Arches National Park, Utah.
GOD MADE THE WORLD from nothing but the nothingness shines through, according to Paul Valéry via the professor in Transcription, by Ben Lerner, whose latest book boggles the brain. The way time bends and memory moves like water can feel unmanageable, I suppose the way all great fiction could feel.
(Note, I never said should).
I also said I would stop writing these morning missives because they squeeze too much creative juice out of my lemon of a brain and I need to save some of this energy for an edit that’s due back to a hypnotherapist any day now. But after I close a chapter, I feel like these writing sessions have become like a brain rinse and so here’s what I have for you today.
(Note, I do not know the you I speak to).
We pour reality into all kinds of containers—conversations, plays, books, interviews—each offers the artifice of a timestamp. Let me share the best tip I ever got for conducting an interview with a source: repeat the first question as the last. That’s because you’re usually not listening to the response when you first ask it, the two of you, just settling into the body odor and eye color of the other, the fact of their flesh.
(Note, let’s go back to the very beginning and see what you recall).
If I were interviewing myself, I would begin by asking about my mother. “Tell me more about that long drive to Florida,” I’d ask myself. “Tell me more about the time you stained the wall with a purple ink pen,” I’d ask again. “Tell me more about why you insisted on leaving again and again,” I’d ask. I wouldn’t remember the first question I asked myself, nor certainly the last.
(Note, I’m terrible with transcription, poets should never be trusted to function as journalists).
I will make a scene for you: Picture me at the age of fifteen sitting atop a rocky cliff at Arches National Park. I’m wearing a white T-shirt with the print of a Blackfeet leader on the front, a pair of Levis, brown suede Birkenstocks, embroidered bracelets on my wrists. I’m studying archaeology that summer in Cortez, on a weekend trip in Utah, with other diggers. I’m reeling from the feeling of effortless belonging outside of time and space, a feeling of communion with the clouds. I’ve just learned how to meditate. I whittled a cigarette out of bamboo. I beaded a red heart onto a leather pouch. I kept a diary. I hiked on trails with mountain lions and wrote letters home about it.
(Note, these are conceits borrowed from Lerner, this is how writers learn to read and write).
Feelings tether us to mortality. We feel nothing without the boomerang clang and thunder of our existence, the static of our existential dread. And so we feel cold and sad and must get warm and happy, which usually involves food—and good company. And something even the engineers of artificial consciousness can’t deny—love, the ultimate substance.
(Note, I’m reading a book about consciousness and all it really tells me is that the whole conversation is a trap—using the same key to lock us in and set us free.)
