DORINE JENNETTE CONTINUES THE CONVERSATION: J. ALLYN ROSSER
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“Dorine Jennette Continues the Conversation” is inspired by the format of Albert Goldbarth’s “Why All This Music?” (Winter 2009), in which the poet interviews himself with questions he draws from literary sources. Following Goldbarth’s lead, Jennette interviews a writer from each issue of The Georgia Review with questions drawn from that issue’s text. Pulling questions out of their literary contexts makes them nearly non sequiturs, and replies to such queries often generate a sort of verbal Rorschach test, revealing a mind at work. An issue of GR is a kind of conversation, a dinner party at which some of the guests are old friends, while others have never met. Jennette has found a unique way to extend that conversation, this time with J. Allyn Rosser.
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“Apropos of the Big Questions”: In Which Dorine, Possessed by Some Version of Poe’s Imp of the Perverse, Throws J. A. Rosser Every Curveball She Can Find, and Rosser Bats Them All Out of the Park
“What’s the point of writing?”1
The point of writing is to promote a deeper engagement with the world by discovering truth in unprecedented manifestations. Whether by tragedy, comedy, romance, satire, fable, discursive or lyrical meditation, writers want to release the familiar from its frame, from whatever contains it, what makes it familiar. One wants to reboot the mind, startle perception, disturb glib reflection; to reintroduce the threat of disorientation so as to apprehend clearly what we had quasi-consciously ignored or distorted to fit our expectation or desire. We too easily forget that the mind is an embattled entity, warily trying to locate and reassure itself, to find comfortable, sturdy, unchanging ground in its constantly mutating environment.
These, then, are the mind’s first instincts: to stabilize, to fix, to banalize everything it perceives; to label, to have a ready-made phrase for and view of the “facts”; to find a pleasing way of distancing or processing the unpleasant; to foreground and draw the pleasant closer; to not claim responsibility for conditions or circumstances; to cope with new stimuli by repressing them; to distort each new confrontation into a replica of one already experienced; to arm itself with thoughts that will render it invulnerable to unexpected, destabilizing situations; to belong, to make nice; to accommodate or neutralize surroundings, feelings, and other minds by not taking genuine notice of them.
Hence small talk. Hence the proliferation of strip malls, sidewalks. Hence greeting cards. Hence houses and automobiles that shield us from the environment and to a large extent prevent us from being seen. Hence aspirin, sunglasses, telephones, Facebook.
Not all of these protective strategies are inherently bad, but in the aggregate they stymie the senses, dull our awareness and compassion, and ultimately constitute the death of meaning. Does this sound hyperbolically grave? Our engagement with the world is half of what we need to feel we belong in it, to feel a reason to live. So we write in order to love our lives—to nourish our curiosity and jolt ourselves from the predicted pathways our minds have learned to follow. A lot of popular writing doesn’t achieve this, because the deeper the pathway’s groove, the more difficult it is to jump the rail and think afresh. When we recognize a stock character in a stock fictional situation, we are agreeably invited to reaffirm an unexamined value system, deepen that groove. Such writers only exploit our complacency and perceptual laziness. But when Shakespeare writes the part of Lear unraveling on the heath, or when Beckett in Happy Days presents us with the determined cheeriness of a woman buried up to her waist in sand, with nothing but an umbrella, a few toiletries, and a deaf and/or senile husband crawling uselessly about her mound, we perceive the utterly familiar in a context that demands radical reassessment of our beliefs, our platitudes, and our mortal coping mechanisms. Such extreme, yet somehow recognizable, representations of our condition drive us to question the bare essentials of human purpose and fulfillment. On the other hand, when we recognize a shopworn ethical dilemma in a previously accepted formulaic dramatization or resolution or sentimental rendering, we are deadened, lulled back into not-questioning, not-engaging. This of course can be superficially gratifying. This is a thing writing can do. But the point of writing is to plunge into the core of what it means to exist, in particular as a human on this planet among other beings; to feel our fellowship with heightened immediacy; to explode apathy and complacency.
We writers do this first for ourselves; so why not just write in private journals? Because not risking the resistance or disapproval of readers would be another form of apathy; we would be complicit in perpetuating theirs. Exploding and rediscovering truth (“the the”) is just one half of our felt purpose, our way to engage with the world. The other half, I’d say, is in the telling.
“You don’t mean you did it twice?”3 As in, how do you sustain the vital but difficult practice you describe? In daily terms, how do you, as a writer and a human being of assorted responsibilities, avoid “perceptual laziness” and take genuine notice? How do you maintain allegiance to Stevens’ “the the,” to the singular, to the estranged-from-the-familiar, to the strange-within-the-familiar?
Good question. How do you remove the quotidian shock absorbers? How do you maintain the feeling of being foreign to your own life, so it can light up and spin like an amusement park ride, delightful and menacing by turns? Travel is one obvious remedy for a glazed-over worldview, to make you see your own surroundings afresh. It’s no accident that some of the greatest literature was written in exile, and most often about the culture the writer was exiled from. When we were children, it was easier to apprehend phenomena without distortive preconceptions—we were born foreigners. Nothing was predictable; everything was a little scary or absurd or uncanny or shocking, or unsayably puzzling, since we were just finding out about it.
There are a few things you can do fairly easily to approximate that raw state, other than spending a lot of time with a child (when not overcome with the responsibilities of monitoring one). Take a walk without a companion, or headphones, or purpose, and just stop at some point, stand stock-still. Listen to the sounds you’ve been screening out. Listen to music coming from a stranger’s window. Put your palm firmly on the trunk of a tree, on a rock, the street. Best to do this in a more or less deserted place, so you won’t be distracted by your own awareness of the strangeness of your act. Notice how self-conscious you are just sitting or standing still anywhere in public? It’s not allowed. People think you’re lost, or maybe you’re mentally or physically sick. We’re not supposed to let the reins fall so the life-horse can graze. We’re not supposed to be. We’re supposed to go, so we can do.
It’s true that a life weighted down with “assorted responsibilities” can make it seem impossible to step outside for a minute, let alone a couple of hours; you have to deliberately carve out rebellion time when you refuse to plod along in the daily traces. I think that’s why so many people (and I was one of them for many years) smoke cigarettes: it is, or was, a culturally accepted excuse to put your life on pause for a minute but still be viewed as doing something. It’s also acceptable to look idly out the window of a plane or a train. Why? Because we’re all struck by the newness of what’s passing there, it’s natural to watch it as if it were a movie. And in that case—especially if you’re traveling alone—you also have the advantage of being between two places, in effect between two identities, and that can also cleanse the perceiving palate. I’m not sure walking the dog counts; you’re still doing something with a purpose, and the dog—straining at the leash—is telling you where to stop, where to sniff. Learning a new language can help to reboot your thinking, since how we say a thing is shaped by how we see it, and, not insignificantly, vice versa. Try explaining words or phrases you take for granted to people in cultures that can’t imagine living as we do. Try explaining bulimia to someone whose whole life is spent scrounging for too little food. Go ahead and try.
Some people consider the kind of present-moment awareness you’re describing as a form of prayer. “Were you brought up religious?”4
I did not have a religious upbringing, unless you count a year attending Assumption Convent High School in the Philippines as an exchange student, and the several weeks of fourth-grade Sunday school during which I acquired free Tootsie Rolls and paper lantern–making skills. My parents had radically different religious backgrounds, so they let my sister and me decide what to believe. The upshot is that I have read the Bible and the work of Richard Dawkins with equal respect and fascination.
This open-ended instruction accommodated my innate distrust of authority and may relate to my desire to accept the world on its own terms—in effect, termlessly—and not to impose anyone’s preconceptions on any part of it. As a poet and a person I want to stay wide open, to have near-constant access to wonder, to allow for impenetrable mysteries without “any irritable reaching after fact and reason”; and I suppose that comes close to what people feel when they pray. You always hear about the part of Keats’s letter I’ve just quoted where he defines negative capability, but not his remark a few sentences later, his assertion that in the best poetry, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”5 This strikes me as an important distinction—those are his italics, not mine—in that he places the appreciation of Beauty above whatever cognition can do with it, beyond consideration. The aesthetic here, as I understand and espouse it, is to grasp and convey the quiddity of something, to honor and preserve its is-ness, rather than slotting it into some sense-making machine. I can’t help linking the power of Keats’s urn to “tease us out of thought”6 with Bishop’s final line of “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”: “. . . and looked and looked our infant sight away.” I believe they were on parallel paths: trying to get at the notion of the sublime and at the same time acknowledging the helplessness of all our grand notions in its presence. Maybe we can call that stance “seculareligious.”
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2 Wallace Stevens, last line of “The Man on the Dump”: “Where was it one first heard of
the truth? The the.”
3 Reg Saner, “My Fall into Knowledge,” The Georgia Review (Spring 2010): 10.
4 Anna Solomon, “The Lobster Mafia Story,” The Georgia Review (Spring 2010): 45.
5 John Keats to his brothers George and Thomas, December 21, 1817.
6 John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
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J. Allyn Rosser’s third collection of poems, Foiled Again, won the 2007 New Criterion Poetry Prize and was published by Ivan R. Dee. This year she has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work will appear in Best American Poetry 2010. Rosser teaches at Ohio University and edits New Ohio Review.
Read J. Allyn Rosser’s “Refusal of a Lifetime” from our Spring 2010 issue.
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Dorine Jennette is the author of Urchin to Follow (The National Poetry Review Press, 2010), and her poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as the Journal, Coconut, Court Green, Puerto del Sol, and New Orleans Review. She lives in Davis, California.
