Mapping the descent

Reading is a complicated, profound, silent, very personal, very private, a very solitary, yet civilizing activity. Nothing is more social than speech—we are bound together by our common sounds more securely than even by our laws—nevertheless, no one is more aware of the isolated self than the reader; for a reader communes with the word heard immaterially in that hollow of the head made only for hearing, a room nowhere in the body in any ordinary sense. On the bus, every one of us may be deep in something different. Sitting next to a priest, I can still enjoy my pornography, although I may keep a thumb discreetly on top of the title: The Cancan Girls Celebrate Christmas. It doesn't matter to me that Father McIvie is reading about investments, or that the kid with rusty hair in the seat ahead is devouring a book about handicapping horses. Yet while all of us, in our verbal recreations, are full of respect for the privacy of our neighbors, the placards advertising perfrume or footware invade the public space like a visual smell; Muzak fills every unstoppered ear the way the static of the street does. The movies, radio, TV, theater, orchestra: all run on at their own rate, and the listener or the viewer must attend, keep up, or lose out; but not the reader. The reader is free. The reader is in charge, and pedals the cycle. It is easy for a reader to announce that his present run of Proust has been postponed until the holidays.

Reading, that is, is not a public imposition. Of course, when we read, many of us squirm and fidget. One of the closest friends of my youth would sensuously wind and unwind on his forefinger the long blond strands of his hair. How he read: that is how I remember him. Yes, our postures are often provocative, perverse. Yet these outward movements of the body really testify to the importance of the inner movements of the mind; and even those rapid flickers of the eye, as we shift from word to word, phrase to phrase, and clause to clause, hoping to keep our head afloat on a flood of Faulkner or Proust or Joyce or James, are registers of reason: for reading is reasoning, figuring things out through thoughts, making arrangements out of arrangements until we've understood a text so fully it is nothing but feeling and pure response; until its conceptual turns are like the reversals of mood in a marriage: petty, sad, ecstatic, commonplace, foreseeable, amazing.

In order to have this experience, however, one must learn to perform the text, say, sing, shout the words to oneself, give them, with our minds, their body: otherwise the eye skates over every syllable like the speeder. There can be no doubt that often what we read should be skimmed, as what we are frequently asked to drink should be spilled; but the speeding reader is alone in another, less satisfactory way, one quite different from that of the reader who says the words to herself, because as we read we divide into a theater: there is the performer who shapes these silent sounds, moving the muscles of the larynx almost invisibly; and there is the listener who hears them said, and who responds to their passion or their wisdom.

Such a reader sees every text as unique; greets every work as a familiar stranger. Such a reader is willing to allow another's words to become hers, his.

[...]

So this reading will be like living, then; the living each of you will be off in a moment to be busy with; not always speedily, I hope, or in the continuous anxiety of consequence, the sullenness of inattention, the annoying static of distraction. But it will only be a semblance of living—this living—nevertheless, the way unspoken reading is a semblance, unless, from time to time, you perform the outer world and let it live within; because only in that manner can it deliver itself to us. As Rainer Maria Rilke once commanded: "dance the taste of the fruit you have been tasting. Dance the orange." I should like to multiply that charge, even past all possibility. Speak the street to yourself sometimes, hear the horns in the forest, read the breeze aloud, and make that inner world yours, because, whether Nature, Man, or God, has given us the text, we independently possess the ability to read, to read really well, and to move our own mind freely in tune to the moving world.

- William H. Gass, "On Reading to Oneself," Habitations of the Word: Essays - pp. 227-8

I left poetry for history in my youth. A terrible turning. I've no excuse. I could have pressed harder. Put the point down upon my paper with more exalted purpose. Perhaps, then, a poem would have written its indented way onto the next page. No, that's inexact. I tried as hard as any archer to have an aim, overhear a calling. I remember the effort, the resolve to be high-minded, the sober choice of models; I remember reading only what would do my genius good, the straining for greatness; and I remember watching every word I wrote unravel like a poorly knitted sleeve. My rhymes clanged predictably, my meters were military, my metaphors fled the mind like frightened mice, assonance set good sense to sleep, and though my alliteration was lively, its lilt always arrived when there was actually nothing to fear, peppering pages which had planned on being bland with a sudden seasoning, mumbling when the night was supposed to be clear.

- William H. Gass, The Tunnel - p. 635

We begin with a desire to describe, to render, to capture even a bit of the world. We wish to stand in the way of time. We wish to gain a little information about things. We wish to understand the make-up and the connection of events. But first we must make things stand still. We must lift things from their world of things and find a place for them in the realm of thought. We must represent. I take my example from an extraordinary and beautiful book by Danilo Kiš.

Late in the morning on summer days, my mother would come into the room softly, carrying that tray of hers. The tray was beginning to lose its nickelized glaze. Along the edges where its level surface bent upward slightly to form a raised rim, traces of its former splendor were still present in flaky patches of nickel that looked like tin foil pressed out under the fingernails. The narrow, flat rim ended in an oval trough that bent downward and was banged in and misshapen. Tiny decorative protuberances—a whole chain of little metallic grapes—had been impressed on the upper edge of the rim. Anyone holding the tray (usually my mother) was bound to feel at least three or four of these semicylindrical protuberances, like Braille letters, under the flesh of the thumb. Right there, around those grapes, ringlike layers of grease had collected, barely visible, like shadows cast by little cupolas. These small rings, the color of dirt under fingernails, were remnants of coffee grounds, cod-liver oil, honey, sherbet. Thin crescents on the smooth, shiny surface of the tray showed where glasses had just been removed.¹

This tray is not handed to us on a tray, all its elements in order coexistent, communal, clean of commentary. Rather the tray is broken apart and strung out, the glaze preceding its surface, the flaky patches on the raised rim as much in front of its frieze of metal grapes as the soup is in advance of the fish. Our reading runs in loops of understanding as we gather a phrase together and then carry it on through the sentence like a package under our arm. The complexity, character, the length, the chronology of every quality's occurrence is carefully regulated by the writer. It is true that in "real life," as we continue so foolishly to call it, our experience of the tray would have many serial characteristics. We turn the tray over in our hands, for instance: first front, then back. We look here, then there. We try this, then that. Taste the sherbet; run our finger along the tray's rim; look through the curtains, through the window's haze at the lawn escaping toward the trees. How ideal language is for that. Meet Gertrude. Meet Ophelia. Meet Maud. Put on the left shoe, drop the right. But the tray is not entirely present, even in this recital of bits and pieces. I remember there was a maker's mark on the back of the real one, crudely indented, as if stepped on. The boy for whom honey and cod-liver oil are being brought cares only for its bearing surface, where a teaspoon might rest along with the jars. We have all the tray we need, for it is a tray we hold in our heads, and not in our hands. We think not only to the nickelized tray, but through the details of its development. The odd sound of the word 'nickelized' stands in for the nickelization itself. We watch a thought in the process of composing itself. No "real-life" tray does that. It does so, furthermore, largely in terms of visual details. The tray is touched but once. It is not a thing we're thinking, with its molecules and secret laws, but a perception, a perception remembered.²
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¹Danilo Kiš, Garden, Ashes (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975). The book opens with this passage. The translation is by William J. Hannaher.
²The recursive character of reading is almost impossible to represent. The first sentence of our specimen "reads" something like this: Late in the morning, late in the morning on summer days, my mother, late in the morning on summer days, would come into the room softly, late in the morning on summer days, my mother would be carrying that tray of hers, late in the morning on summer days, when my mother would come into the room, softly, with that tray.

^{- William H. Gass, "Representation and the War for Reality," Habitations of the Word: Essays - pp. 80-1}

"Blooms, as Rilke knew, are all business; they exist for butterflies and bees, but only incidentally for us, for whom flowers are fortuitous. Autumn's hues are even more serendipital; the function of the leaves has been fulfilled, and their colors are the result of useless residues. The beauty of the world happens only in our eye; even the allure of women is as utilitarian as a wagon's wheel. The Worpswede light, the way the countryside's colors glow even on a dim wet evening, the festive stars and the warm windows of distant farms, the comforting purl of a stream: those are the purest accidents. So when one of us turns aside from living in order to admire life; when a rose petal is allowed to cool an eyelid; when a line of charcoal depicts the inviting length of a thigh; we are no longer going in nature's direction but contrary to it. What was never meant for us becomes ours entirely; what never had a use is suddenly all we need. Gradually, what Rilke's Russian adventure had appeared to teach him—how to live in harmony with nature, so appealing to the poet—would prove itself impossible for the poem"

- William H. Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation - pp. 20-1

"I was humming hit tunes in the backseat watching the roadside go by as dreamily as it was watching me when I heard from my father half an inarticulate outcry and my head was slammed into the watching window. Almost immediately all of me was jerked back as though Martha was yanking one of the kids from the edge of an embankment, only now I was to be thrown onto the pile of elderberries we had wrapped in funnels of newspaper or stuffed in grocery sacks. As I rebounded from the floor of the car my ears received, like the rapid rasp of a saw, a series of terrible sounds: of rending metals, shattering glass, pissing vapors, unstaged screams. Actually, hearing scarcely intervened. They were palpable things, these noises, there like the rear window, rear seat, scissors, bags of berries. Through that window, back on the highway we had so abruptly fled, I saw two automobiles still shuddering from the force of their collision. Gray white steam rose chaotically. Glass began to patter upon the roof of our Chevrolet where we were stopped upon the shoulder. Then, almost slowly, eight door fell off or opened and people fell or otherwise came out of them, some hugging themselves and rolling over on the highway or down the bank beside it near where we were. A fragment of white arm appeared in the steam. I stared. Staring was all I was. How quickly—inexplicably—my peaceful window had been entered by this other. A woman asmear with blood stood up, fell softly down, stood slowly up again, wavering like a little flag. The car which had been in line behind us was new and shiny. I had noticed it because it had followed us awhile, unable to pass and impatient because of the traffic. The car which had struck was a heap of rust, and now weakened fenders and body panels were broken and scattered. Both hoods had risen in the air to allow the engines to rush at one another. One man had hopped away from the wreck on his unshattered leg and hugged a tree. Water appeared to be running down the leg of a lady who'd got no farther than the running board. The dust still rose in rivulets, making the air seem to shake as if it were a pane of glass in the process, like the sky, of coming to pieces. My god, we've got to get out of here, my father said. Then I also smelled the gasoline. People began to come from other cars with coats and their own anguish. They appeared to be oblivious of the gasoline. I didn't utter a word—not one. What I saw entered me like a spear." 

- William H. Gass, The Tunnel - p. 232

"Walking along the edge of the river, I no longer saw those lovely pale leaves pass me like petals, as if some river flower were blooming oddly out of season (poetry appearing abruptly in my social prose); rather I took them to be elements of a threatening metaphor, because I had suddenly seen that the world was held together only by frost and by freezing, by contraction, that its bowels contained huge compressors and ice-cold molds; so the place where I stood looking over a trivial Indiana landscape—snow freshly falling upon an otherwise turgid, uninteresting stream—was actually a point on the hazardous brink of Being. Consequently there appeared before me an emblem of all that was—all that was like a frozen fog—exhaust from the engines of entropy; and I saw in the whitened leaves floating by me an honesty normally missing from Nature's speech, because this adventitious coating threw open the heart of the Law: this scene of desolation—relieved only by the barren purity of trees—this wedge was all there was; and then I understood that the soft lull of August water was but a blanket on a snowbank; the dust that a wave of wind would raise was merely the ash of a dry summer blizzard; the daffodils which would ring our Chinese elm were blooming spikes of ice, encased in green like a thug's gloves; there was just one season; and when the cottonwoods released their seeds, I would see smoke from the soul of the cold cross the river on the wind to snag in the hawthorns and perish in their grip like every love"

- William H. Gass, The Tunnel - p. 343