Committing to the Bit

“In writing,” wrote Faulkner, “you must kill all your darlings.” This lecture is about proving dear Faulkner wrong.

(Here is a draft of the lecture I gave at Bennington last week).

This lecture is about committing to the bit, though it’s clear you all already know how to commit to the bit as we’ve been here already for one hundred years, filing into this beautiful, dark womb of an auditorium over and over again and then filing out and then filing back in over and over again, each time growing stranger and stranger, more alive, and also a little more dead, and then more alive again, and then more dead, and then more alive…

You are all dismissed. Okay come back. Okay you are dismissed. Okay come back.

When I was in graduate school, our poetry prof (as a farewell gift) wrote parodies of our poems – he must’ve stayed up all night – and rumpled and excited he handed them out to us – did he sleep in his clothes? – did he even sleep? – he had clearly gotten carried away – he had clearly gotten carried away with us -- and I remember like it was yesterday the reddening hush spreading over the room, the slow nausea, it was late afternoon, and it was winter in the Midwest so it was already dark, and as we each read our poem which wasn’t exactly ours, but was sort of ours – as we each read our poems to ourselves we recognized our darlings overdressed, over-perfumed, and tricked out They were if not nightmare version of themselves, swollen and unwell.

The Polish writer Bruno Schulz in a letter to a friend wrote: “I do not know how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense crystallizes for us… They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life… Such images constitute a program, establish our soul’s fixed fund of capital, which is allotted to us very early in the form of inklings and half-conscious feelings… These early images mark the boundaries of an artist’s creativity… He cannot now discover anything new; he learns only to understand more and more the secret entrusted to him at the beginning, and his art is a constant exegesis, a commentary on that single verse that was assigned to him. But art will never unravel that secret completely. The secret remains insoluble. The knot in which the soul was bound is no trick knot, coming apart with a tug at its end. On the contrary, it grows tighter and tighter. We work at it, untying, tracing the path of the string, seeking the end, and out of this manipulating comes art…”

All our feelings were hurt. I remember one student crumpling his parody into a ball and aiming it, from across the room, into a waste paper basket. It hit the rim and landed on my foot, but I did not pick it up. It wasn’t mine. It wasn’t entirely his either. And it wasn’t entirely our professor’s, though by the look of him, the dark circles under his eyes, he had clearly worked hard on it. At the worst it was cruel. At the best it was mischief. He was trying to teach us something. Our professor had worked hard on our darlings. They looked ghastly. But they were ours.

My knot was “mother.” It seemed all my poems that whole semester were dotted with mother or something motherish or the question of mother or unmothers. A whole entire army of mothers coming to rescue me or hold me hostage or recruit me forever. “What are you writing about,” asks my mother. See what just happened? Here she is again. Dead center in the middle of even this lecture.

Whatever you do don’t answer her. It will only encourage her.

I walked home from workshop that evening holding my parody and as I walked home the paper got heavier and heavier. Less and less like paper. More and more like a body. It was something heavier than me which is how I knew it couldn’t be my real mother since she barely weighs 100 pounds. It was heavier than my mother. I remember it was snowing.

I put the poem in a drawer. I kept it for almost thirty years and over those thirty years I wrote thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of mother lines, motherhood lines. Mother was my sentence even when there was no trace of her. When my house burned down in 2021 the mother poem burned down too but it wasn’t lost because how can something indestructible ever be destroyed. It can’t. This is how it went:

MOTHER MOTHER

MotherMoth
Hermother

Mother mother mother
Mother 
M
O
THERMOTHERMOTHER 
mother
mothermother 
mothermother
mothermother
mothermother
mothermother
mothermother
mothermother
mothermother

mothermothermothermothermother           mothermothermothermothermother
mothermothermothermoth                       ermothermothermothermothermothermother
mothermothermothermothermother                                   mothermothermothermothermother
mothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermother                                   mother
mothermothermothermothermothermothermother                               mothermothermother
mothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermother
mothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermother
mothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermothermother

mother

Of course it’s ridiculous. I know. I don’t mean to say we write about the same thing, exactly, over and over again. What I mean is that we write about the same thing over and over again, but not exactly. Which is not to say we write about the same thing over and over again. What I mean is that we write about the same thing over and over again, but not exactly. Can you hear me pulling at the knot?

“I create,” writes William Blake, “and I create again.”

When I say mother or knot or single verse I don’t mean one thing, I don’t mean one subject, I mean that one small pebble that you can feel in the lower left corner of your heart, the one that hurts but also – I know you know it – the one that’s heaviness holds your center of gravity, it’s the tiniest seed, a kernel, a pea under the mattress of your existence that names the unnamable parts of you.

It's – as Bruno Schulz calls it – “our soul’s fixed fund of capital.” It might not be much, but it never runs out.

Here is a knot, a single verse that is a burning that is followed for so long, for too long, until everything is burnt up and becomes “our whole life ahead of us.”

Consider “The Fire Cycle” by Zachary Schomburg:

There are trees and they are on fire. There are hummingbirds and they are on fire. There are graves and they are on fire and the things coming out of the graves are on fire. The house you grew up in is on fire. There is a gigantic trebuchet on fire on the edge of a crater and the crater is on fire. There is a complex system of tunnels deep underneath the surface with only one entrance and one exit and the entire system is filled with fire. There is a wooden cage we’re trapped in, too large to see, and it is on fire. There are jaguars on fire. Wolves. Spiders. Wolf-spiders on fire. If there were people. If our fathers were alive. If we had a daughter. Fire to the edges. Fire in the river beds. Fire between the mattresses of the bed you were born in. Fire in your mother’s belly. There is a little boy wearing a fire shirt holding a baby lamb. There is a little girl in a fire skirt asking if she can ride the baby lamb like a horse. There is you on top of me with thighs of fire while a hot red fog hovers in your hair. There is me on top of you wearing a fire shirt and then pulling the fire shirt over my head and tossing it like a fireball through the fog at a new kind of dinosaur. There are meteorites disintegrating in the atmosphere just a few thousand feet above us and tiny fireballs are falling down around us, pooling around us, forming a kind of fire lake which then forms a kind of fire cloud. There is this feeling I get when I am with you. There is our future house burning like a star on the hill. There is our dark flickering shadow. There is my hand on fire in your hand on fire, my body on fire above your body on fire, our tongues made of ash. We are rocks on a distant and uninhabitable planet. We have our whole life ahead of us.

In “The Fire Cycle,” Schomburg takes the fire too far and then he takes the fire into a future that would have no future had there been no fire.

We commit to the bit because when we do something will spring forth. Something all the way down deep. Something is always alive in the dead thing. This is another way of saying don’t give up.

Except I begin to worry this whole thing is maybe a terrible idea. You don’t stay in a house if it’s burning. When your darling is cruel or trying to burst you into smithereens shouldn’t you run for your life. Maybe Faulkner was right. Remove your darlings from the premises. March them all out. Tell them they lied to us when really we lied to them. Maybe this is a lecture on how not to survive.

Years ago there was a Brown Thrasher that repeatedly flung itself onto our living room window. We did everything to stop her. We covered the windows with black paper, hung scarecrows, soaped the glass, cursed it out, taped up raptor silhouettes. Nothing worked. We could’ve removed her nest but we didn’t have the heart. The thrasher fought with her own reflection for months. And even when her reflection was obstructed it still kept hitting the window because this route (nest to glass) had settled into the thrasher like a necessary heartbeat. It was miserable. Maybe we should name this occurrence “What Is a Writer.”

We’re almost halfway through and now I might need to abandon the whole goddamn thing and start again. “I am abandoning the whole goddamn thing and starting again,” I say, stomping through my house untying knots wherever I see them. In the rugs, the curtains, my hair, my sons’ shoelaces, my heart. This is when my husband reminds me this is art not life. There is a difference. And then I realize this might be the only difference. Or if not the only – the most important difference. Where you die in life is where you might be able to survive the most in art. I tie all the knots back up. I return to committing to the bit.

I look up “bit.” The bit is a series of components which include; shanks; rings and cheekpads. All being part of the bridle, (the assemblage, attaching to the reins that goes over the horse’s head allowing a rider to control it) that fits in and around the animal’s mouth.

The part of the bit that’s literally in the animal’s mouth – a metal bar – is not technically the bit.

Our bit, our knot, our darling is what steers our mouth so we know in what direction to follow our language. The bit steers us so that we end up somewhere, so that we’re not wandering aimlessly with zero idea how to find our way home.

“Obsession,” writes Lucie-Brock-Broido, “helps me up the stairs at night.”

In Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Molloy (who is in his mother’s room) cannot remember how he got there, cannot remember if his mother was dead when he arrived, or dead after, or even dead enough to bury. Molloy, who cannot remember his own name, has a thing for sucking stones and wants to establish the best way to distribute the sixteen sucking stones he has to suck among his four pockets so he sucks each stone equally. So no stone is sucked less than another stone.

Molloy sucks the stone, and then puts the stone back in his pocket, but never the same pocket he retrieved it from. He desires to circulate the stones with great fairness, as a father might give bread out to his children. Did he forget to suck one stone? Has he sucked one stone too many times? But why stones? Stones are minerals pushed up from the earth’s core, as the earth’s crust grows and erodes. Stones are the earth’s heart-of-the-matter. They come from the center. Not unlike Bruno Schulz’s knot. Not unlike our single verse. It is the gigantic magnet inside us that attracts what it needs from the universe. The knot. The stone. My mother. I’m sorry.

Remember Peekabo? It’s one of the first bits we commit to. The first great joke most of us probably get. It is said that babies often find "peekaboo" hilarious because they are still developing the concept of object permanence, meaning they might think the person has disappeared when their face is covered. But what’s so funny about disappearance? Missing, missing, missing found. Missing, missing, missing found. Is laughter simply the gigantic relief of not being alone? We laugh because we aren’t alone. We write to proves to ourselves we aren’t alone. Try Peekaboo today, and then try it again tomorrow, and then try it the next day too, I promise it never gets old. Its joke-like structure (surprise balanced with expectation) regenerates. The relief grows because each time we are seen we remember not only that we’re not alone, but that we exist.

The best piece of writing advice I ever got was “slow the fuck down.” I was rushing past my stories to get to the finish line but when I got there no one I recognized was there. Here I come, I shouted to no one, running, panting, losing my breath as if I would win. I’d barrel to the end of each sentence. Try to get to the point years before the point was even the point. Listen, I get it. We all want to get to the finish line. I want to cash in too. Push past. Knock down what’s right in front of me. Here I come. I too want to get the whole thing over with so I can, what, get on with it and go where? Rip through the ribbon and shout ta-da? But there is no real finish line. There is no ta-da unless ta-da is the name of our knot saying ta-da over and over again.

On the first day of workshop when I was in graduate school, our visiting professor walked in (not the same parody professor) and put a small grayish bag down on the middle of the table, and told us her father had just died and those were his ashes. I don’t remember finding this odd. I remember thinking she was sad, and she missed her father. She then began to disparage that law that keeps us from keeping the bones of our loved ones in our house. The whole skeleton, I imagined, leaning up against the livingroom wall. If we inherit anything from our loved ones shouldn’t it be at the very least their bones. All their bits? All their bits in anatomical order?

For me what is most astounding than this story is that every writing workshop doesn’t begin like this. In a small grayish bag we should bring our soul’s fixed fund of capital. Add it to the center of the table. Our most raw inheritance. Like a potluck. And go around the room.

Okay. I’ve bummed us all out.

Here is a boyscout and a warrior committing to the bit:

The boyscout shoves toilet paper in the warrior’s mouth, a dialogue that goes on for far too long, and just as the roll is finished another one materializes out of the boyscout’s back pocket because a boyscout is always prepared. Because it takes at least two rolls of toilet paper to get to the point.

Like Peekabo that commits to the bit to enact the primal fear of abandonment and return, the toilet paper scene – named Othello – echoes one of the last lines in Othello: "Of one that loved not wisely, but too well." The scene goes on for too long and for exactly the right amount of time.

It’s too slow, too repetitive, but its slowness gives us what’s profound. The boyscout and the warrior love not wisely but too well.

George Orwell writes: “A thing is funny when – in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening – it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

And finally here is the Pufferfish teaching us how to commit to the bit.

That is the Japanese puffer fish whose colors are so dull he’s practically invisible. In order to attract a mate he digs perfect circles nonstop for a week, as the current tries to wash them away. When I first saw an image of those circles, I mistook it for a photo of some ancient amphitheater covered in blue sand. A place where a forgotten poet once read, in a great loud voice, a poem about the beauty of this earth. A poem with the smallest hope of being heard. In this realm the fish builds circles with peaks and ridges, and decorates it with shells with the hope his mate will lay her eggs in its center where the sand is softest. Our knot, our single verse appears over and over again where it is most deep, where the light doesn’t reach. But it is there. The bit. The bit. The bit. Like a heartbeat. And it means everything.