Selection from “Locals,” a Recently Completed Fiction Collection
Speculative Friction
by Claire Bateman
In the language of this realm, there are so many words for “knowledge” that they comprise an enormous collaborative document-in-progress referred to as “The Lexicon.” There is a term for knowledge one pretends to possess as well as for knowledge one pretends to not possess, which is not precisely the same as knowledge one is glad to not possess or wishes one possessed; there is a term for knowledge ignored or disregarded; and for anachronistic knowledge, which is related but not equivalent to incongruent knowledge, and very different from extinct knowledge; for knowledge one feels one must protect, as opposed to knowledge by which one feels protected; for useless or unusable knowledge that occupies valuable space in the brain; and for knowledge that is valid but cannot be proven. In this dictionary, you can find words for knowledge that is exothermic and endothermic; stillborn or still-forming; disfigured, crippled, or disintegrating; heavy, light, and weightless; knowledge to which someone significant to the bearer is oblivious; symbiotic (not the same as parasitic) knowledge; merely local knowledge; mutating, expanding, and contracting knowledge of many varieties.
“The Lexicon” is not, of course, not merely a book, but rather, an archival coral reef of ever-evolving elucidation that occupies over half of the capital city’s office buildings. This is why the realm has never pursued expansionist foreign policies—why bother, when the people already possess an inexhaustible definitional frontier? And this is why the national religion is the quest for “what escapes” or “what [uncontainably] overflows/brims over”—by which they mean that particular variety of knowledge impossible to label or categorize. Though nobody can imagine what this might turn out to be, the citizens agree that they will be able to identify it by its conspicuous absence from The Lexicon on The Day of Completion when the final entry has been inscribed. But how are they to know when this has occurred? In government conference rooms throughout the realm, teams of federally-appointed theologians argue around the clock over how to even begin to determine such a thing.
Working against this entire enterprise, however, are the Antidefinitionists, those zealots who have sworn blood oaths to dismantle, disassemble, and disarticulate The Lexicon itself. Though their numbers are few, the realm maintains a sizeable standing army of combat-trained librarians to guard The Lexicon’s giant embossed pages from stealth attacks, any one of which could set the whole endeavor back at least a generation.
First published in Blackbird.
GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—5/23/11—“Consider the book that will now never be written, full of uselessness and accidents, the book which places our distractions and our embarrassments center stage, unfolds them like an artichoke, allows us to escape ourselves, impedes our terrible progress. Consider the necessary book of elevators, and music from 20 years ago, the book of strange invitations, about which we can say, ‘This book is not a book. It’s not a song. Nor a poem. Nor thoughts.’ On the verge of irreducibility, I turned over a rock, and made a discovery. Can this be what people mean when they talk about beauty? I considered a book that might result from following some simple instructions: 1) fill your book with seeds, 2) cut holes in it, 3) hang it where there is wind.”
From 39 Microlectures, by Matthew Goulish.
Claire Bateman
Claire Bateman’s books include Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose); Locals (Serving House Books), The Bicycle Slow Race (Wesleyan University Press), Friction (Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), At The Funeral Of The Ether (Ninety-Six Press, Furman University), Clumsy (New Issues Poetry & Prose), Leap (New Issues), and Coronology (Etruscan Press). She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Writings 40th Anniversary Poetry Prize. She has taught at Clemson University, the Greenville Fine Arts Center, and various workshops and conferences such as Bread Loaf and Mount Holyoke. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina. (Please see Bateman’s amazon.com Author’s Page for links to all her publications, and go here for further information about the poet and her work.) (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)