Lincoln asked:
“Hey. Wanna sit in this weird liminal afterlife for 7 hours?”
And I said, “Sure, why the hell not.”
Lincoln in the Bardo begins with the death of Abraham Lincoln’s young son, Willie, and then promptly abandons anything resembling a conventional narrative structure. I had no idea I would end up in a cemetery with a whole crowd of dead people who haven’t quite moved on yet, and, apparently, have a lot to say.
I finished it tonight and I’ll keep this short.
I loved its experimental form, especially the accumulation of voices. The audiobook made that even more pronounced. An entire ensemble of consciousnesses talking over, interrupting, contradicting, carrying their own histories (some really tough) into the same space.
Grief is everywhere in the book, but Saunders makes it feel less like a single experience and more like a crowded, communal condition.
On the volume of consciousness
There was something happening with the pace here. Or perhaps it was a tightening. No. More like the weight. And the volume.
Whatever it was, by the end, I was holding a lot. A lot of attention and grief. It was heavy and loud.
This was a very different encounter with consciousness for me. This growing collective mind, this shared web of human stories, was new. I haven’t read much that explores the idea of individual lives merging into something like a vast, living stream of memory and thought. Especially not of those existing in some purgatory-like state between life and death.
It felt like hearing every past and present voice at once.
More minds. More histories. More grief. More competing accounts of things that happened.
And writing this, I’m realizing that I wasn’t really following a plot at all. I was holding an enormous amount of human interiority.
Did I like it?
Yes. Absolutely.
But I’ve been doing quite the heavy lift on consciousness lately, and I need to set this backpack down for a bit.
On the discomfort of suspension
I’ve spent enough time suspended to know that discomfort can become its own kind of environment.
Personally. Career. Reading life. You name it.
Like notes scribbled in a margin, I am pushed outside the main narrative in some aspects of my life. Neither here nor there, where movement hasn’t happened yet but remaining in the borders is becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
Sometimes I want out.
Then I want to understand it.
Then, eventually, I wonder whether accepting this suspension is the same or different from giving up.
My mind keeps looping:
Do I want out because I know I’ve lost?
Accept the defeat, Robyn. Move on.
Ah. But I can’t.
Because maybe there is a difference between being penned somewhere and staying somewhere long enough to become ready to leave.
I don’t know.
I’m still thinking about that.
Always thinking.
Is it a choice to turn the page? To let go?
How do you ready yourself for that?
And… what about your heart?
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