the game would collapse
Erasure poems take a text and make something different, chimerical, out of it by erasing portions selected by some logic the poet decides. In “Declaration,” Tracy K. Smith took the Declaration of Independence and erased words until what remained was still about unfreedom, but very differently (particularly read in the context of its publication in 2018) — “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.” I saw Smith give a reading at Yale with my poet-scientist friend. Someone asked her if she listened to music while she worked. Smith said she loves music, but turns it off when she writes, finding that there is something necessary and productive about silence.
My first full day here in my parents’ town, my mother bought me a book about silence. It was the one I’d plucked from the shelf and said I wanted. Greek Lessons by Han Kang, a novel that follows a teacher of Ancient Greek losing his vision and his student, a divorced woman who cannot speak. Reading the book, I felt as though I was tripping unsteadily through a world wrapped in gossamer; so much was described through a scrim.
Yesterday I read another book that touched on silence — Lisa Hsiao Chen’s Activities of Daily Living. The book’s protagonist, Alice, is shuttling between Brooklyn and the SF Bay Area, carrying out archival research on the enigmatic Taiwanese-American performance artist Tehching Hsieh and visiting her aging father, first in assisted living, then memory care and hospice. Her father, who is referred to as “the Father” throughout the book, gradually stops being able to speak. Alice tries to staunch the flood of words from her father’s head: when he gestures towards a word, like saying “that part of the leg between the foot and the knee,” she writes the word (calf) on a list she gives him to keep; eventually, he forgets about the list. In another chapter, a fragmented history of dictionaries, there’s this:
“In Spike Lee’s biopic, Denzel-Malcolm sits side by side with his jailhouse mentor in the prison library [...] They look up the definition of ‘black’: [...] soiled with dirt, foully or outrageously wicked [...] Then ‘white’: innocent, pure, free from spot or blemish [...] Denzel-Malcolm scowls, all but pushes the book away. “This is written by white folks, right?”
Learn the meaning of words so you can undo them. Read their shade. Learn to read a sentence like an ace poker player reads the table — the weight shifting from one butt cheek to the other, a chin scratch, the hardening of an otherwise blank expression. Read the silences too. Develop a second sense for those who would cage you.”
The word vagina comes from the Latin for sheath or scabbard, pudenda from the Latin for shame, hysterical from the Greek hysterikós for suffering in the womb. Wandering in etymology is a little like traipsing a garden of thorns.
***
When my sister and I were little, sometimes we amused each other by trying to “make up” languages in real time, chattering gibberish with inflections and gestures that parroted normal conversation. Inevitably our “made-up” languages tilted towards the already extant. We sounded like we were saying disfigured English, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and French words. Then the game would collapse until the next time.
In those days it felt as though I had an abundance of language, real or not, ready to come out. It’s more difficult to speak now. I sit across from my parents and go scrambling inside my cavern head for something to say. Eleanor Roosevelt allegedly uttered this asshole saying “great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people.” Sometimes you don’t have it in you to be a great mind over brunch.
At the impromptu little seafood dinner in the woods the weekend before leaving New Haven, sitting on tree stumps with a bunch of people I didn’t know well, the garrulous dinner convener suggested we discuss our “rose, bud, and thorn” of the semester (a positive, something we were looking forward to, and something that had been difficult). One person said his thorn was how much dust there was in his room. I realized then that this wasn’t going to be the kind of earnest, trembling-lower-lip group confessional of a NYTimes 36 Questions round. Some of growing up is learning how to spend your life in the register between sincerity and falsehood, the glib middle. The ones who are truly gifted at balancing on this wire amaze me. I was very quiet at dinner.
What do people like to talk about? What do people like to hear?
People and events: there are raconteurs who transform into jesters, actors, dancers if they have a scene to enact. I go through days hoping something will happen to me, a story to possess and animate me in the evening.
Ideas: anyone who’s passionate about something, if they can convey it, is interesting up to a point. Then again if the passion is very common and you don’t personally have an affinity for it (American football for me) maybe not. If it’s too obscure and you struggle to see its relevance to your life or concerns (many dissertation topics), maybe not either.
People don’t always want to talk about their passions. My “thorn” during the seafood dinner was that my research makes me sad. I think about heterosexual relationships and gender inequality more broadly because I don’t feel like I have a choice — that is where my head goes. But it’s also a difficult subject to discuss. Many people I know are in heterosexual relationships. When I talk about my work and offer examples of types of inequality that commonly exist, I am aware I may be describing characteristics of their relationship to their face. By implying that these things are deserving of scrutiny, and possibly part of something pernicious (“gender inequality”!) I may make them introspective, uncomfortable, defensive. Sometimes we have honest, funny, empathetic conversations. Oh yes, someone says, my partner’s great, very woke, but he doesn’t monitor the level of household supplies at all.
Other times, we change the subject.
Eventually, I hope to find a way to talk about research that feels easier, lands in the glib middle if I need it to. I suppose I want to be more dispassionate in order to talk. Passion is clean-cut and wholesome until it turns to melancholy or rage. To be industrious, into what you do but not led around the throat by it, able to talk for a few minutes about sports, the weather, or traffic like the local news — that’s the cocktail party, meet-the-parents personality.
***
Activities of Daily Living is a book about losing language but also a book about projects: the protagonist’s project, the Artist’s project, the necessity of having a project at all. Alice recalls wasting time joyfully with the Father while her mother worked.
“Wasting time was not something Alice’s mother did well or could abide by. She was always after some measure of self-improvement — calisthenics and tai chi for heart health, puzzles and games to strengthen her mind. Whether this was something innate to her personality or immigrant imperative was hard to say; Alice was hardly immune to its pull. She sometimes wondered if projects were an antidote to wasting time, an elaborate manifestation of it, or both.”
For a while I was probably my mother’s project. She has fonder memories of it than I do.
When you watch someone else carry out a project that relies on acting upon other people, you become aware of the discomfort of being an object like that, of having less information than the project’s creator. It’s really funny in movies like Borat and Bad Trip or TV shows like What Would You Do?, John Quiñones jumping out from behind a bush to stick a microphone in some bystander’s face, but we laugh so much because the humor has a sharpness to it, we would be frightened if it happened to us. I suppose all of us are carrying out projects that involve other people, to different degrees of symmetry in information and power and utility. The previous examples are uncomfortable because they are so weighted to one side. Precocious children or participatory theater are a little different. Marina Abramovic offering museum visitors 72 objects to use on her as they wish as she kneels in the center of a room in Rhythm 0 different still.
***
The mercy of having many projects, or even just more than one, is that other projects let you stay silent about the ones that aren’t ready yet and the ones which will never be ready. Maybe that’s why I have this newsletter, to have another project. To have a deferral, too — writing in order to keep close the other words, the ones that aren’t ready yet.
Image credit: Gerhard Richter’s painting (yes, it’s a painting!) Reader (804), 1994; SFMOMA