Sven Birkerts - Varia

7/28/2019 Sven Birkerts - Varia

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SVEN BIRKERTS

Varia



Finding Traction by Sven Birkerts

I seem to do most of my thinking about the future of literature on weekday mornings between nine and ten, sitting in a cloth-covered roller chair in a musty second-floor

office that even Bartleby would have thought to spruce up a bit—which is to say, as I work through the most recent accumulation of AGNI submissions. Though I havedescribed the process before in this column, I don’t feel that I’ve even begun toexhaust its implications, especially as they apply to the larger literary questions. Forin truth I find it impossible to simply screen for interesting contents and not carry ona secondary meditation at the same time. Each new manuscript pulled from itsenvelope renews at some level the age-old questions about aesthetics and preference.Taking from the top of the fiction pile, for instance, I read: “John Maloney hunchedhis shoulders against the bitter wind coming off the lake.” I stop and respectfully slidethe pages back into their envelope. The piece will be returned to its author.

Why? I could say a number of different things, and I will—because I voice them tomyself and they seem to the point. I say (putting sentence- thoughts now to what

would appear to an outside observer as a sequence of flinches, grimaces, andgrumbling head-shakes), “This story is wooing me with a regular-guy protagonist.John Maloney—a name out of literary ‘Central Casting.’ The writer is making theenormous assumption that a common world exists and that he need only set JohnMaloney loose in it. He hits me right off with a trite exaggerated middlebrow verb inorder to inject drama, but the word—‘hunched’—tells me that he has a secondhand, a‘literary,’ idea of what a story is or might be. He is either young and inexperienced, orexperienced and lazy. When a reader reads those words, she sees and feels absolutely nothing, or maybe gets a dull memory echo from the hundred thousand hunched

shoulders she has met with in a lifetime’s reading. There is no attempt to welcomeher to the Never Before.”

Of course, three words aren’t much of an indicator—anyone can fumble a handshake—and editors as well as readers are likely to extend, if only briefly, some benefit of thedoubt. But the encounter with the adjective “bitter” takes care of that, telegraphingfaster than anything that “hunched” was not a fluke, that this is not an invented but areceived world, and that the writer is responding not to his perceptions or freshimaginings, but to an idea of what writers sound like. This idea is very likely derivedfrom an uncritical involvement in the middlebrow fiction that is the noise against

which any real signal hopes to be heard. It is—and I harp on this because so much of

what I read fits the description—as if the writer were hearing not the prompt of thecreative Muse, but a voiceover track, or as if he were somehow already readinghimself as he wrote. “John Maloney hunched—” That’s the stuff!

This is a negative way to begin, I know. Let me stress that my main impulse is not topoke fun (the sentence, by the way, is a pastiche, not part of an actual submission—though a pastiche based on the sentences I read morning after morning), but rather,to give a better picture of an editor’s mind state, vis-à-vis fiction in this case but really relating to the literary in general. Keep in mind that while making selections appearsto be a process of saying yes, editing is much more realistically an almost continuoussearch for reasons to say no. One becomes a philosopher of the art in spite of oneself,for after there has been enough of saying no, the realization strikes—as sketchily suggested above—that while I seem to be responding on the basis of taste, of “I like

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this, I don’t like this,” the taste itself is conditioned by deeper aesthetic biases and valuations, and some reflection on these quickly exposes assumptions about what is viable—needed—in the literary culture, which is in turn a thinly veiled way of pronouncing on the outlook for meaning in general. Quite a jump, from JohnMaloney to the problem of meaning, but I make it dozens of times most mornings,

which may explain why I feel so tired in the afternoons.

I will grant that I react differently to a piece of writing—and therefore think differently about the outlook for writing—when I’m responding to a great many samples at one go than I might in another context. But rather than dismiss my situation as anomalous, I value it as offering a particular kind of intensification, notto mention conferring certain insights not as readily available otherwise. The mostsalient—and to me, most interesting— has to do with what I think of as traction.“Traction” is my code for the way that a sentence or a paragraph or a page of proselands, how it does or does not anticipate and then address the resistance of the openattention.

It may seem strange, if not outright perverse, that I would describe attention, afundamentally receptive, hospitable state, using the idea of resistance. But if I amhonest, this is exactly how the process feels. When I sit down with a huge stack of envelopes, each one containing some hard-won, deliberated expression, I am notthe tabula rasa—the fantasied clean slate—that I perhaps ought to be. No, I am aman of my time, a besieged reader, creating a specific occasion within what is, day inand day out, for me as for most everyone, a near-constant agitation of stimuli, anenfolding environment of aggressively competing signs and mean-ings. And my attitude, when I remove a clump of print-covered pages from their envelope, is not“Send me more and more new information” but “Reach me, convince me that this

news is different, that this is the news I need.” It is, as you see, a kind of receptivity, but a very qualified kind.

Because this is the editor’s—and in a way, all of our—situation, it is absolutely vitalthat the work, as I phrased it earlier, “anticipate and address” it, or at least write

within the awareness of it. Most work does not, and I can tell right away when writingdoes, with whatever degree of success. This accounts for the fact—miraculous, butalso downright suspicious to many—that I can go through a foot-high pile of submissions as quickly as I do. Keep in mind that I am not, initially, screening forthematic value—that is a second-stage deliberation. When I first run my eyes left toright down a page of prose I am looking, as reader, as editor, to see whether the

writer understands that literary culture—culture in general—is no longer what it usedto be, that the situation has changed completely from whatever it was even a decadeago. I check in to see whether the prose somehow records this primary recognition—if in no other way than by avoiding the myriad approaches and attitudes that no longer

work.

To talk about cultural change at the level I need to is very difficult. In part becausethere is no obvious independent place to perch, but even more because no one

believes that anything has changed at a deeper level. When it comes to the things thataffect us at that level, everyone seems to be from Missouri. Not many people will ownthat in the last decade, by degrees but inexorably, the digitized mediated world has

closed up around us, making the seal complete, installing layers of signal betweenourselves and the former world, and that in the process the basic nature of our



experience has altered. Not in a point-to-it obvious way, more in a “God is dead” kindof way—at the level of the transparent ground of things. Which is not to say that most

Americans don’t still believe in God-the-Father. But we have to believe that artisticnecessity evolves.

And our situation? As data and image supplanted the authority of the actual,foreground and background collapsed into each other; we entered what writer G. S.Trow years ago dubbed “the context of no context,” a zone of relativism untethered tothe old material world and its various orders. And with that change our relation to theformer world—to history, to literature—altered, subtly but absolutely. All interactionsand transactions now take place in a different gravitational field, and if the man onthe street won’t acknowledge it, the artist has to.

Postmodernism had the inkling and offered the first conspicuous response—postmodernism with its manifold ironies and its endless play with recyclednarratives. But postmodernism is gone, and a great deal of writing seems to be

working in the spirit of the status quo ante—as if there were any going back from suchre-castings of reality. I don’t feel smart enough to think the whole business through—the totality of the situation is too daunting. For my part, I measure the extent andnature of change by monitoring my responses to things on (and off ) the page, by noting all the former approaches that no longer seem to work and then wondering

why. Like a man tracking an eclipse through a cardboard pinhole, I measure thetransformation of culture by zeroing in on what can and can’t be said—rather, what Ido and don’t respond to.

~

Obviously I’ve gotten onto an enormous topic now, one that a short editor’sintroduction can only brush up alongside. I can’t go into all the reasons why thingshave come to such a pass, nor can I prove that they have (if what I have written so farmakes no sense, then what follows will not bring you around), nor can I enumerate

which strategies are in my view now defunct. But I can, maybe, touch a little more onthis question of “address” and the ways that I think about it.

Basically—short version—a work of prose (or poetry) can no longer assumecontinuity, not as it could in former times. It cannot begin, or unfold, in a way thatassumes a basic condition of business as usual. The world is no longer everything wethought was the case, and the writing needs to embody this—through sentence

rhythm, tone, camera placement, or some other strategic move that signals that notired assumptions remain in place. This writing must, in effect, create its own worldand terms from the threshold, coming at us from a full creative effort of imaginationand not by using the old world as a prop. Now, this last is a tricky assertion and it will

be very hard to make clear, not to mention binding. I don’t mean for a moment thatthe world as we know it cannot be invoked, or used, or dissected. Of course it can. Butit cannot be taken simply on faith, as unproblematic, treated as a natural signifier;nor can it be cashed in as if it were a treasury bond from the literature of a former era.

That’s another problem with “John Maloney hunched his shoulders against the bitter wind coming off the lake.” The sentence acts as if writing were just a matter of supplying the declarative sentence in the old straightforward manner of Hemingway.But—never mind the time warp of the high school English class—between







looks like the figure in the carpet. If I had less faith in my responses—if I doubted that they were somehow organic andintegral—I would be more nervous.

But then the answer, the justification, comes: I see that what I need in this inspection is a change in the frame of reference. I have been looking for commonality in too narrowly defined a sense. So when my associate fiction editor,Jenna Blum, asked me these same questions yesterday, I answered, almost abruptly, “Each of these pieces is completely unique, completely unlike any other.” As soon as I said that, it felt right. Difference—uniqueness—as a basis of

commonality, I like that. At least enough to make it this moment’s platform.

And now, with my own space running out, I will only add that I hope you agree and that you take the time to ponder how it is that so many universes can be collected in such a small place.

I start and end this reflection in the first person singular, but in fact the most vital realization of all has been of theimportance—and pleasure—of the plural pronoun, the “we” that makes everything happen. I offer my special thanks hereto Editor Emeritus Askold Melnyczuk, Managing Editor Eric Grunwald, Associate Editors Jenna Blum (fiction) andRachel DeWoskin (poetry), Brian Staveley (poetry reader), William Giraldi (fiction reader), Tom Sleigh (ombudsman),and our spirited group of interns and volunteers: John Daniels, Elisabeth Donnelly, Adam Fagin, Heather Heckman-McKenna, Nick Klebaum, Katie Krell, Susanna Lamey, Renee Nichols, and Avi Yulish. Enjoy.



What Remains by Sven Birkerts

Possibly because the best words in the best order lay claim to a larger life, we imagine that their authors do as well. Iimagine it, anyway—always have. It’s pure superstition, of course, this notion that the maker of art that lasts partakes of a power. Not an immortality—I’m not that credulous. But a kind of grace, a metaphysical clearance, some strengtheningof the self ’s endurance odds by whatever it is that insists on being said.

This past year, though, brought a double jolt: the deaths of two writers I had placed in the quasi-eternity they had clearedaround them with the abundance of their brilliant prose. Unthinkingly placed there, simply by refusing to associate them

with my idea of normal actuarial mortality. I mean David Foster Wallace and John Updike, who, though they could nothave been more different, were both writers of fiction, novels, and essays, and who, though their styles and visionsunfolded in registers not remotely adjacent, both inhabited their language, those styles, so completely that it was hard toimagine much left over for mere living. Indeed, this was a big part of the shock, for their deaths—by suicide, by cancer—drove home the fact that they had been, yes, flesh-and-blooding it among us, not only not immune, but by that strangetwist of survivor logic less immune than we who remain.

I’ve joined them in my mind somehow, these two, yet Wallace tilted against Updike in the pages of The New YorkObserver some years ago (and I tilted with him, writing a parallel piece that claimed that the Master was too prolix, too

ready to come forward into print with whatever his pen produced). They represented different, in some ways opposing worlds. Wallace was, in a core part of his being, an unassimilated subversive, and what he subverted, over and over, inhis exacerbated scenarios, his outlaw fugues, was the vast entrenched order, the what is that Updike chronicled withcalm Flemish exactitude. Updike celebrated an assumption about reality that Wallace was in some defining way at odds

with.

To call it a father/son dynamic would be simplistic, of course, but there are certain elements of that conventional agon,including the son’s will not just to repudiate but to outdo the father. Considering the divergence in their aesthetics—

Wallace’s complete lack of interest in the realism that takes surfaces as the outer manifestation of interior forces—thefield of engagement would have to be the how as opposed to the what. Which is to say the how of language, style: thesentence. Is it farfetched to think of Wallace’s prose pitching itself in sustained defiance against the philosophical groundof Updike’s, its lightly ironized acceptance of things as they are? The bemused Updike smile endorses a reality, anoutlook, that Wallace could not fit himself to, a failure that was bound up, I suspect, with his deepest suffering. Fathersand sons, but also order and chaos.

No matter what revising impressions our later contacts brought, Dave Wallace will always be for me first the young man,the kid, that I met back in 1989 or early 1990. I had reviewed his first collection of stories, Girl With Curious Hair, withsome excitement in a short-lived magazine called Wigwag, and he had written a thank-you letter (very Wallace, that) in

which he said he was living nearby in Cambridge, studying philosophy at Harvard; he proposed coffee. We agreed on astreet corner near the Pamplona Café. I forget who arrived first. Possibly we both did, for my sense is that we wereperfectly matched in our anal scrupulousness about promises, meetings, deadlines, and the like.

First impressions are funny. Though in later years when I saw him he did not appear to tower over me physically, thatday he did. He was all lanky kid, with—I’m positive—short light-brown hair, every bit the tennis ace he self-deprecatingly describes in his great essay “Derivative sport in Tornado Alley.” Well, not every bit. No tennis ace would smoke—at all,never mind with the shell-game dexterity that had me checking again and again exactly how many cigarettes he hadgoing at once and where they all were. A kid, yes: fresh-faced, nervous, though I don’t think nervous about talking to me—I won’t flatter myself—but about the terms of existence, time and space. At the same time he was keyed up, which issomehow different from nervous. The laces on his talking shoes were all tangled up. He was trying to say too many

different things at once. He was also modest, sending my praises of his work right back over the net, not accepted, butaddressed. His modesty did not, however, prevent him from working to establish his “serious”-credentials. He made it apoint—this I remember—to score and underscore that even his childhood exposures had been intense, that his father wasa philosopher who’d insisted on reading philosophy, not Pooh, to David at bedtime.

I was deeply struck by Girl With Curious Hair. The prose had raised ungainliness to a kind of lyricism of its own—it wasclearly achieved sentence by sentence by a writer who knew exactly how to manage his effects. Those sentences, though Idon’t know that I thought it at the time, were wringing the oft-wrung neck of eloquence, certainly eloquence of theUpdike stripe. They made a music that went against the familiar melos, or honey, of that idea of style. What do I meanexactly? Let me try to illustrate. Here is a small cutting from Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich, fairly representative, I think:

He goes into the bedroom he and Janice have here and dresses himself in Jockey shorts, an alligator shirt, and soft Levi’sall washed and tumble-dried at the Laundromat behind the little Acme in the village. Each crisp item seems another tileof his well-being he is fitting into place. As he sits on the bed to put on fresh socks a red ray of late sun slices through a

gap in the pines and falls knifelike across his toes, the orangish corns and the little hairs between the joints and the nailstranslucent like the thin sheets in furnace peepholes. (143)





Though this looks restrained when set alongside other Updike passages, we nonetheless catch the signature mode: hisdetails, his supple and often striking analogies, the confident rhythmic pacing.

Now Wallace, from his story “Lyndon”:

I saw the big white Bufferin of the President’s personal master bed, stripped to sheets, variously shadow-colored by thechanging traffic light at the Washington and Kennedy Streets’ intersection below and just outside. On the stripped bed—neatly littered with papers and cards, my notecards, a decade of stenography to Lyndon—lay my lover, curled stiff on hisside, a frozen skeleton X ray, impossibly thin, fuzzily bearded, his hand outstretched with dulled nails to cover, partly,the white face beside him, the big white face attached to the long form below the tight clean sheets, motionless, the bedflanked by two servicemen who slumped, tired, red, green.

Is the difference clear? The Updike passage pushing its nuanced observations toward an idea of beauty, extractingaesthetic pleasure from what might be considered the trivial-domestic, the impulse a fundamental valorizing of creationand the adequacy of language for its representation. Wallace, meanwhile, no whit less precise, or less syntactically ambitious, makes a picture that is slightly garish, leached of any softness of light. He is not, through his narrator,approving the world, but registering it in a way that is highly attuned to its menace.

Wallace, I should make clear, was no Updike-hater. Though he excoriated the excesses—the turgidities—of Updike’snovelToward the End of Time, and in the process struck off not a few more broadly applicable criticisms, he also wasopen about his admirations. “The fact is,” he wrote, “that I am probably classifiable as one of the very few actual subforty

Updike fans. Not as rabid a fan as, say, Nicholson Baker, but I do believe that The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm, and TheCentaur are all great books, maybe classics. And even since 1981’s Rabbit is Rich—as his characters seemed to becomemore and more repellent, and without any corresponding sign that the author understood that they were repellent—I’vecontinued to read Updike’s novels and to admire the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose.”

The language, for Wallace, trumps character, and presumably plot, since Updike is hardly to be accused of greatinventiveness or sophistication on that score. But something nags here. Though I almost never find myself questioningthe thrust or psychological accuracy of Wallace’s assertions, that “sheer gorgeousness” rings false for me. Not thatUpdike’s descriptive prose isn’t manifestly gorgeous, nor that Wallace could not admire it, but there is something toostraightforward, something insufficiently questioning, in the way he frames his point. Wallace is not owning up to what Ithink would have to be the complexly conflicted character of that admiration. For Wallace’s whole enterprise can be seen,at one level, as a tilting at that very quality. Of course, to tilt at something in that way, as an artist, is to have beenaffected by it, to have internalized it deeply, in the way of a son absorbing a father’s presence. But no rebel son will admitto finding his father’s worldview an object of simple admiration.

The father . . . In a sense, Updike had only recently begun to accept that public role, and he never seemed at ease with it.For so many years he had been seen as the heir-pending, moving in Cheever’s great shadow, then Bellow’s. Though heappeared to carry the patrician entitlement, and though he was unstinting in his output, dominating the Knopf catalogues, and The New Yorkerpages, front and back, and The New York Review of Books, there was also a way in

which he held back, acted happiest playing the part of the newcomer delighted to have been included. He did not want to wear the mantle most of us had him wearing. I remember thinking of Updike as a consummate senior insider as far back as high school. He would have been in his thirties then, but all adults were older—they wore suits and sat decorously onpanels and took honorary degrees and got themselves pictured in Life magazine . . . By the time I finally set eyes onUpdike at some New York ceremonial event, he was in his sixties and exuded literary paternity. I made him a father. AndI made kid-Wallace a son figure. Even after the lanky kid had been outgrown, enfolded in a greater girth and the aura of his stunning attainments, I couldn’t let the impression go. And Wallace made that preservation easy, even in recent yearsremaining the puer aeternus.

If Wallace was, for many, a writer keyed to disaffection, to late-modern angst, to recognitions of plasticity and horror—

and in this a kind of harbinger, an early-warning system for a world in accelerated decline—Updike was a figure lookingfrom the other side. Though possibly no less attuned to decline, he refracted his vision not viscerally, not as rage or stark

bitter repudiation, but elegiacally, as nostalgia. His renderings expose the starkness of the present through juxtapositionto memory-sweetened evocations of how it was. That , the former world, a world shorthanded as belonging to “thegreatest generation,” was always his subject. And though it was often felt to be fast disappearing, he found enough poeticmeat in the remnants, the ruins, to allow a tone that was on the whole accepting.

What I think Wallace responded to in Updike’s writing was not so much the gorgeousness of the procession of words onthe page as the perceived absoluteness of the investment in language. Not that I think Wallace was at all insensible to thelyric end of the spectrum—his precise ways of defying it show that he registered it keenly. But—here’s the point—hisdetermined refusal of lyricism in his own work makes his professed admiration sound a bit glib. And it is not in Wallace’sgrain to be glib. I don’t believe that he would have pretended to an admiration he did not feel. I suggest it was the deeperaffinity that he was in fact acknowledging, the recognition that here was a fellow language-captive, a man completely consumed, as he himself was, by the process of ingesting the world and spinning it out as words.

This is all psychological guesswork on my part, of course. And I proceed by way of a perverse triangulation, deducing aperceived affinity on Wallace’s part from the fact that the two writers have become conjoined in my thoughts. What has



joined them is my very real sense of loss. Of what, exactly? It’s complex, when I start to bear down on it. With Wallace,though I knew him only slightly, I register first the loss of the person. Although our contacts were sparse and fleeting—afew meetings, a few thoughtful letters, some writing-related business—I did do that human thing. I projected andextrapolated. The man touched me and interested me, I had a strong impression of his character, and I gave him a gooddeal of affectionate thought. This is not entirely separable from the next echelon of loss, which has to do with the idea of the person, with the fact that he—they both—were fellow writers profoundly committed to the arduous ordeal of creatinga voice for the times. In Wallace’s case, especially, I was moved by his urgency, his vision of the existential stress of

contemporary life, his recognition of the predatory corporate ethos against which the private self was so utterly vulnerable, in the face of which he was so disposable. Also by his fiercely dark comedy, the filter of his terrible ironies, hisflashes of inspired absurdity, salient whether in the stories or the grand world-system that was Infinite Jest or in essayslike “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” I was inspired by his all-out tenaciousness and used his example tospur myself to more and better. Updike—in his work I found, though groomed and dressed-up, a sustained lyricaladdress of self to world, a finely managed convergence of the inseparable responses to beauty: exaltation and sorrow.Like Wallace, I cared less for his characters than for the things they carried, their overwrought longings and their losses.

Then there is the disappearance, the evacuation from our common life, of their respective imaginings—so completely unlike, but so insistent, each in its way. Not just the characters and situations, but the disposition of reality, the

visualization that—to refer to my examples—in one case would map a beam of light to its destination on the almostcruelly rendered toe, and in the other would ask me to see the President’s bed as a large Bufferin tablet. Theaccumulation of all those sightings and presentations is not lost, of course—we have them—but the loss of their authorsforces us to imagine all the features of our world that will escape being seen and served up. Here is the sorrow of reality untransformed, never to be subjected to those specific powerful idiosyncrasies.

Finally, though, the big—the more abstract—bereavement: the loss to the language of these makers, these forces of generation. We are fortified by the work of our writers, by their specific books, but no less important is the sense wehave, so long as they are alive, that they are with us, in our midst, engaged, taken up with seeing and thinking andprocessing—with writing. They make up an important part of the invisible but pervasive and perceptible sum-total that

we recognize as our culture. When they die we feel a terrible diminution, a suction of available energies withdrawn. As if suddenly we all have that much less purchase on reality. The air feels thinner, and our gestures of thought feel heavier,more cumbersome, less part of a common purpose.

~

CODA: I have spent the better part of an hour just now fishing through various ad-hoc containers of letters, hopingagainst odds to find a letter that Wallace once wrote to me, because I had the feeling while writing about him, hispresence and use of language, that there was something there for me to find. And I found it, though now, having worked

my way slowly through two pages of handwritten prose—small capital letters on lined paper—I realize that I have theselast few years misremembered the import. It is less the heady meditation on fiction I thought, and far more Wallace

worrying the issue of postmodern irony. But I did find one paragraph on the first page that resonates with what I have been trying to express here:

I’ll tell you why I dislike writing on a computer. It’s just as you say: it makes each line too easy, too provisional. There’snone of the pressure to perfect a line before moving on to the next that script and typewriter enforce. And so on a p.c. Ifind myself writing way faster, more facilely—I literally think out loud onto the screen. And this fucks everything up,

because I can write better than I can think. I like to write not to ejaculate thoughts but to transfigure them through laborand care and the pressure of putting them down on paper where they can’t be taken back. I am not a particularly smartor imaginative man, but I find that after much suffering [here Wallace draws one of his signature smiley-faces] andseveral drafts I’m sometimes capable of producing smart and imaginative prose. Writing by hand and typewriter not only

brings out the best in me—it brings out stuff I never would have dreamed was there. It is this—not improvement buttransfiguration of the contents of my head that I am addicted to. It is astonishing when it happens—magical —and itsimply doesn’t happen on a computer, which makes editing too arbitrary and spatial a business. (posted from

Bloomington, Illinois, November 10, 1993)

I respond to the pressure, the seriousness, and the effort at modesty, but what I value especially is the emphasis ontransfiguration. I have no truck with astrology, but when I read this I had an impulse to check the dates and signs of both

writers.

Wallace, Updike: two Pisces, their element water, their salient quality mutability.



Bits by Sven Birkerts

Schimmelpenninck : Made in Holland. A dented little tin taken down from the cluttered top shelf of the bookcase behind my attic desk, a bookcase that has become one of my default reliquaries, kind of like the mesh sieve in the kitchendrain that catches everything left from the wash-up of a family meal, except that the sieve then gets emptied into thekitchen trash while the sentimental refuse of living just accumulates. I picked it up in the spirit of ‘you have to startsomewhere,’ but also with a certain confidence. I am, after all, the writing teacher who quotes to his students the linefrom Flaubert: “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” And I do believe it, interest being thediscovery of connections that feel as if they are leadingsomewhere, marking a path. It is the product of attention. Look!Look closer! What do you see? Start with the eye and see what happens. Pray, as Lowell did, for the grace of accuracy.Schimmelpenninck. Well, the little tin is there to be looked at, but it would be nothing to me—sentimentally,associatively—if it weren’t for the sound and look of that word. A word that means absolutely nothing to me. A brand of cigarillos, yes. A little choo-choo train of m’s and n’s. Just above it on the tin a small inset image of a high-browed andperuked gentleman with a stiff collar and a formal-looking flow of white cloth, almost a bib, where a tie would ordinarily go. Herr Schimmelpenninck? Or is this the king of Holland offering his imprimatur on the product? It could just as well

be Goethe, there’s that same projection of entitled nobility. Doesn’t matter. But the whole effect, and probably the reasonI kept the thing, is very haute-European. And I know where this thread—it is fine and twisty—leads. Back to the drawerof my father’s desk, upstairs in our old house in Michigan. That desk, its top right drawer I realize now also a reliquary,

was a regular stop for me as I made my way through the rooms. Alone, bored—it seems I was both for years at a stretch—

I snooped and sifted through every cranny of my parents’ lives, looking for god knows what, looking for confirmation of something, maybe the concealed document testifying to my true origins, I don’t think it mattered what , only that I keepalive the feeling that there was something to be found. As if in the scattered stuff of my parents’ lives lay the secret, themissing card that completed the deck. I never found it, but the charged-up idle investigating brought me right up againstall sorts of things—I mean literal things, bundled letters, peculiar artifacts of completely mysterious provenance, like atiny elephant figurine, and an ancient cigarette lighter that I was clumsy in disassembling—that I broke—and that my father confronted me with in a fury, How dare I—? Did I have any idea what that meant? This was a lighter he hadfound during the war, while he was making his way from one place to another, escaping—He wouldn’t tell me the story—he added it to the pile of things he would one day explain about his life. And I nodded solemnly and promised to leave histhings alone, knowing as I did that I would be back, only more careful. The point is that I was right! These things of theirs, throughout the house, but in this drawer, were soaked in significance; they held clues. At least some of them did.How to know which? Without the stories I couldn’t. So I had to imagine everything there was a possible clue. I can hearthe sound of that drawer rolling open. And there was the tin of Schimmelpennincks. With real cigarillos in it, just underthe stiff waxy paper. Maybe a few missing. I can picture—or imagine—my father lighting one in the late evening, with a

whisky drink. But really he smoked cigarettes, a few a day, Benson & Hedges, also there in the drawer. The

Schimmelpennincks must have been a gift. From a client, a European friend. They had that feeling. I probably took oneout and put it between my lips, then carefully replaced it. Much as a girl might try out just a bit of her mother’s lipstick.

We want to pretend, but really we want to get in close, as close as we can.

But this tin here, my tin, is not that. I can’t remember how I came by it, but I know it was not from my father. I think Imay have bought it during one of my attempts to quit smoking, figuring I could allow myself one cigarillo a day, my reward for restraint. If I bought them—I’m pretty sure I did, from Leavitt & Pierce in Harvard Square—I would havedone so both for the association and for the fact that the cigarillos themselves were the length and basic shape of cigarettes. Enough about that. There are other things about the tin. The fact that I have things in it. When I picked it upfrom the shelf of course I gave it a shake. Coins. And maybe something else. But I wasn’t holding my breath with any thought of treasure. I have little gangs of pennies everywhere. Pennies flock to me. I empty my pockets at the end of theday and leave them on the nearest surface, and then the clutter gets to me and I sweep them in to jars and tins. Nothingunique here. The Schimmelpenninck is just another container with stray pennies. Not like that little box—and where onthe crowded planet is it now?—that I had all through my later childhood with my Indianhead pennies. Such aura they had, and would have now—compounded by time and loss—if I were suddenly to find them now. But no, once I had the

tin on the desk in front of me, I opened to confirm. Pennies, pennies…and a button, the kind you clip to your lapel, with arainbow design and the words Mikrofons and Aptauja and the number 81. And: a neatly folded scrap of thin beige-salmon paper that I recognize instantly as Latvian. I have never seen paper of this color and consistency anywhere else.The button I place right away—a small souvenir from a trip I took to Latvia, by myself, in the early 1980s—was it1981? Mikrofons refers to a pop radio station in Riga, I think, and Aptauja—here is one of the many words that marksthe line of my outsiderness. I grew up speaking Latvian at home, I remain moderately fluent, and older Latvians oftenremark with surprise how well I speak for someone who doesn’t use the language regularly, but there must be thousandsof words like this one, Aptauja, that I just don’t know. And because of those words I feel at a permanent remove, lackingsome secret password, the very same thing I remember feeling on the playground when kids used tags and phrases Ihadn’t learned yet. How did they know to be yelling ‘batterbatterbatter’ so confidently at our recess games. I mouthed thesyllables but felt completely exposed…

Finally, that folded scrap of paper. Unfolding it, I see that it’s a ticket: Andreja Upisa LPSR Valsts Akademiskais Dramas Teatris.The theater. Stamped for October 10, 1982. I remember being taken to a play, I don’t remember what it was, not a hint of anything that might have transpired on stage, though there is a secondary sensory memory, a smallcloud of feeling: the space was plush, baroque-feeling; the lights were warm. And I know that when I later readChekhov’s “Lady With a Lapdog,” when Gurov travels to the provinces to find Anna and attends the theater—where hefirst sees her again—it is this place I picture. But so is everything I read of Russian literature somehow embellished by my





various Latvian exposures, whether memories of being in Riga at different times—the feeling of stairwell, the look of windows and sills, the Slav faces at kiosks—or my own imaginings projected into the stories I heard growing up, from my parents, but more richly from my grandmother, Um, who had such a store of memories from her life, and who trumpedother tellers just by reaching farther back—her tales of the farm, of trains, soldiers, there was the real redolence.

1982. Set against those stories of Um’s, the reach they offered into what felt like the timeless time when things had weight and the world was the way it had been forever—an illusion!—not changing every minute and becoming wispy-

light, 1982 is nothing at all. And for a long time it wasn’t. 1982 was around the corner, just down the street, right here.But right now it is far away as a lit auditorium in Riga in what was still the Soviet era, marked for me now by that off-textured paper with its date and place, which I have just now refolded along its creases and replaced in itsSchimmelpenninck tin.

Photo: Father-in-Law. We have framed photographs of parents and grandparents from both sides of the family in various parts of the house—on the downstairs bookshelves, over Lynn’s desk, and along the dresser top in thenondescript room that is really more like a wide passage to our bedroom than anything else. They are so familiar that Irarely look closely, though when I do it’s like a porthole suddenly opening onto some very deep business. You can only have so many full-strength visitations in any given period, when you look and really grasp someone’s likeness in its placeand time. It’s like breaking into a different zone—you actually feel what that person was like when you were with them.But it never happens the same way twice. If the photo doesn’t change, we do. Take the small framed color shot of my parents standing together on the bookshelf downstairs. This would have been taken ten or fifteen years ago, and for thelongest time I thought of it as a recent picture. But then suddenly—I don’t know what happened—it stopped being that.

At some moment when I was not paying attention, the two of them took a full step forward and took up their same pose.Everything looked the same, except now photo felt archival, loaded with change. And when I pass by it now and have it inme to stop, I always remark how young they look. A few years back they were my familiar parents, safely older, but now it’s like I can reach right over. They are closing in on me.

One of the photos on the dresser outside of our room, the one closest to the door, and therefore right in my line of sightday after day, is of my father-in-law Earl Focht as a young man. I knew Earl for several years—he died some years ago, inhis 70s. Looking out is a young man, twenty or so, wearing suit and tie with a pocket handkerchief. His hair is nicely combed, as hair always was, and he is staring steadily out of the frame. Handsome. Earl was often called, with jokingfamiliarity, “Earl-the-Pearl” by members of Lynn’s family. The tag catches something of the pretty-boy quality in thephoto, and also the sense that he was a favorite, eager to please, much liked by the many women in the extended family and beyond. His mother-in-law, “Mag,” adored him, to the point of pestering Earl and Delores, her daughter, to go alongon their outings. And it was much contested by his six daughters which of them was his favorite. Those were not the only

women—and one other in particular nearly broke up his marriage—but the young man in the frame knows none of that, which is of course part of the reason these innocent images can overwhelm us.

Lately, though, I’m catching another kind of haunt. Every time I glance at Earl’s face I can’t now not see the face of MattFocht, the grown son of Lynn’s brother Gary. I’ve maybe seen Matt five times in my life, and only twice, really, since hehas grown up. But he is there, sure as if he had cut off and combed his long hair, shaved, and suited up. Resemblance,sure—why make a thing of it? But it nags at me. For I knew this photo of Earl for some time before Matt leapt into it, andnow that he is there I can no longer not see him. I can’t focus in on Earl on his own any more. And something very similar has happened with a framed portrait of my grandparents, Mike and Emilia, that we have downstairs. A classicportrait: they seem to me to be looking out not just from the past, but from a whole other era, like people unpacked froma battered old steamer trunk before the world found color. They stand, so young, but in that way the young once had of seeming old. Formal, unsmiling, probably the same age as young Earl, buthistorical . That used to be the main thing thatstruck me when I would study their faces. But now, as with the other photo, all I see is resemblance. My grandmother’sface has been taken over by that of my niece Olivia—she is absolutely there, and not just by virtue of facial similarity. Herpresence itself feels like a feature of the resemblance. Not that there is any known similarity between her personality and

what we remember of Um. It’s all so unsettling. As are the flashes—at this point they are nothing more than that—that I

get when I look at that picture of my parents standing together. There was a time when I could look at my father’s faceand see signs of his father—momentarily intense traces, as if someone had turned up the volume on resemblance—andthat does still happen. But more commonly, and I’d say far too often, I am seeing myself. Little glimpses in the photo,and more sustained visitations in the mirror, not during the day, at which point I am habituated to myself, but in thatfirst morning face off, when I step into the downstairs bathroom with its big, well-lit mirror and flip the wall switch. Hemeets me and takes me in for a second or two before withdrawing. That face, and also the person behind the face. Sofamiliar and strange at the same time. He vanishes, but I know he’ll come again, and stay longer as time goes on. Thephoto on the living room shelf is safe by comparison, though it’s true I’ve learned to avoid ambush by moving my gazeselectively when I pass through that room.

Lighter. Found things and the stir they make in memory—that’s one ecology. But there’s another, no less important,describing the shadow world, all that we simply lose, or lose and then, on finding, find without spark. As if to say we areas much about our deletions as our accumulations. Yesterday I came home from travels to find a belated Christmaspresent in my mail, a bulky soft bundle from my brother and his wife. It was a thick fleecy sweatshirt they had special-

ordered, embossed with my (and his) old high school insignia. But wait—something else! There was also a small, tightly- wrapped packet tucked in, and with it a note from Erik. “Something I found in my last sweep through the old place.” He was referring to the visit he and Alison had made to see my parents right before they sold the house and moved East. I



palmed and hefted the packet, mystified—and then I slowly worked the tape loose. The paper-c0vered weight in the handdisclosed a dull silver sheen. A cigarette lighter. Ah…I felt the quick flash of wires making first contact. The lighter! Butthen right away was the pause. Wait, where did he get that ? Hadn’t I destroyed the thing—the relic, my father’s old prizefrom the war? There was an afternoon maybe fifty years back, me alone doing irresistible demolition, working loose theparts, the little screws and cylinders and laying the whole thing out for study on his drafting table. And there was thescene later, when my father came home from the office. There was—But no, this couldn’t be right. How could Erik know about that? Had I written about it? Well, yes, I had—but had I written about barely, in passing. I doubt he would have

read it, or, having read it, would possibly have remembered. Still, a faint waft of conjectural self-flattery: my brotherreads me! But then suspicion comes chasing: if he had read me, had remembered it, then this was a joke, a little brotherly dig. A wink. Except he is not one for winking. Standing there by the counter, I can’t help but consider the speedof supposition: this all unfolded in a second or two. I’d just a moment ago lifted the thing from its wrapping and washolding it up between thumb and forefinger, inspecting, and for some reason I looked at the bottom first. There I saw ahole, a place for a missing screw. Maybe it had been reassembled, redeemed. And though I knew that if I flicked thelighter bar nothing would happen, I did—once, twice, again, each time imagining the clean leaf of a blaze. Then I gave itanother turn in my fingers, another tilt of the wrist, and when I did the whole investigation fizzled. There, plain as could

be on the flat side: S P B. My engraved initials. The lighter had been mine. Mine! Clearly once a gift given, received, andput to use. For of course I would have put it to use. But now, in the wake of all that first surmising, I get nothing. Just a

blank the size of the lighter, and those three initials like the breadcrumbs that the woodlad birds had gobbled down. No way back for me. I stared at the thing, waiting for some first pulse of recollection, some Of course! But there was nothingright then and no feeling that anything might be en route, and I do trust myself to read these sensations when I havethem—the tiny vacuum flutters that are telling me almost and maybe and allow me to hope that later, right before sleep,or while I’m stirring rice, the link will be achieved. Nothing. Though in the nothing I can’t help hurriedly sorting names,thinking of people who might have given me this gift. Andra, Vicky, Sally…Why am I thinking of women? Am I so surethat no male of my acquaintance would think to get the thing, any thing, engraved? Whatever the reason, each person—there are others—asks me to think of a scene, an occasion. Happy birthday! Congratulations! You did it! But no—there’snothing forthcoming. Which means that just like that I’m hedged on all sides with my doubts and fears. Not just what kind of friend am I? But also, worse, if this, then what else? How much of the rest of my living has moved out of reach?Suddenly I can’t help imagining an alternate scenario, a memory film of all that has fallen away, suffered erasure, orsimply bit by bit waned. It would be most of my life, I realize. Most of what has been rustling over the sprockets of theprojector and flowering there on the screen. Myself in all of my banished incarnations: shaking hands with my parents’friends, or my friends’ parents, shifting my weight from foot to foot in the cafeteria line behind my fourth gradeclassmates; stomping in my rubber boots past the bus-driver; taking notes year after year in big and small lecture halls asmy professors make their points; eating sheet-cake at farewell parties for co-workers, laughing on my end of thetelephone at something someone said…Someone—who was it? What did they say? Why did I laugh? I never had pantslike that, glasses that spooned so hugely over my eyes; I never threw my arm around that fat boy and snickered into hisear. What room is that, what house, what little dog am I wrestling with on that carpet? Whose house, whose dog? World

without end, amen. I have never said the word ‘corruscate’ out loud in my life, I will swear on a Bible. I never put thoserabbit ears over that girl in that crowd, and who is she, and who are all the others? I never skiied with wooden poles. Did

I? It goes on, this merest moment’s shudder of imagining. And then I’m there, here, still holding the thing, and Liam islooking on with interest. “What is it, Dad?” I smile and hand it over for him to look at. “A lighter,” I tell him. “With my initials engraved on it.” He looks impressed. “Wow—who gave it to you?” I look away, narrowing my eyes the way I do

when I’m thinking hard. “I’m really not sure.” I say.



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