Much of one’s fieldwork is done in the pages of a book.

Several months ago I turned with relief to Henri Michaux’s Barbarian in Asia, a record of his Asian travels in the early 1930s. For once, a travel book that was not a first-person itinerary, with none of the usual one-foot-after-another chronology: “The next morning I…”

Michaux gives you minute observations and sweeping pronouncements, but never his diary.

The book came back to me recently as I kept watching my sentences write themselves, always favoring the same sorts of patterns and divisions. What particularly irked me was the way that any kind of list seemed to demand no more and no less than three items. Even in conversation I’d notice this pattern taking hold of me. I’d call someone up and say, I have three things to tell you — then hasten to figure out a division of my topic into three.

Michaux noticed a different pattern in Hindu culture.

We ourselves feel and understand by dividing by two, three, and four. The Hindu into sixty-four, thirty-two, rarely nine, almost always into numbers above twenty. He is extremely abundant. …

And if he does not possess the thirty-four elements for dividing a question, he will invent the ten or fifteen that he lacks.

How to let yourself go into such abundance, to take such pleasure in enumeration? My soul feels niggardly by comparison.

 

The post-industrial landscape of the Canal Robaix brought back strong memories of time I spent in the Ruhr region some seven years ago, which had prompted similar reflections on the repurposing and reclamation of landscape. At the time these thoughts had led to my proposing a very large (but admittedly generic) act of artistic appropriation — the designation of a gigantic steelworks cooling tower as a found object or readymade. Behind this plan was a more interesting idea for creating a sanctuary for situated reading. No doubt too pompous a title, but the notion has grown even more important to me now than it was then.

 

Ruhr landscape

The Ruhr region is of course the old heartland of industrial Germany, where coal mines, steel factories, and heavy industry once flourished. Though very populous, it has no center, but consists instead of a string of cities (Essen, Bochum, Dortmund, and others) scattered roughly from east to west.

What’s fascinating about the Ruhr today is that as its industrial sites have fallen into disuse, the natural landscape has simply been allowed to reassert itself. This has produced an extraordinary terrain in which time seems to have skipped either far back or far forward. Once-mighty factories have fallen into ruin and are everywhere overgrown with vegetation. Even the rivers, formerly noxious, now run nearly clear.

The authorities have designated large tracts of this landscape as parkland, with the old industrial structures turned into climbing walls or playgrounds or cultural centers. Tanzlandschaft Ruhr (“Dance Landscape”) was one such arts organization that grew up in this unusual setting, where it now goes by the name of PACT Zollverein (the latter part of its name taken from the former colliery where it has its rehearsal, performance, and exhibition spaces).

It was here that Ghostcatching was once exhibited, but what brought me over to explore the whole region was the idea of situating a digital dance installation out in the landscape itself. This was not at first my idea, but was instead the inspiration of the artistic director, Stefan Hilterhaus, whose first step was to invite me over and then put me in the capable hands of Albertus Alhers. Albertus possessed a fantastic knowledge of the whole region, and he could answer any question I posed as we toured the industrial landscape in search of possible sites.

The interior spaces we inspected were often enormous — the largest was the gasometer, pictured above, that was so large as it make a mockery of my camera’s limited viewfinder. Once upon a time its platform rose and fell above the natural gas stored beneath it; but now that platform is fixed to the floor, and as you stand there gazing up at the vast interior volume above, it strikes you as a kind of contemporary cathedral.

This religious association must have struck Albertus somehow, too, for his passion for the Ruhr’s industrial landscapes was exceeded only by his fascination with a monastery somewhere to the north, to which he retreated from time to time as a lay visitor — and where, I later heard, he gave his vows (if that’s how you say it) to become a monk there himself.

The other interior we explored was that of a gigantic cooling tower that had only recently gone out of use at a steel factory that was being priced out of existence by competitors to the east, in the Ukraine.

Whereas the gasometer was an enclosed space, and thus suitable for the huge projections we later proposed for it, the cooling tower was open to the sky. It dwarfed you, but your thoughts rose upward in a curiously transcendent fashion — somehow your mental space seemed to expand as your own physical presence diminished.

Albertus informed me that under German law industrial buildings of this size had to be dismantled after two years of disuse — a term that was rapidly approaching for this tower. As we stood there contemplating this wasteful necessity, it occurred to me that the owners could save themselves this vast expense by having an artist redesignate it as an art object.

As an artistic act, this was far from original, and it also had nothing to do with my own artistic process or inclinations (better suited to someone like James Turrell). Nonetheless, working afterwards with Shelley Eshkar and Marco Steinberg, I proposed the simplest of interventions: a wooden bench running around the full interior circumference of the space and a minimal set of lights to permit its use at night, perhaps for performances or simply to take in the night sky.

But what really interested me was to make this into a site for situated reading, as I later came to call the idea. I imagined having several sorts of short allusive texts, printed exquisitely on small hand-outs, that visitors could read while sitting in that vast space and then take home afterwards for further reflection.

These were to frame the site differently, so that one text might place it in a cosmological framework (as a kind of readymade Stonehenge) while another (perhaps commissioned from the German writer WG Sebald [this was before his fatal car crash]) would recall its specific history, and in particular the tremendous violence now silenced there — the Allied bombers overhead that once reduced the whole region to rubble in the latter stages of World War Two, and the contentious events (the Versailles Treaty, Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, the Nazi armament industry, etc) that had brought them there.

Texting on a cell phone’s numeric keypad makes your qwerty keyboard look by comparison like a model of efficiency.

Texting can be sped up considerably, however, by predictive text, which proposes the most likely guess for the word you are stringing together letter by letter. Even so, this method takes you through some very odd detours even when you’re spelling out a perfectly commonplace word — for example:

4:ghi	→	i
3:def	→	he
5:jkl	→	gel
5:jkl	→	hell
6:mno	→	hello

But if instead of hello you proceed to try writing hellish, hellhound, hellenic, or gelling, your little cellphone gives up and presents you (aptly enough) with: hell? And now you’re left to plod on with the older, slower multi-tap method.

No doubt many messages are shaped by the tight constraints of predictive text, since texting is something you do on the fly and in a hurry. I imagine that many of us start opting for the common rather than the uncommon word, and even for the templated message.

All in all, then, not an arrangement conducive to articulate writing.

 

Poetry

But doesn’t rhymed poetry constrain you too?

The possible lines you can write within your chosen rhyming scheme are sharply limited by the rhymes available in English, which suggest themselves to you with something of the same restrictive inevitability as predictive text (making you wish you were writing in Spanish or Italian, where words pair off far more promiscuously).

And if you’re also setting your poem to a regular meter, then again your word choice is constricted by the accidents of syllabication and stress.

So much arbitrariness! How can you really say what you mean within arbitrary patterns like these?

 

Prose

But even within the seeming freedom of prose, we find ourselves still subject to well-worn patterns that have long since turned into ruts.

In an earlier post (Divisions) , I remarked on my own peculiar predilection for listing by threes. Similar habits, tastes, and predilections guide my choices in vocabulary, sentence rhythm and syntax, and even metaphor within surprisingly tight bounds. (Case in point: I note that the previous sentence exemplifies my listing by threes habit without my having had the slightest idea I was succumbing to it again!)

Writing betrays its author at every step of the way, unmasking his or her identity like it or not, as was demonstrated dramatically several years ago in headline-grabbing fashion.

 

Outed

The journalist hiding behind “Anonymous,” author of the political roman-a-clef best-seller Primary Colors, was outed by purely formal means.

When a professor of English literature, Don Foster, compared the text of the novel to a range of other writing samples culled from the publications of some twenty-five-plus suspects, he soon established beyond any doubt that Anonymous was Joe Klein, despite Klein’s initial denials. (Foster’s account was first published in New York magazine, and then expanded as a chapter in the book Author Unknown: Tales of a Literary Detective.)

Klein’s quirks gave him up as surely as his fingerprints or dna would have. For example, such tendencies as these:

• an enjoyment of adverbs made from y-adjectives: crazily, goofily, juicily, spottily;
• a predilection for -ish words: darkish, dullish, puckish, smallish, ;
• a taste for extravagant compounds: triple-back-over-somersault-and-pander-pirouette, Scare-Seniors-to-Death strategy;
• a cute use of sort of: Howard was legendary himself, sort of; Fort Green is booming, sort of.

And many others. Foster also noted “internal biographical evidence” present in Klein’s writing that enabled a kind of profiling:

of an author who was white, middle-aged, male, but also ambivalent about women … perhaps a heterosexual male suffering from deep homophobic panic … [with a desire] to tutor blacks in what’s good for them.

Naturally these inferences ended up making Klein very uncomfortable, and when he eventually came clean, so to speak, he tried defending himself, but with no great success: for he was arguing against himself, against a range of concrete evidence culled from his own words.

 

Style

Habits of mind, tastes, prejudices, predispositions, tics, range of knowledge, inner resources, outer resources — aren’t these the necessary basis for anyone’s style, in writing and otherwise — in life?

There’s no escaping much of this as given, either as you struggle to write or for that matter as you struggle to read someone else. Perfect style is the ingenious arrangement of all these things, not their annihilation.

 

Check

During a painful month of my life about 20 years ago, I resorted to crowding all troubling thoughts out of my mind by concentrating completely on chess.

My chessboard and my opponent were provided on my Apple II screen by the Chessmaster program, which certainly did the trick: while matching my wits against the computer (and, it sometimes seemed, against the constricting universe of chess itself), all my worries were pushed aside.

I would have counted this a great success had I shown any concurrent improvement in my chess-playing abilities. But before long I had to face the fact of my utter mediocrity as a player, accepting the near-inevitability of my pieces being cornered and my king mated in pretty short order.

Just a few moves into the game, I would already feel my throat tightening as my options diminished. And yet I knew that mathematicians had calculated that after the first four moves in chess, your choice of possible positions has been “narrowed” to 71,852!

 

Grandmastery

Clearly grandmasters (both human and digital) have no trouble finding new pathways through the vast search-space of chess. They create new ways to attack, to defend, and ultimately to win, and the game goes on being played because its possibilities are virtually infinite.

Perhaps the same thing is true of verse. Grandmasters like Shakespeare or Auden find no obstacle to expression as they navigate virtuosically through the search-space of language and its rules.

—To which the reluctant skeptic in me feels compelled to add: they find no obstacle to expressing whatever the language itself can express — but no more. (To which I can already hear, at the back of my mind, somebody-or-other’s rejoinder: there is no more, man. So get on with it.)

No longer do many of us grow up hearing or reading intricately rhymed poetry, much less trying our hand at memorizing or writing it.

If you’re like me, your ear for verse has a primitive grounding, formed by nursery rhymes (Mother Hubbard ) and children’s books (Dr. Seuss ). Granted, there is a kind of genius to how Dr. Seuss could ring such rich variations from the limited vocabulary of a three-year-old, but even so, he did little to prepare me for the intricate verbal music of Keats or Hopkins.

This has had two consequences: first, that I’ve lacked the instinctive confidence for poetry that I’ve long had with comparably advanced prose (James or Beckett); second, that the more complicated patterns of meter and rhyme tend to sound slightly off to my ear — probably because they don’t conform to the regular beat I’m still unconsciously listening for (as if I were still a young child at bedtime).

Then, too, I’ve always resisted the arbitrariness of rhyme, which strikes me as unfairly compelling the course of the poet’s thoughts. (This objection I’ve already explored more fully in an earlier post, predictive text — for which this entry’s a mere footnote).

However, one traditional form has always made natural sense to my ear, eye, brain, and heart: the ballad.

The great ballads track fate relentlessly, pushing lives along their predetermined courses, which narrow with every step — precisely in the same way that their rhyme and meter do.

And so the first poems of Auden’s that I could completely get were among his simplest: the ballads Miss Gee, James Honeyman, and Victor. Which are still marvels to me, perfect in every way:

Let me tell you a little story
          About Miss Edith Gee;
She lived in Clevedon Terrace
          At number 83.

(Keep reading: Google will find the rest of this online for you somewhere.)

Recently the Times quoted the writer Alan Furst, whose suspense novels are all set in the shadows of World War II:

I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

This telling remark brought back an old suspicion of mine about middlebrow Anglo-American fiction — that much of it is a throwback in form and style to books of earlier times, when the western world comprehended itself so much more fully through the dominant medium of the novel.

In much the same way that the bbc’s similarly middlebrow Masterpiece Theater productions are never happier than when they can roll out their period costumes, props, personages, and plots, so too do many tradebook novelists hark back to the stylistic trappings of previous eras — times when the form of the novel matched more closely the forms of lives as they were lived & experienced.

This imitation of forms has its counterparts in other fields, which feel the same weird nostalgia — for example, for times in which the oil painting or the 3-minute pop song were still vividly and centrally meaningful.

I’m not suggesting a disengagement from the past — no, the opposite. But rather than an aping of old forms, we’d do better to forge new forms for re-framing and re-connecting with our history.

(I might as well say that this is exactly what we were after with such works as Enlightenment, Breath, and Recovered Light.)