On Sentimentality and Silence
I lie in bed to go down to sleep, but first I pull from the shelf Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey. It is a book I’ve moved towards many time without ever making much headway. I believe I purchased it on the strength of a single quote I found in another piece of writing. Madness being the beginning of it’s title, such a strong and overpowering word, may have also had something to do with it. As I was digging into it’s chapter On Sentimentality I found myself drifting away from the lecture (it being a book of lectures) over and over. Thinking back to the critiques I ran this past week. Did I handle it right? Did students learn anything? Were my comments constructive and working? I found myself thinking along the conceit of the essay. How one approaches sentimentality in the work, a kind of causeless emotion, the definition she pulls from the American novelist John Gardner. An excess of emotion would be another way to put it, “indulgence of more emotion than seems warranted for the stimulus.” It brought to my mind an obsessive embarrassment, an avoidance of not only the showing of an emotion which would betray something about oneself, but a fear of being wrong, dumb, or simple. It’s something hard to articulate in words if only because it is the very embarrassment which refuses enunciation. To evoke it would be to engender it. Haunting me for years, this obsessive embarrassment, a fear of sentimentality has infected not only my movements through life, but my art. So afraid of being wrong, of discussion, of having an opinion, an emotion, I become a serene mirror as opposed to a player.
What then is to be done?
Between starting and finishing this piece, this beginning (as I’m so fond of beginnings) I was able to partially experience a partial eclipse. I was not quite in the totality of it all, but something about the moon in a dance with the sun, something about the response to it, something about it’s history, all fell right in my lap as perfect to speak to, especially as it all exists and pertains to some of these first lectures in Ruefle’s book.
Some days after I sat for a moment with the work of Charles Atlas titled The Years. The work itself simultaneously celebrates his historic collaborations he’s participated in over the years, while simultaneously questioning the response of youth, those who are a future, to his work. I don’t care for this aspect of it. Instead it is the deep and palpable silence I experienced in the Black Box space that it was installed in. Beyond the standing video monitors and the projected images of the children, there is another projection of stars. You can move all around this work, and it sits poised, the children always watching, the stars guiding. But the silence. An almost incidental reality of its installation. A besides the point. Something which I would tell my students is deeply important even if not—as they would put it—intentional. Its position in the museum as a silent port, lost in all of the swirling chaos of litanies of children and families and tours (most likely due to this being the Expo weekend) is welcomed and almost immediately responded to viscerally. As I said, the silence was palpable. I shuddered as I existed in this space alone with these works. The stars just beyond.
As Ruefle put it in her lecture Poetry and the Moon, “Another thing: the moon is the very image of silence—and, as Charles Simic says, ‘The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.’” She goes on to discuss his comment that photography’s power is in its being always on the verge of—but never quite—read, and how the moon here, then, becomes a kind of first photograph. It gets us first to a “me here—you there” as she just as quickly reorients in response to Paul Aster’s writing on it to a “you there—me here.” The map cannot be drawn, a charting of topography cannot begin, if we cannot first orient ourselves in relation to the out there, the stars, the moon, the sun. An outer other we are always in relation to. It is not ourselves which constitute the world around us, but the world which constitutes us.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that a solar eclipse awes and disorients us so. Or that it drives so many animals towards unnatural behavior, or rather out of sync natural behavior. On the day of the eclipse, while I was in my front yard, I was witness to two butterflies flying madly around, engaged in each other, engaged in themselves; a far better reflection os the sun/moon dance than the little pinhole box I was using to witness the eclipse. It was chaotic. My own fear of bugs in general made it a bit harrowing as I would have been horrified to have them touch me, and yet I was transfixed. Elsewhere animals have responded in various ways. Dogs go to sleep for a moment, birds cease their song, normally slow Galapagos turtles begin to mate, bears couldn’t be bothered. Nat Turner’s slave rebellion was spurred on by the appearance of the eclipse which he took as a sign. Historically wars have ended in response to the solar eclipse. In Arkansas during this eclipse 109 couples married at the same time in a ceremony spurred on by the astrological phenomenon. A friend of mine had been interviewing friends to see if they also had the heart rate’s going up around the eclipse, it seems to be 50/50. The eclipse occupies the high and the low of it all.
Another brilliant writer, Emily Daniel, who I count among my friends in the Chicago writing community wrote a beautiful piece on the ways in which the eclipse brought people together. What she referred to as the “church feeling” speaking to the kinds of camaraderie that came in this moment, with a simultaneous turn to the kinds of transactions that occurred around. An attempt to work through the beauty of gift that surrounded the event with the transactional commodities which continued to circulate underneath and around it. Capital still seeps in even as we begin to see the ways we constitute each other.
I was underwhelmed in the moment of the eclipse. Some small emotions came over me, a curiosity to it all, but—like many things in my life—there was an inappropriately measured response to the thing. Shows of sentimentality that seemed to be blossoming around me—or rather around my social feeds—seemed to be denied me, or rather I denied them.
Ruefle points out to us that in its original usage sentimentality referred to a refined aesthetic emotion, exquisite taste; it was an expression of a kind of love alongside an intellectual idealism. This definition comes to us from Romanticism (~1770 — ~1850) with that capital R that bestows its status as a movement. It was—as Gregg Bordowitz points out in his lecture performance Gimme Danger— counter to industrialization, and one of its great manifestations was in the liebestod, the love-death. The idea that there can be a great beauty and romance in dying together. A life fully given over to the other. He discusses his disdain for it during the AIDS crisis in the 80s because the reality was that loved ones were dying in front of each other, and it was anything but beautiful. And yet—he points out—there were moments of romanticism, bits of it throughout the works being made at the time in response to the AIDS crisis, one example he gives is Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette. Most importantly he acknowledges how Romanticism then folds over a bit into The Decadent Movement, Le Decadisme, with one of its major ideas being for artifice, against nature, and as he argues these got all wrapped up and moved forward into Punk. I won’t do his whole improvised lecture here in recounting this trajectory, but its this idea that shit’s complicated. There’s complexity to the moves we wish to make in the world, the ways we respond to it, and how we cope and think and love and emote. Movement’s of the past bleed into and affect the the worldviews of their tomorrow’s. Our bodies respond to all of the past histories that they inherit.
Right? There’s nothing necessarily sensible to shuddering to The Years, but there was sure something sensible for me in the room. I responded to what I’ve known and the cultures I’ve grown into. Silence reverberating out as something that pulses, that bleeds, that encapsulates. Sun and moon staring at each other in an embrace, one that shakes the earth. Is there not a kind of sentimentality to being more enveloped in the dance of the butterflies than the dance of the sun and the moon? To see the effects and admire. Sure to stare at the sun and moon with the knowledge that it will hurt you could be a kind of romanticist position, but not really. And we see in the odd effects of the eclipse on nature that it holds its own negation and contradiction. To be against nature in this sense is to be for it. Finding beauty in letting the lovers be, its none of your business, but only because you can feel the reverberations of that silence created passing around and through you. Soft touch.
Ruefle in her essay was not satisfied with sentimentality being relegated to simply strong feelings. I’m not either. Never have been. The idea that artists make work from their individual feelings to express something which can speak to the world, while simultaneously privileging their own feelings and not considering all that the world constitutes in them, and allows them, has never felt right. It’s a selfish position. To express oneself in the world is to be accountable to that world, for better and for worse. “Intersectionality was invented by Kimberle Crenshaw in the late 80’s in the context of legal law. That term, ‘intersectionality,’ it was first used by Kimberle Crenshaw, who’s a legal scholar, who was trying to figure out how black women were treated either as black or women in the legal system, and the fact that they were never both was not considered or ill-considered, and the legal system had no way of understanding the multiplicity of identities that we all have, right? We’re many selves and many people to the various people we interact with. Identity is relational.” Again this is Bordowitz improvising a beautiful construction of sentences that speak to why I’m frustrated by individualistic artistic expression. One must accept that an expression of their feelings without consideration of the silent language of the world will sometimes be necessarily misunderstood. There is a beauty in this, but perhaps it’s why this idea of sentimentality as wrapped in love and the intellectual can mean so much now. Ruefle to point to this refers to a oft-quoted line from Wordsworth to define what poetry meant for the Romantics, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” But that period being there is wrong, she points out it needs to be a comma for it continues, “…and though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.” There are choices here in Wordsworth’s position to be critiqued for sure, but its the “long and deeply” to focus on; to think is not to deny. And although we can follow the religious and moral philosopher John Cottingham that, “There are certain kinds of truth such that to try to grasp them purely intellectually is to avoid them.” in regard to spiritual truths (a quote I found through a friends repost of another) I would go so far as to say that there are certain kinds of truths that if only grasped intuitively, emotionally, or affectually is to deny a true engagement with them. For what are those things I’ve mentioned if not different kinds of bodily thought. It’s time spent, not knowledge accrued. Its a body attended to, not time lapsed. Passion and care and all that comes with it in communion.
The animals go mad in an eclipse. Humans come together in awe. “It is not what a poem says with its mouth, its what a poem does with its eyes.” This is Ruefle commenting on theme in poetry and how it should not constitute the whole of the piece. I would put it more like what it can say with its mouth depends on what it does with its eyes and vice versa. Form and content are different manifestations of the same impulse. She in her writing on theme was attempting to think through how we could possibly think theme in relation to poetry, in the end this pure thinking towards an end tired her out. I paraphrase her now and here when she quoted Roland Barthes quoting Maupassant who said he always ate at the Eiffel Tower because it was the only place in Paris you couldn’t see it. I have lost my point I came in to this writing-with, which in many ways was the point. An attempt to look towards sentimentality as Ruefle gave it to me. A thinking through emotion in some way that it could begin to manifest, written mostly in bed and perhaps with more of an I than I am usually wont to do. I think—as I have been thinking around this piece— of another lecture performance by Bordowitz. Similar style of almost improvisational stand up to the one referenced before, in this one he talks through how his understanding of his queerness came through his Jewish identity, which would later lead to his Some Styles of Masculinity lecture performances. The story goes as he tells it that Bordowitz was walking with his grandfather around Manhattan and as they passed by the Flatiron building Bordowitz made eye contact with a (to him at the time) older handsome man, they clocked each other, made eye contact and then this older man smiled and Bordowitz smiled back. His grandfather was silent for a moment, and then asked if he knew him. He says no he just smiled so I smiled back, what’s wrong with smiling? His grandfather paused a moment, turned and looked at him gravely and said “Only idiots smile.” Its this phrase Bordowitz used for the title of the lecture performance I paraphrase here.
The work as a whole is a beautiful exploration of how we come to various identities as frames in our lives. I can’t help but think in my life of how I’ve internalized this kind of idea. I don’t believe it was ever said to me in my life, but when I first heard the phrase as Bordowitz tells it, there was a familiarity as if it was possible that wasn’t my first time. Something about the phrase seems to perfectly oppose sentimentality. But similarly I think of a moment in my own childhood. When I was young, I was a crier. Constant, flowing tears. Immense amounts of emotional outpourings that would come in anger, sadness, overload. This continued into late elementary and early middle school. And I remember one day it became such a problem—in school especially—that my parents sat me down and told me I had to stop crying so much. I was getting older and I couldn’t keep doing this. I had to have a better control over my emotions, especially something so disruptive it led to my crying. I don’t remember the details very vividly, but this is what I remember, and from that day forward my crying reduced to almost nothing. I’ve brought this story up to my parents, and they deny it ever happening, but it’s still lodged there, a memory one way or the other. A reality constructed even if in its absence.
I want to end with Harry Dodge, if only because I may not end up ending this piece otherwise unless I make the call to. I sit in the corner with friends post shift where I had been reading his book My Meteorite wherein questions of thingly relation appear time and time again, spurred centrally by the passing of his father and a meteorite that came into his possession around the same time. In the 16th chapter he starts by discussing a book he read on a plane on the topic of metadata titled Medata by Jeffery Pomerantz. If I am to do this section justice I will need to quote Dodge himself at length as he quotes and refers to others. My favorite writing activity: quoting people quoting, a pile of relation. Something I’ve been doing throughout this work. Identity is relational.
March 2016 Going to Maggie’s book award ceremony. On the plane to New York I read a book called Metadata, which explains data about data, or, even more precisely and as Jeffery Pomerantz, the author puts it, statements about potentially informative information. I learn that the structure of the most basic unit used to encode electronic objects is called a triple because for a thing to be findable, it has to be in a relation; this two nodes (electronic objects) would be linked by a predicate (which is a category of relationship) or what’s called an edge. It takes three pieces of language to make an identificatory-structure (self?) for this electronic thing, thus, triple. Subject/Predicate/Object. E.g., Édouard Glissant authored Poetics of Relation.
This structure, the triple, having been rendered as the most primary, the most elemental form, rhymes with the idea that collisions make things, that we’re made in relation, of relation, and by having been impressed upon by countless things, organic and inorganic. In other words, there can be no unitary subject here or anywhere, since nothing is anything without also having been rendered, via, in, or through, the crucible of relation. With respect to metadata, all items can be (and are) both subjects and objects. What changes this designation is obviously the nature of the predicate, or category of relation.
In The Intertwining Merleau-Ponty suggests that items normally thought in subject/object dyad could be understood, instead, to be in a kind of mutually constitutive relation (think lungs/air, or skin/atmospheric pressure, or sight/surface). Eduardo Kohn in How Forests Think builds on this, and on Charles Pierce’s thought, by pressuring a different structural facet of relation: the idea is that each node (formerly discussed as sign or interpretant) is both sign and interpretant—which is to say that the interpretation of the sign (i.e., thought) is also a sign that changes things, insofar as it modifies consciousness. So: thinking as something that is material, has undeniable effects, changes bodies.
I choose to think about things. But I know thinking is material. Dodge gives me a way to appreciate this another way. Ruefle gives me a way to think it on the side of affect. And the lovers in the sky who continue to dance with each other, allow me the knowledge that it’s something that never ends if only because it will come back around, and it will be beautiful.