Context
Interview with Thalia Field
Miranda F. Mellis
Thalia Field was born in Chicago in
1966. After attending lycée in France, she graduated with honors from
Brown University, where she was awarded the first John Hawkes prize in
fiction. She was a senior editor of Conjunctions from 1996 to
1999, and guest-edited a special issue on experimental music-theater,
including work by Harry Partch, Meredith Monk, and Robert Ashley. She
is the author of Point and Line and Incarnate (New Directions); her forthcoming novel, Clown Shrapnel,
is due from Coffee House next spring, with a “silent film” by Bill
Morrison. Thalia’s recent multimedia dance collaborations with Jamie
Jewett have been performed at Danspace at St Mark’s Church, New York
City, and Green Street Studios, Cambridge. Thalia is on the Literary
Arts faculty at Brown University and frequently teaches in the Summer
Writing Program at Naropa University. ___________________________ MIRANDA F. MELLIS: Can you talk about how you approach writing vis-à-vis form and content? THALIA
FIELD: At the heart of the question of form and content is process, how
an artist uses “awareness” to destroy dull and conventional habits of
language and worldview. Both Stein and Cage innovatively used awareness
practice to open up new areas of form and theatricality. Cage’s
enactment of materials and structure in “Lecture on Nothing” is a
brilliant expression of form and content as he needed it. Ostensibly he
is challenging European musical theory in which formal abstractions
have replaced direct perception, pulling form and content artificially
apart. The “Nothing” he is saying reveals his poetic translation of
“form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Not a nihilistic view, he
enacts a poetics wherein whatever arises is allowed full freedom of
expression. Analogously in literature, ideas about event and psychology
(i.e. what a “self” consists of) could be replaced with a more direct
experience, where language can refresh form (naming) by prioritizing
nonconceptual freedom rather than ideas which precede perception.
Cage’s idea of time as a container (rather than key structure or
narrative closure) and time as content (rather than linguistic or
musical referents) has inspired me to be sure that description is never
not an enactment (or performance) of awareness. There’s a lot of the
meditative in Cage’s practice: that whatever arises is perfect (needs
no capital E Editing) and passes without effort, leaving room
for any other thought or perception to arise. This constant flow is the
content of time (or mind) as experienced from a meditative (or
ecological) point of view. From where I stand, I think literary
practice is due for a deep revision of our relationship to the world
and to “selves” in it. Cut open to expose the human-centered narrative
for its arrogance and ignorance, the complex impartiality of the world
without cinematic point of view makes for disorienting, broken,
beautiful frames. MM: To “cut open the human-centered narrative and explore impartiality” requires seeing that consciousness is not solely human . . . TF:
Consciousness is a feature of all sentience, all creatures. I’m not
turning theologian here, let’s stay in the aesthetic: I guess what I
call human-centered poetics is where the scale is human, the time is
human (i.e., weeks, days, months, years) the landscape is human, the
psychology is human, the crises are human. It’s become equivalent to
the cinematic in that what we consider “human” is eminently filmable,
or able to be conceived in terms of edited, visual screens. Cinematic
prose contains consistent scale, in space and time, and the human
figure, whether in close-up or establishing shot, predominates. This
aesthetic holds because ultimately we don’t spend a lot of time in the
awareness of our world without ourselves as tragic heroes of it. Larger
timeframes or scales rarely occur to us. Participation in the chorus of
other creatures seems impossible, and it’s scarcely imaginable to write
ourselves out of the picture altogether. So if this is an ethical
stance in some sense, it becomes an aesthetics as the narratives and
imagery, the events and the dispersal of “selves” across a wide climate
of consciousness, all participate in a chaotic nonhierarchical system
of interdependence. Of course this is artificial in that it’s taking
place in human language. But you’d be surprised how enraged people
become at the idea of displacing conventional characters. Revising our
obsession with domestic psychosymbolic tragedies (set on the literary
equivalent of Hollywood “soundstages”) could shake the narrow focus and
force us to listen differently. MM: What do you love about research? TF:
Research is a fancy word for seeking out the infinite stories people
tell about the world. Without research I’d be left sleeping in a
soliloquy, desperate to wake up to living conversation. The endless
variety of descriptions of reality reveals a gorgeous, mournful
cacophony. Esoteric vocabulary is a total turn-on, as little corners of
experience are illuminated and every “branch” of knowledge shakes loose
new stories to their advantage, layering world upon world. This is all
very noisy, very rich and smelly. MM: I once heard you
jokingly describe your work as realist. Obviously, you are not
referring to conventional realism. Where it had been necessary to
stretch, explode, and reject realism, now it seems necessary to claim
it, to ask, I suppose, “whose realism?” TF: For me it is
realistic to be paradoxical, poly-vocal, cacophonous. Stories where
everything is tidy and psychologically or symbolically closed seem
hopelessly incomprehensible, totally unlike lived experience. Whose
universe is that? Recently at a performance in Denmark, someone asked
me, “If you’re a Buddhist, why is your work so difficult?” Despite that
being an impossible question, it’s important to remember that there are
84,000 Buddhist tenet teachings because though truths are very simple,
our neuroses are so manifestly complicated it takes 84,000 teachings to
begin to penetrate them. Anyway, taken in historical terms, realism is
a vast subject whose meanings have shifted drastically over the course
of 150 years. When we speak of “realism” in drama or prose, we mostly
mean a sort of proscenium naturalism where the audience observes the
“contents” as one would observe another planet. This godlike
perspective, the omniscience (the unobstructed view), the ability to
contain closure and entire dramatic arcs within unit “sets” (of
landscapes, time frames, characters, conflicts, etc) allows the writer
and reader to believe they are invisible. Where my work intersects with
some forms of “realism” is in the attention to perception over ideas
and to things being only ever symbols of themselves. That reading feels
like becoming part of a particular environment for a period of time
would be a “realism” I would be interested in, much like Stein
describes in her essay “Plays.” MM: You have spoken of “nonaction” as a writing technique . . . How do you conceive of it? Where do you (not) deploy it? TF:
Is nonaction an art? A technique? A practice? Maybe it’s simply more of
a discipline, in the ethical sense. Can I allow my work to emerge
without overinterfering with it, fabricating my ideas about it, growing
attached to outcome, the very future of it? Can I let it become what it
is, despite the fragments, nonsense, new-sense, noise? It’s simple:
don’t force things. Don’t have a Big Idea. In life as well as in
writing, can I minimize unnecessary interference, unnecessary
aggression? Can I open myself up beyond my own comfort? Can I abide
with allowance and impartiality, two disciplines of nonaction? MM: What questions have guided the writing of your books? TF:
Like Kundera describes his process, certain words or questions ground
each writing’s inquiry. The book I am currently working on (Experimental Animals)
finds itself in an argument, a kind of narrative/poetic essay on the
experimental, mostly as it was playing out in the physiologists’
laboratories of Second Empire Paris. As usual I combine so-called
“historical” and so-called “imaginary” worlds, constructing a
historical essai with poetic tools. My first collection, Point and Line,
followed different discourses and how they control the stories we think
we “know” about ourselves. The writing got all tangled in the places
between silence and over-speaking and this tangle led to my second
collection, Incarnate, where it was as if an atomizer had disintegrated the language, and the geometrical forms of Point and Line exploded. The second book has far fewer recognizable “bodies,” and the
sense of character, which is troubled in the first book, is downright
dismantled in the second. The pieces in Incarnate have trouble
locating where selves or stories begin or end. Fundamentally the
distinctions between event, image, environment, language, and character
fall apart. In the Buddhist sense it’s all a phenomenal display of
mind, out of which we vainly attempt to build solid things to suffer
from. MM: A character is a shifting context. TF: Yes,
we think we need consistent and immutable selves or the world of all
our opinions, careers, likes, dislikes, borders, friends, enemies—it
all falls apart. So whether we’re the most traditional naturalist or
the headiest philosopher, we try desperately to find coherence, whether
defined through a period of a time, a theory, a series of events, even
the word “she” sitting in a few sentences. Characters are who we love
and lose, and their momentary appearance and unexplained passing is
part of the ongoing drama. How rigidly we reveal or ignore this
flickering ephemerality is for me a mark of “realism.” MM: Sometimes there seems to be a crowd of these flickering characters . . . as in your third book, Clown Shrapnel. TF: In Clown Shrapnel every character emerges from and merges directly back into other
characters, just as stories pick up and deposit sediment into each
other. Artists and characters are mixed up, the “historical” and the
imaginary, it’s all echoes, shadows, thievery. There’s no beginning and
end to the stories, seen through the trope of commedia where
the “mask” is what passes down, the whole role and “plot” independent
of each actor. Today we cling to the delusion of individuality, whether
author, “star,” or copyrighted text. I started Clown Shrapnel in 1994 as an inquiry into the porousness of an unfinished opera
derived from a play derived from a whole culture’s worth of secrets,
and I wasn’t sure I would finish it. But it had legs, as we say in
theater. MM: Is there a quality that unites the pieces that
have had legs, that have walked a long way? What has given the legs
their strength? TF: I can only sustain pieces that have
arguments or inquiries but no answers, that don’t resolve. When the
paradox collapses, a piece loses legs. Sometimes the questions in a
piece are too cryptic, too personal. There’s smoldering fire but it
can’t light anything beyond itself. MM: It’s so interesting
that you said personal and cryptic together. It’s as though if you’re
taking the material too personally, identifying too much with it, then
it becomes cryptic, it turns to stone. The work is locked up in the
writer’s subjectivity. It becomes impossible to tell “one’s own story.” TF:
When it gets hard to write is when I feel beholden to some
interpretation of things. It’s best to fall right through the floor of
your understanding, of yourself and all you think is yours . . . In
Buddhism there’s a notion of “self-secret,” which is that teachings are
available to be understood only if you’ve had the initiations or
experiences that would unlock them. If you have received the right
teachings from the right teacher, the texts are totally open. Other
people’s eyes may fall there, but they wouldn’t be able to read the
same things. What’s unique to us is always present, always self-secret.
The beauty of the text has many, many layers of truths. MM: Where are your edges? What do you struggle with? TF:
At the edge of my writing I sometimes don’t recognize anything, and
this is scary. But the edge is only where there is no floor. Hello
friendly edge! Poof. Freedom from false or falling floors. Another edge
is when I am down on my work, seeing it in negative terms, for example
looking at my writing through the lens of any one conventional genre
and seeing it look only like “bad” poetry, “bad” prose, “bad” theater,
“bad” essay. Really this is the trouble of interdisciplinarity, that
one is niche-less, without kind, that criteria for a piece “working”
must be invented each time out. An edge cuts when it is allowed to be
sharp. It defines when it is allowed to cut. Mostly though, I just try
not to think too much about it. Mostly, I struggle against the
poverty-mentality of time, as I neurotically experience it (never
enough!), when actually, time is my greatest teacher. Struggling with
its lessons, hanging over the broken floorboards, the clouds gather and
break completely apart. ___________________________ Selected Works by Thalia Field: Incarnate: Story Material. New Directions, $15.95.
Point and Line. New Directions, $14.95.
