Break Every Rule Read online

  Precious, Disappearing Things

  AVA IS LIVING TEXT. One that trembles and shudders. One that yearns. It is filled with ephemeral thoughts, incomplete gestures, revisions, recurrences, and repetitions—precious, disappearing things. My most spacious form thus far, it allows in the most joy, the most desire, the most regret. Embraces the most uncertainty. It has given me the freedom to pose difficult questions and has taught me how to love the questions: the enduring mystery that is music, the pull and drag of the tide, the mystery of why we are here and must die.

  No other book eludes me like AVA. It reaches for things just outside the grasp of my mind, my body, the grasp of my imagination. It brings me up close to the limits of my own comprehension, pointing out, as Kafka says, the incompleteness of any life—not because it is too short, but because it is a human life. AVA is a work in progress and will always be a work in progress. It is a book in a perpetual state of becoming. It cannot be stabilized or fixed. It can never be finished. It’s a book that could be written forever, added to or subtracted from in a kind of Borgesian infinity. Do I ever finish putting things in order? Can I assign a beginning to affection, or an end? Every love affair returns, at odd moments, as a refrain, a handful of words, a thrumming at the temple perhaps, or a small ache at the back of the knee. AVA is filled with late last-minute things—postscripts, post-postscripts.

  I come back to writing continually humbled and astonished. I do not pretend to understand how disparate sentences and sentence fragments that allow in a large field of voices and subjects, linked to each other quite often by mismatched syntax and surrounded by space for 265 pages, can yield new sorts of meanings and wholeness. I do not completely understand how such fragile, tenuous, mortal connections can suggest a kind of forever. How one thousand Chinese murdered in a square turn into one thousand love letters in the dying Ava Klein’s abstracting mind, or how the delicate, coveted butterflies Nabokov chases on the hills of Telluride become a hovering and beautiful alphabet. I cannot really speak of these things. As Michael Palmer said of one of his volumes of poetry, “the mystery remains in the book.” I can only discuss the writing of AVA

  I was promoting my novel The Art Lover. I was flying places, meeting people, connections were constantly being made and broken. I felt strange and estranged the way I do during such times, with all the reading, all the talking into black microphones, all the usual replies to the same questions over and over. Because I must write every day, I continued to write then, though I could only manage one or two sentences at a time. The next entry, some time later, would be another sentence, often unrelated to the one that had come before. I was using language as an anchor and a consolation, enjoying the act of simply putting one word next to another and allowing them to vibrate together. Most days it was my only pleasure. Shortly after the book promotion, North Point Press, scheduled to do my next book, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, and also The Art Lover in paperback, folded. These books made the rounds at commercial houses where so-called literary editors displayed the usual ignorance and lack of vision I have now become more accustomed to, with their love of safety and product and money. But I was still capable of being shocked by them then. I kept writing in pieces. I was scheduled to escape to France and had sublet my apartment when a death prevented me from leaving the country. The fragments piled up. Keeping the notebooks going, I began to travel the world in my own way. Among the many voices I had accumulated I began to hear a recurring voice, an intelligence if you will. She was a thirty-nine-year-old woman, confined to a hospital bed and dying, yet extraordinarily free.

  I cannot say what direction her story would have taken had it not been assuming its final form during the terrible weeks of the Persian Gulf war. It was my first war as an adult, and like everyone I watched the whole, awful thing live on TV. War as a subject permeates the text of AVA, but more importantly war dictates the novel’s shape. A very deep longing for peace, one I must admit I had scarcely been aware of, overwhelmed me as I watched the efficient, precise elimination of people, places, things by my government. My loathing for the men who were making this, and my distrust of the inherited, patriarchal forms led me to search for more feminine shapes—less “logical” perhaps, since a terrible logic had brought us here—less simplistic, a form that might be capable of imagining peace, accommodating freedom, acting out reunion. I was looking for the fabric of reconciliation. Something that might join us. I was determined not to speak in destructive or borrowed forms any longer. But what did that mean? I began to ask the question of myself, “What could she not ask of fiction and therefore never get?” I began one more time to ask what fiction might be, what it might do, and what we might deserve, after all. Traditional fiction had failed us. Did we dare presume to dream it over? To discard the things we were given but were never really ours?

  In an attempt to ward off death with its chaos and mess, traditional fiction had flourished. Its attempts to organize, make manageable and comprehensible with its reassuring logic, in effect, reassures no one. I do not think I am overstating it when I say that mainstream fiction has become death with its complacent, unequivocal truths, its reductive assignment of meaning, its manipulations, its predictability and stasis. As I was watching the war it became increasingly clear to me that this fiction had become a kind of totalitarianism, with its tyrannical plot lines, its linear chronology, and characterizations that left no place in the text for the reader, no space in which to think one’s thoughts, no place to live. All the reader’s freedoms in effect are usurped.

  In an ordinary narrative I hardly have time to say how beautiful you are or that I have missed you or that—come quickly, there are finches at the feeder! In a traditional narrative there is hardly any time to hear the lovely offhand things you say in letters or at the beach or at the moment of desire. In AVA I have tried to write lines the reader (and the writer) might meditate on, recombine, rewrite as he or she pleases. I have tried to create a place to breathe sweet air, a place to dream. In an ordinary narrative I barely have the courage or the chance to ask why we could not make it work, despite love, despite everything we had going. In an ordinary narrative I would have probably missed the wings on Primo Levi’s back as he stands at the top of the staircase. And Beckett too, during the war, hiding in a tree and listening to a song a woman sings across the sadness that is Europe.

  “The ideal or the dream would be to come up with a language that heals as much as it separates.” When I read this line by Hélène Cixous, I knew she was articulating what I was wordlessly searching for when I began to combine my fragments. “Could one,” Cixous asks, “imagine a language sufficiently transparent, sufficiently supple, intense, faithful, so that there would be reparation and not only separation?” And yes, isn’t it possible that language instead of limiting possibility might actually enlarge it? That through its suggestiveness, the gorgeousness of its surface, its resonant, unexplored depths, it might actually open up the world a little, and possibly something within ourselves as well? I agree with Barthes when he says that the novel and the theater (and not these essays by the way) are the natural settings in which concrete freedom can most violently and effectively be acted out. That this is not the case for the most part, in fiction at any rate, is a whole other matter relating back to the “literary” editors who have entered a covert, never-discussed, and possibly not even conscious conspiracy to conserve a certain aesthetic. Women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, etc., are all made to sound essentially the same—that is, say, like John Cheever, on a bad day. Oh, a few bones are thrown now and then, a few concessions are made to exotic or alternative or “transgressive” content, but that is all. And more freedom slips away.

  All experience, of course, is filtered through one’s personality, disposition, upbringing, culture (which is why I know we do not all sound like John Cheever). Truth be told I was never much for ordinary narrative, it seems. Even as a child, the eldest of five, I would wander year after year in and out of our bedtime readi
ng room, dissatisfied by the stories, the silly plot contrivances, the reduction of an awesome complicated world into a rather silly, sterile one. When my mother was reading stories I would often wander out to the night garden, taking one sentence or one scene out there with me to dream over, stopping, I guess, the incessant march of the plot forward to the inevitable climax. Only when it came time for poetry did I sit transfixed. These seemed to me much closer an approximation of my world, which was all strangeness and wonder and light.

  Back then my remote father grew roses. The tenderness of this fact, and the odd feeling I had that he cared more for these silent, beautiful creatures than he did for us, always intrigued and oddly touched me. It was what my childhood was: random, incomprehensible, astounding events, one after the next. I cherish this image of my father. And because I have never wholly understood it I gave Ava’s father the task of growing roses. Unlike my father, Ava’s father survived Treblinka. He gives Ava a penny apiece for each Japanese beetle she can collect from the garden. The Germans sold the dead Jews’ hair for fifteen pennies a kilo. There were piles of women’s hair there. Fifty feet high. Ava in her innocence and purity, holding her clear jar of beetles, says, “Yes, we’ll have to make holes for the air.” The book is built on waves of association like this. There is a rose called “Peace.” A rose called “Cuisse de Nymphe Emue”—that’s “Thigh of an Aroused Nymph.” It blooms once unreservedly and then not again.

  I have attempted in some small way to create a text, as Barthes says, “in which is braided, woven in the most personal way, the relations of every kind of bliss: those of ‘life’ and those of the text, in which reading and the risks of life are subjects to the same anamnesis.”

  Back to my mother reading me stories those long ago nights. Another thing I did was to detach the meanings from the words and turn them into a kind of music, a song my mother was singing in a secret language just to me. It was a rhythmic, sensual experience as she sang what I imagine were the syllables of pure love. This is what literature became for me: music, love, and the body. I cannot keep the body out of my writing; it enters the language, transforms the page, imposes its own intelligence. If I have succeeded at all you will hear me breathing. You will hear the sound my longing makes. You will sense in the text the body near water, as it was then, and in silence. Not the body as it is now, in Washington, D.C., next to obelisks and pillars and domes, walking it seems in endless circles and reciting the alphabet of those streets over and over. That will show up later; the body has an incredible memory.

  My hope is that you might feel one moment of true freedom in AVA. That the form, odd as it may at first seem, will not constrict or alienate, but will set something in motion. Here I am always just on the verge of understanding, which is the true state of desire. Perhaps you will feel some of this enormous desire for everything in the world in the fragments of this living, changing, flawed work. And in the silence between fragments.

  “Almost everything is yet to be written by women,” Ava Klein says, moments before her death.

  Let us bloom then, unreservedly.

  There’s still time.

  A Novel of Thank You

  for Getrude Stein

  BEGIN in singing.

  Chapter One

  Rose.

  A Longer Chapter

  A word whispered. Called through green. In the years she was growing and lilting hills sung in the night and in the day and in every possible way over water rose the first word, the world. Was I loving you I was loving you even then.

  One word. Rose

  To Be Sung

  Urgently, sweetly, with bliss, and sometimes with desperation

  Chapter Bliss

  Rose.

  Chapter Wish

  Rose. And Chapter hope…

  And this is what bliss is this.

  Rose to be sung against the sky and diamonds night.

  Red Roses

  A cool red rose and pink cut pink, a collapse and a solid hole, a little less hot

  In direct sensuous relationship to the world.

  Chapter Early and Late Please

  I found myself plunged into a vortex of words, burning words, cleansing words, liberating words, and the words were ours and it was enough that we held them in our hands.

  Chapter

  Sincerely Beverly Nichols Avery Hopwood Allan Michaels and Renee Felicity also how many apricots are there to a pound.

  And this is what bliss this is bliss this is bliss.

  They found themselves happier than anyone who was alive then.

  Chapter Saint

  Saint Two and Saint Ten

  Saint Tribute

  Saint Struggle

  Chapter Grace

  Chapter Faith

  Chapter Example

  Saint Admiration

  Our Lady of Derision

  Saint Deadline—not finished and not finishable. I like thinking of this.

  How many saints are there in it? Saints we have seen so far:

  Tributes are there in it? A Very Valentine—for Gertrude Stein.

  Colors are there in it?

  A Novel of Thank You. A Basket.

  Saint Example and Saint Admiration

  Thank you, how many, audacity religiosity beauty and purity your ease your inability to compromise ever thank you

  very much.

  Your freedoms Saint Derision, Chapter One

  Do prepare to say

  Portraits and Prayers, do prepare

  to say that you have

  prepared portraits and prayers and

  that you prepare and that I prepare

  Yes you do.

  A vortex of words very much.

  For your irreverence and desire

  extremity courage and good humorous

  subversiveness

  splendorous

  Yes you do.

  For Your Beauteous

  Language is a rose, a woman, constantly in the process of

  opening

  thank you

  your freedoms. Released at last from the prisons of syntax.

  Story.

  For your—

  Choose wonder.

  Choose Wonder

  Apples and figs burn.

  They burn.

  She had wished windows and she had wished.

  A novel of thank you and not about it chapter one.

  Rose, rose, rose.

  Rose whispered, prayed over the child love love. Please please sweet sweet sweet

  Chapter

  Susie Asado

  Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea

  written for a particularly irresistible flamenco dancer

  Please be please be get, please get wet, wet naturally, naturally in weather.

  Chapter Alice

  To not emerge already constructed, already decided, preordained.

  Thank you

  The difference is spreading.

  very much

  The permission.

  I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do

  I like the feeling.

  very much

  The main intention of the novel was to say thank you.

  A novel of thank you. In chapters and saints.

  And it is easily understood that they have permission.

  Without telling what happened…to make the play the essence of what happened.

  A thing you all know is that in the three novels written in this generation that are important things written in this generation, there is, in none of them a story. There is none in Proust in The Making of Americans or in Ulysses.

  Once upon a time they came every day and did we miss them we did. And did they once upon a time did they come every day. Once upon a time they did not come every day they never had they never did they did not come every day any day.

  A novel of thank you and not about it.

  A story of arrangements

  When it is repeated or Bernadine’s revenge. When
it is repeated is another subject. How it is repeated is another subject. If it is repeated is another subject. If it is repeated or the revenge of Bernadine is another subject.

  inner thought, silent fancies

  There is one thing that is certain, and nobody realized it in the 1914–19 war, they talked about it but they did not realize it but now everybody knows it everybody that the one thing that everybody wants is to be free, to talk to eat to drink to walk to think, to please, to wish, and to do it now if now is what they want, and everybody knows it they know it anybody knows it…1943

  …not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered

  multiplicity and freedom unfettered ecstatic

  thank you

  To begin to allow. To allow it.

  I had to recapture the value of the individual word, find out what it meant and act within it.

  Imagine a door.

  To free oneself from convention again and again and again. Thank you for suggesting once again. And again and again that story is elsewhere, that story must have been, been elsewhere. In every kind of other place. Thank you. Again and again. In every possible way.

  Once upon a time they came every day and did we miss them we did. And did they once upon a time did they come every day. Once upon a time they did not come every day…

  Chapters in the middle

  So then out loud.

  Everyone.

  And so forth.

  All and one and so forth.