Alive

The experimental has always been about finding the way to stay alive on the page, open to radiance and vibrancy and the infinite possibilities of word and world. A vertiginous free fall into beauty, it follows no god, worships no formula—one sets out in the night on an adventure (the lake), toward the unknown, embracing uncertainty, courting ruin, following an intuition, a premonition—stumbling after something—thrilling, ineffable, in motion, becoming, yet-to-be, never before seen. Mysterious and inviting, seductive, one might time and space travel or move not at all—stay small within the confines of a syllable or two. We might try to shape emotion like music or apply a glittering geometrics or calculus to the proceedings. The openness is all. Neither inherited or borrowed, it resists the death impulse that drives so much mainstream work, with its desire to be little and safe and over and already decided. One might allow in the unbidden or the tangential or the random. Invited: endless permutation and variability. At once playful and grave.

And we take our experiments into the lab. We may test a series of thresholds, or weaknesses—note the things we might otherwise swerve away from or circle. We might place our vulnerability into a crucible. Watch the way a narrative given the chance might fray. We might place darkness inside and chronicle 7 Tenebrae responses. We might subject our text to fire or ice or ultraviolet light. Explore the effects of freezing—what does it do to the temporal: the synchronic, the simultaneous? Or fire—reconstitute what we can from the char. Working with the embers: the residue, the trace. That which is left in the end. Bring our heartbreak. Be not afraid: Into the strangeness and the sorrow (she died without warning, out of time, in her sleep during the winter break) the limitation of the mortal body (and in my heart a glass globe—that is how I picture it). Placed in a cradle that holds time, our experiments might be with brevity or density or with the way things end.

Last semester, we read in my freshman seminar Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1982). And only weeks later, after the Paris bombings, we read it again, and talked about the flexibility of a text and the way meaning accumulates the melancholy of ordinary things and the weight of the world and 13 ways to not look away. To create a vessel to hold all this, to contain all that is uncontainable. The things we think impossible to bear or understand. Traversing the uncertain, the open-ended, the strange forever in us.

We might find the way. We might write in codes—in talking codes or computer codes or in the love notes we once passed in class so long ago. We might attempt an accordion narrative, a bifurcated novel, or a story like an echo chamber. We might find ourselves up against the inexorable until something gives way and the narrative blooms or transforms or levitates.

We’ll invite the unexpected in, the outlandish, the unbidden. Tolerant of the erasure, the tangent, the mysterious, the right road lost. We’ll leave nothing out—or maybe we’ll leave almost everything out.

In the laboratory today—an assignment for my undergrads—take your name and see what it has to reveal. The secret asleep in that configuration—and write a piece. Discover these intimacies and connections and reverberations. The thing you have carried all this time, the first word you ever heard—your name. Or on another day, begin with a sharply focused, clearly delineated story and keep adjusting the lens and chronicle that slowly moving out of focus until you end with a blur. There are endless things to test and try—because we are alive.

And after a day’s work and upon reflection, when asked by ABR to reflect, it seems to me the experimental involves a different sort of engagement with the page than the mainstream’s engagement. It interrogates assumptions, as it always has. In active dialog with the things the mainstream has guarded and taken for...