I wanted to call this post “Situated at Universally Public Distance from the Very Private Public Humanness of the Humanly Lived Life of Now,” but then even the two people who read this (me and Ray Gibbs) might have shied away.
There are a few practical concerns about the modern writing life that remind me of high school proms–invitations to which I have said yes and no, sometimes both. Freshman year, Matt Stahl asked me to go. I said yes. But upon reflections in algebra and French, it began to seem like a much too exciting thing to have to experience in public.
Of course, I wanted to see what a prom was like, and to not eat the food the way they all say “you’ll never eat a bite of the food,” to participate in a kind of rite–but I didn’t want it to be me going. So I unsaid my yes and spent one particular April night sitting outside my bedroom window, drinking powdered iced tea, and imagining how it would be to feel the bright orange setting sun lighting up your pancake makeup as you stepped out of the rental car/limo.
I feel this push/pull of anonymity/community with Facebook, AWP, and yes, blogging. The experience seems important, and maybe fun, if only it could be had without being Darcie Dennigan in capital letters.
Don’t get me wrong. If prom, or AWP, didn’t exist, it’s true I would be the last person to invent it. Still, if it’s around, I’ll go. But having to be myself, carrying my nametag around–it’s preoccupying to the point where it interferes with what the experience might actually be.
If I make little sense, it’s because tonight I have been reading Laura Riding Jackson’s essay “On the Continuing of the Continuing.“ She asks, “Is it possible to be an I, and not so know?”
Sometimes I wish so! Especially in my writing.
To be a human, and a writer, living in the world, as William Hazlitt writes, “as in it, not of it: it is as if no one knew there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it…”
(Of course though, I want to make an exception for you.)
(Even as I am trying to be a speaker who, and this is Jackson again, “by grace of spirit and force of mind, breaks the spell of time-and-place confinement, bodily seclusion, and transforms the narrow-boundaried footing and reach of word-address into a standing, speaking, in the open midst of being in its boundaryless whole.”)
Or you could just imagine Jackson standing in a strapless dress, which in its too much/not enough quality is worse than being naked or wearing a turtleneck, reciting these lines:
The wind suffers of blowing
The sea suffers of water
And fire suffers of burning
And I of a living name.
(from “The Wind Suffers“)