2:35 AM:
It’s been a while since I found time to put words down here but that’s because I’ve been largely preoccupied with reading, the most reading I’ve ever done in my life.
This makes me think about how long I’ve been reading.
Ever since those fateful days—as my mom tells me—as a wee babe still in my baby walker, I insisted on being read to and when denied the joy of an 8th consecutive reread of a book, would pick it up myself and flip the pages as if the actions themselves constituted reading, it seems I was destined to have this permanent entanglement with books.
Okay, I am not actually taking myself that seriously here. Fate-books-my life is far too reductive and contrived, cliché in a way I hate. It just so happens that circumstances this season have led me to many many books, and so here I am, trudging through prep for the doctoral comprehensive exams, as much in awe of my own capacity to sit with all these stories as I am of the plenitude of stories to be read.
I confess to being the type of creator who believes deeply in reciprocity when it comes to the art of creation. Artists become better by spending time with the work of other artists, and allowing for their own practice to root deep into a ground rich with other people’s mastery of their craft. So I have been indulgently nourished over the last four months, slowing down in so much of my own creative energy just to sit with all this other language!
2:45 AM
This leads me to my next contemplation, which is that reading is a solitary action. In many ways, it feels more isolating than writing since in writing, there is hope that at the end of the process, is the possibility of exorcism, connection, or at least relief—made possible through an understanding reader. As in, a reader that is aware of what you are doing.
To be a reader on the other hand, is to wander alone into the text, and to emerge on other side possibly to no gathering of other readers, to only the mundane rhythm of your own life moving as it does, outside the borders of the bookworld. In that time that the reader has disappeared, they have been learning to become aware of the construction of that other world—its contours and shape, its logic and intentions.
How should I begin to talk about what it’s been like to hold this increasing mass of language in my body over the many days and weeks? How to describe the feeling of being stretched to the furthest limit and then realize, with some amazement, that I can still be stretched further next time? I actually have NOT figured out appropriate language for these things.
Instead, I’ve been thinking a lot about messages that Flush & Brew readers have sent me in the past. I recognize and appreciate the way empathy is sometimes expressed: texts left for me to let me know I am not alone; that I’ve been through it, I am loved; that I am understood, even in part etc. etc. etc.
And yet.
To this impulse, I have been trying to formulate an explanation that actually, I write so as to build walls for myself—not to break them down. I write to cordon a space off to use on my own selfish terms, to scratch out a patch of self-indulgence.
This is not to say I don’t need the reader or that your love isn’t appreciated.
This is just to say that language is not glass. That it is not my desire to be seen clearly. I do not write so that my words must illuminate something hidden in me for a reader to see.
Truthfully, the writing is not me. The writing is not access to my innermost thoughts and feelings. (Fooled ya!) They express something of me, but the writing is itself. The writing is atmosphere. The writing is otherworldly. The writing is meaning-making: lego, puzzling, a pattern. The writing is delicious, I feel it in my body the way a chef feels pleasure from seasoning their food exactly the way they want it.
Flush & Brew is the practice of writing for me. I come here to make instant noodles (with an egg) at the ungodly hour. I come here to fry the mushrooms in the damn butter.
This becomes clearer and clearer to me as I sit in silence with the novels and the plays and the poems and the theory, as I dig into their structures, roll their diction on my tongue, annotate their bones and dissect the sinews. My god, how itself writing is, I think. How powerfully insistent it digs its heels into setting itself apart from the world so that it can ironically, then point to it. How tall the walls need to be, to contain the raging insistences of their creators.
3:00 AM
One day a few weeks ago, in frustration, I asked a friend, “If we can only reach the world through language as per the postmodernists, is this (jabs aggressively at the book) the world? And if it is not, what is the world and how do I get there??”
Of course, there is no answer to this question because it is a stupid question. The world is the world and I am already in it. But of course, this is also not actually a stupid question and is famously one cause of great disciplinary animosity between academics across fields. Anyway, both things are true. The conviction I have polished over the last few months is that my practice of language is sensory and textured and my writing is a really self-conscious mode of breathing. Feel the lung expand. Push the breath into your hip joint. Exhale and feel the chest fall. This posture produces wonder. Wonder at the immense potential of language. Wonder at its imminent failure.
This is also my conclusion: the words will fail, after all, to do the things I desire the most, even as they succeed in the ways I intend. How frustratingly intoxicating.
I will conclude this fantastically indulgent, possibly incoherent late-night newsletter with a passage from a book that I love fiercely (“fiercely” is the only word that explains the intense growly impulse I feel to shake something extremely hard every time I revisit this passage), that tenderly resonates with the thinks I’ve had in the jumble of paragraphs I’ve just written:
Among the posthumous writing of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was found a moving parable about two gardeners. One of them said goodbye to his friend and went on a long journey which took him to distant cities and towns.
After many years, the stay-at-home received a letter from his friend. The letter, which had been forwarded from country to country before it reached him, said: “This morning I pruned my rose trees.”
The gardener who had never left home was delighted to receive the message. When he tried to write an answering letter, he drafted it again and again, attempting to describe all that had happened in his life since they had last met. At last he simplified all of the conflicting and confusing ideas he wanted to express. “This morning,” he wrote, “I, too, pruned my rose trees.”
- Pierre Clostermann, from the Introduction to Wind, Sand, and Stars