essay on essay and life
this is an essay, from a english course on the essay as literary form
please excuse the capital letters, names changed to protect people...
When I was writing my Zine, 33hz, much like in the case of the YOU anthology, I always felt myself to be communicating to an assumed audience of which I was a part. It was some scary conglomeration of Me/Everybody at Suspension Cafe/God/My Honours Supervisor/Me (again)/A Radio Wave Physicist (who understood about frequencies and could see my ideas were firmly based on pseudo-science)/Mum/Lani (my partner)/Scott (the curt yet amicable PhD student from the Post-grad room[1])/And a Myriad of Others. I found myself casting my creative energy to impress this force, this hydra of self imposed obligations, and I relished the challenge. It was this funny place to occupy, because I found that my talent as a writer had improved on it’s own; like a younger sibling you forget about when you leave home, in coming back you find they have changed from everything you once knew. This facet of my life that should still be the same has changed irrevocably and without my knowledge, and while it’s still somehow influenced by me, it’s not mine to command, but engage with and learn from. In many ways all my writing follows this same curve, that I don’t ever control the argument in its entirety. As I alight on the process of essay writing, literally – that is physically sitting down and giving myself the space in which to do this thing, I am changed each and every time, and the words I have left on the page have changed in their relation to me and to the subject or question. Whenever I am brought to think about place or home – as was the case with the original incarnation of this essay - the idea of communicating that becomes inseparable from my confusion/amusement/amazement at the inadequacies/intricacy/beauty of our systems of communication.
Home is one thing I never feel compelled to write about; something I dance around rather than pin down. Because in doing so I have to write about myself, I must expose what Barthes calls my “Exquisite Points”, those places where I can be hurt most grievously[2]. There are select few people in this world that have claim or that I would ever allow access to, those parts of me I would consider ‘exquisite’. So for me it’s an unenviable task to write about home, in the finality of an objective viewpoint it is just a concept; everything that surrounds an emotional place in time. In simply saying the word “home” a well-spring of sensations come rushing up at once. Memories, impressions, senses, all of it becomes condensed into a synaesthetic rush; snippets and clips of something that we only catch in a backwards half glance; moments of clarity and hints at the weave of our personal journey…
How the light coming through the trees in your backyard makes home feel just so…
Or the remembered sensation of cool air and hot sun hitting your face as the bus door swings open…
Or the smell of water hitting basalt soil,
Home is not the place you were raised in, if you were lucky enough in this day and age to be raised in a single place. Home is a cobbled together series of associations and platitudes we tell about ourselves to pacify our desire for stability in life. Anthony Giddens calls these associations collectively the “Narrative of the self”, a system whereby we construct a running story that we can refer to as an anchor in our self-perception.[3] My childhood was one of stark indifference, punctuated by moments of intense, blinding emotion. I have felt, ever since I can remember, a distinct sense of existing about 3 inches behind my eyes, stuck viewing my life. That is, until some great crisis or calamity draws me instantly present. With no real anchor, a changing psychic rather than physical “Home”, the places I found home in vary wildly and across as many places as I’ve existed in. It’s a song I hear on a radio that’s muffled through the walls of my house; it’s the smell of my lover as she lays in my arms; it’s the sound of pasta bubbling in boiling water. Countless forgotten hours and remembered moments that layer upon one another, that bleed and coalesce until time is not only lost, but is meaningless. More than carrying my home with me every where I go, I am my home, my world is my home. To be glib, writing about my life is about dancing about architecture.[4] [5]
But behind this is a crux I’ve found in life writing; emotion is what keeps the past real. The energy expended in one place is carried with you, kept close and transformed as you move through the myriad words we trace ourselves with. Each time we experience a moment where the past echoes in an experience all the descriptors can’t sum up the ethereal knowledge of that moment. It’s as in a dream, when the impression of a person in your life appears to your dreaming self; that is to say, you don’t see their face or hear their voice but they are rendered presently whole by dream logic alone; that thought and tangibility are one. It’s the same unswerving knowledge, a doubtlessness akin to ignorance that informs us of our past. The thing is here now with me, and shapes how I experience events from this moment on, but “Now” is different from then, yet similar. Home is made of this.
One such emotion that kicks most foul and raw into our current selves is guilt. To speak truly there is no such thing as sin, only the guilt we attach to our own lives. As such the older a sin is, the longer we have carried it, and the deeper we’ve allowed it to hurt us. Each of us has blushed furious with the reminder of a moment where we’ve wronged another to the point where we see no possible atonement. Even now as you read this in the voice of your mind, you will recollect moments of guilt and shame, those twin prongs which pin you like a living specimen to your past self. Time falls away and in that instant you are that past self: seven years old, fists balled, cheeks burning, sobbing with self pity. Such a link is hard to bear, let alone describe to another human being. These place-sakes, these words, they are veils woven of finest silk, barest threads that are trying to hold together the meaning of their spinning. The task of making a communication that is not just a seeming is one of great frustration: And that which frustrates us, we punish. But worst of all are the punishments of the Adult mind on the sexual meanderings of the bored and curious adolescent self, those barbs to which we later attach a burning stigma.
The adult mind is quick to forget that in youth we never wanted innocence, nor sought ignorance and that the mysteries of life are for the finding, not for the keeping.
Once I went to stay with old friends in
We dinnered at a small but reputable pub, seven dollar steaks – no conditions apply, and with the spare money acquired our loosener. Sitting in central park the talk became more and more charged, directly in proportion to the amount of cheap, nasty, white wine thrown back in spite of consequences.[6] I started it all by admitting a few things normal life would demand I shouldn’t…
“[name changed female], I always felt like I missed out on something with you. We were such awesome friends in primary school, walking around the oval just talking about year one stuff. But I was one fuckin crazy little kid, I was masturbating about all the girls in the year, and I was like, six, WHO the fuck does that? AT SIX?”
[name changed female], looked at me, in a half-caring half-amused state, and absolved me.
“You remember how in Mr [name changed]’s class, he would clap his hands loudly and yell “Hands on desks!”? [7] That was coz one time he caught me when I was playing with myself under the desk. When we were s'posed to be having a spelling test...”
The world stopped a little, and through the swim inside my head, buzzing with the nervous energy of an actor’s first lines on stage, I jolted with clarity.
“…it wasn’t even a sexual thing, I was little, you know, it was a comfort thing. So every time he thought I was doing it again he would yell out “HANDS ON DESKS!” Until it just became a thing for everyone else too. But yeah…”
“Ha, I always wondered why he did that!”[8]
We danced lightly and swam through the chill evening, trading story for story, in conversations we had never dared breathe before. And it was only afterwards that I realised they had both accepted the fact that I still wanted [name changed female] , and that [name changed male] wanted a homosexual experience, and that we were absolved from ourselves. I sat in the half light of the late
I have come to realise then that life writing which is focused on the past is self arrested development, the spinning of nostalgia. It is a constant rebirthing and recontextualisation of our story,; all in the hopes that we can envelop the systems of meaning that control our conscious self. Here we are grappling with the same assumed audience to whom zine writers cast themselves prostrate. In a way we are pulling this self-perceived external other into line with our own prism. We are supplanting all potential others in the ‘qua centre’ of our self narrative. Derrida, when he attacked the structuralist frame work, pointed out the fallacy of ‘structure’, the centralizing of meaning in any socially contextualised object (a text in this instance)[10]. Derrida was saying that concepts become a tangible system to structuralists’, that there are limits to the definitions you can give something. This attack was based on Derrida’s hatred of formal-historicism, the school of thought that defined the author as ‘Authority’, and said anything else, be it interpretation or a recontextualised social structure lay outside of the system of influence. As such to life write is to play god with ourselves, to for Authority into our life narrative by setting in writing our socially presented past. Out of the chaos and embarrassment of our life we pull forward the beauty and the controlled moments of nostalgia so we can find an actual pleasure in our past, which is also our “self”. To life write is the ultimate form of masturbation.
So then, each essay is a furthering of this life narrative, it is the condensing of your knowledge accruement into some kind of slate where knowledge is conveyed for memorial. Caroline Drinkwater, that magnificent soul, had organised a day where we were to all meet and read past honours papers from one of the post-graduate rooms. Being the victim of public transport I arrived half an hour early and poked around at a few of the shelves while the young, dour-faced office lady kindly trotted in a heater. As soon as I walked up to the shelf my eyes latched onto a name ‘Shane Holtass’.
“Wait, I know that name.”
It was a disturbing feeling to be confronted by the Honours and subsequent PhD of a man I had been lectured by. It was like those first steps behind the scenery of the University, where knowledge comes from people, not some great place of authority. He was real to me then, he was far older than me, yet his Honours was only 3 years old, his place was one that could be my own. And as I opened and read, I was re-introduced to two men I had known, both Shane and Samuel Beckett. His dissection of Beckett through the frames of great humans that had thought and struggled and finally decided on something to say elated and crushed me simultaneously. Here was the hand me down I had longed for without realising I wanted, yet it outlined just how broad a world shaped the school of thought I was entering into. So with the bittersweet ennui descending on me I fell into reading the many texts around the room, returning again and again to this one, alighting on it as if visiting two friends who had nothing but kind words for one another.
Reading Shane’s work made me realise that this whole process is rather unfair for me, I write in piecemeal segments[12], across many and varied contexts, so each and every time I fall upon the task of communication it’s through another, shifted context. You write a small section, something that seems to fit, then like a hummingbird you’re off to another tangent, down the shops for some milk or to a website about Patent Nostrums. Again and again we go, darting about in the flux of our lives. Each moment demanding it’s own logic begging a varying commitment, varying communication. A song, a smell, the nostalgia specific to a different time, all the myriad memory prompts that we experience, there’s no way to communicate everything that a single moment demands, because they change and flow and dart and when I return to rephrase or rework those scribblings a second time, they’re gone. So we are attempting to make our writing parallax[13]. A continually shifting inclusive that denies all otherness by assimilating everything. For this knowledge I stand on Žižek’s shoulder, surveying the entirety of human kind as my own context and condition, and in a moment of haughty disbelief, I think,
“Isn’t this pushing the whole narcissus thing a bit?”
Žižek, turned his great head to better see me, nodded and smiled broadly[14]. Standing hands on hips we watched the manifold play of the world spread out below us.
Looking out across the human landscape I saw the shimmer and welter of so many billion threads, each unique and tragic, catching and reflecting the light of the westering day. New threads flew up to meet the imperious hand and old ones fell in tumbling coils back to the continents from which they came. It was beautiful and terrifying.
“Truly, is humanity such a mirror then? Are we outsourcing our knowledge of ourselves on such a grand scale?”
“Aye, little brother, in the human spirit there is infinite scope for compromise, and these marionettes dance a merry jig indeed. These are just the threads of believers mind you, there are a great many less that have this thread contained within them selves. So either god is your mirror or his creation.”
“What?”
“…for so far as we think we now see, look where our feet yet be,
There’s not a place left to traverse, that does not lay upon the earth.”[15]
“How do you mean?...”
The light bent around gentle Žižek’s head, iridescent, shimmering like a heat haze. And through the vapour of this vision I saw a fold of worlds, some with cords, some without, some like great clockwork maps, with a centre of blinding light…
“…are you saying that by containing all otherness within ourselves we become god?”
“I’m not saying anything, you’re the one who wanted to stand here and see from the vantage I made for myself. And this perspective is all well and good, but you know I can’t have thought this to be the entirety of my lifes opinion. And given the nature of my own purporting how could you hold a view that I wouldn’t take within myself. This is merely your own construct to appreciate a small facet of the totality of my existence, that which continues as cultural object long after I ever thought it, or dared to breathe it. We will never be outside of our condition, we can only ever continue to support the centre of our own logos[16],”
“Wait, some one else said that…”
It was plain to me that this was no longer Žižek; in the half light coming from farthest west the rippling dream image of my kind giant wavered and danced like a gem facetted kaleidoscope, each face of the manifold another name, another great mind that had pondered the philosophy of an age. Ideas were bending and flexing, every face was distinct yet suffused; like seeing a pure beam of light, yet concurrently every spectrum of colour that light could be. One thousand times a thousand mouths opened and closed, and through the voice of uncountable tongues came words,
“Though you may seek to paint all of existence, you can only do so in the hues of your palette. What colour is imagination, what shade the breeze? How do you describe blue to a blind woman?”
I felt struck, a great dread welling in my chest and stomach, were they right? I sat down on the giants shoulder, letting my thoughts drift over this, washed away with ennui. In that purest of knowledge, gentle dream logic, I presently came to be sitting on a small bridge over looking a quiet pond. It was a cool night, yet not a cold one and somewhere beyond a row of chrysanthemums a cricket played violin. No real tune, just a scraping of C major to A minor, back and forth in an optimistic melancholia. I had just watched the collection and collation of all human thought say of itself that it couldn’t really communicate anything. I was whirling with doubts; had the chorus spoken true or was this only my interpretation? What of metaphor? Had I only heard what I wanted to hear or had I heard only what it was possible for me to hear in my limited capacity? Had I reached the end of learning where everything only reinforced one point and presented no new position? Was my own writing only this, snatches and glances, moments where absurd magical realism was the only thing that could grasp sightless at the inaccessibility of truth. My mind shuddered with turmoil. All the moments of communication I had attempted fled away from me, misunderstood ramblings, frightened of the thing that had birthed them. Without context or a sense of self they became the merest whipped dogs, expressing nothing through thousands of words. The music of the cricket veered violently off key, boiling over into a huge, hammering tumult, building and building into a cacophony of crescendo, doubts, doubts, everywhere doubts
Until suddenly…
something
somewhere,
stopped.
I sat up into the quiet evening of my bedroom. Pale light from a distant streetlight washed the room in hues of a thin blue. I sat as one breathing again, saved from drowning, with that sudden clarity found when you wake from a fevered nightmare. There were answers some where, but they didn’t matter, I would go to the place where I could find a gentle, single soul to converse with. And on my terms tell them of my doubts. Falling backwards into gentle pillows, with the sound of Lani’s breath to reassure me, I kept falling, gently down, further, further…
gone.
I reached out to the heavy set, oak and elm door that now stood in front of me. Beyond it I mapped the terrain, manipulated the ineffable thought space and finally, free of all questions; I stepped through the threshold I had opened for myself.
A quiet shoreline, late afternoon;
In the middle distance is a door in a frame yet unfixed to anything else, sitting at a café table amidst shin-high grass is Samuel Beckett.
Enter Andrew, looking around as if in disbelief. Moves to table, sits down tentatively.
A gentle, pink breeze blows.
Andrew – [after much silence] “Um…”
Samuel – “Um is exactly right.”
Andrew – “How d..” – [Samuel interrupts]
Samuel – [Pompous and self-aggrandising, as if quoting Aristotle to a primary school class] “In the face of our current context, I have said before! “…there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with an obligation to express.[17] ”
Andrew – [Slapping the table with much vim] “Damn fucking straight, [suddenly unsure] well… for half of it any way.”
Samuel – “hmm,” [Samuel leans back, putting finger tips together] “…what’s that?”
Andrew – “Well… finding out that all art can say is that there isn’t actually anything to say is an almighty kick in the balls. We’re in a tight game here Sam, fighting for the table scraps of a society that largely doesn’t want our philosophy, just our products of entertainment. Most of our contemporaries would drop into nihilism if they didn’t see that what you’re actually saying is “You’re free you bastards, go run in the fields and come back to tell these people who don’t how lovely it is!”. Our dear painters and playwrights, singers and players, they couldn’t see an end’s worth of trouble for all the callous means they’ll be trekked through. Main problem being that the gift you want to give has been sitting in our laps all along, but when something’s cloaked in responsibility the human eye seems unable to focus on it.
Samuel – “So…”
Andrew – [as one irritated at their own discursion from the topic] “SO… that brings us here, free once more; with nothing but the obligations we give ourselves. That bastard shoulder sitting God finally given his marching orders. It’ll just take a while to sink in, that ‘Tabula Rasa’ is not the obliteration of what was written, but the charging of everything outside the slate with meaning, and light, and beauty.”
[brief pause, where something intangible passes between the two players]
Samuel – “Pass the salt, I need a grain or two.”
Andrew – “oh ha ha..” [Samuel looks satisfied with himself]
Samuel – “No I think you’re pretty close there, on the money as it were, but the question remains do you think they’re worth it?”
Andrew – [sitting with arms folded, as one deep in thought] “They?”
Samuel – “Well when you stand back and look at the lot of them, each side in the whole mess, is each part worthy of the same attention or do you pick your favourites?”
Andrew – “I tried that, at one point I thought I was everybody, but in the end I found that that’s not actually a question, it’s an excuse – and a lazy one at that. It’s an argument for inertia, and that ultimately the choice is to act or to not, that is all there is.”
[a long, orange silence ensues]
Samuel – [with a hint of knowing sarcasm] “So who are we waiting for then?”
Andrew – “No-one, and that’s the beauty of it.”
[Another brief pause then the curtain falls, a solitary audience member coughs, there is no encore] [18]
[1] Who would never actually read the damn thing and whom, it just so happens, I found out lives next door to me in Islington along with his partner (the nice lady from the Research Higher Degree night at the Syracusa Restaurant.) {small world}
[2] Barthes, R. (1978) A Lovers Discourse: Fragment, Random House, Brittan. Pg.95
[3] Giddens, A (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity, Self and Society in the Late Modern Age.
[4] A quote, stolen (or appropriated, if you’re a post-modernist) and reworked. The original is "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to want to do."
--Elvis Costello, in an interview by Timothy White entitled "A Man out of Time Beats the Clock." Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52. (cited 29/08/2008 @ web address - www.pacifier.com/~ascott/they/tamildaa.htm
[5] Ever noticed how you read all the footnotes at once, even though they don’t entirely make sense yet?
[6] The wine was the kind with that huge, watery gap in between a pallid grape taste and rollicking ethanol burn. Cleanskins from god knows where, utilitarian alcohol at it’s best/worst.
[7] I didn’t remember, but I had that vague, half-felt half-thought sense of rightness in her saying this. That sensation is a well-spring for my trust/distrust of memory, In experiencing a force of recollection stronger than your own do you take on their truth or
[8] “Liar,” I thought, “Liar, you don’t remember having to do that at all, all you remember from year 5 is convincing some of the more crazy Christian kids that you sold your soul to the devil and scared them with your “dark” eyes, or that Daniel LeBlanc asked “Do you do it doggy-style?” when the class was playing “Yes, No, Black, White” and got himself sent out, which left you sitting there not knowing what “doggy-style” was.”
[9] Or really early morning.
[10] Derrida, J (1978, (republished 2005) ‘Structure, Sign an Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, Routledge, pp.351-370
[11] Take a break, I did, I went and got a drink of ginger beer. Very refreshing stuff that, good for the digestion. It all gets a little Creative non-fictiony, dream imaginary, faux-theoretical from here.
[12] Mmmmm, like a Hershey’s
[13] Žižek, Slavoj (2006) The Parallax View, MIT Press,
[14] When you’re a giant I suppose you do everything broadly.
[15] “Who wrote that?” I asked in my mind as I proofed this a second time, then I remembered that in a fit of whimsy (if such a thing could be) I had written it, poetry in an essay.
[16] Derrida
[17] Beckett, Samuel (1983) ‘Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment’, ed. Ruby Cohn, John Calder,
[18] In the darkness behind the fallen curtain I think I see Samuel mouth the words “well done”, but it may have been a trick of the light.
Labels: chaotic essays stuffs, fall, scooters, vacation
posted by Run for the Dawn | 4:39 PM
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