Not to Live According to Images

Your fingerprints everywhere. And forever.

– Carole Maso, AVA

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The Literary Part

Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel begins with words: “Words, words, words, he screamed at the top of his lungs; the first thing that came to his mind when he finally managed to cut through her breathless sentences.” Thematically, it ends there too: words and words flung against words, a shield of words against other words’ swords.

Love Novel (stunningly translated by Mima Simić) is set in an unnamed city in an unnamed country where “everything that could be looted has been looted and everything that could be sold has been sold.” The story doesn’t unfold so much as shrivel or writhe or rot; again, it’s all there from the beginning. “He” is unnamed and so is “she.” So is “the child,” whose “snout, tail and paws” give him a graceful remove from humanity, especially if his parents are what constitute it. They live in a grey, austere poverty in which communism has been recently exchanged for neoliberalism. From dictatorship to democracy, nothing much has changed. She is an underemployed actress and he is an unemployed writer. Neither believes the other is going to succeed, but it’s convenient if they try; their aspirations get each out of each other’s way: “Go ahead, write, write, write, she tells him, as if it were the easiest thing in the world, as if you could just sit down and start writing… as if writing redeems, as if it’ll compensate for all the negligence and laziness he likes to call fatigue.”

Words, words, words: “as if it were really possible to replace reality with words, pull fiction to the surface of the world and decorate it with miracles.” Yet the novel itself does replace reality with words. It does decorate with miracles – of style. While its characters are weak-willed, their author is not. With its shifting tenses and points of view, leaping or blending perspectives within a single sentence; with its dizzying oscillation between stark, concrete intensity and naïve ideals; with its tender disarming of even the most resolute cynicisms, Love Novel transforms the banality their lives – of poverty, of a bad marriage, of a neglected child, of shame, of feeling trapped, of fucking, of getting too drunk – into literature. It doesn’t ask for recognition, it forces it. Typically, this is what style is, in a novel: forcing recognition by using words in a way that can’t be ignored. Overlooked, yes, but not ignored.

But style can be slippery. Sheila Heti’s new book, Alphabetical Diaries, also begins with words, but it might be more appropriate to say that it starts with a letter: “A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope… A book like a shopping mart, all the selections. A book that does only one thing, one thing at a time.” After ten years of keeping a notebook – the usual way writers record their lives – Heti alphabetized the sentences and published them in twenty-five chapters (no sentences began with x, alas). In doing so, she’s created the most basic and transparent version of an algorithm. This algorithm is the book’s style, its way of being in the world.

Somewhere in the Ns – “Neglect my friends and family. Never having felt so sad. New sheets for the bed. New York, I think, made me depressed. Nice after we were done to lie there holding him…” – we encounter this sentence: “Not to live according to images, but according to time.” The irony of these diaries, a form intrinsically linear, is that time is shattered. In the Ts, for instance, these two sentences appear next to one another: “To give up on the idea of children, which was becoming the next thing to race to. To have his child and soon.” Two opposing thoughts from two separate time periods (ostensibly) are juxtaposed solely due to the words Heti had chosen, at those two separate times, to express them. While written by the same person, the “I” or the consciousness behind each of them is not the same. Rearranging her notebooks, Heti collapses time into space – a consequence of almost all algorithmic activity, especially as we tend to encounter it in our daily lives. Heti’s reflections and memories and anecdotes start to resemble a shuffled folder of “memories” on one’s phone or Facebook profile. If style in Sajko’s novel is traditional (authorial, say), style in Heti’s Diaries is arbitrary, incidental. But it is there, and it is recognizable. In its own way it forces recognition: that anyone’s time can be shattered into space, that you too can be dispersed and rendered discontinuous with yourself and with others.

The Personal Part

That I read Sajko and Heti back to back is itself arbitrary – as is the conversation I’ve decided to create between them. But I’ve been looking for a way out. “Surely he must be aware,” Sajko writes, “of how stupid it is to be repeating words, words, words, without actually saying anything; and just demonstrating that every word is meaningless, and too loud.” I’ve lost count of how many times over the last eight months I’ve tried to pick up a few words and put them down, how stupid it’s all felt. “Hanif agreed,” Heti writes, “that you must finish what you start as a writer, because otherwise you don’t learn anything.” Just look how easy it can be, shoring fragments against one’s ruins. But all I’ve felt is frozen and all I’ve done is nothing. Writing, I’ve noticed, is how I feel like I’m here in the world, and for eight months I haven’t been here, haven’t felt welcome at all.

Fifteen years ago was the great thaw of my life. For three years I’d been attending to myself in a kind of recovery – building a support network, putting together a toolbox, all the things you have to do when you’ve forgotten who you are, or maybe never knew in the first place. A hole had torn open in the winter that year, and spring had fallen out early, if only for a week. It was forty-nine degrees at the end of a Minnesota January and I decided – I was twenty-four – that it was time to begin drinking coffee. My boyfriend (now husband) took photos of the faces I made as I suffered through my first cup. A few weeks later, I took my first vacation in three years and drove from Minnesota to California, where we sat in the middle of the Mojave Desert and ate beans out of a can because I’d heard about it in a Tom Waits song. It was years since I’d been out in the world, really looking, but everything was still there. A few months later, I sat down and wrote my first novel. For so long it felt as if everything were pressing against me, but I pushed back, and it was exhilarating. It’s become one of those times I’m always trying, foolishly, to recapture – to reconnect with how it felt to want, more than anything, to write.

Things are heavier now – for everyone – but let me call this a way out. If language is the house we live in, silence is the tomb we die in. Silence accumulates, and it accumulates fast in a nonsensical, oppressive world. Fifteen thousand children have been murdered – some by sniper bullets fired from rifles my taxes have paid for. The newspaper of record seems committed to reelecting the president that helped them sell more subscriptions. A handful of Nazis are making a living on the same platform I write for without pay. For the first time in my life, I had to water our yard in January – a January without snow. An award ceremony for a Palestinian writer was canceled due to the “inflammatory content” of her novel, which (speaking of style) is narrated as a cold accumulation of facts.

This is one version of the world, of course – a picture of the world relentlessly advertised at me, whether by corporations or by friends and acquaintances who use the tools of corporations to share nonstop images of dead children, fascist headlines, apocalyptic temperatures, and genocidal speeches. But it isn’t the world.

By “one version of the world,” I don’t mean there are many worlds. There is only one world and we are all living in it. To say there are many worlds is not only dishonest, but disastrous – the neoliberal fantasy of eight billion little worlds that have nothing to do with one another. But there are versions, or glimpses – the curated perspectives of the world shown or sold to us. If you open Instagram, your version looks different from mine. But the world, the real world, can’t be experienced like an image. If anything, it’s a giant diamond, and the perspectives we’re sold are each a lone face of the crystal, a flat fraction of the prismatic whole. If you remain a spectator, this is the only glimpse you get. If you let someone – or a platform of someones – shrink your view of the world and hold you in place, it’s all going to look very sad and flat, and you’ll start going around saying things that make others think the world is very sad and flat, and that the best you can do is withdraw, hide under a blanket, maybe get a little drunk or high, spend all your money, and crawl back to work. You can quickly become part of what holds people in place, manipulated into depriving others of their agency.

Resisting this pressure is how style is born. Style is art’s version of agency, or the will – a concept that seems of crucial importance in an increasingly totalitarian society. “Only the artists change your soul,” Heti tells herself, “but the souls change everything else.” I don’t want to say that making art is the thing to do, even if it’s the thing that I can do (I hope). But if, generally, you can push back against this version of the world, you can turn it. That is agency. You can start to shape the way it looks, the way it sounds – and ultimately the way others see it and hear it. Even the way others feel it. Instead of being sold one stupid, ugly version of the life we all share together; and instead of replicating that stupid, ugly version of life, you can reach out, make a little alteration, and start to see the whole dazzling thing.

I’m tired of letting people make money by convincing me that the world is something to hate. I don’t hate it at all. I love it. I love it and I want to be in it. This is the reason I wrote this. It may always have been.

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Thank you for reading. This really is the first thing I’ve written in eight months. The talk on social media and fascism that I was supposed to give in January has been moved to March 1, which you can register for here. As always, if you want to support my work, the best way to do it is to buy my books (especially this one). Thanks so much. <3