Mary Cappello - Awkward: A Detour

ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Night Bloom

First published in the United States in 2007 by

Bellevue Literary Press

New York

FOR INFORMATION ADDRESS:

Bellevue Literary Press

NYU School of Medicine

550 First Avenue

OBV A612

New York, NY 10016

Copyright 2007 by Mary Cappello

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

This book was published with the generous support of Bellevue Literary Presss founding donor the Arnold Simon Family Trust and the Bernard & Irene Schwartz Foundation.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

Book design and type formatting by Bernard Schleifer

eBook ISBN-13 978-1-934137-90-1

FIRST EDITION

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

For Karen Carr,

fellow writer, gardener,

reader, friend

Can you understand, asked my father, the deep meaning of that weakness, that passion for coloured tissue, for papier-mch, for distemper, for oakum and sawdust? This is, he continued with a pained smile, the proof of our love for matter as such, for its fluffiness or porosity, for its unique mystical consistency. Demiurge, that great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the contrary, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see behind each gesture, behind each move, its inertia, its heavy effort, its bearlike awkwardness.

BRUNO SCHULZ, Treatise on the Tailors Dummies or the Second Book of Genesis

THE WORLD AND I

This is not exactly what I mean

Any more than the sun is the sun.

But how to mean more closely

If the sun shines but approximately?

What a world of awkwardness!

What hostile implements of sense!

Perhaps this is as close a meaning

As perhaps becomes such knowing.

Else I think the world and I

Must live together as strangers and die

A sour love, each doubtful whether

Was ever a thing to love the other.

No, better for both to be nearly sure

Each of eachexactly where

Exactly I and exactly the world

Fail to meet by a moment, and a word.

LAURA RIDING, Selected Poems in Five Sets

Can we make progress if we do not enter into regions far from equilibrium?

GILLES DELEUZE, He Stuttered

CONTENTS

O NE DAY I READ in order to know things, another day, to know the truth. I read to be aided in my lustto be seduced to feel, to be lured out. I read not to be alone. I want for my day to be split open by a tidal wave of strange imaginings when I read, for something, anything, to break through. A book gains a place on my shelf for the way it forces me to remember. A sentence becomes locked in my heart for the way it helps me to forget. I admit to enjoying that good feeling of being in the midst of something higher and better when I read, but lately I long for a literature that can throw a wrench into the works. A mucking up of the machinery is called for, and instantly I wonder how it came to be a wrench that won that telling phrase rather than a screwdriver or a hammer, because a wrench seems so right now, so necessary to messing things up and forcing the plant to shut down. Had someone been tightening by way of repairing a delicate part when, distracted, they lost their grip and dropped the tool into a spring of well-greased gears, or did overzealousness for work bring the whole works to a standstill? Some anger slipped through, slipping into the work; the worker tightened too well and too hard until the wrench flew. Perhaps no accident at all incited the phrase but a workers quite conscious rebellion. Some momentous act must have lent the world a new sense of the wrench, but now it is yours and mine to use, and use well and more often until wrench has nothing to do with a tool for tightening bolts and everything to do with injury (an ankle, say), and suddenness (a tightening in the stomach), anguish even (you grip your gut), and distorted meanings (desperately you wrest matter from nothingness). The further the wrench travels from the feeling of cold metal in my hand, the closer it comes to becoming a word: see it now standing at the far end of all that happens to us daily for which we have no words. The worker has vanished.

You write the book you want to read.

Something has to give.

I try to forget my computer. I compose a novel using crayons and no sharpener. I experience a waxen feel and acknowledge unplumbed resources. If I write with my arm in a monkey grip, if I compose awkwardlyforget gracethe truth will out. I will not allow myself certain phrases: no sentences can begin with the word today, or now, as if to plead originality, distinctness, departure, or difference. There are to be no arms raised in greeting, no morning dew, no illuminations clear as rock candy and just as liquid, dissolvable; no melting, no account of how I began to understand. No lilting, or claims of possibility, no coulds, how I could do this or that, no refrains but interruptions, and certainly no more than one reference to how I continue to avoid my reflection in the mirror, how it begins in the body, or my memory of swing sets. Ive been chattering without knowing all the while that my interlocutor is deaf. Or that my interlocutor is my deaf self. Ive been listening without hearing a thing my companion has said. Are these the conditions for awkward situations or just the norm? Poet: plaintive illuminator, exposer of secrets, paragon of self-pity who sometimes said what it was and sometimes said what it was like. Now. Today. Through the window gazing at the swing set.

But what if writing sought to describe all that has a claim on me that isnt pretty? Give me a literature of the spasm. Let sentences plunge, a pear plashing through branches gleaming gold, a gift from the gods. No. Let them ooze like a mangled, rotten, half-bitten possibly poisonous hapless thing landing with a splat onto a well-intended platter. Make a paragraph out of overstuffed drawers, the stuff of attempted purges, all youve pushed out of sight without discarding, the drawer overflowing, the drawer that refused to be neatened, that is refuse, what is refused but cant be gotten rid of. Fashion a voice that can break the spell. Where I thought the ground was smooth, I now feel its graininess poking up into my heels, scraping my arches, piercing toes, the sound of a person pushing a locomotive up the street, beneath my window, the trundling of an overloaded trash can on wheels.