At the age of three, the most famous critic in English literature stepped on a duckling. Little Samuel Johnson hadn’t meant to probe any latent sadism through this act, in the way that other boys his age creep around their yards turning slugs into puddles: this was just a misstep. It’s difficult to imagine the grownups on the scene scolding him too harshly, but reason can’t withstand a child’s guilt. He must have known that something beautiful no longer was – and, worse, that he was the cause. He ambled over to his mother and dictated the following epitaph:
Here lies good master duck,
Whom Samuel Johnson has trod on;
If it had liv’d, it had been good luck
For then we’d had an odd one.
This story is recounted early in James Boswell’s biography of Johnson, but with heavy skepticism on all sides. Johnson, the supposed eulogizer, claimed that his father, who was always “foolish in talking of his children,” wrote the poem himself and attributed it to his already precocious son. Boswell concurs, despite the protests of Johnson’s daughter, who claimed that his mother, the scribe in the story, had confirmed the incident. The idea of a three-year-old composing a poem in ballad form was more than he could accept. I have trouble believing it myself, and I doubt anyone with greater experience around this demographic would find it more tempting.
Even so, this is a story that has remained with me in the years since I first read it, which suggests that it isn’t just mundane gossip, which usually passes through the memory like a laxative. Soon after I read it, I understood that it surpassed its origins as a parenthetical in one of literature’s most massive biographies. No, it stayed by my side, assuming the status of an origin story for writers, encompassing innocence and experience, life and death, and, most pertinently, the question ‘why write?’ – which it answers with the concision of a proverb.
Why write? No clue. Why do I write? Only clues. That is, only the peripheral, the hope at hope’s heel, the little ping-pong match between the margins. To freeze these in the white space of an essay would be like leaving a jar full of carrot skins and water to pickle. It’s the sort of question that leaves one paralyzed at a family reunion. How’ve you been, or what’ve you been up to, the sort of pop quiz that seems to conjure a mirror against the back and nape of the asked. Glass on my spine, I find myself wishing it was polite to talk in gerunds – only gerunds. That I could say that I have been trying, waiting, and, above all, tempting.
The gerund, sometimes confounded with the present participle, is the closest any of us come to inhabiting the infinitive: the to be, to move, to die, and to be born. Plato’s realm of ideas as it actually exists. I write ‘to ski’ and you’ve already imagined the whole operation —the skis, the poles, the blanched hump of snow, and… who? The machine is in motion, a conveyor belt hustles Douglas firs along at a slant, but who is skiing? No one skis in the to ski. The present participle, where you and I trudge duck-footed up the slope after a passed go, is separate. We can imagine perfection, the God-machine whirring in each distillation, and a man-shaped hole seethes. Sure, the gerund can feel like an infinitive, but only in the same way the moment can feel eternal. Perhaps in a dark room, I say to myself, “I have to light a match” – within that sentence, a story begins and ends. Outside of it, my room is dark.
Spells often take the form of language, but language itself isn’t magic. More writers know this than believe it. The mantra stands at the barrier point. Om mani padme hum, or Lord Jesus have mercy on me, a sinner. Mantras, however, are not literature. Literature typically accumulates in meaning, but if the mantra is said correctly, meanings flee from it like insects from a burning tree. Repetition is the deal: you repeat and, eventually, something happens. The words exist, not as building blocks of a sentence, but as charged entities – translucent rather than hollow. The early Church fathers wanted to pray without ceasing. They managed something of the kind, mirroring the perpetuity of God’s love with unbroken repetition, breaking temporality between their lips. They used words to move beyond words.
How is that possible? Mantras assume, against conventional wisdom, that the same action repeated over and over can conjure something new. Nothing can come from nothing, but words dissolved to near-nothing in time can produce something. The idea teeters over paradox. However, this may be what inaugurates mantras into the world of the living. I’d be stumped trying to identify anything – that is, anything that inspires more than a polite nod – in life that is not paradoxical. Writing is no exception. How can I agree with Jenny Boully, who wrote that words on a page are the aftermath of poetry, as quickly as I do with E.M. Cioran, who referred to his books as deferred suicides? How can writing be both the soil and the coffin?
I get the sense that this uncanniness is just a single shade of one primal grief. That it, like a shard of a broken mirror, refers back to the most uncanny of all things: death. Especially that death that just seems to sleep. The moment that our Johnson, eyeing the duckling, realized that it was still and would remain so forever. One wrong step and he’d shed his time and place, had slipped into the whisking gut of uncanny. In the black convection, he saw three youths hog-tied beside him, begging the infinitive to puncture the sweltering dark. But Johnson didn’t wait for infinity. He began to write and soon found himself in another place entirely.
Centuries later on black and white film: a journalist asks Bob Dylan why he spends so much time crafting poems. His response? “I’ve got nothing else to do, man!” Uproar in the crowd for all that I’ve said put simply: naught to do, just doing. Laughter floats grease-like on terror. In a dark room, I say, Om mani padme hum. Dark as though night inhaled the world. Om. The oven bursts in its swell. A little fish-eye light above me. Maybe this is the jewel of the lotus or just a feather caught in my eye. What would it change? I have nothing else to do.
There are places to be, but I’ve forgotten how. Sometimes at my desk, I have to write, but the trance is undone by an ice cream truck. Its speakers play Greensleeves. This always takes me aback before I decide that it has to play something. When I hear the voices of children squealing in its tracks and I see the gaps in my Word document, my personal self-loathing warps into that formalized self-loathing of writers, logocentrism. It’s an ancient and therefore respectable tradition. After all, we know that Socrates despised writing – because Plato wrote it down. Any freshman philosophy student could spot the contradiction and chuckle at it as they’re made to parse Jowett’s translation of the Phaedrus. However, when I lay aside my desire to be smarter than the old man – a desire that masks my disbelief in my own death – I understand him. Please humor me with another hypothetical of a great critic: slide on Socrates’ sandals for a moment as he meets Phaedrus at the city gates.
See how he runs up to you blushing and out of breath (but only in the way that athletes lose their breath, with an equine assuredness in each puff). Why?
“I’ve gone crazy for speeches,” he says. Does he know that you’re the most eloquent man in Athens? He shows you his teeth; yes, he knows. His clarion laugh, a flex in the air. It startles the greyhounds napping in the market and makes the street hawkers turn their heads. ‘Scold him.’ you think to yourself, but your disapproval lacks vigor. Your white beard hangs limp, your bald head sunburns easily – god are you sick of sleeping on your stomach while Xanthippe snores on her back. Where has your lifetime with Homer left you? You’ve rotted into Argos: a rheumatic dog brooding with perfect love. A love that shares its consummation with death. How long must you wait?
How long have you two been sitting by the river? How long have you volleyed your words, been hushed by the rhythm of call and response? The sun, at its afternoon peak, siphons through the pine leaves, dappling hot and cool over Phaedrus’ stomach. Sat close, you smell his sweat. His curls flick in the breeze, and the river moves too; it’s all moving. The world runs like a mill wheel, never halting as each atom flickers in and out of place – a vast, pointillist tapestry.
“Teacher…”
Teacher? Teach what?
“… you were saying something about writing,” Phaedrus begins. “That it’s lesser than speech. Why?”
A beat. He’s smiling; you’re not.
“Every text is silent. Every text is a void. Every text is a beautiful body frozen forever.”
Yes, this is where I understand Socrates: I would have told Phaedrus the same thing.
But what wouldn’t I have said just to detain him for a few more minutes? Phaedrus, the attractive young man in a toga, who might in our own time be Tim in ripped jeans, Sam in a paternal sweater, Brian nude, or Joel in drag? Rilke’s words, that beauty is just the beginning of terror, droop before me like a foundation and soar above me like a vulture. Around beautiful people, manners compel me to hold back the highest compliment I can give them: that they nauseate me. Or, more politely, that they give me anxiety. Nothing was ever beautiful without being vulnerable. Anything beautiful has first dared to exist, and in that daring made itself destructible. In this way, the speaker and the text are equal.
From here, another scene from the past comes to mind, but not as a dream. Charcoal strewn like dog scat in the streets. Airborne: at first glance, a moth’s wing severed, as though excess flight was burning out in death. No – paper. Patches come up from the bonfire, entropy chews them from the gut out.
The photos of the Brownshirts burning Magnus Hirschfeld’s papers make the Phaedrus feel charming and irrelevant, like a cursive workbook. Leaving aside the absence and presence of the speaker, this is a gesture that means something. Franz Kafka would agree: he requested in his will that all his written material be burned after his death. He tried to write a world with no Metamorphosis into existence, and hindsight tells us what a drastically different world that would be. The difference would be even greater if the National Socialist project of destruction was successful, that all records of Judaism, homosexuality, transsexuality – perhaps after the process was done, genocide enacted and hushed up with the same gesture – were burnt. There is something in the written word, mute and ineffectual on the shelf, that possesses real power.
The right understands this in America. Social media activists decry the placement of sexually explicit and LGBT books in school libraries as “grooming,” a deliberately traumatic term deployed with enthusiasm inverse to accuracy. The party line is settled: children are being groomed for abuse and indoctrinated into queer leftist degeneracy. Bill Eigel, a Republican candidate for governor of Missouri, assured voters that he was not burning books in a publicity video where he wielded a flamethrower, but clarified, “you bring those woke pornographic books to Missouri schools to try to brainwash our kids, and I’ll burn those too – on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion.” No, he wasn’t burning books, but would it really be so bad if he was?
This is not simply a matter of preventing children from seeing illustrations of genitalia. Book b(ur/an)ning is an act of self-actualization on a societal level. Towards a new old hegemony, where Thomas Jefferson built this country, and his slaves did not. Towards a reassured illusion of childhood innocence inoculated against queerness. Towards Shakespeare and C.S. Lewis, not Morrison and Baldwin. All this would be possible, they say, if the walls of the schoolhouse weren’t so porous. The text, which Plato called a dummy without its ventriloquist, is the floor of the world – the gap between the one that exists and the one that is desired.
Lord Jesus have mercy on me, a sinner! If I’m really to take words seriously, then what about The Word? What about the many Words, many of which dismiss the others as mere words? No one understood the value of words better than those old men of the desert who left everything behind to pray without ceasing. In Katheleen Norris’ Acedia and Me the figure of Abba Paul stands out among them. This monk had a peculiar habit: while reciting his prayers – those peculiar Christian mantras – he would weave baskets. This was not a means of subsistence: Paul lived a great enough distance from the towns that the voyage there and back would devour whatever little profit he made at the marketplace. Nevertheless, he would pray and weave, day after day, knowing that he’d never move a single unit. When his output grew unwieldy, with baskets far outnumbering men in the desert, he would pile it all up in his cave and set it ablaze. What else was here to do in the desert for a monk but to spin wicker as his mouth beamed scripture? What does money matter equidistant from the town square and eternity? The cave glutted with hemp and set alight: not art for art’s sake, nor basket for basket, but stitch for stitch. And yet, I often have trouble telling the ash from the sand. The duckling must’ve been dead by the time the boy saw it: to stand over anything is to be baffled.