Nor It the Nothing Never Is

I was on holiday recently, and, as I was picking my way through the books I'd brought with me, I re-encountered a wonderful little thing I hadn't looked at for at least five years. It was a three-page story (or a three-page piece) by Donald Barthelme, one of those included in his career-spanning collection Sixty Stories. I don't know Barthelme very well, but Sixty Stories is one of the most rewarding selections of short prose I've ever seen or heard of, and I'm thinking now that it might be a worthy contender for a go-to holiday book: it's light, compact, beautifully designed (in my Penguin Modern Classics iteration at least), and promises delight on every page. It's always an uncanny sort of pleasure to recognise a source of influence for writers you already know well, or, if not quite influence, a concentration of much that you've loved in others. I read Gravity's Rainbow after I'd read Midnight's Children, and I remember well the strange suspicion that the best of Rushdie's book had been lifted almost wholesale from Pynchon's.¹ Reading Barthelme now, he shines as a true hero of doggedly comic writers; every page calls to my mind David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, John Barth, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Rushdie, Pynchon, B. S. Johnson, James Thurber, Vonnegut, Heller, bits of Burgess and Borges and Bellow, O. Henry, Nabokov, Beckett, even Joyce. This is a partial and imperfect list, obviously, but what also matters to me is that these are not just great comic writers but writers of impeccable prose—some of the doyens, in my experience, of sentence-craft. You can get sick on prose like Barthelme's and Nick Baker's (who often writes better sentences than Martin Amis, I feel), but it's also a reliable source of uncut, moment-by-moment joy.

As an undergrad, I was assigned a handful of bits from Sixty Stories for a seminar on contemporary literature, but I remember that I missed the class. I had, however, done the reading, had enjoyed the reading, and the piece that most beguiled me back then was the one I turned to on holiday. Its title is 'Nothing: A Preliminary Account', and it was first published (surprise surprise) in the New Yorker. Barthelme himself has been recording reading it.

'Nothing', like the poems by Emily Berry and Oli Hazzard that I discussed in a previous post, is a virtuosic piece of list-making. Unlike those poems, which are laid out in sparse, regular forms, Barthelme holds the freer reins of prose.

It's not the yellow curtains. Nor curtain rings. Nor is it bran in a bucket, not bran, nor is it the large, reddish farm animal eating the bran from the bucket, the man who placed the bran in the bucket, his wife, or the raisin-faced banker who's about the foreclose on the farm. None of these is nothing. A damselfish is not nothing, it's a fish, a Pomacentrus, it likes warm water, coral reefs—perhaps even itself, for all we know. Nothing is not a nightshirt or a ninnyhammer, ninety-two, or Nineveh.

You get the idea. Here's some more:

Nor is it snuff. Hurry. There is not much time, and we must complete, or at least attempt to complete, the list. Nothing is not a tongue depressor; splendid, hurry on. Not a tongue depressor on which a distinguished artist has painted part of a nose, part of a mouth, a serious, unsmiling eye. Good, we got that in. Hurry on. We are persuaded that nothing is not the yellow panties. The yellow panties edged with white on the floor under the black chair. And it's not the floor or the black chair or the two naked lovers standing up in the white-sheeted bed having a pillow fight during the course of which the male partner will, unseen by his beloved, load his pillowcase with a copy of Webster's Third International. We are nervous. There is not much time.

More:

It's not the ice cubes disappearing in the warmth of our whiskey nor is it the town in Scotland where the whiskey is manufactured nor is it the workers who, while reading the Bible and local newspaper and Rilke, are sentiently sipping the product through eighteen-foot-long, almost invisible nylon straws.
         And it's not a motor hotel in Dib (where the mudmen live) and it's not the pain or pain or the mustard we spread on the pain or the mustard plaster we spread on the pain, fee simple, the roar of fireflies mating, or meat.

Reading the whole short thing is truly exhilarating, vertiginous. The prose is breathless in places (parts make me think of Hopkins's 'The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo', a poem Richard Burton once recorded at an appropriately fast pace), but also expertly controlled. It's not a loose firehose but a tightly twiddled valve. The piece contains a consideration, or a refutation, of some concepts of nothingness, but I don't love it for its philosophical sophistication (which I'm not really equipped to judge, anyway). I love it because it's one of the most purely celebratory things I've ever encountered; in its passion for life and language, it's as stirring as the close-out of Ulysses. You know: 'and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arm around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes'.

Heidegger is far too grand for us; we applaud his daring but are ourselves performing a homelier task, making a list. Our list can in principle never be completed, even if we summon friends or armies to help out (nothing is not an army nor is it an army's history, weapons, morale, doctrines, victories, or defeats—there, that's done). And even if we were able, with much labor, to exhaust the possibilities, get it all inscribed, name everything nothing is not, down to the last rogue atom, the one that rolled behind the door, and had thoughtfully included ourselves, the makers of the list, on the list—the list itself would remain. Who's got a match?

*

If I were a teacher of creative writing, I would encourage students to make their own versions of 'Nothing', not for any significant assignment but as perhaps a fortnightly exercise, a couple of pages of not-nothings at a time—although foregoing the explicit discussions of philosophical and scientific concepts of nothingness. Imitating lists is an easy way to get yourself writing, and this list is the most germane one I can think of. Everything is permitted, first of all, but every aspect of everything is permitted: nothing is not the gin bottle on your desk, nor is it the secret beauty of barcodes, nor is it the history of serif script, nor is it the drop sliding like a tear down the inside of the neck, nor is it the double-thump heaviness of the name L O N D O N, nor is it the comfort of being dry. The goal is not to describe every inch of a space as you might in a New Novel, but rather to pluck one thing, pick a few of its petals, and move on. In Barthelme's story, each apparently new not-nothing begets a small family of not-nothings, all related along various lines. There are small enclosed narratives ('bran in the bucket', 'the large, reddish farm animal', 'the man', 'his wife', 'the raisin-faced banker'); back-pedalled chains of production ('the ice cubes', the 'warmth of our whiskey', 'the town in Scotland where the whiskey is manufactured [....]'); and links of linguistic closeness ('a nightshirt or a ninnyhammer, ninety-two, or Nineveh'). There is also, however, plenty of fancy and invention, moments where imagination creates the next step:

I am sorry to say that it is not Athos, Porthos, or Aramis, or anything that ever happened to them or anything that may yet happen to them if, for example, an Exxon tank truck exceeding the speed limit outside of Yuma, Arizona, runs over a gila monster which is then reincarnated as Dumas père. 

So the prompt or brief for aping Barthelme might read something like this: Write your own version of Barthelme's 'Nothing: A Preliminary Account'. First, find or imagine something that is not nothing. Then, name some other things that bear some proximity to the first—such as in terms of colour, shape, category, linguistics, opposition, inversion, physical closeness, or anything else. Try not to spend too long in any one rabbit hole, and don't be afraid, every now and then, to randomise. Vary your sentence structures; try to find a few different ways to introduce or declare what is not nothing. Experiment with syntax, imagery, and metaphor. Aim for some kind of cohesion, but not at all costs.

An example: Nothing is not why cavemen painted on walls, nor was it to be found anywhere in their favourite natural pigments. It is not the mental roadblock of trying to imagine a colour you have never seen. It is not, fortunately, your late grandfather's favourite watercolour, and not the square of papered wall where it was once hung and where now, presumably (you can't, I know, remember damnit which room it was), there hangs another, another's. "The paint doesn't move the way the light reflects, / so what's there to be faithful to?" Is it that fine question, read aloud? It is not. Nor is it saying, more than once and with feeling, I am faithful to you, darling, whether or not you say it to the paint.²

Now that's not great, and it probably reads as confusing and obscure. But it was quick to write and, as I see it, the point of this hypothetical creative writing assignment is not to produce something proud and polished but to get you thinking and writing. It could, as I've suggested, be a genre of diary-keeping; you could use it as a way of revisiting and repackaging your day or your week. It might, for some, turn out to be a useful therapeutic tool, a kind of affirmation-by-negation that every bad part of your day, even the taste of your own tears, was nothing if not not nothing.³

Put it on the list. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. What a wonderful list! How joyous the notion that, try as we may, we cannot do other than fail and fail absolutely, and that the task will always remain before us, like a meaning for our lives. Hurry. Quickly. Nothing is not a nail.

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¹ This is grossly unfair . . . It was the simple chronological uncanny of reading second what I knew had come first, and thereby having an altered sense of their connections. I'm very fond of Rushdie, if not actively so. Midnight's Children was a very important book for me: I read it during my transitional period between adolescent and adult reading, and it was possibly the very first book that opened my eyes to the possibilities both of the novel and of prose per se. On a very local level, Midnight's Children makes use of a simple linguistic device that I absolutely love, namely, writing out lists with no commas. As on the second page: 'such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours'. Like Barthelme's story, it is exhilarating, pulse-quickening; it has a peculiar urgency, as if the importance of getting everything in as quickly as possible trumps one of the basic tenets of punctuation.

I'm also amazed by how rare it is. You'll see it in some form in poetry, but rarely as a twist within what is otherwise conventional prose. I've only seen it in one other novel (although I have a possibly false memory of seeing it in some of Whitman's prose), Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. Which (and this is a pointless story, but obviously I've teed up the telling of it) Rushdie mentioned as one of his favourite novels, and one he had been recently rereading, when I saw him give a talk a couple of years ago. I queued up to have him sign my copies of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, and, while I waited, I thought about asking him about this very device. But he had so many books to sign that I knew I couldn't, and I still probably took too long to tell him how pleased I was that he mentioned Humboldt's Gift, which is also one of my favourites. He didn't even have time to notice and admire any of the hopelessly earnest notes and annotations my teenage self had scribbled in his books.

To sum up: I love Rushdie, and he has been very important to me, but Pynchon is probably better.

² There are verbatim quotations in this passage from Richard Siken's poem 'The Way the Light Reflects', which has appeared in B O D Y (among other places), April 28 2014.

³ There is a risk that you will find yourself piling up negatives in a cloying fashion. There is a risk of ending up with something that resembles Martin Amis's uncharitable parodies, in his memoir Experience, of Beckett's prose: 'At a dinner, having been irked by Salman Rushdie’s professed admiration for Beckett, he lays down a challenge:

‘Quote me some. Oh I see. You can’t. […] Well I’ll do it for you. All you need is maximum ugliness and a lot of negatives. “Nor it the nothing never is.” “Neither nowhere the nothing is not.” “Nothing the never—”’.

'Some Fears' by Emily Berry

Discovering poets is rather more difficult than discovering songwriters.¹ It seems that way at least, and a few reasons suggest themselves: poetry is less well populated than music; it's not so easy to gain unfettered access to the whole output of a contemporary poet without buying an actual book (there are no poetry streaming services, not really); poetry takes longer to digest and often hits hardest when you're not reading or hearing but recalling it. It's hard to read poetry on a long drive, for the most part. Different poetry suits particular moods, sure, but we don't put together party poetry playlists to share with friends.

What I find most persuasive, however, is the possibility that human voices in themselves are more reliably compelling than utterances, that it is easier to find a voice we immediately like than it is a verbal arrangement. I'm half in love with the voices not only of those I love but everybody I meet, and in fact I love most of what they have to say; but I don't usually want to see them slow down for poetry. Inarticulacy is so often more stirring than clipped and rounded words. Words are not deeds. A kiss is not a poem.

This isn't to say that a good poem is hard to find. But to snag a whole living breathing poet takes at least a little enterprise, and perhaps some patience and serendipity too. Emily Berry, the poet whose poem I feel like discussing, was given to me as an incidental gift. She's the first in the first volume of the revived Penguin Modern Poets series, which I received not long ago included, possibly as an afterthought, inside a book-stuffed tote bag. From that first selection I graduated to her debut book, Dear Boy, which I've been reading carefully yet unsystematically. As far as I can tell, Berry is a very funny poet capable of great delicacy and opportune poignancy.

Here's the whole of a really good one entitled 'Some Fears':

Fear of breezes; fear of quarrels at night-time; fear of wreckage;
fear of one's reflection in spoons; fear of children's footsteps;
fear of the theory behind architecture; fear of boldness; fear of
catching anxiousness from dogs; fear of ragged-right margins;
fear of exposure after pruning back ivy; fear of bridges; fear of
pure mathematics; fear of cats expressing devotion; fear of
proximity to self-belief; fear of damp tree trunks; fear of
unfamiliar elbows (all elbows being unfamiliar, even one's own);
fear of colour leaking from vegetables; fear of the mechanics of
love affairs; fear of slipping; fear of ill-conceived typography;
fear of non-specific impact leading to the vertical ejection of the
spine from the body; fear of leaf mulch; fear of the timbre of
poetry recitals; fear of balcony furniture; fear of colour leaking
from the heart; fear of internal avalanche; fear of the notion of
a key engaging with the inside of a lock; fear of psychoanalytical
interpretations; fear of dregs; fear of book titles; fear of particular
hues of sky glimpsed from areoplane windows; fear of text
stamped into metals; fear of promises; fear of alieantion brought
on by hospitality; fear of unexplained light; fear of comprehesive
write-off; fear of fear; fear of help. Fear of asking for, receiving,
refusing, giving, or being denied help. 

Berry hasn't made the full text of 'Some Fears' available online, but she has been recorded reading it for Faber's official YouTube channel.

Although the poem trades in idiosyncrasy, reading at times like Barthes's catalogue of likes and dislikes, it is not a simple list of personalised paranoia. The title alone tells us that these fears are unattributed. They are not my or your or our fears—tellingly, the only possessive pronoun in this list is the generic one's—and they are thus, all at once, real, documented, imaginary, hypothetical, inverted, ironised, knowingly ludicrous, deathly serious. We don't know, that is to say, whether the poet has known these fears, heard about them, read about them, invented them out of nowhere or adapted them from something else. This makes each entry wonderfully protean, in that it will be encountered and considered differently by whoever the reader happens to be. In fact, despite the apparent hyper-specificity, most if not all of these fears are ambiguous. Is it a fear of having 'quarrels at night-time', or hearing them? Is it a fear of one's own boldness, or others'? The 'mechanics of [one's own] love affairs', or others'? (Or those at work in fiction?) Bridges of the real or metaphorical variety? Making, breaking, or keeping promises? Should we probe the figurative significance behind 'children's footsteps' or 'exposure after pruning back ivy', or should we delight in literalness?

Apart from the fruitful ambiguity of the referent, however, what has come to seem more important about this poem is that is not, in fact, a list of things to fear: it is, quite specifically,—I pause to apologise for the perhaps irritating but probably necessary upcoming italics—a list of fears. Now, this may be very fucking obvious, given the title and the identical 'fear of ...' construction hedged by semicolons, or else it may be no distinction at all. But it seemed an important step in my encounters with this poem: to recognise that these were not, as I've said, things—things of which it would be, variously, understandable or wise or embarrassing or debilitating to have a fear—but rather self-contained concepts or conditions. It's clearly no accident that the construction 'fear of ...' matches the customary form for defining phobias—or, as you might prefer to call them, irrational fears. The first thing we all know about phobias is that they can be astonishingly specific, occasionally to the point of almost poetic archness; and the second thing is that they all seem to have been ascribed an unwieldy Greek word. Limnophobia. Lachanaphobia. Metrophobia. There are websites dedicated to collecting and curating named phobias, but they tend to be far more interested in the pleasures of strange or ornate words than they are in the lived experience of phobias themselves.²

The poem, meanwhile, implicitly reflects on the nature and occasion of fear, even though it says nothing explicit about what fear is, what it feels like, who feels it, when it arrives, or anything else. It suggests that fear is indeed everywhere, and everything has the power to provoke fear. By itself, the list takes a sympathetic view on the multiplicity of modern anxiety, a word that seems to be shimmering, obscured, behind this poem. We now understand that some people 'have anxiety', that generalised anxiety disorders can live in people, precipitating any kind of irrational fear that it might be possible to imagine. I don't think the poem is exclusively about what we diagnose as anxiety disorders, nor do I think it has the gall to suggest that all fear is the same. But I do think it hopes, in part, to acknowledge that the defining feature of 'anxiety'—which is to say, its irrationality—has little effect on the force of fear. The poem never specifies anxiety, and it even slyly uses the word anxiousness instead. Each entry, however, implies a level somewhere between practical fear (or fear in the face of something) and almost abstract or armchair anxiety (fear, that is, in the thought of something).

One of the most frequent complaints about contemporary discourse surrounding mental health is that there are now far too many bogus 'conditions' or 'disorders', that the current edition of the DSM is grossly overstuffed. Martin Amis was exemplary on the very first page of his novel The Pregnant Widow: 'When [Keith Nearing, the novel's protagonist] was young, people who were stupid, or crazy, were called stupid, or crazy. But now (now he was old) the stupid and the crazy were given special names for what ailed them.' This is mean-spirited, and any irony you might be able to coax out will be distinctly toothless. The sentiment, however, reflects the power of naming: Amis implies that not everything deserves a name, that the apparent legitimacy achieved by having a name for what ails you belies a signifier signifying nothing, or else overcomplicates—medicalises, pathologises—something that is, in point of fact, rather simple. From the same novel: 'I recognise that one, he would say to himself: otherwise known as Little Shit Syndrome. And I also recognise that one: otherwise known as Lazy Bastard Disorder. These disorders and syndromes, he was pretty sure, were just excuses for mothers and fathers to dope their children.' 

Berry's poem, conversely, suggests that there might not be enough names, or that we could easily do with a few more entries on our phobia listings. But she does this, funnily enough, without suggesting any names. It is of piece with Oli Hazzard's poem 'The Inability to Recall the Precise Word for Something', a list of unanchored definitions: such as 

The act of mentally undressing someone
One who speaks or offers opinions on matters beyond their knowledge
A secret meeting of people who are hatching a plot
The act of beating or whipping schoolchildren
The categorisation of something that is useless or trivial 

According to the notes in the back of Hazzard's first collection, Between Two Windows, this is a found poem, assembled from this list of 'Unusual Words'. (The title itself comes from this list, the word being lethologica). These are not, then, definitions without corresponding extant words, but the words are so obscure (the only ones in the list I've ever seen before are floccinaucinihilipilification and defenestrate) that they themselves are dead—little more than mere curios. I don't mean to say that the words aren't interesting, but I think the specificity of the definitions is the more interesting part of the equation. Like Berry, Hazzard seems concerned with the extent to which the world is divisible. He also shows an affection for the dictionary definition as a form or genre of literature, one that lives and dies by how exacting (or otherwise vague) it turns out. There is no possibility of a definitive definition, after all, or a perfectly condensed one.

As a new whole thing, this found poem represents an abridgment and a rearrangement of the definitions into an order less apparent than the original one, which is, naturally, alphabetical. It is this shuffling and shifting of order and of context which makes the poem. The original list might not be a poem, but the poet's eye sees its potential and transforms it into something new while keeping it the same. It reminds me of another found poem, the class list Humbert Humbert finds in Lolita.

But I also think that Hazzard demonstrates how lexical definitions are poems unto themselves. Prose poems, perhaps, or monostiches. Part of their attempt to arrive at precision involves clearing space for doubt. More attention should be paid to the poetical habits of definitions.

Martin Amis, again in The Pregnant Window, gives us an example. He's an OED man, after all (or a Concise Oxford man), like Hal Incandenza. Nothing but the best. Accept no substitute.

What a very compassionate book it is, the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Take, for example, the entry on neurosis. [Keith Nearing] ran his wife and read it to her.

'Now listen. A relatively mild mental illness, my love, not caused by organic disease. Here's an even better bit. Involving depression, anxiety, obsessive behaviour, etc. — that et cetera's great — but not a radical loss of touch with reality. There. That's so understanding, don't you think?

'. . . Come to the house.'

Lexicographers are people too, and their skills, which must be literary as well as linguistic, are in constant struggle with the history of usage, the tides of change, and ambiguity. Some are more, or less, compassionate than others.

Together with Berry's, Hazzard's poem is also of a piece with The Meaning of Liff, that wondrous book put together by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd in which unassuming place names are given appropriate definitions (or, rather, daffynitions). For example, Fraddam: (n.) 'The small awkward-shaped piece of cheese which remains after grating a large regular-shaped piece of cheese and enables you to cut your fingers'. The process for Liff is markedly different, however: whereas the fears are nameless conditions, the 'meanings' in Liff have been retroactively supplied for a batch of preexisting names. You could draft a list of possible names for 'Some Fears', since we have the ready lexical formula suff + phobia, but these would have no place as part of the poem. It occurs to me that the poem is itself formulaic, and that anybody could construct their own version of 'Some Fears'. Not that it would be any good, but, again like Barthes's likes and dislikes, we could each concoct our own list of fears, either (again) real or invented. Berry's poem may not demonstrate that everything out there needs a name, but it does show that the world is infinitely divisible⁴—and, further, that each mind can draw the dividing lines differently.

There are several moments of wit here that jump out, some of them what you might call meta-tyopgraphical—'fear of ragged-right margins'; 'fear of ill-conceived typography'—and one of them what you might call juxtapositional: 'fear of the notion of/ a key engaging with the inside of a lock; fear of psychoanalytical/ interpretations'. There are also gestures towards serious personal pain which seem to build as the poem goes on: 'fear of colour leaking from the heart'; 'fear of internal avalanche'; 'fear of comprehensive write-off'; 'fear of fear; fear of help'. The entries nearer the end suggest a person afraid of, or to some degree anticipating, a serious mental breakdown: somebody who recognises anxiety (or 'fear') as a compounding force, in that it manifests in response to particular things but can grow into something all-consuming, something comprehensively debilitating. 

The final fear is also a need. With qualifications stacking up before the final word, the reader's instinct is to separate them with tiny pauses, so that 'help' sounds as if it stands alone as a disguised plea. 'Help' is also unique among this list in being followed first by a full stop and second by further detail: 'Fear of asking for, receiving, refusing, giving, or being denied help'. I don't know if I've ever read a more succinct encapsulation of the hell that is asking for help. Most people seem to think that asking for help is a good in itself, that a problem shared is a problem halved. But Berry shows us a couple of things. The contemplation of asking for help can inspire fear towards the realities of what it means to receive help, and can conjure imagined scenarios of being asked for help (and being unable or unwilling to provide it), and of finding there actually to be no help available. All this can happen in an instant. But she also shows that, in a sequence of events, the act of asking for help is not necessarily followed by relief, is not always a self-evident good. Fear begets fear, and help always comes too late. Help is a fantasy: comforting, solipsistic, scrupulously imagined, but rarely pursued. Help is other people, and that is fear enough.

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¹ I used to think so anyway. I wrote this post about a year and a half ago and now, having somewhat refined my research skills, it seems to me very easy to discover new poets I love. As with music, it depends on how generous your own tastes are, but all you need is a little effort and internet savvy and some money to spend on new collections (at best bought directly from presses or poets themselves if you can manage it, although I certainly don't live up to this). Some of the above paragraph is still true, but I would quibble with it now. (Why have I written this note literally nobody reads this blog. JC Jan 2018)

² The linked website carries a rather wonderful disclaimer on its homepage: 'Please don't ask me about curing phobias because I know little about them. My interest is in the names only.