M.I. Gelb

a series of intermitten reflections on my "project" as a writer

today

definitions

by project i mean the thing that i am doing (or more specifically the thing i want to do but am incapable of (forever incapable of) which is a mix of influences and desires and pain which is to say ah let's start again

i don't like the word project (but i do like it because it is painfully unromantic) but i think it is the best choice for that thing all artists have (that is to say, you don't have to lay out a manifesto to have a project (i just mean what you are trying to do with your art (and how you are trying to do it)) therefore ah let's start again

constellation points:
- surrealism (to destabilize, to bring something out from below, to push into something else)
- modernism (to explode into new logics)
- postmodernism (to recognize that the only logic that exists must be exploded)
- marginalized literature (to be small to be anti-hegemonic to be anarchist to find value in anything else but this)
- fear and rage (to scream to scream to scream)
- radical transfeminism (to explode my own body into liberation to push back to try not to die to recognize the world wants to kill me)
- mad pride (to write through and for my brain and nothing else)

thus, writing (such as it is (is it funny or awkward or embarrassing to write this while i'm still working on a collection that expresses these things) and such as it will be)


)

probably the most I have ever felt recognized by a book, have felt that the author thinks and writes like I do. To apprehend this as a book about pregnancy that drifts into abstraction is wrong, in the same way as saying Taubes' To America and Back in a Coffin is about divorce. Pregnancy is the trumpet of Jericho, the walls fall and everything comes pouring out and it's no longer about that exactly. Now it's about, ultimately, whether it's worth trying to live in a world that despises you for your strangeness, or if it's worth dying.

The wind reconfigures and merges with you. Let it.

therapist: evil Clarice Lispector isn't real, she can't hurt you
Unica Zurn: check out my novella it's called The Trumpets of Jericho and you'll have normal feelings about it

like a lot of mentally ill women writers, especially of the surrealist and post-surrealist milieu, there's a degree to which Zurn's history of Brain Stuff outweighs in public consciousness her actual work. Even when people talk about The Man of Jasmine, for instance, they tend to focus much more on its autobiographical nature than its literary qualities. i'll write a different post about that, but the point right now is just that if you like the sparking animistic stream-of-consciousness explosions of someone like Lispector and are interested in what a more nightmarish, almost horror-tinged writer might do in that dimension, Zurn is a great person to take a look at.

is that sometimes he's writing about French social manners which i have limited patience for and then he brings out the most incisive, unique, beautiful sentiment you've ever read

some bits living in my head from Combray I and the beginning of Combray II:
- the bit about how in bed at night space melts away completely
- the whole extended bit where he talks about his horror at his parents realizing he was going to be a sad, weird child forever
- the madeleine bit of course, though more specifically, the visual way he describes memory as a theater set that is suddenly connected to its surroundings
- the description of his aunt's tea where he talks about how, since it's not a factory-made blend, all the individual leaves create this pile-up of detail and desiccated life

people always talk about Waiting for Godot as this existential waste, which it is, but it's a really charming one, and they don't talk about that part so much. if only we could be so lucky to be trapped in the void with our best friend who's kind of annoying but goddammit we don't know what we'd do without him!

the thing about Beckett, or how i read him, is that there's a difference between an absurdist and a nihilist. if the question is "why do humans keep doing things even though it doesn't matter?", then it is a question asked with affection, the same affection you feel towards a particularly old dog who still tries to run to dinner even though her legs can barely carry her.

even The Unnamable, possibly the most straight-up nightmarish Beckett work, ends with the above phrase. Beckett does not champion the human impulse, but he doesn't really denigrate it either. more so, he thinks it's odd and funny and is curious what exactly is going on there. his work is an investigation of peeling away layers of the person only to find more layers and more words and more perception and, like all good investigation, that requires a genuine interest in the thing you're investigating, not just a desire to prove that it's useless.

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