1.

At the end of Adrienne Rich’s poem “Transcendental Etude” a woman walks away from the argument and jargon in a room to sit alone in a kitchen turning in her lap/bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps. It is a kind of creating that isn’t about virtuosity, but care for the many-lived, unending/forms in which she finds herself. Whenever I steal away to sift through some materials and write I think of this woman. Vision begins to happen in such a life. It’s funny—she’s not even real. She’s fictional, speculative: as if a woman quietly walked away… But she’s there in the kitchen before me; I join her.

 

2.

The other night someone was explaining to me again that all great writing is done alone, alone, alone, and I thought of a lot of people but especially Ernest Hemingway, because of the new documentary. Hemingway who could not write without a wife, or take a wife without asking her to leave her career out of it, and cut her hair a certain way, and be there in the living room at the end of every writing day to read the tales of combat and bullfights and solitary heroism and encourage him.

 

3.

I get up and make my bed, because Ada told me once that things go better if you always make your bed. In the shower, I wash up with peppermint castile soap and moisturize with a certain sesame body oil, because two decades ago my first girlfriend did. Now Nicole has the sesame oil in every shower in her house, because of someone she’s never met, by way of me. When I was first learning to write, Nicole and Stephanie and Dawn read all the drafts sometimes many times. Now they don’t always but I still write as if, for them. If there’s a room with a door these days it’s lent by one of them or Emily & Cooper or Svetlana or Trish. The woman from the end of the poem is already there. I sit down to write. Oh, I think, I am so alone.

 

4.

Self-implication on the page is the holy grail of memoir and the personal essay. As Vivian Gornick puts it, in these forms, the writer has only the singular self to work with. So it is the other in oneself that the writer must seek and find to create movement, achieve a dynamic. The inward-turning reflective movements of a musing and/or recollecting mind—even when we don’t explicitly stage the “I” on the page, it’s there in the shaping of scenes and stories out of the raw materials of life, since they didn’t occur as materials at all, just as life. Only when we can see our own frightened or cowardly or self-deceived part, Gornick says, will we be able to create the equivalent, in creative nonfiction, of plot and character development. When it is true, it can be a way the craft trains us to become more honest, more trustworthy, on and even off the page. But another way to put this would be: to stage the I on the page, in a way that moves, you have to become a we, or reckon with how multiple you were already.[1]

 

5.

It can long solitudes to get to self-implication. Legend has it the man often called the inventor of the essay, and even the first modern man, wrote his first sentences about escaping the city to solitude, to examine himself and his own experience. For two decades, Montaigne would draw his own portrait with his pen. His sentences were long and leisurely, winding and doubling back, his essays full, no detail of his experience left unknown or unreflected on. The slavery of the court is how he described what he’d gotten away from to do it, there in the family castle.[2]

Therefore one of my teachers emphasized we must forget about others when we write, withdraw, that the paradox of the essay and memoir is that the more particular you can get about the details of your own experience, the more narrowly focused, the more universal it will be. A lot of teachers say that.

Who has the time? Across an ocean, two centuries later, Frederick Douglas would begin a memoir by naming the absences of his childhood, the things he wasn’t allowed to know, like the date of his birth, or who his father was. “The white children,” was one of his opening sentences, “could tell their ages.” The sentences short and declarative, the stories compressed and full of blanks.[3]

These are the lineages. Who gets to write like the details speak to all of our lives? Who does the hard labor of representing some group? You don’t write “I” without whispering or shouting a “we” ever, it was the problem and matrix of the essay and the memoir all along. You don’t get freedom from these questions, especially if you feel like you have it.

 

6.

In the early days of this plague, I heard people who must have been aware of hospitals and medical workers and cashiers and prisons and housing crises and refugee camps say, zooming from their living rooms, now that we all have to stay home.

Though some, finding themselves at home, alone or not, stopped for a while. The old I-we formula under pressure, cracking. The failure of single stories to hold the differentiations in sufferings, and new awarenesses of why and how. Growing to hold the scale of it. But too much argument in the room to think. And the possibility of new virtual solidarities.

 

7.

Aurora taught me another way: root where your love meets your rage. That’s not what you gently respectfully try to eventually show. That’s where you begin.

 

8.

The news runs up your screens now shaped into the old story about apocalypse—there’s the separation of people into good and bad, a colossal showdown coming. The argument and jargon in the room tell you stories of crisis designed to get you to imagine the catastrophe’s coming from the future, the fault of those on the other side. The design of the shape of the story is to keep you numb and clicking, and to keep secrets. You stand on postapocalyptic lands, though, and what hurts and kills is sometimes spectacular but more often importantly boring and slow and complicated and unexpressed by the stories you’ve become addicted to, and so much of what we do live for is not as spectacular as heaven. Though we can see some of the secrets, if we walk away from the argument and jargon in the room. Which details of the lives we share with others are the truths left out of the stories of catastrophe? When you walk away from the argument, sit down, and look at your materials, it is not just you there. It’s not your own fascination that tells you what really matters, but attention to your we’s.

 

9.

Like a lot of people I love the clothing of the designer Harris Reed. They take tulle and satin and suiting, feathers and hoops, and create suits that are dresses and pants that ruffle and float and bell-bottom out extravagantly, blouses both ancient and futuristic, and hats like giant halos to saint those for whom nothing is ever only one thing or another. In design school, when teachers asked who they could possibly be planning to sell to, Reed remembers saying, I hope I don’t know who my customer is, because they shouldn’t exist yet.[4] A way to imagine readers, in the end, as possibility.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374528584

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/me-myself-and-i

[3] https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html

[4] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/27/harris-reeds-gender-fluid-fashion