The Mumpsimus

Stan Brakhage, from "The Dante Quartet" (Life has become time-lapsed fragments. I began writing these reflections some weeks ago, trying to capture the halting, disorienting, jagged experience of pandemic time. It all crumbled and keeps crumbling, yet in crumbling feels oddly static.) Time tripped ahead this summer; I can barely account for June and July in memory, though when I look back over events in my work calendar, notes I made for myself, emails I sent, I see that plenty of things got done, read, viewed, written. This is pandemic time, chaos time, life unmoored. Eventually, we will get to look back at these years and what they did to perception. The constant uncertainty, the underlying fear, the vigilance, anger, bewilderment. "The lost year," I said to somebody, then wasn't sure quite when I was referring to, and that confusion only highlighted the loss. The lost year began ten thousand years ago and yesterday. "I haven't been in this room in tw...

  1. Early in her new book, To Write As If Already Dead , Kate Zambreno notes that "Kafka's insurance firm was full of aspiring poets, a reminder that it is fairly commonplace to want to be a writer or poet. It is more unusual to stay a writer despite lack of status or outward success, to sacrifice sanity, sleep, positive well-being, health, to instead dwell in a life that is one of almost constant paranoia, oscillating between horror at invisibility and nausea at visibility." One of the things about Kate Zambreno's work that I particularly appreciate is the way it refuses to be positive and hopeful. (More than anything else, that's what links her to Jean Rhys , a writer she has frequently referenced overtly and covertly.) To Write As If Already Dead  makes the life of a writer seem just flat-out awful; it also makes the life of a mother seem flat-out awful. A mother who is also a writer? Sheer, unrelieved torture. Nevertheless, she persists. Zambreno's narrat...