December 20, 2019
Some passages from What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché
Some passages from What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché:
*
I was at the time quite young, with a romantic view of the world, and I was also an American, which made this worse.
*
“I don’t think you understand Leonel. I’m a poet. Do you know how poets are viewed here? We’re seen as bohemian, or romantics, or crazy. Among the poets I admire, there is one who waved good-bye before jumping from a bridge, another who put on a fur coat and gassed herself in her garage. Great American poets die broke in bad hotels. We have no credibility. Although this isn’t true of every poet, and I’m giving you the dramatic examples, when poetry is mentioned in the American press, if it is mentioned, the story begins with ‘Poetry doesn’t matter,’ or ‘No one reads poetry.’ No matter what else is said. It doesn’t matter.”
He appeared surprised. “Well, you’ll have to change that. In my country, and the rest of Latin America, poets are taken seriously. They’re appointed to diplomatic posts, or they’re assassinated, or put into prison but, one way or the other, taken seriously.”
*
From childhood I had experienced bouts of depression, and my mother had also suffered this during her child-raising years. I would find her in her room sometimes, crying and staring at nothing. She told me that I would understand when I was older, something she said about many things. In my own life, this darkness descended always unexpectedly. That is, it did not seem caused by particular events. The sadness arrived, stayed for a while, and just as unexpectedly lifted.
Something could, at times, push against it. Work did, and also the urge to do something in the face of some wrongdoing or injustice against another, and this urge swelled during the conversations on the terrace in Mallorca that summer, as I sat on the edge of the circle taking things in, until, toward the end, I also worked at being invisible, because it seemed, from what I understood from these conversations, that injustices of a political nature were not historical accidents, and that most injustices in Latin America were supported or made possible by the United States, or that was my impression. One of the visiting writers had even responded to my plaintive question regarding ways I might get involved with something like: There is nothing you can do, my dear. Change your government. Enjoy your summer.
*
Margarita had insisted that I be my own person. Leonel was also adamant that I think for myself, that I let go of my preconceptions, although I hadn’t, until then, been aware of having any. But all right, I thought. How to do that? Leonel had complained of my daydreaming, that I wasn’t paying proper attention to things around me in my waking life, so from now on, I would pay attention, and try to see as much as I could, not the world as imagined in my continuous waking dream, but as it was, not only the obvious but the hidden, not only the water cánteros but their weight, not only their weight but why it was necessary to carry water such distances. I would try to learn from Leonel how to listen to what was said but also to what was not said, and I would also try to learn how to detect deception in others, which, he assured me, is a skill that can be acquired. I would learn to review my experiences for the missed details, and to keep in mind that while I was observing others, they were also observing me, and I would become less (how did he put it?) readable, and when necessary, I would attempt, in his words, to “manage the perceptions of others” so that, of the “five versions of the truth,” in any given situation, mine might prevail.
“This place is a symphony of illusion,” Leonel often said, “and an orchestra needs a conductor.”
*
“Revolutions do not go according to plan,” he went on. “There must be thinkers among the commanders who understand the tactics of the battlefield, who can think strategically, and whose plans can be executed successfully so that they may command loyalty and respect. There must develop a strong bond among the fighters so that they will risk their lives for one another, not once but every day. And these fighters, who will nevertheless be hungry and thirsty, wounded and in pain, must respect the lives of the people, must not steal from them or harm them. And when the enemy is captured, he must also be respected and not harmed. Those captured must be housed and fed and clothed and treated for their wounds. None of this is easy,” he said. “Armed uprising is one way to attempt to lessen repression and begin building a just society, Papu, but it is not the only way, and it is, without question, the most difficult, and when it is over, and let’s say you have triumphed, you must guard with great vigilance against becoming an oppressor yourself. This is the greatest danger. If you are defeated,” he went on, “that’s another story. Waging a guerrilla war takes something more than waving red flags with hammers and sickles at the bull.”
He wasn’t exactly talking to himself, but he certainly seemed to have said all of this before, and possibly many times, but to whom?
“As Sun Tzu teaches us, ‘the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.’”
“Leonel, are you a Marxist?” I wanted to know this because it seemed to matter so much here.
“Marx was a great social philosopher.”
“But are you a Marxist?”
“I have told you, I’m not a religious man.”
The bus had pulled to the shoulder to disgorge passengers. The women bent down to hoist the water cánteros back onto their heads, and the men swung large sacks over their backs.
Perhaps to dissociate myself from those he considered ideologues, I might have said something critical about the Soviet Union at that moment. It hadn’t yet been a decade since the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and that is the lens through which I viewed the Soviets: from the kitchen table where Anna sat, listening to the radio with a handkerchief over her eyes. The Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring. They had sent their writers to the gulag.
“Remember that the USSR lost twenty million people during the Second World War. Twenty million. Leningrad was under siege for nearly nine hundred days. They were pulling wallpaper from the walls to eat the wheat paste. And, remember, they won that war in Europe for you. Without the Soviets, Hitler would have been victorious. What? You look surprised.”
“No, not surprised. Well, maybe a little.”
“Don’t get caught up in the rhetoric. If the Salvadoran campesinos fight, and I think they will, they must win. If they do not win, they will suffer for another two hundred years. But to win, they must defeat the Salvadoran military, and if, in this engagement, they are perceived as so-called Communists, the Salvadoran military will have the backing of the largest military force in the world. So. If you are going to wave a red flag around, you had better know where is the bull.”
*
“Let me give you a little history. Several years ago, some campesinos came to me and wanted to farm this land, which, as I said, had been abandoned for lack of infrastructure in the area. Who wants to grow crops when there is no way to get them to market? So I said yes, and we settled on the percentage I would be paid. Fine. At the end of each harvest I would visit, make arrangements to collect my rent, and it went on like that. Soon, there were a number of families farming the land. One year, the crops failed. I don’t know why. Maybe blight or drought or some such fucking thing –”
“You were charging people to farm your land?”
“This is the system here, but wait. That year, when I visited, I decided to cancel their debt because of the failure. Remember – I was learning something too. I told them that if they formed a cooperative, I would charge half what I had been charging. If they opted to stay on their own, the price would remain the same. The next year, I went back, and guess what? All but three had formed a cooperative. So I made good and charged the cooperative members half. The next year, everyone was a member. At that year’s meeting, I suggested they might want to do something for the children. I didn’t say what. You decide, I said – but do something. That is how the school appeared. And as each year passed, the people became more secure. If the cooperative continued, it was always half price, if the crops failed, no charge, and each year when I visited, there was something else to show me: the clinic, the playground, the new road, and then they began to paint the houses. I realized that the one factor, the one difference, and maybe the only difference was this: The people felt secure. They made decisions together, they took risks together, they shared the risk, and, very important, they knew I wasn’t going to kick them off the land.”
The engine heaved and pulled and the sun bore down on us. We were off the dirt road now and onto the paved highway that led toward the coast. There was salt in the air. I was smoking again and drinking from the warm canteen.
“What?”
“That all sounds fine,” I said, “but – ” The water was almost hot.
“But what?”
“It’s your land. You are the one who visits. You are the one who makes suggestions, and you are the one who collects the money. You make the rules. Why don’t you just give them the land? They are the ones doing all the work.” I crushed the butt into the ashtray and leaned back, folding my arms across myself. “That’s what I think.”
We drove, listening again to the engine.
“I can’t give them the land.”
“Why not? Of course you can. You’re the padrino! This is paternalism, Leonel, pure and simple. You’re the jefe. Well, good for you!”
I pressed my bare feet into the dash, leaned back, and closed my eyes. “Maybe that was a little harsh. I liked your village. But it’s yours.”
This sounded smug and self-righteous and I knew it, but I didn’t know how to save the moment. The wind in the Hiace buffeted us because of how fast we were going on the paved road.
“I can’t give it to them,” he said again, flatly. “They have to take it from me.”
.
December 11, 2019
Some favourite things from my 2019
.
[As previously mentioned, I really do love lists. As with previous years, this list is in no particular order and many of these things did not come out during the previous year.]
Books
Delayed Rays of a Star – Amanda Lee Koe
Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) – Hazel Jane Plante
Turn This World Inside Out – Nora Samaran
XYZT – Kristen Alvanson
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments – Saidiya V. Hartman
Tonguebreaker – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Appendix Project – Kate Zambreno
Overthrow – Caleb Crain
Twelve Clues – Hassan Khan
petit cadeau – Claudia La Rocco
Radical Doubt: The Joker System, After Boal – Mady Schutzman
They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears – Johannes Anyuru
Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow – Michiko Ishimure (translated by Livia Monnet)
The Taiga Syndrome – Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Suzanne Jill Levine & Aviva Kana)
Music
Spellling – Mazy Fly
Sacred Paws – Run Around The Sun
Mourning [A] BLKstar – Reckoning
Meara O'Reilly – Hockets for Two Voices
Richenel – Perfect Stranger
Little Simz – GREY Area
Angel Bat Dawid – The Oracle
Combo Chimbita – Ahomale
Outro Tempo II: Electronic And Contemporary Music From Brazil, 1984- 1996
Davis Green – Parakeet Suite
Mega Bog – Gone Banana
O Terno - atrás/além
DaBaby - KIRK
Farai - Rebirth
Sault – 5
Music I like perhaps mainly because it makes me feel a little bit better about getting older
Edwyn Collins – Understated
Edwyn Collins – Badbea
Robert Forster – Inferno
Robert Forster – Songs to Play
Peter Perrett – How The West Was Won
Robert Wyatt – Comicopera
Performance
seeds cast afar from our roots – Angie Cheng, Winnie Ho and Chi Long
My Mother Was a Keypunch Operator – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Neuter Ality – Yunuen Rhi
Tour – Mardon + Mitsuhashi
Le pouvoir expliqué à ceux qui l'exercent (sur moi) – Système Kangourou
Visual Art
Leyla Majeri – Garden Archive
Shuvinai Ashoona – Mapping Worlds
69 Positions: Porter témoignage | Our Vanishing – Curated by Jamie Ross
Life of a Craphead - Entertaining Every Second
Moyra Davey at the Ryerson Image Centre
k.g. Guttman – Visiting Hours
.
[As previously mentioned, I really do love lists. As with previous years, this list is in no particular order and many of these things did not come out during the previous year.]
Books
Delayed Rays of a Star – Amanda Lee Koe
Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) – Hazel Jane Plante
Turn This World Inside Out – Nora Samaran
XYZT – Kristen Alvanson
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments – Saidiya V. Hartman
Tonguebreaker – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Appendix Project – Kate Zambreno
Overthrow – Caleb Crain
Twelve Clues – Hassan Khan
petit cadeau – Claudia La Rocco
Radical Doubt: The Joker System, After Boal – Mady Schutzman
They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears – Johannes Anyuru
Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow – Michiko Ishimure (translated by Livia Monnet)
The Taiga Syndrome – Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Suzanne Jill Levine & Aviva Kana)
Music
Spellling – Mazy Fly
Sacred Paws – Run Around The Sun
Mourning [A] BLKstar – Reckoning
Meara O'Reilly – Hockets for Two Voices
Richenel – Perfect Stranger
Little Simz – GREY Area
Angel Bat Dawid – The Oracle
Combo Chimbita – Ahomale
Outro Tempo II: Electronic And Contemporary Music From Brazil, 1984- 1996
Davis Green – Parakeet Suite
Mega Bog – Gone Banana
O Terno - atrás/além
DaBaby - KIRK
Farai - Rebirth
Sault – 5
Music I like perhaps mainly because it makes me feel a little bit better about getting older
Edwyn Collins – Understated
Edwyn Collins – Badbea
Robert Forster – Inferno
Robert Forster – Songs to Play
Peter Perrett – How The West Was Won
Robert Wyatt – Comicopera
Performance
seeds cast afar from our roots – Angie Cheng, Winnie Ho and Chi Long
My Mother Was a Keypunch Operator – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Neuter Ality – Yunuen Rhi
Tour – Mardon + Mitsuhashi
Le pouvoir expliqué à ceux qui l'exercent (sur moi) – Système Kangourou
Visual Art
Leyla Majeri – Garden Archive
Shuvinai Ashoona – Mapping Worlds
69 Positions: Porter témoignage | Our Vanishing – Curated by Jamie Ross
Life of a Craphead - Entertaining Every Second
Moyra Davey at the Ryerson Image Centre
k.g. Guttman – Visiting Hours
.
December 6, 2019
I’ll Never Leave Ravicka
.
Where is Ravicka? A prosaic answer to this poetic question is that Ravicka is a fictional city-state within the recent novels of Renee Gladman. You may already know these books: Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), Houses of Ravicka (2017). Ravicka is shifting, disappearing, possibly under attack, difficult to translate. There is a crisis and this crisis can be variously understood. And though there is a crisis, you are not allowed to call it that, at least not in front of government officials. I once thought these books were a trilogy, but there are already four and I understand at least two more are on the way. I recently reread the Ravicka novels one after another and would recommend reading them in exactly this fashion, in rapid succession. Each book complicates the others. Their status as a series calls into question what it means for books to exist as a series, each book troubling timeline, narrative, and geography alike. For me, The Ravicka novels desire not just to be read quickly and in succession, but to be reread. This desire might be rephrased in the form of my original question: Where (or perhaps what) is Ravicka? The more you reread the less you are able to satisfactorily locate it, as each new aspect you learn (or relearn, or unlearn) continues to resonate.
In several of the books, a governor none of the protagonists like or respect appears. “Our governor Ludoc Vlati sings the city’s praises; we are against him. While I will also adore our city, we are not against me,” says the Great Ravickian Novelist Luswage Amini. We don’t know anything about Ludoc Vlati, but also we do, since of course we instinctively know all the ways a politician can be wrong. This is Ravicka, a world at once identical to our own and absolutely nothing like it. In our world, buildings and neighborhoods are moved out of reach through gentrification and rising rents. In Ravicka, the buildings literally stand up and walk away. (But do they do so literally, or in some other way? This is never fully explained.) Ludoc Vlati is a politician claiming everything is all right, when everything is clearly not alright, when things are falling apart, though it is impossible to know the severity of the disaster. We don’t know enough about him to gather whether he really believes that everything is all right or if he’s simply lying for votes. Or, rather, do we know that everything is all right for Vlati and his class, and he’s bet the farm on the assumption things will continue to be so? Vlati is rarely mentioned, only a few times. It’s unclear why I’ve begun with him. He’s not significant.
Ravicka is a land of many customs. Most of these customs involve putting your body into it, bending and twisting as custom requires: “But there was a gesture I was to make upon entering a place that was already peopled, something between ‘hello,’ ‘sorry,’ and ‘congratulations I’m here,’ and I could not remember what it was. As subtly as I could, I bent here and there trying to jog my memory: was I to do a shake, a roundoff? […] A child approached me and asked if I were sleepy. Why it was this question that recalled the missing gesture, I shall never know. But there it was: you folded your body as though you were taking a bow with your legs spread apart, and then, after holding that posture for several seconds (depending on your age) you brought your legs together quickly.” The physicality of such customs make Ravicka a land of continuous social dancing. But we think of dancing as fluid and graceful, while so much of Ravickian social life comes across as awkward, aspiring to grace but falling short. Perhaps the physicality of the customs themselves are graceful, but those performing them are no more graceful than you or I. Might this also be how I perform whatever social customs I encounter in my own daily life, which mercifully require less physical acumen than those of Ravicka? “…no culture performs as extensively as the Ravickians. You cannot enter a place without proving to the occupants that you have a body. Not just to display the limbs and skin you carry around with you, but to prove you are in dialogue with them.” When I am reading I am often not aware of my body. Perhaps one of the reasons I love reading so much is it allows me to temporarily forget my considerable bodily limitations. But Ravicka never lets me forget. Every few pages I am reminded that to properly interact with others requires one’s full physical presence: eye contact, open and welcoming body language, a hug or no hug, a shake, a roundoff or whatever else the encounter might desire.
Ravicka is a city-state in two parts, divided by the all-important bridge. (I would like to further explain the importance of this bridge, but also must admit that I still haven’t fully grasped it.) “But in which place? There were reasons for choosing either: cit Sahaly because it was gorgeous and ancient and from it we could watch the spectacle at the other end of the bridge, or cit Mohaly because it was the spectacle.” I can never quite keep these two places straight. The old world and the new. Is it true that most large cities have a part of town where much older buildings remain intact? Or does this only apply to cities with an unbroken history, cities in which older buildings haven’t been eliminated by extensive redevelopment or war? “I wanted to sing and I wanted to draw, so I moved to cit Mohaly, as every other creative person does. You go there or you go to cit Sahaly – to Sahaly if you’re looking to practice art at the level of science, if you want to be an architect, for example, or a cartographer…” I wonder if I will ever fully comprehend the many tangled differences between cit Sahaly and cit Mohaly. This wondering is also a reminder that I’m still a newcomer here, in Ravicka, still a tourist, almost a child, unable to fully understand what it means to be in one neighborhood rather than another, though I definitely understand it means a lot. Perhaps everything.
I have been thinking how each of Ravicka’s narrators are embodied neurotics, since their internal struggles are rarely, if ever, kept inside. (I say this as someone who works very hard to keep my own neuroses hidden.) Instead they actively and repeatedly embody their dissatisfactions and confusions, playing them out in each of their wanderings and carefully unbalanced exchanges. In Event Factory, an unnamed “linguist-traveler” arrives as a tourist (or researcher), and then continuously attempts to keep up, so many newly made friends and acquaintances slipping past her, uncertain to what degree her understanding of basic matters is shared by others. Or, in The Ravickians, the Great Ravickian Novelist Luswage Amini pines for Ana Patova in an ongoing arrangement that never quite coheres, getting purposefully lost on her way to hear her old friend, the poet Zàoter Limici, read a few poems that soon become an entire chapter of their own: “I am not sure if I have ever just gone anywhere. In Ravicka, you walk out into the city and want immediately to get swept up into an adventure, and it is only after this adventure, which might take the better part of the day, that you wish to arrive at your destination.” Then, in Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, Patova writes (or, at least, starts writing) book after book, reaching towards the contours of the ongoing crisis, her friends a swirl of unreliable information and beautiful semi-communication around her, every chapter unspooling like the next stanza in a poem: “I wrote a book whose title I withheld from the book for a long time as I wrote it and slept on it and not because I didn’t want the book to know itself (I had no influence on that), rather, because I feared that once I put the two together they would go on without me.” And finally the overconfident—and, one suspects, rather incompetent—Comptroller Jakobi in Houses of Ravicka, author of Regulating the Book of Regulations, wanting to be fully in charge of situations as they unravel. For example, dragging his close friend Triti away just as she’s claiming to have discovered the lost house he had originally enlisted her assistance to recover. (Triti was about to find it down a manhole.) Yet who wouldn’t be neurotic in this world of physical social customs? The air is yellow (or not yellow but dahar, a Ravickian word we can only translate into English as yellow, though it is not yellow), the population mysteriously leaving or in some other way diminishing, the buildings moving of their own accord. Indeed, because of the crisis, you might even get run over by buildings slowly moving through the night. Of course this is the only world the Ravickians know, saved by the ways the dahar air is sometimes beautiful, “and as I pass through I am brushing glitter from my skin,” reflects Luswage Amini.
The formal shifts within each Ravicka book, and from book to book, keep me elegantly off balance. When, in the final section of The Ravickians, we drift into a fragmented poem of misdirected dialog between friends, the section reads like an absurdist stage play. Or, when the “linguist-traveler” in Event Factory begins living homelessly, I also felt myself slipping into a different, and precarious, method of literature and feeling. (A method that doesn’t require the reader, or writer, to fully understand all aspects; that allows our understanding to ebb and flow within whirlpools of desire and unsatisfied anticipation.) Then there is the perspective shift in Houses of Ravicka, moving from Jakobi, who is searching for house No. 96, to the occupant of the invisible, corresponding house No. 32; from the world of the pompous professional to the world of artistic living. Such shifts are a blast from nowhere, the sound of an author surprising herself in some genuine and flourishing way, and rereading them renders them no less uncanny.
Ravicka is also a land where national writers are nationally beloved. (This is very different from anything I know in real life.) In almost all of the books, The Great Ravickian Novelist is sought after, her titles searched for, encounters with her fulfilled or imagined. In a moment of great stress, trying to recall the books on his bedside table in order to calm himself, Jakobi wishes he was currently reading something by The Great Ravickian Novelist, instead of The Days Were Done by Gunnezet: “I wish I were reading Amini right now. How The Very Long Array would fortify! But Gunnezet is the man of the hour.” Of course Gunnezet is never mentioned again. The “man of the hour” vanishes just as quickly as he appeared—and can’t we all think of at least a few writers who fit this description? What is this disintegrating world where writers and literature are continuously important, to so many different kinds of people, yet in an everyday sort of way, as if the books we read cannot help but be at the center of our lives. “Passerby would suggest I read Patova’s I Thought of Architecture, which I had read many times and knew many passages by heart, as most everyone else did.” These writers struggle to solve a crisis, through writing and action, that at the same time they cannot officially acknowledge. And has any crisis ever been solved through a writer’s struggle with words?
As I’ve already mentioned, there are aspects of each Ravicka book I don’t completely understand. And I hope, no matter how much I explore them, that some parts will never completely cohere. That Ravicka will remain a labyrinth in my mind, entire swathes of the city just out of reach, what these swathes are changing over time in my memory and rereading of them. In Eileen Myles’s blurb for Event Factory she compares the novel to Kafka’s Amerika, and Gladman does often make me think of Kafka. Yet, as soon as this comparison occurs I know I’ve taken a wrong turn. A wrong turn on the road to answering the question: Where is Ravicka? Gladman is nothing like Kafka, yet both writers are consistently uncompromising—in their language, in the fragmented worlds they have, paradoxically, so seamlessly and convincingly created. There is a quote from Kafka I sometimes see online: “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” Ravicka is the story of one writer’s merciless obsessions and the city-state that embodies them. These obsessions, mirroring our own world, a world that is also disintegrating before our eyes, miraculously manage to find joy and relief in the most unexpected of ways and places.
The rumor that more Ravicka books are to come is a rumor I hope is true. The next in the series is rumored to be about the grasses of Ravicka, grasses where the ancestors long ago lay down and dreamt what Ravicka might someday become. Future books, of course, will have to wait (even future books taking us further back into the past.) So perhaps I’ll just let Ravicka have the last word: “It was amazing to imagine your city was a novel, and that for you to walk around within it meant that you were in language, you were in a thinking text; pages were walls that enclosed you, the ground was the floor of the book, the horizon of the sentence, and all you were doing was walking up hill, going for coffee, hanging clothes to dry. We were inside a living structure, ourselves living, and went on this way for a long time.”
.
Where is Ravicka? A prosaic answer to this poetic question is that Ravicka is a fictional city-state within the recent novels of Renee Gladman. You may already know these books: Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), Houses of Ravicka (2017). Ravicka is shifting, disappearing, possibly under attack, difficult to translate. There is a crisis and this crisis can be variously understood. And though there is a crisis, you are not allowed to call it that, at least not in front of government officials. I once thought these books were a trilogy, but there are already four and I understand at least two more are on the way. I recently reread the Ravicka novels one after another and would recommend reading them in exactly this fashion, in rapid succession. Each book complicates the others. Their status as a series calls into question what it means for books to exist as a series, each book troubling timeline, narrative, and geography alike. For me, The Ravicka novels desire not just to be read quickly and in succession, but to be reread. This desire might be rephrased in the form of my original question: Where (or perhaps what) is Ravicka? The more you reread the less you are able to satisfactorily locate it, as each new aspect you learn (or relearn, or unlearn) continues to resonate.
In several of the books, a governor none of the protagonists like or respect appears. “Our governor Ludoc Vlati sings the city’s praises; we are against him. While I will also adore our city, we are not against me,” says the Great Ravickian Novelist Luswage Amini. We don’t know anything about Ludoc Vlati, but also we do, since of course we instinctively know all the ways a politician can be wrong. This is Ravicka, a world at once identical to our own and absolutely nothing like it. In our world, buildings and neighborhoods are moved out of reach through gentrification and rising rents. In Ravicka, the buildings literally stand up and walk away. (But do they do so literally, or in some other way? This is never fully explained.) Ludoc Vlati is a politician claiming everything is all right, when everything is clearly not alright, when things are falling apart, though it is impossible to know the severity of the disaster. We don’t know enough about him to gather whether he really believes that everything is all right or if he’s simply lying for votes. Or, rather, do we know that everything is all right for Vlati and his class, and he’s bet the farm on the assumption things will continue to be so? Vlati is rarely mentioned, only a few times. It’s unclear why I’ve begun with him. He’s not significant.
Ravicka is a land of many customs. Most of these customs involve putting your body into it, bending and twisting as custom requires: “But there was a gesture I was to make upon entering a place that was already peopled, something between ‘hello,’ ‘sorry,’ and ‘congratulations I’m here,’ and I could not remember what it was. As subtly as I could, I bent here and there trying to jog my memory: was I to do a shake, a roundoff? […] A child approached me and asked if I were sleepy. Why it was this question that recalled the missing gesture, I shall never know. But there it was: you folded your body as though you were taking a bow with your legs spread apart, and then, after holding that posture for several seconds (depending on your age) you brought your legs together quickly.” The physicality of such customs make Ravicka a land of continuous social dancing. But we think of dancing as fluid and graceful, while so much of Ravickian social life comes across as awkward, aspiring to grace but falling short. Perhaps the physicality of the customs themselves are graceful, but those performing them are no more graceful than you or I. Might this also be how I perform whatever social customs I encounter in my own daily life, which mercifully require less physical acumen than those of Ravicka? “…no culture performs as extensively as the Ravickians. You cannot enter a place without proving to the occupants that you have a body. Not just to display the limbs and skin you carry around with you, but to prove you are in dialogue with them.” When I am reading I am often not aware of my body. Perhaps one of the reasons I love reading so much is it allows me to temporarily forget my considerable bodily limitations. But Ravicka never lets me forget. Every few pages I am reminded that to properly interact with others requires one’s full physical presence: eye contact, open and welcoming body language, a hug or no hug, a shake, a roundoff or whatever else the encounter might desire.
Ravicka is a city-state in two parts, divided by the all-important bridge. (I would like to further explain the importance of this bridge, but also must admit that I still haven’t fully grasped it.) “But in which place? There were reasons for choosing either: cit Sahaly because it was gorgeous and ancient and from it we could watch the spectacle at the other end of the bridge, or cit Mohaly because it was the spectacle.” I can never quite keep these two places straight. The old world and the new. Is it true that most large cities have a part of town where much older buildings remain intact? Or does this only apply to cities with an unbroken history, cities in which older buildings haven’t been eliminated by extensive redevelopment or war? “I wanted to sing and I wanted to draw, so I moved to cit Mohaly, as every other creative person does. You go there or you go to cit Sahaly – to Sahaly if you’re looking to practice art at the level of science, if you want to be an architect, for example, or a cartographer…” I wonder if I will ever fully comprehend the many tangled differences between cit Sahaly and cit Mohaly. This wondering is also a reminder that I’m still a newcomer here, in Ravicka, still a tourist, almost a child, unable to fully understand what it means to be in one neighborhood rather than another, though I definitely understand it means a lot. Perhaps everything.
I have been thinking how each of Ravicka’s narrators are embodied neurotics, since their internal struggles are rarely, if ever, kept inside. (I say this as someone who works very hard to keep my own neuroses hidden.) Instead they actively and repeatedly embody their dissatisfactions and confusions, playing them out in each of their wanderings and carefully unbalanced exchanges. In Event Factory, an unnamed “linguist-traveler” arrives as a tourist (or researcher), and then continuously attempts to keep up, so many newly made friends and acquaintances slipping past her, uncertain to what degree her understanding of basic matters is shared by others. Or, in The Ravickians, the Great Ravickian Novelist Luswage Amini pines for Ana Patova in an ongoing arrangement that never quite coheres, getting purposefully lost on her way to hear her old friend, the poet Zàoter Limici, read a few poems that soon become an entire chapter of their own: “I am not sure if I have ever just gone anywhere. In Ravicka, you walk out into the city and want immediately to get swept up into an adventure, and it is only after this adventure, which might take the better part of the day, that you wish to arrive at your destination.” Then, in Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, Patova writes (or, at least, starts writing) book after book, reaching towards the contours of the ongoing crisis, her friends a swirl of unreliable information and beautiful semi-communication around her, every chapter unspooling like the next stanza in a poem: “I wrote a book whose title I withheld from the book for a long time as I wrote it and slept on it and not because I didn’t want the book to know itself (I had no influence on that), rather, because I feared that once I put the two together they would go on without me.” And finally the overconfident—and, one suspects, rather incompetent—Comptroller Jakobi in Houses of Ravicka, author of Regulating the Book of Regulations, wanting to be fully in charge of situations as they unravel. For example, dragging his close friend Triti away just as she’s claiming to have discovered the lost house he had originally enlisted her assistance to recover. (Triti was about to find it down a manhole.) Yet who wouldn’t be neurotic in this world of physical social customs? The air is yellow (or not yellow but dahar, a Ravickian word we can only translate into English as yellow, though it is not yellow), the population mysteriously leaving or in some other way diminishing, the buildings moving of their own accord. Indeed, because of the crisis, you might even get run over by buildings slowly moving through the night. Of course this is the only world the Ravickians know, saved by the ways the dahar air is sometimes beautiful, “and as I pass through I am brushing glitter from my skin,” reflects Luswage Amini.
The formal shifts within each Ravicka book, and from book to book, keep me elegantly off balance. When, in the final section of The Ravickians, we drift into a fragmented poem of misdirected dialog between friends, the section reads like an absurdist stage play. Or, when the “linguist-traveler” in Event Factory begins living homelessly, I also felt myself slipping into a different, and precarious, method of literature and feeling. (A method that doesn’t require the reader, or writer, to fully understand all aspects; that allows our understanding to ebb and flow within whirlpools of desire and unsatisfied anticipation.) Then there is the perspective shift in Houses of Ravicka, moving from Jakobi, who is searching for house No. 96, to the occupant of the invisible, corresponding house No. 32; from the world of the pompous professional to the world of artistic living. Such shifts are a blast from nowhere, the sound of an author surprising herself in some genuine and flourishing way, and rereading them renders them no less uncanny.
Ravicka is also a land where national writers are nationally beloved. (This is very different from anything I know in real life.) In almost all of the books, The Great Ravickian Novelist is sought after, her titles searched for, encounters with her fulfilled or imagined. In a moment of great stress, trying to recall the books on his bedside table in order to calm himself, Jakobi wishes he was currently reading something by The Great Ravickian Novelist, instead of The Days Were Done by Gunnezet: “I wish I were reading Amini right now. How The Very Long Array would fortify! But Gunnezet is the man of the hour.” Of course Gunnezet is never mentioned again. The “man of the hour” vanishes just as quickly as he appeared—and can’t we all think of at least a few writers who fit this description? What is this disintegrating world where writers and literature are continuously important, to so many different kinds of people, yet in an everyday sort of way, as if the books we read cannot help but be at the center of our lives. “Passerby would suggest I read Patova’s I Thought of Architecture, which I had read many times and knew many passages by heart, as most everyone else did.” These writers struggle to solve a crisis, through writing and action, that at the same time they cannot officially acknowledge. And has any crisis ever been solved through a writer’s struggle with words?
As I’ve already mentioned, there are aspects of each Ravicka book I don’t completely understand. And I hope, no matter how much I explore them, that some parts will never completely cohere. That Ravicka will remain a labyrinth in my mind, entire swathes of the city just out of reach, what these swathes are changing over time in my memory and rereading of them. In Eileen Myles’s blurb for Event Factory she compares the novel to Kafka’s Amerika, and Gladman does often make me think of Kafka. Yet, as soon as this comparison occurs I know I’ve taken a wrong turn. A wrong turn on the road to answering the question: Where is Ravicka? Gladman is nothing like Kafka, yet both writers are consistently uncompromising—in their language, in the fragmented worlds they have, paradoxically, so seamlessly and convincingly created. There is a quote from Kafka I sometimes see online: “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” Ravicka is the story of one writer’s merciless obsessions and the city-state that embodies them. These obsessions, mirroring our own world, a world that is also disintegrating before our eyes, miraculously manage to find joy and relief in the most unexpected of ways and places.
The rumor that more Ravicka books are to come is a rumor I hope is true. The next in the series is rumored to be about the grasses of Ravicka, grasses where the ancestors long ago lay down and dreamt what Ravicka might someday become. Future books, of course, will have to wait (even future books taking us further back into the past.) So perhaps I’ll just let Ravicka have the last word: “It was amazing to imagine your city was a novel, and that for you to walk around within it meant that you were in language, you were in a thinking text; pages were walls that enclosed you, the ground was the floor of the book, the horizon of the sentence, and all you were doing was walking up hill, going for coffee, hanging clothes to dry. We were inside a living structure, ourselves living, and went on this way for a long time.”
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December 2, 2019
Block Diary Confabulation
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[This text was originally published in Sarah Pierce's catalogue No Title.]
For the past few years I have had the worst writers block in my life. With this text, like everything else I have recently been invited to write, I find myself wondering if I should push through and force myself to write something, or if instead I should write to Sarah and say I’m sorry, I tried, but I just can’t, nothing will come out, and then hope against hope that I’m allowed to graciously pull out of the project. The fact that I have now already gotten this far makes me feel, for now at least, that I’ve chosen to push through.
Along with the block comes an enormous and ongoing rush of anxiety. The anxiety has many shades and aspects, but mainly it wonders: will the rest of my writing life be like this? Will I never be able to write easily and with great natural pleasure again? Has something been permanently lost or is this just a temporary phase? I think of this anxiety as a subset of a larger anxiety about getting old.
Leonard Cohen died last week. I live in Montreal where Leonard Cohen is so much part of how the cultural city thinks itself. I don’t really want to write about Cohen but he died last week and he’s in the air, and as I consider getting older I remember this morning, fresh out of the shower, examining my hair in the mirror and noticing how much more grey there was since the last time I could remember examining my hair. Instantly the opening lines of that song are happening: "my friends are gone / and my hair is grey / and I ache in the places that I used to play." And then the next line: "and I’m still crazy for love / but I’m not coming on." My friends aren’t gone. In fact, most often I announce that I don’t have any friends (while at the same time telling myself that I really have to stop saying that.) And I’m not still crazy for love, in fact most often I say I’ve never been in love and I don’t exactly know what people are talking about when they say that love is so important. But my hair is getting grey and more and more my writing life feels like a struggle to the death with some sort of neurotic block.
I believe that artists should do less, should make less. So in one sense the block falls very much in line with my more general beliefs. I no longer watch films, but when I was younger cinema was important to me. Back then I also thought that artists should do less. I was struck by how Leonard Cohen made eight albums during the same time period that Bob Dylan made nineteen, and believed that Cohen’s albums were each considerably stronger and more consistent because of this fact. I noticed that Andrei Tarkovsky made only seven films and attributed the remarkable consistency of his work to his relatively limited oeuvre. And then, years later, I read Tarkovsky’s diary Time within Time and was startled to learn that there were dozens of other projects he had begun to develop, that he absolutely desired to make, but for mostly bureaucratic reasons could not get made. The small number of films he made was not because of any great artistic purity, discipline or quality control on his part but simply because of worldly obstacles that prevented him from producing more. And this made me question my theory that artists should make less, made me realize that so many artists I admire had this enormous creative energy, an energy that just wants to keep producing and producing, and it was often only extremely frustrating obstacles that created an artificial degree of quality control. That an obstacle might force an artist to decide which of their many ideas, which of their many potential projects, are actually the most important to them, which ones they abandon and which they push through. My current creative life is certainly not without obstacles, but it occurs to me that, along with the grey hair, there are also now somewhat fewer worldly obstacles blocking my practice than there were in the past. And to compensate I need to become my own worldly obstacle, which may or may not have something to do with the aforementioned block.
I feel completely stupid when I write or say this, but my greatest fear about getting older is that my work will start to suck. This fear has something to do with gradually losing my faculties, losing sharpness, but also, simply put, with becoming old-fashioned, outmoded, out of date. It makes me question the ways in which my conceptions of art are in confluence with our advertising-driven, youth obsessed culture. I now know how problematic it is, but I can never seem to completely divest myself of the idea of the radical or modernist break, that the most striking art breaks into us in the form of a paradigm shift. But new ideas are most often variations on old ideas, often stolen from other places or other cultures, most often falsely pretending that there was nothing there before. And yet a more circular idea of art and life, while now striking me as more honest and true, is also tainted, for me at least, by stogy, conservative ideas of respecting and preserving traditions. What traditions to keep and what traditions must be burned to the ground?
As was frequently noted, the week L. Cohen died was the same week Donald Trump became president. I want to write something like: it seems that American imperialism is entering into some sort of strange fascist senility. But I’m afraid to make light of the situation in any way, thinking of just how many people will be harmed and killed in the years to come. We are living in dark times and I’m sitting here worrying that as I get older my work will begin to suck; perhaps a metaphor for the artist in relation to the world at large. It is because our lives are relatively short, and we often find it so difficult, on a day to day basis, to see beyond them, that as a culture we are not able to more fully reckon with the world we are handing over to future generations. Does the world get older as well?
I have now written enough that my claims of writer’s block seem somewhat unconvincing and yet I know, or at least feel, that this text is only a small oasis in the desert. I strike out blindly at larger-than-life questions as a cover for the fact that I have so little relation or connection to the small daily struggles of actual life. When I got the invitation to write in parallel or in connection to the theme of dementia my first thought was that I should write about my grandmother. I clearly remember her saying to my mother, quite near the end: "I feel so crazy. Why do I feel so crazy?" My grandmother suffered from manic depression her entire life, frequently underwent electroshock, and I felt very little connection to her as a child. To this day my mother strongly believes that my melancholy outlook on life is the hereditary remnants of my grandmother’s manic depression, which may or may not be true, I honestly have no idea. For the most part my depression doesn’t interfere with my ability to work or to be an artist, which I suppose is why I tell myself that it’s all right. But then I look around, I look at the world, and it seems that nothing is all right, and I wonder how much of this observation comes from my melancholy perceptions and how much comes from the actual world. And what kind of art to make in such a situation.
I’ve never thought of my writing as stream of consciousness, but it is often a kind of structured (or unstructured) improvisation. I’m continuously trying to surprise myself, to walk the line between control and out of control, but in real life, even with much drugs or alcohol, I am so rarely out of control. I don’t know what it is holding me together but it’s definitely something. And yet that something constantly feels on the precipice of slipping away.
An artist should do less, should make less, in order to have more time for experiences that connect him or her to the world. Art should be a reflection of living, not an activity which prevents it. In this respect I have always done it wrong. Quotes I noted down when I was young:
Friedrich Nietzsche: "Witness: I do not live, I write."
Thomas Mann: "I tell you I am sick to death of depicting humanity without having any part or lot in it."
The older I get the more clearly I see the error of my ways. Two more quotes that strangely influenced my formation:
Henry Miller: "Celebrity is merely a different form of loneliness."
Pier Paolo Pasolini: "Success is the other face of persecution."
I look at these quotes and can see the path I long ago set myself upon and that I’ve now lived. But I also don’t want to be melodramatic. I usually try to avoid writing that seems like little more than a plea for therapy, but somehow the theme has unlocked it in me. Getting older is a form of looking back. (And I know that I’m actually not that old. But it’s starting.) Writing and thinking are so close to one another, so close together. Writing is also a form of memory. Someday people will forget that Cohen died the same week Trump was elected, but then perhaps someone will read this text, or some other recently written thing, and the facts will be revived. Whether or not, at that point, they will seem in any way significant is another question altogether.
.
[This text was originally published in Sarah Pierce's catalogue No Title.]
For the past few years I have had the worst writers block in my life. With this text, like everything else I have recently been invited to write, I find myself wondering if I should push through and force myself to write something, or if instead I should write to Sarah and say I’m sorry, I tried, but I just can’t, nothing will come out, and then hope against hope that I’m allowed to graciously pull out of the project. The fact that I have now already gotten this far makes me feel, for now at least, that I’ve chosen to push through.
Along with the block comes an enormous and ongoing rush of anxiety. The anxiety has many shades and aspects, but mainly it wonders: will the rest of my writing life be like this? Will I never be able to write easily and with great natural pleasure again? Has something been permanently lost or is this just a temporary phase? I think of this anxiety as a subset of a larger anxiety about getting old.
Leonard Cohen died last week. I live in Montreal where Leonard Cohen is so much part of how the cultural city thinks itself. I don’t really want to write about Cohen but he died last week and he’s in the air, and as I consider getting older I remember this morning, fresh out of the shower, examining my hair in the mirror and noticing how much more grey there was since the last time I could remember examining my hair. Instantly the opening lines of that song are happening: "my friends are gone / and my hair is grey / and I ache in the places that I used to play." And then the next line: "and I’m still crazy for love / but I’m not coming on." My friends aren’t gone. In fact, most often I announce that I don’t have any friends (while at the same time telling myself that I really have to stop saying that.) And I’m not still crazy for love, in fact most often I say I’ve never been in love and I don’t exactly know what people are talking about when they say that love is so important. But my hair is getting grey and more and more my writing life feels like a struggle to the death with some sort of neurotic block.
I believe that artists should do less, should make less. So in one sense the block falls very much in line with my more general beliefs. I no longer watch films, but when I was younger cinema was important to me. Back then I also thought that artists should do less. I was struck by how Leonard Cohen made eight albums during the same time period that Bob Dylan made nineteen, and believed that Cohen’s albums were each considerably stronger and more consistent because of this fact. I noticed that Andrei Tarkovsky made only seven films and attributed the remarkable consistency of his work to his relatively limited oeuvre. And then, years later, I read Tarkovsky’s diary Time within Time and was startled to learn that there were dozens of other projects he had begun to develop, that he absolutely desired to make, but for mostly bureaucratic reasons could not get made. The small number of films he made was not because of any great artistic purity, discipline or quality control on his part but simply because of worldly obstacles that prevented him from producing more. And this made me question my theory that artists should make less, made me realize that so many artists I admire had this enormous creative energy, an energy that just wants to keep producing and producing, and it was often only extremely frustrating obstacles that created an artificial degree of quality control. That an obstacle might force an artist to decide which of their many ideas, which of their many potential projects, are actually the most important to them, which ones they abandon and which they push through. My current creative life is certainly not without obstacles, but it occurs to me that, along with the grey hair, there are also now somewhat fewer worldly obstacles blocking my practice than there were in the past. And to compensate I need to become my own worldly obstacle, which may or may not have something to do with the aforementioned block.
I feel completely stupid when I write or say this, but my greatest fear about getting older is that my work will start to suck. This fear has something to do with gradually losing my faculties, losing sharpness, but also, simply put, with becoming old-fashioned, outmoded, out of date. It makes me question the ways in which my conceptions of art are in confluence with our advertising-driven, youth obsessed culture. I now know how problematic it is, but I can never seem to completely divest myself of the idea of the radical or modernist break, that the most striking art breaks into us in the form of a paradigm shift. But new ideas are most often variations on old ideas, often stolen from other places or other cultures, most often falsely pretending that there was nothing there before. And yet a more circular idea of art and life, while now striking me as more honest and true, is also tainted, for me at least, by stogy, conservative ideas of respecting and preserving traditions. What traditions to keep and what traditions must be burned to the ground?
As was frequently noted, the week L. Cohen died was the same week Donald Trump became president. I want to write something like: it seems that American imperialism is entering into some sort of strange fascist senility. But I’m afraid to make light of the situation in any way, thinking of just how many people will be harmed and killed in the years to come. We are living in dark times and I’m sitting here worrying that as I get older my work will begin to suck; perhaps a metaphor for the artist in relation to the world at large. It is because our lives are relatively short, and we often find it so difficult, on a day to day basis, to see beyond them, that as a culture we are not able to more fully reckon with the world we are handing over to future generations. Does the world get older as well?
I have now written enough that my claims of writer’s block seem somewhat unconvincing and yet I know, or at least feel, that this text is only a small oasis in the desert. I strike out blindly at larger-than-life questions as a cover for the fact that I have so little relation or connection to the small daily struggles of actual life. When I got the invitation to write in parallel or in connection to the theme of dementia my first thought was that I should write about my grandmother. I clearly remember her saying to my mother, quite near the end: "I feel so crazy. Why do I feel so crazy?" My grandmother suffered from manic depression her entire life, frequently underwent electroshock, and I felt very little connection to her as a child. To this day my mother strongly believes that my melancholy outlook on life is the hereditary remnants of my grandmother’s manic depression, which may or may not be true, I honestly have no idea. For the most part my depression doesn’t interfere with my ability to work or to be an artist, which I suppose is why I tell myself that it’s all right. But then I look around, I look at the world, and it seems that nothing is all right, and I wonder how much of this observation comes from my melancholy perceptions and how much comes from the actual world. And what kind of art to make in such a situation.
I’ve never thought of my writing as stream of consciousness, but it is often a kind of structured (or unstructured) improvisation. I’m continuously trying to surprise myself, to walk the line between control and out of control, but in real life, even with much drugs or alcohol, I am so rarely out of control. I don’t know what it is holding me together but it’s definitely something. And yet that something constantly feels on the precipice of slipping away.
An artist should do less, should make less, in order to have more time for experiences that connect him or her to the world. Art should be a reflection of living, not an activity which prevents it. In this respect I have always done it wrong. Quotes I noted down when I was young:
Friedrich Nietzsche: "Witness: I do not live, I write."
Thomas Mann: "I tell you I am sick to death of depicting humanity without having any part or lot in it."
The older I get the more clearly I see the error of my ways. Two more quotes that strangely influenced my formation:
Henry Miller: "Celebrity is merely a different form of loneliness."
Pier Paolo Pasolini: "Success is the other face of persecution."
I look at these quotes and can see the path I long ago set myself upon and that I’ve now lived. But I also don’t want to be melodramatic. I usually try to avoid writing that seems like little more than a plea for therapy, but somehow the theme has unlocked it in me. Getting older is a form of looking back. (And I know that I’m actually not that old. But it’s starting.) Writing and thinking are so close to one another, so close together. Writing is also a form of memory. Someday people will forget that Cohen died the same week Trump was elected, but then perhaps someone will read this text, or some other recently written thing, and the facts will be revived. Whether or not, at that point, they will seem in any way significant is another question altogether.
.
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