structure

microcosms and non-linear form

I write to you, readers, from my self as an eight year old. Enclosed, a page of my diary:

I did love Book ⭐️. There I found out about how babies come out of their mothers, about anything I wanted to. Reading was anof. More than enough. Life was so vivid when I lost myself in the lives of others. Reading shifted me into all kinds of exotic shapes, into the life of the mind and the lives of other minds and for me there was nothing more invigorating. Life on the page was life in Technicolor. Just more of life. And I knew my own life to be a story of many stories. Each one of them entitled Rachel and with an end so The End appeared on every page a story within the big story filled. Every day passed and every story had to end. However much I didn’t want them to, I knew the end was in their genes; it was included in their make-up.

Here is the first page of the six-volume 1,371,255-word series of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, my favorite of the first volume, A Death in the Family:

Knausgård drops right in, literally into the heart of the matter. Rereading this page, I remember being a child watching a video of an open heart surgery on our behemoth living room TV, the heart organ and cardiovascular system filling the big screen. Pumping in the chest cavity. I remember not wanting to look away from the close-up viscera. Maybe later I looked for it in art, in formal abstraction as a vessel of deep animate content. I think I have carried around that moving image of the human heart, wanting to be mesmerized by it again.

I decided to change my novel’s structure and put the final section of the first draft at the beginning of the revision. So it opens on the physical injury rended by the climactic action. Asserting the wound as an opening, for language, expression to eventually come through. I guess it took me all of this time and these reflections on process to understand I should foreground form in this way, ending the novel just before the wound is inflicted, so the negative space between the end and the beginning of the novel is visceral, alive for the reader who will have known since the beginning what would happen in that negative space. And the break in the form of the novel represents the break in the form of the human body. This structure also allows for some meta content to come through, about the illusion of linear time as would be reinforced by a more conventional narrative arc obscuring its cyclical nature as made evident in trauma.

I have put the new first pages of my revision after the illustration.

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life. —Joyce Carol Oates

At first, there was only white. The flesh of his open inner forearm, white as the sharpest glare. Soft tissue you could shape into anything, a cloud, a book imprinted with no words, no ink spilled on it. The blood surfaced in its own time, like an idea born from the torn spatiotemporal fabric of his skin. With none of the urgency you’d imbue the effluence of a death wish, although he’d pulled the blade in the right direction for that—not across but up from the wrist toward the elbow. The blood did not gush but then suddenly was upon them, a bloom of red so decadent it reversed all of the words never put down, issuing corrections, marking whatever it touched wrong. The pulp of his arm like that of a white birch limb caught on fire.

Elliot looked shocked the blood would leave him through the exit he’d made for it. Desert him, like her. On its way out taking all of the color from his face. The way he regarded her it was like she’d been the one to make the incision, he’d just performed the symbolic action, the ritual bloodletting for show. It appeared the razor had migrated to his eyes, every second flickering something different, punctuating how could you one way then another, cutting deeper into his pallor as it got ghostlier. His eyes darker and farther away.

A scream rang out in her far interior reaches. In her only, and not the world beyond, because the world beyond had split in the microcosm of his body, and she didn't know yet how to encounter it with her voice. Say what she was feeling out loud as only her audible scream could. So it stayed within her own soundproof walls before it had a chance to pierce those of the practice room. Ringing out, out, but not beyond the chamber of her that was nowhere near anechoic, claiming it could pin down sounds to the present; the sounds inside of her scattered, hid, then came out of their hiding places, echoing with origin points in the past recasting the present as future.

Her body had collected in the corner of the room. When she wasn’t looking, leapt from where it had been seated on the piano bench. Without waiting for permission, taken unsanctioned action, coming into its own sovereignty. She noticed it now, forging a new trajectory out from under the dominion of her mind which, stripped of its meat suit, the absurdity of its whole raison d’être as control center laid bare, quaked, forlorn. Her arms had raised up over her head in a helpless gesture, thrown up by ancient software developed in the day before machines and bullets stole the fight. A gesture that might be found in a field awash with light—a squinting of major musculature—like Elliot were shining a high beam at her isolated in an overgrown place, and all she could do was block out the blinding light while she could not stare it down. There was nowhere in the corner to go. No secret escape hatch. Her only way out was on the other side of him, because apparently he had thought to sit between her and the door, just like he had thought to acquire the blade at some point on his way to see her. She lowered her arms.

She had to find some way of putting her hands to use. The moment had arrived a long time ago to do something. There was a number to call. That dutifully recited in childhood simulations of emergency certain as she’d been of God He’d never let come true for her. She picked up her phone and dialed 9-1-1. A voice came on the other end of the line. Rae opened her mouth to speak and her intake of breath made the line go slack, dissolve, for even what she was about to say collapsed all distance. The line became a point and the voice that wasn’t hers spoke; it sounded right beside her. It formed words with a subtext: it’s okay not to know what to say right now, because ultimately there is nothing to say, but this is a situation requiring attention that together we can address. And deeper, something like: how imaginary are strangers. How the events of real life prove there are none, because the events of real life tell the whole truth: there are no dividing lines, no boundaries, only souls making contact with eternity in a perpetual state of neither life nor death. How the end of time will lay waste to that fallacy of the stranger, revealing nobody had ever called out to anybody else for help, nor had any anomalous event ever occurred to relay between them. Strange had only ever been a misattribution. A misconception before the monolithic public record cracked open to show what it was really made of, just a collection of private yearnings, completely ordinary in their natural preponderance. Shapeless when the deep faults opened to spill them, the secrets kept by the first responders no longer burdened with the responsibility of countenancing the public image, what passed for real. Rae whispered words including slit and wrist into the phone. Her voice curled up into a fetal position, small as it could make itself intimating the violence conjured by simply putting the two words side by side. Slit wrist. And boyfriend, a designation so ill-fitting for whatever Elliot was now it chafed. Of all of the words she spoke, that one hurt the worst, sliced deeper than slit, blunt (like blade, or blunder) though it sounded, because boyfriend pointed directly at her loss, what he was no longer and could never be again. Because final as a red line into which rolled every other red line he ever had in him to draw, beyond any clarification words could provide, was the inscription of their severance on his skin.

And yet, she had never been more with him, never more aware of his body in space, his every movement including his eyes’, how they might be tracking hers and her eyes’, the area her gaze fell upon and where it might’ve overlapped with that his did, both of their gazes grappling for the dominant position on the floor. Never more had she felt them coming together than when she navigated back toward the piano bench in his general vicinity. He penetrated her, so strongly did he project onto her how it hurt to love her, especially when to hate her was the only way he knew how.

And time would prove, the only way he knew how not to leave her was to haunt her. So in dreams he would visit her, and return her to this place. Over and over, to this place of their broken human contract, this room as if it alone held the key to her escape, and she could only find her way out by going back in, again and again; it was the only way he knew how to stay inside her, by pretending to be her release. And the pressure of the space would fill her body, as if her body itself were the space, and she would want to flee her body, even in waking life, even if she couldn't understand why. But there was another dream she’d have, in which she’d be the one to brandish the weapon. Slice him open and scoop out his guts for a compost pile, for earthworms to writhe around in and butterflies to hatch from. And in this dream would form a palindrome of their relationship, fecund at its extremities, with a sinkhole in the middle.

From the floor where he’d dropped it, the blade winked at her—or so she wanted to believe—a flash intended for her eyes only, not meaning to attract his attention. Reflective silver when it was not camouflaged in the peppery carpet fibers, where jewel-toned beads of him would fade into rust-colored stains under vacuum cleans and lemon scented mist. She kept an eye on it, her gaze fixed softly on the bright shiny object so as not to give it away. She knew she could not hold it still with her gaze but it reassured her to see it there, flat on the floor, where its utility of boxcutter could not be perverted again and it could do no more harm.

All the while, the voice on the phone, having entered the space, was coming between Rae and Elliot, driving a wedge between them with every concrete detail elicited from Rae, who was in on it, more and more a collaborator in their distance, trying on an aerial view of him, the cold perspective of the ambulance dispatcher that left him an ant on the ground, some inchoate structure seen from an airplane, just another small man resorting to violence.

Rae placed her foot on the blade, not as discreetly as she would’ve intended. It was more empowering than she would’ve expected. It gave her a boost to show them both she was in control, she had to love herself before she could expect him to. She didn’t even care if Elliot knew she was less concerned about his welfare than hers. The right actions were coming now, it seemed she could take them although they were coming from someplace inside of her, like a song she hadn’t known was there. She put the phone down and her hands on his bowed head. If he tried anything, if he moved so much as a muscle, she’d knee him in the face and watch blood gush from his bountiful nose, pure, washed in the name of her self-defence. She took his skullcap off of his head and tried to jury-rig it into a tourniquet around his arm. It wouldn’t reach far enough for its ends to be tied. It could only hide the wound and soak up some of the blood that flowed freely now, with nothing much to stop it, down his arm in ruby red rivulets.

Then she made him hold the beanie in place himself.