by Ben Lerner
Although I felt Noor had been speaking for hours, only forty-five minutes of our shift had passed. As we bagged the last of the mangoes, someone came from checkout and asked if anybody had ever worked at the register; one of the cashiers had had to go home early and they needed another person. Noor said she had done checkout before and discarded her gloves and bandanna and apron and, after smiling goodbye to me, went upstairs. I spent the rest of the shift bagging dates and trying not to look at the clock.
When my shift was over I left the co-op, buying a couple of bags of mango first, and, since it was unseasonably warm, decided to take a long walk. I walked on Union Street through Park Slope and my neighborhood of Boerum Hill and through Cobble Hill and beyond the BQE until I reached Columbia Street, a walk of a couple miles. I turned right on Columbia—the water was on my left—and walked until it became Furman and then continued a mile or so until I could descend into Brooklyn Bridge Park, which, except for a few joggers and a homeless man collecting cans in a shopping cart, was empty. I found a bench and looked at the magnificent bridge’s necklace lights in the sky and reflected in the water and imagined a future surge crashing over the iron guardrail. I thought I could smell the light, syrupy scent of cottonwoods blooming prematurely, confused by a warmth too early in the year even to be described as a false spring, but that might have been a mild olfactory hallucination triggered by memory—or, I found myself thinking, a brain tumor. Across the water, a helicopter was lowering itself carefully onto the downtown heliport by South Street, a slow strobe on its tail.
I breathed in the night air that was or was not laced with anachronistic blossoms and felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I looked at Manhattan’s skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the present absence of the towers. It was a thrill that only built space produced in me, never the natural world, and only when there was an incommensurability of scale—the human dimension of the windows tiny from such distance combining but not dissolving into the larger architecture of the skyline that was the expression, the material signature, of a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate registers, were nevertheless addressed. Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community. Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of increasing severity—whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. What I felt when I tried to take in the skyline—and instead was taken in by it—was a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied, my personality dissolving into a personhood so abstract that every atom belonging to me as good belonged to Noor, the fiction of the world rearranging itself around her. If there had been a way to say it without it sounding like presumptuous co-op nonsense, I would have wanted to tell her that discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred. You might have seen me sitting there on the bench that midnight, my hair matted down from the bandanna, eating an irresponsible quantity of unsulfured mango, and having, as I projected myself into the future, a mild lacrimal event.
* * *
“It’s always a projection back into the past, the idea that there was a single moment when you decided to become a writer, or the idea that a writer is in a position to know how or why she became a writer, if it makes sense to think of it as a decision at all, but that’s why the question can be interesting, because it’s a way of asking a writer to write the fiction of her origins, of asking the poet to sing the song of the origins of song, which is one of the poet’s oldest tasks. The first poet in English whose name is known learned the art of song in a dream: Bede says that a god appeared to Caedmon and told him to sing ‘the beginning of created things.’ So while I assume I was asked to talk about how I became a writer with the idea that my experience might be of some practical use to the students here, I’m afraid I have nothing to offer in that regard. But I can tell you how, from my current vantage, I have constructed the fiction about the origins of my writing, such as it is.
“In the story I’ve been telling myself lately, I became a poet, or became interested in becoming a poet, on January twenty-eighth, 1986, at the age of seven. Like most Americans who were alive at that time, I have a clear memory of watching the space shuttle Challenger disintegrate seventy-three seconds into flight. There had been, as many of you probably know, unusual excitement about this mission because one of the seven crew members was a teacher named Christa McAuliffe. She was selected from I don’t know how many applicants to be the first teacher in space, also the first civilian, part of a program called the ‘Teacher in Space Project,’ which would be canceled a few years after her death. McAuliffe was selected in part to represent ‘ordinary Americans’ and so we ordinary Americans were particularly interested in this mission. Millions of schoolchildren were being taught curricula related to the program and were looking forward to the launch. My third-grade class wrote her letters expressing our pride and wishing her luck. I remember Mrs. Greiner trying to explain the word Godspeed.
“Can I ask you, by a show of hands, to indicate if you watched the Challenger disaster live? Right. The majority of Americans who are over thirty years old today remember watching the shuttle crumble on live TV. It’s consistently noted as the dawning of our era of live disasters and simulcast wars: O. J. Simpson fleeing in the white Bronco, the towers collapsing, etc., although there had of course been other televised traumas before. I don’t have a single friend who doesn’t remember watching it as it happened—not as a replay later when you knew the shuttle was doomed, but when you expected the shuttle to disappear successfully into space and instead saw it engulfed in a giant fireball, saw the branching plumes of smoke as its components fell back to earth. I remember a moment of incomprehension, trying to imagine that what I’d witnessed was part of the plan, some kind of timed separation of one part of the shuttle from the other, and then, with a terrible sinking feeling, realizing, even as a seven-year-old, that that wasn’t possible.
“The thing is, almost nobody saw it live: 1986 was early in the history of cable news, and although CNN carried the launch live, not that many of us just happened to be watching CNN in the middle of a workday, a school day. All other major broadcast stations had cut away before the disaster. They all came back quickly with taped replays, of course. Because of the Teacher in Space Project, NASA had arranged a satellite broadcast of the mission into television sets in many schools—and that’s how I remember seeing it, as does my older brother. I remember tears in Mrs. Greiner’s eyes and the students’ initial incomprehension, some awkward laughter. But neither of us did see it: Randolph Elementary School in Topeka wasn’t part of that broadcast. So unless you were watching CNN or were in one of the special classrooms, you didn’t witness it in the present tense.
“What many of us did watch live was Ronald Reagan’s address to the country later that night. I knew everybody in my family hated Reagan, but I could tell that even my parents were moved by the speech. At the time I didn’t know that politicians’ speeches were written by other people, but I did know—because it was discussed in my favorite movie, Back to the Future, which had come out the previous year—that Reagan had been a Hollywood actor. Reagan’s speech was written by Peggy Noonan and is widely considered one of the greatest twentieth-century presidential addresses. Noonan would go on to write a bunch of memorable Republican catchphrases
—‘read my lips: no new taxes’; ‘a thousand points of light’; ‘a kinder, gentler nation.’ (She would also, by the way, become a consultant for the television program The West Wing.) The speech was only four minutes long. And the ending—one of the most famous conclusions of any presidential speech—entered my body as much as my mind: We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’
“The prosody of that last part of the sentence, the way the iambs offered both a sense of climax and of closure, the way the alternating stresses lent the speech a sense of authority and dignity, of mourning and reassurance—I felt it in my chest; the sentence pulled me into the future. I had no idea what surly meant then, and it’s an awkward modifier in this phrase, since you usually see it in contexts like ‘a surly waiter,’ meaning uncivil; a ‘surly sky’ is threatening or ominous. It’s hard for me to apply it to a ‘bond,’ although I see how it does elegiac work by helping us think of the astronauts as having escaped a threat as opposed to having succumbed to one—they are in a better place now, etc. (Bede says: ‘By his verse the minds of many were often excited to despise the world.’) But the meaning of the words was nothing compared to that first experience of poetic measure—how I felt simultaneously comforted and stirred by the rhythm and knew that all across America those rhythms were working in millions of other bodies too. Let me allow the preposterousness of what I’m saying to sink in: I think I became a poet because of Ronald Reagan and Peggy Noonan. The way they used poetic language to integrate a terrible event and its image back into a framework of meaning, the way the transpersonality of prosody constituted a community: poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, it seemed to me.
“Had I seen a transcript of the speech, I would have seen that ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ and ‘touch the face of God’ were in quotation marks. They weren’t Reagan’s words, and they weren’t Noonan’s: they were taken from a poem by John Gillespie Magee entitled ‘High Flight.’ Magee—an American pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force—died at nineteen in a midair collision during World War II and on his gravestone near where he died in Lincolnshire the first and last lines of ‘High Flight’ are engraved: ‘Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth / Put out my hand and touched the Face of God.’ ‘High Flight’ is a very famous poem and it’s not so surprising Noonan had it on hand. It’s the official poem, whatever that means, of the Royal Canadian Air Force. It’s on a lot of stones in military cemeteries. When I learned these facts while writing a term paper in high school, I didn’t feel as though I’d been cheated: I loved the idea that a poem written by a young man weeks before his fiery death would be quoted by a speechwriter and read by a president and felt in the chests of a million American children in the wake of another aerial disaster. It showed poetry’s power to circulate among bodies and temporalities, to transcend the contingencies of its authorship.
“While preparing these remarks, I was reading up a little on Magee—by which I mean, why hide the fact, that I was reading his Wikipedia entry—when I noted a section called ‘Sources of Inspiration for High Flight.’ ‘Sources of Inspiration’ is an understatement, a euphemism; if Magee were a student of mine and showed me a poem with this number of ‘sources,’ I’d either say it was a work of collage or an act of plagiarism. The last line of ‘High Flight’—‘And touched the face of God’—also concludes a poem by a man named Cuthbert Hicks, a poem that was published three years before Magee’s in a book called Icarus: An Anthology of the Poetry of Flight. Hicks’s poem ends: ‘For I have danced the streets of heaven, / And touched the face of God.’ What’s more, Icarus contains a poem called ‘New World’ by one G.W.M. Dunn, which includes the (unfortunate) phrase ‘on laughter-silvered wings,’ which Magee stole for the second line of ‘High Flight.’ Moreover, the penultimate line of ‘High Flight’—‘The high, untrespassed sanctity of space’—sounds an awful lot like a line from a poem in Icarus by someone known by the initials C.A.F.B., ‘Dominion over Air,’ a poem that had previously been published in the RAF College Journal: ‘Across the unpierced sanctity of space.’ Reagan’s unattributed quotation provided by Noonan was taken from a poem that was cobbled together by a young poet out of an anthology of other young poets enthralled by the power of flight, which cost many of them their lives—unless someone made this all up on Wikipedia, which is possible; I didn’t have time to track down a copy of Icarus. I find this less scandalous than beautiful: a kind of palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song with no single origin, or whose origin has been erased—the way a star, from our earthly perspective, is often survived by its own light.
“I want to mention another way information circulated through the country in 1986 around the Challenger disaster, and I think those of you who are more or less my age will know what I’m talking about: jokes. My brother, who is three and a half years older than I, would tell me one after another as we walked to and from Randolph Elementary that winter: Did you know that Christa McAuliffe was blue-eyed? One blew left and one blew right; What were Christa McAuliffe’s last words to her husband? You feed the kids—I’ll feed the fish; What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts; How do they know what shampoo Christa McAuliffe used? They found her head and shoulders. And so on: the jokes seemed to come out of nowhere, or to come from everywhere at once; like cicadas emerging from underground, they were ubiquitous for a couple of months, then disappeared. Folklorists who study what they call ‘joke cycles’ track how—particularly in times of collective anxiety—certain humorous templates get recycled, often among children. When the IRA blew up a fishing boat with Admiral Mountbatten on it in 1979, the year of my birth, people told the same dandruff joke. When an actor named Vic Morrow died in a helicopter crash in 1982, there was the joke again—head and shoulders. (Procter & Gamble developed the shampoo in the 1950s.) The Challenger joke cycle, which seemed to exist without our parents knowing, was my first experience of a kind of sinister transpersonal syntax existent in the collective unconscious, a shadow language to Reagan’s official narrative processing of the national tragedy. The anonymous jokes we were told and retold were our way of dealing with the remainder of the trauma that the elegy cycle initiated by Reagan-Noonan-Magee-Hicks-Dunn-C.A.F.B. (and who knows who else) couldn’t fully integrate into our lives.
“So at the beginning of my story of origins is a false memory of a moving image. I didn’t see it live. What I saw was a televised speech that wasn’t written by anyone, but that, through its rhythmic structure, was briefly available to everyone; the next day I went to school and another powerfully unoriginal linguistic practice enveloped me, an unsanctioned ritual of call-and-response that was, however insensitively, a form of grieving. If I had to trace my origins as a poet to a specific moment, I’d locate it there, in those modes of recycling. I make no claims for ‘High Flight’ as a poem—in fact, I think it’s a terrible poem—and Ronald Reagan I consider a mass murderer. I don’t see anything formally interesting about the Challenger jokes, I can’t find anything to celebrate there; they weren’t funny even at the time. But I wonder if we can think of them as bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all. Thank you.”
I thought the applause for my remarks was enthusiastic, but I might well have been mistaken, because almost none of the questions in the ensuing conversation was addressed to me; the other two writers on the panel were much better known. I sat in a modernist leather chair on the stage at Columbia’s School of the Arts, unable to see the audience clearly because of the tungsten lights, a distinguished professor of literature moderating, and mainly listened to the distinguished authors—so distinguished I’d often thought of them as dead—talk abou
t the origins of their genius. (Would you believe me if I said that one of the distinguished authors was the same South African man I’d observed from across the room at Bernard and Natali’s fifteen years before?) There were the usual exhortations to purity—think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form—exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
But at the elegant dinner the distinguished professor had arranged for us after the panel, all the initial small talk was about money: had you heard about X’s advance, how much money Y received when her aggressively mediocre book was optioned for film, and so on. After two quick glasses of Sancerre, the distinguished male author started holding forth, periodically tugging at his salt-and-pepper beard, his signature gesture, moving from one anecdote about a famous friend or triumphant experience to another without pausing for the possibility of response, and it was clear to everyone at the table who had any experience with men and alcohol—especially men who had won international literary prizes—that he was not going to stop talking at any point in the meal. Unless he dissects, I thought. When a young Latino man tried to refill his glass of water from a pitcher, the distinguished male author snapped in Spanish, without looking at the man, that he was having sparkling water, and then switched back into English without missing a beat. The distinguished professor was sitting immediately across from the distinguished male author and seemed more than happy to receive his logorrhea; a younger woman—probably also an English professor, but too young to be distinguished—was sitting beside him, smiling bravely, realizing her evening was doomed.
