Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children ceased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
— emily dickinson (quoted in Tell It Slant)
I recently read Tell It Slant by Beth Follet, and I must say that I think it's very much beautiful and great - quite vivid - and it makes me miss Montreal. (I am often missing Montreal, and it happens a lot, it seems, when I am reading things ... I think I have some sort of fundamental association - a correspondence, if you will - with Montreal and writing). There is a triad of cities in the book that are settings for the writing that I can currently relate to: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver.
Where you come from means something, and of course where you are means something else. There is often a relationship between the two, but sometimes the places are where they are, meaning whatever it is that they mean, without referencing or figuring predominantly in relationship to one another.
Sometimes you move around to different places, and doing so is tantamount to moving around in different modes of being. And sometimes it is just you dealing with different environments. And choosing to be anywhere is about choosing the environment, which is like choosing the space-of-being to be in.
There is also always sometimes a place you would like to be where you are not. And you can hope to be there, plan to be there, long to be there, etc. -- and yet not be there. And that also is a way of being; like being out of being and wanting to be in being.
Places can make you be some way, can shape you into being some way, influence the way you are. And people can in this way also be like places. So, going to places can also be like going to people, and going to people can be like going to places -- and both can be like going towards what or who you are, can be, when you are there in them, with them.
And of course all of this is very much like time, because when-you-are is very much like where-you-are. And you can think about the way you were, and think about what happened, and remember when you were with whom, where, about what and how -- like as though you’re in a dream (or writing) about what you think you do remember, and what you think and feel about it all.
You are now and you are then and you are you, but different in each place. That is, when it is or was.
This is how it all becomes to me, thinking now about it, like it all is what a diary is like, without it being written like a diary in form. It is, in this respect, sort of like the heart of a diary. Or, like the art of letters, when the letters are disclosures, poetic, of the heart and soul, growing, grown, finding, losing, lost.
But you are there when while it is all happening, so it doesn’t have the comfy cosy feeling that a thing that’s already happened and now you’re being told about it all does have -- it has the current feeling of whatever it is that is happening right then. And yet even though you are there with it, going along as it is going, you are also not there but outside of it, and so it is still in its way comforting to read it all. It’s a confession that is literary in form, and that is why and how it can be both romantic and aesthetic.
The book makes me think about Roland Barthes: The Lover's Discourse, (one of the many books I loved by him, but that one in particular was very important); Camera Lucida, (its sense of the erotics of slight disclosure, and I note the main character in Tell It Slant is a photographer); and Barthes By Barthes ("read it as though it were a novel" he says at the start of his autobiography ... more literary confession, more romance, more aesthetic, etc.). All those books went a long way to shape my approach to writing theory/criticism/philosophy (... dare I just call it writing?).
There is a peculiar kind of space in Beth Follet’s writing that I find very peaceful and languid; a sort of melancholy that is liberating in a particular sort of way. I love the way it is seamlessly fragmented - the shifting time frame - the slippage between the first personal singular and second personal singular - (I am fascinated with how saying "you" can be like saying "me"). It is writing that does not present itself as writing but as the shifting interconnectedness of stories/memories/impressions, of a seeming narrative making you become and be through unraveling it all, until there's nothing there but the everything that makes it possible ... the silence, the stillness.
Very nice.
