Kicks Against Solipsism

"If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years less six months and four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?" -- Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

"Then producing smartly a hammer from an inner pocket he dealt himself, right in the middle of his ancient wounds, so violent a blow that he fell down backwards, or should I say forwards. But the part he struck most readily, with his hammer, was the head, and that is understandable, for it too is a bony part, and sensitive, and difficult to miss, and the seat of all the shit and misery, so you rain blows upon it, with more pleasure than on the leg for example, which never did you any harm, it's only human." -- Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

The first sentence contains two instances of the same adjective, which is dressed up for some reason as an adverb. The second sentence contains a bunch of adjectives, but of more worthy of notice is the way in which it slides up and down the pronoun persons, like the Olympic podium -- third, then first, then second. Both are from novels in which the narrator is rather difficult to follow, and both are things that I have underlined recently, less because I thought they were totally crucial to the work as a whole, but more because I thought they were good candidates to go into my collection of sentences.

I conceptualize my collection of sentences as being something like a mason jar that one would toss sentences into, and then I guess shake the biggest sentences out for use on laundry day. I've gone on at great length previously about my love of the sentence as a unit, mostly I think because I tend to get overwhelmed by larger units (paragraphs, stories, novels, ouevres) and there's only so much one can say in praise of individual words. These two additions to the sentence jar are especially indicative of the evocative power of sentences on their own, because the narrators are themselves constantly confused, or confusing, or in some manner not the final arbiters of what's really going on. People who are not the final arbiters of what's going on are of course well known to us; they are most of the people whom we meet, and their sentences, like the sentences of Dowell and Malone are free to break out and do whatever they please. It's entirely possible that in years to come, I will be swimming through my piles of money like Scrooge McDuck and I will, unbidden, think of John Dowell and that all that I will be able to remember is that he has something to do with goodly apples, or that the only thing I will remember about Malone (because even his titular dying isn't as knee-weakening as that sweet sliding sentence) is that little tidbit about the horrifying guard Lemuel. They aren't Pip Pirrip; they aren't in charge; I can remember of them whatever I please. Them and anybody I might see on the subway or talk to at work or at dinner parties. Ha, ha, everybody.

The claim of the power of sentences, naturally, isn't going to shake the world, any more than the claim of the power of words or the claim of the power of much else verbalized these days. But those two sentences I love, the former of which I knew about years before I encountered it in its natural habitat, and the latter of which snuck up on me unawares. The staunch defiance -- with or without context -- of the goodly apple sentence, with its aching bookkeeping; the bitter spit of those sentences against the bony and sensitive and difficult to miss head; look at 'em go! Do these sentences have anything in common, apart from their fierce motion to be free of their speakers? They each reach out to their readers, their hearers: Dowell's (Ford's) by virtue of its being a question and Malone's (Beckett's) by virtue of its slick move into the second person. Words kick against solitude; every word has its hearer, even those shouted into a hole by Midas's barber. The indelibility of these sentences stays on, I think; they remind us, in their weirdly similar ways, of our unaloneness, even when uttered by their deeply idiosyncratic speakers.

The Goldfish Pile

I went to Buffalo, and from there to Lockport, the ancestral manse, to look at my bookshelves. And after about thirty-six hours, I put a bunch of the books from my bookshelf into a bag and got on a bus and just before seven this morning, put the books in a pile on my bed. I don't know when I will read any of these books; none of them are books that I, say, had urgent needs to get my hands on. Now I am sitting on my bed, and the books that I got off my giant wall-sized bookshelf have been moved to the floor. Although the bag in which I moved them across New York state (and probably part of New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; I fell asleep after Syracuse) also had some clothes and some other books (ones I had read/read from on the way to Lockport), the new recruits to my little room in Brooklyn are now sitting by themselves, in a pile next to the cardboard box that I use for a desk. I felt like it was necessary to do, like how when you buy a goldfish you put it in the fishtank still in its plastic bag for a while.

When I got home, finally, from my overnight trip, and before I had even got the books out of my baggage and into their new goldfish pile I thought about whether or not to go to sleep, and listened to a podcast of Baseball Today from last Thursday, and eventually decided to sleep, from maybe nine to noon. While I was asleep, I had a dream that, while I was on a lunch break from my current job at a Barnes and Noble, only it was the dream version of the Barnes and Noble where I work (it has appeared on previous dreams; it is somehow still at Lincoln Center, but also in a wooded environment). I was running late, in the dream, to get back to work, so I recruited some of my friends, all of whom were about fourteen, to pick up my Honda CR-V and carry it over the turnstile into the subway. "Too late to drive!" dream-me must have thought. "C'mon, my young friends, let us get our Honda onto the uptown 2!" This resulted in trouble of a nondescript variety; when I woke up, the thing that I thought of was that what I was remembering -- the manifest dream content, as I quickly realized -- was in fact the plot of an episode of the Wire. I cannot for the life of me account for why that is what I thought of first, but it is. I thought about that for a few minutes, and thought that 1) although I have seen every episode of the Wire, I was not familiar with the events of the dream; 2) none of the episodes of the Wire take place in New York and most saliently, 3) I was prominently involved in the dream content, and I was not featured even a little in any of the episodes of the Wire.

I can remember literally nothing about what I thought or did for the three hours in between when I deduced that the episode of "Putting Jeff Schratz's Honda CR-V on the 2 Train to Get to a Sylvan Version of Barnes and Noble Store 2628" was not an episode of the Wire and when I actual got to the non-bucolic BNS2628 at around three. I must have showered and ironed my clothes and taken the subway, and I must have put the books that are new to my room in their current new goldfish pile next to my cardboard desk. That makes the books of my room into three segregated groups: on the maimed Target bookshelf, decapitated in the U-Haul when we moved here, are the books I haven't read but that have been here since I moved to New York. In two piles by the wall next to my fan are are all of the books that I have read at some point during my New York life. I keep imagining that they will get lent to people, but no one comes by to see them. And then there is the goldfish pile.

Not only is the bucolic version of the uberurban place where I work bucolic, it also appears to be in a cross between the Hundred Acre Wood and Lockport, New York, where my ancestral manse and my wonderful wall-sized bookshelf are. And not only was the Honda CR-V that my young wards and I were muscling onto the 2 a Honda, but it appears to have been the very same maroon 2005 CR-V that my father drives in the winter and my brother the Duck in the summer, and of which, one year on the night before Christmas Eve, I flattened the tire driving home at two in the morning. All but one of the lug nuts came off easily enough, but one of them needed a special Honda lug nut device which was, though I did not know it, in the glove compartment. When I prevailed upon my poor father to come to my aid, he did not know it either, so he came and we kicked at the tire in the snow in the parking lot of a donut store for ten minutes before we went home, wet and tired and befuddled.

I haven't decided yet whether to know for very long that the books in the goldfish pile have unique status, or that they are in some way brothers. I can't decide whether it is inane or thoughtful to keep in mind their biobibiliographies, to associate Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth just as much with Kafka's the Castle, which is now on top of it, as with Goodbye Columbus and American Pastoral. More than likely, it will not be up to me to decide to know; I will just know it, and every time I think about either of them or Four Plays by Henrik Ibsen or the Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks or the Checklist Manifesto, I will think too about the assimilatory quality of plastic bags, about shoving one favorite means for getting about your home into another with the help of young faceless dream-strangers, about being two places at once.

Doesn't/Isn't

Socrates is a philosopher who never wrote down any philosophy. Stanley Cavell once asked if it were possible for this trick to be plied in other fields -- a novelist who didn't write any novels, a poet who didn't write any poems. The idea, I guess, is that someone who fit the bill would just BE those things; agrammic poet X would be a poem, would make his life into a poem in some important way. This is deeply stupid, insofar as what I've guessed the idea to be is the idea; a life is not a poem, or a novel, because in life you keep having to eat dinner and be bored and so on. I have addressed these temporal concerns elsewhere and elsewhen, if I am not mistaken. The idea that a person, by means of not writing, just IS (by the way, all of these conjugations of to be connecting a person to the poem or novel that is her life sound, in my head, to be capitalized, but I'm going to stop doing it from here on because it's typographically annoying) their work is a category mistake. Johnson wrote that you should avoid meeting the authors of works you've liked, because it is like poking a very pretty soap bubble. And persons are not soap bubbles. It can seem here, I think, as if I am being overliteral or picking on a straw man or something, which is a danger of which I am cognizant. But what I'm thinking about is a set of ideas that has come from, among other things, my long and habitual lapses of activity, times in which I am a blogger who doesn't blog. So it's possible that a sturdier-than-straw man, a stick man, maybe, could be built on the figure of a poet who didn't rely on being a poem, but a poet or novelist who had just an endless stack of poem starts or disconnected chapters. What's that work worth? And what's that work worth if the poet or novelist or blogger, as a part of real life, thought constantly about their poem or novel or blog post that seemed, for a critical reason, that it ought to remain unfinished, that there were something beyond laziness keeping the work from getting done?

It certainly seems like a form of entitled laziness to do this sort of thing: it's a bit like, in Johnson's metaphor, to want credit for making a beautiful soap bubble by buying soap, then never mixing it with water, but constantly imagining what you're going to do with your soap once you open it up. The only benefit of no soap bubble over a soap bubble is that you can't poke it and ruin it; and I am a person saying this who played with soap bubbles three days ago. That too, beyond entitled laziness, is the benefit of undone poems and novels and even blog posts that have been sitting unwritten; they can't be fairly poked, or ruined, because they are already ruins. You can't live as a poem or a novel, but everyone who tries to be a poet with no poems or a novelist with no novel is living in a house made out of planned and unborn poems and novels, and that is a thing you can do.

Here's another way of talking about this. I think that the only way to live in anything approaching reasoned comfort is only to live within your nonpublic failures, especially insofar as they are failures of words (poems, novels, blog posts). Something finished, whatever its quality, is in some perfect as itself; but you can't live in a soap bubble house. The ineffable -- because, again, I'm refusing to allow that mere human laziness is preventing these endeavors, and consigning part of their incompleteness to the ineffable -- keeps things from finishes, keeps mere good sense from owning and ordering. Here, we go to Johnson again, this time from the life of Pope:

But good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains supremacy. Pope had likewise genius; a mind active, ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; in its widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do.

Of course, we writers who can't write don't have Pope's genius to give supremacy to our safety; but there's something to be said for endeavouring more than you can do, and especially (this is where Johnson is most perfect, I think) imagining something greater -- not than one can accomplish, but than one knows, even if it's as small in scope as going to work in the morning, rather than writing the Essay on Man. Or even the Essay on Criticism.