We both make fun of ourselves in some ways. Lofty ambitions can’t truly control the future. The world turns, and people impact it, but those impacts create smaller dents than we realize. To think only of the future lofts your goals away from the world inasmuch as it exists. To think only of the present is to shield yourself from the fact that the world is always in transition. Therefore, the only thing one can do is work in the moment, while at the same time reaching for infinity.
December 14th, 2011: “I concede, Mr. McCarthy…”
I’m currently finishing up Changing my Mind, a collection of essays by one of the few writers in the generation above mine that I respect, Zadie Smith. To sum up the essays: she’s a brilliant literary critic, albeit not nearly as interesting when she begins to delve into the personal essay form. Anywho, the reason why I feel like writing a blog post on her is because one of her essays, “Two Paths for the Novel” has spoken to me in a way it definitely didn’t the first time I read it. Back in 2009, when I was an intern at a literary agency, looking for articles to read with which I could waste time, I chanced upon an essay in the New York Times Book Review, in which Zadie argues that, right now, we have either traditional realism, or experimentalism, neither of which are healthy states of literature, but that the experimental road, or at least the one recently paved by Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, was the best bet for our literary future. At the time, I thought “cool story brah.” Then, a few years later, I flipped to this essay, and I almost didn’t want to read it. I had remembered what I had thought the essay was about, and thought, “Oh, great, another self-indulgent essay arguing for more meaningless language for the sake of language,” which to me is just as pointless as meanderingly boring realist writing that’s pretty much doing what people 200 years already perfected. My aesthetic is the writer who fuses language with story, constructs worlds of great intricacy with sentences that are unique, and if you can’t do both, you might as well back your literary bags and go home. I began Zadie’s essay with this thought in mind, that Zadie was pretty much arguing for the lesser of two evils, but one that was still pretty irrelevant to art. Then, I stumbled upon her conclusion one of her concluding thoughts.
“As you read it, Remainder makes you preternaturally aware of space, as Robbe-Grillet did in Jealousy, Remainder’s obvious progenitor. Like the sportsmen whose processes it describes and admires, Remainder, “fills time up with space” by breaking physical movements, for example, into their component parts, slowing them down; or by examining the layers of a wet, cambered road in Brixton as a series of physical events rather than emotional symbols. It forces us to recognize space as a nonneutral thing – unlike realism, which often ignores the specifities of space. Realism’s obsession is convincing us that time has passed. It fills space with time.
Something has happened here, someone has died. A trauma, a repetition, a death, a commentary. Remainder wants to create zinging, charged spaces, stark, pared down, in the manner of the ancient plays it clearly admires…. But the ancients always end in tragedy… Remainder ends instead in comic declension, deliberately refusing the self-mythologizing grandeur of the tragic. Fact and self persist, in comic misapprehension, circling each other in space (literally, in a hijacked plane). And it’s precisely within Remainder’s newly revealed spaces that the opportunity for multiple allegories arises.” (Smith 95-96)
Ladies and gentleman, with this one page, I am convinced that me and Zadie Smith are indeed of the same world, for she too realizes that, regardless of whether a story has meaning or not, that story has to take place in a space, and whereas literature up until now has used space to annihilate time, it is now time for a literature that uses time to annihilate space (see, she’s even using my own wording!). In other words, I’m interested in a literature that shows representations of time, but without ever referencing a fixed space, because of the constant movement back and forced between space that fragments the notion that we can even exist in one space. Maybe, McCarthy is interested in a similar thing, but in a different way. For me, it’s a geopolitical, physical space. For him, it’s a space that has to be orbited instead of stated, bricks that are used to construct a wall rather than an abstraction, ie brick 1 + brick 2+ brick 3 = wall, rather than “I live next to that wall.” I’ll admit that I had to put down Remainder; it was a book that I couldn’t get into. That being said, I’m always looking for more allies, and I’m pleased that Smith may have inadvertently helped me find one.
December 16th, 2011: “say you’ll go…”
Today, in an hour, I leave New York, hopefully for good. When I first came here, a year ago, it was a great city. It was exactly what I needed for freshman and sophomore year, a place in which I could reinvent myself and hide from the traumas that made me so passive to myself in Georgia. There was so much to do, everyone and everywhere had a great energy. I clicked with people in a way I didn’t know I could. Then, I went to Madrid, evolved into a different person, and found the States not only boring, but strangely scathing. I realized that the States disturbed me so much (and not in the sense of “pissed me off,” but in the sense of “agitated my very sense of self) is because I kept framing my world as evolution rather than actualization. I am still the Kiran that I was at age 5, even if I’m changed; my traumas will always be mine, and I can’t pretend to kill them off; I have to accept them, using my art to make beauty out of myself and therefore redeem my self.
In other words, I came full circle in this city, and I’m proud of that. No longer do I hate this city because of “what it did to me,” but because it’s super noisy (despite my goal to sleep in until eleven today, I got awoken by my loud neighbors at 8:30), and its competitive edge kills me. I need some place more calm, energetic, but at the same time laidback (MADRID!).
There are many parts of myself I’m leaving behind with this city. First are my friends. I’m pleased to say that every person who went the extra mile to keep in touch with me when I left for a year stayed by my side this year, and for the most part grew to become an even greater part of myself than when I first had left them. I feel like these 5 people have grown with me as I have with them (along with the addition of one new super-friend), and I hope that I can cherish them for a lot longer than my stay in New York.
The second is my brain. I’ve realized that academia and critical thought aren’t my cup of tea, even though I still largely think in that logic. This semester has been me trying to exhaust whatever theory I have left in. I’ll probably keep the skeletons of my thoughts with me, referencing them at future readings and lectures, but keep them out of my artistic modes of thought. Frankly, I’m glad blogging has allowed me to slowly exhaust the millions of thoughts in my head, because I’ve realized I can only create a global novel by just working on every novel I write, piece after piece, in the hopes of finally reaching a novel that has encompassed the entire world’s way of being in one space. I want to create art that can speak centuries after my life has ended. I write for the globe.
The final is myself. I’m learning to become Kiran instead of Kiran 1 or 2 or 3. Time will continue to make me who I am. This is inevitable for all people. I’m different only in that I see redemption in where I’ve failed, beauty in all that I’ve lost. The world is chaos; somewhere, there can be peace in anarchic matter. Me coming to terms with New York was a step forward in finding my peace. Even if I haven’t imploded into myself just yet.
December 17th, 2011: “a reaction to Don Quixote, the novel of great transitions…”
I don’t know if this is common knowledge, but Don Quixote’s knightly name is The Knight of the Sorrowful Face. It comes when Sancho,