Lindsay Ahl: In your lectures that I’ve attended, there is usually a moment when the hair on the back of my neck rises, and my heart starts to beat more quickly. I feel goosebumps, fear, exaltation. I’m not even note-taking, I’m spellbound, inside some strange idea you’ve conjured. One of those ideas, a riff off Emerson’s, “to write the aura of the thing,” is related to another: being inside the space-time or outside the space-time, and how to enter, exit, or exist within Time. These are long lectures of yours, and anyone who is interested should find them. But could you tell us a little about those ideas of yours here?
Kevin McIlvoy: I hesitate to reflect on my teaching. I’m a learner-teacher who is obviously still learning the concepts, processes, and practices he teaches. I try to bring to any teaching occasion what my own efforts to write and my own efforts to respond to others’ works are exposing as the things I most need to learn. I consciously choose reading (poetry, fiction, nonfiction) that ranges really far beyond what is already familiar to me, and I feel luckiest when the reading at hand asks me to question all my accepted first assumptions about what I know and, importantly, about what I feel-know. I exorcise some of my shame about my limitations through staying in, through not running away from my ignorance but running headlong into it. When I teach poorly I have delusions of perfect clarity and command, and I feel safe. When I teach adequately I feel I have represented the uncertainties that invite wisdom (feeling your way deeply into the enigmas of what you know) and not merely knowledge (knowing with increasing certainty the engines of what you know). I am aware at this stage—a writer for forty-five years and a teacher for thirty—that my headlong-running ways always, always carry me further into inquiry about the habits of presence. There it is: I learn-teach only that one subject, the source of endless dynamic uncertainties. Life invites us to be more fully present to what is before us. The habits of presence that art provides invite us to be more alive in the surrounding darkness and light. So then, an example of my questionable method of instruction is my effort to learn-teach the habits of presence by rambling on about how a monochronic person (a person whose attention is almost exclusively fixed on the present moment) and a polychronic person (a person whose attention is more or less constantly shifting from the present to the past to the future) respond differently and similarly to the holiness of the everyday. My own fiction demands of me that I follow the character’s experiences of space-time rapidly re-forming and deforming; my own life has taught me a great deal about this—but, in the big picture, very little. The “holiness of the everyday” is a concept articulated in Robert Nozick’s The Examined Life; the terms “polychronic” and “monochronic” are used by Eva Hoffman in Time. Behind all of this is the persistent voice of Thomas Merton who wrote (in Echoing Silence) that the artist “seeks to recover an immediate, direct intuition: not so much an intuition which is rooted in and identified with his very experience: an intuition in which the existent knows existence, or ‘isness,’ while completely losing sight of itself as a ‘knowing subject.’” Acknowledging that I have only barely tracked the scope of what Hoffmann and Nozick offer and what Merton has offered me for forty years of reading him, I stand at the threshold of excitable and innocent perception, and I offer what I can. I have what George Santayana called “animal faith,” and I go with that. (Do I understand what Santayana really meant? Ha! Ah!)
Ahl: Can you go deeper into details of presence?
McIlvoy: By “presence” I mean the unhurried attentiveness that Emerson and Thoreau advised. There are many processes through which writers seek stories and seek to be found by stories. One that I believe in is the effort to consciously be in readiness for the “incarnate experience” that Anais Nin developed as her own artistic discipline. (She called it her “incendiary neurosis,” and she admired how D.H. Lawrence and other writers brought it to bear in their daily lives.) In the hours of the day—and not just the hours in front of a sheet of paper or at a keyboard—there is the opportunity for the writer to consciously open all possibilities for estranging and engaging sensation. In my own efforts to be present, I’m always reminded of how my education trained me to be alert to achieving comprehension (the sorting and identifying process) and less alert to prehension (the something-there sensation). In my particular path as a writer, my struggle is the effort to undo the notions of efficiency that ask me to concentrate on visual data at the exclusion of smell, taste, touch, sound. It takes longer to hear, to touch, to taste, to smell. Sensing—fully sensing—actually slows down thinking and it interferes with the acceleration of thought toward the “ah-ha” moment of adult recognition and away from the “ha-ah!” of childlike wonder. If you wish for the reader of your work to have a sense of completeness (the sense that the work is generous in its presentation of everything of use), you will, above all else, train yourself to comprehend. If you wish for the reader of your work—including your darkest and most overtly “adult” work—to regain the child inside, you will strive for the sense of childlike fullness (the sense that the work is generous in its presentation of everything that has no apparent use) in all aspects of the work. I hope I do not seem to be saying that one kind of work is more worthy than another. I admire the completeness of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Remains of the Day, and I admire the completeness of Raymond Carver’s book of poems, Where Water Comes Together With Other Water. I admire the fullness of Akira Yoshimura’s Shipwrecks, and I admire the fullness of C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining.
Ahl: Interesting. I’m supposed to be writing a review for Fanny Howe’s Second Childhood at this moment, and articulating something about my reading experience has been challenging. It’s much more about fullness then completeness, because the images and thoughts and ideas don’t cohere in any easily definable way. I’ve taught many books with fullness as their mode of being, and I’m always somewhat miffed at how resistant people can be to the experience. The less graspable an experience, the more disorienting it is, both in life and in reading, and people tend to avoid this. Unless they are specifically seeking it out, like Rimbaud.
McIlvoy: Yes, there is resistance in American literary culture to work that does not offer completeness. I believe it can be helpful for the writer—at the right moment during revision—to unhurriedly contemplate her/his particular work’s invitations to a resistant and receptive reader. For my own part, I try to picture a single reader instead of readers (plural). I try to stay open to the possibilities in the work that will generate resistance and not merely receptiveness. And, in order to avoid generalizing, I try to make no general rules for myself; I try to welcome these possibilities case by case—in the individual prose poem, story, novella, novel that is in draft before me. I believe it is easier to fail in the intuitive act (the body responding to and creating fullness) than in the indicative act (the mind reacting to and constructing completeness). (Sartre’s Imagination makes the distinctions between “intuitive act” and “indicative act,” and that’s what I’m trying to make use of here.) I try to be real honest with myself about each piece. Is the one reader resistant to this particular work of mine because I accomplished completeness but failed to commit to fullness? Is the reader receptive to this particular work of mine because I achieved fullness but failed to commit to completeness? In other words: is the failure all mine?
Ahl: Artists often create their own seeing, and create, to some extent, their own language. My experiences with meditation, structural integration, and ba gua, in particular, have led me to places where no language is necessary, and, in fact, a hindrance to awareness. But in my daily life, I often like to articulate my experience in order to affirm it, or understand it, or even, god forbid, “experience” it.
McIlvoy: Language sinning is so much more stirring than language avoiding sin. What is at risk for the writer whose sentences, without urgency, assert, “I understand now, and I will explain for you—and for me”? And what is at risk for the writer whose sentences urgently assert, “I need, I really need to understand, and I do not, and here is my wrecked effort for me—and for you”? We all come to certain skill-sets through different processes, as far as I can tell. Learning the outcomes of subtle particle-level choices is part of the rigor that life asks and that art demands. What is marvelous about long life and long practice in art is how the later years obliterate all the patterns of learning that have become familiar. For instance, many writers who have trained themselves to write great dialogue, only later come to feel that what is unsaid between two people matters more than what is said.
Ahl: What I haven’t ever heard you talk about, and maybe I just missed the times when you did, is music, sound, rhythm, which is a concern in your work, something you’re working out through the body and the intellect … it’s sometimes almost as inside itself as late Joyce … can you talk about your process for getting inside that sound play, sound-as-other?
McIlvoy: I’ve been formed by the oral storytelling that shaped me as a young person among so many natural storytelling aunts and uncles. Their stories, which veered wildly in many excursions, which created as many voids as bridges, which involved a high degree of self-delighting play, which moved impulsively but had qualities of shifting intention, which violated at all points their own source material, which crudely and skillfully ventriloquized other voices, which were unresponsive to censorship or self-censorship, which were unshapely more often than shapely, always offered more singing than saying. In the ways that these stories straddled order and chaos, they were “unconventional” and rewarding to my mind and body. In the ways that some of these stories committed fully to dreamlike chaos, they were definably “experimental,” rewarding almost exclusively to the sensations of my body, and challenging altogether my assumptions of “story.” In my answer to your other question, I offered my belief that art invites us to be more alive in the surrounding darkness and light. The oral stories that are my most significant teachers verge on being inarticulate, and they invite the listener to be more alive and wild in the surrounding darkness and light. When I read Julio Cortazar’s Cronopios and Famas or Russell Edson’s prose poems or Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. or James Schuyler’s or C.D. Wright’s poems I feel the works’ surrounding qualities not their directing qualities, and I know my park bench has been taken away and I have been placed in the wilderness. I really do value many kinds of fiction, including the fiction intent on saying something. When my own fiction says more than it sings, I really do not feel it is my own, and I am disappointed.
Ahl: A surrounding quality instead of a directing quality … so that the reader is inside the mood, ambience, and rhythm of the piece, all created by sound. Potent imagery could also create a surrounding quality. I think of how Joyce didn’t want to create kinetic art, art which “moves” the reader—for the same reason—that’s a direction. The goal was to fully inhabit the new world. It is in that inhabiting, that you become new.
McIlvoy: The surrounding quality that I’m trying to describe has a great deal to do with whether the fiction writer writes sentences and makes paragraph decisions and structural decisions that consistently support reading as transaction. According to the particular story, the writer often faces a set of choices that support reading as transformation. Stephen Crane’s famous opening sentence to “The Open Boat” is a surrounding sentence that transforms us by evoking a riddling space-time that many readers, wishing for the clear transaction of information, will resent: “None of them knew the color of the sky.” The reader who wishes to be directed would prefer, “None of the men in the boat could see the color of the sky.” Crane’s sentence does not direct the reader toward comprehension; it enacts the prehension of the group which can no longer ‘know’ what it once knew. The group is experiencing a ‘noneness,’ not a clarifying awareness of self, of identifiable oneness. “None of them knew the color of the sky” is one of the greatest lines of poetry ever written. I honestly believe that. There are many sentences like it in “The Open Boat,” a work that is not easy to categorize, even on the broadest terms, as a nonfiction account, a story, or a poem.