What Makes You Do It Then?
I’ve just finished Amina Cain’s novel, Indelicacy. I’ve referenced another work by her, A Horse at Night: On Writing, here. It came out within a year of my Everything Affects Everyone and this wasn’t the ideal time to release a novel into the world. I waited to read it though, because I knew I’d love it and I wanted to come to it in the proper state.
The main character is a woman who cleans in an art museum until she marries her husband and becomes more posh. She’s always wanted to write and this enables her to do this. As well, she has her own maid, her own people to cook and clean for her.
A few quotations:
“I’m writing about myself looking at paintings.” I told her. “And Sometimes at plants.”
”Is there an audience for that?”
”Im sure there is not.”
”What makes you do it, then?”
”My soul,” I said boldly. I didn’t care how it sounded.
“I am stalking my own soul.”
“I wanted to write about paintings, but I wasn’t seen as someone who could say something interesting about art. I wasn’t seen as someone who could say anything at all and then publish it. When I went with my husband to the museum, I felt I should be cleaning the place.”
“I have benefited from a woman who never stops working, walking back from the factory in the morning and the night.”
I feel a kindred spirit reading Indelicacy. You can’t help but imagine it was inspired by Lispector, Duras, and a lot of the same works I’m also inspired by. But maybe we’re all, a lot of us who are interested in so-called poetic or experimental or non-mainstream fictions (there is no good trying to put a label on these writings….Lispector said it best and it’s the epigraph to my book The Flower Can Always be Changing (which is itself a line from Woolf)…. “Genre no longer interests me. What interests me is mystery”) are influenced by the same things. We’ve all read Lispector and Cixous and Duras and Woolf. We’ve read Anne Carson and Fleur Jaggy and Kate Zambreno and Elisa Gabbert and C.D. Wright and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Anne Boyer and Rachel Blau Duplessis and Moyra Davey and Elizabeth Smart and Kristjana Gunnars and Toni Morrison and Jean Rhys and Mary Ruefle and Nicole Brossard.
The thing about writing and being influenced and living in this world and trying to get some of its weirdness down, is that we’re going to be coming at it from both similar and dissimilar angles from those attempting same. We all get to do it in our own way. And if you’re trying to get it down in your own way, please know that there is room for all of it. Just pour it down out of your paint can and drip it onto the canvas like Jackson Pollock. Or you know, just throw the paint at the canvas or also try just small brushes and many details. But do keep pouring it out of yourself. That’s the best advice I have for right now. Don’t worry if anyone will read it or publish it. Just create your weirdness and keep creating more.
