Brian Dillon, Essayism. He writes beautifully, and has become famous by doing it.
Actually I'd never heard of him until I started noticing those Fitzcarraldo Editions – are they named for somebody involved, or for Herzog's strange movie, and the man the movie is about, played by the mad Kinski? – it's probably about the movie, since Fitzcarraldo is apparently a bizarre Spanishization (españolisación?) of the locally unpronounceable Fitzgerald – but in any case Fitzcarraldo Editions are terrifically subtle, well-crafted, densely literary books with simple covers, blue or white with spare lettering, they're the kind of thing one buys while being very aware that one is buying A Book (shades of Mallarmé, he would have liked to be published by these people, unless of course he were overwhelmed with the dismayed feeling that they are creating things that are almost, but hopelessly never quite, what he wanted), and I do indeed like buying books, and with some slight distinction buying A Book, which I also regard as a non-shameful (to me anyway, I live alone and don't need to justify my purchases to any vaguely disapproving partner) indulgence.
So Dillon (may I call you Brian?... no?... well all right then) Dillon is writing about the nature of the essay, and so tearing into / breaking apart the usual statements (which aren't quite clichés but are close, and Dillon being famous as a Current Voice, he's struggling with the possible clichéistic nature of them).
And as he moves rapidly and deftly, but also slightly irritably and desperately, around the topic, I am reflected back on (as so often) myself. (For some years I also have an oblique self-justifying set of thoughts around the idea that my constant self-reference, in this blog and in writing and in conversation, isn't narcissism – we've recently had a grandiosely fucked-up example of real narcissism in political history, which has fortunately made it much easier to clarify to analysands the distinctions between narcissism and being a bit, possibly too, focused on oneself – and if mine is egotism it's kind of an unavoidable egotism, because if you end up living alone in a quiet suburb of a small city, there isn't much else other than oneself to think about.)
As it's four in the morning, but with the glory that is a North Sea summer light, which almost (for years I would say this resentfully: almost, though this summer is a bit different because warming has created several weeks that actually feel like a very mild, almost-warm summer) makes up for the damned winters, the sky is already light, beautifully so; and so although yesterday, Tuesday, I was tired and mildly ill, to the point of worrying about the small amount of student marking still to be done – the plan was to be entirely done with it last week, then last weekend, then Monday, then yesterday, but sadly it's not done yet and I hope I'm not about to get yelled at – and this morning I fortunately feel much better, to the point of getting up at this bright four a.m.; and so my mind is working, and it reflects the Dillon essay in a way not atypical of my imaginative flights....
and that's a bit like responding with my own thoughts to Dillon's worrying, growling pulling-around and chewing on the nature of the essay.
Because the book I'm supposed to be writing, the first of two or three AIDS books, has pulled me into the orbit of Becker on death, and his junior colleagues' extension and concretization of his ideas (if you look at the link I'm really sorry about the cover – someone seriously incompetent chose it, clearly panicking over the content of the book to cover it over with something twee and disconnected), which points towards the general human need, which is exaggerated as one gets older, to build, make, establish, remake, parent, control, foster, and all sort of other verbal things in order to create somethings that will get us beyond our own deaths...
And so a kind of Discussion Panel comes to mind, where I (because I haven't published much and am not very notable) am included at one end of the table for numerical reasons, probably, and so can appropriately be humble, but am still allowed, even expected, to say something.
So, after everyone sails into Why There Are Essays, I respond with my version: that essays, with their abstract and writerly pleasures, are a bit like drawings in the books of John Berger: art that is sketched, real, present, because it is existential in nature. That whatever other reasons there may be for generating essays – a newspaper gig, a desire to explain – essays are like sketches, and that's why they exist, and maybe that's one explanation for the weird etymology of the word.
We write essays, or make sketches (or blog of course) as a way of being: writing that emphasizes writing, but also writing that emphasizes what we're seeing, what we're understanding at this moment. And that's a major triumph over death, despite its slight and casual nature, because it's an unquestionable statement that I was here –
and I suppose it would help to point out that, if one reflects off to the side: if most writing is arranged around story-telling, in a way that pleases Jungians – stories are natural, when we write stories we fall into those stories, as in the one I read by Gene Wolfe in the middle of the night; and Wolfe is a good example of this kind of thing because he's always writerly, aware of the history of writing and of the many directions it can go, but also very aware of mortality and time and loss; and so when he writes a pastiche of Jack Vance he's very aware of time and the fact that Vance is dead, and the fact that Wolfe himself won't live forever, as is now especially true because he actually died a few years ago, but Wolfe is able to look all that in the face – and so our constant focus on stories does indeed contain many of the most important driving forces of why people write, and paint, and make art and talk to each other, and enter that world of creating worlds –
but in the case of the essay, as in the case of Berger's sketches, I want to emphasize the purity, the pure existential impact, of it: no longer tied to story-telling (I'm hyphenating that to make a point, I know it could be one word), when someone is writing an essay they are making sentences, and enjoying them, enjoying the process: as when Berger draws something rapidly, casually, and redraws it to try again to capture an element, it's not so much about making a substantial artwork that will impress everyone with its image-ness and reference to archetypal whatever and artistic visionaryness and so on, but it's just about the making itself, about the pleasure of creating something that didn't exist before –
which can quite fairly, but without any dreadful Beckettian tragedy or childish Dylan Thomas-esque brandishing of toy swords, create a space that isn't touched by death:
when we write these sentences or draw these lines, with the emphasis on the sentences and the lines themselves, they are merely, but definitely, assertions of being present: they are life because they reiterate that basic human statement that I am here, which is also always, especially for those who are older, I was here.
And that is what I like about essays, whether by Lamb or Sebald or Sontag or MFK Fisher or, frankly, me:
that even if I never finish any of the books, I, now, like these sentences: and I like that I made these sentences exist: so I like essays because they prove that Lamb and Sebald and Sontag and Fisher and I are alive, or were alive, as that distinction isn't terribly important.
Just like a sketch by John Berger. Just like an unfinished painting of a lot of water lilies. Just like that earthquake-y point where Annie Dillon asks potential writers, Do you like sentences?
Because we have all been alive and we proved it and that can't ever really be erased, even if civilization vanishes into eons of dust.
And when I finish my improvised statement, my time on the panel is done, and we throw it open to questions from the audience....
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