Break Every Rule

by Carole Maso

  Wish list: that the homogeneity end. That the mainstream come to acknowledge, for starters, the thousand refracted, disparate beauties out there.

  That the writers and the readers stop being treated by the mainstream houses like idiot children. That the business people get out and stop imposing their “taste” on everyone.

  Wish: that as writers we be aware of our own desire to incorporate, even unconsciously, the demands and anxieties of publishers and reject them, the demands and anxieties of the marketplace.

  That the business people go elsewhere.

  Market me. Promote me. Sanitize me. Co-opt me. Plagiarize me. Market me harder.

  Wish list: that the grade inflation for a certain kind of writing stop, and that the middlebrow writers assume their middle position so that everyone else might finally have a place, too. Be considered seriously, too. Be read, too.

  Paint me black. Paint me Latina. Paint me Chinese. Pour me into your mold and sell me harder.

  Fuck me (over) harder.

  Those of us jockeying for position in the heavens, intent on forever, major reputations, major motion pictures and $$$$ $$$$, life after life after life after death, forget about it.

  Wish: that straight white males reconsider the impulse to cover the entire world with their words, fill up every page, every surface, everywhere.

  Thousand-page novels, tens and tens of vollmanns—I mean volumes.

  Not to own or colonize or dominate anymore.

  “Well, we’ve been kept from ourselves too long, don’t you think?” an old woman in Central Park says to a friend.

  Two women in the park at dusk.

  Turn the beat around:

  The pauses and rhythms and allowances of Laurie Anderson. The glow of Jenny Holzer. The ranting and passion of Courtney Love. Brilliance of Susan Howe. Brilliance of Erin Mouré. Theresa Cha. Visionary P. J. Harvey. Suzan-Lori Parks.

  The future is feminine, for real, this time.

  The future is Emily Dickinson and Emily Brontë and Gertrude Stein still. The future is still Maya Deren and Billie Holiday.

  Language is a rose and the future is still a rose, opening.

  It is beautiful there in the future. Irreverent, wild.

  The future is women, for real this time. I’m sorry, but it’s time you got used to it.

  Reading on a train by the light the river gives. The woman next to me asleep. Two plastic bags at her feet. Lulling, lovely world. And I am witness to it all—that slumber—and then her awakening—so vulnerable, sensation streaming back, the world returned, the river and the light the river gives, returning language, touch, and smell. The world retrieved. I am privileged to be next to her as she moves gracefully from one state to the next, smiling slightly. I recognize her delight. It is taken away, and it is given back. The miracle and mystery of this life in one middle-aged black woman on the Metro North next to me. The Hudson River widening.

  Let all of this be part of the story, too. A woman dreaming next to water.

  The future: all the dreams we’ve been kept from. All the things yet to dream.

  An opening of possibility. A land of a thousand dances.

  I want sex and hypersex and cybersex, why not?

  The river mysteriously widening, as she opens her eyes.

  We can say, if we like, that the future will be plural.

  Our voices processed through many systems—or none at all.

  A place where a thousand birds are singing.

  “The isle is full of noises….”

  A place without the usual dichotomies. No phony divisions between mind and body, intelligence and passion, nature and technology, private and public, within and without, male and female.

  May we begin a dialogue there in the future. May we learn something from each other. Electronic writing will help us to think about impermanence, facility, fragility, and freedom, spatial intensities, irreverences, experimentation, new worlds, clean slates. Print writing will allow us new respect for the mark on the page, the human hand, the erasure, the hesitation, the mistake.

  Electronic writing will give us a deeper understanding of the instability of texts, of worlds.

  Print writing will remind us of our love for the physical, for the sensual world. And for the light only a book held in one’s hands can give. The book taken to bed or the beach—the words dancing with the heat and the sea—and the mouth now suddenly on my salty neck.

  Electronic writing shall inspire magic. Print writing shall inspire magic. Ways to heal.

  “Intoxicated with Serbian nationalist propaganda, one charge is that X took part in the murder of a Muslim civilian, F, by forcing another Muslim to bite off F’s testicles.”

  What is a book and how might it be reimagined, opened up, transformed to accommodate all we’ve seen, all we’ve been hurt by, all that’s been given, all that’s been taken away:

  “…deliberately infecting subjects with fatal diseases, killing 275,000 of the elderly, the deformed and other ‘useless eaters’ through the guise of euthanasia, and killing 112 Jews simply to fill out a university skeleton collection.”

  No more monoliths. No more gods.

  “Let us go then, you and I….”

  No more sheepish, mindless devotion. No more quiet supplication.

  All the dark roads you’ve led us down no more.

  You will call me naive, childlike, irreverent, idealistic, offensive, outrageous, defiant at times, because I do not believe in a literature of limitation, in a future of limitation. I annoy you with this kind of talk, I know. You’ve told me many times before. You’d like me to step into my quiet box. You’re so cavalier, as you offer your hand.

  The future. Possibility will reign. My students poised on some new threshold. We’re too diversified, we’re too fractured, all too close in proximity suddenly—one world.

  One wild world,

  free of categories, free of denominations, dance and fiction and performance and installation and video and poetry and painting—one world—every hyper- and cyber-

  And in upstate New York, a woman sees fields of flax and iris and cattails, and dreams of making paper. And dreams of creating an Art Farm—a place just for experimenting with unusual indigenous fibers, a real space for bookbinding, an archive, a library, a gallery.

  Dream: that this new tolerance might set a tone, give an example. This openness in acceptance of texts, of forms, this freedom, this embrace will serve as models for how to live. Will be the model for a new world order—in my dream. A way to live together better—in my dream.

  Godard: “A film like this, it’s a bit as if I wanted to write a sociological essay in the form of a novel, and all I had to do it with was notes of music. Is that what cinema is? And am I right to continue doing it?”

  But I do believe, and no doubt childishly, unquestioningly, in the supremacy of beauty, in pattern, in language, as a child believes in language, in diversity, in the possibility of justice—even after everything we have seen—in the impulse to speak—even after everything.

  “Peder Davis, a bouncy, tow-headed five-year-old, shook his head and said, ‘I would tell him: You shoot down this building? You put it back together.

  And I would say, You redo those people.’”

  One hundred and sixty-eight dead in Oklahoma bombing.

  “Peder said he drew ‘a house with eyes that was blue on the sides.’ He explained, ‘It was the building that exploded, in heaven.’”

  Wish: that writing again, through its audacity, generosity, possibility, irreverence, wildness, teach us how to better live.

  The world doesn’t end.

  The smell of the air. The feel of the wind in late April.

  You can’t have a genuine experience of nature except in nature. You can’t have a genuine experience of language except in language. And for those of us for whom language is the central drama, the captivating, imaginative, open, flexible act, there can never be a substitute or a replacement.

  Language
continually opening new places in me.

  A picture of a bird will never be a bird. And a bird will never be a picture of a bird. So relax.

  The world doesn’t end, my friend. So stop your doomsday song. Or Matthew Arnold: “The end is everywhere: Art still has truth, take refuge there.”

  All will perish, but not this: language opening like a rose.

  And many times I have despaired over the limits of language, the recalcitrance of words that refuse to yield, won’t glimmer, won’t work anymore. All the outmoded forms. Yet I know it is part of it, I know that now; it’s part of the essential mystery of the medium—and that all of us who are in this thing for real have to face this, address this, love this, even.

  The struggles with shape, with silence, with complacency. The impossibility of the task.

  You say destined to perish, death of the novel, end of fiction, over and over.

  But Matthew Arnold, on the cusp of another century, dreams: art.

  And I say faced with the eternal mysteries, one, if so inclined, will make fictive shapes.

  What it was like to be here. To hold your hand.

  An ancient impulse, after all.

  As we reach, trying to recapture an original happiness, pleasure, peace—

  Reaching—

  The needs that language mirrors and engenders and satisfies are not going away. And are not replaceable.

  The body with its cellular alphabet. And, in another alphabet, the desire to get that body onto the page.

  There will be works of female sexuality, finally.

  Feminine shapes.

  All sorts of new shapes. Language, a rose, opening.

  It’s greater than we are, than we’ll ever be. That’s why I love it. Kneeling at the altar of the impossible. The self put back in its proper place.

  The miracle of language. The challenge and magic of language.

  Different than the old magic. I remember you liked to saw women in half and put them back together, once. Configure them in ways most pleasing to you.

  You tried once to make language conform. Obey. You tried to tame it. You tried to make it sit, heel, jump through hoops.

  You like to say I am reckless. You like to say I lack discipline. You say my work lacks structure. I’ve heard it a hundred times from you. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

  In spite of everything, my refusal to hate you, to take you all that seriously, to be condescended to—

  Still, too often I have worried about worldly things. Too often have I worried about publishing, about my so-called career, fretted over the so-so-writers who are routinely acclaimed, rewarded, given biscuits and other treats—this too small prison of self where I sometimes dwell.

  Too often I have let the creeps upset me.

  The danger of the sky.

  The danger of April.

  If you say language is dying….

  Susan Howe: “Poetry is redemption from pessimism.”

  April in the country. Already so much green. So much life. So much. Even with half the trees still bare. Poking up through the slowly warming earth, the tender shoots of asparagus. Crocus. Bloodroot.

  This vulnerable and breakable heart.

  As we dare to utter something, to commit ourselves, to make a mark on a page or a field of light.

  To incorporate this dangerous and fragile world. All its beauty. All its pain.

  You who said “hegemony” and “domino theory” and “peace with honor.”

  To not only tolerate but welcome work that is other than the kind we do.

  To incorporate the ache of Vietnam, the mistake of it, incapable of being erased or changed. To invent forms that might let that wound stand—

  If we’ve learned anything, yet.

  Summer 1885

  Brother and Sister’s Friend—

  “Sweet Land of Liberty” is a superfluous Carol till it concerns ourselves—then it outrealms the Birds…

  Your Hollyhocks endow the House, making Art’s inner Summer, never Treason to Nature’s. Nature will be closing her Picnic when you return to America, but you will ride Home by sunset, which is far better.

  I am glad you cherish the Sea. We correspond, though I never met him.

  I write in the midst of Sweet-Peas and by the side of Orioles, and could put my hand on a Butterfly, only he withdraws.

  Touch Shakespeare for me.

  “Be not afraid. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.”

  Fifty years now since World War II. She sits in the corner and weeps.

  And hurt not.

  Six million dead.

  “Well, we’ve been kept from ourselves long enough, don’t you think?”

  We dare to speak. Trembling, and on the verge.

  Extraordinary things have been written. Extraordinary things will continue to be written.

  Nineteen ninety-five: Vinyl makes its small comeback. To the teenage music freak, to the classical music fiend, and to the opera queen, CDs are now being disparaged as producing too cold, too sanitary a sound. Vinyl is being sought out again for its warmer, richer quality.

  Wish: that we be open-minded and generous. That we fear not.

  That the electronic page understand its powers and its limitations. Nothing replaces the giddiness one feels at the potential of hypertext. Entirely new shapes might be created, different ways of thinking, of perceiving.

  Kevin Kelly, executive director of Wired magazine: “The first thing discovered by Jaron Lanier [the virtual reality pioneer] is to say what is reality? We get to ask the great questions of all time: what is life? What is human? What is civilization? And you ask it not in the way the old philosophers asked it, sitting in armchairs, but by actually trying it. Let’s try and make life. Let’s try and make community.”

  And now the Extropians, who say they can achieve immortality by downloading the contents of the human brain onto a hard disk….

  So turn to the students. Young visionaries. Who click on the Internet, the cyberworld in their sleep. Alvin Lu: citizen of the universe, the whole world at his fingertips. In love with the blinding light out there, the possibility, world without end, his love of all that is the future.

  Let the fictions change shape, grow, accommodate. Let the medium change if it must; the artist persists.

  You say all is doomed, but I say Julio Cortázar. I say Samuel Beckett. I say Marcel Proust. Virginia Woolf. I say Garcia Lorca and Walt Whitman. I say Mallarmé. I say Ingeborg Bachmann. The Apu Trilogy will lie next to Hamlet. Vivre Sa Vie will live next to Texts for Nothing.

  These fragmented prayers.

  Making love around the fire of the alphabet.

  Wish: that we not hurt each other purposely anymore.

  A literature of love. A literature of tolerance. A literature of difference.

  Saving the best of what was good in the old. Not to discard indiscriminately, but not to hold on too tightly, either. To go forward together, unthreatened for once. The future is Robert Wilson and JLG. The future is Hou Hsiao-hsien. The future is Martha Graham, still.

  The vocabularies of dance, of film, of performance.

  The disintegration of categories.

  If you say that language is dying, then what do you know of language?

  I am getting a little tired of this you-and-I bit. But it tells me one important thing: that I do not want it to have to be this way. I do not believe it has to continue this way—you over there alternately blustery and cowering, me over here, defensive, angry.

  Wish: a sky that is not divided. A way to look at the screen of the sky with its grandeur, its weather, its color, its patterns of bird flight, its airplanes and accidents and poisons, its mushroom clouds.

  Its goldfinches frescoed against an aqua-blue dome.

  Wish: that the sky go on forever. That we stop killing each other. That we allow each other to live.

  April 1995 in New York City and the long-awaited Satyajit Ray Festival begins. For
years he’s been kept from us. Who decides, finally, what is seen, what is read, and why? And how much else has been deleted, omitted, neglected, ignored, buried, treated with utter indifference or contempt?

  And in conversation with the man, my friend, a famous poet in fact, and the topic moved to someone we both knew who had just been operated on, and he said “masectomy,” and I said back, “Yes, a mastectomy, a mastectomy,” and he said “masectomy” like “vasectomy,” and I said only under my breath, “It’s mastectomy, idiot,” ashamed, embarrassed, and a little intimidated, that was the worst part, a little unsure. That it made me question what I of course knew, that was the worst part—because of his easy confidence saying “masectomy,” his arrogance, he hadn’t even bothered to learn the right word, a poet, for God’s sake, a man who worked with words, who should have known the right word for the removal of a breast, don’t you think?

  Mastectomy.

  The undeniable danger of the sky.

  Adrienne Rich: “Poetry means refusing the choice to kill or die.”

  Wish: that the straight white male give in just a little more gracefully. Call in its Michael Douglases, its suspect Hollywood, its hurt feelings, its fear—move over some.

  After your thousands of years of affirmative action, give someone else a chance—just a chance.

  The wish is for gentleness. The wish is for allowances.

  “What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use….”

  Wish: that the typical New Yorker story become the artifact it is and assume its proper place in the artifact museum, and not be mistaken for something still alive. Well we’ve just about had it with all the phony baloney, don’t you think?

  That the short story and the novel as they evolve and assume new, utterly original shapes might be treated gently. And with optimism. That is the wish.

  That hypertext and all electronic writing still in its infancy be treated with something other than your fear and your contempt.

  That, poised on the next century, we fear not. Make no grand pronouncements.