Context N°18
by 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.
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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.
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Selected Works by Thalia Field:
Incarnate: Story Material. New Directions, $15.95.
Point and Line. New Directions, $14.95.
