chimedetroit

I’ve never seen such a geologically-layered example of an author going through it, where ‘it’ is neuroses and insight impressed and pushing through each other like pegmatite igneous rock spurs pushing through each other — hard insight piercing through thick layers of neurosis, and crystallized neuroses unable or unwilling (perhaps due to affectionate loyalty to the author’s past self) to melt itself down even in the sharp pressure of insight.

 

The quote I come to is one of James Baldwin: It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

 

The entire novel reads as proof of this quote. Not as a full process of the vomiting, nor a securely backwards-looking reflection of how the vomiter went through this process, with careful assurances that the writer knows full well that the vomiting-of-filth had happening and is simply reflecting on it. But something more like a several-stage epistolary presentation of an event: the base text as a woozy and unpleasantly self-abasing, unselfaware, neurotic, and in-denial discord liveblog of a short snapshot of time with the vomiting sufferer slumped over the toilet, starting well after the vomiting has begun, and ending long before the vomiting has ended; then a subsequent screenshotting of a pared down collation of the most interesting parts of the liveblog in a blog post, with fascinated reflective presentation of the insights the live blogger failed/refused/lied about looking at; and then finally, the final text, as a collaged remix of the liveblog and its collation, but without ANY smug commentary or ego-stroking parading of self-awareness — prizing emotional honesty to the liveblogger of that past snapshot, including honesty to the persistent dishonesty of that liveblogger. Most of the text examines the vomit, little of it is concerned with pointing out that it is vomit, or that it’s being vomited, much of it comments on a distanced-from-the-liveblogger Someone Else’s process of ignorance and realization and eventual understanding that has little resemblance (but does have relevance) to the vomiting depicted in the the novel.

 

And interspersed, reluctantly a center of gravity while denied to be, are the vomiting liveblogger’s intrusive dazzled intermittent thoughts that maybe, perhaps, it might be possible to walk on the earth as if they have a right to be there, which flicker in and out, the central line yet repeatedly shied-away-from, repeatedly looked at and looked away from. Much like the burned-out flaming eye-prices of Tamar that flit through a story whose word count is textually dominated by strange narrative treacles.
 

 

I’ve read three editions of this novel and it’s given me a huge amount of ideas about storymaking. But I’ll focus on the most recent edition. The points, driving force, of the novel goes something like this:
 

 

Two years ago, Tamar, just turned 17, an impulsive and arrogant skater/biker girl type, motorbikes alone and without telling her friends Elīya and Yenatru, out of the middle-eastern-coded fantasy city of Ennuh and into the desert, propelled by an intense passion and curiosity even she can't quite understand. And at the top of Erezel Plateau, which has inexplicably loomed in her heart entwined with this desire, tell God, who is a bodiless entity of laughter and fire and harshness right out of Sinai of Exodus, that she wants Them to show her Their soul. After a moment of warning and wrestling, They do, and in glee and shock, looking at a sky of cresting and rippling stars that is the entire soul of God, Tamar's eyes burn out forever, leaving them still burning.
 

 

This is the prologue, and is around 5 pages, which really puts into perspective some things about the next half of the book. The pacing is very uneven, and many of the longest scenes are the emptiest, and the shortest the most powerful.
 

 

The time skip of 2 years is heralded and punctuated by a epigrammical quote that both sharpens the two personalities in the preceding prologue, and overhangs and mockingly dogs what is to immediately follow:

 

-Evian translation of God's Covenant, originally delivered without words, 0 A.C. (After Covenant)
 

 

Because in the current day, it immediately cuts to Elīya and Yenatru, Tamar's old friends from high school, who are in college, drifting apart and aggravated by their lukewarm education and experience of life.

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Another Baldwin quote: "Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as the very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a mighty, intimidating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope. It contains a comment on all human beings, and the comment is not flattering." 

The passion is Tamar’s, perhaps also it is God's to Tamar, or the world's to God, especially Lucifer and Lilith's to God millennia ago. And the one who hears a comment and challenge is Elīya. And the other characters? Well.
But the most interesting character in the book isn't Tamar, Yenatru, Elīya, Lucifer, or even God. It's the author, Skye. There may not be a frame narrative in this book, but parts of the narrative are so strangely put-upon on the content that the author's presence kicking and screaming and fighting with something that never quite makes it onto the page here (not fully until the last book in the series, The Lives That Argue For Us), is an entirely parallel narrative of its own, glinting and hinting, in the redacted gaps between revisions, in the gap between narrative and depiction, made of the things that are forced in and the things she can't force herself to take out.

Another James Baldwin quote is something I’d partially-assign and partially-deconstruct in light of the author's continual self-soothing lapses as she digs herself and falls back into the hole that is not her grave and sternly tells herself to get out of the hole, this is not her grave: It starts with “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart;” And then continues “and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.” 

The last bit of this quote has always deeply disagreed with me, a dismissal and incuriosity that disappointed me coming from Baldwin. The first part of the quote is excruciatingly true. But it is far, far less likely to be 'the signal of secret violent inhumanity' than to be the signal of a depression, repression, and denial: the roaring water of real feeling squirting through the dissembling channels of sentimentality that are the only ones society deems socially safe. Channels that, if subjected to mockery from either readers or the expresser’s own self-scrutinizing brain, ensure that the mockery will never quite touch the expresser’s true feelings or heart, and therefore leaves the expresser unwounded and intact.

Or: How long will you sit here in this room, eating your heart out? Judging by the publish dates of the next two books, the author only sat in that bathroom eating and vomiting her ate-out wounded heart for two or three years at most. By The Lives That Argue For Us, the geologic layering is not only volcanically cohered, not only protostar-igniting, but primordial-soup-life-sparking. That's a lot more than I can say of myself.