Mineral Point (Part 2)

There is a connection between my father getting sick and when I started to write. This sentence is based on a sentence I wrote fifteen years ago in the square little memoir-ish prose poems, a belief that the act of recovery can provide clarity and a belief that the thingness of poetry is an end in itself. I wrote,

There is a connection between when I started to write, or at least become aware of the desire that writing was something I wanted to do, and to my father's illness. It's difficult to make this connecting explicit. There were times during my sophomore year of college, before the diagnosis, when he would call to chat at five in the morning or appear unannounced at my dorm room on a Tuesday afternoon, a long two-hour drive from the farm. Later, watching him fold laundry, each item, a t-shirt or a pair of socks was put into its own pile so that the laundry room was completely covered in a single layer of neatly folded clothes. Like reading a sentence so closely you forget the beginning before you reach the end. "That's a good way of explaining it," my mother said.

Regardless of poetry, whether this block of text does or does not posses a life of it's own; and regardless of my intention at the time of writing it and aesthetics, it seems to me that if I want to write about the phenomenon of being foreign and all the other beings available to me here in China, or in Kunshan or my apartment or my mind/body complex or whatever physical forms one imagines themselves as; it seems to me that if I want to write about basketball or language learning or my mixed feelings about living here or really just the mixed feelings of being alive, then I need to again try and articulate the desire that pushes me to write, the part of my identity that wants to make monuments to my desires. If these desires are what shapes my experience then it follows that to understand my experience I must understand these desires. I set out to write about basketball and China but again I find myself writing about my past in hopes that I can set things up to better understand the contours of my experience without blame or pathos. 

Instead of poetry then I attempt phenomenology, where phenomenology is about bringing an experience into view and making previously unarticulated aspects of this experience visible. I consider these attempts to be a kind of phenomenology so long as they bring forth the architectures of feelings and sensation that underlie a given narrative; that is, so-called the structures of consciousness that give rise to the particular ways I experience the world. To be clear though, narrative is not phenomenology though ultimately I think phenomenology is just another narrative, a way of making sense. What happened earlier to this blog, maybe about a year after I started it was that the newness of my experience was covered over with narratives of the occasional event, i.e. a kind of record of my life here, diary like so I stopped writing in it. I lost the thread. Maybe these stories and attempts at phenomenology will eventually also result in piles of clothes scattered around a room, no sense but the sense of the creator who made them. A worry that I too am like my father in early onset cognitive decline, a worry that I felt much more acutely when I was younger but a worry that still hangs around, maybe pushing this writing forward. 

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What is different now then when I was younger is that instead of spending part of my time working on poetry I now use those three or four free mornings in a week to work on academic stuff. I started my PhD almost ten years ago and after about three years into the process, poetry, especially the regular time I'd put into it, diminished to the point of only something I worked on during the summers or on an occasional weekend. Like anything, one cannot be good at something unless you put time into it. What this gradual transition into academic work and 'trying to make sense' for particular audiences has done to this kind of memoir-ish writing has a) made writing in lettered bullet points fit within the logical flow of my writing, b) made me feel that I need to justify my 'method' by giving it a name recognizable to an academic audience, i.e. phenomenology and c) most importantly for the writing itself (and actually what I wanted to write about); what seems to be manifesting these days is an ignorance of the kinds of formal constraints that I used so frequently in my previous prose poetry writing, that is, not writing into three blocks of prose or a single block or prose with fully justified margins in order for a thing to be a complete piece of writing. While this may seem like a trivial and slight constraint (and also something that you can still see if you look at pretty much any entry in this blog prior to this summer with a few exceptions) what it meant for the writing itself is that I would need to start and finish any given piece during the same session and/or I would need to 'end' a piece after three paragraphs. No more or less. There have been some variations on this form over the years, but the difference in terms of the actual writing process is that the sense made is not constrained by a kind of word limit. Instead, one writes until the impulse has been satisfied or in terms that I still have reservations about, until the argument has been made. 

This form however, this set of three paragraphs has been baked into this variety of writing such that I cannot escape it or the poetic symmetry it requires; one part a mildly OCD desire for control and one part, which is maybe the same part, a habit formed over many years of writing. A prose poem I wrote around the same time as the passage above,

Window

 

Because everything is right here an ending is right here. I snap my fingers and listen to the aftershock. I pick my head up to hear the sounds of traffic. I don’t mean to be obvious but I stop for a second to think, and air goes out the window. And I hear somebody driving by. There was an idea to work through, to not stop until something happens.

The 'something' in this case could be conceptualized via what Zen Buddhism calls the 'satori,' a sudden awakening or enlightenment. Or perhaps more famously (and citably), what Roland Barthes in the essay "Exemption from Meaning" from Empire of Signs calls the satori is a momentary emptiness of language where the meaning of a given poem/photograph/moment in a song is secondary to the time stopped stillness it creates in our mind/body complex. Regardless of if the poem above provokes a satori, I put it here as an example (which is what one provides when trying to make sense) of what I was often trying to go for in my blocks of prose, often failing but occasionally achieving. That is, I was trying to write poems. In some versions of poetics this what a poem is supposed to 'do.'

Another difference is in the writing process itself, a more temporal difference, that is, a movement away from trying to finish a piece in one session. Back at Brown, eighteen years ago, I was hanging out with Mark, a fiction writer, one day and we were talking about writing processes. He mentioned that one thing he always does is avoid ending a writing session at the end of chapter or scene such that the next day there is already some momentum or unresolved opening present on the page to pull him back in. I've thought about that. Whereas, the short form of poetry pushes towards closure, that I stop when something happens. This is something I learned in CD's workshop at Brown, where she'd often say something like, "I like those last two lines. You should throw the rest of the poem out and start over with those lines." The idea that it would often take an entire poem to just open up the space where something happens and that the poet should then proceed from that point. That a lot of what we write is a necessary warm-up to discovering what we want to say. In a way this contradicts what I was saying earlier, to end when something happens, but I think one takeaway for me from those days is to recognize those moments and assume, rightly or wrongly, that what strikes me as an insight will also strike others. That poem, "Window," I sent to CD about a year after I left Brown. She was on a writing retreat at the time and said that the poem was generative for her, that she printed it out and put it on the wall above her desk. Knowing that sustained me, her validation an encouragement to keep writing. 

And now I've drifted away from phenomenon into narrative, piles of socks and t-shirts strewn around the room. My point was that I don't always try and finish everything, setting things down until I have time again, a process dependent on picking up the previous thread. Like Mark, I find myself stopping in between happenings. This has a direct bearing on not just the process but the writing itself. The pliers and clamps I'd use to construct poems have grown rusty and instead I have come to rely more on the string and glue of the sense making language one uses to connect one thing to another. Yet, however, for example, and thus this feeling that I-must-write-these-things-down continues to manifest.