Darning Socks with Narrative Threads: The Essay, Collection, and Liberation

In Douglas Hesse’s article, “Saving a Place for Essayistic Literacy,” he seeks to “wrestle back the ‘essay’ from its history” in answer to some academics who seek to define a new kind of literacy in the computer age against the confines of the scholastic essay. Hess points to a contradiction, namely, that the logos driven academic essay with its well-defined topic and methods of documentation and perspicuity has moved far a field from the kinds of things the father of the genre, Montaigne, had actually written. Montaigne’s essays are not the articulation of airtight logical relationships in a linear development, but rather a series of overtly biased disjointed explorations steeped in rhetorical patterns more commonly found now in journalistic writing and yes, on the internet. The logical thread is there, but it is not the industrial thread of the machine age that nosily stitches along prefab patterns, rather it is more like a single strand darning a pair of well-worn wool socks with a cat and a fire and glass of good port--spectacles if you need them. It is as if the mind-stuff itself, those bits of refection, repose, and memory mix with the coinage of novel discoveries and armchair philosophy: The collection of the mind and the collection of things of the world.

In order to address some logical relationship, I am compelled to include some forms of scientific travel writing in the category of the self-conscious pathos and ethos-driven essay of the kind Montaingne and the early English essayist like Addison and Steele wrote. Unashamedly biased, subjective, and determined to make even the most specious or neglected subject matter a worthy good read. The early essayists used pity, humor, emotion, juxtaposition, irony, and biting satire. And if all these bells and whistles of weaving a narrative become too forceful (a cudgel when a hand trowel will do), understatement could darn a sock quite nicely.

My thread finds me thinking now about “collections and narratives” (the ostensible subject of this essay) and the kinds of writing seen in scientific travel literature. Thankfully, Hesse makes a connection for me: “It is telling that the essay’s rise paralleled the rise of the scientific method in the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment and that Francis Bacon, that author of “ The Advancement of Learning,” should its first prominent English practitioner. It is as if Bacon himself recognized the limitations of the single method and sought to establish a counter method, one that later essayists would call anti-methodical” (37). Well then, the history of collecting the world’s novelties and the history of the essayist’s narrative find common footing.

In “Collecting: Body and Soul,” Susan M. Pearce connects the notion of narrative to the collection, noting that “[c]ollections are a significant element in our attempt to construct the world, and so the effort to understand them is one way of exploring our relationship to the world” (37). I like Pearce’s willingness to see collecting as something everyone does. I am not the collector Susan Stewart describes in On Longing, in which the true collection “supercedes the individual narratives that ‘lie behind it’ (153).

I am the anti-collector, the lunatic hobbyist, pack rack, hoarder, or keeper of camp and kitsch, and everything I keep carries an aura of narrative kinetic energy. My old 1975 Volvo is the car I left Salt Lake City in twenty years ago (I can and do recount the various collections of parts I have replaced), but it is losing its use value, and so it is too burdensome to carry around like I do other things of no real use, such as my horrible and maudlin (some passable) poetry I’ve kept since the age of twelve. But the Volvo will be a bitter (and liberating) goodbye. I lament the loss of this huge orange leaking hulk, the tangible connection to my bachelor past through 16 years of marriage, the kids, the places it’s been (the time it broke down in Wells Nevada, we had to go to Salt Lake to have a customized piece made; Malibu, Triple A was pissed at how far they had to drag it away from the glamour; that overpass 70 miles from Burley when that nice old guy stopped to show the kids a mammoth tooth; drag racing bikers in Huntington Beach until oil spewed; Reno, Huntington Beach, Portland , the Olympic Peninsula, . . .)

The stories connected to my stuff that I drag around are unstable, because memory is, and they are hallucinatory, mundane, exalting, fleeting, and sometimes bitter. I must confess (confession being a long tradition of the essay genre) that my collections will not survive my death intact like the collections donated to museums and such. However, I take solace in the equanimity of a common narrative: The natural ending to the story of collecting is losing and liberation, whether by choice, circumstance, or death. Go not easy into that.

Don't Get Dyer Started, You'll Love it to Death

After reading Geoff Dyer’s dust jacket blurb about how D.H. Lawrence did a study of Thomas Hardy, I searched my shelves.

Going and Staying
The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,---
These were the things we wished would stay;
But they were going.

Seasons on blankness as of snow
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,--
These were the things we wished would go;
But they were staying.
--Thomas Hardy


Anyone still read Thomas Hardy? I guess they do, I just did, but I tried to sell this book for a quarter at our latest yard sale. I last remember my six-year-old daughter coveting the book’s peeling imitation red leather cover, sections of open wounds of corrugated cardboard and glue. She thought the strangely dignified carcass of 1920 edition of Modern British Poetry was an ideal make-believe book of magic spells. Maybe it is. There were no takers, so I took pity on it and keep it just in case.

Now, some twenty years have passed since I purchased it at a flea market, and in this blog it finally becomes a bone fide textual subject, a focus of study. This is why it leads this week’s blog, because every study needs a place to start.

Editor, Louis Untermeyer, writes in the introduction that he is not interested in “hairsplitting,” but in the interest of some place to start he designates “modern” as beginning in 1885 (the year D.H. is born) and characterized by several historical periods and “chief tendencies.” This pre-post-modern modern literary analysis is not abstract, but kind of like old-fashioned cause-and-effect physics. Some are easy to understand today, like “The decay of Victorianism,” but others provoke amused ignorance, such as “The muscular influence of Henley.” Not the guy from the Eagles. As I read on, I didn’t get angry, I got bored, but I suppose that is why criticism grew into more than simple introductions to works and anthologies, why it started to provoke and get more abstract. The blasé aesthetic of “modernism,” gave way to the angst of “post-modernism” and then “post-everything.”

Geoff Dyer doesn’t get bored when he reads The Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, which surprises me. He rages about the state of criticism, “it kills everything it touches.” While I sympathize with his take on “this group of wankers huddled in a circle,” he displays a flair for his own literary histrionics. What imagery! This is not boring, and I can see why he compares literary scholars to “morticians,” but even dressing the dead can be a beloved act, a kind of acceptance of the temporal mixed with violence and reverence. “Going and Staying” like old Hardy says, the dead old fart.

This is the place

I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and one of the things that every Utahn learns in school is that "this is the place"--an utterance attributed to Brigham Young when the tired Mormon pioneers decided to give the unimpressive valley of swamps and rocks a go. That place is gone, replaced by the place the valley has become under the stewardship of time, growth, and progress. It sticks out of the desert like the dream that started it all.

Now having lived outside of the belly of the whale of my youth, I find that every place is the place, at least for me when I take up habitation and especially employment. For example, I spent 9 months on the big island of Hawaii over 20 years ago, planting coffee trees and serving seafood in a tourist-trap restaurant dressed like a sailor in a Popeye cartoon. The island had no roads home, no way to hitchhike out in case things turned sour. I will always remember to buy a return ticket when going to an island.

When I came back to the mainland (Hawaii gets boring for a 21 year old with few job skills and a full tan) I had a slew of dreams showing me how I could get back to Hawaii by simply taking a few back roads never before taken near my house. These uncommonly used roads that could take me to the middle of the Pacific Ocean were there all along. The Hawaii in my dreams was only remotely similar to the physical place I had been, but more like an idealized village of how I wanted the whole world to be. Even so, the dreams showed me how “place” is at the crossroads of reality and wishful thinking, real things and imagined things. Place physically distant is somehow accessed by emotion and instinct. As long as you touch the ground, even if only once, the ground touches you back whenever it wants.