Writing is a Perfect Mouth
by Ted Simonds
+
I have been told a human should chew each mouthful of food between twenty and forty times before swallowing. When I chew, do I do it with the focus of a sharp-shooter, or do I let the bolus grow and linger? Am I efficient with this process, or do I care? It is enzymes in my mouth that are changing the it I’m chewing into something useful to my body, which is not quite me, or not me yet. Digestion is a powerful metaphor for learning. You have to be able to sit with the not-you until such a time that the not-you becomes a part of you. Some of it is absorbed, and some of it passes right through. How much agency do you have in this scene? Am I making any sense? I am trying to be deliberately slow, to chew for longer, and to notice more. Did you know the word ruminate means to chew for a long time. Like, chew with your teeth. I am trying to write from some generative form of rumination. This unsurprisingly leads to lots of material that is somewhere between unreadable and boring. There is little room for assertion or claim. In this mode there is lots of description, questioning, and speculation. From where I am, there is lots of exclamation and surprise. I am a friend to backtracking, diversion, wrong-footedness, tangent and losing a train of thought. I like the air inside the bubble-gum’s bubble and the vacancy in the sound of the chew.
But there are bites that sever, and bites that gnaw. I can bite my own tongue, catch the apple as it bobs, or bite the flower off the stem and keep it intact inside my mouth. Writing is a perfect mouth for thinking through, and the mouth a perfect setting for thought. Words pass through my mind but stay on the page. I can do it over and over again, picking up words, phrases, sentences and gists that I keep chewing over in my head. Attention is held still or quickly swallowed up in the rush of next things.
+
There is a print out of the poem ‘Ode’ by Jane Huffman on the table by my window. I put things down here when I am done with them, but want to keep them in my orbit. The table top is a little diorama. It is an avatar for what I am trying to say: it is a lab bench, a classroom, a mouth to chew in. Over a few weeks, objects which have acted as tools for other activities accumulate on the table top. A tape measure, a hammer, a candle, a comb, a screwdriver, an old photograph, a list of trees, a stone from a mountain far away. From the nucleus of this scene Jane Huffman says “My intuition rode around me in small and dizzying circles.” From inside my mind, Lauren Berlant says “One of the things […] writing has clarified for me as an intellectual is that I bring everything I know to the table when I’m engaging a problem.” Problems provoke the stimulus of our intuition which then magnetises everything we’ve ever learned to help us solve/sit-with/understand the problem that has arisen. Everybody has a different set of ‘everything’ that they bring with them when they encounter something new.
Berlant said “what we do in classrooms is all about trying to read something and make it resonant and make it a magnet for other kinds of thoughts.” There is a sticky substance between word and thought, between thought and world. There are orbits we are magnetised into thinking with. I have been compelled to put everything in my mouth and see how long I can keep it there for.
+
Sara Ahmed talks about tables a lot in Queer Phenomenology. The table, the piece of furniture you put objects on, more specifically, a writing desk, is what she’s talking about in a very literal way. She uses the image of the table to show what the “what” that we think “from” is – which she sees as being the writing table, or an “orientation device”. I love this thought, which is fairly new to me, but crystallises some disparate thoughts I’ve been having about “tools” and “instruments” we use to approach problems with. How does the use of a device (or tool) change the way we understand the world? What does the idea (or function) of a ladder, a barometer, a magnifying glass or a telescope do to the way we approach objects?
I was on the phone with Lotte and they talked about Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and tables. They tell me that a haircut has changed everything for them, which they say feels silly. I don’t think it’s silly at all. We think from positions that alter everything. Sara Ahmad writes:
I bring the table to ‘‘the front’’ of the writing in part to show how ‘‘what’’ we think ‘‘from’’ is an orientation device. By bringing what is ‘‘behind’’ to the front, we might queer phenomenology by creating a new angle, in part by reading for the angle of the writing, in the ‘‘what’’ that appears.
Lotte’s life is going to change because something that is foundational to them (the way they move through the world) is different now. I guess I am less interested in phenomenology than I am interested in “orientation devices”: the “what” we think “from”, and the how we think with.
I used to think that theories and approaches were reserved for academic use, but if that’s true how come I still carry a toolbox in my mind? Even when I’m not in front of a poem my teeth grind around in circular grazing motions. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick said that there is a “largely tacit theorising all people do in experiencing and trying to deal with their own and others’ affects.”
I’ve got finite tools in my box, only so much room in my mouth. There are human limits to what writing can do.
+
It is like running. When I run I can only carry a few things with me: my keys, my phone, a pair of headphones (which I wear), and maybe a tissue for my nose. I have a running belt made from a stretchy material that fits everything inside it. When I run my thoughts, like everything I’m carrying with me, are flat and rangy; or, are held close and shaken about. When I try to remember things exactly I can only summon whatever I have retained. In a devastating/encouraging moment, in an interview between Sheila Heti and Lauren Oyler in the Paris Review, Heti asks:
“One thing that distressed me in your collection was the sense that someone as obviously intellectual as you are nevertheless does not carry around in her head a library of references and quotes from decades of reading and remembering what she read. It seemed clear that many of your references came from Google Books searches or internet searches. It made me feel the relative shallowness of the contemporary mind that many of us share, compared to the intellectuals of the past who had a world of references inside them. Is this something you feel, or are bothered about in any way?”
Sheila Heti must know we all CTRL+F, she probably (definitely) also does it too. I don’t think it’s distressing. Being intellectual isn’t about what you can carry with you, but rather how you use whatever is available to you. It’s an attitude thing. Stay rapt, stay close, but mainly just stay with whatever it is you’ve got.
The larvae of the cased caddisfly protect their soft infant bodies in shell-like cases made of stones, leaves, grains of sand or grit held together by a gluey silk. Whatever is on the river bed has the potential to be glued together, worn and carried around for protection. In the early 1980s, the artist Hubert Duprat put caddisfly larvae into tanks with flakes of gold, diamonds and pearls and watched the small shrimpy bodies sew these fragments together into elaborate armour.
+
When I tell people that I write they tend to ask what I write about. I usually say “riding the bus” or “running”. This isn’t a lie, but it isn’t entirely true. The truth is that I work a job that mostly doesn’t care about my writing life. When you work a job, the time you have to do other things decreases. Duh! I take long bus rides to and from work that bisect the city. These are the only times when writing and reading are possible. The things I write down come from thinking that happens away from a desk, sat on a bus or running around. Every day I pass the same stops, but every day it’s different. Different people, different lights, different times. I am incapable of running the same route twice. James Schuyler said it better when he said, in the poem ‘Hymn to life’:
“The roses this June will be different roses / Even though you cut an armful and come in saying, "Here are the roses," / As though the same blooms had come back, white freaked with red / And heavily scented. Or a cut branch of pear blooms before its time, / "Forced." Time brings us into bloom and we wait, busy, but wait / For the unforced flow of words and intercourse and sleep and dreams / In which the past seems to portend a future which is just more / Daily life.”
The same things happen, but happen differently. My life, measured by thoughts, passes by in the “unforced flow” of life’s repeating patterns: in bus rides, in the strides of a long or short run, in the silent clench of my imaged or real jaw as I chew a meal or something I’ve just read. It is monotonous and it is generative. John Ashbery felt the same about Gertrude Stein when he said of her Stanzas of Meditation:
“There is certainly plenty of monotony [...], but it is the fertile kind, which generates excitement as water monotonously flowing over a dam generates electrical power.”
+
When I chew with the teeth of my mind, thinking becomes meditative. The chomp chomp chomp is the rhythm mimicked by feet plodding, buses stopping, or the day after day and year upon year of life. The poet David Antin talks about “the sentence” we begin to speak with our first word, and which we end with our last. The scale of his thought oscillates between the big and the small (a favourite train of thought for me). Life becomes truncated into one sentence; one sentence gets stretched out to the length of a life. There is a power then, or it is a force that matters, to think slowly. Life is the longest thing you’re ever going to experience. Stay with it.
This is all to say: I am slow. I am slow because I have no other option, because simple things are not simple, and because I want to savour this experience. Diane Seuss talks about a time in her life she “needed to push [her] courage out in front of [her] like a slug pushes slime out in front of it so it can move.” It was an important time, but it was hard, and like the slug it was slow. Lauren Berlant fesses up often with admissions of badness and slowness: “I am a bad writer […] I feel like I’m very slow compared to other people.”
When asked tough questions on “the future of left wing politics”, and how she would “end” the Vietnam War, the intellectuals Susan Sontag and Holly Woodlawn say (in separate interviews, respectively): “I can’t tell you. I cannot answer such a question. I don’t have sound bites. I’m sorry, I just don’t” (Sontag). Woodlawn, after a big pause full of “uh”s and “oo”s, some spinning around in her chair, a swig of beer from a can pulled out of the armoire drawer, says simply and with precision “a mathematician, I am not!”
There is a posture of honesty which is also flatness. (Note how it is women and queers who are firstly put in this position, but also have the wherewithal to resist it). The pose is basal. It is totalising. There is nothing in my bag to solve or explain this. I cannot attempt to explain or account for this. The pose is a reluctance to participate in the idea that thinking is easy, or that simple things are ever that simple. In an interview about her collection Frank sonnets, Diane Seuss is asked how it felt when she wrote one of the poems. She says “like I’d told the truth”.
+
If there is truth, and coherence we can express it through (I am under no illusion) let’s not pretend it is the same as thinking. I cobble together answers to every question I’m ever asked using whatever knowledge seems most easily to fit, out of what it is I have to hand. I can miss the mark, or recover ground, sometimes I am surprised. I feel weakest when I rely on the broader web of things I think I should know. I have no problem throwing up my “I don’t know” hands. Make of this what you will.
Lauren Berlant, pondering the question of how to write better, resolved to write a blog. Berlant understood this blog as a project in improving their writing in public. She/they said:
“I thought it probably is good ... it probably matters – although I didn't know if it would matter to anybody – to think that criticism could look different and that criticism could look engaged and fierce and meditative and magnetise so many different kinds of knowledge that we have in relation to enigmas that were finding very, very hard to clarify.”
Writing can clarify, as teeth grind hard stuff to palatable mush. My body measures itself against the lengths of new matter that could serve or sustain my broader project (being alive). Stay on it. Writing is the perfect mouth for carrying on like a thought propped up by a sentence that my tongue traces out on the back-side of my teeth while I am somewhere else.
(Caitríona de Búrca, Lauren Berlant, Jane Huffman, wooden table, Sara Ahmed, Lotte Crawford, haircuts, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, running, Sheila Heti and Lauren Oyler, Julius Eastman, cased caddis fly larvae, Hubert Duprat, the bus, running, James Schuyler, John Ashbery and Gertrude Stein, Kathleen Stewart, David Antin, Diane Seuss, Susan Sontag and Holly Woodlawn)
Ted Simonds is a librarian, editor and writer based in London. Their writing has appeared in anthologies from Pilot Press and in The Oxonian Review. He maintains an occasional mailing list called Come Clean: mailchi.mp/be762b0565f8/comeclean
