Whatever Survives Survives

Summer Chronicles #4*

By Jim Miller

It’s hard to say if I will ever be the same after the last year or so.  This is, of course, something one could say about any year really, but this last year seems to fit the statement more than most other ones.  Perhaps it was something about the nature of my and others’ peculiar forms of voluntary house arrest that makes it seem unique in the way it exposed the mercurial nature of human consciousness.  

When I think about how best to capture it in words, the mode of writing that comes to me is surrealism.  Hence, I will take as an explanation of my approach this passage from Andre Breton’s classic surrealist novel, Nadja:

• Do not expect me to provide an exact account of what I have been permitted to experience in this domain.  I shall limit myself here to recalling without effort certain things which, apart from any exertions on my part, have occasionally happened to me, things which, reaching me in unsuspected ways, give me the measure of the particular grace and disgrace of which I am the object; I shall discuss these things without pre-established order, and according to the mood of the moment which lets whatever survives survive.  

What was once directly lived moved away into representation.  I went from screen to screen and forced myself to unlearn my love of crowds.  It was, for a long period of time outside my immediate family, the death of touch.  

At a certain point, I came to see the moods that washed over me like weather, states of being not necessarily related to objective reality.  Despair, joy, boredom, anger, ennui, happiness, rage, anxiety, a strange kind of edgy undefined energy, and more feelings and psychic spaces intricately interwoven like an ornate pattern on a wall tapestry or maybe a Tibetan painting featuring various realms of experience.  

In disembodied conversations, I learned of peoples’ illness and death.  Six co-workers of my family members died.  More students than I can remember got sick, had family sick, or had someone die.  My father-in-law died not of COVID in the peak of the winter surge.  We couldn’t be with him.  

The maelstrom of hate, rage, and madness blared from the TV news in my house.  

I marched in a couple Black Lives Matters protests, one of them huge, everyone masked-up, but the sight of the crowd brought tears to my eyes.  

I broke a rib tripping on a run but got up and didn’t stop.  I threw out my shoulder lifting weights in my study.  Other parts of me started to fail as well.  Lots of thinking about death, kinds of death, how little or how much life remains for me and others.    

There was the sense that “it” would never end until there was a sense that “it” was beginning to end.  

Sports in empty stadiums on TV.  

Being filled with dread by public restrooms.  

The overwhelmingly gorgeous visage of the John Muir Trail in the Eastern Sierras—the light glittering on the rushing river, a beaver lodge, bear tracks in the mud.  Driving up the 395 to the highway that leads to Lassen National Park with Mt. Shasta looming, snowcapped, in the distance.  The dense smell of Redwoods.  Burning my hand in the campfire.  Watching back at home on TV the raging fire rip through the woods in Lassen.  

Wondering who the fuck I was.

I learned how to listen to tales of woe from people who I was powerless to help.  Listening was the point, painful but important.  

Walking through the closed-off street in the spring with the wildflowers blooming, the empty streets and hotels downtown, the mini-landscapes of thousands of yards.  The Matilija poppies in my front yard, the possum walking on the lawn, hummingbirds at the feeder, the cats chasing phantoms they spotted outside the window, the way the clouds moved across the sky with the breeze, the sun pouring in, the June gloom, the extraordinary beauty of everyday life.  

The dead possum on the street.  

Learning to relearn my love of crowds.  

Summer Chronicles#4*

In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven-year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil (The Brazilian News) not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil.  As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes.  The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."  

What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles."  As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word."  It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.  

More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe.  Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector.  So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."  

Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it--for better or worse. So, for a few lazy weeks of summer I will, as I have for a few years now, try my hand at the form.  

Lead image by Kimberly Rotter via Pixabay