robyn reads books

Clarice has infected my syntax. I love her for it.

I’ve been thinking about this all week.

My My Dark Vanessa essay was written after understanding. These Clarice entries are different. I’m trying to write them before understanding.

Because I think my reading room needs two kinds of writing. Personal essays that organize experience after the fact.

And encounters, just fragments, that preserve experience before my interpretation rearranges it.

When I met Clarice in Near to the Wild Heart, I knew almost immediately she would be dangerous for me.

I understood her.

Too quickly.

Too bodily.

Too instinctively.  

I thought,

“How on earth did she know that?”

“Why does this already feel true?”

“She’s giving language to things I haven’t spoken yet.”

She is strange and too difficult to summarize (she even says this herself). Any preconceptions I had about the conditions under which I think and feel about books, she released me from.

Including meaning.

Now I’m reading Agua Viva. And I keep feeling she’s asking,

“Who told you the room needed walls?”

So I don’t just want meaning now. I want the closest possible relationship to language itself. (Oh for the love of wants.)

I’m not abandoning meaning altogether. I’m hearing Clarice say it’s okay to loosen my grip on it.

She’s very much telling me there are no walls here.

Shelves and libraries are lovely.

But we all have books strewn across floors, nightstands, tables, kitchen counters, car seats. And they belong there.

They belong open.

With passages underlined because they changed my breathing. Open mid-sentence. Waiting, breathing too. Waiting for someone to kneel beside them. Waiting for me to return.

It’s a discovery and a learning for me. That order and structure isn’t the price of entry. No conditions can apply. And nothing has to be finished or perfectly engineered before it can matter.

Revisiting…

Can the shelf hold an encounter?

I think it has to.

Before I organize it.

Before I smooth it into an essay.

Before I decide what happened.

Because it’s evidence that something happened here before I knew what it meant. A moment I felt alive when reading a passage of text. And for me that feels worth preserving.

Freedom? it’s my final refuge, I forced myself to freedom and I bear it not like a talent but with heroism: I’m heroically free. And I want the flow.

Clarice writes about freedom as a final refuge.

I don’t know that I’m heroically free. But I think I’m learning to leave things open. Less shelves, more room on the floor.

Because I want the flow too, Clarice.