been houses

 

Fragmenting cloud. Frome, 20 August 2020.

5 ≈ Sentimental Education

I step inland

been houses

all look fact.

                            The                              calculated

                                                     wooden

              solitude                                   mythology was my thing.

Aptly                very evidently the

lounge around       history

                                                              beckoned

This written vocabulary offended

                                    the time as if

                                                              "differentiation" meant

              first

seventh was ok.

                  Some friends come to a strange circular show to sing

                        Right sides and differently shake the horn.

Dropped out before         exactly stories

               being

   in the field beside collecting leaves, loving doing                    dancing at

Zelda's           to              yes:

                              with us for a gosh.

                                   That fall,                         beck

              before everything over the ridge the golden

                   male               was                         my first poem.

(the opening of "Sentimental Education", from Lisa Samuels' Anti M (Chax Press, 2013).)

Nonetheless, any attempt to explicate the work as a whole according to some "higher order" of meaning, such as narrative or character, is doomed to sophistry, if not overt incoherence. The new sentence is a decidedly contextual object. (from Ron Silliman, "The New Sentence" (1977).)

The writing in Anti M can't be precisely retrofitted to Silliman's "new sentence", but it's pretty close. The new sentence isn't new any more, it has crisscrossed the world for fifty years (and I wonder if it was ever quite as circumscribed as in Silliman's narrative, quite as firmly located in the prose poem and the Bay Area). Nevertheless the new sentence still causes new variations of trouble, and that's the idea.

Anti M isn't a memoir and it would be unrewarding for anyone who's a fan of memoirs to try and read it as one, but nor can the background shapes of memoir be entirely discarded. In the page I've quoted, the bare "education" of the section title bulks large: history, written vocabulary, collecting leaves, the organized singing and dancing, the phrase "Dropped out". By the end of this extract the idea of early stirrings of sentiment is becoming more relevant.

Silliman's insight about "contextual" has two almost contradictory implications. The glass half empty one is that you can't weigh any single sentence until you've absorbed the whole book: and I do feel the pressure of that, I know I have to read it all (more than once, probably). The glass half full implication is that when a page glints, that glint is real. You can even hold it still and inspect it, a bit. 

I'm just going to talk about the first sentence:

I step inland

been houses

all look fact.

It's an arresting one, and very different from what follows it, both in terms of layout and its internally torqued syntax. It's also in the present tense, while the next sentences switch to the past tense. So thinking about that shadow-memoir, you could imagine that behind this sentence lies a bit of baldly functional metatextual commentary, like "I resume my narrative".  I step inland .... away from the coastline of the present, into the past of .... been houses  .... houses of the past, house that have been, or houses where I've been .... . And by similar broad interpretation you could take all look fact as an epistemological remark on the material of our memories, their uniform assertion of factualness disturbed by our occasional discovery that some of our early memories are demonstrably and inexplicably wide of the mark, and by our suspicion of the inherent implausibility in some of the others.

But this is already becoming an unbalanced commentary, over-dignifying the referential aspect of the sentence and clamping down on what Silliman calls "syllogistic movement". And the movement here is intent, isn't it? Even fierce? (Doesn't the reader, seeking to impose a more regular syntax, hear a whisper that the "houses all look fucked"?)

The section "Sentimental Education" ends with another sentence in this same anomalous form: 

This kind of why allows

for holding

fascism so follow.

This one almost rhymes. How fascism grows, what it grazes on. (And between "allows" and "follow" there lurks another acquiescent word, "fallow".) 

These two book-end sentences are unexpected. None of the other eight sections has them. They have hard outlines, and surely they draw attention to the aspects of darkness and frustration in the anti-memoir between. Their tendency, I'm thinking, is to dissolve the separation of adult spheres and children's spheres, to discover a deeper recognition of community across human age-groups. Like, We're all dealing with the same stuff . . .

A ripe fig exciting the local insects. Frome, 20 August 2020.