Gary Barwin's Imagining Imagining:Essays on Language, Identity and InfinityReviewed by Maria Meindl
What do the Zohar, Wayne Gretzky, NFTs and a deceased poodle have in common? You’ll find them all cavorting between the covers of Gary Barwin’s collection of essays, Imagining Imagining. To find out how they’re connected, or could be connected, you have to read the book.
It’s a series of reflections on the art and business of writing, on family, place, tradition, heritage, and most of all, language. As Barwin puts it, “I love writing even when I hate it,” and as a writer, he’s been around. His 2016 novel, Yiddish for Pirates, achieved what many consider the heady pinnacle of mainstream Canadian publishing, a spot on the shortlist of the Scotiabank Giller Prize (among other honours). But he’s taken part in many kinds of publishing. With his Serif of Nottingham Editions, he was on the ground floor of Toronto’s Small Press Book Fairs in the eighties, and he has continued to share his work in minuscule, small and large venues ever since. Thirty years of “writing strange books” led to mixed feelings when he made the Giller list: “I was quite depressed. Why? I let it get to me. … Part of me always wanted that kind of approval and affirmation … But when I got it finally, I didn’t like it. It seemed like it was saying that my worth as a person had to do with this success.” Okay, I did think – just for a moment – my heart bleeds for you, Gary, but he is in a unique position to say what should be said more often: small and micro-presses, like literary magazines, are not just important as starter-spaces. They don’t exist to create a pool of eager newbies from which mainstream publishers can cull a few “good” writers for “real” careers. All forms of writing and publishing are, for Barwin, “vital.” In a time of narrowness and scarcity in the arts, his celebration of creative publishing models (including getting words tattooed on the body) arrives as a balm. The collection includes the author’s particular spin on a “how-to” essay. Spoiler alert: there are no how-tos. There are tensions to be held, questions to be played with. He urges the writer to trust “your own language, your own particular place in the language.” Yet, “we also need to watch out for language’s ability to lull us, to beguile us, to trick us with its deftness, its beauty, its ability to construct plausible and believable world, worlds which may misrepresent or ignore.” For Barwin, writing is a rhizomatic process, in line with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s proposition that thoughts are connected like a root system. Echoing the duo’s concept of Plateaus, he suggests that writers should make like the bear who went over the mountain “to see what he could see.” They should find “the most interesting feature on the fictional landscape. That mountain over there? … So you head for it. When you get to the top, you do it again.” In a rhizomatic structure, any point could connect to any other. The approach is embedded rather than overseeing: “The writing knows more than you do.” Barwin weighs in on the popular topic of ancestry-exploration in his “Triaspora +1: The Sky on The Other Side of the World.” Tracing the migrations of his family from a Shtetl in Lithuania, to South Africa, thence to Northern Ireland and, finally, Canada, he contemplates heritage and homeland. Each place the family alights is riven with oppression and injustice (though only in the first case is it against his own family). As a privileged child, he was “insulated” from the sectarian violence of Ireland, yet on some level, insulation was impossible, and they ended up in Canada (where he’s insulated from another world of injustice). Ironically, given that his wife is a criminal lawyer, he has ended up raising his own family in Hamilton, Ontario, which they chose “for the crime.” He makes clear in this essay that he distinguishes Judaism from Zionism. In response to the Passover adage, “next year in Jerusalem,” he responds: “really?” “The tongue is not in exile,” he points out (though he now lives in a place where language was stolen from its original inhabitants). Home is, for Barwin, a “stew” of “cultural triangulations” and “proxy memories.” Heritage travels through language. The essay is an argument against the idealization of a promised land, yet this sentiment is balanced with the longing for a homeland. Despite the “not-stalgia” of wanting to avoid painful memories, he misses the culture of the Shtetl, and feels connected to it: “Its deep grammar informs your life.” Jews are not evangelical, but this book celebrates the Jewish mysticism, tradition and practice which are central to Barwin’s poetics. The opening essay, “Broken Light: The Alefbet and What’s Missing” shows how learning Hebrew shaped his relationship to language. Feeling awkward as a left-handed child learning to write English, he found himself at home in his ancestral tongue, which not only runs right-to-left on the page, it “seemed to preserve the motion of ink and brush, the motions of the scribe not writing so much as drawing the letters.” Knowing the deep history of Hebrew letters transforms them into visual poetry. Bet, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the first letter of the Torah, is closed on three sides and appears like a square bracket at the beginning of the text. “It means start here – it all starts here – then keep going left in the direction of reading. Be open to what is to follow. The shape of the letter is an aphorism, a parable.” Jewish mysticism involves the belief in a missing letter that will someday be revealed, “an inconceivable letter that makes an inconceivable sound … Its sound will make undreamed of words and worlds.” The letter will heal the universe, the “crack in everything.” Jewish tradition sees language as abstract and concrete, sign and symbol, word and world. Sound is included in the package. In “John Coltrane Was My Bar Mitzva Teacher,” Barwin evokes the sonic effect of men davening together, but not in unison: “the resulting texture was a complex weaving of voices, each individual part of an organic ever-changing community of voices. There was no regular rhythm and there were no chords: it was a braid of melodic simultaneities.” At the heart of the book are a few standout pieces that show Barwin at his mischievous, eloquent best, disrupting the essay form and holding meaning loosely. With the improvisor’s invitation embedded in its title, “Yes, and: The Ampersand, Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet” checks in with how this ancient typographical symbol is faring in the era of emojis. In its present incarnation, it’s a contraction of “and per se and” (read the book if you want to learn how that happened), but it even appears in graffiti in Pompeii. Barwin sees the ampersand as a picture: “It’s a miniature mother & child.” He reads it, as well. “It is time turning back on itself, but it also links one thing and another, a joining.” This essay is a tribute to the power of the microcosm: “We need to see the big picture but also examine these very small pictures, because, ultimately, they reflect ourselves. ‘&’ we need to continually ask ourselves, ‘&’?” All this invites the reader to do so much more than simply extract meaning from a text. “Language and a Half” contemplates the ineffable by bringing punctuation to the foreground, particularly (but not only) ellipses, “those no-see-um markers that represent what isn’t there […]” Barwin discourages readers and writers from accepting ineffability in silence. The missing referent may be inferred, guessed, invented. Calling upon Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics (“the imaginary solution to a real problem”), he encourages us to travel further into our relationship with a text in a series of “what ifs.” “What if we speak about what we cannot speak? If we write what we cannot write? If we remain where we let ourselves almost fall but catch ourselves? If we see how far language will take us.” “Three Sides to Everything” gives prepositions centre stage, contemplating their implicit metaphors. “In this essay I will. ‘In’ implies an inside and an outside, some kind of boundary. As if the essay were a Boston cream …” But the author points out (in what will be a comfort to many students), “[T]his essay hasn’t been written.” He opens the way to thinking by writing. The preposition “in” suggests a container, but there are many things you can do with a container. “Who I am is both inside and outside of my life. In my life. Around my life. Through my life. During. Despite. Because of. What, I wonder, is the apt preposition?” The essay contemplates yet-to-be filled spaces, yet there are also spaces created by loss, as years pass, life’s potential dwindles and parents and friends pass away. Their very absence has presence. Invoking Cocteau’s proposal that a book is a dictionary in disorder, Barwin comments: “The work is both the words that were used and the words that were not used.” My favourite essay in the collection is the lovely “Flying is just Falling with good PR: on writing.” It gestures playfully to logical progression with headings like, “Writing: A Theory,” while unleashing a series of questions which challenge tired habits of sense-making.
The impossibility of writing is like the impossibility of flight, yet both happen anyway. Birds are a mystery, conceptually. How do we know both an ostrich and a pigeon fit the category? We have to keep our minds wide open to understand.
These are exploded metaphors. Like the Aleph, they are open-ended, inviting readers to make their own connections, or at least, disrupt habitual ones.
If some writing is visceral, Imagining Imagining is vestibular, offering the kind of nervous system rush that happens in a funhouse. The riffs and puns and chains of associations are just disorienting enough to refresh the senses. This is writing as a means of discovery, a way of experiencing the world, and language never seeks to be a transparent lens. It’s the object of curiosity and playfulness, and delight. Maria Meindl is the author of a novel, The Work, and a memoir, Outside the Box, along with short stories and essays in many anthologies and literary magazines (including The Temz Review). In 2005, she founded the Draft Reading Series, offering a venue for emerging and established writers to share work-in-progress with a sympathetic audience. She teaches movement classes, and offers a series of public discussions called The Work: Straight Talk on Craft and Method, about the history of today’s wellness, fitness and performance-training techniques.
|