Academy of Readers, In Utero

I cannot bear to have eked out this lovely site on the 'net only to neglect it for over two months. I had intended this blog to be a forum for objective commentary on the nature of reading, literature, language, and academia. Lately I have found it difficult to be "objective" as I currently am experiencing what I can only think to call a Linguistic Revolution/Evolution. In what may well be an act of writerly prostitution--except even more abject as I am offering my intimate verbal moments without being guaranteed payment--I have collated excerpts from my writing notebook that I feel best illustrate the issues about which I've been attempting "objectively" to discuss in here. Many people use their blogs as personal diaries; I think keeping a diary that is available for all to read is an entirely different organism with an entirely different effect on the mind than keeping a secret notebook, and I strongly advocate the latter over the former. But when you are struggling to express something, as I am begrudgingly discovering sometimes it is better to go with whatever you are capable of, to throw it all out there and trust that you'll get closer next time.

I would like to draw your attention to the mention, in these notebook excerpts, of what I have dubbed the "Jekyll-Hyde mind": a mind that employs equally two disparate faculties, one that operates as "a humming machine of analytical rigor" and "revels in questions, in lineages, in facts and order and repetition until understanding is gained," and another faculty that represents "wild, crashing, rapacious creativity" and "revels in the moment of NOW, to express what is shy, transient, fleeting...to speak the understanding beyond conscious deductive or reductive knowledge." By likening the opposition between these ways of thinking to that between a "Jekyll" and a "Hyde," I do not mean to imply that one kind of thinking is "good" and the other "bad." Rather, I mean that often these different ways of thinking, that in my opinion complement one another splendidly, often are set up by culture as hostile to one another--for example the Enlightenment thinkers who viewed 'poetical' knowledge as an important stage in human progress but as representative of a less advanced stage of thought than 'rational' knowledge. And what I really mean, of course, that I, Carroll, feel pressure to relinguish the language of my experience in order to advance in the halls of the language of academia. I cannot tell from whence the pressure comes, only that I know it is not from me--is it from discourse itself? I do not know the answer.

March 17, 2005
A room of one’s own. This journal is my room, where thoughts are disentangled, a voice is born via strands of language and self-trust is restored. My theory, born last night, is that to be able to speak your thoughts on the page, you have to cultivate a relationship with yourself through the medium of the page. You have to learn to speak to yourself effortlessly in a voice you could never use directly with others but that is addressed, indirectly, to others, or to “eternity,” i.e., to the promise of being read by virtue of existing as a material thing. I somehow lost my ability to converse with the page, so that the pages I write can converse with others. That’s what it is: you converse with the page, so that your pages become living manifestations of mind, that recreate, or enact, the play of the mind in such a way as to engage others, who dart in and out of your flow like children in a fountain. The words must rise, leavened, from the page, individually and in strands, syntactical bonds, the way you rise out of bed in the mornings, a living being, and assume a role in the world. Thus a journal is not merely a repository of thought, but the site of a kind of exorcism, a playing Dr. Frankenstein, a breathing life into something that is heavy, dead, because objectified. A page becomes a living thing, a stingray, waving its sinewy flaps of treeflesh in a sea of signs. A fascinating, remarkable process, the way a piece of paper can become a communication of timeless, manifold importance.

See how my language becomes more assured, more ‘poetical,’ more closely and immediately issuing from that impulse to speak. There is a sense, I feel it now, of belonging, of existing in a family of minds, pages, possibilities. This is the joy I seek, the nirvana that makes me want to put myself through the strain of finding a voice by which to speak. The violin* is being played; it’s not drying out and coming unglued in the coffincase lined with plush velvet, velvet to soften the degradation of being so alive and yet neglected as though dead. There is a relation between writing and playing the violin—there are many relations—and one of them is that a tree was cut, wood was pared, planed, and bound together into a cohesive object, and when the bow is drawn across the strings or the pen is drawn across the paper, music (or the promise of such) issues forth. To be a violinist in language, the VioLinguist—this is what I want. A complete amalgamation of visual, aural, kinesthetic and linguistic, a rendering of time, space and sound, all through language.

Writing in here I feel I am digging. Words, like sediment, lie on the ocean floor and I go downdowndown to it through transparent fluid and grab fistfuls, reveling in their texture, the way the loose strands swirl and dance in the current. Tension, like a swarm of air bubbles, flees to the surface. Each word that concretizes a real feeling simultaneously envelops me in and releases me into ecstasy—the ecstasy of clarity, the clarity that ensues from acceptance of the fact that clarity, in language, is impossible. Only approximations, only evocations are possible. As Toni Morrison observed in her Nobel speech, “Language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.”

*Until seven years ago I seriously pursued a career as a violinist and so I tend to think about language in terms of music. The idea of a "coffincase" refers to the fact that whereas I once spent at minimum 4 hours a day playing my instrument, I now only take it out of the case once a month, if that. Nevertheless, music was so much a part of my life for so long that I cannot separate myself from that mode of thinking and hearing. Music greatly influences my thinking about language, reading, and narrative; hence my sense that at my writerly/artistic/intellectual/academic best I will know myself as a VioLinguist.

June 1994
Having given up entirely on getting home at a decent hour from this “Journal-a-thon,” I’ve read my entire journal from beginning to end. And I am depressed, because though I have asked myself hundreds of questions, and though I have belabored many in a quest to answer them, absolutely no answers have been reached. Nothing is even close. And if I view this journal as a prophet of the future, then it tells me that I will never find answers to most of the questions I or others pose. So what is the use of always searching? It’s a test: what’s the use of a teacher giving a student a multiple-choice question with ten pages of possible answer choices, if there IS no answer, and the student will get the question wrong no matter WHAT answer he or she circles?
But that’s like questioning the point of doing ANYTHING because nowhere in this world, in this life, is there a true answer. The object is to come as close to an “answer” as you can. As close as you possibly can.
And though right now I am about as far from answers as our sun is from another sun, I AM getting closer—I AM moving somewhere, though I don’t know where yet. The second and third times I confronted a question in here, I had just a bit more to add. And if I keep sparring with the question again and again, then bit by bit I will get closer and closer, though I will never hold an answer in my palms. But I suppose I can accept that. As I’ve learned in English this year: there is no one answer, ever. Ever. But it’s worth it to take part in The Quest….

April 1, 2005
My my my what a morning hormones thrashing mood crashing angry bashing shoulders tense mind dense menstrual fence emotional dents. Dark thoughts heavy and thick and boiling in the cauldron of this muggy spring day. Play: splash with the words on the page thrash with the thoughts in the mind cut and pull and stab and pound the rubber soles on the asphalt in desperate furious steps. Seize, punch, grip with your fist and hurl into the nearest trashbasket. Tie the cord around its neck and twist more and more tightly, choke him with your bare hands, feel the giving way of the larynx, the mad, desperate look in his eyes, set in a face blotchy, almost purple, the skin tight and on alert. Feel the spray of the sputters of his last breath, crush crush his neck as he claws and pounds at your determined hands, that have suddenly acquired the strength of a giant, the sleek power of an anaconda, a boa. Boa beau—they’re all the same. Squeeze and squeeze until the breath dries up in you like you’re old, dried-out violin wood; you die in their hands, or you hand over, as they crush down on your windpipe, your breath, your will, your soul. And then you are just a rag doll. Boa. Beau. Well beau, I am stronger than you, and six feet longer, and six inches thicker, and I will live on and on and tell everyone this story, of our tug-of-war with a rope of breath between us, consuming it at either end and drawing ever closer together as fierce opponents, not as friends, not as lovers. Our embrace was one of war, like two praying mantises locked in a post-coital struggle until the female in a final enraged seizure bites off the male’s head and swallows it as though it were a chewysilly Sunmaid™ raisin. Skull crushed like a cracker, the brain pulped and juiced like an orange at the Tropicana factory. Teeth pulverized into a white powder like evaporated milk, the sultry red flesh of cheek and gums dried out on wooden boards like salt fish. Anonymous parts: only breath amalgamates them into something whole and with a name.

Wow. That all just came out of nowhere and now my commencement of orderly commentary feels like a ridiculous pretense. Pale and grey, thinned out, watered down, a putrid gruel. Jekyll-Hyde mind, one part wild, crashing, rapacious creativity in a colorful helter-skelter tangle, the other part a humming machine of analytical rigor: clean, determined, hungry to KNOW, to break elements down and expose the nothingly everything-ness upon which they are built. Hybrid I am. One part revels in the moment of NOW, to express what is shy, transient, fleeting, to convey visions no matter what vague, random and disparate notions comprise them, not to gain understanding but to speak the understanding beyond conscious deductive or reductive knowledge. The other part revels in questions, in lineages, in facts and order and repetition until understanding is gained. Which part is Jekyll, and which is Hyde—or are they both Jekyll-Hyde amalgams?

March 18, 2005
…I’ve built up a strong, confident “public” self, and am much more comfortable with my “private” self—much more comfortable in my own skin—but I’ve temporarily lost a “writerly self.” What is a “writerly self” comprised of? An amalgamation of public and private, I believe—but with a twist. The chemistry is different; the writerly self is not merely a compound of public and private. How you communicate on the page is entirely different from how you communicate within your own thoughts and to others. Perhaps because in writing—good writing—one doesn’t speak through or by means of words; there is not (overtly) a distinct consciousness from which ideas, encapsulated in words, issue forth; the words themselves speak. The words must speak for themselves. Perhaps these were Derrida’s thoughts when he claimed the author does not exist. More than a play of mind, writing that truly can be called such is a play of words. Gradually, even in a journal, there is a removal of the author from the page. Now, you could say this is always the case: as soon as anything is written, the author fades into the background or fades altogether and what is written is considered in that light. But with a true play of words even the author of the journal has the sense of being removed; she ceases to think of herself (she loses self-consciousness) and thinks of and in words. There is immediacy: an idea arises, and it appears in words—so quickly that the idea arises in words before it arises in the mind. So that the author is simultaneously reader of her own mind. The mind exists on the page; the page is alive because the writing gives the sense that the page secreted these words; the page appears to be the site of some omniscient consciousness. I say, for example, that “I am reading Woolf,” but I don’t care about Virginia Woolf, because I don’t have to; her writing does not draw attention to her. It seems as though I am saying that Woolf’s writing is “incandescent,” as she calls in Room writing that reveals nothing about the state of mind of the author. But I don’t think Woolf achieves incandescence; rather, she knows how to wield language so well that I don’t have to refer to her life to find coherence in her writing; I need only refer to her writing….

…Is all this self-observation grotesquely narcissistic? “Should” I be talking about weighty, universal topics? Would this journal be more “sophisticated” if I wrote about Iraq, say, or North Korea, Medicare or stem-cell research? Why this continual concern that I appear sophisticated, intellectual, impressive? One reason children produce such powerful artwork (written or drawn) is that they are not trying. They just express what they know. A reviewer of Alice Munro observed that Munro has been criticized in the past for her failure to write about the “big” subjects, that because she writes about the interior lives of ordinary women her work has been viewed to be less “important.” But would we read Munro if she tried to be anything else? Clearly she is an “expert” in her subject. (How I loathe, LOATHE the word “expert”!) Would she call herself an intellectual? Who knows what that word really means; it could mean almost anything. I suppose I’m getting at the nagging question, What does it mean to be “educated”? Plenty of people graduate college, even obtain Ph.D.’s and are unable to think critically or imaginatively; plenty of people without college-level educations demonstrate high levels of critical activity and imaginativeness. These latter people, unfortunately, are limited, socially, as to where they are able to apply their mental abilities. Prestige eludes them. That’s the difference. Fiction-writing is a field that favors equally the well-educated and the minimally educated, since what is important to fiction-writing is not what the writer knows but how he or she thinks, i.e., what he or she imagines. Or, to say it better: how the writer applies imagination to gain insight into a situation. Who’s to say what topic is more intellectual than another when both are considered intelligently—and by that I mean both analytically and imaginatively?

March 21, 2005
…personal growth (intellectual and emotional) does not automatically translate into writerly growth. Your imaginative, your writerly (to what degree are these two the same?) self has to be honed and developed within the medium of its expression. That’s probably why so few older adults succeed in becoming writers if they’ve never really written before: they’ve spent so many years enjoying the competence and eloquence of adulthood that it is a shock to find themselves in childhood again, and a pale, gray childhood at that, where judgment and disappointment override (at first) the joy of discovery, the triumph of each increment of progress towards mastery. The adult wants to be an adult in writing, and most adults abandon the literary dream once they realize they’re going to have to dredge a writer’s voice from the fragmented void of infancy through the awkward bursts of toddlerhood, the triteness of adolescence, the imitativeness of young adulthood, and only then: a mature voice of their own—a feat even the most tenacious rarely attain. My point here is that I have to allow for awkwardnesses of all kinds if I am going to get my idea out, and that is the most important thing: getting the idea out there, in whatever state of mess, to JUST GO, as [a friend] said in her e-mail, to SPEND IT ALL, SPEND IT NOW, as Annie Dillard said. Meaning, courage always looks better, reads better, than complacent fear. No one wants to read a narrative that sounds cramped and intimidated. So maybe, since I am so comfortable and eloquent here, and lately my computer screen is a scary, finger- and mind-numbing presence, I can practice being courageous here, and write out my idea longhand, never mind the mess. I need not be a perfectionist this first go-round. I can spew everywhere; as soon as uncertainty hits I can yell—in gibberish if it must come to that—until I settle into what I intend to say. Then in pencil I can excise the hoverings around a thought, type what I have, and lo! A draft. I have two hours ahead of me. How far can I go?

March 22, 2005
…I am drawn to the emotive and poetic and the intellectual is only a vehicle to that end, never the end in itself. I hate how there’s this differentiation between “artist” and “intellectual.” Artists are the most intelligent people I know; they possess a deep intuition regarding how elements in life are related, and oftentimes so-called “intellectuals” don’t pick up on these relationships. I think part of the cause for the differentiation is that if you are a mediocre artist, unless you appeal to some strain of popular culture you are relegated to a life on the margins, respected by no one, ridiculed for being so impractical, so selfish as to continue to pursue a craft for which you clearly lack the requisite gifts. But mediocre intellectuals procure university positions; universities teem with them. True intellectuals—true thinkers—are very rare: those who master discourse so as to work freely within its confines and yet still manage to push a completely original idea through. True intellectuals are people like Freud, Melanie Klein, Winnicott, Erikson, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Barthes, Genette, Said, Chomsky—to name only a few. At this level, as far as I’m concerned, the intellectual is an artist, a creator. Artists—real artists—and intellectuals—real intellectuals—overlap in that both are ORIGINAL THINKERS. It’s only the differential social treatment of the quacks—the quack artist is dubbed a loser while universities create, fund and nurture quack intellectuals**—that makes it seem as though “artist” and “intellectual” exist at opposite ends of the thinking spectrum.

But why am I so bitter? Why do I continue in daily irritation at the preferential treatment given intellectuals? Because, outside the university, I feel I am not allowed to call myself one. [One of my graduate-school professors] wrote that “anyone who knows me does not doubt” that I am a “serious, first-rate intellectual,” but I feel I cannot own that identity until a university hands me a doctoral degree, or until I publish something that puts me in conversation with other intellectuals.

Well, since you clearly are suffering a lapse in confidence, let me ask you this: to you, is Alice Munro an intellectual? Here is a woman who never finished college, who at your age was a housewife with few prospects, who besides writing when she finally published a book at age 37 never had any occupation, once married, than as a book shop co-owner. Her writing—much of it—focuses on the “lives of girls and women” in Canada. So let’s call her an “expert” on women and the social difficulties they face. Does she know less than a scholar of feminism? The scholar of feminism studies Munro’s writing, and puts it in context with other women-centered writing, with cultural movements, and with the scholarly discourse on feminism. Munro studied, to produce her fiction, the craft of writing in the context of the literary tradition, the immediate world around her, her own attitudes, yearnings, life and psyche. And who knows: maybe she also is interested in feminist theory and read that over the years. How does her work require any less “intellect” than that of the scholar of feminism? How does her work require any less “knowledge”? Perhaps the scholar of feminism does not know how, or it does not occur to her, to view her own life through the lens of the feminist discourse she consumes and speaks. Often that is what happens—that the scholar lacks the imagination to reconfigure the theoretical/historical/cultural discourse into something personal, or original. To the scholar, these discourses are tools merely, tropes to be quoted, not challenged. Of course, not every scholar thinks in such a limited way. The best scholar may herself have the requisite imagination to be a fiction-writer and chose an academic route instead, and thus the difference between her work and that of Munro is one of focus rather than intellectual strengths.

But these differences—see how they crumble under scrutiny? Of course Alice Munro is an intellectual. And who cares what you call her? Her work is exquisite, original, thought-provoking. At that level, categorizations are irrelevant. They nearly always are irrelevant. It is so petty even to consider them, as though they have any real power. But they DO have power, when you’re young and seeking a place in the world. You present ideas, and people say, “You are this; you belong *here*.” Or, “You are that; you belong *there*.” And you look at each of the circumscribed groups and protest, “Well, I see myself in both of them. And why are these groups separate, anyway?”

**This claim is not intended as a dig at academics, nor is it meant to suggest that university systems as a rule produce quack intellectuals--only that there is a lot more job security for academics than for artists. The reason for this, as I see it, as that despite the demand for "original scholarship" embedded in every phase of one's academic training and career, the criteria for what counts as "original" is far less stringent than the criteria for artists. Artists are perpetually put on the line to prove their originality; academics--not so much. As an academic, you can build a whole career--and receive tenure--out of a scrupulous obeisance to the rules; as an artist, you must learn the rules but only in order to break them, otherwise you are nothing more than a devotee of a certain tradition, a copycat. Also, writers, as artists, must invent their own unique discourse; academics are handed a discourse with which to speak. This difference is owing to the fact, it seems, that art cannot be institutionalized, whereas the academic disciplines can and must be. This is a complex subject and no way could a blog address all the nuances of difference between the arts and academia and artists and academics. My wish is that the two could be better amalgamated; I do not know why they always appear to be antithetical, even hostile, to one another; from where does that hostility come? Admittedly I feel a degree of hostility towards academia, but only because there is in its discourse, from what source I cannot discern, a brazen arrogance that deadens the faculty of thought, or seems to. That arrogance seems so unnecessary, so counterproductive; I cannot imagine academia actually wants it in its discourse; it seems most likely that the discourse, as it became more sophisticated, more wary of dogma--its own and that of other discourses and institutions--inadvertantly produced its own arrogance as a noxious byproduct, than that some conscious intelligence placed it there. But all this speculation is me hovering on the lip of a volcanic debate, an endless discussion. Important, but it cannot be figured out all at once.

March 30, 2005
Maybe critics have trouble writing fiction because their theory gets in the way of their ability to embrace their experiencing of things without having to name them, or decode them. I was thinking just now about the terrifying power of mothers, and immediately I went into a “psychologist” frame of mind. I began thinking psychoanalytically about mothers, how her body, her beliefs, her nurturance or the lack thereof leave hoofmarks all over the psychic body of her child, deep half-moon-shaped clefts, scars that are reopened and reopened, that bleed, that swell and seep pus…. Or worse: they clot. The blood and pus congeal and become a kind of enamel covering the psychic body, encasing the once supple psyche in a prison of its origins, determining how it shall live out its life. But what if I could only write from my own experience of mothers? I’d have to invent my own language. D.H. Lawrence in Sons & Lovers did that; no aura of psychoanalytic jargon invaded his narrative; he simply committed himself to the story of a young man coming of age, his tight bond with his mother thumping, throbbing, like a mournful, percussive motif beneath the fresh song of his love affairs, weighing them down with nostalgia and melancholy until they modulated and slowed into eulogies of unrequited desire, aimless, nameless yearning, and heartache….

…Sometimes I have this feeling of wanting to reclaim language by going back to babyhood and learning to speak all over again, but with the awareness of my adult self, and the abandon of a young child who has discovered something that gives her joy. I feel…congealed in certain tropes, as though I am mindlessly echoing what I hear around me. I feel…hardened, as though a steel shield obstructs my soul. There is anxiety in my language. Hardened, congealed, anxious: how to break open my syntax to allow more air, more moisture, movement, and color in?

March 23, 2005
SNEEZE. Languagespittle sprays like seawater from a dolphin’s blowhole, disrupting the rolling blue surface. An accumulation of unsaidfelts, germs of years of repression clogging my mind with mucus, finding release only through discordant bursts, everything-all-at-once, language violated, sprays of signifiers with an order of signifieds congealed in the back of the mind like a cancer. Poke. Prod. Tear it down in sheets, melt it with the heat of a will for rebirth, desperation, a sense of living in a language that has hardened around me. Lies I have told and have lived…. Language, malleable, spandex, loose molecules stirred to activity by the heat of thought, broken apart, reconfigured in the cool of a new certainty. Owning language, beating it into a shape—the imprint of all you imagine, unique associative twists, turnings of corners, from one image to the next. What is it to wield a word? To own it, to say this word means *this* because I have built grammatical scaffolding around it such that it appears congealed to another mind; it can’t mean just anything. If I could choose words like yarn at a knitting store, if I had money for only one skein, what word would I choose? Beauty? Love? Book? Purse? Teacup? Mother? I own them insofar as I unearth what these words mean to me, so that when I use it I appreciate its power.

…Sleepiness has made me weak and moldy; my body outline is growing blurry; I am melting into my mattress, evaporating into dream, condensing on the underside of a tender green leaf, a new day. “The close withdrew; the hard softened.” The hard—the tight sphere of mental activity—softened—dissipated into a devout mass fluttering of butterflies’ wings, wings the color of lemon meringue and brushed in the most subtle velvety down, wings of meringue flannel, beating softly at their posts, like hundreds of mouths opening and closing, singing heavenward in perfect silence. Butterfly milk. Sated and fluttery, pollinating the crimson flowers of night. Good night.