S2 Ep11: Language for the Ineffable

Story Geometry

How do we elegantly write about ‘unexplainable’ concepts like spirit, sex, beauty, or death? In a lightly edited panel discussion, national and regional award winners Mark Doty, Greg Glazner, and Lidia Yuknavitch provide thoughtful consideration to this challenging task while referencing literary giants Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Walt Whitman. You’ll also hear the third installment of our Election Year Literature segment, featuring Pulitzer Prize finalist Luis Alberto Urrea’s recommendation.

Links:
Pam Houston - http://pamhouston.net
Mark Doty - http://markdoty.blogspot.com/
Greg Glazner - http://www.gregglazner.com/
Lidia Yukanavitch - http://www.lidiayuknavitch.net/
Luis Alberto Urrea - http://www.luisurrea.com/

Season Two Partner Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
Episode Sponsor - Talking Book, http://talkingbook.pub
Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - http://twitter.com/BenHess

Election Year Lit Selection: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson

Coming Up in Episode 12:
Craig Childs - http://www.houseofrain.com/
Luis Alberto Urrea - http://www.luisurrea.com/
Gretchen Howell - cross country cyclist and aspiring writer - http://spinstera.wordpress.com

Transcript

the Transcript

Episode 011 - Language for the Ineffable

Greg Glazner:

I’ll just try to start and we’ll hear what everybody else has to say. But the subdivisions of this particular topic don’t exactly go together to me [LAUGH] …

Ben Hess

Welcome to Story Geometry, the podcast on the craft and community of writing, I’m your host Ben Hess that’s award winning musician, poet, teacher, and writer Greg Glazner. And the topics he’s not sure go together? Well, here’s Pam Houston to explain:

Pam Houston

I’m very eager to hear the three panelists, Mark Doty, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Greg Glazner, speak on the subject of Spirit, Sex, Beauty, (Death), and the Ineffable and how the mind makes language of them.

Ben: As you may know, Pam is the author of the award-winning short story collection Cowboys Are My Weakness and the autobiographical novel, Contents May Have Shifted. She’s also the co-founder of Writing by Writers, my partner in podcast crime. This is episode 11 Language for the Ineffable and this is a companion to Episode 5, our first ‘live panel’ episode.

Of course to attend writing workshops and literary adventures, including panels like this one, visit writingxwriters.org for schedules, faculty bios, and all the registration details.

So you’re about to hear a thought-provoking discussion on writing unexplainable topics and the language our mind creates to do so. In fact, Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Wallace Stevens make appearances too. You’ll then hear from Pulitzer Prize finalist Luis Alberto Urrea, for our Election Year Literature segment where I exploring past works inspired by, about, or shaped by policies, politics, or politicians of the era. And finally, you’ll meet a guest from next month’s episode 12. She’s an aspiring writer, who also happens to be cycling across the country.

All of this is brought to you by our friends at independent audiobook publisher Talking Book … so stay with us.

Again, Greg Glazner:

Greg: The first thing to do there is to see what we’re talking about. What are we talking about? There are probably about 50 different answers to that question in this room. So when I think about that question, I think about literal interconnectedness. So I would be very inclined, if I’m writing about this thing that I’m calling, innerconnection, to take the edge off of it by mentioning a cheeseburger wrapper or, you know, a jingle or some bad remark I made in public. Do you see what I mean? That for some bizarre reason, to be a person to me seems to mean to be on about 17 different levels all at the same time. And the more of that we can suggest in language, the less hokey it sounds.

Lidia: So when I looked at that funky list on the piece of paper, um, they did all look connected to me.

Ben: This is Lidia Yuknavitch whose most recent novel is the haunting, lyrical The Small Backs of Children. Her memoir - or anti-memoir as she calls it, The Chronology of Water - was a Finalist, PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award and named as a Best Book of the Year by The Oregonian

Lidia: From my point of view, when I thought carefully about each of those words, and I think sex and spirit and death and beauty and the ineffable. Is that -- is that it? When I looked at them separately and as a group, what it brought me to was that they’re each thresholds [LAUGH]. And when we arrive at them as embodied creatures, we experience identity dissolution. You don’t have to agree, but I like it when you agree [LAUGH].But then, when I was listening to Greg, I went off on this whole other tangent in my head. When you were talking about how -- writing about the cheeseburger in addition to the cosmic awareness thing or the lofty writerly thing. I tapped into that quite keenly because a poet who I think does that beautifully and opened the door for a lot of us was Emily Dickinson. “And I heard a fly buzz when I died” is, like, a quintessentially one of those. Right?

Ben: I gotta admit, I had to look it up. So we’re all on the same page, Lidia’s quoted the first line of Dickinson’s famous - but not to me until now - four stanza poem, I Heard a Fly Buzz.

Lidia [cont’d]: At the moment of dissolution [LAUGH], she sees a fly and she writes a poem about it. And that remains profound to me. I will never stop loving that poem or any of her poems. She’s a god [LAUGH]. So that’s one thing. A second thing is that when I myself move to try and write about those instances, I got to personal experience, because it’s those are hard topics to capture without being a cliché idiot. Right? So I go to personal experiences and in my life. I, for whatever reasons, I’ve been at the life-death moment three different times. So some of it’s sad. I’m giving you the warning. I was there at the moment my father drowned and died and I brought him back to life. With mouth-to-mouth. So I was at the moment of his death and the moment of his life and they happened on top of each other. That’s a big one. And it’s a big one, too, if you haven’t -- I can’t assume any of you have read the Chronology of Water, but if you did read it, thank you [LAUGH]. You read the scene where I, as the 23-year-old daughter have to make the choice whether or not to save my abuser. And that moment is you can’t write about it. You can’t bring language to it and succeed. It’s one of those moments. Right? Utter dissolution. And so, going back and trying to recapture it brings you back to a dissolution moment. But that’s a life-death moment where I understood profoundly that life and death were longer opposites and they were not at two ends of a spectrum.

And a second one I had, this is the sad one -- that one’s not sad to me, which is interesting [LAUGH]. I said it last night. I had a baby girl who died the day she was born. Also can’t quite write about that. I’m not the only one in the room, by the way. This is not a story that’s told often. But same thing. I had the birth-death moment in one moment. Right? And I’m a writer and a painter so that was big. And in there with the grief and I went all the way down the grief road to psychosis, I was institutionalized not knowing what to do with that grief. So I went all the way down the grief road and I had to choose to come back because I kind of liked it there. Dissolution. Ego dissolution, world dissolution, body dissolution. Holding -- I keep going like this because I know what it felt like to hold life and death.

Mark Doty

This topic, which seems impossible, is suddenly made possible by having genius colleagues. This is wonderful.

Ben: Mark Doty won the 2008 National Book Award in Poetry for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems and in additional to several books of poetry, has written three memoirs including a craft book, The Art of Description: World Into Word.

Mark: We approach these experiences with humility because we understand, as Greg is saying, that knowledge is partial, always, language is not comprehensive, always. So that space of rupture, of what is uncapturable, may well be this space that spirit can occupy, because we have that doubt, because we can’t easily fill it. It’s a breach into which other kinds of knowledge can enter.

Lidia: And so, to go and try and write, none of us, no writer anywhere on Earth is ever going to be able to perfectly capture the truth of any of those dissolution moments. So, you know, why try would be one question. Right? Why try if it isn’t possible? But what makes us human is that we can’t help it [LAUGH]. What’s beautiful about us is that -- the urge to try to bring language close to the threshold and -- and maybe even dissolve in the process, it’s worth it.

Lidia: That’s why you do it. That’s why you get that weird feeling in your stomach when you’re getting close to it in a piece of writing and you want to run away. [LAUGH] And if you stay a writer, it’s because you don’t run away. … It’s because you keep going. So that you can and then, it isn’t because you want to represent it and be the person who stands up and rises and says I am the one who represented it. We do it so that we remember how to recollect ourselves as a group too. We do it to tell storytelling, oldest form, poetics and storytelling and cave drawings, to recollect the group so the group isn’t facing dissolution in the face of catastrophe or racial injustice or war or abuse. That’s the reason to do it. So I’m here to recruit you [LAUGH]. Okay. I’m in [LAUGH].

Ben: A brief pause to say you’re listening to Episode 11,a lightly edited panel discussion on Language for the Ineffable brought to you by independent audiobook publisher Talking Book. I was able to sit down with Talking Book at the recent Association of Writers and Writing Programs - AWP as it’s called - in Los Angeles:

AD INTERVIEW - My name is Kris Hartrum, I’m the senior editor for Talking Book. I do most of the acquisitions, edit the lit blog. I lived in Tokyo for 7 years where I started TYO Mag which is a literary and arts community magazine. Writing that you can get behind as a person and a reader, that for me is the litmus test. I’m Ben, Story Geometry with Ben Matchar, Kris Hartrum, TalkingBook.pub … go there …

Ben: I think we should contribute a Talking Book audiobook to Gretchen, our cross country cycling writer. You’ll hear from her later in the episode, but now back to our panel with National Book Award winning poet, Mark Doty …

Mark: Those moments, they seem to me profoundly linked to, and I liked very much how you said that, Lidia, that they are thresholds. And they are thresholds to that which cannot be spoken. They are the places where language fails. And therefore, the will, in particular, somehow, of the poet, I think, and I probably am meaning poetry here not specifically as a form, but more as a distillation of what that when we talk about the poetry of sport or, the poetry of trees or whatever, that spirit is to fill the silence, to articulate it, to give voice to it. It’s why you cannot look in the eyes of a seal and not want to supply some words. You know, there’s a consciousness that’s not yours. Is there any language? What do you do? You got to speak. Dogs. The wordless always calls to us, babies.

There’s a beautiful phrase by Hart Crane -- one of the great love poems of the 20th century.

Ben: Mark’s referring to American poet Hart Crane’s Voyages, which is a six-section love-cycle of poems, published over multiple years starting in 1923.

Mark [cont’d]: He’s -- he’s talking to the sailor that -- that he was briefly enamored of,who broke his heart, and he says, “Sleep hasten while they are true. Sleep, death, desire close around one instant in one floating flower.” And that’s a description of orgasm.

Mark: “Sleep, death, desire close around once instant.” In that moment , everything has dissolved that I know and, yet, I’m not gone. So to be dissolved, to lose your sense of self, but to be present. -- is something that -- in some ways, familiar to all of us and is absolutely resistant to words. And therefore, the only way that we can have a communicated shared experience with that is through art. Right? The most sophisticated use of words, the same medium that I use to order lunch is the one I’m using right now and the one that I’m going to use when I write a poem and the one that Walt Whitman is using, Elizabeth Bishop are using. Right? But to use it with the maximum degree of subtlety and sophistication, to point to what you cannot say? Poetry is very good at indicating what it can’t name. That sort of drawing a circle around an open space so that you can see what’s in it.

Lidia: Yeah. I’m so glad you brought Whitman up. I’ll do a quick pass at it. Okay? First of all, as I was saying in the workshop I’m sharing with the wonderful writers I’m with this week, Whitman is my alternate Bible. It’s on my bedstand.

Mark: It’s what he wanted.

Lidia: Yeah. I know. He told me [LAUGH]. So Kathy Acker was my mentor, but Whitman’s the reason I became a writer. And in it, even when I was young, I saw energy never dies, it just changes form, which is what you’re talking about partially. I saw it in his words. I saw that’s what he was saying, that life and death are not what we’ve been told, so I’m so glad you brought that up. And the other god in that era is Emily Dickinson to me. So Dickinson and Whitman really represent the start of something huge in America, that we took really weird directions eventually. But I also wanted to say while I was listening, the books I’ve written in the last five, eight years -- eight years, about eight years, that came out of the trauma of losing a child. And I agree. You can’t really say certain things around that event. But it is absolutely a concrete example of energy never dying and just changing forms. Because the girl in Small Backs of Children is the girl.

What if she had lived? What if there is a girl spirit that I can follow as a character in fiction and poetics and reanimate in another form? And can I follow her and love her and learn something from her story? Can she be brought back from the dead if the dead is not an end, not a tylose? And even more, can they give you instances or even if I fail at it, can I try to give you instances where you can feel her body in your body, this girl? That’s a moment of what we’re talking about. And so, I think we do take these instances of stuff you can’t handle in ife or stuff that’s one of these thresholds and remake it. And another thing I wanted to say before I do my mic pass is, I might be in the minority on this, I don’t know because I haven’t asked either one of them, but sometimes, I think both language and the body are similar thresholds. Sometimes, I wonder if they shouldn’t have been on the list. That language and the body are metaphors for experience, which I learned from Dickinson and Whitman. And so, it’s -- I guess I’m just throwing it out there like an idea. What if they, too, are the kinds of thresholds we’re talking about? And

Greg: I want to say that in addition to these questions of thresholds, which I’m really interested in personally, very interested in, they’re in my writing a lot, there’s also the other side. So here’s an example by a poet … who, if he would have said he had a spiritual life at all, he would have said it was in the imagination. Sometimes he said he did not believe in such a thing, and that would be Wallace Stevens.

Ben: Stevens was an American Modernist poet whose known for Sunday Morning, Snow Man, and The Emperor of Ice Cream.

Mark: Yeah, amazing example. And I think that really great poems never want to have it just one way.

Lidia: For my literary recitation, I’m going to [LAUGH] recite the entirety of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved [LAUGH]. No. I’m addicted to literature so I just -- I’m basking in bliss right now just listening. I want to be a student again [LAUGH]. But I want to bring another element of the topic in besides what we’ve talked about so far, and that is -- and I could be dead wrong about this, so don’t sue me. It’s just an idea [LAUGH]. But in some ways, I think there’s, those categories and these spaces of writing are also, possibility spaces for agitation. And in particular, agitation against cultural norms and narratives. And art has always been a possibility space for speaking truth to power or bearing witness to what the culture is trying to smooth over and make you forget about. And it’s just another angle on the question that these particular topics and thresholds and sublime, subliminal, liminal spaces are also a place with a politics to it.

Mark: So -- so we’ve been, talking about these -- approaching these things sort of from a position of transcendence, you know? And it seems to me important that we talk about it from a position of desperation, too, because we come up against the things we’re talking about. It’s usually absolute wreckage, that’s leading us towards the necessity of confronting these things. We’re broken by them. We are harmed by our culture’s response to sexuality or we are grief stricken and unable to put anything together and nobody wants to hear about it, you know? So that’s the place where we have to find some way to speak in order not to be erased. Yeah. I’ll take it a little further -- on a personal level. We were having a conversation the other night about writing about grief, you know, and how do you talk about loss? And it occurred to me that I don’t know how anybody lives through grief unless you make something. And you need a container and one of the things that writing provides for us is, something that will hold that which is by nature uncontained. So we say we’re falling apart, you know, or I can’t hold it together or my experience of new grief was that it was oceanic. I was just slapped by waves. I couldn’t focus on anything. My attention was carried away by any current. And writing was the first thing that let me focus. Before I could read, I was beginning to write sentences about what I was experiencing because that felt like the lifeline. And so, that work of making something that would sort of be the more stable externalized version of my own consciousness, you know, was the thing that got me through. Without that it couldn’t have happened. And part of that work was then describing the process of making it. I mean, if you’re writing non-fiction, one of the things that invariably you wind up doing is talking about how you become the person who can write this. You know, what are the forces that are making this book or whatever this thing is come into being? And so, it’s a process of paying attention to one’s own process of consciousness and awareness, and that is enormously helpful. Right? It’s kind of meditation, really

Lidia:There’s a thing I’d like to encourage you guys to ponder, write about, think about, challenge yourself to articulate. And that is, if you go back to the little list of sex, death, that list, give yourself writing challenges where you use one to articulate the other. You use sexuality to articulate death. Right? You use death to articulate something banal. You use [LAUGH], you know, not opposites or binaries, exactly, but you move through the one to find a new way to articulate the other. I think that’s a great sort of writing prompt area to fuck around with and to open yourself up to the idea that the ways we’ve inherited for telling the story are tired. And that you really are writing in a new time. This really is a zeitgeist and the demand of a zeitgeist is that you innovate. It’s that you make the new forms and you find the new ways to say things and you have relationships differently and you let go of the old stories and risk the weirdness of telling in a fucked up way that might just be the way of your time. And in particular, I’m interested in death and sexuality in my own work. How do we retell, reinvent, innovate in those areas to liberate ourselves from the old narratives and understand new ways of being, like in terms of physics?

The demand is on you to tell the story differently, but we’ve been chicken shit for a long time [LAUGH]. And we have, you know models of people telling the story differently. We can pluck them out and name them and recite them. But it’s our job too. It’s your job to figure out how -- what the new ways of telling it are going to be.

Lidia: And so, the topic of the panel seems to me partly about you. How you going to do it? … You know, we’re busting our asses trying [LAUGH] on our end and probably sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail. But the question is bigger for you. How are you going to do it? How are you going to change your writing? How are you going to tell it differently? What does innovation mean for you? What is the largest risk you could take in writing to enter the areas we’ve been talking about? What would it look like on the page? Right? I had to risk writing a novel that looks different on the pages than other novels. One of these things is not like the other [LAUGH]. And I had to risk that it could flop and no one would publish it and I’d be sitting alone in my underwear in my bathroom with it. But to me, the answer was the form has to change and move toward poetics, even though I’m a novelist. So I did. But anyway, the question is more important for you. But you see what I mean? The panel topic is about you and how you’re going to make the changes in your own language.

Ben: With this panel in mind, I’ve been wondering as I continue writing, what changes am I going to make in my own language? And where in the process do they occur? Some changes in the first draft, but with a novel length thing, for better or worse, close attention to language comes during revision, when I have the arc of story and shape of my character’s journey. To me, added thought and nuance with language, with vocabulary, with word choice is icing on the completed novel cake. And yes, I can almost feel Greg, Lidia, and Mark cringe.

So it’s late April now, how are you doing with Election Year 2016? I had the great fortune to sit down with Luis Alberto Urrea in Boulder, Colorado. Luis is the best selling author of 17 books, including The Devil’s Highway and The Hummingbird’s Daughter. Urrea recently released a book of short stories,The Water Museum and a poetry collection, The Tijuana Book of the Dead.

Ben: With the-the political climate that we're in, back on your experiences as a youth in Mexico and your family and being in San Diego and the States so given what’s happening politically and you hear all the rhetoric that's shouted around. Where does put you from a literary perspective? I'm wondering if there's any work or author that comes to mind that was really powerfully motivated politically, that yielded some great work?

Luis: So many, but I would say, you know, one thing you need to understand about me was that I was a working class kid, self taught Rock and Roll idiot. So my epiphanies were often ridiculous. "Jim Morrison said" blah blah blah, you know what I mean. … I hammered things together by reading and listening and watching. So you know, at that age, Hunter Thompson blew my mind. I thought how can you possibly get away with the things you are saying, you know on the campaign trail and so forth? Yet his incendiary rage and enthusiasm made me really comprehend that this wasn't just politics, this wasn't just "oh I don't like that guy," you know or this guy, there are things such deep things at stake about our identity and our soul. And this election cycle is just insane for me to watch. I sometimes can't believe my eyes and my ears … at this point. Where we've gotten to.

Ben:Hunter S. Thompson’s novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is an autobiographical commentary on the failed 1960s counterculture movement. It also popularized Gonzo Journalism, which is Thompson's often seamless blend of fact and fiction. The novel was published in two parts by Rolling Stone magazine in ‘71 then released by Random House in 1972. Which is the year Republican Richard Nixon trounced Democrat George McGovern in the Presidential election. Thompson was not a fan of Nixon’s and claimed the new President represented "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character"^[1]

Ben:What recommendations do you have for a future installment of Election Year Lit? We’ve featured John Steinbeck, Junot Diaz, and now Hunter S. Thompson … who’s next? Send me your ideas to [e-mail]. Special thanks to Mark Doty, Greg Glazner, and Lidia Yuknavitch for their thoughts on language around Spirit, Sex, Beauty, (Death) and the Ineffable and Luis Alberto Urrea for Election Year Lit thoughts.

Coming up in Episode 12 of Story Geometry, You’ll hear much more from Luis on his works across genres, insights from globe hopping, award-winning science and nature writer Craig Childs, and also from Writing by Writers workshop participant Gretchen Howell … who arrived to the Chataqua Lodge on a loaded down bike. I asked her about the origins of her journey from California to Boulder:

Gretchen: It came about in a couple of days at the beginning of February, I had seen an ad for this writing workshop, and I knew I wanted to do another long bike ride. I had quit one job and didn’t have any enthusiasm at all about getting another teaching job so I decided I could ride my bike from California to Writing by Writers in Boulder and then continue on to see more of my friends and visit different places I hadn’t see in the US and hopefully go to more writing workshops on the way.

Ben: I’m a cyclist but have never yet done anything like this. Yet! Very inspiring. You can follow Gretchen’s journey in real time on her Cycle Spinster blog at spinstera dot wordpress dot com - the link will also be this episode’s show notes on StoryGeometry.org.

I’m your host and editor, @BenHess on Twitter and Instagram and we’re Story Geometry on Facebook and Twitter. Mark those calendars for future episodes arriving the last Monday of each month throughout 2016. Don’t forget to visit today’s sponsor TalkingBook.pub to create your very own audiobook. Our theme music is from Mark Hodgkin and additional tracks are from Greg Glazner’s band, The Responders. Be sure to rate and review Story Geometry in iTunes, send feedback via StoryGeometry.org, and sign up for future Writing By Writers events and conferences at Writing Writers.org.

More literary words of wisdom next time, thanks for listening …

the Transcript