by Jenny Boully
A text with endless omissions
In reading and in lovemaking, the memory fails, gives way to self-made omissions. In rereading a book, I have a vague sense of feeling both at home and homesick. What I remember afterwards, I approach again joyfully and, like looking at snapshots of a past trip, nostalgically relive what I lived so wondrously before. What then of all the plot in between I have honestly forgotten? I feel a nausea of panic that I will die soon. I think of (a) all the books I have yet to read, (b) all the books I have read and don’t remember clearly or at all, (c) all the books I hope to write, (d) all the books of which I have no knowledge, and (e) the books that may be trying to find me. I think too of how love works, as I have loved many books whose characters, places, plots, and long scenes of ponderings I can’t recall, which means, shamefully, that I must be a bad lover. A nausea of panic that I will die soon and the one I love will not remember anything about me other than a few trifling details, such as my name or the memory of a gesture, and that is how I will exist: a text with endless omissions.
Erratum
In an ideal world, we would be able to furnish our lovers, years and years after seeing them last, with an erratum. Although we really mean whatever it is we mean when we say what we say, we realize often, after the fact, that perhaps what we really meant was something else entirely or perhaps we should have said what we said in a slightly different way: perhaps our fates are tied to how we punctuate. My errata: Where I left you with a semicolon, I meant period; instead of slay, please read stay. Passages and passages inadvertently omitted will now read, making possible the binding of two mirror-image yet truthful texts: the text of what is and the text of what should have been.
How to Write on Grand Themes
1. Keep your audience in mind.
As there will always be writing solely for one. It is easy: imagine that just for once, for you, your beloved begins to have pity. (He sees how you eye longingly the hands of the pampered and plush, the groomed young ladies. You think, This will never happen; this will never happen to me.) For this one and for this one only, you age; your journals are projected into some lonely future, where, huddled and cold, you have only one can of soup to last you. The focal point in the room is the door, through which your beloved may or may not enter to save you.
2. Include a search for the great unknown.
It may or may not have happened as you had liked, but there was always something like a chase in it. Over the cliff, you may or may not have spotted a jewel in the ravine. The boy with the trembling umbrella may or may not have called your name. You see, there will be a heavenly castle; there is a holy grail; there did fall golden apples. The page will always remain allusive. Give everything then: upon dying, you may or may not know if he loved you, really loved you—you can go on, with all of your eye-closing, your convulsing, your brutal burial, the rites, and the rest of the shrouding and transporting. You will know then if you were or were not his woman in white.
3. Dream.
It will happen when you least expect it—the mystery explained in terms of what you were feeling. The anony-mous letter is not so anonymous, and so you go on addressing, not knowing that all the while there is something in dreams so desperately addressing you. The dove, the wedding gown, the orchid and iris, the precious pillow—you will dream, but you will not have. The monk in white is shaving her hair and eyebrows; the songbird is calling; the fog is not lifting; the traveler will hear voices. Among the rows and rows of cabbages and turnips, only the drifter in sleep will find the one with a heartbeat.
4. (Keep things in.)
(It takes great training to divorce oneself from always-thinking-of-eminent-endings.)
Each morning, you will feel as if you have just done something wrong, as if an apology is in order; however, you will never know to whom your apology should be addressed. It is best, therefore, to keep things in—this way, there will be no exposed skin. He will not know what it was you most wanted; anyhow, he would never have given in.
5. Pay particular attention to detail.
Because they will leave you. Every moment, therefore, will be significant. You may not know it in the doing of it, but when he holds you, this is very important. Take note of that sunset. Don’t close, do close your eyes. You will wish; it will never happen again. The aforesaid moment already acting as artifact—the teacup so lonely, so empty.
6. Cry about it.
But only afterwards. If you lose a child, calm yourself: it was only imaginary. She will rise again in her white nightgown; she will ask after her father. Morning sickness will give way to. Always a dull moment; chandeliers shivering. It might be best to be. Incomplete. That is when it might start: the choppy sentences, the fragments, the memory oblique. Beware of the man with a few words. If you lose a child, calm yourself: it was only virginity.
7. Name your enemies.
You must give up thinking that you will ever be at your best. Blame it on the big capitalistic machine, blame it on the weather, blame it on whatever, but blame you must. Blame it on her, because she was there and she was willing. It was the Sirens’ song; it was another strange cacophony of hearts and breaths. You must attribute fault to the fishnet stockings, the Brazilian bikini, the manicured nails, the bottle blonde. The devil is real, and she is sleeping with.
Don’t allow your readers to know what you are thinking: they are waiting to find faults in your logic, discrepancies in your tone, falters in your dress; they will point out whether you are too young or too old; they will say that your whole wardrobe is nothing more than a gimmick, because they all feel a bit deflated after the harlot’s show of skill, her cheap tricks, her sleight of hand.
Hate the pinwheel and glitter. Say his proper name: first name last.
8. Edit lightly.
More often than not, if you are approaching the act of writing due to some internal circumstance, then likely you will not be too attached to whatever it is you are writing. Immediately, you will think that your tone is too self-pitying, too inclusive of the privacy of whatever disaster transpired to you and you alone. No one saw you in the taxi crying. All along, you were giving yourself away too freely; here now is your chance to keep and hold whatever it is you own, to say it and then retract it and say it again and to mean it, to really mean what you say, to use everything.
9. Obsess.
Remember: It is not my job, he said. It is not my job to take care of you. Remember: I’ll tell you right now, I’ll make a terrible. Remember:
10. Invoke the supernatural, especially ghosts.
It will happen, and you will say chance or coincidence—fate is never something that comes, at least not until much later. (Just when you are thinking that someone may be dying, that person does die.) How else to explain the inner workings? (So fully I believed my sister when she said that inside little perfectly round stones lived the coiled souls of angels.) If you haven’t any ghosts now, then invoke them or make them up if you know who may or may not be lurking. Say: the mysterious envelope (always too late) is falling from a sublime grace; say: the code matches exactly his license plate; say: the handwriting reminds me of someone I once knew; say: really, I was here before; say: you loved me briefly, but in a lifetime past; say: maybe it was just not meant to be, maybe today I will start calling on fate; say: how did I come to be here in bed with you, and then here again without you?
11. Learn dictation; snap pictures; take good notes.
Never assume that you will remember what is being said when you most need to repeat it to the outside source who may or may not need it more than you do. What is said all needs to be crucial. What is uttered once is just once and all else is but a mere echo. When your lover says, I love you, I do, you will want to write it down; you will want to keep rereading it forever. Let us say it this way: the night will not go on, but you will want to keep.
12. Close quietly.
Like the rustle of yellowing sycamore leaves; however, if you prefer, the shaking of spring lilie
s, too, will do. If you want to make a scene, know that your memory will forever be creating one for you. In any event, it will make for a better-written version—all the possibilities and outcomes still intact, with you forever thinking, Well, what if I had done this or that? You see, when a lover wants to leave, there is no other outcome. Only when you yourself have left someone will you know what this means—but for now, you are only you, and you are never the one who leaves. It is better to close the theme quietly, with an ever-evasive ending, on tiptoe with breath held, a noose, a sinking stone.
The Art of Fiction
PART 1
Chapter 1
When I first met Butch, he was counting spiders on his ceiling, which he said wasn’t the ceiling but rather a metaphor for sky, which itself wasn’t a sky at all either but rather a metaphor for something else, and so it happened that I fell quite madly in love with Butch; however, Butch never really happened either, or maybe he did, but his name was something other than Butch, and the manner in which we’d made the other’s acquaintance didn’t happen with such significance—but the way I am telling it makes it no different from the telling which occurs quite truthfully under the guise of fiction, which means, if it’s truly true fiction, which is to say, if it is true, then it really is fiction, and everything else is a failed mimicry. This takes me back to the ceiling and sky and metaphor and how the ceiling mimicked sky and how sky mimicked how I kept seeing the sacred or something like the sacred manifesting itself in various guises, and naturally, this led me to loving too completely all types of winged creatures, most specifically luna moths, because they were the most poetic, which derives from the Greek poiesis, meaning to make, meaning one ought to consult Aristotle’s Poetics right about now and review the relation of poetry to mimicry.
Chapter 2
When I first met Butch, I was in bed alone, staring at my ceiling, counting eyes, which weren’t eyes at all but someone who I felt was always with me, who wasn’t a person at all but rather a metaphor. Butch was standing in a doorway, talking about driving too quickly, driving his truck over a cliff in Paraguay; however, I understood that it wasn’t a truck or a cliff or Paraguay, and the doorway meant something I didn’t understand just yet.
What the great philosopher says in the span of two sentences, the maladroit novelist takes eight hundred pages to extrapolate. I’m not saying that certain novels are bad, I’m only saying that I don’t always orgasm, and by orgasm, I mean marginalia I couldn’t help but have. By marginalia, I mean the need to underline, to punctuate, to write notes, the characteristic mindful doodling that can only point to one conclusion: that I came across the one golden trail, the one passage in a book that is worth the pages and pages of perfunctory plot and narrative.
I’m not saying that my affair with Butch was bad; I’m just saying that I didn’t orgasm, and by orgasm, I mean orgasm. In bed, he was quick and shy, and eyeballs were eyeballs, and spiders were spiders, and the ceiling was a ceiling that never opened up to any heaven.
Chapter 3
When I first met Butch, I was not well-read, and therefore I confused my hermeneutics of suspicion with having brilliant thoughts.
Years later, I became better read: random affairs will do that to you. After a lonely while, I realized that reading smut novels just wasn’t my thing: those novels that litter airport terminals and vacation beaches, those novels that are easy to read and end up at some secondhand bookshop that sells nothing but bad sci-fi and horror and romance novels. They are easy; they make the time go by, and maybe you become a bit fond of certain reoccurring characters; however, you realize—after a lonely while—that you need a book that you want to spend the rest of your life with, a book that you can read and reread time and time again and love more and more each time and realize, as the book changes, as books will do, that you change too, and the book loves you back and is a winged thing.
PART 2
Chapter 1
When I first met the father of my daughter, he was not a book I wanted to read because the beginning was so slow and I think he thought I was a sloppy reader anyhow. I’d read a page and put the book away, read a page and put the book away again, each time reading a bit more until I realized that I was in love with the book and didn’t want to read it so completely because I didn’t want it to end.
What does it mean that the man I am currently in love with knows more about the literary device of recognition than anyone I know, and looking through my copy of the Poetics for a passage to quote here, I turn randomly to the section on recognition, which I didn’t even know was there?
[This was no accident: my copy of Aristotle on the Art of Poetry: With a Supplement on Music was owned by Nancy Thorp, who attended Hollins College and who died in an automobile accident; her parents set up several poetry awards at the college, one of which I won my sophomore and senior years; this book was found in the basement of West, a dormitory at the college, during asbestos removal; a friend of mine was involved in the cleanup. She spotted it and thought I should like to have it; I opened it up: on the front page, in faded blue ink, smudged slightly by a water stain, read: Nancy Thorp M. 224. (I can also guess that M. stands for Main, another dormitory on campus, and that perhaps Nancy lived in Main room 224.) For months, I thought that perhaps I should try to contact her parents and send it to them, or maybe donate it to the English Department or the Hollins Library, but then I realized it was a winged creature that had somehow found its way to me for safekeeping.
My digression betrays itself because I wanted to share something, but then I realized that the significance behind the shared object would have to be explained, would take away life from whatever I was meaning to show and tell about previously. Therefore, I had to tell of how I came upon the Poetics, and then I felt strongly the urge to tell so much more about my attendance at Hollins, but I realized it had nothing to do with what I was sharing before. I think I can save myself by digging into my Poetics, finding the exact quotation regarding recognition.]
Chapter 2
When I first met Butch, he was a baby in a bulrush basket, and I held him to my breast to suckle; he didn’t especially want it, kept asking me to point the way to Charon. To the ferryman or the moon? I asked before knowing that in these times Pluto is still a god somewhere and not a planet. In this story, my womb is cold and old, and my ovaries sag, deformed like the moons of Pluto. Butch is a baby, and he’s in a bulrush basket. I am the way, I say.
In fiction, digression means promise. I promise this will fit in somehow; I’ll return to this in a way that will allow sense to be made; the diamond ring is the missing puzzle piece; the jackrabbit gnawing on our celery isn’t a diversion from (as Robert Kelly warns in his book Doctor of Silence: beware of animals when they appear in fictions) what really eats us up when we’re in love. So when the novelist suddenly drops her coveted plot like an expensive vase, beware—love is in the air.
In love, it is easy to forget one’s promises to one’s self. To be in love means to sleepwalk when the lights are on—to lie wide awake when the lights are out, engaged in some other kind of dreaming. In his essay “Riddled,” David Weiss says that love is dangerous behavior. Jeannette Winterson says that those in the most need of change choose to fall in love and then blame it all on fate. To suffer Romeo’s woe, professed at the beginning of the play, of no love to bemoan means simply that one has yet to invent a white rabbit.
Chapter 3
In my lying-awake dreams, he has already left me. I don’t find out I’m pregnant until a week later. Picking up the phone to call him, I stop myself, and think that because my heart hurts so much, I’d rather do this tragically and, therefore, alone. Years later, he calls me, only because he’d heard, through a mutual acquaintance, that I was dying and that I had a beautiful daughter who had his eyes. I confess that she is his and Would you like to meet her? We set up a dinner meeting at my apartment. I dress my daughter in red velvet and ballerina slippers. She eats her peas, plucking them off the plate wi
th her fork. She doesn’t speak much, but when she does, he looks at her as if she had wings. I send her to bed promptly after the bread pudding. She is confused by the word copse in Anna Karenina; he is impressed, as she is only four. I explain, and she goes back to her room, closing the door behind her. When he leaves, he can hear her footsteps approaching; he kisses her good-bye. Behind the closed door, he overhears her ask, “Mommy, was that man my daddy?” “No,” I say. “You were sent to me in a bulrush basket.” All night, she sleeps, and I eat celery in small bites, by the refrigerator door, to keep me slightly alive.
PART 3
Chapter 1
What the magicians know will hurt you, as it is they who possess the knowledge of from whence objects come and whither they go. The white rabbit never exists until summoned, and the place where the white rabbit existed before being summoned never existed—only in the spectator’s mind do these places exist. When the doves fly forth from the magician’s breast pocket, they do not enter our world to perch on random branches of earthbound trees—we only see them briefly for the sake of the trick. When I meet whomever it is I meet, this person never existed before and exists then, at the meeting, simply for the sake of the trick. What the magicians know will hurt you, because when whomever it is I meet flies forth from my breast, as they will and as they must, these beings do not enter this world, but go where only the magicians know they belong. Into the black hat of disappearances so many loves go and reemerge as playing cards and the animal manifestations of the symbols of fecundity or hope.