Scribblings with Green Chalk

Last night I laughed myself to sleep (yes) after reading Richard Brautigan’s “At the California Institute of Technology.” When you’re too bored to appreciate brilliance, grin and bear it. Like a Cheshire cat.

He could not resist a city called Boat so far inland.

I remember reading a few years ago about Lynch’s visit to Łódź and how he took thousands of photos of old tenement houses and abandoned factory buildings. Film journalists held their breath, hoping the images would yield inspiration that would yield a movie. It seemed like everything was in place, just the story missing — Łódź, the home of Polish film industry with a partly unremembered past, seemed perched in expectation. The city’s name is feminine; a woman in trouble, a boat pulled ridiculously far inland. Of course it exists beyond and apart from personification. The buildings from the photographs have new tenants or waste away quietly. No one knows the names of their pre-war Jewish landlords anymore. Anecdotes of old days at the film school hang in the air, half-repeated. And both the quotidian and the solemn mar the delicate process of making things up. If all is too obvious and too serious, there can be no story. Think of the human eye and its blind spot. If you take too much for granted, your blind spot expands.

Does the ability to see lie in undoing habits of thought and sight? I wouldn’t want to put this forward as some kind of grand rule, I think it depends on what you want to see. I was not interested in guessing the names of particular streets. In fact, I’ve never been to Łódź. I wanted to see images of the place pared to what Lynch found useful. I wanted glimpses that could diminish my blind spot.

(Image from Dream Videophile)

The reason why we fear and revere dream logic is its ability to make things visible through series of improbable juxtapositions. My homemade dream method consisted not only in having David Lynch show me Łódź. I saw INLAND EMPIRE in Vienna, till the last moment not sure whether to expect German dubbing (luckily, the movie was subtitled). How strange the opening dialogue must have sounded to the majority of the audience. The white letters faded into the black and white picture, so it must have been difficult to follow. A piece of exotica. Or a piece of home. If you allow it to be both, it becomes a tightly sewn lining to the California scenes. Not a backdrop nor an alternative dimension. For what could be more bizarre than that which is so familiar you cease to notice it? As the emotions of the character she is playing sift into Nikki Grace’s consciousness, the now of the Polish girl watching Rabbits collapses into pre-war Łódź. The desolate Californian suburbia winds up in a Polish street in the middle of winter.

I am not trying to crack any kind of code, only saying that the unfamiliar always has its inverse: there is someone to whom it is domesticated. When I saw Leon Niemczyk in one of the scenes, a chill went up my spine. I’m afraid that for everyone in my generation he will always remain Golarz Filip from Akademia Pana Kleksa, the enchanting and terrifying children’s movie that seized our imagination. It comes in here, that cold and unlikely fright, whether anyone told Lynch about it or not. There’s Cyrk Zalewski, which I saw at least twice before I was big enough to disapprove of the circus. The question rozumiesz?, repeated several times, seems ironically turned towards itself. It means “do you understand?” but it marks the failure to communicate. It is funny to think that the first word I knew for understanding is meant here as opaque noise. And even when the noise is heard and comprehended it means little. You may know Polish but how can you locate the referents of the deictic terms? Where is “here”? When is “now”? Who is the “he” that did something to the “you”?

These are just glimpses, and for many viewers they will never exist as part of the movie. I looked at several reviews — American and Polish — curious about what others have identified as meaningful, what they dismissed, and what their blind spots blotted out. Common to most of the reviews was a thirst for coherence and a focus on what to their authors was the more immediate context. American reviewers placed the inland empire in California, as their sense of direction told them, and mentioned the Polish scenes and actors fleetingly. Someone identified the neighbor who visits Nikki Grace in one of the first scenes as a Russian. I don’t know why — perhaps on the assumption that all Slavic people are Russian “by default,” unless specified otherwise. Polish reviews were sparse and I did not find the insights I counted on. The three hours strain the attention span and allow for picking and choosing. I’d be interested to see what others pull out for close inspection, setting aside cries for logic.

I hadn’t really thought about collaborative poetry before reading this interview with Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton. The concept of collaborative writing seems to have a sense of playfulness that works against the ego in favor of a careful negotiation of meaning. It intrigued me but since I didn’t know too many poems written in collaboration, I conceived of it more as a curio. Months later I had the chance to meet Denise Duhamel and listen to her talk about the different forms of poetic collaboration.

One of the poems she read to illustrate the techniques of composition was Angela C. Dancey’s “In My Mother’s Handwriting.” I wish I could simply quote it here in its entirety but — even though I believe it highly unlikely that the poet or any ardent defender of copyright should stray anywhere near this blog — I don’t think it would be right, so I post a link instead. While exquisite corpse pieces and those written by Duhamel and Ginsberg with their students strike me as jocular and rather abstract, Dancey’s has the colder and darker tangibility of a found poem. The poet took an entry from her mother’s journal and wrote into it a complementary perspective. It’s an impossible dialogue, written between and against earlier lines which could not anticipate the other voice. With the lucidity of a memory at once called to mind and created, Dancey’s words cut through her mother’s text but they do not deprive it of its former wholeness. It can still stand on its own, but it does not need to.

Whenever I reread it I wish my mother and I wrote letters to each other. We rarely do. In the past few months I got several packages from her. In each one she included a brief note beginning always in the same way: “I know that the things I’m sending you are not enough and that you will want some words from me too…” Following it was a brief account of the recent events at home. The letters were important because of that beginning, because in her own way my mother said through it “I got you there! You may be far away but I still know you.” Maybe between me and her it’s not so much about words but about outsmarting the other, our own personal ritual of exchange. There is a picture I stole from her shortly before I went to Vienna. It’s a sepia photo of her taken when she wasn’t looking. I pinched it from a box where she keeps old photographs, knowing that she’d never let me take it if I asked her. I told her about it this winter when I came home with a brief visit. She only smiled and wrote a few words on the reverse.

an idea stolen from Marianne Moore, of course. The word sounds both more open and more focused than ‘thoughts’ or ‘meditations.’ It captures a sense of distance between the thing and the thinking mind, which only gets hold of the thing in passing, borrowing it for a moment, and letting go. I realize as I write this that borrowing and stealing can be interchangeable without an ironic undertone. Perhaps, we do steal the object of our thought from the world and, when we replace it, it is slightly used?… I can’t resist a quote. Costello calls Moore “a kleptomaniac of the mind”:

Moore was a compulsive reader and note-taker, copying out verbatim in her tiny scrawl page after page of others’ observations — more than a dozen volumes during her career. [...] At the back of every diary, Moore kept a personal index — these volumes were compendiums of the represented world, resources she could draw on in creating an individual reality.

I find such meticulousness endearing. But while not everyone is interested in cataloging observations and turning them into art, everyone revels in having them. I say ‘everyone’ and immediately my thoughts go to a text and an incident that put my generalization into question. The text is Agnieszka Salska’s article on Moore in which she considers the title Observations as an expression of Moore’s Americanness. The incident is my stolen observation, in my notebook, that is, here. A few weeks ago I was waiting for a friend in front of Stephansdom. There was a group of American tourists — five or six ladies in their fifties — that had just come out of the cathedral. They were in the midst of a rather heated debate about politics. Only the exclamations reached me, so I’m not even sure what their views were. But I heard the ending very clearly. One of the ladies, apparently annoyed with the direction the discussion was heading, said in an authoritative tone that everybody is entitled to their own opinion in America, bacause that’s what America is about. I fought the compulsion to ask her about it. Instead, I asked Denise — as a sociologist and an American — if she thinks there is something distinctly national about having and expressing opinions and observations. Denise was very cautious about this idea and actual freedom of speech. Our brief exchange made me wonder about yet another aspect of the issue: why do we like to label and arrange our observations so much? When I think of 1980s’ Po(e)land and family gatherings, the first thing that comes to my mind is how my relatives enjoyed arguing about politics. It was a completely different country, no one mentioned freedom of speech, yet they all claimed the right to express their views. Was the enjoyment they derived from their observations any different just because they would attribute it to “Polish subversiveness”? I don’t know. Maybe this is the point where observations get too close to the thinking mind and change into convictions.

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me -
The simple News that Nature told -
With tender MajestyHer Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see;
For love of her - Sweet - countrymen -
Judge tenderly of Me

This way, hiding behind Dickinson, I can slowly begin. I imagine I could go on pretending that I don’t really have any observations and that I don’t scribble all the time. I could put my scattered thoughts in a dusty drawer or the dusty back of my mind. It does seem very appealing in its modesty.

And then I could sigh that the world never writes back… But it’s not the nineteenth century, I am not that brilliant recluse who put together fascicles of poems that keep critics awake at nights. When it comes to sewing, I can only patch up socks. Dickinson hid away in her home to conjure imaginary prairies. I haven’t been home in months and, as things are, I won’t be coming back home at least for a while. In fact, words like “home” and “away” have become questionable. If I’mhere — wherever that may be — why should I assume that what makes me what I am is elsewhere? I remember once having this fear that without the mass of quotidian detail that gathered around me during the past few years I would dissolve. I didn’t. What happened is that I went to Vienna and first understood “Questions of Travel.” On one of the chilly autumn mornings I opened Bishop’s Complete Poems and found that this particular one sounded different.

Perhaps we can’t all just stay home and revel in domesticity. Perhaps, at times, we must dream our dreams / and have them, too just because it’s a more honest solution than renunciation. But I don’t think it’s fair to demand that journeys be epiphanies, expand your mind, elevate the soul. They will change you, nevertheless, through the small annoying particulars and the connections you will be tempted to make. So then, like Bishop’s traveler, you will take a notebook to jot them down.

I might not have made any logical connection to the “letter to the world” idea, but I will argue that it exists in my mental notebook. I don’t know about “home” and “away” anymore. I know that there are friends in the places tentatively labeled “here” and “there,” and that letters get easily lost or remain unwritten altogether. There is no inspiration from the muses in my scribbling. This is just a notebook. Just observations. Not gems of thought sewn together by divine logic. Just patched up socks. Please, don’t judge my inflated ego too harshly. But maybe drop a line sometimes.