The College Hill Independent Vol. 40 Issue 7

HOLDING

SPACE

UNCERTAINTY

These are certainly peculiar times. Many of us are spending more hours of the day with ourselves than ever before. We are seeking out the books, the films, and the records that give us a little more space to sink into our pillows and breathe. We are searching for voices to distract us from the precarity of our health, of our homes, of the coming months. We are taking the time to copy lines into our journal, to read aloud the passages that move us, slowly and liberally.

One author that we find ourselves returning to during these days is Maggie Nelson. The author of nine books of nonfiction, poetry, and prose, Nelson combines unabashed personal testimony with philosophical inquiry to challenge all that she studies and experiences. She offers musings on non-traditional motherhood, identity, and family-making in her genre-bending memoir The Argonauts, weaving in feminist and queer theory, while her cult classic Bluets tells the story of pain, heartbreak, and pleasure in numbered segments through the lens of the color blue.

Nelson has also published several books contending with her aunt’s murder, as well as pieces of cultural, art, and literary criticism. Her unclassifiable writing awakens an insatiable part of our minds; she calls us to refuse limiting labels and instead embrace ambiguity.

We walk away with more questions than answers, yet somehow we have gained a newfound lucidity.

To read Nelson’s writing is to surrender the ultimatum of certainty. In a time where the future feels particularly nebulous, we are trying to exhale into our knotty thoughts instead of demanding a non-existent answer.

Nelson graciously took the time to answer a few questions from the College Hill Independent. Below are some of her reflections on remaining inquisitive, receiving criticism, and sitting with the uncertain state of our future.

FOR

BY Mia Patillo & Mara Dolan ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

contemporary writers. What do you think is the power and less so by publishing personal writing? How do and the future of the fragmented style? you strike a balance between turning the personal into wonderful, creative public work in a way that evades Nelson: Fragments are as old as the hills, which are those pressures? fragments of mountains. I used to teach a class called “The Art of the Fragment,” in which we discussed Nelson: Writing books makes use of a radically the difference between the fragment found and the different time frame than does social media. In writing fragment made, amongst other things, the ancient books, you typically write and edit and agonize over versus the modern fragment, the body in fragments what you want or need to say for months or years, and (fetishism), and more. I don’t think of it as a new thing, then, once you’ve decided, there’s yet another year however, nor can I imagine it as a “style.” I am inter- before it goes into print, after which point whatever ested in its long history as a compositional or phil- sting the revelations might have carried has been osophical principle, and its relation to material fact extinguished, assimilated, or outgrown. Social media (decomposition, phenomenology, and so on). doesn’t work like that, obviously. There are people who have quickly evolved to use the latter very brilliantly (or The Indy: Your writing has been described as “auto- now, many who have been born into it), and I admire theory” or “autofiction”—forms of autobiography that and enjoy their innovations. I’m just not one of them. do away with traditional elements of the novel such as plot and character development. Such terms describe The Indy: During these weeks of diminished social genres that are usually considered to be emerging in activity and an ambiguous future, what have you found this generation. We are wondering if you also view helps you sit with yourself in uncertainty? these genres as recently developed, or if you see them as following historical tradition that is overlooked or Nelson: Remembering, I guess, that while this is a underacknowledged? particularly dramatic and compressed time of uncertainty, it is also our ongoing and ever-present condition.

Nelson: I think I would tend toward the “historical We never know what's about to happen; everything is tradition that is being overlooked or underacknowl- impermanent, and impermanence is hard—extremely edged” reading of the situation, and add that there are hard—to bear. But struggling against it might be harder. many histories within “history.” I think a compelling case could be made—and I’ve heard Eileen Myles, for This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. one, make it—that there is a queer basis for a lot of what people are treating as new in this arena. But I’m not MIA PATTILLO B’20 and MARA DOLAN B’19.5 are super into flag-planting. I have more of a maximalist learning to lean into impermanence. view, like, why not read all philosophy, as Nietzsche suggested, as autobiography, and vice versa?

The Indy: Is there a piece of criticism you have received about your work that has stuck with you, and The Indy: Your writing is filled with questions and why? dialectics, with the open-ended and unanswered. At a political moment that feels like so many issues are Nelson: Most everything harsh people say about your viewed as black or white, like we must choose one side work, you’ve probably already thought of yourself, and or the other, what are ways in which you hold space for a hundred times. At some point you make peace with inquisitivity, eager curiosity, the “incomprehensible” who you are as a writer, and the fact that your work may or uncategorizable? be very important to some people and radioactive to others. That seems fine.

Maggie Nelson: Certainty leads to dead ends, so writing and thinking goes there to die. My challenge Oh—there is one thing—Bernadette Mayer once wrote is how to stay curious and uncertain while not letting on top of a poem of mine, “This looks like a poem, but the writing lapse into a kind of undecided muddle, I’m not sure it is.” I’ve been thinking about that for 20 which yields irritation. That usually involves working years. the performativity of opinion, rather than actually believing in it.

The Indy: In The Argonauts, you talk about the personal made public juxtaposed against your fear of The Indy: You were part of this wave of writers that social media, which you call the “the most rampant first leaned into the fragment as a style—particularly arena for such activity.” What are the temptations and in Bluets—which seems to be really popular now with pressures that you feel are presented by social media

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FEATURES

10 APR 2020