beyond comprehension
This Week In Reading
Little Weirds by Jenny Slate
Little Weirds genuinely challenged my conceptions of what writing can be. I know this is a bold stance but I’m not taking it back— this book melted my brain and reformed it out of the residual goo.
Jenny Slate uses language in a way that is nearly incomprehensible. The essays are full of invented compound words: feeling-sight, honey floral petal cones, wet water bloops. She carries out extended metaphors for pages without ever acknowledging that they are metaphors at all. The book is barely readable, and yet, her voice is so palpably strong that her thoughts cut straight through the gibberish. Her voice is the gibberish, and also transcends it.
In her opening essay she writes: “I knew that my warmth and lovely shape were the result of thoughtful and gentle work. Oh please feel it: I am the croissant that felt its own heat and curves and wished to become a woman, and I am the woman from the wish.”
Like, okay! This book is bizarre and astonishing and radiates with the same kind of specialness that Jenny Slate herself does.
Most writers write from a place of self-expression. They write to articulate something for themselves, and then they publish it, in hopes of sharing that self-expression with us. Jenny Slate flips that on its head. Jenny Slate is not writing for herself. She is writing as a gift to us, in the hopes that we will like her writing, and thus, love her. And that—the being loved— is the gift to Jenny Slate. She is a performer that fell sideways into writing and wrote a shockingly good book. Her intention was not really to write a book at all, but rather to give herself, full-heartedly, to her audience. She writes: “Look at me and say, “Oh I really shouldn’t,” just because you want to have me so very much.”
I am someone that needs desperately to be understood, and the most direct way of manifesting that seemed to be to learn how to communicate my ideas as clearly and concisely as possible. Articulation is the means to the end, and also a smokescreen I hide behind.
My impulse when I write an essay— any essay— is to write it as a list of questions. This, I have gathered, is not how good essays are structured. If I wrote this however I wanted I would write:
What could I gain if I gave up comprehensibility? How is articulation a crutch that prevents me from expressing a truth that transcends the limits of language? Do I know what my voice is outside of the construct of communicating with other people? Are our voices only distinguishable in contrast with the voices of others? How can my voice be true if it only functions to be understood by an audience? Am I an artist that writes? Or a writer that accidentally became an artist?
Whether I am a writer that makes art or an artist that writes is a distinction that doesn’t matter at all, except in the way that it matters very much to me. I’ve always made art so that I could write an artist statement— the visual decisions and touch of the hand secondary to the satisfaction of carefully shuffling 200 words into the perfect order.
I am all questions and no conclusions. In college I was infamous for ending most of my papers with a question that had been camouflaged as a statement via tricky punctuation. My concluding paragraphs were more often than not a single sentence— if the sentence was long enough to wrap onto the third line of a word document, you could create the illusion of having written a full paragraph.
I fell into art because conceptual art felt like a space where you could throw a question into the void and listen to it echo. My art practice is for questions that I don’t have the answers to yet. Some of these questions I have been asking for nearly a decade— what does it mean to manage land? How do we define home when our concepts of place are always in flux? What does it mean to be Good? Who gets to define quality? Value? What is Taylor Swift’s deal, anyways?
Once I have found an answer, it is time to stop making art about it. Writing is for the questions that I have come to some sort of conclusion about. As my grasp over language becomes more precise, I find that many of the questions I would once pose as a piece of art are easier to tackle through an essay. In response, my art practice has become a little bit less tangible. It is a home for the thoughts I can’t quite pin language to, thoughts that need to exist outside of the boundaries of words and commas. Artist statements are harder for me to write now, but perhaps that is a good thing— proof that I am working with an idea that remains just beyond my fingertips.
I only allow myself three or four question marks per essay, carefully editing the others into periods. Sometimes I feel like I am making up answers just so I have the chance to pose a question. Often, to me, the question is more compelling than the response. The wonder is in its open endedness, the space it creates for discussion, observation, further inquiries. Maybe I’m neither an artist nor a writer, but a conversationalist who is afraid of the ephemeral. Maybe if I release myself from the formalities of writing I can let the questions sit placidly in the open, undisguised, a complete beginning middle and end that is finished with a question mark.
Further Reading:
Other writers that have reshaped my understanding of writing: Rebecca Solnit-- whose sheer mastery of the written word and ability to seamlessly connect disparate topics is jaw dropping. The Faraway Nearby is my favorite and overdue for a reread. I didn’t love Taffy Brodesser Akner’s novel, but she writes celebrity profiles like she is staring dead into a camera, and truly, is a revelation to the field of journalism.