Speculative Friction

“Do not mistake actual life for reading. Inside your brain, there is no homunculus waxing lyric on the events of your day, so you must quit feeding him truffles, and shoo away his attendants with their ostrich-feather fans.”—Claire Bateman

By Claire Bateman

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—12/30/2013—

I

If a book hasn’t shaken you up even a little after three chapters, you must lay it aside, since the very purpose of reading is to set all your previous clarities resonating at incompatible frequencies.

II

Do not mistake reading for actual life, which suffers from lack of both compression and dynamic focus; note the prolonged mundane stretches no editor would stand for, the proliferation of characters and incidents that apparently do nothing to advance the plot. Also, as you may have noticed, the protagonist comes across as muddled, inept, though neither in the comedic nor in the ironically reflexive post-tragic sense. The main problem with reality is that you aren’t allowed to skim it.

III

Do not mistake actual life for reading. Inside your brain, there is no homunculus waxing lyric on the events of your day, so you must quit feeding him truffles, and shoo away his attendants with their ostrich-feather fans.

IV

As song preceded speech, so reading antedated writing: our palaeohuman ancestors perused the compositions of coastlines and interpreted the displacements of clouds.

Even now, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In the third trimester, the outsized head moves back and forth in a readerly manner, spooky eyes open, the subject matter as yet unidentifiable.

V

Should you need to break free from a book, the route is generally diagonal. If this fails, you may have to slip into the helical flow to slingshot you from a vortex. But whatever your situation, be sure to remember this most basic of facts: those who fight the text directly almost always go under.

VI

You must ascertain the title of anything being read or even merely carried in a restaurant, airport, etc., despite the fact that in doing so, you will violate public mores regarding invasion of personal space. Even at the shore, you must trespass under vacationers’ umbrellas in order to rifle through their beach bags and dig out their paperbacks. This is as close as you can get to what you have actually always craved: the Universal Blending of Minds.

VII

The fact that you’re relishing every nuance of a particular book doesn’t exclude you from reading others as well, and savoring them no less intensely, or from maintaining by your bedside a pile of books continually on the verge of collapse, or from loading the trunk of your car with several such piles, which is why your rear tires have to be replaced twice as frequently as the front. You don’t consume only one kind of food per meal, so why should you be bound to just one book at a time? Anyone you might happen to kiss will taste on your breath an intricate comingling of textual flavors that is nothing less than ambrosial.

VIII

When you write, your inside becomes your outside, which becomes your readers’ insides.

Only if everyone died or disappeared, leaving all the books behind, could there be an outside without an inside.

One of the names for this not happening is history.

IX

No matter how tightly you’ve packed your books in on the shelf (yes, even if you have to use a butter knife to retrieve one), each volume perceives itself to be alone in free-fall till you select it. Then it knows—not its own content, but yours, for as you read it, it is reading you. And if you lose interest and replace it after only a few chapters, it suffers anguish at the disruption of your narrative arc, deprived of that longed-for moment when your life becomes retroactively inevitable, your own character fully visited upon you, your entire existence revealed as strange, rare, highly improbable, the ultimate exception. Now the book has nothing to console it as it drifts once more into storyless space.

X

A certain restaurant chain rewards school children with pizza for finishing a pre-established number of books. This practice contaminates the very act of reading by turning it into a consumer experience, and should therefore be immediately outlawed, unless adults can get in on it too.

XI

Your reading self is all your selves turning the pages of everything you’ve ever read in a spectral library. There is the-you-in-a-little-plastic-chair, laboring through your first chapter book. And there is the-you-of-30-years-ago, practically inhaling the words of a poet the current-you dismisses. And there is the-you-of-a-few-hours-ago, opening a novel already digested in the 90s but since then so thoroughly forgotten that re-reading now it will turn out to be, no pun intended, an authentically novel experience.

When this-morning’s-you lifts her head to unkink her neck and unfocus her eyes, she glimpses all the other you’s in all the other chairs. But when the youngest-you does the same, she sees that she is utterly alone.

XII

In your sleep, you find the leaves are too fine-spun to separate, or your fingers have suddenly thickened. The narrowest of slippages, the hint of a whisper, and you think you’ve got it—but no, the corners won’t come apart, for the entire book is the most delicate of fortresses, unbreachable. Thus, your dream body is simultaneously always and never between pages.

XIII

When an enraged reader sends a book flying across the room, it flutters, pumping to prolong the suspension even though it’s already experiencing it in typeface time, 127 centuries per human second. This is a volume’s event horizon, the apotheosis from which it was born from martyred forests. Every thrown book is certain that its arc and trajectory surpass those of its kin.

XIV

If you’re seeking a lost book, run your gaze along all your shelves very quickly from top to bottom, left to right, scanning for a perfect match to your mental image of the book as you last glimpsed it—that mottled blue-and-gold binding, that slight wear at the top left corner of the spine. Then reverse directions in honor of the great nations of the Hebrews and the Chinese, which read right to left.  When this fails, console yourself by thinking about young children for whom a missing object possesses no corresponding mental reality, and so evokes no sense of loss.  Imagine a library of babies crawling ecstatically through a disorder of books on the floor. Finally, try to recall anyone to whom you might have loaned the volume: acquaintances, colleagues, students, blood kin, creditors, arch-nemeses, representative entities from Avon, the March of Dimes, the Homeowners’ Association, the Fraternal Brotherhood of Ancient Freemasons. Imagine their hands reaching out to receive the book, leaving their fingerprints all over the air. Imagine you can read them.

XV

It’s a frenzy, the newscasters will say, It’s the close of an age gone by! as the people consume portions of text, comparing various authors’ aftertastes, vomiting Proust, wetting down volumes with whiskey, and when, a good hour before official conflagration time some dimwit lights a cigarette, how everyone will scramble to get out, get out: first the underglow and then the great rushing as the top layers ignite, rise up, only to be sucked down into the vacuum of paragraphs melting together, mere pulp and ink, all the stories long since keyed and scanned and uploaded into digital heaven. But apart from their Ur-texts in the dimensional universe, those signals won’t hold together; at the next log-on there will be nothing but empty screens. Then everyone will look around shyly at each other, as though for the first time. Someone will have to invent plot all over again. And after that, paper.

Note: This piece first appeared in No. 44 of  Mudlark (An Electronic Journal of Poetry and Poetics).