Day 18: Laura Riding, Grace Paley, Yiyun Li
Poem: Laura Riding - Forgotten Girlhood
A bizarre series of poems that form a loose narrative of a girl coming into existence, taking place in a fantastical world that reminds me of both Gormenghast and Spirited Away.
The stove was grey, the coal was gone.
In and out of the same room
One went, one came.
One turned into nothing.
One turned into whatever
Turns into children.
Mostly I like the poems which resemble the nonsense verse of children's games:
One, two, three, four, more,
Knock at the door,
Come in, come in,
Stir the stew,
Warm love up
In a wooden pot
And serve it hot
With a wooden spoon.
Rap, rap,
Come in, come in,
Loveâs the only thing
That deceives enjoyably.
Mother Mary and her Magdalenes,
We donât care a curse how much weâre deceived
Or deceive.
Again and again the poems come back to a kind of existential phenomenology, as if the narrator is a newborn with a high IQ:
I am hands And face And feet
And things inside of me
That I canât see.
What knows in me?
Is it only something inside
That I canât see?
Laura Riding's poems of the 1920s and 30s are really great. In the late 1930s, she pulled a Wittgenstein, declared poetry meaningless and turned her back on it entirely, turning her attention to linguistics. It seems her work has been forgotten and it is all out of print. I hope the anthologists rediscover and reprint her.
Story: Grace Paley - Mother
A REALLY short story, only one page. You should give it a quick read and return.
First, I love the banal way it starts: "One day I was listening to the AM radio"... The sentences that follow tumble out one after another, relying on association. It feels self-generating in an exciting way.
I also love the way it plays with time, the wonderful sentence "Then she died." appearing both in the middle and then at the end. "Then she died" is the funniest way to end a story, probably because teachers tell you not to do it.
Through tiny flashbacks, you get a clear sense of what the dynamics between the mother and her family are like- in just a few sentences. I don't know how she does it.
###Grace Paley on reading very short stories:
The truth is people are kind of scared by very very short stories- just as they are by long poems.
A short story is closer to the poem than to the novel (I've said that a million times) and when it's very very shortâ1, 2, 2 ½ pagesâshould be read like a poem. That is slowly. People who like to skip can't skip in a 3-page story. (from Sudden Impact, 1986)
We might call this sort of writing Flash Fiction, or Prose-Poems, which can be defined as "one or more justified blocks of text in which weird shit happens".
This story makes me quite excited again.
Essay: Yiyun Li - The Ability to Cry
Content warning: suicide
The best non-fiction book I read last year was Yiyun Li's All Things In Nature Merely Grow, a memoir in which she writes about losing both her sons to suicide. What impressed me was the stark clarity of her writing - the ability to put this overwhelming grief into logical, measured words. Through the writing, Li shapes the world's darkest chaos into order; turmoil into facts and propositions.
This essay from The New Yorker was written five years prior to Things in Nature. In the essay, she talks about her inability to cry after the suicide of her first son and her father's death 14 months later. Only after the unexpected death of her son's babysitter does she break down. Stoicism, that Greek ideal, is either met with Stoic nods from classic men, or vocal euggghhhs from everyone else. To be vulnerable, at least in a performative way, is the contemporary ideal - yet in the essay, Yiyun Li defends her stony composure: "Everything I do, or do not do, may be explained by Marianne Mooreâs poem 'Silence'":
To quote the end of that poem here, in which the narrator recalls things her father used to say; that
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.â
Nor was he insincere in saying, âMake my house your inn.â
Inns are not residences.
I love this poem, and while I would like to say that this distant demeanor is a bad way to live, I actually think it is fairly wise. Yiyun Li writes that this protective distance does not mean unfriendliness or cruelty. Li writes with a lovely, humane coldness:
"Always be kind to people,â my father said when he told me the last story. âWe donât often know what could make a difference to another personâs life.â
Be kind. Keep smiling. These principles have become my default mode, but they are also effective in keeping people at a distance. Make my house your inn, and youâll have my kindness and my smile.
Why I love Li's non-fiction is there is no performative love-for-humanity, an affect you find in most contemporary writing. Her writing shows you can be sincere without gushiness, and vulnerable without self-infantilisation. Should she have written three memoirs about suicide? (Her history with her own attempts, her first son's, her second son's?) For her family and relationships, probably not; but for the world, yes. I really do think she is the best writer for the topic. Most books try to sell you life, and treat death woth utter disgust. Yiyun Li does not try to turn you into an optimist. She does not pretend that life is good and will only get better. All she can do is to report clearly and honestly about the effects upon those who are left behind. To understand the emotional devastation that suicide leaves upon a family has been, for me, a lifeline.
Read her essay here and I very much recommend her book Things in Nature Merely Grow.