The poem from analogy: Samatar Elmi's "The Snails"

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The task of poetry educators is to remind students “that the most beautiful light comes from the most unrepentant flame,” D. A. Powell wrote somewhere. In this, the distance between the literal and the figurative can be the poem’s hinge. I am compelled by how poets accomplish this in analogy.

By definition, an analogy is a comparison between two things for the purpose of explanation or clarification. The analogy works on the basis of similarity to reveal something greater about the world. Unlike simile or metaphor which aim to show, the analogy's goal is not just to show but also to explain. To point to something bigger.

An analog is a person or thing seen as comparable to another. (It is also an amorphous evocation of nostalgia for Gen X’ers who remember the days of analog with fondness.)

Some have argued that the analogy is the core of human cognition. Certainly, it relies on language—on the slipperiness of connotation and shifts in meaning, and poet Samatar Elmi makes splendid use of analogy to reveal how cognition relies on re-cognition, or knowing by recognizing.

First published in Poetry Review, 2021.

First published in Poetry Review, 2021.

By locating the analogy itself as a subject in the poem, Elmi uncovers a tension in the analogizing, and this tension conveys a tone of displacement through disorientation and juxtaposition. Pronouns are critical to the pull of this poem, and each pronoun packs and repacks differently.

"The Snails" uses analogy as its starting point and its frame. The speaker declares this outright in the first line:

I mean, the analogy writes itself

The "I mean"  signals that the speaker is thinking, looking for meaning, using the analogy itself as a way to try and explain something difficult. The reader knows that the speaker is thinking aloud, leading into the strange unwinding of the long, enjambed sentence and its nested figurative languages:

like the onion in a grand conceit
though we are really like two slugs
in a derelict mausoleum.

Something uncanny happens inside the first stanza. The first few lines are linked by strange smilies and metaphors - and the recurring consonance of tea sticks to the tongue. T, itself, is sticky – it links in an awkward way. The onion signals that there are layers to be peeled back in a bigger “conceit,” and the next line begins with a qualifier—”though”—where the speaker brings in a plural pronoun, a “we” that designates a couple, a double, “two slugs” in a “derelict mausoleum.”

Then, in the middle of the first stanza, after this heady, strange beginning, the poet changes tone and pace with a directive:

Google “Snails are….”
Dangerous. Slow.
Destroying my garden.
Our jobs and our women.

Here, the syntax changes, sharpens the gaze, tightens the poem, creates a lexical accumulation of fragments which feel threatening and evoke the language of nativist xenophobia.

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The second stanza begins with a direct address to “You, who cannot speak snail,” and then reclaims the analogy of the immigrant as a snail in a moving home, wearing his shelter on his back.

Read it aloud. Read across the stanza break with its gulf in the middle to hear how a chasm opens between the Google “Our” of nativists and the accusatory turn that hinges on the “You”:

Our jobs and our women.

You, who cannot speak snail,

This is a dramatic You—it is the stuff of dramatic monologue and epic poetry. I hear so many you’s in this, including Rilke’s “[You who never arrived]”…..

Now the shell is a gift and a curse – against the biological or natural view of the snail as a sneaky invader, the  the poet presents the analogy from the snails perspective.  we know this by the shift in pronoun--the way "Our" does the work of recreating a boundedness, pressing into the tension of inclusion and exclusion.

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So much hinges on the sharp turn between stanzas in Elmi’s poem.

Gaston Bachelard described the poetic image as “a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.” To experience the image, we have to feel it's reverb, and what Elmi does with the snail—how the snail analog carries the shift in pronouns— reminds me of syncopation in music theory, where one holds a note while the chord changes.

We have the snail as it is seen by the gardener—the property owner—and straight from that clipped syntax, the poem moves into direct address.

In the Bachelardian frame, the empty shell evokes the empty nest, which limns dreams of refuge. But B. qualifies this by presenting the paradox of the “vigorous mollusk,” which suggests “the most decisive type of aggressive, aggressiveness that bides its time."

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 Ancient burial grounds contain snail shells as allegories of graves in which men would waken. The shells were vessels for the regiving of life – for the return and resurrection—hence the name “resurrection shells”. The body becomes lifeless when the soul leaves it and the shell cannot move anymore; the shell cannot move when separate from the spirit.

The poet here, keeps his shell, insists on its presence, refuses to remove the perceived threat of shell, or to respond to the threat that others make of immigrant. There is something almost Rilkean in this.

Here’s “Part One, Sonnet IV” of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy).

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

I read it almost as a response or a dialogue with Elmi’s poem, which focuses on the ground, the planet, the property marks and boundaries created by humans—and Rilke’s call to relinquish these heavy things, to look towards the sky. I think what these poets want is similar—to be the “Blessed ones, whole ones” of Rilke’s fifth line—and it’s transfixing to map the distances across time here.

But also, a resonance in Bachelard’s words: "Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones." To be in-between, to be trapped between the perception of threat and the home one carries: to study the poignance of Elmi’s juxtapositions and images.

A final note on the poet, who is new to me.

Samatar Elmi (a.k.a. Knomad Spock ) is a British-Somali poet, rapper and neofolk singer-songwriter “who explores musical genres as extended analogies for his own multiethnic heritage,” which includes Somali nomadic traditions and British working class communities. Elmi’s poetics hinges on what the displacements of language reveal about belonging and identity. “The Hope and the Anchor” and “The Invaders” accomplish this in a very different way from “The Snails.” Portrait of Colossus, his debut pamphlet, is available from flipped eye publishing. I am keeping my fascinated, analog eye on this poet.

Using Diane Williams' lines as writing prompts any damned day of the week.

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I think you can read any line from piece by Diane Williams and use it as a starting point for something—poem, essay, fiction, hybrid, Girl Scout cookie slogan, empowerment-feminism speech delivered in a garden of heirloom roses…. But I also think studying her lines is instructive. So I did.

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Example 1: “He had dragged me along to this refined filth of a hotel, which aroused my truest false feelings.”

This line from “Speech” does the magic thing twice! Williams lays opposites side by side in a description, so the “refined filth” makes the hotel feel even filthier, like the afterbirth of a Stanislaw Lem story on the linoleum. And then “my truest false feelings” make the feelings feel even faker. When coupling opposites, it appears that the subject sinks beneath the lowest common denominator.

Example 2: “…the redness and the whiteness of a fine radish.”

This brief image appears in “Gods of the Earth At Home,” where it sticks to the mind and shimmers. Williams does this suffixing often, adding a -ness to an adjective to make it a noun, to wrap the object in a condition or quality rather than a simple description. So the red and white radish becomes redness itself, whiteness itself, two separate, divided conditions. Notice how red and white evokes the colors of objects while the redness and the whiteness evokes their condition, their aura. Hence luminosity, shimmering.

Example 3: “I say yes yes. I say my excitement is so great, so huge.”

Again, from “Gods of the Earth At Home,” Williams reveals how a series of enthusiastic superlatives actually makes the enthusiasm, itself, incredible, and suspect.


Example 4: “I am the dark one, the short one, the thick one, the coarse one, who is so unsatisfied with all of my suggestions.”

This is the second paragraph in “Desperately Trying to Lie Down.” I love how one can watch the narrative voice distance itself from the intimacy of the “I” as if by striptease; each additional qualification tells us less and less about the speaker. And each “one” moves us further away from the single person we are trying to understand. What if taking off all our clothes made us invisible rather than naked? Is nakedness and earnesty, itself, a facet of invisibility? Sometimes Williams seems to suggest this in “I” statements.


Example 5: “Rather, it is from the blather, rather I am made. I parade around plenty, which means I do have the globular breasts. Yet, I am watched.”

The final two paragraphs of “Her Hair Is Red”—and so many Williams’ in these sentences. I will focus on the use of rhyme to bind lines and create motion forward through sonic effects rather than plot. Rather/blather rhymes, and then repeats. Then made/parade link arms across the punctuation mark. Notice how the “t” sounds accumulate and only really prick up their eats in the last sentence, where the rather/blather/plenty/breasts rub against the “Yet”. I kept hearing the “Yet” as “Yes”—and I suspect the purpose of this short story lies in the unlatched friction between Yet/Yes right there. Yet, I suspect because I am suspicious. And wow.

Example 6: “There is a slim chance that anything is unable to be unmoved.”

The last line of “Actual People Whose Behavior I Was Able to Observe,” a destabilization accomplished by attaching the prefix -un to two verbs, and then using one to define the other. Williams could have written this as: Everything can be moved a little, but that’s not quite what she means. What she means is that negation is related to motion, and the prefixes render the sentence prismatic, the promise that “There is” complicated by the double -un.

Just because bars are fascinating. And prompts are bars, re-visioned. So do whatever with the iron below. I just used to it to free-write.

Just because bars are fascinating. And prompts are bars, re-visioned. So do whatever with the iron below. I just used to it to free-write.

Prompt 1: “How about the deity responsible for me?—why should it not move me through the realm, escort me to the other side of the predicament?” (from “Upright Pearl”)

Prompt 2: “Get myself endeared I should, endorsed with a day in mind. This day in Wednesday.” (from “Madder Lake”)

Prompt 3: “An entire formula for feeling good….”

She was jealous of people with sea green or lavender scooters who had grown up in small towns with singular traffic lights. The arrogance of rural intimacy was the highest emotional connection she imagined when trimming her hair with nail clippers over the expired Confederate gravestones.

Where had the nail clippers come from, anyway?

It was Long Rod who urged the clandestine. He had family in Uruguay he couldn’t talk about at all. Or under any condition. But no children. “I love knives too much to be a father,” he had announced. They met at a sword conference by mistakes.

Both had similar, variant deficits in their peripheral attention spans, which caused them to see sword when what happened was a Swordfish Convention. Neither had ever fished. Failure felt like bondage when he touched her arm with his mind and she used the word swords and love in the same unbuckled sentence.

“Believe in the extended metaphor of us,” he had whispered the following morning in the hallway of her apartment near the poster of the Dalai Lama she’d inherited from a professor, disgraced. Sacked, shamed, and gone—all his stuff left to scald the walls of his large university office.

“I have come to collect his spiritual influence,” she told the secretary who shrugged. Just take it. Take it all. Like a 90’s indie record song lyric.

She dreamt taxis had wings hidden beneath their yellow hoods.

But they did not develop eyes and entire formula of flight was useless.

“Believe in the extension rod,” the professor once said while holding white chalk. She lost the nail clippers after pitching a multi-modal review essay to an editor she knew from grad school. But he was married and not interested.

You think it’s easy to be noisy and quiet, but the pillow in the taxi’s backseat was put there on purpose. Someone made plans.

"A infinitude of catastrophes...apace": On Diane Williams.

“It is one of those lovely times when crisis does not come as a surprise,” writes Diane Williams in what could be a keynote on tonal effects rather than a line from a short fiction titled “An Opening Chat.” Nothing is more surprising than discovering that The Collected Short Stories of Diane Williams (Soho Press, 2018) still scorches my eyes when I read it. The tips of my fingers still tingle when I crack its three-Bible-stack-thick spine. O, I’d leave a copy on every hotel nightstand if I had the time, money, patience, and institutional relevance.

But I have none of these things. What I have: thoughts about Stupefication, the novella tucked near the center of the collection, with the following epigraph attributed to Several of My Neighbors:

Is it necessary to state a guarantee of my goodwill?

If they come in, they go right back out again.

The narrator signals they will be adapting a village omniscience to the material and emotional demands of American suburbia. As with other titles by Williams, the chapter titles stage the stories, if by stage one means an abandoned basement and by story one means miraculous alienation.

The first chapter, “Oh, I Hope You Like Everything I Say!,” turns out to be attributed to no one, if by no one means divinity. The omniscient narrator describes a male and a female as they navigate the stakes of a relationship, which is to say: what they want from another while also wanting nondescript things from the world. And so it begins….

Williams drops qualifiers like raw confetti at a church bingo party in order to elicit the excitable vagueness, the sense of something important happening, while also marking it as typical, ordinary, the usual scissored paper someone will later sweep from the floor.

The distance between the female character’s thoughts and words are magniloquent. For example, she has “her own ideas” when spotting old water and forsaken hills, but what she says aloud is: “This is the nicest part of the trip!” Speaking isn’t a form of communication among characters so much as a conversation between the narrator and the strange humans she lays on the page. The male doesn’t respond to the nicest part of the trip; we remain inside the female’s head, the frisson of her private thoughts.

Then, on the second page, the narrator peeks in with an “I” that isn’t tied to the male or female characters. In this weird intrusion, the narrator compares itself to the female: “If she is not much different than I am, she was hoping I would like everything she would say.”

The reader scratches her head, distracted from the male-female relationship. And Williams pokes her pen a little deeper into the reader’s unprotected eye by letting the female make an “I” statement in the next line. This is how the first chapter of the novella closes.

In the second chapter, we have the same structure: a fascinating title (one could populate whole zines with theories on Williams’ use of titling to subvert conventional narration) + a fact about a character which creates the possibility of action + fragmented, discontinuous descriptions which don’t develop into the intimacy of conflict + extraordinary chunks of awkward syntax.

The narrator steps in to declaim the title in the third line, and Williams tucks in the edges of the statement like dough on a perfect pig-in-a-blanket. It feels like part of the story. It feels like the narrator doesn’t want to intrude so much as to perform a sort of intrusiveness, which is to say suburban neighborliness.

There is the miracle of not getting lost, despite the absence of a magic ornament. And there is the way in which “that” dangles over the last line, suggesting it could go either way: that it could bring them good luck, or that it being lost could bring them good luck.

The initial problem of urinating is still present. She pees near a tree. “The squirrels are so fidgety.” The animals and objects are asked to carry the inappropriate feelings of the characters, a classic Williams narrative effect.

Notice how the memory of her dog intrudes on the squirrels’ violent illness—and how intensely the dog interacts with the pear. Each of these mental meanders feels more real, more actual, than the events of the story. And the reader is left in suspense, hanging between two breasts and the possibility of freedom, which may involve small objects.

The third chapter is titled IT WAS A JOYFUL TIME.

One is inclined to change it, to leave the overwrought marvel between the breasts and notice the joyful scene. His hand in the tent, zipping and unzipping.

“You sound sexed-up!” she exclaimed.

The dog died and she did not miss it—missed no part of its frisking, its wet nose on her cheek at dusk, its demands for bones or begonias, depending.

The campsite had been waiting for them to arrive. He found a receipt for vodka near the charcoal grill. But no charcoal. A wet sock crushed into the dirt.

“All of these vines—” she said, waving her hand, listening to her bracelets argue and jangle. The whole vine-ness of the scene. And the yellow tent, lying there, gilded by sunset.

He kept zipping and unzipping, putting things in and exiting. She didn’t know where to sit, really. There was nowhere to watch from.

Except for the stump.

He bounced his flashlight over the lower portions of the pine trees. An unlikely bullfrog, pinned against bark. The zippering, again.

The fourth chapter: FREEDOM IS LIKE BLUEGRASS!

She couldn’t sleep. What did you expect? Neither could he. Peas in a pod. The squirrels were atrocious.

“They are omnivorous,” he said of the bears in the news. Some animals eat anything, and one should not trust them with entire hearts or emotional openness.

Nearby, the younger guys had a radio and a fire and someone kept giggling. Freedom is like bluegrass.

“They must have appeared after darkness,” she said.

The tent was so dark it swallowed the flashlight. An old piece of tinsel lay in the corner from Christmas. A retiree.

“It’s been so long since then,” he said. Dusk could take aeons. Inside the endless, they had already eaten a hot dog with mustard she found in the glove compartment. The mustard waited inside a white envelope. It waited for them, and this.

His hands made rabbits appear on the nylon walls. She added a parrot. By then, he smelled naked, that moistness attaching itself to old sleeping bags.

They had all been young, once—young once or twice—stupid with fire and music. Ach, the giggling.

“Let me see your eyes,” he said, in the dark wet.

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Amazingly, here is the actual third chapter of the novella as penned by the insatiable Diane Williams for your reading pleasure and disturbance. Clean bedding—everything!

As for the fourth chapter, it is actually titled “Cautiously, She Looked Around,” which has nothing to do with bluegrass. It does, however, feature a jar of red jam, gold embroidery, soft light, and full-fledged cocoa bread pudding which you taste in The Collected Short Stories of Diane Williams.

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As for Williams, herself, the author, maybe she tweets. Certainly she spoke to Michael Silverblatt in the Bookworm podcast which deserves credit for the photo I borrowed.

Ultimately, like a hard-boiled omelette, truth boils down to what the narrator elects, specifically, in “The Power of Performance,” where we are assured: “Customary noise can occur in thick clumps, all of which can be turned sideways.” As all ending depends on positioning, an imp’s posture becomes an imposture if one lingers in clumps too long. Tarry on, interior monologue, carry those tons along.

Last-page blues.

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1.

I felt emptied this weekend when finishing Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (translated by Sasha Dugdale). I always feel this way at the end of something incredible.

The last-past blues: that horrible, narrowing dread which signals the finitude of a book’s world, the cessation of a voyage, the reentry into everyday life.

I renounce it.

I grind my teeth and refusenik the ending with a pen. Sometimes I dash off a review, but mostly I save it for the room of the notebook, the particular room of endings where last lines and final images are collected, treasured, preserved—and revisited as thresholds for reentry.


2.

Backwards can be a way into things. I thought of this when reading Robert Walser this weekend, and reconsidering The Walk in light of one of my favorite book-musers, Joseph Schreiber, who summarizes the feel and texture so well:

The narrator is a writer and a self-styled flâneur whose environment is not the bustling metropolis, but a semi-rural/semi-suburban setting featuring bucolic scenery and peopled with eccentric characters. The novella opens with our hero leaving the gloomy isolation of his daily confrontation with the empty page, to set off on a series of errands. He is in a jaunty, positive mood. It’s evident that being out on the street is where he feels most free, confident, and at ease. Opinionated, observant, and self-conscious, the narrative that unfolds is marked by an excessive chattiness. Whether he is addressing the reader or someone he encounters, a certain manic energy drives the perambulator’s account….

The walk, itself, is deeply significant for Walser—who acknowledges the important of walking to his own writing. The walk is where one collects the details which turn into words—the impressions which become images, the clothing which signals social status, the world.

Maira Kalman’s “Thoughts on Robert Walser” (included in New Directions’ Christine Burgin series-version of Microscripts) is an ending that feels like a beginning, or a bouquet which gathers Walser without burying him, without marking a grave.

It is not wrong to begin without knowing where one is going.

Many of us follow the footprints which fascinate us into the forest of impossible things and emerge with our own story—a story that doesn’t replicate the feet which led us there.

What do I mean by any of this?

How is this connected?

What is connection when it feels most palpable with the dead?

“Did I pick flowers to lay them upon my sorrow?” I asked myself, and the flowers fell out of my hand.

This is second-to-last line of Robert Walser’s The Walk (translated by Susan Bernofsky and Christopher Middleton).

But it is also the beginning of an essay or a story. The flowers fell on a flagstone, the place where he asked me to meet him. His grandfather’s name chiseled across the top. And a new message written in black Sharpie which the rain had mostly washed-off.

My endings notebook is filled with these, and for me, they are writing prompts. The endings are the best beginnings, the most luscious counterpoints already keyed on the metronome, ready to be subverted, destabilized, stirred into stew or marble.

If you find yourself looking for a way into something, pick up your favorite books—the ones you love in unfathomable ways—and scour the last page for a line that feels like a gauntlet. A line that wants to become a bone in a necklace.

Don’t continue the book or create a serial (that’s a different prompt, a different way of dealing with loss, a different relationship to temporality). Instead, start something from that line in the key of X…. Start in the unforgettable key and see what happens.

"Autism Screening Questionnaire--Speech and Language Delay"

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A National Poetry Month morning exercise inspired entirely by Oliver de la Paz’s "Autism Screening Questionnaire--Speech and Language Delay" (which you can also hear read by the poet at the link)—and by my incredible, gorgeous, brilliant son.

Getting ready for work and preparing to drop him off at the Montessori preschool which eventually became untenable to his thriving.

Getting ready for work and preparing to drop him off at the Montessori preschool which eventually became untenable to his thriving.

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1. Did your child lose acquired speech?

He has always been polylingual. I mean: he learned the language of puppies, cats, eagles, furred creatures he admired. The march of the penguins—his tears when the daddy penguin dropped the egg. The words moved from his mouth to his fingers, shimmering, twinkling, circling the brown curls of his head.

2. Did your child produce unusual noises or infantile squeals?

He laughs with his whole body: it is as if the laugh lives inside him, inseparable from every nerve ending. A full-bodied laughter. He doesn’t point to things. Is this the question? What am I answering? He likes quiet. Unusual noises scare him. Football and fireworks scare him a lot. We try to leave town on those weekends.

3. Is your child’s voice louder than required?

I think I mentioned it is loud where we live. I never realized how loud lawnmowers and leafblowers could be, the endless screaming of inhuman machines. Given the surrounding sounds, his voice is very loud—his teachers say disruptive. My friends say: shouting. It is loud enough so he can hear himself speak over the noises in his head. My child’s voice is as loud as required. He could be a sportscaster, really.

He presses his invisible volume button when he needs to lower his voice in public spaces. The button is located right above his heart. Sometimes he presses it so intensely that he mutes himself.

4. Does your child speak frequent gibberish or jargon?

He loves to sing. He sing-songs. He uses his voice to untangle the sounds inside a word from their shell. Did you realize each word has a shell around it? He opens each one carefully, slowly, with his mouth. And then he repacks it. He puts the soft sounds back into the hard shell. He will do this for hours. Often he uses his fingers and hands to help.

5. Does your child have difficulty understanding basic things (“just can’t get it”)?

The toilet is connected to a series of underground pipes that swallow things. He has shown me this with a drawing. He puts toilet paper into the bowl and flushes with one hand over his ear, the other ear laying against his shoulder. It is true that the toilet paper disappears.

He started kindergarten late as a result. He was only fully potty-trained at six, and he will not use the school restroom. At home, he goes into the backyard, crouches near a tree to use the bathroom, the sparrows chairing overhead.

He cries and covers his ears when toilets flush. Always.

He says animals are his best friends. He trusts dogs and looks deep into their eyes. He does this even after one bites him on the ear and draws blood. I worry so much when people walk their dogs and he runs up to touch them. I worry those people don’t understand dogs are his best friends. I worry the dogs will hurt him again.

6. Does your child pull you around when he wants something?

He takes my hand to show me the ice cream. He stares at the freezer door until I open it. Then he looks directly at the ice cream and waits. The connection between our fingers which becomes a connected gaze is actually a blanket. We wrap ourselves in the blanket and eat birthday cake ice cream on the couch. Oh no—is that bad?

7. Does your child have difficulty expressing his needs and desires using gestures?

He takes my hand. He looks at things and waits. He crumples up on the floor when he is frustrated. After aligning all the ketchup and condiment bottles on the kitchen floor, he dances around them. Fingers twinkling. His eyes twinkle when his fingers twinkle in the air. The joy on his face is incredible—he knows what he needs to assemble it. He knows his joy’s patterns. The bottles, the trains arranged by color and size along the edge of a rug. His hands dancing, dancing.

8. Is there no spontaneous imitation of speech or communication from your child?

I don’t know what you mean. I know what he means. I know others don’t know what he means as I do not know what you mean by this question. Is this an answer? It feels like we aren’t communicating.

9. Does your child repeat words, parts of words, or tv commercials?

He repeats everything sing-songy. He loves vowels and fricatives. He repeats everything and takes it apart with such tenderness. Like a tiny monk studying the matins, the motion of music toward song. He chants a lot.

10. Does your child use repetitive language (same word or phrase over and over)?

Yes! Yes! He’s been doing this more and I read in a book that repetition is how kids learn new words so I’m excited and hopeful about his vocabulary. He loves repeating alphabet flashcards. He does it by himself. He sits in his teddy chair and repeats flashcards for hours. And train words. And “Outside.” He says “Outside” thirteen times in a row when he wants to go swing. He sings it. He sings it and stares at the window.

11. Does your child have difficulty sustaining a conversation?

Not with himself. He has monologues. He meanders into new places with them. Twinkling places. But he won’t answer questions unless they are related to trains. Or bottles. Or whatever is fascinating him at that moment.

12. Does your child use monotonous speech or wrong pauses?

I don’t know. I mean, yes. I mean he recites what is happening in his mind as if I am not there. When he is finished, he crawls into my lap and repeats the word mommy. I mean a word is an island that protects him from all the other words and mean kids at school.

13. Does your child speak the same to kids, adults, or objects (can’t differentiate)?

Yes. He was born egalitarian—he doesn’t he see status or authority or prestige or charisma. He loves puppies and penguins.

Last week, I had to leave work and get him from school because the principal said he was acting hysterically. In that office, he was so tiny, sitting in a large leather chair, his cheeks reddened, his eyes rimmed by tears. The principal said he disrespected a teacher and refused to apologize. He looked up at me, his lower lip trembling: “No, mommy, no. No no no. The teacher said dinosaurs were 2,000 years old. No no no mommy. The teacher lied. Lied lied lied.”

I took him home. He wouldn’t apologize until the teacher took back what she said. The teacher would not take it back. I’m not sure what will happen with school. I can’t differentiate between respect, apology, and fact.

14. Does your child use language inappropriately (wrong words or phrases)?

He said I love you for the first time recently. He said it to a tiger at the zoo. He stared through the bars and said, “Tiger, I love you.” He was so happy. His fingers danced around his eyes.

Empathy complexes & crafts in recent readings.

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I. Technologies of enchantment

In this video, Ba-Benzélé persons, members of a pygmy tribe in the African Congo, demonstrate the Hindewhu, a style of singing/whistle-playing which announces the return from a hunt. Michael Clayton says the word hindewhu is “an onomatopoeia of the sound of a performer alternately singing pitched syllables and blowing into a single-pitch whistle made from the twig of a papaya tree.”

Anthropologist Jerome Lewis has described the polyphonic, polyrhythmic music of the Ba-Benzélé pygmies as a "technology of enchantment," where one individual voice is lost in awareness of the community, creating a sort of vocal communion.

The term comes from the work of Alfred Gell, a British social anthropologist whose most influential work concerned art, language, symbolism and ritual. Gell’s “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology” linked the spectator’s response to a work of art to their socialization, particularly how the spectator has been condition to perceive the technical processes which produce the artwork:

The moral significance of the work of art arises from the mismatch between the spectator's internal awareness of his own powers as an agent and the conception he forms of the powers possessed by the artist. In reconstructing the processes which brought the work of art into existence, he is obliged to posit a creative agency which transcends his own and, hovering in the background, the power of the collectivity on whose behalf the artist exercised his technical mastery.

At the heart of this mastery is the ability to induce a transcendence, or a state which lifts the individual outside their particular lived experience to partake a shared or cosmic experience. A communion. An eternity tasted inside a bread crumb. A we invoked by a Gregorian chant. A simultaneous sense of at-oneness and nonexistence.

“Just as money is the ideal means of exchange, magic is the ideal means of technical production,” Gell writes, arguing for an expansive understanding of valorizations outside capitalist markets. He notes that “money values pervade the world of commodities, so that it is impossible to think of an object without thinking at the same time of its market price.” In the same way, “magic, as the ideal technology, pervades the technical domain in pre-scientific societies.”

Modernity craves this we profusely—to the point of rabid nationalisms, to the point of hysteria inside stadiums where men kick balls for money—and one must wonder if the exhausting individualistic conception of accountability and agency generated by late Protestant capitalism has only increased the fever for communal ecstasy.


II. Empathy’s industrial complexities

In her Bookforum review of George Saunders’ recent fiction craft book, Russian scholar Jennifer Wilson headlined "The Empathy Industrial Complex" as a facet of American fiction—the belief that fiction can create empathy, and writers are part of an empathy-marketing industry. Wilson doesn’t like it. She thinks the focus on empathy in Saunders undercuts the how Russian writers "enable a critique of Western civilization and English society." In a sense, this maps on the socialist realist critique of literature as a bastion of bourgeois sentimentality that ignores social and structural issues, and sets aside the responsibility to create a new man.

Wilson is correct that Russian critiques of the West in fiction are not "roped off from discourse about race, gender, or empire,"  but her critique of Saunders revolves around the transcendence that we read into Russian writers. For example, she doesn't like that Saunders de-politicizes the anti-feudalist message of Ivan Turgenev's story, "The Singers." The reluctance to pass judgment, for Wilson, places Saunders in the let's-report-on-Trump supporters category of what she calls "the empathy industrial complex." Unfortunately, by failing to define this category, one gets the sense that it could be anything from a chain prayer spam to a nonprofit that reunites undocumented families.

Empathy matters. Fiction structures how we think about the world. Family, love, community, and interpersonal relations are often reflections of how socialization evolves in cultures. Granting Saunders' focus on the skaz tradition as a vehicle for multiple realities, Wilson suspects that the focus on narrative voice leads to a sort of tactical concession--that the fiction writer represents humanity, in all its grotesque banalities.  From here, she jumps to the assertion that Saunders' craft leads to the conclusion that Trumpists aren't racist so much as confused, lost in the loop, over-identifying with the collective We of late-Americanist capitalism.

Wilson's rue is not amoral--she hates seeing white racist as the victims they paint themselves to be. But the question of didacticism in fiction remains fuzzy. How much does the fiction writer owe the world? And what is critic’s role in the denomination of ethical voices?


III. Fiction scripts us

The arguments for the role or duty of fiction often overlook the extent to which fiction already socializes and creates the scripts by which we read and interpret one another’s actions. And I wonder what Gell would say about social media if he had not died in 1997, before the rise of virtual romance and screen-generated interpersonal relations.

In “On love,” Gell noted that conversation plays a critical structural role in modern British love, where “chatting-up” enacts a slow information striptease, a revelation of incremental information in the context of urban spaces and communities where residents hold little in common, or share little of their actual day-to-day lives. It is because modern humans are strangers to one another that how we disclose—and what we choose to convey—remains impactful and significant. In the lovers’ conversation, the “torrent of confidential information” usually occurs in person (and one wonders, again, how social media and email have increased the stakes of disclosure while simultaneously lowering the value of “emotional capital”).

“The effect of love, in modern society, is to reproduce, fictionally, the kind of pre-structured affinities which are taken for granted in a society like Umeda, thus converting the arbitrary into the inevitable,” Gell writes. Because there is no “structural predestination”—no tradition of parents arranging a marriage, no local rituals to rely upon—modern love has to invent itself from scratch, or rather, from the social scripts offered by culture. Hence the “fictionalization of love”:

…. the fact that the confidences that couples exchange are provided for them, structurally, because it is structurally necessary that these confidences by exchanged. Modern love would be unthinkable without fiction, romantic fiction in particular. 

Since the structural exchange of secrets forms the script which couples accept in order to play the game called modern love, one also wonders how “flirting” behavior is misread or misunderstood based on the individual fictions consumed by players. Is it wrong for the female-identifying player to reach towards the first kiss in heteronormative couplings? How has queerness inflected flirtation behavior?

“Each modern couple has to devise for itself a history which will justify its existence as a couple, on the basis of zero personal experience;” each couple makes use of the scripts offered by novels, magazines, television, sitcoms, soap operas, movies, and media; each navigates across the canyon of their chosen templates. “Love-fiction” is not less cool or authentic than lived experience precisely because it informs, shapes, and interprets lived experience. To quote Gell:

Fiction is a giant simulation, an external thought- process, which provides individuals with the scripts they cannot do without and which non-fictional experience cannot supply. This means that we cannot put love-fiction to one side as if it were less authentic than real life. Fiction is, where modern societies are concerned, what genealogy is in those societies which have marriage rules, i.e. the means of producing the relationships on which social life depends. Fiction, re-enacted as real life, produces the histories on which relationships and society at large are grounded.

Noticing how my own ideas of love and amatory relations have changed over decades, I’m inclined to agree with Gell. There’s an article in the current Atlantic Monthly about how the reality TV show Sister Wives inspired other persons to seek and sustain polygynous relationships—no word on polyandrous ones, however (and some theorists would argue that polygamy, itself, is so deeply patriarchal and essentialist that polyandry isn’t compatible with it).

Gell takes arranged marriage as a structural sensibility which exists in tight-knit communities. Westerners, with their love-at-first sight socializations, believe that love generates the relationship, but cultures with arranged marriages believe that the relationship generates love. In Bengal, where arranged marriages were common, access to Western media led youth culture to reject these traditions for the love-scripts they consume on television.

The production of love as knowledge is dynamic—it has social, emotional, structural, and economic repercussions. In cultures where arranged marriages predominate, bisexuality and queerness often remain illegible, secret, and persecuted. For Gell, the future of modern love includes a different form of match-making, a technical replacement of community by science, where couples may be matched according to genetic profiles or information deemed “scientific.” I think we see this in multiple online dating and match-making apps, and I wonder how these have evolved into “technologies of enchantment” and constructed affinities or group affiliations.

* Also, highly recommend Bergita Bugarija’s short fiction, “Summer of Bombs” (Pleiades) for a look at how Russian novels and bourgeois sentiment inflect the lives of those at war, those living in fear of bombs, those struggling to survive and clinging to the most ordinary parts of human existence—the hope of some exalted interpersonal communion.


Alfred Gell puts forward an anthropological theory of visual art seen as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others. The anthropology of art is here reformulated as the anthropology of a category of action: Gell shows how art objects embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. He explores the psychology of patterns and perceptions, art and personhood, the control of knowledge, and the interpretation of meaning, drawing upon a diversity of artistic traditions-European, Indian, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian.

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. With a Foreword by Nicholas Thomas. Publisher Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998.

[Source: Monoskop]

The Brás Cubas index.

in

I have a habit of adding indexes to my notebooks while reading.

Because I enjoyed this book so much, I decided to type this strange index assembled from personal saliencies in the 2020 version of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, written by Machado de Assis, translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, and published by Penguin.

In my dream, I asked the powerful Penguin perhaps to find a way to format the chapter titles without eliminating so many page numbers (for those of us who take notes by page)—but the Penguin did not respond. In my forthcoming dream, I will ask the hippo to ride me past Eden where I might try to ask the Penguin again. Or, initially.

Per indexing impulse, a precursor. Machado’s innovative use of typography on pages 75, 123-4, 233, 241, 260.

The narrator celebrates a few objects in tonal gestures which resemble the ode, so I added an index for Machado’s narration in ode modes. Several objects prefaced with an “O” enter this small index, but you should read the odes themselves. They are delightful.

Index of odes

paddle: 40-41
tight boots: 91
legs: 145
nose: 112-113
Formality: 244-245
muleteer: 62-62

Some words are used ironically—and I indexed those. Some words are defined in a topsy-turvy way—and I indexed them as well. Other things which made it to this index: unique phrases, philosophies, precepts, intertextual references, abstract states like silence (but only on the pages where one abstraction seemed to resignify another), a few minor characters, estranged metaphors, larger symbols, dances, translator notes, neat words (including Flora Thomson-DeVeaux’s marvelous “smallsword”). I’ve italicized the words that are direct quotations or interesting phrases which recur, almost thematically, in this novel. There’s not really a key, And nothing is exhaustive,

Index of text


Achilles: 20, 247, 301
administrative solution: 165
Africa: 6, 10, 230
alienist: 282-6
American riddle: 64
ambition: 60, 175, 246, 261
Anacreontic panpipe: 226
antiphons: 290
Athenian maniac: 284, 294
avarice: 70, 239
bachelor: 5, 6, 17, 169, 234, 238
Bakbarah the Toothless: 54-5, 306
bibliomaniac: 154-155
blood: 30, 32, 80, 88, 202, 221, 236, 239
Bocage: 36-37, 303
Borba, Quincas: 41, 130-134, 136, 187-8, 214-6, 228-231, 234, 242, 256, 258, 261-5, 270-273, 276-7, 282-3, 285-7
Bras’ father: 10, 73-74, 104-105, 106, 107, 110
cadaver: 58, 59, 67, 83, 84, 106, 152, 196
caliph: 270, 287, 291
capitalist: 289
catafalque: 106
Catumbi: 5, 295
cerebral ventriloquism: 248, 249
childhood: 28, 29-42, 66, 135, 167-169
Claudius: 12, 318
concubine: 160
conscience: 117, 181, 209, 277, 279, 288
clock (see also pocket watch): 98, 122, 134, 135, 141, 188, 207 *
cockfights: 236
colloquy: 186
cynic: 89
cypress tree: 153
Damasceno: 189-190, 191, 197, 235-236, 242-245, 246, 316-7
dandy: 50, 125, 186 *
Dante: 126-7, 311-312
declaration: 274-275
delirium: 18-25, 28, 60, 213, 230
dialogue as form: 123-124, 224
divine pillow: 136
dogfight: 263-264, 266
donkey: 62-64, 277
duodecimos: 65, 307
drug: 177
Dungeon: 239, 320
eclogue: 58, 307
eleven: 5 (friends), 56
ellipsis: 91
embryo: 185-186, 192, 193, 211
envy: 229, 242, 254, 278
epitaph: 241, 242, 280
Erasmus: 277
fate: 126-127
fatal error: 272
fatigue of the idle: 287
fixed idea: 12-13, 14, 55
flag: 13
Flamengo Beach: 201
folly: 26, 277
formality: 31, 243, 244-245
gimlet: 116
gossip: 17, 182, 200
hairpin: 206, 207
Hamlet: 6, 172
Hebe’s cup: 16, 300
hero: 29
hippopotamus: 19-25
Hotel Pharoux: 145, 170, 224
hubbub: 8, 34
Humanitism: 187-188, 214-216, 242-243, 228-231, 234, 261-262, 270-271, 287, 290
hypochondria: 8-9, 70, 79, 170, 291, 297
I stared at the tip of my nose: 110, 111 *
illusion: 16, 23, 230, 284, 290
improvisatore: 38
inheritance: 148-149, 220-221
injustice: 32
inventor of butterflies: 84-84
Job: 24, 301
lamentations: 229
law of the equivalence of windows: 117, 209
Lobo Neves: 103, 110, 119, 114-5, 128-9, 139, 163-4, 166, 175-6, 179-180, 194-5, 199-201, 207, 217, 220-1, 246, 278
Lord Byron: 64
love of glory: 8, 9, 79, 128-129, 198, 232
letters: 212-213, 226-227
Macrobians: 14, 299
manure: 34
masculine indiscretion: 252
maxims: 233
mediocrity: 40, 60, 68, 221
metaphysical: 101, 102, 221
monotony of misfortune: 288
monumental: 188
moral geology: 179-180
mother: 21, 22, 30, 32, 66-67, 80, 208, 289, 303
mysterious parcel: 117, 118, 311
nabob: 282
nanny goats: 270
Napoleon: 35, 36, 40, 50, 261, 303 (see also Ani DiFranco’s “Napoleon”)
Nature: 12, 21, 22, 23, 281
no remorse: 192, 247 *
nostalgia: 16, 168, 226
oblivion: 254
ode: 57
oil lamp: 172
opportune moment: 125, 207
Pascal: 77, 266, 318
perpetual: 179
philosophy of old papers: 226-227
Plaster: 8-9, 11, 13, 14, 52, 79, 232, 291, 296-7, 300, 319
polka: 224, 253
pride: 21, 60, 199
privation: 276, (memory of) 276-277
prologue: 3
Prudencio: 70, 71-2, 107, 148-149
public esteem: 146, 238-9
public opinion: 3, 69, 79, 198, 220-221, 223, 267 (neighbor’s attention)
publicity: 239
Puritanism: 13
rank: 60
Realists: 42
reciprocal deceit: 180
red-haired virgin: 175-6, 316
restitution: 117, 188
rhubarb: 231
Romantics: 42
romanticism: 60, 64
Rossio Grande: 43, 45
Sancho Panza: 45
Saturn (planet): 254
selfishness: 22
servant: 43
Shakespeare: 70
shakos: 256-258
shuttlecock: 215
silence: 20, 47, 59, 81, 101, 238, 245, 260 (see use of typography), 261
sincere: 48, 76, 80, 168, 264, 281 (sincerity)
slave/s: 31, 33, 38, 47, 51, 66, 82, 94, 98, 107, 148-149, 230, 239, 317
sleep: 57
smallsword: 35, 36, 40
snakes: 144
spectacle: 22, 23, 24, 58, 57, 67, 93, 236, 242, 254, 264, 265
Stendhal: 3, 249-250, 294
storks: 6, 15
sub-Greeks: 216
sublime: 22, 57, 117, 230, 253, 270, 276, 287
superstitions: 14, 172-174, 175-176, 201, 217, 316
Suetonius: 12, 226, 318
the grand idea: 7
the little house: 142, 146-147, 151-152, 156, 196
the living condensation of all time: 23
the pure reality: 213, 224
the mystery: 178, 186
theory of human editions: 16, 77, 93-96
thirteen: (see also superstitions) 172-174, 175-176, 201, 217
Tijuca: 70-73, 87, 88, 89, 263, 307
tomb: 5, 20, 244
tragedy: 6, 202, 210, 213
trapeze: 8, 52
Valongo: 148-149, 313
Venice: 64
vertigo: 68, 211 (vertiginous)
Virgil: 68, 75, 171, 308
virumque: 75, 308
Voltaire: 261, 190, 231
voluptuousness of woe: 70-71
waltz: 114-115, 117, 125, 126
wart: 176
weeping willow: 257
widower: 226
women’s indiscretion: 250
worm: 1, 21, 77
yellow fever epidemic: 242-243, 300
youth: 28, 33, 71

*

Machado’s original novel can now be read for free online in Portuguese thanks to Gutenberg.

Borba comparing conscience to why a pretty woman is vain and likes to look in the mirror often: "Conscience..... contemplates itself frequently when it finds itself beautiful. Remorse is nothing but the grimace of a conscience that sees itself to be hideous." 

But remember: “The book’s greatest flaw is you, reader….”