Reading Huckleberry Finn and Vanguardistas in Berkeley

Dears,

This is a much elaborated letter that I originally wrote in shorter form to another friend in France: The last few days have been spectacularly hot (by northern CA standards) and the carpet of my apartment is cut up by bright, sun-filled patches of heat. I don't know what is wrong with me, maybe it's the leftover pizza I've had for breakfast (and cheese not agreeing with my lactose-intolerant stomach), but these same days have left me closemouthed and shellshocked in Spanish class. My teacher pokes me ever so gently every hour or so, Juliana, ¿quieres decir algo, o Juliana, ¿tienes una pregunta? but I'm underwater somewhere, or under shimmering heat waves.

For homework, we had to write a poem in response to the poetry of visiting poet Arturo Dávila (the polyptotonic redundancy of poe-poe-poe-, I hope, you'll take as a sign of my groan of frustration when we were given this assignment; there is so much bad poetry, I think, because we are told to write poetry in this way—as homework, as an outlet, as leftovers and throwaways).

I'm not a poet, and I don't write poetry except maybe once every five years, but as you mentioned the things left out, the missed encounters and misunderstandings, and the detritus in your last email, I thought I'd share the piece I finally wrote—not as sobras y restos, but as something extra, superfluous, and spontaneous. I realize that many of these words are all near synonyms, but there’s a difference among the bits and pieces that slip out of our hands—some are simply throwaways, some continue to haunt us (like the Steve McQueen film you described), some we keep chasing. Too much of my writing, and the writing that I read, is a mere listing of things. The “list” is a great temptation—it gives the appearance of, if not encompassing everything, then the massive quantity of what more there is to list, if only the list could go on.

But the “list” is a lie; it captures all the wrong bits and pieces so that its abundance is the mire of trash. I want to be saved by something beyond this great listing of things—maybe by rhythm, by the drawing out of things, which is the slipperiness of figuration, by hunger for something not there rather than satisfaction of what is there (“donde hubo manzana/ solo queda un hambre;//donde hubo palabras/ (potros o toros/ sujetos) queda la severa/ forma del vacío” – João Cabral de Melo Neto):

“Tomo esta evanescencia y lubricidad de todos los objetos, que les deja deslizarsenos de las manos cuando los agrarramos más, a ser la parte más innoble de nuestra condición.” –Emerson

Respuesta a Naufragio

El sueño es una migaja triste
Que el pájaro pequeño comió
Y después se acostó en tierra
Con las garras arriba al cielo

La mañana no trae su canción
Y las alas no vuelan de nuevo
Pero nadie nota la omisión
Donde anidan los pensamientos

(The first line is taken from Dávila’s poem “Naufragio.”)

I finished reading yesterday Huckleberry Finn—someone (Jenn Liu) told me over the weekend that the huckleberry plant is renowned for being undomesticatable; it won't bear fruit if you try to cultivate it in the garden (and just now, a quick online search tells me that it has to do with elevation. Huckleberries grow wild at high elevation where deep snows insulate buds and shoots; but tend to freeze in the open coldness at lower elevations.) My first point of reference was Thoreau's huckleberries and their elusive and essential ambrosia, but of course! Huck Finn is the embodiment of undomesticatability.

I fell in love with Huck Finn as he went along his way down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (so much so that I hated the part where Tom Sawyer came in, or where anyone else took too much of a share in the dialogue). I loved his voice, his easy acceptance of everything, mum on all things disagreeable, and going at turning and thinking, turning and thinking. There are a few people whose voices I have fallen in love with—and they are people not quite from the South, but with a lump of the South in their throat so that they catch you unawares with slight drawls and infinitesimal caesuras. I am thinking of two people in particular—his has a velvety smoothness, hers a grainier catch. Huck’s voice goes in hops and skips, yet in the main, straightforwardly on, and it carries you forward so gently that you forget its relentless power to wash over and blandish things.

But mostly I felt for Huck’s lonesomeness—which is different from when he is lazying about with Jim, a "solid lonesomeness" "listening to the stillness" in the company of someone familiar. There is another lonesomeness deep in the droning insects, the rustling leaves, and the hum of a spinning wheel, when the buoyancy of Huck’s voice seems to falter and the suspense of the moment is something out of his hands. These are the times when we suddenly hear the frailty of our own voices, the slightness of its timbers and cords, and every knot and tie that holds it together is poised to unravel. It is when we have only our own voices to trust that we are most alone in the world.

At some point, I tired of the circles of discussion, platicando platicando, and I remembered suddenly that these words which I puzzled over and rearranged and loved were just words, that there was some gap between the words and the feeling. Maybe it has to do with the Girondo and his “Apuntes callejeros,” vanguardista to the hilt. Somewhere along the lines of experimental poetry, the words detached themselves from all reference and became literal puzzle pieces and ingots of steel. I said that the apuntes were observations scribbled en tranvía and trailed off in the form of ellipses, each estrofa un apunte that gets shorter and shorter until cut off. It was only later that I felt abandoned or my brain lulled while my stomach dealt with lactose, and I wondered what hole I'd dug myself into with all these words. (Only now do I understand why Girondo’s sombra throws itself into the spinning wheels; or as Huck says, “I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead.”)

Yesterday I took a nap during the hot afternoon slump and hoped that things would take a turn for the better. Phoebe and I bicycled down California, stopping at a farmer’s market down by Milvia where I picked up some peaches, to Monterey Market on Gilman where I picked up some nectarines and pluots. I bought some black mustard seeds from Lhasa Karnak because I’ve been dreaming about that upma and those green beans that I had at my sister’s in-law’s place. Today Lisa is visiting so we’ll pick up some cheese as a side and I’ll fry up the turbot sole, and the upma and green beans will have to wait until next week.

p.s. A response to Jerry: Strangely enough, I met Amitav Ghosh back in my college days when I took a class he taught on “archives” and read a mishmash of books that all touched upon archival materials but remained (in my poor bewildered undergraduate brain) intransigently disconnected from each other. But to return to what it is to “write history in the form of a novel”—I thought about this in Huckleberry Finn, which can be read as a nostalgic representation of life in the Mississippi Valley “forty to fifty years ago”—a history of the South, of slavery, and growing up.

It was difficult for me to reconcile that lulling effect of Huck’s narrative style with the cruelties and injustices that he encounters, and I think this is part of the conundrum that Twain’s notice at the beginning of the novel states: “Persons attempting to find a Motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a Moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a Plot in it will be shot.”

How can we be nostalgic about a South that was horrific, abusive, and yet honey-loving, and corn pone-filled? What sort of political commentary is Twain making about the violence (and artifice) that knits together the South with its feuds and brawls, loafing and humbugging? To say that this is no commentary and no moral lesson, and damned if I am nostalgic, is maybe one way to deal with the messiness and relentlessness of life—but only in retrospect.

It is at heart a deeply pragmatic way to shuffle through the debris of the past and into the care of providence, but it eschews a regular plan of action and offers no impetus for change in the present. To me, that is part of the stalemate in Burma—what oversight allows its people to be simply lulled over again and again and what foresight (or lonesomeness) will provide the moment of stillness to make the decision to “go to hell,” to risk all morals and principles, and all interest and welfare, for someone else’s freedom (as Huck does for Jim)?

p.p.s. Speaking of shipwrecks and freedom and being passed over, a story someone retold to me over the weekend about Vietnamese refugees: https://www.dw.kqed.org/tv/programs/archive/index.jsp?pgmid=17330&date=20090501