A tribute to Lauren Berlant, an Alice Walker short poem, and a collaborative series of poems by Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz
Envelopes of Air
I just discovered a couple of days ago that the writer and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant had a cat. I must tell you, I have a sneaking suspicion that my love for their ideas actually has a lot to do with this. Their cat came in during an online talk they were doing from their home (during/post one of the waves of this pandemic) where they were talking about ‘the inconvenience of other people’. Berlant’s work has fascinated me for some time now. I have come to the conclusion that their ideas on our relationships with each other, and our negotiation of systemic inequalities and objects of desire that are designed to create attachments, but inherently limiting, must be right. Apart from the fact of their being a cat-parent, Berlant writes like a fiend, and one is caught in their world-making gestures and spirited critiques with the adolescence of first love.
I list below the other reasons for my attachment: that they always, always took each question asked in Q&As very seriously, and with such humility, and made sure they shared their email at the end of their talks for those people who didn’t feel comfortable asking their questions “in front of other people”; that they speak with vulnerability, a persistent self-effacing humour, and are terribly apologetic about the possibility of sounding certain, or preachy. In short, their words are laced with empathy, and the kindness that few commentators embody in their entitled critiques of thinkers who have come before them, or worlds they have little real connection with. Berlant talks about affect, of course, and reiterates consistently that they see theory not as a creative space of critique but of transformational infrastructure. It makes them sad that their landmark work ‘Cruel Optimism’ is often seen as bleak, putting a sharp edge on the much debated conception of happiness, and take great pains to dispel this illusion by slipping into the folds of their writing, nuggets of possibility, and ways to think about our social-economic order (‘why must we earn life?’) that does not necessarily embroil us in a cycle of vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself and falls on th’other.
They return consistently to the question of why they write, and the existential anxiety of academia itself. For me, this insistence on a particular dynamic formulation of intent, located very much in the real world of objects, and not arbitrary ideas (their observations range from Trump’s hairdo to the revolutionary possibilities of jokes), serve as an interesting counterpoint to my constant questions about the value of poetry, and of writing. Just yesterday, I discovered that they died last year at the age of 63. This felt like a personal loss, even though I discovered it many months later. I had been meaning to write to them, and I felt like I could, really, and even that they would answer. I searched for tributes, and saw how Berlant touched the lives of so many.
I am terribly interested in utopias, and I would like to believe that Berlant lives on in their words, their unravelling of intimacies, their forests of belonging. It is difficult to imagine them as dead, simply because their words are always alive, and open to the possibility of rupture. This is a kind of poetry, I think, but more than that, it is an intense concern for that which is disappearing, a distancing from the impulse of control. It transcends the page with an anarchistic fervour that assaults the reader with the tenderness of its intimacy.
That Berlant thought about their audience deeply, is for me, not a question of doubt. But I wonder about their other audiences, their journals and letters - were there writings that were, perhaps even more intimate? Were there personal negotiations of belonging that gave in to self-doubt? Were there letters or poems written to a partner, or a friend, or an imaginary audience, even to oneself - writing that was never meant to be read, because the words that were alive in the privacy of anonymity, would die at the possibility of revelation.
There are registers of dissent, of confessional identities unmaking self and world. The eye is subject to the broken lens of a body that feels pain or freedom, even before the mind knows, and often writing frames these unpeopled terrains. have you had the experience of writing a word, or a phrase, without realising where it came from? or even that you had written it? I do not mean to implicate memory, I am talking about that moment when the words on a page express the strange familiarity of meeting a childhood friend after years - words that dance even before the ink on the page is dry.
Writing has that peculiar characteristic of being located within community while being a deeply private, individual act. I do not mean that a poem is ‘communal’ simply because it is read, and shared. But the instinct of testimony comes from the awareness of the crowd. The universe throngs in our words fostered and nurtured by experience. As Berlant would say, we “throw language” at the world. We second-guess ourselves, and our audiences (notional or subconscious), our naked bodies of text shivering in the cold gaze of the multitudes. But then sometimes, these texts reveal to the reader a place that they themselves do not know, an anxiety they did not have the language for, and at that moment a world opens up, a utopia whose persistent visitation slowly turns to reality. I see in art, in writing, the transformational infrastructure of a language that untethers, even lived experience. How beautiful it is to write to a friend, no? How meaningful to find, in another, the shape of a word that you know intimately, as your own. Berlant’s constant emphasis on the possibilities of language, and the philosophical drive that wills into being, realities of relationship that are beyond the state, beyond history and political control, beyond, even the ephemeral cage of desire and disruption, is a psalm to me. I want to share it with you for no other reason than, because, it comforts me. This might sound selfish, but I trust in the value of personal experience as synchronous snowballing.
***
One of the Natalie Diaz poems I shared in the last post that I read in her collection Postcolonial Love Poem, had actually grown from a most curious collaborative project, a conversation between two poets - the other half of this conversation is Ada Limón. Entitled ‘Envelopes of Air’ and behind The New Yorker’s paywall, it weaves through the American Landscape, a nondescript engine flitting through the fields and dry country, a river that moistens the wild country of the poet’s ‘internal dialogues’. Limón and Diaz wrote to each other in a ‘third space’. The letter poems lived inside their own undisturbed glade, outside of their other spaces of interaction. They met in public events, and even socially, but these poems were outside of that - a place that was at once sacred and intimate.
They were that intimate time and space for us, of a poem, of a letter, of a room that was a new room for us to inhabit, individually, as we moved toward or away from ourselves and one another, and together, as we became a new space for each other to fill with words.
- Natalie Diaz, speaking about ‘Envelopes of Air’
I found their discussion about the experience itself very interesting, and how they both saw an acceptance of the artifice of poetry, a trust that did not exist in other poetic creations, an honesty that ‘frees’. This is for me, the value of poetry. I treasure the space it allows me, to be completely myself, to make mistakes, to learn and observe with awe, without being observed.
They were that intimate time and space for us, of a poem, of a letter, of a room that was a new room for us to inhabit, individually, as we moved toward or away from ourselves and one another, and together, as we became a new space for each other to fill with words.
Mashallah. What a beautiful bond, no? Here’s the first poem that marked this collaboration (I am thrilled that it starts with “I wish”):
The last two lines of the poem reminded me of an Alice Walker poem from her collection Hard Times Require Furious Dancing:
Sahi baat. Is there any other way to live? But let’s listen to Natalie Diaz’s response to Limón’s poem.
But then Limón responds - Is poetry merely correspondence? There is a freeing in this poem, a momentary lapse in the social contract of life, where Limón asks her friend to suspend form - ‘Imagine a body free of its anchors’…
And here’s the last poem I share with you today - Diaz’s response.
The two poets talk about how they stepped into each other’s space - how they felt comfortable there, how they wore each other’s clothes - Diaz talks about the way Limón’s words formed on her page, and Limón talks about Diaz’s exploration of colour, of how red and green become living things with form and corporeal movement. The way these poets discovered the intuition of each other and themselves is the subtext I’m interested in, and the words betray this comradeship of aesthetics and identity, something that is not easily found, or grasped.
Note: You can find the complete correspondence on the New Yorker archive here.
Shout out to the reader - the anonymous contributor from the UK who wrote such kind words, and made a direct generous contribution!
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