That’s just an excuse for a crappy net, he might say. But it’s my book, mine! Yes, but the details of my life, of our life together, don’t belong to you alone. OK, but no mind can take the same interest in his neighbor’s me as in his own. The neighbor’s me falls together with all the rest of the things in one foreign mass, against which his own me stands out in startling relief. A writer’s narcissism. But that’s William James’s description of subjectivity itself, not narcissism. Whatever — why can’t you just write something that will bear adequate witness to me, to us, to our happiness? Because I do not yet understand the relationship between writing and happiness, or writing and holding.
We used to talk about writing a book together; it was to be titled Proximity. Its ethos would derive from Dialogues II, co-authored by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet: “As we became less sure what came from one, what came from the other, or even from someone else, we would become clearer about ‘What is it to write?’”
Eventually, however, I realized that just the idea of such a merging was causing me too much anxiety. I guess I wasn’t ready to lose sight of my own me yet, as for so long, writing has been the only place I have felt it plausible to find it (whatever “it” is).
Shame-spot: being someone who spoke freely, copiously, and passionately in high school, then arriving in college and realizing I was in danger of becoming one of those people who makes everyone else roll their eyes: there she goes again. It took some time and trouble, but eventually I learned to stop talking, to be (impersonate, really) an observer. This impersonation led me to write an enormous amount in the margins of my notebooks— marginalia I would later mine to make poems.
Forcing myself to shut up, pouring language onto paper instead: this became a habit. But now I’ve returned to copious speaking as well, in the form of teaching.
Sometimes, when I’m teaching, when I interject a comment without anyone calling on me, without caring that I just spoke a moment before, or when I interrupt someone to redirect the conversation away from an eddy I personally find fruitless, I feel high on the knowledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as quickly as I want to, in any direction that I want to, without anyone overtly rolling her eyes at me or suggesting I go to speech therapy. I’m not saying this is good pedagogy. I am saying that its pleasures are deep.
It’s like she’s pulling Post-it notes out of her hair and lecturing from them, one of my peers once complained about the teaching style of my beloved teacher Mary Ann Caws. I had to agree, this was an apt description of Caws’s style (and hair). But not only did I love this style, I also loved it that no one could tell Caws to teach otherwise. You could abide her or drop her class: the choice was yours. Ditto Eileen Myles, who tells a great story about a student at UC San Diego once complaining that her lecturing style was like “throwing a pizza at us.” My feeling is, you should be so lucky to get a pizza in the face from Eileen Myles, or a Post-it note plucked from the nest of Mary Ann Caws’s hair.
Cordelia could not heave her heart into her mouth. Who can? No matter: her refusal to try famously becomes her badge of honor. But her silence has never moved me, quite; instead it’s always struck me as a bit paranoid, sanctimonious — stingy, even.
What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted? Can it be that words comprise one of the few economies left on earth in which plenitude — surfeit, even — comes at no cost?
Recently I received in the mail a literary magazine that featured an interview with Anne Carson in which she answers certain questions — the boring ones? the too personal ones? — with empty brackets [[]]. There is something to learn here; I probably would have written a dissertation on each query, prompting the reply I’ve heard countless times in my life: “Really, it’s terrific — it’s just the people upstairs who say we’ve got to trim it back a little.” The sight of Carson’s brackets made me feel instantly ashamed of my compulsion to put my cards more decidedly on the table. But the more I thought about the brackets, the more they bugged me. They seemed to make a fetish of the unsaid, rather than simply letting it be contained in the sayable.
Many years ago, Carson gave a lecture at Teachers & Writers in New York City, at which she introduced (to me) the concept of leaving a space empty so that God could rush in. I knew a bit about this concept from my boyfriend at the time, who was big into bonsai. In bonsai you often plant the tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine. But that night Carson made the concept literary. (Act so that there is no use in a center: a piece of Steinian wisdom Carson says she tries to impart to her students.) I had never heard of Carson before that night, but the room was packed and everyone else there clearly had. She gave a real lecture, with a Xeroxed slide list of Edward Hopper paintings and everything. She made being a professorial writer seem like the coolest thing you could ever be. I went home fastened to the concept of leaving the center empty for God. It was like stumbling into a tarot reading or AA meeting and hearing the one thing that will keep you going, in heart or art, for years.
Sitting now at my desk in my windowless office, its back wall painted pale blue in commemoration of the sky, I stare at the brackets in the Carson interview and try to enjoy them as markers of that evening from so long ago. But some revelations do not stand.
A student came to my office the other day and showed me an op-ed piece his mother had published in the LA Times, in which she describes her turbulent feelings about his transgender identity. “I want to love the man my daughter has become,” the mother announces at the outset, “but floundering in the torrent of her change and my resistance to it, I fear I’ll never make it across my river of anger and sorrow.”
I talked with the student politely, then came home and raged, reading parts of the mother’s op-ed aloud. “A transgender child brings a parent face to face with death,” the mother laments. “The daughter I had known and loved was gone; a stranger with facial hair and a deep voice had taken her place.” I couldn’t tell what made me more upset — the terms with which the woman was talking about her child, or the fact that she had chosen to publish them in a major newspaper. I told you I was sick of stories in the mainstream media told by comfortably cisgendered folks — presumably “us”—expressing grief over the transitions of others, presumably “them.” (“Where does it fit into the taxonomy of life crises when one person’s liberation is another’s loss?” Molly Haskell asks in her anguished account of her brother’s MTF transition. In case her question is not rhetorical, I’d suggest the following answer: pretty damn low.)
To my surprise, you did not share my outrage. Instead, you raised an eyebrow and reminded me that, just a few years ago, I had expressed related fears, albeit not articulated in exactly the same terms, about the unknown changes that might be wrought by hormones, by surgery.