that a fully whole experience is not something I will ever have. My body is disfigured; not by choice or wilful design—it is simply the best I can achieve. And in the end as in the beginning, the body is only an echo of what I am, a reminder of what I have been.

You can change your face but your body will betray you.

The further I proceed, the more I realize that I will never arrive. Transition is an experience that is always in the reframing and redefining of boundaries.

Borderless, I am forever a migrant—endlessly coming into being.

Being cannot be measured.

Being cannot be reduced to the change of a marker on a passport.

On the street I am invisible.

And here lies the crux of the matter. Invisibility, once achieved, is deemed to be a mark of success. That’s what a person in transition means when they say: I pass. To pass is to be seen, without question, at one with a gender identity that feels true. And it is more than an ability to disappear in a crowd. There is an internal completeness that comes with the hormones and the pronouns and the new name—a levelling, a sense of peace.

But the body, the body is another matter. Only now, the axis of discord has shifted.

For those of us who traverse the visible lifeline from female to male, there is a sacrifice. The journey is forever written on the body, no matter how far one is able or chooses to travel. We are at once dramatically transformed and decidedly unfinished or differently designed. Scarred. I accepted that cost, assumed it would not matter.

Fifteen years on, it matters. At least, it does for me.

Don’t get me wrong. I made no mistake. This is the only path I could have taken once I found it on the map. I am infinitely happier, more settled than I might ever have imagined I could be. But if I long for anything, it’s the life I never had, the boy’s life—or any life, male or female—that might have been coherent, sex and gender, gender and sex. As much as the two are divided, the physical and the psychological, they are not separate in the living, in the experience of being. We exist as embodied minds, or if you prefer, embodied spirits, in the world.

Pre-transition, there was an internal fracturing of being. I struggled to align the outside world with the inside space I inhabited. I was an awkward misfit. Nothing made sense. Even the glam rock and punk of my teen years offered little more than a glimmer of hope before fading away. For years I fancied myself a Cartesian dualist. The ontological reality I experienced was akin to being tethered to a body that could never be a home. Over the years I began to talk about this body, to describe it as a distinct entity. I would catch myself at moments feeling like I was consciously moving my hips and propelling my legs forward, like an injured person re-learning how to walk. I floundered in pregnant form. By then I was at a complete loss.

Recognizing myself as transgender, that is, understanding that the real me was the male identity inside and learning that the outside could be modified to conform, was sufficient to see me through a divorce and launch me on my way into a new life. In the early years there was so much to look forward to, so many changes, and so much random strangeness. Puberty at forty is intense and wild and weird. For years I threw myself into work, measuring my worth by the title on my business cards, and finding validation in the sole corner of my life in which no one knew my past.

My transition was a textbook success. Or so it seemed.

I made no close friends, took no lovers, dared not risk the delicate balance of finally existing as a man in society. I sacrificed newfound authenticity for another superficial truth—one coherent with an implied history that would not threaten to expose me. The wall I had once constructed on the inside, I reconstructed on the outside.

Now I have dismantled and deconstructed it again.

But I still find myself troubled by a restless inauthenticity of being. It worries its way into the tension between my desire to blend and my need to be true to a life lived against the grain. It is looking for a voice.

On the street I am invisible.

I am. And I am not.

I am at once more, and less, than the sum of my parts.

Always have been. Always will be.

Here I am writing about my life, opening up the veins of the story without fleshing out the details. I have offered scraps and fragments, just enough to begin to frame a question, to try to begin to articulate my hybridized experience of living—then and now.

This is a sketch. That is all.

I am forever in the process of writing myself into being.

Postscript:

If the apex of manhood is to stand to pee, the nadir of manhood is to be gay and to understand that you will always arrive short-handed.

The bride stripped bare by his bachelors. Even.

 

Listening to voices in search of my own: A reflection

§ New Line of Thought

Every new line of thought is a departure.

Or a new way of arriving where one already is.

–  S.D. Chrostowska, Matches

I have been thinking about voice lately.

I am drawn to voices in literature, listening to the way stories are told, the language, the perspective, the vision, the content. I can’t say what I am looking for but I know when I find it. Or, more critically, I know when there is, in an otherwise worthwhile read, nothing for me at this time. As a reader I am grazing, hunting and pecking, listening for the voices that startle and ideas that stimulate. It is an entirely idiosyncratic endeavour driven by my own writing–reading to write that is sometimes at cross purposes with reading to review.

But it is reading that leads one down interesting side roads.

I’ve been immersed for the past few days, in en abîme, the blog of Daniela Cascella, in anticipation of reading her book of the same name and its successor F.M.R.L.. From the fragments and articles I have read to date, it is clear that she writes with an intuitive grace about the experience of language as rhythm, tone, and meaning. Reading, writing and listening are, for Cascella, deeply sensuous experiences. Most explicitly she is drawn to writing after sound, a project as seemingly elusive as the task that drives my own writing: that is, writing after being.

In her review of Marlene van Niekerk’s mesmerizing The Swan Whisperer for Music & Literature, Cascella prefaces her piece by describing this work as:

“ . . . a tale of transmission, disappearance, and utterance, of writing as it hovers at the edge of language, trafficking with the ephemeral and the unreliable; challenging the primacy of the written text through a compelling reflection on flow and interference, rhythms and non-origin.”

I am deeply interested in articulating the experience of being, an age old question I know, but I would suggest that its timelessness arises from the inherent challenge of adequately giving voice to an experience that, itself, “hovers at edge of language.”

We live in a world of sound-bites, of inspirational quotations, often ripped out of context and juxtaposed against images of flowers, beaches, or sunsets and spilled out on Twitter or printed on coasters and tea towels in gift shops. Authenticity is a watch word, To thy own self be true, as the Bard himself would say. We hunger after the healing journey of self-discovery, we admire it in our heroes, we long for it in our own lives.

I have sought it myself. My life has been a constant struggle to balance and rationalize an incongruent and conflicting experience of being in the world. I don’t know if my own challenges are, or have been, greater or less than those of anyone else, for in truth, the only truth I have is my own and even that is suspect.

“He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this sense of hinderance in turn, he deduces the proof that he is alive.”
– Franz Kafka, Aphorisms

What I do know is that I am possessed of a persistent sense of groundlessness, a very real and present awareness of a fragile and constant process of coming into being. It is an ongoing expression of inauthenticity that I experience – if I could capture a truth it would be momentary and fleeting, cancelled out by its negative in the act of expression. My writing is directed toward giving this experience, as I know it, voice.

Which brings me back to the point where I started. As I said, I have been thinking about voice. But until this point I was thinking of voice in the sense of expression, not sound.

Spring in silverMy own voice is damaged. Metaphorically and in fact. I sacrificed my voice a number of years ago in my endeavour to be real, and as a result I have lost power and depth. My voice strains easily. To speak loudly and project takes concentration and effort and leaves me hoarse. Yet I frequently read aloud to myself. I find that to write seriously, I require silence and the freedom to read my writing aloud as I progress. Those that have the misfortune to live with me have learned to accept this quirk, but I must confess I really love to write when I am alone in the house.

That makes me wonder about the necessity of an aural component to the process of writing about being. About silence and sound.

Interactive Silence

“A stillness that is initially a stillness ready to be, once it ceases to be still . . . An end, recurring so many times that in the moment that it ends . . . An ignited fire of the end to an extent of necessary measure . . . A braided braid . . . Getting to know one another and being known . . . In the trap of mental unification . . . Nonbreak-down . . . Silence, sounded over, blaspheming about silence and about not being silent . . . The inability to locate the word, and yet the necessity to seek it, as if the word could save one from that which is unsaid.”
– Róbert Gál, On Wing

To talk about being, for now, for me, begins with writing about my life. I need to be able to frame the angle at which I intersect with the world. To that end my first piece of “memoirish” writing will be published on Minor Literature(s) in the near future. I am concurrently exhilarated and horrified by the prospect. This is an openly queer piece, at once honest and guarded, and marks the beginning of a journey to find that elusive voice in all its permutations.

January 2016: A slow start to my reading year (and why does that bother me?)

The first month of 2016 has almost slipped away and I am feeling overloaded. Too many stressors have collided to take a curious toll on my ability to read and blog. My reading continues to be fractured. Books are not the same refuge they were a few months ago. Not that they don’t keep arriving (or rather following me home) and haunting me as the stacks pile up, staring at me, daring me to read faster. But my reading is slow, and the books I had expected to venture into by month’s end have not yet been cracked.

And then there is life, the one that doesn’t exist in books, the one that can’t be shelved or put aside for a later date or, as much as I would love it sometimes, be tossed into a pile to go out to the next charity sale. It is hardly a surprise. Over the past month I have had to face some extraordinary challenges on the home front – some new, some long standing, and others simply arising from the financial reality of owning a car and a house, both of which are well past their prime. Some matters have been resolved – one mechanic and two plumbers later – I just have to figure out how to pay for them; others are less concrete, more emotionally corrosive and resolution is not in sight. If another well meaning person says, “This too shall pass,” my reaction may be less than generous.

Copyright JM Schreiber, 2013 The last time I had a month with two separate plumbing calls I took this shot to celebrate the joy of a clear drain that had been blocked for more than four weeks.
Copyright JM Schreiber, 2013
The last time I had a month with two separate plumbing calls I took this shot to celebrate the joy of a clear drain that had been blocked for more than four weeks.

Through it all I have been reading but by some weird twist of logic my attention has been drawn toward much more intensive review projects. Blogging is fine but for each review I write I spend 4-6 hours, so when I encounter an ambitious, complex, postmodern novel like Klaus Hoffer’s Among the Bieresch, forthcoming from Seagull Books; I can’t resist the desire to read into the varied subtextual materials, especially the works that I don’t know well and – with luck – explore the novel in a space with greater critical elbow room and a much wider audience than my blog commands. There’s a voice in my head that says “Are you out of your mind?” and, maybe I am but, at this moment, I seem to be most comfortable burying myself in demanding critical projects, losing myself I suppose. At the same time, I am also spending more time on my own writing: a personal essay I hope to enter in a contest and a piece of experimental prose.

Tell me then, what is with this book blogging pressure I feel? It’s not a numbers game. No one is going to disown me if I don’t read and review two books a week. Reading and writing about books is supposed to be fun. And, heaven knows, the spaces I that want to write for, on or off my blog, are literary acts of love and, as such, there’s typically no money involved.

So blog posts may be slower for a while. I am reading. I am writing. And I am dealing with all the messy business of living.

Writing to make sense of loss: Stammered Songbook by Erwin Mortier & further thoughts

As a man watches his mother, once so vital and full of life and charm, steadily losing her grasp on the spoken word – fumbling, scratching at the air for the names of people, places, and things – what can he do maintain the fragile flow of words? As uncertain laughter and tears of frustration become the increasingly fragile threads holding a woman, just 65 years-old, to the web of anxious family members spreading out around her – her husband, daughters, sons and grandchildren – is there any way to make sense of the inexorable dissolution of this person who is disappearing, fading, before their eyes? If the man in question is Flemish author Erwin Mortier, the only way to find comfort is to write:

“I realize that I only write to hear sentences dancing without interruption through my head. To make rhythm, acceleration, rallentando, to make pauses sing. Just to be able to hang from the dashes – the trapezes of syntax – weightlessly for a moment from the roof beam of a sentence, I let the words loose.”

songbookMortier’s passionate, insightful record of his mother’s decent into the unforgiving spiral of fragmentation and decline that marks early onset dementia, is at once a loving memoir and a writer’s thoughtful reflection on the vital role that words play in his own ability to make sense of and cope with the most painful and difficult process of letting go or, as he puts it: “constantly saying goodbye to someone who is still there, yet not.” But the pages of Stammered Songbook: A Mother’s Book of Hours contain much more than a portrait of one woman’s steady regression from independent and vivacious to prematurely helpless, frightened, and lost; it offers an honest, sometimes brutal, account of the challenges of negotiating the surge of conflicting emotions that batter and buffer the individual and the family in mourning. He tracks her illness, from the earliest missteps through to the recognition, so painful for his father, that her needs can no longer be met by her loving husband, or by juggling responsibilities between her five children and their spouses. Even a large, closely knit family cannot provide the support and care she requires in the end – it is too difficult, too draining, and far too painful – especially when the person who once inhabited the emaciated frame of the body that remains has been slowly fretted away into the space of memories and dreams.

Mortier’s writing has frequently drawn comparisons to Proust; powerfully, and I would argue rightly, reinforced by his elegant, sprawling epic set in Flanders during the First World War, While the Gods Were Sleeping. Smaller, more immediate, and intensely personal, Stammered Songbook turns – as his mother in the present recedes into the distance – into a lyrical, poetic sketch of the woman as he remembers her, and a moving reflection on the complexity of our relationships with those we love. Yet as he captures his experiences and emotions, he is aware that, as a writer, it is essential that he is able to fine tune the words he employs so that he may strike the exact note. That is, he is not only writing about his mother, he is writing about the process of writing about his mother.

“Time does not unite us in oblivion but unravels us into memories. I only started writing properly, I suspect, when I began to realize that words are at their best when I can make them vibrate like minute compass needles in response to those elusive magnetic fields that constitute someone’s whole “being” – rather like iron filings form patterns on a sheet of paper under which a magnet is held. From the cloud that my mother is becoming and that in fact she already is, slivers of images will shoot out unexpectedly, strangely sharp – the way she laughed, the gesture with which she arranged a lock of hair behind her ear… And then we will say: yes, that’s how she was.”

Stammered Songbook is a lyrical farewell to a woman lost too young to a cruel relentless thief; but even more powerfully it is a personal meditation on death, mourning, memory, and the myriad emotions – sadness, confusion, anger – that confront those left behind. Yet in reading it I could not help but think about two other books that traverse similar grounds and have informed some of my own thoughts about the project that I am attempting to write into being, so to speak. Both are powerful works that approach difficult emotional experiences arising from the authors’ own lives, each from a different angle.

The first is a novel, This Is Paradise, by UK writer Will Eaves. Here the narrator begins back at a time before his own birth and moves through a childhood account of the unique dynamics that shape and define his family. Then, in the second part of the book, our protagonist is grown and his mother, now increasingly incapacitated by dementia, must be moved into a care facility. The account of the complicated emotions and tensions that pull at the family throughout the painful process of watching their loved one die – especially in the grips of such an unforgiving, emotionally paralyzing disease – was so striking that I kept thinking: There is an authenticity beyond careful research here. And, sure enough, after finishing the book I found an personal essay Eaves wrote for The Guardian chronicling his mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s. Clearly, much of his own experiences were embedded in the novel, but he chose to approach the subject mediated through the curtain of fiction – whether for distance, freedom or stylistic comfort, it doesn’t matter – it works beautifully.

The other book is a memoir, this time a son’s effort to honour his mother in the light of her suicide at the age of 51: Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. On the surface it might appear that suicide is the polar opposite of dementia in that it is sudden, but the impact is no less devastating because it raises questions, so often unanswerable, that linger long after death and complicate the mourning process. Like Mortier, Handke is deeply conscious of the importance of writing and the efficacy of adequately capturing a life by spilling words onto a page. However, rather than placing himself at the heart of the memories he is trying to capture, he attempts to step back and maintain an intentional emotional distance. He wants to see his mother, in part, as an exemplar of the rural Austrian women of her generation; to place her life in a broader context to make sense of the very intimate act of her decision to take her own life. And the result is a spare, elegant meditation; but in the end, he cannot help but break the wall between his accounting – which was written within two months of her death – and his own emotions which are still very raw.

These three books do seem to me to fit together, to form a triangle at the centre of which is the attempt, by a writer, to capture the essence of his relationship with his mother, in life and in death. What is of specific interest to me is not the exact nature of the subject at the centre, rather it is the question of the best way to approach writing about a deeply personal experience drawn from one’s own life – memoir from within, memoir with a degree of distance, or memoir turned into fiction. It seems to me that each can be powerful and effective, the challenge, I suppose, is to find out what works best for the writer and his or her circumstances, that is, to find the intersection where the story comes alive.

Stammered Songbook by Erwin Mortier is translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent and published by Pushkin Press.

In the dark days of winter, searching for words

Normally January and February are my favourite months. The days are growing longer, minute by minute; the days cold and crisp, the ground a snow-covered white, the sky a bright clear blue. A perfect time for reading.

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Copyright JM Schreiber, 2014

More than one week into the new year, I have a strange sensation akin to trying to make my way on one of those moving sidewalks that traverse the passageways of major airports. However, because the direction of the sidewalk and I are at odds, I’m making little progress. Lately my weeks have been punctuated by trips to visit my father, 1 1/2 to 3 hours each way, depending on whether or not we pick up my mother. Weather dictates travel, scrambling the best laid plans, and now that my father has moved on to the rehabilitation unit his stubborn determination has returned – for better and, sadly, for worse. Through it all, my mother, now so tiny in her old winter coat, is entertaining the thought that he might someday return home – home to a setting that neither one of them is really well enough to live in anymore. The potential challenges that lie ahead are fraying the less than stellar relationships between myself and my brothers, and these are still the early days. Meanwhile I have dealt with car repairs and a burst hot water pipe. And I don’t even want to venture into the messy, potentially violent eruptions that have threatened peace in my own house as my son struggles with an addiction to alcohol.

To say that my reading has been scattered would be an understatement.

I am afraid that, anxiety and exhaustion aside, I seem to be responding to an internalized sense of guilt that reading, and writing about reading, has no value if it does not generate an income. If your life does not presently include income generating activity – a circumstance that was not by my design but has afforded me the time and energy to read and write – then my literary pastime is even more self-indulgent. Or at least that is what my family members (and their voices that echo in my head) are telling me.

Of course I have been reading, but my focus is off.

I have just emerged from Rafael Chirbes’ forthcoming On the Edge, a testament to internalized guilt, regret and resentment if ever there was one; fuel for my abiding mid-life angst. I’m preparing a review for Numéro Cinq. Otherwise most of what I have read lately is not quite carrying me through. I find myself distracted and picking at pieces, reading on line journals and stabbing aimlessly at collections. As I said, my focus is off.

§ Finish Your Thought!

As in death, we are equalized in thought when we think that every mind in its effort to comprehend the world must come upon the unthinkable.

§ Think for Yourself…

…not others. There is no such thing as thought to spare, only to share.

Matches_Cover_Front_Mockup_07182015-216x346That said, I find that I do have an appetite for aphorisms and fragments. Perhaps that is the ideal antidote for a scattered new year. I am dipping in and out of S.D. Chrostowska’s MATCHES: A Light Book, over 500 pages of illuminating meditative thoughts about the contemporary quality of thinking, reading, and writing. This is not a work intended to be read from cover to cover over a few sittings, rather it is ideal for slow, thoughtful engagement. Light the match, let it burn for a moment, reflect for a while – return again and again, over time. The perfect companion I hope, to lead me back into reading when I feel I am straying and, more critically direct me to writing when fear I am losing my way.

§ New Line of Thought

Every new line of thought is a departure.
Or a new way of arriving where one already is.

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Copyright JM Schreiber, 2013

MATCHES: A Light Book is available from Punctum Books.

Honouring the unwritten: The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories by Ivan Vladislavić

“Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil’s own job. Yet words on a page make all things possible.”

Central to this collection of brief odes to the fictional inspirations that once planted, failed to germinate, refused to take root and grow, or died off before even hitting the soil; is one full and essentially complete story – the magical titular “The Loss Library”. Surrounding this tale, to either side on the book shelf of South African author Ivan Vladislavić’s imagination lie a selection of meditations on the curious nature of the creative process and the many ways that an intriguing idea can lose its way on the path to realization, finding itself shelved in the place of the might-have-been, filed away in a writer’s own personal loss library. Looking back at the notes and outlines he explored during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the unsettling years of transition from apartheid to a democratic state, Vladislavić notes that his inspirations tended to arise from documentary sources – the past perhaps seeming more sound than the bloody history being made on the streets of his country at the time. Moving forward, within the scope of the “case studies” selected for this book, the pieces and fragments he gathers turn to dictionaries, reference materials and the “means to read and write – or not read and not write – books.”

2015-12-09 15.08.34But let us begin in the middle, at “The Loss Library”. With a clear nod to Borges, the master of the library of the imagination, a young man arrives at a most unusual archive, a repository of the all of the unfinished works, possible and impossible of all the writers who have ever lived. He is greeted by an attractive librarian. Fit and tanned she is the antitheses of what he expects. As she guides him into the library she first steps into slippers and advises him to do the same. They literally glide across the polished floors of the rooms and corridors as she directs his personal tour of the premises. The first room contains a single glassed in cabinet containing the books that would have been written had their would-be authors not chanced to die young:

“‘Arranged alphabetically and classified by cause of death.’ A wave of her slender hand. ‘Accidental death. Booze, of course. Disease – those old standbys, consumption and syphilis, and the new one, AIDS, a growing collection. Duels – little sign of growth there. Motor accidents. Murder. Suicide. A disproportionate number of Russians and Japanese, as you’d expect, and quite a few of your countrymen and women too.’”

As our protagonist leans in for a closer look, he can recognize no words on the spines. He tells the librarian he is looking for Bruno Schulz. Filed down with the war dead, six little volumes are found but he is not allowed to see them… after all, opening such a book could have consequences in all the others, in essence I suppose, the way fiddling with the future given access to a time machine might. In this library of potential works, one can’t risk having people “talk them into being.”

2015-12-09 15.02.54Together they encounter a room filled with books that remain unwritten because their authors lost faith in them, and he is shown a collection of the books that lost their way or were talked out of existence before they had a chance to be realized. They pass through a room containing books that were destroyed, stop at a shelf of books that comes into being by evocation of the proper author’s name (any guesses?) and, finally, enter a room of floating, ghostly, ethereal books – those that presented themselves to their would-be writers in dreams. In the end, is this excursion through the Loss Library a fantasy, the beginning of book that the young man himself will write into being, or another story that might have been, relegated to the back of a notebook, the bottom of a drawer or, in this day and age, lost somewhere on a hard drive?

Returning now to the startling opening essay, Vladislavić describes his attraction to the famous photograph of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow on Christmas Day, 1956, and reflects upon the way that the isolated image fueled his imagination before had even read any of Walser’s work. He contemplates writing a story about the writer’s last days, about that fateful final walk, the curious absence of footsteps or bystanders around the body, the precision the photographer must have employed to capture this solemn record, and with particular fascination, the dead man’s hat lying in the snow. However, before he sits down to write, Vladislavić engages in a little research and finds another photograph, taken from a different angle. From this vantage point he can now see many footprints in the snow, two men off to the side, and realizes that even the hat has fallen differently than he imagined. The curious, romantic and uncomfortable questions – the necessary elements of the creative process – are shattered.

As he continues to rifle through the pages of his notebooks, Vladislavić explores a variety of mislaid ventures, the inspiration or ideas behind them and the reasons they fell off the rails or, perhaps, only flickered for a moment or two. “Gross”, an intended venture into the land of the OuLiPo in which he set for himself a series mathematical constraints within which he would construct a novel, proves unsuccessful. Along the way, the character he was creating to take centre stage, morphed into someone else who would, ultimately wander off to join the cast of another novel,The Restless Supermarket, but more critically, he found himself completely overwhelmed by the prospect of the challenge he had set and decided that this type of approach was best left to Perec, et al.

In a later example, he describes his fascination with an unassuming sign on the side of a building in his Johannesburg neighbourhood that simply reads “Gravity Addict” with a phone number. He begins to wonder what a gravity addict is and how that might be imagined in a story. He thinks about the post 9/11 performance artist in Don Delillo’s The Falling Man, contemplates the structural format of that novel, and eventually imagines a woman, an aspiring writer, sitting on her sofa watching endless episodes of old cartoons – the ones where characters repeatedly chase each other off the edge of cliffs – and then, when one day the innocuous meaning behind the mysterious appellation “gravity artist” is revealed to him, his interest in the story instantly dissolves and he can go no further.

Finally, in light of the recent re-release of Vladislavić’s first novel, The Folly, the story “The Acrobats” special attention. In this outline for a story we see a man in a library reading a book. At some point he closes that book and retrieves a copy of Tristram Shandy from the stacks. He seeks out a particular passage which in turn, is a lengthy quotation from Gragntua and Pantagruel by Rabelais, so he stops and wanders off to fetch that text and goes on to read from the original, or rather a translation of the original, the same quoted passage describing the wild acrobatic exploits of Gymnaste, performed on horseback, as he faces down an enemy combatant. As such, Vladislavić envisions a post-modern inversion of a book within a book within a book, the initial level being, of course, at once the book that both the man and his reader are reading. However, the idea is set aside, in part due to the complication of modern versus contemporary translations of the nested passages.

Several years later, in the writing of The Folly, Vladislavić sees his character Nieuwenhuizen, the eccentric stranger who arrives out of nowhere to take ownership of and build a house on a vacant lot, as a direct descendant of Gymnaste. As he marks out the foundation of the ephemeral house that he will ultimately construct out of imagination and thin air, Nieuwenhuizen engages in his own acrobatic measurements, leaping, somersaulting, and throwing himself around the lot. Could the earlier story now be revived, with The Folly as the third book in the line, he wonders, could he develop the idea that his “ostensibly post-modern novel stood in a pre-modern tradition”? Ah, but for the paradox that his outline for “The Acrobats” was written three to four years before The Folly, how could a story refer to a book that had yet to be written?

Yet Vladislavić was, it would seem, not quite done with his potential story. Several years later he encountered the 18th century French writer, Diderot, who was a contemporary of and acquainted with Laurence Sterne. Although the publication of Rameau’s Nephew would arise through a circuitous route, there was an indication apparently, that Diderot’s initial sketches for the eccentric, rambling character who engages the narrator of his novel could have roughly coincided with the publication of Tristram Shandy. Now he wants to fictionally trace the lineage of Nieuwenhuizen from Sterne via Rameau… except for a new paradox that arises. The Folly was written before his discovery of Rameau’s Nephew. How could his own novel be influenced by a work he had not read?

In his note at the end of this account of the stubborn death of a story idea, Vladislavić can look back and recognize that, as a young writer, he demonstrated too great a concern with precedent. Wiser now, he remarks:

“Every writer belongs to one bastard bloodline or another, and laying claim to one can be a liberating lesson in perspective. But standing on the shoulders of giants is a skill that comes from long practice. When you start out, you are more likely to get under their feet. Don’t be surprised if the giants – or their legitimate progeny – come stomping after you in the playground: ‘We walk straight so you better get out of the way!’”

And herein lies the true gift of this slender collection of artistic musings,and inspirational dead ends – the insertion throughout of the author’s updated reflections on his varied false starts. There is no writer or would-be writer who does not have an accumulated hoard of ideas, outlines and abandoned projects. If they don’t, one ought to be suspicious.

Wandering through The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories is a rare privilege to spend time in the company of a thoughtful, gifted writer who truly appears to be without pretensions. This journey, contained within the covers of a finely crafted hardcover from the singular Seagull Books and accompanied by the original collages of Sunandini Banerjee, is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon, and treasure to return to time and again. After all, there may well be, within these pages, the inspirational seeds of other stories just waiting for the right gardener to plant them and bring them to fruition.

To write one’s self: reflections on the stories we have to tell

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Don’t write yourself
in between worlds,

rise up against
multiple meanings,

trust the trail of tears,
and learn to live.

             – Paul Celan

 

I have resisted the act of writing my self. Writing about myself. The conceit of imagining that my own experiences hold a value, interest or point of connection for others. I wanted to tell stories, inventions, creations that were removed from the inexorable ordinariness of my own life.

IMGP2477 (1)I am not sure I have that gift. I fear that all the stories I have that are worth telling are real. Not true stories. I do not believe there is an objective truth to the stories we tell ourselves or others. But they are real.

For many years I worked as a storyteller. Not in the conventional sense of the word. I worked with survivors of acquired brain injury and their families. Whether I was meeting with clients, advocating with professionals or leading support groups stories were my medium. I had hundreds of stories, I had a facility for remembering the broad details of the experiences of our clients and their families. Tales of courage, tales of horror, tales of the ordinary and the everyday. I was able to pull out an example whenever I required one to offer warning, hope, validation. And I was able to do so without revealing identifying details.

IMGP2465 (1)As always I was the master of ambiguity. After all that was how I engaged with the world myself. But what is essential in a professional capacity is crippling in a personal sphere.

I have touched at the edges of my own stories, in so far as I am learning to articulate them, in this space from time to time. And I am beginning to wonder whether it is a folly for me  to assume that I have the capacity to make up stories, to entertain with carefully constructed lies.

Or if this mess of a life that has piled up in front of me like heavy wet snow against a plow has to be cleared, examined, transformed into words on a page before I can even begin to figure out if there might be something here that someone else might want to read.

IMGP2461 - Version 2 (1)In the coming days I will officially be two months out from the night a blood clot very nearly took my life. My chest still feels tight, bruised and cracked ribs are slow to heal completely, but I can finally get out and walk with comfort – something that was still impossible a few weeks ago. Rat poison is my friend.

I took my camera out into the neighbourhood this afternoon. The foliage is turning colour, the sky is crystal blue, yet I found my attention turning to the cracks in the road, the fallen leaves in the gutters. I photographed the little things that caught my eye and tried not to think too much.