What will you do, God, when I die?
I am your pitcher (when I shatter?)
I am your drink (when I go bitter?)
I, your garment; I, your craft.
Without me what reason have you?
Without me what house
where intimate words await you?
I, velvet sandal that falls from your foot.
I, cloak dropping from your shoulder.
What will you do, God? It troubles me.
— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 36
While I sit here analyzing myself a sudden doubt assails me: did I really love cigarettes so much because I was able to throw all the responsibility for my own incompetence on them? Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one’s own latent greatness. I only put this forward as a possible explanation of my youthful weakness, but without any very great conviction.
— Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno
Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me. I am thinking of a summer on the Baltic when I was a child: how talkative I was to sea and forest; how, filled with unaccustomed exuberance, I tried to leap over all limits with the hasty excitement of my words. And how, as I had to take my leave on a morning in September, I saw that we never give utterance to what is final and most blessed, and that all my rhapsodic Table d’hote conversations did not approach either my inchoate feelings or the ocean’s eternal self-revelation.
— Rilke, Early Journals
Spring! And Earth is like a child
who has learned many poems by heart.
For the trouble of that long learning
she wins the prize.
Her teacher was strict. We loved the white
of the old man’s beard. Now we can ask her
the many names of green, of blue,
and she knows them, she knows them!
Earth, school is out now. You’re free
to play with the children. We’ll catch you,
joyous earth. The happiest will catch you!
All that the teacher taught her — the many thoughts
pressed now into roots and long
tough stems: she sings! She sings!
— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 21
When I was young I asked my father what the highest number was. He said, in that fatherly way: “Twenty is the highest number, my son. Not here, nor in the furthest reaches of the land, is there any number higher.” I was satisfied, I walked proud with my new knowledge and assurance.
Till I came of age, at twenty one.
I went to our village doctor, to tell him I had a Numerical Tumor in my age; that somehow I had grown an additional one on my twenty. He informed me there was no cure. Fortunately, the tumor was benign, although it would continue to grow.
I was fascinated by the knowledge of this learned man of science, and sought anew the answer to my question, ‘What is the highest number?’ The doctor regaled me with a scientific instrument, the abacus, and showed me that it could count as many as a hundred things. “But surely,” I asked, “if one had one hundred abacuses, one could use yet another abacus to count those hundred abacuses, and yet each of these could count a hundred more things. What, indeed, if there are yet more numbers, beyond the reach of this fine tool?”
The Doctor was all a-fluster, and told me in stern terms that any number that had not been counted on the abacus was not worth considering, and indeed could hardly be said to exist at all. He spoke of a man named William of Occam, and of something called the Least Hypothesis. But what use was all this to me, if the highest number was always the last number to which I had counted? Is it useful to know where the end of the earth is only after you have stepped over it?
I asked around the village for answers until they tired of my interrogations and told me to seek out the priest — a well-studied man, possessed, they said, of an answer for everything.
I soon learnt that the priest did have an answer for everything. The reason for this was that he didn’t waste very much time in finding them. He was a meek man, and did not need the fancy expensive answers so beloved of academics: he would make due with older answers, even if they were a tad worn out. The priest would see an old answer lying about, and say to himself, “Ahh, that would fit the question I have perfectly.” Whether or not the answer was right seemed to his mind a somewhat indulgent concern: “Oh no,” he mocked me, “My trousers are not the right trousers; my car is not right the car; and oh, my answers are not the right answers.” And through guffaws he said, “if the answer fits, it does the job.”
He told me that the highest number was Jesus Christ, and sent me on my way.
In desperation, I sought out the village idiot, and asked him what he believed the highest number to be.
“Austria,” said the idiot.
In his small way he had granted me wisdom, for I came to realise that if there was an answer to my question, I would not find it in my little village. So against the protests of my parents, I went out into the world in search of that elusive goal, The Highest Number In The Universe.
Many were the lands to which I travelled, and many were the experts I met. I know, for I counted them all. But not one of them could give me the answer I sought so dearly. Nobody could help me. Till I came upon the Mountain.
The peasants of the lower village told me that at the Mount’s summit lived a hermit, the wisest man living in this world or any other, and that if my answer existed, then surely he must know it.
So I climbed.
And there was a cave.
And in the cave was a hermit.
There was a sign at the entrance: “You don’t have to be enlightened to work here… but it helps!!!” The hermit sat within, heating beans in a rusty pan over a small fire.
I wasted no time, and silhouetted in the cave’s entrance, I asked, “What is the highest number?”
But the hermit only laughed and said, “Kid, you don’t wanna know,” and not a word more.
For three days I sat outside his cave, in blistering cold and through haunted nights. After three days he came out to me. “Look kid, it ain’t what you think… you can still just go home,” he said.
But I would not move, and so the hermit sighed and said, “Very well… The highest number is… gazillionty-seven.”
I looked at he. He looked at me, and grinned impishly. But I would not be bought off so easily, and so out-loud I counted: gazillionty-five, gazillionty-six, gazillionty-seven, gazillionty-ei… and blacked out.
When I awoke some time later, his wrinkled face was staring at me from above: “Told you so kid. You can’t go any higher.” Then his face took on a dark hue, and he whispered, “Here’s the thing, kid: there’s only gazillionty-six things in the whole universe.”
“Even if you count a pair of trousers as two things?” I asked.
“Even so,” he said. And then he just laughed and laughed and laughed, and pointed to the ceiling of his cave, where he had scrawled in red letters three feet wide:
Oh look at me you Wise Men
Sitting on my Mountain
With all the numbers in the world
And nothing to be countin’
I never go anywhere that’s more than twenty feet above sea-level anymore.
.
— Sam Morris (Published in Philosophy Now, February/March 2010)
From infinite longings
finite deeds arise . . .
But in these dancing tears,
what is often withheld can be found:
our strength.
— Rilke, Book of Images
When I lean over the chasm of myself —
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.
This is the ferment I grow out of.
— From The Book of Hours I, 3
Nowhere, Beloved, will the world exist, but within us.
Our lives are constant transformations. The external
grows ever smaller. Where a solid house once stood,
now a mental image takes its place,
almost as if it were all in the imagination.
Our era has created vast reservoirs of power,
as formless as the currents of energy they transmit.
Temples are no longer known. In our hearts
these can be secretly saved. Where one survives —
a Thing once prayed to, worshipped, knelt before —
its true nature seems already to have passed
into the Invisible. Many no longer take it for real,
and do not seize the chance to build it
inwardly, and yet more vividly, with all its pillars and statues.
— Rilke, From the Seventh Duino Elegy
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel (minus the novel).
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
..
Consider the state of literature at the moment. Consider the rise of the memoir, the incidences of contrived and fabricated memoirs, the rash of imputations of plagiarism in novels, the overall ill health of the mainstream novel. Consider, too, culture outside of literature: reality TV, the many shades and variations of documentary film, the rise of the curator, the rise of the D.J., sampling, appropriation, the carry-over of collage from modernism into postmodernism. Now consider that all these elements might somehow be connected, might represent different aspects of some giant whatsit that will eventually constitute the cultural face of our time in the eyes of the future. That is what David Shields proposes in “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.” He further argues that what all those things have in common is that they express or fulfill a need for reality, a need that is not being met by the old and crumbling models of literature.
To call something a manifesto is a brave step. It signals that you are hoisting a flag and are prepared to go down with the ship. David Shields’s clarion call may in some ways depart from the usual manifesto profile — it doesn’t speak on behalf of a movement, exactly — but it urgently and succinctly addresses matters that have been in the air, have relentlessly gathered momentum and have just been waiting for someone to link them together. His is a complex and multifaceted argument, not easily reducible to a bullet-point list — but then, so was the Surrealist Manifesto. “Reality Hunger” does contain quite a few slogan-ready phrases, but they weren’t all written by Shields, and some are more than a century old.
One way in which the book expresses its thesis is in its organization: it is made up of 618 numbered paragraphs, more than half of them drawn from other sources, attributed only at the end of the book. This will remind readers of Jonathan Lethem’s tour-de-force essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” published in Harper’s in 2007, in which every single line derives from other authors — note that Lethem acknowledges a debt to Shields’s essays. But what reality is such magpie business enacting? Shields answers: “Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.” He is, of course, quoting Emerson.
There is an artistic movement brewing, Shields writes. Among its hallmarks are the incorporation of “seemingly unprocessed” material; “randomness, openness to accident and serendipity; . . . criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity; . . . a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction.” He briefly summarizes the history of the novel — set in stone by the mid-19th century — and that of the essay. One form is on its way down, the other on its way up. The novel, for all the exertions of modernism, is by now as formalized and ritualized as a crop ceremony. It no longer reflects actual reality. The essay, on the other hand, is fluid. It is a container made of prose into which you can pour anything. The essay assumes the first person; the novel shies from it, insisting that personal experience be modestly draped.
The flood of memoirs of the last couple of decades represents an uprising against such repression. So why have there been so many phony memoirs? Because of false consciousness, as Marxists would put it. Shields (echoing Alice Marshall) is disappointed in James Frey not because he lied in his book, but because when he appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show he didn’t say: “Everyone who writes about himself is a liar. I created a person meaner, funnier, more filled with life than I could ever be.” After all, just because the novel is food for worms doesn’t mean that fiction has ceased. Only an artificial dualism would treat every non-novel as if it were reportage or court testimony, and only a fear of the slipperiness of life could perpetuate the cult of the back story. “Anything processed by memory is fiction,” as is any memory shaped into literature.
But we continue to crave reality, because we live in a time dominated by innumerable forms of extraliterary fiction: politics, advertising, the lives of celebrities, the apparatus surrounding professional sports — you could say without exaggeration that everything on TV is fiction whether it is packaged as such or not. So what constitutes reality, then, as it affects culture? It can be as simple as a glitch, an interruption, a dropped beat, a foreign object that suddenly intrudes. Hence the potency of sampling in popular music, which forces open the space between the vocal and instrumental components. It is also a form of collage, which edits, alters and reapportions cultural commodities according to need or desire. Reality is a landscape that includes unreal features; being true to reality involves a certain amount of wavering between real and unreal. Likewise originality, if there can ever be any such thing, will inevitably entail a quantity of borrowing, conscious and otherwise. The paradoxes pile up as thick as the debris of history — unsurprisingly, since that debris is our reality.
Shields’s text exemplifies many of his arguments. “The lyric essay doesn’t expound, is suggestive rather than exhaustive, depends on gaps, may merely mention,” he writes (quoting John D’Agata and Deborah Tall), and so it is with his book, which argues forcefully and passionately, but not like a debate-team captain, more like a clever if overmatched boxer, endlessly bobbing and weaving. And for all that so much of its verbiage is the work of others, it positively throbs with personality. This is so not simply because Shields includes a chapter of autobiographical vignettes; he puts his crotchets on display.
He is serious perhaps to a fault. The decision to identify the authors of the appropriated texts was, he tells us, not his but that of his publisher’s lawyers, and he suggests that readers might want to scissor out those nine pages of citations. This is a noble and idealistic stance, of course, but it overlooks a human frailty that is undeniably real: curiosity. His asceticism seems also to govern his view of narrative. He is “a wisdom junkie” who wants “a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation,” and thinks that “Hamlet” would be a lot better if all the plot were excised, leaving the chain of little essays it really wants to be. But while it’s true that Shakespeare’s plots can sometimes seem like armatures dragged in from the prop room, they are also there to service the human need for sensation. Sometimes Shields can give the impression that he dislikes the novel for the same reasons Cotton Mather might have: its frivolity, its voyeurism, its licentiousness.
On the whole, though, he is a benevolent and broad-minded revolutionary, urging a hundred flowers to bloom, toppling only the outmoded and corrupt institutions. His book may not presage sweeping changes in the immediate future, but it probably heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come. The essay will come into its own and cease being viewed as the stepchild of literature. Some version of the novel will endure as long as gossip and daydreaming do, but maybe it will become more aerated and less controlling. There will be a lot more creative use of uncertainty, of cognitive dissonance, of messiness and self-consciousness and high-spirited looting. And reality will be ever more necessary and harder to come by.
..
..
Luc Sante’s most recent book is “Folk Photography.” He teaches at Bard College.
In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is also the mother of the nine Muses.
Tell the story of your life that is the most emotionally cathartic; the story you “remember” is covering the “real story,” anyway.
Reality takes shape in memory alone.
Memory: the past rewritten in the direction of feeling.
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.
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.
Anything processed by memory is fiction.
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?
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.
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.”
Remembering his country, he imagined it.
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.
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.
The genius of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and tempermental.
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.
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?
It’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.
Did this happen?
….Yes.
….Did this happen in this way?
….The answer to that, if you’re a grown-up, is “Not necessarily.”
Memory loves to go hunting in the dark
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.”
The essay consists of double translation: memory translates experience; essay translates memory.
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.
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
The Floating Library 