On composure
Sarah Cook
Sometimes, I
think about this haunting sentence, from “On Erasure,” by Mary Ruefle:
…life
is much, much more than is necessary, and much, much more than any of us can
bear, so we erase it or it erases us, we ourselves are an erasure of everything
we have forgotten or don't know or haven't experienced, and on our deathbed,
even that limited and erased "whole" becomes further diminished, if
you are lucky you will remember the one word water, all others having been
erased.
Ruefle says that
our lives are erasures because we cannot bear them in their entirety. I wonder
about the conflicted life of the poet: simultaneously erasing and writing,
erasing and writing, considering things she sometimes can’t bear to feel or
remember; writing as an attempt to document, and then writing as an attempt
purge.
Documenting and
purging: there is a schism between the inner and outer world: between my
private self and the one I make visible. And even this visible self is
ruptured: I find myself intellectually, artistically, even ethically drawn
toward & excited by the loss of composure—by the idea of refusing to
accommodate the world’s demand of public poise—but I remain practically,
viscerally scared of such a revelation. As a result, my motivation as a writer
has been to creatively transpose the body into language, to alter my
understanding of it via the expansion of words and, in doing so, (re)create my
relationship to the body. In other words, to think and theorize my way through
and around vulnerability, to walk closer toward it in words and then hope my
body will follow. But what does it mean to take risks in writing that aren’t
being taken in life? Where do I draw lines of responsibility and interest, of
theory and practice, of personhood and poethood?
Before I came to
articulate this motivation—before I’d even begun to recognize its preverbal
form—I went to grad school. There are probably a lot of complicated reasons why
I’ve erased almost all my memories from the composition theory course I took my
first semester, but of the few that remain, I think of one almost weekly: I
have no context leading up to this instance, nor any memory of what followed
the moment when a professor said, with a slow deliberateness that almost
revealed his southern drawl, “compose yourself.” Not to any one student in
particular so much as to the room, calling attention to what the command is
truly saying, compose yourself!, to
make yourself readable and sensible and, as Butler might say, culturally
intelligible. To be, especially if you are a woman, composed, as in emotionally contained.
He didn’t say it directly to me but he might as well have, and that’s the
first trick of language: to unlock a sense of self that previously wasn’t
there. Suddenly, I heard the danger underlying those two superficially harmless
words. And it is the loss of this composure, by which I mostly mean the appearance of composure—the revelation
of the messy and complicated and uncontainable female self—which underlies the
greatest form of risk I can imagine taking.
Hence the
rupture: between word and body. I feel embarrassed and melodramatic making such
statements, ones so clearly born of a privileged life, where risk has made few
appearances. But what if this is the consequence of having confused my writing life with my real lived experiences one too
many times? What does it even mean to associate risk with things like school, and poetry, and a kind of danger that
is mostly visual, that is even theoretical, that hinges on the in/visibility of
one’s most crafted and edited self? What do I mean when I say, “risk?” I tried
mapping it out:
- ·
potential
for public failure and/or mistakes
o
being
seen as out of one’s “league” or “wheelhouse”
o
being
seen as trying too hard or as overly ambitious
- ·
potential
for confusion—either looking confused or confusing others
- ·
“that’s
not something I would do” -- whatever that is
- ·
potential
for embarrassment and/or over-sharing
o
to
make oneself too accessible
o
to
make the invisible visible
§
to
lose control
o
to
inject emotion where it isn’t wanted
§
to
lose composure
- ·
potential
for discomfort
- ·
potential
for confrontation
There is no
space for my body in this list, and yet it all wraps tightly, every single
possibility, around my skin. Perhaps I say body
and I’m really just addressing the signified thing: not the organism
standing in front of you, but the whole and its parts envisioned in the clear
space of one’s reading mind. I can spill the word “body” all over the poem, include
it in every single title, without having invest(igat)ed a single bone, a single
strand of hair. And while some of the things listed above have to do with
gender or trying new things, all of them revolve around constructed notions of self
and success: how I present my
personhood to the outside world, how I make visible to you the things that will
validate my life as a good one. Composed in the ways I mean to be, and
unintelligible so long as I am in control of the mess—so long as it is
relegated mostly to the page.
In other words,
there are things we bear in our selves and there are things we bear in our
writing, and these are sometimes very different things and why, what does that
mean?
I don’t even
know if this essay is true. Or the difference between body and word: what I
think I am afraid of; what I claim to be doing,
in one medium or another. If the divide is not really just a blanket.
A true thing: Last
summer, I finished reading Maggie’s Nelson’s The Argonauts during the late hours of the night while sitting in a
crowded terminal in O’Hare. I was waiting for my repeatedly delayed flight home
after visiting my best friend in Lafayette, Indiana. The trip coincided with
her 30th birthday; we drank Polish vodka and rode horses with little
instruction. Why do I tell you this? Because I cannot unstitch the context of
my life from my writing and questioning and thinking. Perhaps writing is the
only space in which I have no ability to compartmentalize, where I can consider
anything so long as it is all at once, all in the same room. Where I can un-compose
and re-compose myself as language demands: where I might become suddenly brave
enough to enact the things I’m driven toward. Or, to choose to write about
myself as if my boundaries are clear: here is what I do, here is what I write.
I tell myself I
am writing to get closer to the body, but aren’t I just keeping it at bay?
Once, when I was
a young girl in middle school, I wanted to be
Gwen Stefani, and sometimes I remember the sense of it so acutely: how desire
can feel urgent and enthralling and inspiring and quite unrealistic; how it can
keep you, in secret inner ways, reaching forward toward a self comprised of all
the things. Who needs “poetry” or “theory” or “memoir,” categories of
definitive composure, when you can do them all at once? Who needs a cohesive sense
of style when you can wear a skirt on top
of your jeans!
Does the self
begin on the page, in word, and grow larger from there? Sometimes I feel like
I’ve taken the longest route possible to achieve a short thing. Sometimes I
feel like I’ve started a life backwards, relegating my achievements, my ideas,
my best selves to language. As if I need to know the right words first before anything
happens: as if words make up the vessel in which I’ll be caught. As if poetry
ever had anything to do with the soul.
When I’m
writing, I tell myself it is toward messiness and complexity. But I repeatedly
run head first into an inherent disposition toward composure, toward control,
engulfed in the fear of anything otherwise. Can fear be a habit? I tell myself that
I figure out important personal things in writing, but perhaps I am making it
all up, the words acting like a safe distance, like an arm’s reach I can keep
myself at always. Sometimes,
I’ll realize a mistake I’ve made in life, see something in the poem and
chastise myself for not having recognized it sooner elsewhere. But with any instance
of clarity, I’m never learning from my mistakes so much as finally catching up
with them, out of breath, making space for myself slowly over long stretches of
uneven time. Trying to
un-contain and re-contain my body through language and yet remaining consistently
frozen with my back against the wall, with my back against the page. A safe or
habitual or made-up response to the world’s pervasive demand that I compose
myself.
Sarah Cook is: a) some mountainous pictograph, b) a misguided cover letter, or c)
trying real hard, promise. She has work forthcoming in VIDA, and elsewhere.
