Start Here
On transgressing the boundaries when you must because you can
At the moment of this writing it is 6:09 p.m., Central Daylight Savings Time, 21 April 2024, which is mainly of no consequence here at my desk, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (33° 12' 20.448'' N/ 87° 35' 1.428'' W give or take a foot or two).
For the completist, finding this in the future as the first post of this collection, it will serve as a way point, where for me, to be honest, I’m trying to get the f*cking custom domain to work and seeing what difference the presence of a post might make. But then variations on being honest and making a difference—or some alchemy of the two—is pretty much all a writer wants to do (cue paywall).
Earlier today I published the second newsletter for The Long Schoolroom, my public project, so what is this impulse to start a whole other one? But if I have to guess, it’s just that: a move against the public, toward the private. The shout that elicits a whisper. When one has 1000 things that should be done, the one imperative, history may prove, is to start a substack. Or, at least, to write something.
But, platform-specificity aside, this is not a newsletter, but a zone. A territory, a space, a scene, a site, a dream: things that cannot happen one place will happen here.
Within the impulse to build there is the equal (or stronger) one to dwell, and even more particularly, to dwell with style. In Geoff Dyer’s Zona, his “Book about about a Film about a Journey to a Room”—a meditation on Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”— he cites Flaubert’s image of a book that would be “held together by the internal strength of its style” and rhymes it with an entry from the filmmaker’s diary:
From the standpoint of pure Art one might establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject—style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “zone of indiscernability” defines a loci of transformation, a region of mutability, anywhere things might go either way.
May this be thus. I turned 54 this year, which is the same year that Marvin Bell wrote his first Dead Man poem, and began a project that lasted him the rest of his life. Over at the Museum of Conceptual Art, you can look and see what others have accomplished at your age, and here is what comes up for me:
Annie Jump Cannon, the dean of women astronomers, became the first person to systematically classify the stars according to spectral type.
Henry Jay Heimlich developed his emergency maneuver.
Napoleon abdicated the throne.
John Locke began to publish the results of a lifetime of study and thought, including his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding."
Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. learned to ride a new-fangled contraption called a "bicycle."
But no matter. We write at the horizon of our understanding, an old phrase, maybe Gadamer (gets interesting when horizons start fusing), and whatever age one is the real zone with which we contend is the one with the unknown boundary of our impending extinction (cue Tim Urban’s Your Life in Weeks).
Everything remains to be done. Agony columnist, novelist, eroticist, pundit, personist, showrunner, mogul, visionary world-whathaveyou… Yet, here we are.
Speaking of formal deviance, I will end with the “The Zone of Interest,” loosely based on Martin Amis’ novel, from which but one bit of actual text survives the adaptation.
From the novel: “I spent the whole 2½ hours intently estimating how long it would take (given the high ceiling as against the humid conditions) to gas the audience, and wondering which of their clothes would be salvageable, and calculating how much their hair and gold fillings might fetch . . .”
From the film: “I was too busy thinking how I’d gas everyone in the room. Very difficult, logistically, because of its high ceiling.”.
The soundscape stars in this horror show.
It is a film of borders, and walls, and constraints, of emotionally- and psychologial-suffocating tolerances. But its the flywheel of another genre—the workplace drama—that drives its most insistent theme, the bureacratic 9-5 mundanity of tasks that accrue to Evil. The narrative break that occurs at the end, corresponding with Rudolph Höss’ Robert-Durst-like wretches, cuts from one job site to another, and neatly encapsulates cause and effect, professional competence and human tragedy.
Within his context, his sense of vocation and duty, Höss and Eichmann and others said variations on, “What choice did I have, I was doing my job?” We could multiply examples of times when people report their greatest happiness and purpose came when the felt part of something larger themselves, whether in school, the military, a start-up, or any other kind of cult-like collective from which one derived a role and clear directives.
But what, about heresy, does any of this amount to? The weight of conscience and the burden of ambition? The hæresis is choice. Confined within the straight lines of any orthodoxy, the default belief is: you are here, and here is right. (A.A. Dowd in Vulture suggests Höss’ vision is a vision of his ultimate irrelevance). We do as we’ve been told, taught, and know.
But it takes poetry (or, at least, acts of poesis), in which nothing famously happens, to teach us how to choose to make nothing happen. How does one become sufficiently distinct, sufficiently unique, to embody the spirit of our intentions? To have intentions strong enough and worthy of embodying? This is what Hannah Arendt saw lacking at Nuremburg.
Sometimes, from the correct angle: Nothing remains to be done.
From Sofistikashun, by Tony Hoagland:
The artistic life begins in instinct and moves toward calculation; or maybe, it begins in blind obsession and ends in self-possession. Or does it begin in play and end in ambition? Or, some say, it begins in inspiration and moves toward repetition. Whichever version you subscribe to, the loss of innocence is inevitable, and it is indeed a loss—but one that has compensations. Some of the names for that compensation are skill, perspective, and choice.
A more expansive way of stating what Rick Rubin calls “hard-earned abilities [to] transcend rules.” Only in continuous practice do we learn necessary faiths. When art functions as art it does not rest on having followed rules. Extrapolate.
It may be glib, in this light, to speak of poetry alongside morality, but wherever one may find the inner light and source of self to resist prevailing powers—which travel in words and images—then so be it. Practice the practices that work.
So that, first and finally, is the demarcation of this zone, a space for a writer and a space for a reader (the line between need not be defined). Who can know where writing will take us? “Be neat and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your work,” Flaubert said. That is one job.