Temporary change of venue for Tinfish Editor

For the next three months, most of my blog posts will be available at Jacket2.

My commentaries will appear here, but I'll also announce them when they're posted.

And so the first is titled, "Gizelle Gajelonia, Timothy Yu, and Jonathan Stalling in Conversation: No Intertexts!  But Inhabitations!"  You can take a look here.

This space will remain reserved for more argumentative and more personal posts, but most of my words will appear in the virtual Philadelphia of our imaginations.

Interpellating _Coal Mountain Elementary_ by Mark Nowak, based on a talk by John Zuern

This past Thursday I attended a colloquium given by my colleague, John Zuern, called "Who's There? Two Modes of 'Interpellation' with Implications for an Ethics of Fiction."  I won't forget the first talk I heard John deliver, in which he managed to discuss the Vatican and software icons in the same breath.  And I won't forget this one either, as it so ably framed issues in my Documentary Poetry class, as well as in the four novels John is working on for his book project.

The two methods of interpellation John laid out are by Louis Althusser and Emmanuel Levinas.  The more famous Althusserian theory posits that we are interpellated into the dominant culture as compliant subjects without our really knowing it.  For me, the moment of interpellation emerges most vividly when my bored children suggest that we do something fun, like go shopping.  Ah, consumerism.  Levinas' less famous formulation of interpellation depends on our being interrupted out of our self-satisfaction.  The knock on the door does not offer us the end of a dream that becomes a poem, as it did for Coleridge, but a disturbance that shakes us, gives us "consciousness of" the Other, puts us in proximity to that Other.  The problem is that disturbance, like a wave, folds over on itself.  The writer needs to extend that moment, or repeat it.  But that much is for later.


And so I re-opened Mark Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary on Friday morning before workshop and saw Nowak working with these models.  For those of you who haven't read this book, a brief description: Nowak collages testimonies on the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia, various mine disasters in China, and school lessons about the coal mining industry devised by the American Coal Foundation (a non-profit!).  He also includes photographs of mines and miners from China by Ian Teh and photographs of Sago that he took.  Jules Boykoff has elsewhere referred to this juxtaposition of China and West Virginia as "radical geography."  I included it in my documentary poetry class as the limit-case of authorship as collage, as curation, as editing, rather than as writing.

The clear model of interpellation in Coal Mountain Elementary is the Althusserian one, which emerges in the lessons prepared by the American Coal Foundation to teach children about profits and losses in the industry (monetary, not human, costs).  That "the ACF does not engage in lobbying" is a red herring, as their work is to indoctrinate children into the virtues of capitalist coal mining by way of worksheets on the making of coal flowers and the mining of chocolate chip cookies (sic).  Again, I thought of my children, their school worksheets.  A worksheet is a form that comes to the child from an anonymous authority--no one knows who authors the worksheet--and it demands particular answers on the blank lines it offers.  My daughter, when she fills the sheet out, may feel she is operating with volition, but she is not the author; she is the form filler, the person offering the answers that have already been determined.  The children who do the chocolate chip project in Nowak's book are then asked to create a worksheet for other students; this only enforces the notion that we are being made into subjects who then do unto others as others have done unto us.

That we were talking about worksheets in workshop struck me as telling.  While the children of the first lesson were to "observe the process of crystallization in the making of coal flowers, a historic craft among coal mining families," we were gathered to talk about the "craft" of poetry.  Our workshop is a metaphor for the place where a craftsperson makes something useful, even something beautiful.  But is that beauty a cover for the ugly industry it advocates, if that industry is coal-mining or even the poetry biz?  Hmmm.  (Do the beautiful color photographs of Chinese miners and the cities they live in offer any cover for our recognition of the toll they pay for their dangerous work?)  While the children are not being told about that toll, we graduate student/professorial subjects think we know all too well.  We've been talking a lot about tenderness (see this post) and discomfort in our class.  But how to "solve" our own experiment?  I suspect we cannot, except by carrying its perpetual discomfort with us, like the Levinasian moment of interpellation.  And I'm keen to remember our workshop colleague, JS, who reminds us that beauty is a good thing.

And so we arrived at the ethics of form.  Form is often talked about as craft, which is assumed to have its own value.  But for us, in this course especially, form is what enables us to keep the disturbances going.  When my student DC copies the directions for the pulmonary respirator and alternates moments of being with his dying grandfather; when AB prints a poem by a woman inmate beside statistics about incarceration; when DK writes a Valentine out of equations for financial derivatives, these cause disturbances in us.  But lest we get too comfortable in our forms, we need to switch gears, keep the reader guessing.  And we need to do that without seeming to switch those gears arbitrarily.  As in, the form must say something significant about the content.  Better yet, it does that through the content, so that the process remains alive to writer and reader alike.  Not a work-sheet, but a working-place.

There are many more lessons here, appropriate in talking about a book based on lessons, where lessons are learned in West Virginia and China, in our classrooms, and in Kuykendall 410 where John Zuern so ably shepherded us through his ideas about interpellation.  The last "lesson" in Nowak's book mandates that children write "creatively," but within rather severe restrictions.  This is another moment to think about pedagogy (what am I offering my students and how am I limiting them?) and about reading (to what extent am I being re-interpellated by Nowak's text, and should I be skeptical of that process?)  I hope to return to them soon.  Levinas's "traumatism of astonishment," which might otherwise be translated into the surprising thoughts during meditation or an apt synchronicity recognized, is everywhere to be felt.  I want also to note the irony of learning so much about documentary poetry from a talk on the ethics of fiction.  But for now I need to switch forms, leave the blog for the work of this coming week . . .

Note: Probably the best interview with Nowak is by Steel Wagstaff and can be found here.  It was originally published in Contemporary Literature.

Incident report, 2/22/12: Cell phone domestic

This happens a lot more than I like to admit; I couldn't find the book I'm teaching on Friday.  I drove to my office, couldn't find it there.  I drove to Revolution Books to pick up a fresh copy, but I arrived before they opened.  So I sat in my car, drinking Kokua Market's best ginger ale.  Through the windshield I spotted a smiley face on one of the cactus leaves, the one attached to two outstretched arms.  Cactus angel.  An employee from the restaurant approached the recycle bin pushing a white metal cart; dozens of bottles rattled and clanked.  He poured them in the container, walked away.  On the curb beside the orange dumpster (Roll-Offs, it read) a young woman sat, left arm tattooed from top to bottom.  She held a cell phone to her right ear.  YOU MISUNDERSTAND, she yelled.  Shorter words ensued.  One half of a domestic.  She held her left palm up to her face as if to read it, or like a threat to no one but herself.  I got out of my car, climbed the stairs, got my book.  On my way out, she still crouched there, smoking a cigarette, clutching the phone.  The air a bit quieter.  She was wearing brown boots. 

Incident reports

I always get lost in Pearl City, always.  Give me counter-intuitive directions (the kind you remember, because they're backwards) one-half mile uphill from the H1 in Pearl City, and I'll turn the other way when I get there.  When I first moved to Honolulu I never failed to miss the airport exit; every time, I ended up in Pearl City.  Pearl City is the long strip of my bad driving dreams.  So, when I went to pick up paperwork at LCC the other day, it crossed my mind that I might soon be getting lost.  Driving downhill toward Kamehameha Highway, I spotted a very large cement mixer turning left across the road; we came nowhere near each other, but we could have.  He laid on his horn.  "I must have run a red light," I thought.  When I stopped at the next light, the one I saw, he pulled up behind me, laying on his horn again.  Having recognized my error, I threw up my hands.  We both turned onto Kam Highway, and he pulled up next to me, well before the next light.  I only caught one glimpse of him, his cab sitting so high above my Nissan Versa.  And then I heard the cascade of obscenities, raining down on the gray roof of my "little car," as one of his insults had it.  Something about "lady," and then less polite syllables.  I sat at the bottom of a waterfall of anger.  My mistake was a public transgression, but his words careened at me out of some nightmarishly private place.  Before looking to see what company he drove for, I quickly turned right, away from LCC, away from the large white truck, away from anger as large and hard as concrete.  It was then I realized I'd gotten lost.

____________________


I remember he went away to one of the wars and the girls cheered for him.  I remember he was in uniform that day and left the game early to go to his war.  Our war.  I remember he returned.  He started enjoying our conversations on the sidelines toward the end of practice.  Something about how he could afford so much more land and house in the west than here.  He told me in detail about the cost of square footage.  He explained something about the national economy I did not follow, how money is made or lost.  Said something about how war was not what we saw in the movies.  Then one day he appeared completely unsettled, couldn't sit still on the bench, told me how difficult life is, wondered how to clear his mind.  I told him how to meditate.  He flung himself on the ground, there and then trying to clear his mind.  He hugged me.  By the time I got to my car, I knew that was not it.  That was not it at all.  I gathered documents on-line, put them in an envelope for him, carried them around for a week or two.  He disappeared.  And then he came back.  "Oh so you knew what it was?" His eyes looked like they felt bruised.  "Did it hurt?" he asked me.  I almost laughed.  Did it hurt?  Every muscle in the body, every joint, every thought, every image, every breath.  Don't you wish you could say in ordinary conversation that you suffer? I'd asked my class earlier in the week.  "Did you get better?"  Of course I got better, but he asked again.  He didn't believe me.  He couldn't hear through his hurt eyes what I was saying to him about how there's another side, you've got to decide to get there, you've gotta put one foot in front.  He turned and walked away.  Came back from the other direction.  He looked quizzically at someone's teeshirt from close-up.  His eyes were those of a small child. 


__________


On Kahekili (the highway named after a king of Maui) one day between Temple Valley and Haiku I was two vehicles behind a small black pickup truck.  The truck veered to the center of the road and then a pig appeared, crossing the highway, as big as the small black truck.  It reached the other side and ran up an incline back into the wooded area.  Kamapua`a?

Documentary poetry and tenderness: teaching update

Some questions about documentary poems, misremembered from the white board in my Friday afternoon classroom:

--What genre(s) do we find in the poem?  [Use values?]
--What claim is being made on the reader?
--What is the relationship between the speaker and the documentation?
--Is the poet trying too hard to persuade us?  Not hard enough?
--Talk about the movement between images and words, about lay-out, about empty space.
--Should there be notes?  How should they be presented--in the text, at the end, with or without prose commentaries?

These are mainly technical questions, the kinds you use to investigate poems as if they were word machines set up on blocks, and the workshop members were a group of apprentice mechanics itching to turn their wrenches and loosen (or tighten) some screws.

But what's been most fascinating about my English 713: Documentary Poetry course this semester has been the amount of time spent talking about pain.  I'm as interested in pain as anyone, even have a few things to say on the subject, but my poetry classes tend to be more rollicking, less engaged with tenderness than with "how to do things with words."  I'm as surprised as my students that this class has ventured into such territory: the dying grandfather, the homeless woman, the diabetic, the angry father, the exiled prisoner, the man saved by his art, the mother who died of Alzheimer's. (These questions are quite personal to me, having devoted so many years to writing about my mother's last years)

And so our primary sense of hurt is for others, locates itself as empathy, is the act of bending over at the sight of events on television (Claudia Rankine) or in the streets of Honolulu.

Where pain lives, ethics cannot be far behind, however.  And so one after another, students (a wide ranging group in age, experience, work history) say they do not want to write what they're driven to write.  What if their subject is hurt by their attention to him or her?  What if they reveal bad behaviors in their workplaces or even themselves?  What if their ethnic community feels shame over one of its own?  And on and on.  What if thinking is itself a problematic activity?  What if knowledge is intrusive, not to be trusted?  All of these are real concerns, made stronger yet by living in Hawai`i, where everyone seems to know everyone else, where those who study others have often demeaned them, where our skin is necessarily thin.  Who was it said that William Carlos Williams was a "non-cutaneous" man?

And so my role, more than that of introducing the texts we read, or shepherding the class through the questions at the top of this post, is to pester them to get closer to their subject matter, to this tenderness.  It's not a role I've often assumed in the classroom, where I push students to think harder about their analyses, about their uses of language, about their writing.  Now I find myself pushing writers to get closer to the bone, to use the document not as a way to write about their subject, but to enter a wormhole that may resemble an abyss.  A course about documentation has become one much more akin to self-examination, albeit less confessional than confrontational.  Who might be hurt?  What are you protecting her from?  Are you also protecting yourself?  Are there other goods than privacy?  Is curiosity consumerist, materialist, or can it lead us elsewhere?  What is dignity and why does it feel so necessary to preserve it? What do we publish, and what do we keep to ourselves in this fourth floor classroom?  Or, as Norman Fischer asks in his new book, Conflict: "what's worth protecting / to what extent // & // when // does protection // exceed that worth / its cost in pain[.]"  A rhetorical question without a question mark suggests there is no answer, rhetorical or otherwise.

There are at least two paths out, through.  One is the path Fischer takes in this new book, where he writes down the voices of traumatized vets, those he sits and walks with, but does not identify by name or station.  "we     bear / what we     bear" he writes, and those words belong to all of us.  The other path is by way of the projects the students are discovering themselves starting work on; these projects are far less limited in scope than they'd feared.  It's not grandpa, or the homeless woman, or the angry father: it's these characters in the world that constructed them.  It's not grandpa, though it is grandpa, but it's the journal he kept in his final illness, and it's the cancer that killed him, and it's the doctor who treated him, and so on until the nested eggs--the good ones and the bad ones alike--line up in front of you like the soldiers of Xian.  The poem is order, but it doesn't try to cover the earthly chaos, conflict.

Documentary poetry is perhaps not my favorite form, even now.  But it is the way I love to teach poetry, as it leads further afield and further in-field, engaging questions as large as national identities and as small as the plans for the addition to a house.  And they do that in layers, which attract more layers.  The answer to "a knot ,     is there something // I should be dying for ?          Can I     choose it?" (Fischer, 57) may not be immediately apparent, but we might discover work to live for.

Thanks to Lynn Young for showing us the Jenny Holzer book, whose cover is at the top, where she works with redacted National Security documents.  The first I spotted in the book was a "wish list" for torture methods.

From Oedipus to Alzheimer's: the New Whodunnit: Alice LaPlante's _Turn of Mind_

The last dozen years of my life have been framed and informed by two narratives, those of adoption and Alzheimer's.  We adopted our son in 2000, our daughter in 2004.  By 2006, my mother's Alzheimer's had progressed (as it were) to the stage where she could not stay in her house, and was moved to a care home.  That passively voiced verb form, "was moved," was enabled by a third adoption; in early 2006 I went to court to become my mother's guardian so that I could oblige her to receive care.  I became my mother's mother, made her decisions, signed her checks, held onto her memories as best I could for reasons medical, familial, artistic.  Not too long ago, I found a loose page of my mother's check register from August, 2006; I had blogged on it back then.  The check is public and personal; her register was one of her primary ways of organizing the world.  That she wrote "for food!" next to a check she'd written to me (getting my name wrong as she did it) testifies to her disbelief that ordinary staples could ever cost so much.  The checkbook rendered autobiography, its register poem.

Early in this twelve year span I drafted an essay, since discarded, in which I pointed out that Oedipus-- best known as the detective-king who discovers that he was the bad guy whose victim was his biological father--had been adopted.  The Oedipus narrative, which permeates our western cultural references, depends on our ignoring his adoption and focusing almost exclusively on his genetic relation.  That family relations are hidden even from the family members makes the story more powerful, of course.  But that burst secret depends on maintaining the adoption's secrets.  Yes, he was left on a hill as a baby, and yes, someone found him, and yes he grew up in Corinth.  The secret was kept from him, and the significance of his upbringing kept secret from the reader.  The second secret does not bother us, unless perhaps we are literary critics who are also adoptive mothers.  That history is elided for the history that depends on blood genealogy.  (I have found this focus typical in mainstream American culture, despite all conscious emphasis on the individual or hockum about the wonders of adoption.) "Oedipus" became a plot device that generated many of western literature's best stories; this is now what is called "adoption literature," and includes novels by George Eliot and Charles Dickens, plays by Edward Albee, a host of memoirs, a ton of movies (Harry Potter, anyone?), and many a facebook status line.

If adoption narratives depend on a search for the self in relation to a missing blood parent, then Alzheimer's narratives depend on a search for the self within a decaying brain.  (The brain is our birth parent, the mind our adopted one, perhaps.)  These are narratives folded in on themselves, especially when the narrator suffers the disease.  My recent post on Walter Mosley's The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey argued that Mosley uses Grey's search for his own past to unravel a larger history.  But Mosley's book depends on a miraculous, if deadly, cure for forgetting, one that takes the novel out of the poetry of Alzheimer's and into the dream-realism of remembered stories, then back into dream-forgetting.  There is also an adoption in the book, but not one that carries secrets with it.  Turn of Mind, by Alice LaPlante, does not allow its author or reader that luxury of artificial memory.  Instead, this book, also a literary detective novel, uses Alzheimer's to get at family relationships (which include a case of hidden parentage), and drives a murder mystery in which the demented narrator may or may not have been the perpetrator.  But I'm more interested, in both cases, not in whodunnit, but in how the author writes Alzheimer's.

If the genre of discovery, of self-knowledge, is prose narrative, then the genre of Alzheimer's is prose poetry.  This is a book written in short detached paragraphs; it's as close to new sentence writing as a mainstream novel is going to get.  So the notion of "plot" is in some ways severely reduced.  Consider this paragraph, by Alice LaPlante in the voice of her demented narrator, a retired hand surgeon, Dr. Jennifer White:

When I have a clear day, when the walls of my world expand so that I can see a little ahead and a little behind me, I plot.  I am not good at it.  When watching the heist movies that James [her late husband] loves, I am impressed by the trickery the writers think up.  My plots are simple: Walk to the door.  Wait until no one is looking.  Open the door.  Leave.  Go home.  Bar the front entrance against all comers. (187)

The plot involves guarding oneself from other's plots, but it also--and this is where I'm drawn in--involves nothing so complicated as walking, opening, leaving, going, and barring.  In a straight detective novel, verbs work at the service of nouns and pronouns.  "She did it," has a subject, a verb, and an object (the done thing).  In this version of the detective novel, verbs are themselves difficult, must be plotted.  It's as if you're an American driver who has arrived at a round-about in a left-driving country; you need to think ever so carefully simply to turn your steering wheel.  During a walking meditation once on the Big Island, I watched a man in our group who had had a recent stroke.  His left leg swung forward with great difficulty; the rhythm of his walk differed from ours.  It was the ordinary, the difficult, witnessed as beauty.

LaPlante's book contains many of the plots of Alzheimer's: there is the take-the-driver's-license-away from mother plot--and her anger at that theft; there is the talk-about-mother-in-front-of-her plot, in which the talkers do not know, or especially care, if she understands what they say; there is the child-needs-money-from-mother plot; there is the sell-the-house plot; there is the "this-is-your-home-now" plot.  That these are not the centerpieces of the novel's larger plot says a lot about the anxieties of fiction, in which plots need to do their plotly things: they need crisis, climax, denouement, and not in the smaller realm (that of Alzheimer's) but in the realm where plots tie together, novels come to a clean end, and we leave happy that we paid our money to be entertained, but not damaged by our reading.

Dr. Jennifer White is an unreliable narrator, to put it mildly.  That's what makes her such a good one.  But her Alzheimer's is also, necessarily, a fiction within the fiction.  To write from inside Alzheimer's presents the writer--Mosley, LaPlante--with a challenge that leads to wonderful, poetic, writing.  It generates plots very like those in adoption fiction: something is missing, it's part of the central character's story, which she needs to figure out in order to find herself, be whole.  Mosley follows that narrative arc more reliably, as Ptolemy Grey--at least for a brief moment--recovers himself from the decay.  LaPlante lets it go to some extent, as Dr. White never does figure out the answer on her own.  But she relies on several crutches to make the Alzheimer's narrative work as a story, not as a series of discrete, confusing moments.  One of these is writing.  She keeps a journal, and her family and friends also write in this journal.  So, even when she cannot read what they have written, we can.  I'm reminded of the pathos in caregiving memoirs, like that of Rachel Hadas, when the carer finds writing by the Alzheimer's patient, from a point in the disease when there was still awareness of decay, when decay was a verb and not just a noun.

LaPlante's imagined Alzheimer's mind is confused, yes, especially about linear and historical time.  But her narrator can still write in sentences that "make sense," can still convey her feelings to the reader.  As a writer, the narrator is less ill than as a character.  LaPlante finesses this problem by using the "you" when Dr. White narrates her movements late in the book.  Take the scene when Dr. White escapes her Alzheimer's ward:

You realize that you are impeding the flow of traffic.  People are politely navigating around you, but you are inconveniencing them.  One man bumps your elbow as he passes and stops briefly to apologize.  You nod and say, not at all, and begin moving again.  (238)

The longer scene that ensues, when Dr. White eats at an Italian restaurant, her neighbors and waiter deeply suspecting her state, Dr. White suspecting that they suspect, is an amazing piece of writing.  One that is only possible inside a fiction.  A brief moment possible outside a fiction comes when Dr. White first enters the care facility:

The woman with no neck is screaming again.  A distant buzzer and then the muffled sound of soft-soled shoes on thick carpet hurrying past my door.

Other noises emerge from other rooms on the floor.  The calls of incarcerated animals when one of their own is distressed.  Some recognizable words like help and come here but mostly cries that swell and converge.  (143)

I'm not obsessed with the actual truth, per se, though I can attest that those last passages record what an Alzheimer's home sounds like during the late afternoon period of sun-downing.  And Alzheimer's is--at least early on--a literary disease.  My practice of transcribing voices, and the much more ambitious practice of the Trebus Project in the UK of recording stories told by Alzheimer's patients, proves to me that the confusions of early to middle Alzheimer's result in a genre at once poetic and narrative.  Just as depression is better literature than schizophrenia, however, early Alzheimer's makes for a better story than late.  The silences of late Alzheimer's take us from Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein to John Cage.  I'm not at all sure you could write a novel from that place, unless you're B.S. Johnson, perhaps.  What Mosley and LaPlante offer are Alzheimer's experiments that flirt with, but do not join, the avant-garde of late Alzheimer's.

Late in Turn of Mind, Dr. White remembers a conversation she'd had decades earlier with her best friend, Amanda, the woman who is now dead and whose fingers have been amputated in a last act of desecration.  This conversation turned on the question of adoption.  At 35, Dr. White is rather unhappily pregnant with a child that her husband wants more than she does.  (She will have an unexpected child when she's over 40, as well.)  Amanda tells her that she and her husband are "still trying."  Dr. White's response, which she immediately regrets, goes as follows: "What about adopting, you asked, then wished you could take back your words.  Of course she must have considered it.  How facile"  (262).

Amanda's response: "No. I need more control than that."

The two women then debate what "control" means in relation to children.  When do they need to become "yours" for you to feel you have control?  Dr. White asserts that being in the delivery room when the adopted baby is born might be enough.  "That would take care of the nurture part," Amanda responds.  "But what about the nature?  That would be unknown." (263)

Amanda eventually turns the conversation back on her friend, asking why she has so resisted having children.  Turns out that Dr. White distrusts nature as much as Amanda yearns toward it.  "Children do love the most horrible, depraved people.  They attach to warm bodies.  Familiar faces.  Sources of food.  To be valued for such base requirements doesn't interest me" (265).

Why this conversation near the end of a novel about Alzheimer's?  Aside from plot considerations, namely that Dr. White's daughter's paternity is in question and Amanda becomes something of a surrogate parent to her, Alzheimer's, like adoption, forces the big questions.  Who am I, and why am I so?  What is my history, and how do I find it?  Even, along with Oedipus, did I do it?  But nature is not always to be trusted.  We don't always resemble or love those to whom we are biologically tied.  Our natural minds sometimes decay.  We may begin not knowing our biological identities; we may also end not knowing ourselves because biology fails us, or we it.  If we are writers, we recognize these tropes as plot lines (even when the lines more resemble circles, erased geometries).  If we are writers, we have control over those plot-lines in our fictions.  That's why daily life has come to fascinate me more than fictions, because we cannot control, only record, them.  But sometimes--as in these novels by Mosley and LaPlante--fictions move us back into our ordinary lives in ways that matter.

__________

A year ago I spent nearly a week with my mother.  It was our last visit before the last visit in June, when she was dying, died.  The blog posts of January, 2011 can be found in this thread, moving from the aftermath of that visit back into it.  I miss her and the residents and caregivers of her home more than I can say.

TELL MRS MILL HER HUSBAND IS STILL DEAD: Oral histories from the dementia ward

 

The Alzheimer's Foundation of America recently sent me a card that reads, "A Season to Cherish Memories."

All ironies aside, many of my memories now do have to do with Alzheimer's.  This time last year I visited my mother for the next to last time, the time before the time she was dying and then passed.  (That last verb, which used to strike me as tired euphemism, now seems right; she passed on, she passed into, she passed away from me, from us, she passed out of time.)  My blog posts on that visit can be found on this archive page, starting (or ending on the blog) from 1/11/11.  "Ending from" is not a good phrase, except in blogging, so I'll leave it be.

During this past sabbatical year, when I was not with my mother, or blogging about dementia, I was traveling to talk about my blogging about dementia.  I developed a talk on how best to write Alzheimer's, which argued by example that experimental writing worked better than realist narrative, that giving voice to the Alzheimer's sufferer was preferable to hearing the voice of the caregiver or spouse.  It was a polemical piece, not nearly as good as the actual writing, I suspected, but sometimes such writing requires an introduction, a foreshadowing. As polemic it both explained and sometimes off-put.  But now I think I've found the positive critique--not the "don't write like this, but yes, do work like this . . . " in the form of a UK project, launched in 2003, called The Trebus Project, founded and run by David Clegg.

Clegg is an artist who gave up museums and galleries for the space of hospitals, of nursing and care homes.  He gave up the artist's eye/I for that of the editorial you.  He listens, accumulates stories, then edits them into short pieces, many of which are then acted out for radio programs.  You can find the project website here; they also have a Facebook page you can "like" for updates.  The volume of stories I have in hand is called Tell Mrs Mill Her Husband is Still Dead, available on the Trebus Project website, which jolted me back to the moment I recorded in Dementia Blog from the August 19, 2006 entry.  My mother was then spending much of her time looking for her mother and brother, both dead (I think) since the 1960s: "My mother has not said a word about her father; he is still dead."

Dementia is not just a disease, it is a temporal state, one in which the dead are still living, the speaker still inhabits an earlier moment in history, and time is not linear but circular.  History gives way to poetry, although they cannot ever be divorced.  Like my mother in her later years, the speakers in Tell Mrs Mill, are still living the Second World War.  Because most of them are English, some German, they remember the Battle of Britain from the perspective of children or young adults witnessing bombs, bodies, V2 rockets.  It is, as Mabel says, "A rather violent sort of poetry," this memory that "the bombing" (for example) "sounded worse at night," or that as Mrs. Mill herself puts it:

I remember the bombing . . . and taking cover . . . being careful not to show any light from the windows . . .  you could hear the planes coming . . . they seemed faster than the English planes . . . we were lucky we had an Anderson Shelter . . . but I was scared stiff . . . the bombing was very close to where I was living in Nunhill Road (159).

And there's Nelson, who saw through the reports that an English plane had crashed on its way home, "but it was too much damage."  He and his friends knew this was a V2 rocket.  Nelson later drove a lorry that carried crisps, many of which he seems to have eaten on the sly: "get your fingernail under the edge of the tin lid and you'd split the seal.  Have some of the crisps out and seal it back up again" (61).  Even Sam, whose Alzheimer's is deeper than most of the others, remembers something of the War ("Do you remember a nice-looking woman called Eva Braun?" he asks), though a few sentences later he writes, "I was 18 when I came to England [from St. Lucia, home to Derek Walcott].  I can't remember the history of me" (175).

Among the stories Clegg has gathered in his book, mainly soliloquies punctuated by occasional questions or prompts, are those by a gay man who is still reticent to say so, by some people who grew up so poor that (in Hilda's case) she had to have all her baby teeth pulled because her diet was so poor, and by many who were neglected and/or abused.  There are stories of how they met their partners, along with some fearful, quizzical assertions that they don't remember them.  Lots of dance halls, movie theaters.  For the most part, the details are relentlessly ordinary, and hardly a soul other than Isabella utters a polemic against dementia care: "Dementia care in this country doesn't exist . . . The problem is that . . . a great many people who are supposed to be carers . . . have contempt . . . for the loss of memory . . .and . . . the mental problems that that leads to . . . and take advantage of it.  They behave in the most diabolical way and think they can get away with it . . . because . . . no one would believe the poor woman with dementia" (112).

Clegg believes her.  He writes bluntly in the introduction, "Telling Stories": "Some people have questioned the honesty of the narrators and the historical accuracy of their stories, as if a lack of authenticity somehow distinguishes them from our own.  Dementia or not, we are all unreliable narrators; we all consciously and unconsciously change our stories all the time and we all lie" (12).  He also pointedly dismisses the "rewriting and sanitising [of] life stories without consent as a further form of protection and risks leaving people like Elsie Mill to struggle with darker thoughts and feelings in unsupported isolation" (13). 

As a literary critic, I love those moments when the tellers of the stories comment on their own telling, and on the book that Clegg has told them he's compiling.  "This book to help people remember," notes Fia, who finishes her thought by saying, "The future is something I try to forget" (17).  Mabel calls it a test, this "trying to remember a memory of a memory" (29).  Leonard is one of the few whose language is itself affected/afflicted by the illness (these are mainly early to middle Alzheimer's patients, the ones who still speak in sentences with beginnings and ends).  He tells the listener that he's "got this euthanasia in the back of my head . . . it doesn't hurt a bit . . . and don't worry it isn't contagious . . . but . . . it just means that by the time I finish what I'm saying I'll have forgotten what price I offered you" (47).  Like the woman who thinks of everyone arounde her as passenger on a train, Leonard, who owned an art gallery, thinks of his interlocutors as potential customers.  The nouns and verbs of our working lives survive into the afterlife of metaphor.  And Mrs Mill, in some ways the book's fulcrum, its heroine, begins her speaking by saying, "I'm so pleased to do this . . . I never thought I was popular enough to write a biography.  I was born in Shropshire" (157).  Clearly, she remembers the autobiographical form, beginning as she does with her own birth. 

The cd that came with the book contains the voices of actors performing some of the monologues.  What the cd offers us beyond the book's words are the regional accents that inhabit Alzheimer's homes; in my mother's, there were New England accents, Spanish accent, New York Jewish accents, and then there were those who had gone back to their original language, like Dutch.  The sounds of the voices are living a time that no longer much exists (at least extrapolating them to the American context, as I am).  There are upper class accents, northern English accents, West Indian accent, lower class accents.  Alzheimer's patients may forget vast swatches of their own histories, but they do not forget their vowels.

One of my favorite voices is that of Morris, a Yorkshireman, who starts talking as a balloon is being thrown around the room--typical recreation for the elders.  He grew up working in a mill, as his mother had done.  Perhaps typical of working class boys, he turned to sports.  He was also reacting to his mother's constant illness.  His first sight of a cricket pitch is from a doctor's office where his mother has one.  "I used to watch the cricket," he reports, "while she was in the doctor's" (115).  His father was ok, but always too tired.  Morris's monologue turns back and back again to his prowess at athletics.  "What the hell did I do?" he asks.  "I was always playing football with the school . . . I got into cricket and I was good . . .and I was captain of football at school and cricket . . .kids idolised me at Brighouse and further than that . . . I was very good . . . really good" (115).  Even as he falls in love with Betty, married to another man, he remembers his sports accomplishments, but then also his gambling problem, which derailed his relationship with her.  It was an October to December affair, he remembers. He played snooker, he says, so well that he "could really have been someone" (117).  He was supposed to take her to the station (her father was also a gambler) but he did not.  "I always won . . .from then I was always a gambler . . . I couldn't stop" (117).

Maybe it's the transparency of a story like this one that makes it so moving; what Morris has lost is his cover, and our covers almost always begin from words.  As Clegg notes at the beginning, we all lie.  These voices seem to lie less because they cannot lie low.  They say what they think, they say what they remember, and they admit to their actless act of forgetting.  What could be more honest than John's admission of his lost memory: "All I remember about my grandfather isn't really a memory at all . . . all I've got is . . . not an image . . . I remember somebody in the next room . . . someone in the bed . . . and my mother saying it was my grandfather . . . he had gone out or gone in . . . Shakespeare was much more specific with his ghosts" (85). 

If they invent, re-imagine, it's not to impress the listener, but because "confusion" takes our contrivances away.  That strikes me as one of the great beauties of this book, its honesty.  The honesty is that of the speakers, but also David Clegg's.  The stories are funny, and sad, and mixed up, but they are true, even if they are not--as Clegg puts it in the introduction--"authentic," by which one might mean "accurate."  Accuracy be damned.  These are the truth.