In alleyways I sweep myself up
out of garbage and broken glass.
With my half-mouth I stammer you,
who are eternal in your symmetry.
I lift to you my half-hands
in wordless beseeching, that I may find again
the eyes with which I once beheld you.

I am a city by the sea
sinking into a toxic tide.
I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown
had poisoned my mother as she carried me.

It’s here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours II, 2

….1

Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. Zola: “Every proper artist is more or less a realist according to his own eyes.” Braque’s goal: “To get as close as I could to reality.” E.g., Chekhov’s diaries, E. M. Forster’s Commonplace Book, Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up (much his best book), Cheever’s posthumously published journals (same), Edward Hoagland’s journals, Alan Bennett’s Writing Home. So, too, every artistic movement or moment needs a credo: Horace’s Ars Poetica, Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie, André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto,” Dogme 95’s “Vow of Chasity.” My intent is to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media (lyric essay, prose poem, collage novel, visual art, film, television, radio, performance art, rap, stand-up comedy, graffiti) who are breaking larger and larger chunks of “reality” into their work. (Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks.)

….2

Jeff Crouse’s plug-in Delete City. The quasi–home movie Open Water. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Joe Frank’s radio show In the Dark. The depilation scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Lynn Shelton’s unscripted film Humpday (“All the writing takes place in the editing room”). Nicholas Barker’s “real-life feature” Unmade Beds, in which actors speak from a script based on interviews they conducted with Barker; the structure is that of a documentary, but a small percentage of the material is made up. Todd Haynes’s Superstar—a biopic of Karen Carpenter that uses Barbie dolls as the principal actors and is available now only as a bootleg video. Curb Your Enthusiasm, which—characteristic of this genre, this ungenre, this antigenre—relies on viewer awareness of the creator’s self-conscious, wobbly manipulation of the gap between person and persona. The Eminem Show, in which Marshall Mathers struggles to metabolize his fame and work through “family of origin” issues (life and/or art?). The Museum of (fictional) Jurassic Technology, which actually exists in Culver City. The (completely fictional) International Necronautical Society’s (utterly serious) “Declaration of Inauthenticity.” So, too, public-access TV, karaoke nights, VH1’s Behind the Music series, “behind-the-scenes” interviews running parallel to the “real” action on reality television shows, rap artists taking a slice of an existing song and building an entirely new song on top of it, DVDs of feature films that inevitably include a documentary on the “making of the movie.” The Bachelor tells us more about the state of unions than any romantic comedy could dream of telling us. The appeal of Billy Collins is that compared with the frequently hieroglyphic obscurantism of his colleagues, his poems sound like they were tossed off in a couple of hours while he drank scotch and listened to jazz late at night (they weren’t; this is an illusion). A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was full of the same self-conscious apparatus that had bored everyone silly until it got tethered to what felt like someone’s “real life” (even if the author constantly reminded us how fictionalized that life was). At once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice, I know all the moments are “moments”: staged and theatrical, shaped and thematized. I find I can listen to talk radio in a way that I can’t abide the network news—the sound of human voices waking before they drown.

….3

An artistic movement, albeit an organic and as-yet-unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. (What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 film of the Kennedy assassination?) Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.

….4

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.

….5

It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel (minus the novel).

….6

I need say nothing, only exhibit.
.

— David Shields, Reality Hunger

Much that may one day be possible can already be prepared by the solitary individual, and built with his own hands which make fewer mistakes. Therefore love your solitude and bear the pain of it without self-pity. The distance you feel from those around you should trouble you no more than your distance from the farthest stars. Be glad that you are growing, and realize that you cannot take anyone with you; be gentle with those who stay behind. Be confident and calm before them, and don’t torment them with your doubts or distress them with your ambitions which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Find in a true and simple way what you have in common with them, which does not need to change when you yourself change and change again. When you see them, love life in a form that is not your own, and be kind to all people who are afraid of their aloneness.

— Rilke, Worpswede, July 16, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

In our next lifetime
we’ll take care not to be human.
We’ll be two wild geese,
flying high in the sky.
The blinding snows,
the seas and waters,
the mountains and clouds,
the red dusts of the world.
From far above we shall see them,
as though we had never fallen.

— poem voice-overed at end of Winged Migration
(Who is the poet?)

They are quiet now. The walls
inside their minds have fallen.
The hours of understanding
draw near and soon will pass.

Sometimes at night, watching at the window,
it is suddenly all right.
What their hands touch is solid,
and their hearts lift as if in prayer.
Their eyes gaze, relieved,

upon the garden
at last undeformed, and safely
contained within its square,
which in contrast to the uneasy world
keeps being itself and never gets lost.

–Rilke, New Poems

….160

In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is also the mother of the nine Muses.

….161

Tell the story of your life that is the most emotionally cathartic; the story you “remember” is covering the “real story,” anyway.

….162

Reality takes shape in memory alone.

….163

Memory: the past rewritten in the direction of feeling.

….164

Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however removed that my be from reality.

….165

According to Ulric Neisser’s analysis of the structure of episodic memory, we rely—in our remembering—on complex narrative strategies that closely resemble the strategies writers use to produce realist fiction. David Pillemer, whose specialty is “vivid memories,” thinks that it takes something like a painter’s touch (the mind being the painter) to bring a memory to life and create belief. Antonio Damasio compares consciousness to a “movie in the brain” and argues that memories are just one among the many captions and images that our mind makes up to help us survive in the world. Remembering and fiction-making are virtually indistinguishable.

….166

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

….167

When memory is called to answer, it often answers back with deception. How is it that almost every warm bar stool contains a hero, a star of his own epic, who is the sum of his amazing stories?

….168

Consciously or unconsciously, we manipulate our memories to include or omit certain aspects. Are our memories therefore fiction?

….169
Memories have a quasi-narrative structure, constituting a story or a scene in a story, an inbuilt successiveness strong enough to keep the narrative the same on each act of remembering but not strong enough to ensure that the ordering of events is the ordering that originally took place.

….170

Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, hired a memory-loss expert to make the case that Libby forgot about Valerie Plame’s employment status due to the “vulnerability of memory.” Libby’s defense team argued that “any misstatements he made during his FBI interviews or grand jury testimony were not intentional but rather the result of confusion, mistake, or faulty memory.”

….171

Remembering his country, he imagined it.

….172

Our personal experience, though it may convey great truths, most likely won’t be verified by security camera tapes later. We usually think of memory in just this way, as if a recorder planted in our head could be rewound and replayed; however, memory often stores perceptual information in verbal form, not images. We remember a “light blue Rambler,” and yet because we have translated it in our minds into a verbal construct, we would find it difficult to retranslate the memory into an image, re-creating exactly the right shade of blue. Autobiographical memory is a recollection of events or episodes, which we remember with great detail. What’s stored in that memory isn’t the actual events, but how those events made sense to us and fit into our experience.

….173

We tend to think of our memories as having been tucked away for safekeeping in, say, file cabinets or dusty old boxes in the backs of closets or filed away on the hard drives of computers, where they can easily be accessed by the click of a button. All it takes to remember events and objects is to open the boxes, open the files, and there our memories will be, waiting for us. Just as boxes and files molder and rot and computers become infected with viruses making the files inaccessible or corrupted, so do our memories. In a sense, all memories have been forgotten. Memories are predicated on loss. It’s through the act of remembering that we bring these forgotten experiences back from oblivion. They require this rescuing because they’ve run their course. These experiences are complete and have been relegated to our memories. In other words, to remember is to recall what we’ve forgotten, but it’s not as if our memories have been rubbed away by years of wind and rain like names and dates on a gravestone; instead, our memories are filled with gaps and distortions, because by its very nature memory is selective.

….174

The genius of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and tempermental.

….175

To fill in the holes, we turn our memories into specific images, which our minds understand as representing a specific experience, object, or thought. Our past experiences have been dismantled, analyzed, re-collated, and then made ready for imagistic recall. The images we store in our memories are not exact replicas of what we experienced; they’re what our minds turn them into. They are what we need to re-create the story, which is the full experience the image represents.

….176

Freud: we have no memories from our childhood, only memories that pertain to our childhood. Is a story merely a memory of a memory? How can a memory, which is grounded in an image (e.g., a light blue Rambler) and which rings so true to me, be false? If this is false, then what is true? And why does this matter?

….177

It’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

….178

Did this happen?
….Yes.
….Did this happen in this way?
….The answer to that, if you’re a grown-up, is “Not necessarily.”

….179

Memory loves to go hunting in the dark

….180

Nonfiction writers imagine. Fiction writers invent. These are fundamentally different acts, performed to different ends. Unlike a fiction reader, whose only task is to imagine, a nonfiction reader is asked to behave more deeply: to imagine, and also to believe. Fiction doesn’t require its readers to believe; in fact, it offers its readers the great freedom of experience without belief—something real life can’t do. Fiction gives us a rhetorical question: “What if this happened?” (The best) nonfiction gives us a statement, something more complex: “This may have happened.”

….181

The essay consists of double translation: memory translates experience; essay translates memory.

….182

For example, in Proust, who is to me at base an essayist, nothing ever happens. The only obstacles are that someone might rebuff someone else or someone might get sick or grow old, and even these are usually hypothetical obstacles. People get educations, travel, buy paintings, go on diplomatic missions, but the events are for the most part meetings between various people (or simply sightings of one person by another, sometimes thanks to a stroll or a ride in a carriage) and what these meetings bring out, on a psychological level, about life itself. How can a work be considered fiction when there’s no plot? Philosophy, perhaps, or criticism, but not fiction.

….183

Carpenters restore old homes to their architectural and design period, not knowing the original color of the walls. If restoring a home is like writing a nonficiton narrative, and if choosing the paint for one wall is like imagining one moment in the larger story, shouldn’t we acknowledge that the house and its walls were in fact never one particular way? On a single wall, sometimes wallpaper hung, sometimes paintings stared, sometimes children penned their names, sometimes flies sat, sometimes dust settled, sometimes sunlight blazed, sometimes fingerprints shimmered. The lost story the carpenter tries to restore isn’t one particular story, but a pool of possible tales, with different perspectives from different characters, told at different times for different reasons. The nonfiction writer who works to revive a lost scene adds one similar story to the collection of stories that ever existed for that moment. The entire platform of my imagination—my purpose, my hope, my intent—is different from that of a fiction writer’s. I don’t seek to tell the best story. I seek to tell a story that once was. I seek to fill a place that once had meaning with meaning again.
….

— David Shields, Reality Hunger

Praise the world to the angel: leave the unsayable aside.
Your exalted feelings do not move him.
In the universe he inhabits you are a novice.
Therefore show him what is ordinary, what has been
shaped from generation to generation, shaped by hand and eye.
Tell him of things. He will stand still in astonishment,
the way you stood by the ropemaker in Rome
or beside the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even a lament takes pure form,
serves as a thing, dies as a thing,
while a violin, blessing it, fades.

And the things, even as they pass,
understand that we praise them.
Transient, they are trusting us
to save them — us, the most transient of all.
As if they wanted in our invisible hearts
to be transformed
into — oh, endlessly — into us.

— Rilke, From the Ninth Duino Elegy

I opened myself too wide. I forgot
there’s more outside than things and animals
at ease with themselves, whose eyes reflect
the wholeness of their lives.
I forgot my habit of grasping every look
that fell on me: looks, opinions, scrutiny.

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

Like one who has traveled distant oceans
am I among those who are forever at home.
The crowded days are spread across their tables,
but to me the far-off holds more life.

Behind my face stretches a world
no more lived in, perhaps, than the moon.
But the others leave no feeling alone
and all their words are inhabited.

The things I brought back with me
seem strange here and out of place.
In their own land they moved like animals,
but here they hold their breath in shame.

— Rilke, Book of Images

It’s less true of other art forms, but for some reason with writers in particular we want to know where to stick them, where to shelve them. There’s a general tendency in the world to force people to assume positions that are much more rigid than what comes naturally to them. Once you make what you think is a choice that’s going to empower you in some way, often it turns out somewhere down the line that it turned into a trap; you were actually closing out a lot of options to yourself without realizing it.

— Michael Chabon

Loneliness is like the rain.
It rises from the sea toward evening
and from distant plains moves into sky
where it ever belongs.
And from the sky it falls upon us in the city.

It rains here below in the twilight hours
when alleyways wind toward morning
and when lovers, finding nothing,
leave the failure of each other’s arms,
and when two who loathe each other
must share the same bed:

Then loneliness flows with the rivers. . . .

— Rilke, Book of Images

Each of us has a name
given by God and given by our parents
Each of us has a name
given by our stature and given by what we wear
Each of us has a name
given by the mountains and given by our walls
Each of us has a name
given by the stars and given by our neighbors
Each of us has a name
given by our celebrations and given by our work
Each of us has a name
given by the seasons and given by our blindness
Each of us has a name
given by the sea and given by our death.

— Zelda

Just imagine: what for you now is sky and wind,
air to breathe and light to see,
becomes stone right up to the little space
made by my heart and hands.

And what you now call tomorrow and
soon and next year and after that —
becomes an open wound, full of pus.
It festers and never drains.

And what has been
becomes a madness.
It rages and mocks within you,
twisting your mouth with crazed laughter.

And what had been God
becomes your jailer
and blocks with his filthy eye
your last escape.

And still you live.

— Rilke, New Poems

My hand has one gesture left:
to push things away.
From the rock dampness drips
on old stones.

This dripping is all I can hear.
My heart keeps pace
with the drops falling
and sinks away with them.

If the drops fell faster
an animal might come to drink.
Somewhere it is brighter than this —
but what do we know.

–Rilke, New Poems