First and prime-motherfuckin’-airily: it is too stupid for words to outsource your own sense of worth. Strong words, okay. But what, pray tell, backs them up? Good question. Almost sounds like you’re on to me. It might increasingly strike the reader that I open myself to charges of solipsism. This might be a good time to make the case that the enunciative “I” here, gendered merely for expedience, works in a laboratory and observes human phenomena germane to a set field of study, though one that is generously open-ended. Aldous Huxley praised D. H. Lawrence for writing novels with no characters in them. D. H. Lawrence was a lab technician. If I come along with the imposture of a “proper name” with its capacity to provisionally constellate, there are no shortage of such names floating around in Lawrence either…and in the case of both D.H. Lawrence and myself: not all of these phenomena are especially pretty. I wrote a large book of small essays last year. It is called Bottomless Casket: A Year in Books and it is not actually itself a book because it is only a manuscript which I have half-assed shopped about and which, in the year of COVID, I cannot get so much as officially rejected. Is there a person I observe—or some thing or set of things relatively like a person—whose ego is bruised? It’s not nearly that simple. The answer “yes and no” hardly seems to cut it. Let’s note two things, the second already a repetition: 1) the work is a life; 2) it is too stupid for words to outsource your own sense of worth. That being said, something compelled me this past week to send the manuscript to an old friend I have neither seen nor in any way contacted (or been contacted by) in many years. Back in Ottawa at the turn of the century, this friend and I were impossible larger-than-life marauders who, upon reflection, strike even myself as escapees from the asylum of fiction, a challenge to so much as credit as flesh and bone (which those two young people obviously no longer are). He is now a professor out East, married to his second wife, and owner, he tells me in his first of two rapidly-dispatched emails, of a mortgage-free house in the burbs. Okay. I suddenly felt like I needed to send this friend my large more or less abandoned manuscript. Though all of my various deflective statements absolutely tell their truth too, I will confess to having been highly gratified to have received the second email from my old friend half an hour after I had sent my first. He had just boarded a train, he wrote, and, having his tablet along with him, had already made serious headway with my manuscript, which had him “hooked.” He offered me meaningful praise, and his meaningful praise meant. It meant for me and I felt it mean for me. “And, on those many occasions you allude to where it was like you were pretty much out of time, on death's proverbial porchway,” he writes, “you had nothing but time + books. And maybe because, in the long hospital and psych ward and rehabilitation clinic times when one is contained and/or hooked up to a machine (literally and figuratively), a flitting of consciousness here and there permitting that one thing that was the only worthwhile thing to be permissible: read, read, read.” Right. That is right. He continues. “Everything outside is busy, people rushing about, chasing things, deploying small plans, always trying to strategize just an hour ahead of themselves, but there you were, active in mind but not in body. No, I'm not courting old dualism except as a matter of point. Only the fastest minds know how to slow the fuck down.” I am not quite sure how clear it is or will be to readers what my friend means by “the machine,” especially its figurative aspect. (He has been going on about the machine and the machinic since I met him in the 1990s.) The literal meaning is pretty simple. During late stage alcoholism/addiction I spent a lot of time in hospitals hooked up to IV drips and monitors. To explain what it is to become uncoupled from the figurative machine and what that might have to do with a superpower my friend attributes to me—which is indeed a superpower I possess—probably requires more explanation, which I would like to begin providing by backtracking ever so slightly. Bottomless Casket: A Year in Books is comprised of 101 essays I wrote in 2019 corresponding to each of the 101 books I read that year. I knew the fact that I originally shared all of these essays on the social media site Goodreads probably made the whole thing seem dubious in the extreme, such that it became my reckoning that I needed to provide a gangbusters Introduction capable of making with the heavy suasion. So that is what I did. The Introduction incorporates close consideration(s) of the 1948 film Portrait of Jennie, which is approached from a number of angles and made to bounce off the text (my manuscript) and the contexts of the text (which is framed as bound-up in work set on pursuing recovery by idiosyncratic means). The eponymous Jennie, played by the great actress Jennifer Jones, is a revenant, a solid and material being capable of (and available for) direct physical intimacy who just so happens to have died approximately two decades before she enters the story, gallivanting childlike in Central Park in 1940s-anachronistic Puritan regalia. In my Introduction, I address how the revenant figure occupies an abstract line, the third synthesis of time conceptualized in philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s 1968 book Difference and Repetition. Now, if the figurative machine, a device of capture making use of the variegated apparatus of daily life in the social field into which one finds oneself haplessly flung, subsists primarily on the first two syntheses of time, those relating to habit and memory, the abstract line is where the indolent supplicant who reads may perhaps have an opportunity to uncouple, making efficacious use of a temporal regime zigzagging parallel, in colloquy with revenants, both teachers of return and agents of the immediately accessible living eternal (the only eternal available to us). In her essay/lecture “Nationalism and the Imagination,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak extrapolates forward from Roman Jakobson’s argument that the experience of “equivalence” is the key mobilizer of the poetic function. Spivak wants to inaugurate an “inventive equivalence” employed in such a way that it might be able to undo the “possessive spell.” It is this “possessive spell” that I believe we could argue is what is produced and reproduced as long as we are coupled to the figurative machine. The imaginative utilization of an abstract line may allow us to decouple in such a way that we are able to take back possession of possession itself. The imagination is not the caster of spells but rather the tool we can use to break them, and that is how the speedy mind slows itself down…precisely in its newly achieved authority over the spells originally imposed from without. As somebody who has suffered from mania and manic psychosis, I have lived the experience of the speed getting on top of me, of its poisonous usurpation of agential governance, triumph of fateful (perhaps fatal) allegro. Much of my fiction has dealt with the spree and I have always responded to literary fiction fixated on spree. Spree is the diabolic interpolation of an alien and annihilating will. When you are in spree it is too late to slow down. You’ve been caught, you have to ride it out. There are two perfect novels on the subject by American writers that immediately come to mind, Stanley Elkin’s The MacGuffin from 1991, a brilliant and hellacious comic novel with no chapter breaks (or even breathing breaks) about the marauding coca leaf-chewing street commissioner Bobbo Druff, and John Hawkes’s Travesty from 1976, a protracted monological nightmare about a logorrhoea that is prelude to a monstrously deferred vehicular murder-suicide. As an alcoholic with a proneness toward manic psychosis, I can relate to Travesty all too well, having for a long while unwittingly fashioned of my life a harrowing hostage situation. Books can put me on and ventriloquize me in a manner altogether Satanic. Punctuation marks seem at times principally to exist as necessary breaks, like those incorporated into the engineering of motor vehicles, preventing the whole enterprise from cartwheeling off into void. A book can slow you down betimes, surely, but my powers of adagio and lento, the contra to allegro, those my friend notes in his praise of my manuscript, are, I should think, more reliably ministered to by the cinema, which will again bring me to Jennifer Jones, a revenant dead since 2009, no matter what character she is playing. What is crucial here and is always crucial is above all the actress. The actress has always been my principal point of identification in the cinema. Dating back to the dawn of film as a domain of legitimate academic study, we owe to the feminist scholar Laura Mulvey and her cohort the implementation of a macrotextual schematic that couples the cinematic apparatus to the male gaze and situates the woman within the context of the bondage of to-be-looked-at-ness. However, my identification with the woman is my identification with the apparatus, and what cannot be nullified here is the potency of her gaze. Think of films where we have a privileged view of an actress gazing directly into the camera. Harriet Andersson in Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953), Setsuko Hara in various film by Yasujirō Ozu, Alicia Vikander in Wim Wenders’s Submergence (2017). The actress looking directly at the camera is not looking at me, merely at the camera, I am not there for that gaze even as I am, the actress likewise receiving my gaze with no knowledge of my existence, no consciousness of its displaced, individuated presence. It is common to frame these matters in terms of scopophilia, gendered imbalance, but what I experience is a complementarity that immediately provides a space—contingent upon the working of an abstract line—for precisely what Spivak calls “inventive equivalence.” This is already a matter of magic and it compliments the magic that is the breaking of the spell, the uncoupling from the figurative machine, the radical re-territorialization of identification, the slowing the fuck down. 'Tis assuredly the case that my favourite movie stars born in the first decade of the 20th century are Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks, but it has taken me longer than it ought to have to realize that Jennifer Jones, born the same year as my maternal grandfather, stands alone as the finest born in the second. Two of her greatest films, Cluny Brown (1946) and Gone to Earth (1950), are about the achievement of a line-of-flight, a key concept in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on schizoanalysis, categorizing as it does a species of phenomena relating to the forging of connections and the opening of new passages that subvert the impositions of the binary apparatus and as such the figurative machine (the machine that is all those mechanisms with which the social field would set out to figure you). In the long-unpublished interview with Deleuze and Guattari conducted by film scholar Raymond Bellour finally made available in English this past summer (in Letters and Other Texts, the final of three collections of Deleuze minutiae brought to us by Semiotext(e)), the two interviewees repeatedly make the assertion that schizoanaysis believes and wants to communicate a belief in the right to nonsense. While Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud are of course patron saints for this school of advocacy, might not the declarative “squirrels to the nuts!” from Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown serve as its battle cry. However, if you really want the revenant Jennifer Jones, the teacher first of return, secondarily of adagio and lento, you could not conceivably do better than 1943’s The Song of Bernadette, the film that sent her supernova. It ends with dying, but this is a dying that communicates its profound dignity and superhuman forbearance through the face and the gaze by means of an economy of affect. Sister Bernadette, a saint, a worker of miracles, is dying of tuberculosis of the bone, a brutal and agonizing way to go, but you’d never know it, just as the cruel Sister Vauzou, who believes her charge a fraud, does not know it. Upon realizing what Bernadette has withstood so serenely, Sister Vauzou is struck with holy awe, absolutely converted, the viewer’s (certainly this one’s!) conversion already long a done deal. Jennifer Jones is not dying of tuberculosis of the bone during the production of The Song of Bernadette. Still, what her face offers us is precisely the communicable neutralization of the intensities a novel like John Hawkes’s Travesty so effusively performs.
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