It always goes like this: I was going to do one thing but then I did something else. I was going to spend one hour reading Deleuze and Guattari, but then I started scrubbing the inside of the garbage can. I was going to look up interviews with Jack Spicer, but then I got too hungry for the mismatched food in the fridge and walked to the deli I like a few blocks away. I was going to organize my thinking about the readings we were assigned for class, but then I went rollerblading three loops around the park in the middle of a hazy afternoon, weaving back and forth down the big hill until the final stretch, the cheap thundering of plastic skates on rough pavement and all the people who slightly turned their heads to look at me wobbling along with my knees bent.
For the class I was taking we were reading about translation and sourcing and collage. Jack Spicer’s idea that poems are some sort of transmission—received and disclosed by poets but not invented by them. We read Jonathan Lethem’s essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” which broadly claims that all art is influenced by, if not copied from, other art, that in fact the point of art is a multi-faceted sort of engagement both toward itself and extending outward. “Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses.”
I started texting Halle instead of writing. Sitting outside a cafe at a neighborhood near my job, all the beautiful people in clean white shirts pushing strollers, walking tiny dogs with pink leashes, I started thinking about all the things that happen around and on top of and in tandem with writing, these varied atmospheres and noises. Influenced by the woman in a blue dress next to me asking her husband if he’s okay, influenced by the bright plane of sunlight on the asphalt, influenced by the sign across the street that says “EDUCATIONAL TOYZ” and a narrow cage full of neon-colored soccer balls. Influenced or distracted by?
Lethem’s essay implicity suggests that when an artist uses another artist’s work (honestly! I’m not talking about blatant plagiarism here, obviously), it never results in the same piece of art because people and their grammars and their modes of expression are idiosyncratic and irreducible—the “inviolability of a man’s own language,” as Nicholas Moore writes in the preface to Paris Spleen, a book of 50 translations of the same Baudelaire poem. It reminds me of what Gertrude Stein writes in “Portraits and Repetitions,” about how repetition is impossible “because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.”
I watched Souvenir a few days ago, a movie about a young film student who falls in love with a heroin addict. “The most important thing,” her advisor tells her, “is that you somehow make a connection between your experience and the experience you’re trying to film.” The part where he’s high and swaying and sad and she tells him to leave. His face—this look of sadness and surrender and pity, standing there in the pale light. A look of utter distance.
The writer and translator Kate Briggs talks about translation as “not a layering but a setting alongside of something new.” I’ve always loved this idea, which reminds me of a certain kind of parataxic poetry in which many distinct declarative sentences press together to create the opposite of a declaration, a language that allows for both doubt and also openness somehow within—alongside—its certainty. There is a part in Briggs’s novel, The Long Form, where one character tells another that explaining herself, specifically her new reality as the single mother of an infant, may be an ongoing process, that she can’t tell her friend “in five minutes, half an hour,” it might not be “fully sayable.” “Her answer: rephrase it,” Briggs writes. “Repeat herself. Set stories around it, tell stories about it. Keep saying it in different ways.”
At work the other night I was trying to write down the conversations I overheard but kept losing the threads of specific voices in the growing noise of the deepening night. Working in restaurants is such a strange and fragmented experience of language—sentences are cut off by my arrival at a table, or I eavesdrop accidentally on an intimate conversation happening right in front of me, or my own phrases are interrupted by people or drink tickets or the kitchen bell ringing from the basement. I’ve always thought that restaurant work was the opposite of writing because it was embodied and physical, but maybe it’s more because its language is so formless and chaotic, ungraspable. We have our own lexicon, of course, but it’s one of distractions and tangents, stops and starts. A group of three guys wearing backwards baseball caps came in the other night just before last call. I was serving and kept hearing them say, “As a bartender…” to my coworker. Sometimes I heard the questions that followed but mostly I was clearing tables and pumping wine.
“Even when it is unique, a language remains a mixture, a schizophrenic melange, a Harlequin costume in which very different functions of language and distinct centers of power are played out, blurring what can be said and what can’t be said,” write Deleuze and Guattari in “What Is A Minor Literature?” A minor literature embraces this “polylingualism”—translations, influences, distractions, and as such, it resists the major literature, the “languages of masters.” It is a minor literature which allows for a borderlessness, for words to move beyond their definitions and into varying states of “intensities,” a “circuit of states that forms a mutual becoming.”
On Monday I went with coworkers to the end of Long Island to tour a distillery there. We took three trains and leaned our heads against the smudged windows. Strip malls, construction sites, trees. Flatness and green. We stood around a pit full of pineapples gently smoking and said things like, “in the city this would never happen,” and “you can’t get that in the city.” I found myself accidentally bragging about my effortless tan and felt embarrassed.
“Language … is virtuous precisely because it can’t communicate; it can only indicate,” writes Moore. “The communications people have with it are ipso facto imperfect, and precisely because of this lend their lives interest and value they would not otherwise have.” I keep coming back to this very basic idea, lately, that at the root of all great art is a person just being themself—having the audacity to make something of one’s unique singularity, believing in it, and locating as precise a shape for that self as possible. Failure is kind of the point. It’s the translation—full of holes and influences; a little wrong, a little distracted—that matters.
