The text is not the book (C’est ne pas un blog)
This morning, reading Pema Chodron, I make no grand claims about her. We have never met, and I have no insights into her life or practice. She’s just the type on the page, and the photo on the back, a warm, wrinkly smile, with either inner glow or studio light reflection on her cheeks. What I can say is that she writes motherfucking incredibly well, and that it is a true pleasure to meet her texts. If reading is a performance, then this was an intimate, quiet, deliberately slow one, a neural unwinding neither hushed nor precious. I read slowly cuz her lines slip in and in and in.
This is my new mojo, to understand that the very real pleasures and profundities of a read text relate more to me, to my reading, than to any distant, other author. I don’t contest that she wrote this book – no doubt with help from others – but that its simply less relevant – is actually fundamentally suspect – for my reading to focus on an absent author that I must construe and conjecture on than on the present reading subject, and this undeniable, and immediate, and pressing, experience of reading. There is a real opportunity here, and a responsibility too, not just for/to the self, but also the world with which we share whatever it is we find in our readings. And we are always reading.
This also admits complexity, it allows for one to write deeply engaged and intimate and brilliant poems, and then behave like a monosyllabic ass at the next party. The contradiction is only juvenile, apparent, born of sloppy thinking. Still, my vestigial faith tells me that writing this gentle and incisive rather pushes the hog-wild party-wrecker archetype off the menu for Pema. No one’s mentioned that side of Gampo Abbey to me. Yet.
So a vital sense of complexity, and uncertainty. A tentativeness and humility in staking claims, even in my own mind. An ability to listen, to accept, to weigh. That’s what I was reading, and reading for, this morning. A way to proceed in a life marked by awkwardness, discomfort, confusion, forgetting, difficulty. In/Of’s Malcolm X quote was a small revelation – that one can embrace awkwardness, even see its necessity. And in the arts, how the writer can allow, see the wisdom of certain awkwardnesses of language and rhetoric, how beauty is diminished by aiming always for some transcendental luminosity and exactness, as if that precision and heat of soul is the only thing worth aiming for (well then, goodbye to farming, for one). And aiming at all, it is so easy to disappear into our aims, projects, goals. To what end? And with what (unsaid?) motivation?
And with practice, I as a reader-writer can become conscious of my effects, my textual traces, and conscious of how I feel around each, about what they are connected to – habits of abandonment, of verbiage, of examples, and rapidity, of repeating words, themes, forms, of avoidances and misgivings – watching it all like a movie on an endless –yet iterative – loop, until it all becomes familiar, even in each new crop of mutations. Knowing the terrain, can’t I chose how I move through it? – and its no dumb choice. Intimacy with my surroundings allows for great insight, for fluid and masterful motions. Or, at the least, to be at peace in the war of the heart – bravely in it, not fearfully apart from it. Selfless in the middle of chaos – on Monday, for me, the ER (well, working on that “selfless” part).
And if there is anything at stake in our work, then there is danger, and in danger, one must not only be a warrior, but a capable, a fearless one. If there’s nothing at stake, then hey, go do what you want. But isn’t this “nothing at stake” just another tourist excuse? A product of some invisible luxury which oppresses us, grinds us down to nothing and no one? It seems to me too big a negation – even in play, there are stakes, as in childhood: the stakes are as high and vast as we care to see them. Regardless, as I keep doing it, and keep asserting (largely in the face of my own opposition), writing matters. It is a matter of mine. I triumph it, share it, I trust in its revelations and obstructions. In its path. The bitch is a practice, and a damn good and uncompromising one.
This is my new mojo, to understand that the very real pleasures and profundities of a read text relate more to me, to my reading, than to any distant, other author. I don’t contest that she wrote this book – no doubt with help from others – but that its simply less relevant – is actually fundamentally suspect – for my reading to focus on an absent author that I must construe and conjecture on than on the present reading subject, and this undeniable, and immediate, and pressing, experience of reading. There is a real opportunity here, and a responsibility too, not just for/to the self, but also the world with which we share whatever it is we find in our readings. And we are always reading.
This also admits complexity, it allows for one to write deeply engaged and intimate and brilliant poems, and then behave like a monosyllabic ass at the next party. The contradiction is only juvenile, apparent, born of sloppy thinking. Still, my vestigial faith tells me that writing this gentle and incisive rather pushes the hog-wild party-wrecker archetype off the menu for Pema. No one’s mentioned that side of Gampo Abbey to me. Yet.
So a vital sense of complexity, and uncertainty. A tentativeness and humility in staking claims, even in my own mind. An ability to listen, to accept, to weigh. That’s what I was reading, and reading for, this morning. A way to proceed in a life marked by awkwardness, discomfort, confusion, forgetting, difficulty. In/Of’s Malcolm X quote was a small revelation – that one can embrace awkwardness, even see its necessity. And in the arts, how the writer can allow, see the wisdom of certain awkwardnesses of language and rhetoric, how beauty is diminished by aiming always for some transcendental luminosity and exactness, as if that precision and heat of soul is the only thing worth aiming for (well then, goodbye to farming, for one). And aiming at all, it is so easy to disappear into our aims, projects, goals. To what end? And with what (unsaid?) motivation?
And with practice, I as a reader-writer can become conscious of my effects, my textual traces, and conscious of how I feel around each, about what they are connected to – habits of abandonment, of verbiage, of examples, and rapidity, of repeating words, themes, forms, of avoidances and misgivings – watching it all like a movie on an endless –yet iterative – loop, until it all becomes familiar, even in each new crop of mutations. Knowing the terrain, can’t I chose how I move through it? – and its no dumb choice. Intimacy with my surroundings allows for great insight, for fluid and masterful motions. Or, at the least, to be at peace in the war of the heart – bravely in it, not fearfully apart from it. Selfless in the middle of chaos – on Monday, for me, the ER (well, working on that “selfless” part).
And if there is anything at stake in our work, then there is danger, and in danger, one must not only be a warrior, but a capable, a fearless one. If there’s nothing at stake, then hey, go do what you want. But isn’t this “nothing at stake” just another tourist excuse? A product of some invisible luxury which oppresses us, grinds us down to nothing and no one? It seems to me too big a negation – even in play, there are stakes, as in childhood: the stakes are as high and vast as we care to see them. Regardless, as I keep doing it, and keep asserting (largely in the face of my own opposition), writing matters. It is a matter of mine. I triumph it, share it, I trust in its revelations and obstructions. In its path. The bitch is a practice, and a damn good and uncompromising one.
posted by Kyle at 3:08 PM
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