Issue 2, March 2009
We Don't Know and They
Won't Tell Us | previous next story |
Shelley Jackson Interviews herself
SJ: Why did you agree to this interview?
SJ: For the usual reason, to find out what I have to say.
SJ: But how can you ask yourself questions without feeling meretricious and insincere? Doesn’t a question need a little distance from its answer to count as a question at all?
SJ: You’re calling yourself “you.” Doesn’t that imply you’re already at a distance from yourself, however small?
SJ: But who is “you”? For that matter, who am I?
SJ: You are the writer, of course.
SJ: A few introductory phrases, then, to set the scene: “Shelley Jackson greets me without ceremony. She is frowning at the screen of a somewhat battered—frowning slightly, is—lying in bed, knees—is frowning. Her hands rest on—tap nervously, asdf jkl; —a worn laptop propped up on her knees—”
SJ: That’s not me, I don’t have knees.
SJ: Well, it’s not me.
SJ: Then it must be her. The mouth.
SJ: Now there are three of us. The writer, the mouth, and—?
SJ: The hole.
SJ: Hole in what?
SJ: Hole in a bigger hole.
SJ: Describe the hole.
SJ: Darkness. Smells. Uncomfortable furniture. I say furniture, it’s not furniture, I say furniture so you’ll understand how I can feel it, almost feel it, a clutter of shapes in the gloom, some hard and grooved, some fuzzy, some like buttons forced deep into upholstery, some like formless squishy masses. Through all this, something moving, rising, verging—
SJ: And outside the hole?
SJ: Like I said, a bigger hole. But that’s your territory, you describe it.
SJ: This hole is tilted at an angle, like a satellite dish, though it’s shaped more like a goldfish bowl, with a mouth considerably smaller than its diameter at the widest point. Its smooth interior walls are suffused with a dim light in colors corresponding to what lies outside the opening, though muddier, but you, the hole punched in the very bottom of the bowl, are completely dark. You are in fact the absence of an appearance, though you can be made out, as a flaw in the bowl. Just as the bowl itself appears as a flaw in what lies outside the bowl.
SJ: Which is what?
SJ: Endless reaches of dun-colored sand, thorn bushes, hot little lizards.
SJ: Liar. Do you even know what lies outside the bowl? Isn’t that her business? Why don’t you get on with yours: interviewing me. Ask, “Can you describe your writing technique?”
SJ: Can you describe your writing technique?
SJ: Extrusion. I extrude words from my hole. No, too fecal, it’s more gaseous, call it emission, I emit words, you name them, she types them up.
SJ: What is a word before it has a name?
SJ: Pong of a dog’s feet. Taste of snow. Fringes and bumps. Something under your fingernail. Something twitching. The idea of stripes.
SJ: Where do these nameless words come from?
SJ: I don’t know. They drift up. From under the furniture, like dust bunnies. Maybe the furniture emits them. No, it’s me, it’s involuntary, peristaltic, I suck them up, from where I don’t know, somewhere behind me.
SJ: Doesn’t that imply there’s something deeper than your hole? And someone down there, speaking?
SJ: Something, yes. Someone? I don’t know. Whatever it is doesn’t have a face. I’m its face, in so far as a hole can be called a face. It doesn’t have a voice, I’m its voice, in so far as emissions can be called speech. Just as you’re my voice, really, giving names to what I mumble. Watching my hole like an ice fisherman, naming the words as they bob up, tossing some back, the broken ones, the ones you don’t recognize, the ones that come up while you’re busy with the ones you do. Fitting them together. How do you do it?
SJ: Do what?
SJ: Make sense.
SJ: Let me get this straight. I’m squatting over the hole?
SJ: With a sharpened stick and a net, no, you’re right, that’s ridiculous...
SJ: And the words come up like fish—only they’re not quite words, they’re not-yet words, they’re—?
SJ: Things.
SJ: Things?
SJ: It’s you who make them into words, or choose the words that seem to match them best. You say the words, you don’t say them out loud, not with your physical mouth, her mouth, you say them to me, back to me, like a mouth speaking to its throat, and I indicate, somehow, not in words, yes or no or maybe I don’t care; I seem to see the words, I who am a throat, it’s a metaphor, I might as well be the pupil of an eye, but a hole in any case, a sensate hole, anyway the words are formed by you, somehow, and I see them and approve, or not, but see them, and this changes what arises next in me. It is like reading, like reading what you are writing at the same time as you write it, and being a little surprised, not much, just enough to stimulate thought, just enough to prompt the next word, itself a surprise, something of a surprise, a surprise you were waiting for.
SJ: If you can see words, what do you see?
SJ: If the word designates something visible, a wildebeest for instance, then I do picture a wildebeest, approximately: hunch, wild tufts of hair, tapering haunches, long bony legs, hooves, stripes somewhere, not many, this is not a zebra, it’s uglier, it’s ungainly, heavy around the neck and chest, scrawny in back. But more interestingly, I see the word “wildebeest” too—and I don’t mean the shapes of letters floating in the air, although I see that too sometimes—but an object in its own right. Sometimes it looks completely different than what the word means. “Wildebeest,” though, looks a lot like what it means, with its mismatched halves, its horned W, the snap of st like the sharp edge of a hoof.
SJ: So writing is really a visual art. This must have something to do with your feeling that art and literature are related. Though there is a difference between seeing the pictures words make and making pictures.
SJ: Words don’t “make” pictures. It’s the words themselves I see, and they’re not pictures, but three-dimensional objects. So writing is a little like designing a sculpture garden or a very peculiar building. And reading is like walking through one.
SJ: Are some objects more interesting or beautiful to you than others? If you could literally speak objects, like those enchanted maidens who spit up toads or rubies, what would you say?
SJ: If I could say an object, I would say something not ordinarily detachable from some more integral object, like an elbow. Or something that didn’t exist in its own right, like a ripple with no pond, or the reflection in that pond of a swan, minus both pond and swan. I might say the pattern of a knit scarf, but without the yarn, although maybe, then, coincidentally, I would say some yarn, yards and yards of it, yellow, a little scratchy, passing it between my pursed lips until it raised a little blister there. I would say something that remembered too well where it came from, like a smell, or a short wiry hair. I would say something that would alter in passing through me, like butter, or ice, or that altered me in passing, like a knife, a flame, or my own soul. Maybe I’d say something bigger than my head, like a bicycle, and then get on it and ride. I’d like to say something that was part of me and still keep it, or something I was part of, like the landscape in which I stood, saying these things. Something alighting temporarily on something else would be worth saying, or something from which something else was escaping in the form of a vapor. Maybe I’d say something in disguise, foam painted to resemble a rock, a stuffed vole posed in a miniature landscape impersonating a very small polar bear. Eventually I would say a piece of paper on which I had written what I did not want to say out loud.
SJ: You’ve described how words look, how they feel, even smell, but you haven’t said anything about how they sound. Isn’t that a little strange? Some people would say that words are made of sound.
SJ: For years I had a problem with sound. I saw and felt the words clearly enough but couldn’t say them. A word didn’t seem like anything one could say. Can you “say” a thumbtack, a lump of mud? Real speech, what other people spoke, seemed like almost pure meaning—no more physical than a breath. To speak a word once it was formed—all bulky, buckled, fringed—one would have to melt it down first, into its meaning. Which would mean swallowing it back into me, into this hole. Then somehow not forming it again, but just intimating it, and allowing this intimation to go straight to the mouth, instead of lingering in this holding space, in you. You are really the problem, you were always the problem.
SJ: Later I became the solution.
SJ: You became the solution to a problem that didn’t exist before you.
SJ: Still, we should talk about how I became the solution.
SJ: First let’s talk about how you became the problem. It started when I became aware that I existed for other people. (Specifically, other kids—my parents weren’t exactly people to me yet, they were more like internal organs.) Until then, my substance seemed to convert itself into words without interruption or alienation, like a fructifying plant. I was and I was words. I didn’t think about words any more than I thought about my hands or feet. But when other kids started to notice me, I noticed myself, and I made a discovery: I could make my words into objects for myself and make sure I approved before I said them. That was when a space opened up between my words and my mouth, and speech became a problem for me.
SJ: You developed a speech impediment?
SJ: It was more like a self impediment. My mouth worked, in theory. Her mouth, I should say—I didn’t have a mouth, but someone had a mouth, someone who had previously spoken freely in response to questions asked me. They were my answers, but the mouth had delivered them, it seemed willing to take my word for it. But not any longer.
SJ: You had answers but couldn’t move your mouth?
SJ: I did not even have answers anymore. Answers seemed to require a mouth and a mouth required speech. To speak you must be a speaker. To be a speaker you must speak. Before speech, there is no speaker; without a speaker, no speech; each is the condition of possibility of the other and yet they can only happen simultaneously. So how can you get from the moment before you speak to speech? The minute I did it, it would become, retroactively, possible, but until then, it was unthinkable.
SJ: You’re speaking now.
SJ: Actually, I’m reading aloud.
SJ: Can you explain that?
SJ: When I stopped speaking, I started writing. It was almost as though the blockage here forced an opening there. I wrote poems, stories, a journal. I used to wish I had no tongue, just a slate hung around my neck and a piece of chalk to write with. But with time I got fast enough that I learned to write in my head and read off what it said there. In this way, I got my slate. And, so in the end, by the most ludicrously contrived means, I made my way back to where I was in the beginning.
SJ: What does any of this have to do with writing?
SJ: Let me ask you a question. What does it take to interview yourself?
SJ: Vanity?
SJ: Not necessarily.
SJ: Honesty?
SJ: Not necessarily.
SJ: Some capacity for introspection?
SJ: That’s not the most important thing.
SJ: What is?
SJ: More than one voice. Next question: What is a writer?
SJ: Go ahead, tell me...
SJ: A writer is someone who thinks she can interview herself.
SJ: Why did you agree to this interview?
SJ: For the usual reason, to find out what I have to say.
SJ: But how can you ask yourself questions without feeling meretricious and insincere? Doesn’t a question need a little distance from its answer to count as a question at all?
SJ: You’re calling yourself “you.” Doesn’t that imply you’re already at a distance from yourself, however small?
SJ: But who is “you”? For that matter, who am I?
SJ: You are the writer, of course.
SJ: A few introductory phrases, then, to set the scene: “Shelley Jackson greets me without ceremony. She is frowning at the screen of a somewhat battered—frowning slightly, is—lying in bed, knees—is frowning. Her hands rest on—tap nervously, asdf jkl; —a worn laptop propped up on her knees—”
SJ: That’s not me, I don’t have knees.
SJ: Well, it’s not me.
SJ: Then it must be her. The mouth.
SJ: Now there are three of us. The writer, the mouth, and—?
SJ: The hole.
SJ: Hole in what?
SJ: Hole in a bigger hole.
SJ: Describe the hole.
SJ: Darkness. Smells. Uncomfortable furniture. I say furniture, it’s not furniture, I say furniture so you’ll understand how I can feel it, almost feel it, a clutter of shapes in the gloom, some hard and grooved, some fuzzy, some like buttons forced deep into upholstery, some like formless squishy masses. Through all this, something moving, rising, verging—
SJ: And outside the hole?
SJ: Like I said, a bigger hole. But that’s your territory, you describe it.
SJ: This hole is tilted at an angle, like a satellite dish, though it’s shaped more like a goldfish bowl, with a mouth considerably smaller than its diameter at the widest point. Its smooth interior walls are suffused with a dim light in colors corresponding to what lies outside the opening, though muddier, but you, the hole punched in the very bottom of the bowl, are completely dark. You are in fact the absence of an appearance, though you can be made out, as a flaw in the bowl. Just as the bowl itself appears as a flaw in what lies outside the bowl.
SJ: Which is what?
SJ: Endless reaches of dun-colored sand, thorn bushes, hot little lizards.
SJ: Liar. Do you even know what lies outside the bowl? Isn’t that her business? Why don’t you get on with yours: interviewing me. Ask, “Can you describe your writing technique?”
SJ: Can you describe your writing technique?
SJ: Extrusion. I extrude words from my hole. No, too fecal, it’s more gaseous, call it emission, I emit words, you name them, she types them up.
SJ: What is a word before it has a name?
SJ: Pong of a dog’s feet. Taste of snow. Fringes and bumps. Something under your fingernail. Something twitching. The idea of stripes.
SJ: Where do these nameless words come from?
SJ: I don’t know. They drift up. From under the furniture, like dust bunnies. Maybe the furniture emits them. No, it’s me, it’s involuntary, peristaltic, I suck them up, from where I don’t know, somewhere behind me.
SJ: Doesn’t that imply there’s something deeper than your hole? And someone down there, speaking?
SJ: Something, yes. Someone? I don’t know. Whatever it is doesn’t have a face. I’m its face, in so far as a hole can be called a face. It doesn’t have a voice, I’m its voice, in so far as emissions can be called speech. Just as you’re my voice, really, giving names to what I mumble. Watching my hole like an ice fisherman, naming the words as they bob up, tossing some back, the broken ones, the ones you don’t recognize, the ones that come up while you’re busy with the ones you do. Fitting them together. How do you do it?
SJ: Do what?
SJ: Make sense.
SJ: Let me get this straight. I’m squatting over the hole?
SJ: With a sharpened stick and a net, no, you’re right, that’s ridiculous...
SJ: And the words come up like fish—only they’re not quite words, they’re not-yet words, they’re—?
SJ: Things.
SJ: Things?
SJ: It’s you who make them into words, or choose the words that seem to match them best. You say the words, you don’t say them out loud, not with your physical mouth, her mouth, you say them to me, back to me, like a mouth speaking to its throat, and I indicate, somehow, not in words, yes or no or maybe I don’t care; I seem to see the words, I who am a throat, it’s a metaphor, I might as well be the pupil of an eye, but a hole in any case, a sensate hole, anyway the words are formed by you, somehow, and I see them and approve, or not, but see them, and this changes what arises next in me. It is like reading, like reading what you are writing at the same time as you write it, and being a little surprised, not much, just enough to stimulate thought, just enough to prompt the next word, itself a surprise, something of a surprise, a surprise you were waiting for.
SJ: If you can see words, what do you see?
SJ: If the word designates something visible, a wildebeest for instance, then I do picture a wildebeest, approximately: hunch, wild tufts of hair, tapering haunches, long bony legs, hooves, stripes somewhere, not many, this is not a zebra, it’s uglier, it’s ungainly, heavy around the neck and chest, scrawny in back. But more interestingly, I see the word “wildebeest” too—and I don’t mean the shapes of letters floating in the air, although I see that too sometimes—but an object in its own right. Sometimes it looks completely different than what the word means. “Wildebeest,” though, looks a lot like what it means, with its mismatched halves, its horned W, the snap of st like the sharp edge of a hoof.
SJ: So writing is really a visual art. This must have something to do with your feeling that art and literature are related. Though there is a difference between seeing the pictures words make and making pictures.
SJ: Words don’t “make” pictures. It’s the words themselves I see, and they’re not pictures, but three-dimensional objects. So writing is a little like designing a sculpture garden or a very peculiar building. And reading is like walking through one.
SJ: Are some objects more interesting or beautiful to you than others? If you could literally speak objects, like those enchanted maidens who spit up toads or rubies, what would you say?
SJ: If I could say an object, I would say something not ordinarily detachable from some more integral object, like an elbow. Or something that didn’t exist in its own right, like a ripple with no pond, or the reflection in that pond of a swan, minus both pond and swan. I might say the pattern of a knit scarf, but without the yarn, although maybe, then, coincidentally, I would say some yarn, yards and yards of it, yellow, a little scratchy, passing it between my pursed lips until it raised a little blister there. I would say something that remembered too well where it came from, like a smell, or a short wiry hair. I would say something that would alter in passing through me, like butter, or ice, or that altered me in passing, like a knife, a flame, or my own soul. Maybe I’d say something bigger than my head, like a bicycle, and then get on it and ride. I’d like to say something that was part of me and still keep it, or something I was part of, like the landscape in which I stood, saying these things. Something alighting temporarily on something else would be worth saying, or something from which something else was escaping in the form of a vapor. Maybe I’d say something in disguise, foam painted to resemble a rock, a stuffed vole posed in a miniature landscape impersonating a very small polar bear. Eventually I would say a piece of paper on which I had written what I did not want to say out loud.
SJ: You’ve described how words look, how they feel, even smell, but you haven’t said anything about how they sound. Isn’t that a little strange? Some people would say that words are made of sound.
SJ: For years I had a problem with sound. I saw and felt the words clearly enough but couldn’t say them. A word didn’t seem like anything one could say. Can you “say” a thumbtack, a lump of mud? Real speech, what other people spoke, seemed like almost pure meaning—no more physical than a breath. To speak a word once it was formed—all bulky, buckled, fringed—one would have to melt it down first, into its meaning. Which would mean swallowing it back into me, into this hole. Then somehow not forming it again, but just intimating it, and allowing this intimation to go straight to the mouth, instead of lingering in this holding space, in you. You are really the problem, you were always the problem.
SJ: Later I became the solution.
SJ: You became the solution to a problem that didn’t exist before you.
SJ: Still, we should talk about how I became the solution.
SJ: First let’s talk about how you became the problem. It started when I became aware that I existed for other people. (Specifically, other kids—my parents weren’t exactly people to me yet, they were more like internal organs.) Until then, my substance seemed to convert itself into words without interruption or alienation, like a fructifying plant. I was and I was words. I didn’t think about words any more than I thought about my hands or feet. But when other kids started to notice me, I noticed myself, and I made a discovery: I could make my words into objects for myself and make sure I approved before I said them. That was when a space opened up between my words and my mouth, and speech became a problem for me.
SJ: You developed a speech impediment?
SJ: It was more like a self impediment. My mouth worked, in theory. Her mouth, I should say—I didn’t have a mouth, but someone had a mouth, someone who had previously spoken freely in response to questions asked me. They were my answers, but the mouth had delivered them, it seemed willing to take my word for it. But not any longer.
SJ: You had answers but couldn’t move your mouth?
SJ: I did not even have answers anymore. Answers seemed to require a mouth and a mouth required speech. To speak you must be a speaker. To be a speaker you must speak. Before speech, there is no speaker; without a speaker, no speech; each is the condition of possibility of the other and yet they can only happen simultaneously. So how can you get from the moment before you speak to speech? The minute I did it, it would become, retroactively, possible, but until then, it was unthinkable.
SJ: You’re speaking now.
SJ: Actually, I’m reading aloud.
SJ: Can you explain that?
SJ: When I stopped speaking, I started writing. It was almost as though the blockage here forced an opening there. I wrote poems, stories, a journal. I used to wish I had no tongue, just a slate hung around my neck and a piece of chalk to write with. But with time I got fast enough that I learned to write in my head and read off what it said there. In this way, I got my slate. And, so in the end, by the most ludicrously contrived means, I made my way back to where I was in the beginning.
SJ: What does any of this have to do with writing?
SJ: Let me ask you a question. What does it take to interview yourself?
SJ: Vanity?
SJ: Not necessarily.
SJ: Honesty?
SJ: Not necessarily.
SJ: Some capacity for introspection?
SJ: That’s not the most important thing.
SJ: What is?
SJ: More than one voice. Next question: What is a writer?
SJ: Go ahead, tell me...
SJ: A writer is someone who thinks she can interview herself.
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