Sunday Morning! What is Literature? A little on Sven Birkerts

1. Maybe I should start here. Lately, I’ve been having one of my regularly scheduled existential crises. I remember saying this to a friend in Hamilton years ago, and she responded: “Aren’t you always having an existential crisis?” Fair enough. This one, as far as I can tell, is about literature. What is it? Where do you find it? Aside from the thing I can’t find much of lately, and which I’d like to be involved somehow. I motion towards it and can’t quite reach it.

Part of this is I’ve been going through the traditional hazing ritual known as “querying and pitching” something seemingly designed to make you feel you are headed in the wrong direction. The less said the better, I suspect, but most of what people in “the industry” want to know about your fiction now is what I imagine you hear when selling a picture to Hollywood. “What does your MC (main character) want? What is at stake? What is the hook? Does the II (“inciting incident”) come in the first ten pages? What are similar books (“comps”) that came out in the last four years? Above all, what is your market?” Just point me to the casting couch already!

Which might explain why so many recent novels I’ve read feel more like film treatments than literature. Lots of big events and action, and heroines and villains, and an inkling that something might be going on beneath the surface, but not much more. Like the way we know our coworkers, rather than ourselves.

2. Okay, now, here’s a question I’ve been obsessing over for a while without knowing why. Suppose you get on a train and walk 10 feet from the door to your seat, sit for an hour, and walk 10 feet back to the door and leave at the end of your trip. Meanwhile, the train has gone 50 miles. Is it more appropriate to say you went: 20 feet? 50 miles and 20 feet? or 50 miles? I can’t let go of this question.

We’ll come back to this.

3. The other morning, I was walking to work; in New York City, this usually requires wearing the necessary carapace of rushed indifference. This morning, there was no one else out, though. I was all alone in this stage setting for people’s performed lives. Right as I approached the block where my job is located, I had a distinct feeling of… what was it? Bittersweet ambivalence? Detachment? I can’t quite articulate it, but I was aware that another day would be dedicated to this work, that I am now in middle age, and that I could easily walk away and never work the job again, but I probably wouldn’t know what to do with my time if I did.

But I felt there was “another sky” and another life being lived somewhere else. And, for a moment, I felt connected to this other, deeper life.

Mostly, it was an awareness of time’s passing. Or, of that seated place where time does not pass. You could think of a human life as a journey from one location to another, or a passing of time. Either way, I’m at midpoint. At least, on the outside.

But that’s the closest I can get to the feeling. In general, these feelings that come to me while walking, which feel most central to my consciousness, are ones I can’t quite describe. Maybe they’re only like that for me. Maybe no one else ever feels them. Or, maybe, none of us can talk about them.

4. Ezra Pound either called “poetry” or “literature”- “News that stays news.” The difficult thing with Pound is he said some very smart things and many very stupid things. He was a traitor and an antisemite, and the less said about him the better. But that was a smart thing.

5. A related question: Why is it I feel older today than I did yesterday, but no older than I did when I was twenty?

The answer: Consciousness is that part of you that does not age, but which is the most involved with the passage of time.

Think of consciousness as the traveler on the train watching time fly past the window. Is she moving? No, she’s standing still. Everything else is moving.

Or, maybe it’s just like that for me.

6. By coincidence, I was thinking about all of this when I came upon Sven Birkerts’s book “The Other Walk,” a collection of short essays, in a Little Free Library, where it had been deposited while I was doing something else. No, I had no idea who Sven Birkerts is, but when I read the first page I opened, there was this:

The poem is a memory flash of a meaning that exceeds us, that hovers almost completely out of our reach. If we could possess it- and we can’t except in glimpses- we would know that being, consciousness, is not for nothing, even if it is clearly bracketed by the moments of our birth and death. Being contains the solution for itself, the explanation, and poetry happens at those moments when being connects with its principle.

Jeez, it’s exactly like that! When I say “literature,” I also mean “poetry,” like when I say “philosophy,” I really mean “autobiography.” The things that feel deepest and central to me are the hardest to describe and articulate.

Birkerts’s example was the awareness that would come to him after falling asleep on the subway train. And then, upon waking up, “I would feel that I had awakened in a different place in myself, in a state that felt very strange compared to my usual state but that was at the same time more deeply familiar than anything.”

This felt like more than a coincidence.

Have you ever noticed it’s only fortuitous coincidences that feel that way? Like “more than a coincidence”? Or, maybe that’s just me. It might be different for you. For the guilt-ridden, maybe every unlucky coincidence feels that way.

7. Maybe literature is writing that answers the forever unspoken question with:

“No, no, it’s not just like that for you.”

And so, what is it like for YOU this weekend?