Full immersion: Aesthetics and ethics and The Chronology of Water

 An extraordinary thing happened to me this spring. I stumbled upon a book that really challenged me. The Chronology of Water, a seemingly benign book, exposed cracks in my psychological assuredness, and forced me to examine a habit of avoiding pain in my life. I was not ready for it, but, ready or not, there it came.

       I sell books for a living. As a publisher sales representative, a lot of books come across my desk, thousands every year. I can never read them all and I must sell them based on catalogue descriptions, author notes, and reviews. I only read selectively. And, after hearing Powell’s Bookstore had sold 1000 copies of this one, I read the opening chapter. I then raved about it to a local bookstore to motivate them to hand-sell it. A woman I know, I will call her M., a discerning bookseller who works at the store, phoned me a week later at my office.

  “Heather, thank you for this book. I have never read anything like this before. What did you think of it?”

Embarrassed, I had to backtrack and explain that I had only read one tiny chapter. Thank goodness I was honest. She pleaded with me to read it all, saying she needed me to finish it so she would have someone to talk to. She said, “I am 50 years old and it changed me. I don’t understand what happened but I can’t stop thinking about it!”

       Uneasily, even a little resentfully, I read more. It was slow going, and so emotionally powerful I was a bit traumatized every time I opened it. Then one day I put the book aside to read later, when “I had more time”. Truthfully, I was afraid of it, but I didn’t realize that at the time.

       Then I was asked to read a work of creative nonfiction for a class and write a book review. In a fit of bravery, curiosity and obligation (to M., to the course, and to myself), I went back to The Chronology of Water. This time I read its short chapters slowly, each little dose jolting me, stirring forgotten pain, opening memories to my own past. I put it down frequently, to process, to ponder, to write in my journal. But it kept leading me in to its dangers and pleasures. This was unprecedented for me. Uncharted.

       Now I sit on the other side of that experience, struggling to put it into words. M. was right; after it was over I was dumbfounded. I had to call her at home to make sense of it. I was intrigued by how this small book had broken us open. Why were we so affected? This memoir of a girl surviving a painful childhood, reaching beyond her world as Olympic hopeful, is of a sister and daughter who lived as a drug user; but she is also a mother, an artist, a writer, a wife. It is told in fragments, with slant and specificity. It is edgy, often experimental. Many of the experiences have no mirror experiences in my own life. Yet somehow it transcended all its specificity, weirdness and experimentalism and connected both M. and me to our own memories, and to that which is universal. How did Yuknavitch do this?

       First, this is an exemplary work of non-fiction. Yuknavitch’s life is unusual. She struggles to overcome abuse, violence, horror, and self-harm; but there is also love, joy, and ordinary pleasures here as well. However, the real gems are in Yuknavitch’s originality in the telling: her style, narrative structure, and character portrayal, and the braiding of these so beautifully with metaphor. She achieves Carole Bly’s “ancient balance” between sensory experience and contemplation, and the book serves as memoir and commentary on time, memory, consciousness and identity

      Vividness is conveyed in the continually shifting prose, varying from enlightened insights to carnal sensuality. The continual switch from prose to poetry, intentionally speeding up and slowing down the reader’s pace, is not unlike the experience of a time warp in a car accident: action unfolds in micro-seconds, while the experience of time is weirdly elasticized. This plunges the reader into full immersion by centralizing the body in memory, and doesn’t rely upon the usual Cartesian mind-body separation. Lidia^⁠ brilliantly uses language to recreate these somatic experiences:

The day my daughter was stillborn, after I held the future pink and rose-lipped in my shivering arms, lifeless tender, covering her face in tears and kisses, after they handed my dead girl to my sister who kissed her, then to my first husband who kissed her, then to my mother who could not bear to hold her, then out of the hospital door, tiny lifeless swaddled thing, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and a sponge. She guided me to a special shower. The shower had a chair and the spray came down lightly, warm. She said, That feels good, doesn’t it. The water. She said, you are still bleeding quite a bit. Just let it. Ripped from vagina to rectum, sewn closed. Falling water on a body.

I sat on the stool and closed the little plastic curtain. I could hear her humming. I bled, I cried, I peed I vomited. I became water.(25)

We are inside the scene via a ruptured narrator, details relayed in hindsight and slanted by her pain. Hindsight offers not neutrality but insight into the symbolism in metaphors, these shaft down into a readers mind, as Carol Bly eloquently says, alighting a million satisfying connections. Indeed, this passage refracts my own remnant grief, igniting pain in the ballooning cavity that is my chest.

       Structurally, scenes are recounted out of time and place, and are not chronological.  This narrative choice is more satisfying because the meanings inside Lidia’s mind, not clock-time, dictate the linkages. Lidia starts the book in the middle of her life, at the stillborn birth, a metaphorical beginning. It is significant because it is grief that leads her to a writing class and eventually to this book. This structure, like my bookseller M. said, makes it feel like Lidia has somehow gotten inside of our own heads, inside our own structuring of memory.  It exemplifies Yukavitch’s incredible insight into the way memories are tenuously connected to the narratives that form our very identities.

       The book’s crucial elements, style, structure and language, link consistently to a central organizing metaphor: water. Water is a prominent substance in the events in the story as well. Lidia was a competitive swimmer and water was her balm: she used swimming as a healing activity and escape from her abusive home life. She and her sister shared lovely baths after their father’s destruction. Her father suffered a disabling drowning accident. Years later his ashes are committed to water.

       Water’s properties are also integral to the philosophical underpinnings behind the book. Like language, Lidia shows that our memories and our lives are watery, mutable and fragmented. In this way, we ourselves are changelings.

I thought about starting this book with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.(28)

       Water is also a suitable metaphor for what must be done together, author and reader, in the communion that is this book: to enter the turbulence and allow one’s self to float; to trust that immersion will carry us to a safe landing. Reading this book with open heart and mind is an expedition into those fearful waters of our own existence, and could lead to something wonderful. “I may have been a big fat failure at making a home, but I made up how to make something else in its place. Out of the sad sack of shit that was my life, I made a wordhouse” (191). 
We float on your wordhouse, Lidia. That wordhouse is both an act of creation and a safe place to reflect on life, yours and our own.

       Yet the wordhouse is her hideaway. She never uses her art to retreat, but uses it only to reframe truth. Thus, this book, as beautifully crafted as it is, goes beyond “craft fascism”. Lidia is engaged, always, in the world, in the ethics of judgment of right and wrong. Her wordhouse is the place for examining and articulating the truth that resides inside us as living bodies. From giving voice to those aspects of ourselves that remain unexamined, and embracing fearlessly her internal darkness, we begin to see a new possibility for truth, as existing within us in opposition to the dominant discourse. Her process is just the opposite of what Bly calls “immunity” in art, sought by aesthetes; it is more like a leaning into the full disaster of living.

       By reading this book we learn to be brave creatures. But we also steal a little from Lidia Yuknavitch. We live vividly with her memories in her wordhouse for a while. We use her language to connect to ourselves, and hopefully, to that which we love. We follow her charted course, reframing our own pain into a new story.

       And she gives us this most willingly. For me, her courage was the resounding wake-up to reflect upon my own unexamined pain. Lidia’s lasting gift then is her resounding sturdiness, and it is this that cleaved a tiny oasis for me to examine my life as Lidia would, and reconstitute my own story. Such wisdom and craft shows that Lidia Yuknavitch is a remarkable contributor to the culture and literature of our time.

      

Notes

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Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon is one of the leading independent bookstores in the US.  http://www.powells.com/

M's conversation is reproduced with permission. March, 2012.

Craft Fascism is Aldo Alverez’s term for the retro approach to writing literature: an act of shoving aside of feelings in order to develop the craft of writing.

Bibliography

Bly, Carol. 2001. Introduction. In Beyond the writers workshop., xvii-xxiv. New York: Anchor Books.

———. 2001. Taking on three demanding situations first. In Beyond the writers workshop., ed. Carol Bly, 3-32. New York: Anchor Books.

Miller, Brenda, and Suzanne Paola. 2005. Tell it slant: Writing and shaping creative nonfiction. New York: McGraw Hill.

Yuknavitch, Lidia. 2010. The chronology of water. Portland: Hawthorne Books.