Losing It
Losing It
On the Acconci mentality, birthdays, overwhelm, and other abstractions
In the middle of a book tour (after relearning how mysteriously exhausting and energizing it is) I texted a friend of mine who performs for a living to ask how she could possibly do anything like this for months at a time.
Her response—
Coincidentally my birthday is also this weekend, but the most ideal way I’ve ever spent it is by attending other people’s parties, incognito. It happened a few years ago— I went to a toddler’s birthday during the day and another friend’s birthday dinner that night. It was, in every way, perfect— a celebratory feeling without the burden of being the focal point.
My ideal book event, as it turns out, is similar. For the launch of Biography of X (at the new-ish bookstore P&T Knitwear last month) I asked three performers to pretend to be a novelist answering questions at her book launch.
I sat in the audience, delighted. The original idea was that I wouldn’t appear at all, that these faux-Catherines would even sign books on my behalf. Alas— I was convinced to attend, even to get up on stage for the expected interview after the faux-Catherines had broken the ice.
The deflected attention was wonderful, a revelation. Several years ago in New York I went to a few readings aided by musical acts, and last week in London I saw Max Porter and four actors perform a part of his wonderful new book, Shy. It’s a relief to depart from the standard issue Author-Describing-Book-In-Bookstore event, to start thinking more creatively about how to have a conversation rather than make some kind of pitch.
It seems increasingly clear to me that all art and literature is commonly held, that even though our perspectives are meaningfully different, we live in the same world, and we’re drawing from a communal well of images, myths, histories, characters and events. People don’t write books alone so much as a book is a byproduct of a community. It’s a reaction to a moment in time, a set of ideas, to other books, other works of art, to societal fluctuations and patterns. Yet the standard understanding of authorship exists in opposition to this idea.
In the uncomfortable first ten minutes of a book tour event, it seems I’m trying to make peace between these opposing stances—communal creativity and my existence as an individual within the book economy. The anxiety arises and vanishes at such a predictable rate that I’d almost expect my vagus nerve and adrenal gland to have realized it’s not worth the trouble— and yet! There’s this tenacious gap between comprehending a mental or emotional habit and being able to change it. Or, put another way, just because it’s an abstraction doesn’t mean it can’t be as difficult to move as a boulder.
It makes sense that the most frequently lost things in the what-have-you-lost emails have been abstractions.
For every Leonor who’d lost a bracelet on a school trip to Paris, there were fifteen others writing about lost ambition, dashed hopes, and ideals that have fled.
Apollinaire has lost “some witless certainty in my body: that it will always feel like mine.”
Ege lost that “voracious little thing” known as “curiosity.”
Jacinta misses aloneness.
Maggie has misplaced their sanity.
Candence has lost emotions.
Vidya doesn’t know what became of her bravery.
Bri no longer has a grip on reality (which seems worth losing, honestly.)
Gabriela is missing a purpose.
K can’t find their meaning.
I’ve sometimes considered sending an encouraging note to one of those strangers, but then there’s the aforementioned gap, and it’s impossible to say how anyone else might traverse theirs. It does seem to me, however, that a regular writing habit—regardless of genre, regardless of publication—might help. It’s a way to reach the unseen things you might be thinking, fixations you might not be aware you possess.
The subterranean is an important aspect, in my interpretation, of Vito Acconci’s work. (I’d almost forgotten I’d written a fictional Acconci into Biography of X until he came up in an interview earlier this week.) Acconci is probably best known for a performance piece called Seedbed, in which he masturbated, unseen, under a ramp that spanned the width of the Sonnabend gallery, muttering his fantasies into a microphone amped into the space. He worked in various other mediums (from poetry to photography to architecture) but, you know, masturbate under a ramp once and you’re forever the guy who masturbated under a ramp.
When I first learned about this piece as an art student I felt that the sexual dimensions of Seedbed weren’t nearly as important tension between proximity and absence. Some of my peers wrote the work off as perverted and juvenile and hopelessly male, but I thought I saw more to it even if I wasn’t quite sure, at the time, what it was that felt strong about the work.
A friend asked me how book tour was going and I said I was happiest when I felt like Acconci under his ramp. (It’s been a joy, too, but I find it all a little overwhelming and wish I could go around with faux-Catherines everywhere.) This is not unlike the desire to be at someone else’s birthday party on your birthday when no one knows it’s your birthday— a sense of participation filtered through a sieve of privacy.
Yet wouldn’t it be nice to happily and easily participate in a moment directly rather than through a metaphorical ramp? There’s an idiom for this—I read somewhere it originated in German— ‘to jump over your own shadow.’ Ich bin über meinen Schatten gesprungen. Acting out of character, evading your own neurosis. And just as Ege might want to regain their curiosity or Bri might find it useful, at least sometimes, to have a grip on reality— wouldn’t it be nice to put the abstractions aside?
There’s no natural way to conclude here except to share this, my favorite gif on Whatsapp, which feels like the correct response to nearly every situaion:
I think this is very good. I shared with a writer friend.
Happy Birthday Catherine. I love your writing. My bookclub read Pew when it came out and it still occurs regularly in our discussions. I'm looking forward to reading X.