Post 26: Something about writing

Unrelated photo about how not to hold a burrito according to Super Burrito in Brooklyn. (?)

I’m frequently thinking about the prospect of writing. How likely something is--in terms of what it is, what happens, the way that it happens or doesn’t happen–to be transformed into writing. “Likely” is a funny word to use since it seems to imply that what the writing is exists outside the bounds of my choices. Likeliness should really be attributed to my own odds to participate in such an act as writing, but I think I mean it here more in the sense of how close something may seem already, as it is, to be or become writing. (What gives something the sense of being like writing, like something written, of appearing to have a smooth path of transition into it? Do certain things ask to be written about in a way that others don’t?) How fitting would an object, a person, a scenario be to the structures that writing can provide? Or, how much would I want one of these things to be writing? How difficult would it be, how enjoyable would it be, even how different would such a thing be as writing? The impulses of these questions repeat in me while I sit, stand, or walk through various places, though I’ve only more recently noticed that the idea propelling them is one that separates writing from everything else, separates it at least from what is, from what’s happening. On the one hand, I’d say, isn’t it separate? Doesn’t it truly, in fact exist in a nowhere that is always somewhere else? But on the other hand…I don’t know exactly what the other hand is, but it’s something like: what kind of separateness can writing (being the everywhere and nowhere sort of thing that it is) have from anything? (And how separate could the world be from this thing that doesn’t have set conditions for coming into being?) Is it that writing sometimes appears, or is it that at other times it disappears?

The presence of writing, the possibility of its presence never feels especially present to me; it never exists in exactly the same place that I am. I find the act of writing to be something that points in a different direction--different from at least one other part of me. (Possibly also askew from the written stuff it contains?) Writing needs to operate in a contrasting orientation from something--to diverge from some given physical or mental circumstance at hand. I’ve been wondering if the creation of a change in direction is required for writing to be set into motion. Over the past few days, I’ve thought that I might need to clean my room a bit (foreign concept) in order to do it. Not for the sake of cleanliness, but just for the sake of change. The idea is that writing is inherently a shift from things that are present, and so needs to operate on a shift. (What is this logic of something needing to operate on the kind of surface that it also embodies?)

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I’ve been reading a monumental book that looks like this:

It’s a story, at least partly so, while also being aware of and questioning its own nature as such. The narrator of the story, Helen (a woman caring for her six-week-old baby Rose), reads Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (arguably the first English text to be classified as a novel, and one that goes to great lengths to consider what a novel is and what it's doing) throughout the book. The Long Form talks a lot about things (events, characters, settings, objects) arriving, existing, and continuing in a novel--the way that the form of a novel allows these nouns to pair up with these verbs--alongside sharing words about Helen and Rose arriving, existing, and continuing in the open world, outside the bounds of a book, though their story too is contained in a novel-container.

Here’s an early passage of Helen beginning to read Tom Jones:

Helen read on. She felt rather than saw the gait of an older person walking. She responded in her lungs to the description of the dawn: the pink lighting, illuminating in touches first the outer edges, then the central portion of the scene. But now, oddly there was a turn. A jolt: a pinch or snag in the steady rolling out of the telling: “Reader, take care.”

    It was the narrator speaking, switching unexpectedly from description to an informal direct address: “I have unadvisedly led thee to the top of a hill.”1

How exciting this intertwining of writing and space is. The suggestion and also acknowledgement of the not easily detectable influence on space that writing has for its reader. (How does writing space lay overtop the already present space that one reads from?)

The way Helen thinks and feels is so much built off of this spatial logic that Tom Jones uses to describe (proclaim?) itself as a novel. Both she and the old novel notice and question the specific way their “lives” unfold in space and time. They question what writing does to the where that is where you are in the physical world that you read from. Helen will be carrying her baby and will say things like: 

Their day was the story of their holding arrangements: an ongoing narrative of finding (sometimes planning, sometimes inventing, making up) and holding to (for as long as they lasted: believing in), then collapsing little scenes.

    Allowing them to stretch out.2

I listened to an interview with the book’s author where she talked about considering her book as something people would move away from and then return to, knowing it wasn’t something that could be read all in one go. If there could be said to be a path between a person and a novel, The Long Form inches into some of the in-between space between these points. It has this nice tone of sharing its words--as though its writing is an act of listening. It speaks not as a presentation of its own force, but of waiting, being opened-up to receive something. It questions the way writing shows up, where it is, and what it is for it to suddenly just be there on a page. It asks these questions of writing as though asking questions to a fellow life form. One big question of the book's many, wonderful ones: How does writing place you in the spot of what it has written?

Notes:

1 Kate Briggs, The Long Form (Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2023), 50-51; Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, in The Long Form (Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2023), 50-51.

2 Kate Briggs, The Long Form (Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2023), 185.

Bibliography: 

Briggs, Kate. The Long Form. Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2023.

Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Edited by Burton Egbert Stevenson. New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1904.