Facing The Unknowable With Heather McCalden
Heather McCalden
P. Eldridge speaks with Heather McCalden about her groundbreaking debut novel, The Observable Universe; discussing metaphors, grief, and how words make the world more observable.
INTERVIEW BY P. ELDRIDGE
PHOTO SUPPLIED BY HEATHER MCCALDEN
When The Observable Universe came through my letterbox slat, I stuffed it into a backpack to take with me across three continents. I only had space for a few books, my luggage was limited, but I was intrigued. It has since become my favourite read for its style, authenticity, and harrowing reflections on McCalden’s personal journey of loss and grief after her parents succumbed to AIDS when she was a child. It weaves together a deeply personal narrative with a broader examination of the AIDS epidemic at the intersection of the rise of the internet, exploring the unique parallels between these two powerful forces, the seismic shifts of which are still felt today. To have traced them so delicately, layering in a personal journey of monumental proportions, is nothing short of amazing. Through a unique blend of memoir, history, and cultural commentary, McCalden creates a moving and thought-provoking exploration of life, loss, and the search for meaning in a hyperconnected world.
P. Eldridge: I wanted to say, The Observable Universe is incredible. Is this the first book you’ve written?
Heather McCalden: Thank you so much for saying this. It is indeed my first book.
As a way of introducing yourself to our readers, I’m really interested to hear how your photography practice prepared you for writing this book? Is it a discipline you felt you were able to leverage from when approaching the writing process?
Photography is an incredibly fascinating medium in that its language – pictures – is that of the mind: we think and feel ostensibly through images, so photography is like this incredible shortcut into more visceral layers of consciousness, the ones that ripple underneath words… I also studied film theory before getting my MA in Photography, and I was profoundly shaped by the Kuleshov effect which essentially describes your mind as a montage: if you show a viewer one image, and then chase it up with a completely unrelated image, the viewer will automatically fabricate a narrative link between them. Wikipedia describes it as, “a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.” When I was studying, I was absolutely spellbound by this idea. It seemed to open a portal between art and my brain, and it made me wonder what other invisible, cognitive reflexes might be brought to the surface through art.
Leveraging this knowledge into a writing practice just naturally happened. I write in fragments, which is comparable to taking photographs, and the construction of The Observable Universe is an expression of the Kuleshov effect in writing: it creates an emotional experience (or meaning) through the juxtaposition of fragments.
The Kuleshov effect is so interesting, especially as it delves into ideas of the amorphous, how a viewer creates an interpretation of things entirely based on the situational context. I wonder if you have an idea of the context you'd like people to read this book from?
An open-minded one, that’s really all I ask – and, well, a human one too. This isn’t a text to consume, it’s a text to engage with.
The central metaphor of the book is about virality between HIV and the internet. Can you tell me how you began researching and subsequently connecting the two? What drew you to telling this story through an inquisition on metaphors?
Wow, I love the phrase, “an inquisition of metaphors,” so beautifully put!
I think what drew me to telling this story this way is that our understanding of the world is derived through metaphor, so if I want to write something resonant with this truth, then I must employ metaphors to support the perspective.
I’m very into uniting content and form to deepen/solidify whatever point I’m trying to make.
The connection between HIV and the internet came into sharp focus while reading an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books called “The Viral Imagination.” In it, Elizabeth Winkler writes, “we talk about virality not just because the world is interconnected or overpopulated; we talk about it — or, at least, we first talked about it — because of HIV.” This struck me like a lightning bolt. I began to plot out, on two separate timelines, events in the history of HIV, and events in the history of the internet, to find interesting overlaps. After this was completed, I could see when particular situations or advents would have erupted in the public psyche, triggering an inadvertent linkage of virus/illness/plague to the growing ubiquity of tech.
The book grapples with how we live, after loss in the age of the internet, and draws upon your search for answers about your father. You hire a private investigator and so I wanted to ask you: how does grief mutate when the control of information, and how you receive that information, is found and relayed to you by someone external from the emotional experience?
The main thing is, you think your grief will mutate if you buffer yourself against it through intermediaries, but it’s not the grief that ultimately shifts, it’s you. We mutate when we receive information, wherever it’s from accommodating it, fighting it, processing it… but grief, the emotional experience of loss, is not something that is enhanced or lessened by the acquisition of information. No matter what, it hurts just the same, and it’s up to us to evolve to face it.
Grief is a Virus is my favourite vignette, you write that “grief has no metaphor. To give it one or a hundred does nothing but compromise it, or transmute it into a lesser form. Viewing grief through the lens of something else is a way of actually not seeing it, of rendering aspects of it invisible, which is to say: you are cheating.” There’s a few questions that come to mind when reading that passage, the first being: do you feel the expression of grief in the book is compromised by presenting it in the container of a larger metaphor?
Yes… and no. Grief requires expression, but I don’t believe that the tools to truly communicate its scope exist, which is part of why it is so difficult to process. Language only gets us so far in conveying the totality of the experience; art similarly is limited. Our only recourse then is to syphon grief through one or more of these forms and hope that enough of the raw emotion gets translated and communicated. But this syphoning necessarily causes compromise as the raw emotion is transformed into something… other. In terms of the book, it’s a bit of a catch-22 situation: the grief is compromised under a larger metaphor, but it’s the only way it can exist outside of my own heart.
So beautiful and kind of harrowing. There is the thought that grief, melancholia, is felt most within the unconscious; meaning that you can feel the pain but be at a loss on where it is coming from. Do you think the way you structure writing helps you unearth the unconscious self to the page?
I definitely think unconventional structures in narrative forms (books, films, etc.), unearth something. I don’t know if it is the unconscious self, or something else, but the act of grappling with an unfamiliar structure throws a monkey wrench into our habitual mental processing, and through this tension, an aspect of self emerges that is typically under the radar. It can feel very vulnerable, but also exhilarating.
My second question in relation to the quote is: does this book, and writing this book, fully reconcile the grief you feel, or what aspects do you think still remain invisible that mightn’t necessarily be able to be expressed through writing?
I don’t think anything can fully reconcile the grief I feel, but words help.
A lot of my experience still remains opaque to me, however the beauty of having the book in the world is that when I hear the reader response to it, I’m able to see new things in myself that were previously invisible – felt but, somehow unseeable.
Were there certain books that were important to you, that you drew inspiration from, when writing?
So many! Here is a brief list:
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
Playback by Raymond Chandler
The White Album by Joan Didion
The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
Nocilla Dream by Agustín Fernández Mallo
A Visit from The Good Squad by Jennifer Egan
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso
Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion
Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures by Mary Ruefle
You also write, “Words are how we know something happened. We say what we saw and the experience appears. It becomes observable.” What do you think has become most observable to you on the other side of the book's release?
I’m definitely still trying to get my head around this one! Mostly it’s just become more apparent to me how much courage is required to live. It doesn’t matter if you have everything or nothing, life is so infinitely complicated in scope of its brutality and beauty, facing it daily requires a strength of heart almost beyond comprehension. I can’t quite explain how the book has made this more visible to me, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about, almost obsessively, since the book’s release.
A large facet of the book is about looking toward what you don’t know. How is it you face the unknowable? I ask because there does exist this sense of vacancy in the book in the way it feels like an attempt to formulate questions without distinct answers.
Wow. What a question. How do I face the unknowable? Like a fool, I guess, or a hermit. In the case of the fool, I let curiosity lead me, and sometimes that results in going off a cliff. In the case of the hermit, I tread slowly into the dark – not because I actively want to go off road, but because I have to – because nothing I see in life makes sense, so I have to search for something that does, and often those things exist in overlooked places, or in the dark.
You’re right that the book doesn’t give distinct answers, but that’s because I don’t presume life (and death) have distinct answers – and if they did, there are other writers much more talented and intelligent than myself to articulate them. I’m just a weirdo who sits at a desk for eight hours a day with a pen and caffeine. I do however think it’s funny when people say that the book “doesn’t come together” for them. It genuinely makes me laugh. I’m like: please tell me about your world, where things come together and people live happily ever after! It sounds fantastical.
Heather McCalden is a multidisciplinary artist working with text, image and movement. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art (2015) and has exhibited at Tanz Company Gervasi, Roulette Intermedium, Pierogi Gallery, National Sawdust, Zabludowicz Collection, Testbed 1, Flux Dubai and with Seattle Symphony Orchestra. In 2017 she attended the Emerging Writers Intensive at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity and returned in 2018 for their Summer Writers Residency. In January 2021, she participated in the Tin House Winter Workshop. The Observable Universe is her first book.
