1. Fear of Fixing Meaning
Lining right up in a loosely contemporary tradition, or swoon of self-revelation, I recently self-discovered that I write fiction and poetry so I don’t have to write about them. So I can slip out of one thing and bleed all over other things. So I don’t have to double-check with reality, logic, laundry, so meaning can mean open and opening forever, a circular fan, unfixed, in flux, fragmented. Yet here I am omniscient with introduction, facing down something that walks, talks, squawks like an essay. Must be an essay.
Days spent scraping the manuscript as if I were an AI. A for avoid, I for imagination. Delineating by descriptions of sunsets, data-mining for dogs, what if cars had astrological signs, songs, lines from stories collaged to make a new story, lists ad infinitum.
And nights too, inventing constellations, hallucinating symbol and theme, racking up word-count hedging and squirming and breaking all too often to read marketing emails slipped through spam. Now we’re excited to call it home to our ninth restaurant location featuring an expanded bubble tea menu and tables made from recycled chopsticks thanks to our friends at ChopValue!
illustration, fig. 1: Notes on Scrap Paper for Fetish Objects from Double-Check for Sleeping Children
2. Behind the Mask the Real Mask, a Nesting Doll of Cancellations and Contradictions
To say it another way, because repetition and refraction are also habitats of the contemporary, I seize up like stage fright when it’s time to uncloak, provoke, trot out the reliable narrator. When I have to write something relatable in my “real” voice, my breaking-the-fourth-wall voice, behind-the-scenes voice, a translation of fiction or poetry stripped of fiction and poetry, a reverse translation, unwriting, unraveling the tapestry toward the raw wool, sheep, mammoth, uncouth, before art, from the metaphorical to the literal, a lingua franca, an Esperanto of dissembling, de-storying the material to notes and grunts and feeling around in the dark with my fused fingers, fins, for the walls.
Writer’s block, writer’s blank, nothing in the bank, bricked-over windows at the thought of poking at the stories to see what else they might yield. To think all the way through and out the other side.
illustration, fig. 2: Collage, “To Pour Through Walls”
3. Refusal of Aboutness
Aboutness seems duplicitous. I’m about the irreducible. Not the limited but the infinite irreducible. The writer Percival Everett, speaking to a packed audience of mostly Am Civ students in the Literary Arts black box at Brown University, said, “Any meaning that exists in the text is created by you, the reader.” It was pitch dark so I wrote it down blindly.
The world needs praises sung not content production!
illustration, fig. 3: Collage, “Black Box”
4. Form and Content Is To Pattern and Matter Is To Time and Memory Slash Dream
Waldorf education expresses a philosophy in which the archetypal mood, or characteristics of child development are identified with an arc of world mythologies. I started school in 3rd grade, the Old Testament year: light and dark, form and void, hungry Eve.
From “Ambush,” whose middle-aged protagonist, Daphne, feels herself existentially tethered, like a tree, in the recurrent, mythic context of a hunter’s sexual predations: “It wasn’t being alone that scared me, but being discovered alone — that brought me shame.… I was hot with shame. But all at once it froze me, that phrase, for suddenly I heard it differently. Hot with shame. Does shame make women hot? Was that the message, the real meaning?” The legacy of Eve?
illustration, fig. 4: Collage, “Hungry Eve”
5. Grammar of Mythology
Yet soon it became clear that I couldn’t write straight, it seemed like I was born on a curve, I couldn’t bear to shake the mysteries and silences out of the text and render them in left to right lines across the squared-off page. And algebra was hard. But I could do Eurythmy, the Waldorf dance form that embodies poetry, the spoken word, an alphabet of shapes in motion made by hands, arms, face, spine. Funny white cloth shoes.
The Eurythmy teacher, who commuted from Charles St. in the West Village to the obscure Waldorf boarding school, had been friends with e.e. cummings, Muriel Rukeyser, maybe even Octavio Paz. At fifteen I read “My Life with the Wave,” decided I couldn’t be contained, dropped out of school, which seemed the only way to be both the wave’s lover and the wave.
The GED was administered in a high school auditorium so dark and vast and vaporous it seemed to plunge underground. The only other test-taker was a well-built red-haired farm kid from a Christian homeschooling community who took the seat beside me, not one of the thousand other seats. His nose bled for seven hours. I was a redhead too, no stranger to unquenchable bleeds.
illustration, fig. 5: Eurythmy Alphabet
6. I Still Can’t Write Straight
I danced my way around college. You could dance a final paper, a loophole, or cash in “life experience” credits for dance classes at studios all around the city. Jazz, ballet, Graham, Horton, Dunham, Downtown floppy modern, West African, yoga, Pilates, Contact Improv … A vocabulary of symbols set to music and motion tested for truth on the body.
No self-respecting dancer was a dance major, so I chose Great Books, and my senior thesis was a giant Great Books mobile. I strung love letters to books like kites, a many-limbed marionette, and draped it from the ceiling — it caught all kinds of psycho-weather, indoor wind. I want to say it was life-sized, but what I mean is that it filled the room. I was trying to express text kinesthetically, movement as original narrative, because I had looped around and started writing myths of my own. The principle of myth was connection. I used a whole ball of string.
illustration, fig. 6: Collage, “Contact Improv”
7. Distance
My felt experience of writing has to do with handwriting, and with space quantified and charged by distance. Every movement I make opens or closes the distance, a dancer’s fan. A contributor bio in a recent issue of a literary magazine in which I had a poem: “[writer in question] divides his time.” The unrequited-love story “The Distance” takes place entirely in the front seats of a leaking Cabriolet on rain-slaughtered I-95 in February. Maybe I just mean point of view.
illustration, fig. 7: Collage, “Space Dance, Vanishing Edge”
8. My Husband Asks Me, “How Is Your Consciousness?”
Not a question looking for “fine.” No “shaky,” no “hanging in there.” Non-emotional, but non-mental too. Maybe allegorical? “That’s kind of an amazing question,” I say, buying, or dividing time. What kind of ontological weather are we trying to talk about here????
My consciousness is the texture and moisture of mist, fog. It’s a wave pattern, ebb and flow between people posted up at a garden party. In sun and shade. Still-frames so super-loaded their bedsprings bend the ground — the reason the earth is rounded. From “Time of the Testudinidae,” “My mind is shallow water in the sun.” It’s the track at the high school. Or a “snow farm, dirt-battered berms and hillocks unmoved by April’s cold rain.”
illustration, fig. 8: Hope High School track with hawk
9. Fear of Fixing Meaning Redux
My fear of fixing meaning, delimiting, helps me define stories as different from myths. I see the fiction in Double-Check for Sleeping Children as mythic, if myth is malleable like memory, like theory, speculative, hovering, never landing yet somehow already under your skin. If myth is metaphor, an instance of evocative recognition, a suddenly-bright spill of words, but blown up, scaled, then writing is socializing, Scripture Conference, bake sale, recognition in the supermarket checkout line.
illustration fig. 9: Notes for Types of Myth in Double-Check for Sleeping Children
10. “And Then There Is Using Everything,” Said Gertrude Stein
Claudine Grammot writes that for Matisse, “Painting an object became a matter of introspection rather than observation.” Inner-driven, Dionysian felt-distortion as opposed to objective, Apollonian representation. “The object,” writes Grammot, “is a vector for emotion; it becomes a kind of fetish — an intermediary between the world of material reality and the artist’s inner mental reality.”
The story refracts, hoards, becomes an object.
Willa Cather: “Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed.”
Jorie Graham, from the poem “Dusk in Drought,” “Bushes are taken//away and replaced by//sounds & circuits of/mind where those sounds get/lost—pavilions”
Says the narrator-protagonist in “Janus,” “I didn’t understand how the fresh water and the salt water kept themselves straight, but I knew I wouldn’t Google ‘brackish.’”
Yet I’m aware of counting on there being a website. An Internet referent, an ur-reality. Even trees have wikipedias to make them real — the existence of a thing on the Internet seems more real than the thing itself.
At the same time, the Internet version of the thing is the signifier to the thing’s signified, so that the Internet is both abstraction, or word, and physical, material, felt sense, felt form.
Waiting in the ER catacombs, its own particular consciousness, stuck with my nauseating phone, dispiriting newspaper, not so much worried as bored, “Beneath a Tiny Pacific Nation, a Fraught Bed of Wealth.”
“Researchers found a seabed carpeted with avocado-sized rocks, or nodules, rich in cobalt and manganese. Each nodule grows the thickness of a credit card roughly every million years.”
illustration, fig. 10: Collage, “A Voice on the Back of Her Head, or the Story of the Story”
Kirstin Allio is the author of Garner, Buddhism for Western Children, and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure, winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Competition. Her collection Double-Check for Sleeping Children won FC2’s 2024 Catherine L. Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, judged by Matt Bell.
