Wednesday 9 March 2022
It’s a cold day, in the teens, with a some faint wisps of cirrus clouds in a whitish blue sky. As the temperatures have fallen over the past few days, puddles have solidified, breeding long spear-like ice crystals. There are ice crystals in the sky as well — they make up the Cirrus clouds and distinguish them from most other types of clouds which are made of water droplets. Cirrus clouds occur during fair weather, which this is; they sometimes herald warm fronts, but not this time.
I have just come from my weekly meeting with CT, where we discussed essays. We have finished the Oxford Book of Essays, and embarked on a new book: The Best American Essays, 2020. After the Oxford book, whose most recent essay was authored in 1984, we wanted to get a sense of the state of the art. For this session, we read the Foreward, Introduction, and first three essays of BAE2020.
We went with the 2020 book, rather than a more recent one, because I had purchased it a few years ago and then failed to read it. Now, having (re-)read the first portions, I remember why. Both the Foreward (by the editor of the entire series), and the Introduction (by the editor of the volume), espoused views of essays that don’t resonate with my tastes. The Foreward discusses Gertrude Stein and her experimental work, Tender Buttons (which I don’t care for) and quotes her as saying “creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting.” I’m not convinced, but do find it interesting in the light that her earliest research – when she was pursuing a degree with William James at Harvard – was on automatic writing. I prefer manual writing, and with a bit of forethought, if you please.
The introduction, although it has some nice writing about Machiavelli and Montaigne, hues to a similar view: “The author of an essay dislikes certitudes and retains the right to change his mind, to cradle not just skepticism but indecision and contradiction as he is writing…” If this is so, and an essay is a grand unplanned meander through fields of thought strewn with contradiction and ambiguity, how does one tell the good from the bad, the artful from the clumsy? In any event, it was this view of what an essay is that put me off: I was not encourage by the selection criteria.
On the other hand, I liked better the comment that “An essayist is someone who examines things in a manner that bears the stamp of his very private, personal and peculiar manner of reading and interpreting the world around him.” To me, this gets at the core value of an essay: providing a idiosyncratic lens through which to see the world in a new way. In any event, after a year to two years of delay, I am now ready to give the essays a chance.
Of the three essays we read in this batch, I most liked “Driving as Metaphor,” by Rachel Cusk. I did not, however, actually see how driving was a metaphor; nor did the essay explain, at least in terms clear enough for me to follow. Driving, to me, seems to be too diffuse, too individually and socially and culturally distinct to play a metaphorical role.
I am reminded, many years ago, of traveling to the Yucatan, and taking a bus. I was struck by the way the driver interacted with other people on the street. He had his windows rolled down, and rather than treating his vehicle as a private insular container, it was more of a stage. He waved and shouted and called out greetings to cars that had stopped alongside, and pedestrians, and store keepers. And as I watched this, it seemed that he was not alone — although as one who traced and retraced the same route, he probably knew the territory well – but that everyone was connected in a web of sociability that vehicles did little to inhibit. This stands, in stark contrast to my own experience, as well as Cusk’s: she comments, at one point, the drivers, isolated in their vehicles, may tend to behave more badly by virtue of their insulation. Such are the differences imposed by cultures, although, of course, the necessity of open windows in a tropical environment may play a role as well.
In spite of being unconvinced that driving is a metaphor, I did very much enjoy her descriptions and perspectives. In describing English roads in the region she lived, she characterized them as “narrow and burrow-like, with high hedges on either side…” She also talked about how the roads are “digressive in nature, rarely traveling directly a specific location. They branch across the flat fields like veins.” Like the roads she describes, her essays seems digressive in nature as well…
The most striking bit of writing was the penultimate paragraph:
I wanted to pull over but the inescapable fact was that I had to remain on the motorway in order to get off it. On that wide, gray, unfamiliar road, swept along by the anarchic tumult of speeding cars, every moment seemed to contain the possibility of disaster, of killing or being killed: it was as if driving were a story that I had suddenly stopped believing in, and without that belief I was being overwhelmed by the horror of reality.
–Rachel Cusk, 2019
I like the notion of looking at the world and having the story fall away, the suspension of disbelief collapsing, leaving one confronted with raw world unmediated by any scaffolding of familiarity.
At the end, our discussion cycled back around to its beginning, and the question of whether an essay should really be a spontaneous endeavor, unafraid to traffic in indecision and contradiction. We discussed the process of writing, and how, in writing, if one makes a wrong turn, one can take it back — even undo it so it is as though it never existed. We contrasted this with conversation, where if one says something infelicitous, or ventures a poorly expressed observation that another takes as an offense, one cannot take it back. While that is true literally, on the other hand, as skilled conversants, we can in fact effect repair. We can try to make amends, clarify our thought, rectify our contradictions. If we cannot actually take it back, we can at least be seen to be attempting to take it back, and that seems to me to be worth a great deal. Perhaps that is what the editors of the volume have in mind, though it seems to me that what is so easily done in conversation — and for which there is no other alternative — is not so easily done in text. In text, the earlier words can be revisited, and do not naturally fade and blend with the passage of time; contradictions remain explicit. In conversation the words dissolve in the mist of memory, even if the sting of infelicity lingers a bit, and others emerge to make it a palimpsest.
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