It occurs to me that forty could be half my life or it could be all my life. On television I am told I don’t want to look like I am forty. Forty means I might have seen something hard, something unpleasant, or something dead. I might have seen it and lived beyond it in time. Or I might have squinted my eyes too many times in order to see it, I might have turned my face to the sun in order to look away. I might have actually been alive. With injections of Botox, short for botulism toxin, it seems I can see or be seen without being seen; I can age without aging. I have the option of worrying without looking like I worry. Each day of this life I could bite or shake doubt as if to injure or kill without looking as if anything mattered to me. I could paralyze facial muscles that cause wrinkles. All those worry and frown lines would disappear. I could purchase paralysis. I could choose that. Eventually the paralysis would sink in, become a deepening personality that need not, like Enron’s “distorting factors,” distort my appearance. I could be all that seems, or rather I could be all that I am––fictional. Ultimately I could face reality undisturbed by my own mortality. (Rankine 104)
Either you read this entire passage or you didn’t. Either you read it quickly or you read it slowly, read some parts more than once. Either you wondered if it was poetry or you didn’t. Either one of these things happened or something in between them did, or something happened outside of or beyond any of these staged and motionless binaries.
Maybe, later on, you’ll be walking somewhere, or showering, paying half your attention to the news or someone talking––and some of these words from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely will come back to you (or, even better, their feeling will), and a connection will have been made: subtending a piece of poetry with something in the world.
Or maybe that doesn’t end up happening. There isn’t necessarily a “better” or “worse” at work here.
Although, something is at stake.
Before I started writing these posts, I had hoped to show how important a book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is. How beautiful a book it is––meaningfully, critically challenging. How it’s a book likely to break one’s heart. Make one rage against the-world-that-is. I then worried that impulse was overly subjective or non-rigorous or unprofessional.
Maybe what I’m writing now reads like that. I hope not. I hope what’s preceded and what follows doesn’t read as insincere/idealistic/confrontational/naive––but I want something to be understood (even if it is nothing more than a personal neurosis):
Ashley stated in her response to a post of mine, “I wonder if the quest for the value of applicability and the impulse of applying [any given] theory [to any given text] is not ultimately blurred by the conditions, constraints and questions we face in reading texts and theories the way we do.”
I wonder about this wondering. I wonder about values, impulses, blurrings, conditions and constraints. I wonder if there is a consequence entailed or a difference made in what we do, or are learning/studying/working/laboring/trying to do. I wonder about the difference between condition and constraint, work and labor, trying and failing, reading and exploiting, writing and obscuring. I wonder if “applicability,” the idea that we can “use” things like “tools” to do a “job,” is problematic, unsettling or troublesome. I wonder about worrying about saying the wrong thing. I wonder how a question about “applicability” might be rephrased best in terms of an “ethicality” that is more pertinent to a world of consequence, material, social and political conditions, etc.. I worry about a reification that inflects an over-concern with “applicability” without ethics/self-conscience/self-awareness/sensitivity/etc..
I remember one of my teachers, during my undergrad years, saying something like (as a general statement on poiesis), We can’t afford to keep anything at arm’s length, reaching her hands out, pulling a small body of air in to her chest.
There are people in this world who, after realizing it was only their couch they’d been loving, don’t renounce that love and instead remember it as something real. Imagine a world where people are created and treated like objects (that world is this one), so that if one really could care for objects, then one could really care for an other. Je est un autre.
However I think or don’t think back on Colebrook’s paper, I think it wanted something similar to happen. If it did in fact want [literary criticism] to give the text life, to give life to the text, why should we hesitate at that call to arms? Why do we hesitate to believe that the text has something more to offer us than an interface for a study of period, or genre/gender, ‘material cultures’, etc.? Is it that we sometimes treat literature like a natural resource, something for consumption/commodification? If our work should be without empathy, without compassion, are we not laborers unawares?
I’m wondering about these lines from Fred Moten:
where the theoreticians will become senses in their practice
where the theoreticians will not be seeing, hearing
where the theoreticians will sear, the theoretician is a seer
where the theoreticians will be seen and heard in their practice
where the theoreticians will touch themselves
where the theoreticians will become sensual in their practice
where the reverse will always be in excess
––from “where the blues began”
2 comments:
Hi Bryan,
Thanks for this post. These questions of methodology, academic rigor and more generally what’s at stake when we engage with literary works have been floating around in my brain as well. I’m interested in your reason for choosing Rankine’s work for these posts. You said you wanted to show your readers “what a beautiful book it is.” That might be construed a selfish reason to write about a book, but decidedly no more selfish than mine— to figure out why I don't find Pointed Firs to be a “beautiful book.” One could easily argue that your methodology is far more respectful to the author and to the book than mine. However, I’m curious about what can actually be gained by singing the praises of an authors work? What can we learn from that kind of practice? Of course, maybe thats not the point of literature—I doubt that these works were created to be analyzed. But, that’s what we’ve signed up for—to use literary works as springboards for our own theoretical questions. Bottom line: I don’t really have an answer. I feel like I now have a greater appreciation for my chosen text now that I’ve spent two months picking it apart that I can argue about with others. I can now do what you started out wanting to do, so maybe that’s pretty cool. Not sure about rigorous, but definitely cool. Thanks again for your honesty and artfulness in this post.
-Sarah
Hi Bryan,
Really interesting post! I like how you subtly draw on your previous work on Rankine, while simultaneously interpolating/expanding answers to others' comments.
Rankine's words in your first excerpt are striking and poignant: "I could be all that seems, or rather I could be all that I am --fictional. Ultimately I could face reality undisturbed by my own mortality." Not only do these words demonstrate a seeming obsession with aging and time (also the objectification of human beings), but they also can be applied rather nicely to engagement with and reading of texts. I, as a student-scholar, can imagine that a text is all that it seems, and even what it doesn't or cannot seem, or I can consider its fictionality as mortalizing concretization (perhaps a type of killing).
In my comment to Megan, I touch on the idea of single categories of analysis being unfit, as they seem to perpetuate static conventionality. Instead, I would argue, as you point out, that being in the world is a constant, multifarious, lived obscuring. Academic obsessions over analytic applicability/methodology deter and detract from understandings of self-awareness and social connectivity. They can lead away from the love of one another (and the understanding of profoundly multifaceted, relative subjectivities), which needs to replace the object-love that capitalism exponentially engenders.
With Love,
Zach
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