"Screen Tests" by Kate
Zambreno. As if everyone
is equally important. Secondary
sources tertiary sources
small opinions, large critiques,
(well perhaps only a couple)
while carrying a child,
mother-in-laws and
Elena Ferrante recommendations.
Languid & languishing,
moment upon moment,
the baby loves Andy Warhol's book,
etc. and a detail in Solanas' biography.
Bricolage may be the single most
important word, ever.
In this book.
Wittgenstein's Mistriss?
Not name dropping after all.
Now getting interested in writing my memoirs. But without a very good memory it would have to be near fiction. Or more like 'faint reminiscences that morph into philosophical screeds'. I'd definitely want it to be readable, that is, literary. So that would be the challenge.
Does it help to read other people's memoirs? Probably. I used to love biography when I was a certain age. 3rd grade, so that would be 8 or 9. I remember the stacks in the library at Noah Webster school, in Hartford Connecticut, with the light streaming in from these gigantic windows, with the wide old wood casing, and overlooking the playground.
The playground where I had to learn to play dodgeball but never really liked it. I noticed dodgeball really only amplified the status of the bigger boys, and how hard they could throw that big red rubber ball. Wack, is the sound of that ball hitting your leg, if you had shorts on. Or smack dab in the middle of your back. Then you'd have to go outside the box, to try to hit the remaining kids out. Why did the teachers condone this game? Or did I volunteer for it? I can't remember, but I think I felt like the new kid, having just moved there from Philly.
But up on the stacks on the left in the library was a series of biographies for young readers: Geronimo, George Washington, George Washington Carver, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman. It must have been an early attempt to put some diversity into the kids' minds, this was around '69. The covers were all the same style but with a different background color for each, green, red, blue. But inside, each person was just so different and unique. My finger would lean a book out and the story would become mine for an afternoon back home on the couch. Plain language, simple paragraphs, it almost seems to me now as if these people just did what they did, as if it were fated that way. Even the struggle seems fated, after the fact. Geronimo spent years roaming the desert with his band of guerilla soldiers until... I can't remember how it is Geronimo came to surrender to the U.S. Cavalry. At least Harriet Tubman got to live out her life with some semblance of victory, having made that glorious trip via the N. Star a multitude of times. Through swamps and over mountains, night time was her best friend. She was on the night shift you might say, on some abstractly described mission: freedom! All these people were on some kind of mission, as if on a conveyer belt, looking for something. George Washington went looking for it in the cherry tree, Abe Lincoln splitting rails, George Washington Carver in the simple peanut. Even now you can get boiled peanuts by the side of the road, from under a tent, on Georgia county roads.
Ah, but who wants to read reminiscences about the bygone eras? People these days just want to take sides and use their own hand selected 'facts' to back up whatever judgments they have made about you because of the way you look. Its a new and old complaint about the nature of humanity. I think I'd almost like to go blind like my grandmother Margaret did, shortly before she passed away. Who wants to really SEE the world anymore? We judge so much with our eyes, I believe, checking people out as they come walking down the street towards us.
In a way, maybe reading (and writing for that matter) are an escape from the instant judgmentalism of looking. Reading is more like music, the words just roll into the mind and make sense in various ways. Reading allows the mind to think while the heart feels, whereas looking demands the mind make a decision. Friend or foe, prey or predator. Looking essentially constantly asks who is within whom, since everything is outside? Whereas with hearing, you are within me and I am within you, interchangably. You can't really shut your ears. Hearing is inside and outside both, looking is always outside.
We sort it out with words and as we all know, that can be a sordid affair. Would you really like to hear what I have to say? (No wonder I enjoy poetry so much. )At least, with reading we can be sure that the words, the story, the intention, are all within us. Each one of us. One at a time. A world of our own. We are reading a story of various impact and each one of us is blessed by the story. That is, I suppose, if you want to be reading it...
Ps: I noticed when getting the image of Geronimo that it looks like he never surrendered. No wonder I didn't remember exactly what happened. Prisoner of war.
