The child draws the letter A.
She closes her eyes and is surprised to see Matisse
sitting on his balcony in Nice, looking at a woman
a bird, a hat, some fish in a bowl, turning them over
and over in search of serenity, until he sees a pattern
finally, turning them over until they glow.
Miracles might occur…
Movement and stasis:
We took the overnight train.
You kissed me everywhere.
A beautiful, passing landscape. Imagined in the dark.
Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose: A LIFELONG CONVERSATION WITH MYSELF ENTERED MIDWAY
AN EROTIC song cycle.
AVA could not have been written as it was, I am quite sure, if I had not been next to the water day after day. Incorporating the waves.
Making love those afternoons at dusk, just as the shapes were taken back. Afterwards darkness. Provincetown in winter.
The design of stars then in the sky. I followed their dreamy instructions. Composed in clusters. Wrote constellations of associations.
Loving the world, and needing it, as I did. Wanting to transmute it into shapes. Begging it to—
“Stay a little.”
Virginia Woolf: “The idea has come to me that what I want to do now is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes — It must include nonsense; fact; sordidity; but made transparent.”
The desire of the novel to be a poem. The desire of the girl to be a horse. The desire of the poem to be an essay. The essay’s desire, its reach towards fiction. And the obvious erotics of this.
Virginia Woolf knew the illusion of fiction is gradual even if moments are heart-stopping, breathtaking. There is a pattern, which is only revealed as patterns are, through elongation and perspective, the ability to see a whole, a necklace of luminous moments strung together. How to continue the progression, the desire to go beyond the intensity of the moment or of moments. Like sex, one has to figure out how to go on after the intensity of the moment — how in effect to compose a life afterwards, how to conjure back a world worth living in, a world which might recall, embrace the momentary, glowing, obliterating, archetypal. One longs for everything. For the past one never experienced, for the future one will never know — except through the imaginative act. One longs to be everything. To have everything.
A certain spaciousness. There would be time and room for it all.
The creation of an original space. The desire for an original space in which to work.
Passion of the mind. Persistent desire for form to meld with idea and emotion in organic ways.
Restlessness of the form. Every rose pulses.
Gertrude Stein: “It can easily be remembered that a novel is everything.”
Accuse me again, if you like, of over-reaching.
The novel’s capacity for failure. Its promiscuity, its verve. Always trying to attain the unattainable. Container of the uncontainable. Weird, gorgeous vessel. Voluptuous vessel.
Room for the random, the senseless, the heartbreaking to be played out. A form both compressed, distilled, and expansive enough to accommodate the most difficult and the most subtle states of being.
Musings, ideas, dreams, segues, shifts in key, athletic feats of imagination, leaps and swirls. Or small, nearly imperceptible progresses. The unarticulated arc of our lives.
Many fiction writers do not, I believe, acknowledge reality’s remoteness, its mysteriousness. Its inaccessibility to us and to our modes of expression, though the novel is one of the very few good places for this sort of exploration.
Together, many novelists, now commodity makers, have agreed on a recognizable reality, which they are all too happy to impart as if it were true. Filled with hackneyed ways of perceiving, clichéd, old sensibilities, they and the publishing houses create traditions which have gradually been locked into place. They take for granted: the line, the paragraph, the chapter, the story, the storyteller, character.
I love most what the novel might be, and not what it all too often is.
Reach.
The novel as a kind of eternity. A kind of infinity. Inevitable progressions of beauty — with room and time enough for it all.
Not to worry.
Lyrical novels imply a formal design — an aesthetic patterning in order to achieve the desired intensity.
A personal sensibility projected through the minds and actions of others so that both the lyric and the narrative might be achieved. The lyric self coupled with the novelist’s “omniscient” visions.
My relationship to poetry was always one of reverence: How could I ever approach such beauty, such perfection? An unhealthy relationship, finally. With fiction I feel far less reverent. What has been done? Maybe not that much.
The novel might be musically or visually conceived — pictorial relationships, symphonic turns rendered in prose.
The novel’s design, for me, being an abstract relationship between parts.
Recognition of the patterns, the relationships, so they might be destroyed if necessary or deviated from or tampered with.
The ability to manipulate shapes and space. Writing AVA I felt at times more like a choreographer working with language in physical space. Language, of course, being gesture and also occupying space. Creating relations which exist in their integrity for one fleeting moment and then are gone, remaining in the trace of memory. Shapes that then regather and re-form, making for their instant, new relations, new longings, new recollections, inspired by those fleeting states of being.
Complexities.
How to prolong the lyric moment?
Andrey Tarkovsky: “Writing which links images through the linear, rigidly logical development of plot…usually involves arbitrarily forcing them into sequence in obedience with some abstract notion of order. And even when this is not so, even when plot is governed by characters, one finds that the links which hold it together rest on a facile interpretation of life’s complexities.”
Room as well for the random, the accidental, and the associations and shapes that arise from allowing accidents to happen.
It’s not easy to keep this thing from that. At other times I feel most like a composer. More than anything else I aspire to the state of music. It’s not desirable or possible to keep things separate. Many things arise:
The child draws the luminous letter A.
As a girl my favorite novel was Wuthering Heights. But I could not find a book anywhere else remotely like it. It created a hunger.
And my father playing his trumpet. Lying in the dark listening to that aching music. And how it seemed to approximate all we could not say.
Always I have loved poetry most, but at the same time felt the need for a larger canvas: a series of panels, a series of screens.
My form is always an odd amalgam — taken from painting, sculpture, theory, film, music, poetry, dance, mathematics — even fiction sometimes.
Reread: Goethe’s Werther, Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Gide’s Le Voyage d’Urien, Barnes’s Nightwood, Melville’s Moby Dick.
To sit next to the great mysteries, or to lie in the dark next to them and find shapes, ephemeral and changing as they may be, for this. All this: