Apostrophe Cast News

Get ready to exhale. The wait is up. Sabrina Orah Mark breaks her long silence. Our thanks to Kristen Iskandrian for tracking down the wily Ms. Mark for some Q&A.

1) What is the difference between a character and a figure? Would you call the entities in your book one as opposed to the other? To me, a figure implies allegory, but I think to read your poems as allegories is to gravely under-read them, if not misread them altogether. But the traitor, and the nurses, and the soldiers, and some others in here do feel like they are implying something beyond themselves.

Wowza.  Let me see.  If anyone is standing in a darkened doorway it would probably be The Figure.  If The Character is there too, The Figure probably has The Character tucked under its left arm.  I imagine The Character as not fully understanding the gravity of the situation.  Probably The Character is happily chatting about trees and candy.  The Figure, on the other hand, is more secretive, more ominous.  The Character gives it up, while The Figure saves it for later.  The Figure is of allegory because in both realms of experience are parallel, unknowable, unnameable, invisible, and yet presumable.  That timbre (the one of The Figure) is the resonance I strived for as I chose my cast (the traitor, the soldiers, the nurses, the babies and so on and so froth, I mean, forth).

2) If you had to describe Beatrice and Walter B. physically, what would they look like? What are they wearing?

A long, long time ago there was a mirror.  Beatrice smashed it with Walter B.’s boot.  They laugh frequently and nervously about this incident, as one might laugh when one is stuck up a tree and has no way of getting down.

3) I have always enjoyed your syntax—in particular, your placement of prepositions: “…Walter B. and Beatrice had on their hands a situation” instead of “had a situation on their hands.” This is how you speak, too, and it seems to me to be a distinct trait of Semitic (American) vernaculars. Do you write this way consciously, or no?

My maternal family speaks / spoke Yiddish.  And what always struck me about the language was that is was as much a state of being as it was a way of communicating.  Often the syntax assumes the pose of the wanderer.  So, for example, when my great-aunt offers me a can of salmon she asks me like this: “You want I should open for you a can of salmon?”  The object / goal is at the very end.  I love how she speaks.  I feel the journey towards the can of salmon in that sentence.  First there is the wanting, then there is the doing, then there is the having.  Walter B. and Beatrice speak like this because I imagine them as hatched in galut or exile, and consequently as permanent wanderers.  This syntax was a way to stylistically inject galut into the poems.

4) Can you say a few words about the Kabbalistic notion of Tsim Tsum, and why it seemed like an apt title for your book?

Funny you should ask.  I recently finished a long essay on Tsim Tsum which I have just begun to send out for publication.  Here are the first few paragraphs of the essay (footnotes and all!):

In “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” Gershom Scholem names the most highly respected system formulated in Safed as the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria Ashkenazi (1534-72), later called the Ari (the “Lion”).   Galut, or exile, as the Ari saw it, was not only the Jewish State (psychically and geographically), but a condition of the universe, and of the creator.  According to the Ari, the universe was created by a God who because he did not reveal Himself enabled the world to be revealed. This phase is called Tsim Tsum, a Kabbalistic claim that a being cannot become, or come into existence, unless the creator of that being departs from that being.  And in this Tsim Tsum emanation and limitation (or retreat and propagation) share the same breath.  “But it was sudden,” writes the poet Nick Flynn, “how overnight we could be orphaned / & the world become a bell we’d crawl inside / & the ringing all we’d eat.”*  The Kabbalists believed that right before God made His exit He filled garbs and vessels with His light, not to bring with Him but to leave here.    It is a startling moment of divine despair and desperation.  As if the world is a painting illegibly signed.  And the signature is a sad and beautiful one.  It echoes a posthumous gasp to be remembered.  These containers (these garbs and vessels) at the end, like the overstuffed trunks of clothes and letters left behind by estranged mothers and fathers, cannot hold the light.  The garbs and vessels burst and shatter.  Scholem explains that the light is scattered everywhere, and we spend the rest of our lives collecting the offspring of this light.  We spend the rest of our lives trying to make what once was broken whole again.  This, according to the Kabbalists, begins the history of trauma. A few years ago I was browsing through a junk shop in Athens, Georgia and found a glass jar filled with an incomplete set of old alphabet blocks.  Through the glass I could see some of the letters were worn away.  Each block held two letters (each in uppercase and lowercase), and an image that began with each letter: “D/d” had a pink doll, “A/a” had a blue airplane, “B/b” had a brown bear, “W/w” had a red whistle, “S/s” had a yellow star, and so on, and so forth.  I had just learned about Tsim Tsum, and the claim brought me a sense of calm.  As a Jewish New Yorker living in a small town in Georgia I was experiencing my own wobbly galut, and I felt an affinity with the claim and a rush of excitement when I found for it in that junk shop an objective correlative.  A flawed correlative, I admit, as each block was only metaphor, and the jar had not yet burst, but it felt (for the time being) like an object that came very close to the beauty of the impulse I was after: that impulse to contain what must be left behind.  I bought the jar, but never opened it because it felt like an attempt at salvage that would be blasphemous to disrupt.  I wound around the neck of the jar a small tag.  On the tag I wrote “TSIM TSUM.”  I gave the jar to my dearest friend.

Because I am a poet, my fascination with Tsim Tsum led me to wonder if I could enact this wondrous phase in Jewish mysticism poetically.  I had just finished my first book The Babies.  It is a war book, or more specifically it is a collection of imagined testimonies spoken by the imagined ones who never lived because of war.  One section of the book, entitled The Walter B. Interviews introduce Walter B. and Beatrice, two figures who are hatched at the center of ruin.  When the book was done I began to miss Walter B. and Beatrice.  I wanted them to return to me, but because they already were goners (so to speak) I needed to make for them a field, a field contingent on being gone, on galut, and meet them there.  This order is in keeping with the Kabbalist’s conception of redemption: first comes catastrophe and annihilation, and then comes tikkun or restoration.  First there is the “forgetting of the Torah and the upsetting of all moral order to the point of dissolving the laws of nature,” and then there is repair.**  The world of tikkun, according to Scholem, is “the re-establishment of the harmonious condition of the world.”***

He writes:

The escapist and extravagant character of such utopianism, which undertakes to determine the content of redemption without having experienced it yet in fact, does of course subject it to the wild indulgence of fantasy.  But it always retains that fascinating vitality to which no historical reality can do justice and which in times of darkness and persecution counterpoises the fulfilled image of wholeness to the piecemeal, wretched reality which was available to the Jew.****

What Gershom Scholem imagines here as utopian, fantastical, extravagant, and escapist, I have heard the Israeli novelist Amos Oz refer to as “a third state,” as a state of reconciliation, where what once was dissonant becomes harmonious, where you are offered either herring or marmalade and you decide you will have a little of both.  Tikkun, for the Kabbalists, is made in preparation for the coming of the Messiah.  For my artistic purposes, my attempt at tikkun is made in preparation for the return of Walter B. and Beatrice.  “In the footsteps of the Messiah,” according to the Mishnah (the oral Torah), “…the house of assembly will become a brothel…the people of the frontiers will wander from city to city and none will pity them…the wisdom of the scribes will become odious…truth will nowhere be found…”***** In order for me to stage Beatrice and Walter B. under the laws of Tsim Tsum, as a way to effect for them a tikkun, I needed to drape them in exile, lodge them in a ruined world, and imagine them as immigrants in their native land and as wanderers.  Their creator must be hidden from them, and consequently the “actual” meaning of things must be hidden from them too.  Ontologically, they are to be out of the question.

* Nick Flynn, “Sudden” in Some Ether (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2000) 18.

** Scholem,  The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 12.

*** Ibid., 13.

**** Ibid., 13-14.

***** End of the Mishnah tractate Sota.

5) What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received or read? What is the best writing advice you’ve ever given?

Reginald McKnight told me about a dream he once had.  In the dream he encounters a man who asks if he would like to see the effect of his writing 3000 years from now.  He says yes, and rises with the man up into the air. The air is filled with electric sparks.  They fly with such a speed he feels the details of his whole life (from his birth to his death).  They arrive at a green meadow with squares of green like a quilt, and large shoots, and through the shoots he can see giant guinea pigs being herded.  Everything is golden red (as the sun hits the horizon). The guinea pigs are in the open field, among big yellow salt blocks.  Very large trees have been hewn down so the pigs could gnaw on them.  He turns to the man, and says, this is very beautiful but what is the effect of my writing.  And the man says, “You’re looking at it.  Your job is to write stories.  There is no aim.  There is no trajectory.  There is only creation.”

6)What do you think is more important, “talent” or “hard work”?

Hard work.

7) To me, one of the most fascinating features of your poems is how language becomes its own set of nesting dolls. This is very noticeable, for example, in “Where Babies Come From,” where the entire poem is a kind of nesting doll: Beatrice’s question seems to make the painting of the babies materialize—or perhaps the painting spurs her inquiry, but I think I like the first interpretation more—and then of course Walter B.’s explanation begs the question further. But elsewhere, too, we see language that cannot be taken for granted, language that seems to threaten, or that seems threatened by, the very thing it attempts to convey. As Walter B. “stepped back” from the painting of the babies, so too are words “stepped back” from their meanings (as in, for example, “The Organization”), so too is our immediate recognition of places and objects stepped back. I don’t want to talk, really, about the ins and outs of Beatrice and Walter B.’s relationship—doing so feels almost taboo—but I think it’s interesting to consider, based solely on language, the clusters of relationships in your book. Except for in a few instances, such as “The Traitor” (where there is a common enemy), Beatrice and Walter B. cannot seem to come to terms, so to speak. Their communication is constantly thwarted by their communication. But the Oldest Animal’s language, while less knowable at first blush, seems absolute, complete, “transcendent.” Why must the Oldest Animal have its own language? Can it ever be understood by Beatrice or Walter B.? Will they ever send the byrds? This was a really, really long question that seemed to lose its way. Sorry.

I do not want to say too much about The Oldest Animal.  Just this, for now:

a)The Oldest Animal may be born out of all the secrets Walter B. and Beatrice keep from themselves.

b)The Oldest Animal suffers the consequences of Beatrice’s worst crime, but in exchange for its suffering it is given the ability to speak/write in a “transcendent” (as you so beautifully call it) language.

c)They will never send the byrds.

d)It’s ok, though.

e)Because the byrds you imagine the byrds to be are not the byrds these byrds are.

 8) Do these poems take place in the time before God, in the time after God, or in the time of no God?

Yes.

9) I can’t imagine these poems lineated. The prose poem form seems essential. Obviously, you agree. Can you maybe talk about why the prose poem appeals to you? What came first here, form or content?

I was asked about this in an interview for Cranky in 2007.  This is what I said (and I will say it here again because it still for me rings true): “There is a 1934 photograph of Hans Bellmer’s The Doll.  In this photograph the doll is open at the torso.  Where her navel should be is a wheel.  Bellmer’s plan was to attach to the wheel a rotating disk, lit by tiny colored bulbs (operated by a button placed on the doll’s left nipple), that would contain six wedge-shaped scenes: a boat sinking into ice, sweetmeats, a handkerchief dirty with saliva and several pornographic shots.  (You can read more about this in Sue Taylor’s The Anatomy of Anxiety).  I often imagine this disk (fixed to where her navel should be) as the perfect image for the prose poem, as both maintain themselves through their doubleness.  They both possess a firmly sensed certainty that there exists a reason, a center, on one hand, and a spinning decentered randomness on the other.   Through this doubleness, the prose poem captures fragments, and makes out of its elusive simultaneity of vision a little monastery – as Bellmer had made, for the belly of his doll, a spinning center out of scraps.”

10) What is the home that the Oldest Animal left, and where is the Oldest Animal writing from? Will it return? What does it write with, and on?

In “The Organization” Beatrice and Walter B. decide to join the organization because they believe if they do they will learn from where their organs have come.  In order to join the organization they have to “empty their house of their oldest animal.  They would have to brush their doorpost with its leftover fur.”  Some poems later The Oldest Animal writes a letter (the first of five) to That Mutter and That Fodder (Beatrice and Walter B.).  The letters are sent from The Foryst.  That is all I know.  That is all Beatrice was willing to admit.

11) In “The Joke,” Beatrice seems gritty. Angry and triumphant. What is she most tired of? And can you talk about those creepy, creeping nurses? They are terrifying. This is one place out of many where I find your work savagely funny. I can’t think of nurses in quite the same way anymore. Why nurses, who are meant to be benign caregivers, rather than, say, meter maids?

The word “nurse” has always terrified me.  Perhaps because I think in reverse. Unfortunately, I’m an apocalyptic materialist.  I cannot see the splendor without seeing the splendor up in flames.

12) What is your honest opinion about reality television?

Had reality television never been invented Walter B. would’ve written the book Walter B. never wrote.   As for Beatrice, she would never have left The Babies at the party.  As for me, I like it a little too much.

13) There is a moment of reversal, or disruption, in many of your poems—Beatrice running into the field in “The Mistake”; Walter B. and Beatrice “sailing away to another land” in “The Traitor”; the nurse invasion in “The Joke.” Do Beatrice and Walter B. recover from these moments?

No.

14) Is writing more agony, or ecstasy?

On Friday nights (for Shabbat dinner) my grandmother always made vegetable soup and chicken soup.  Who wants vegetable soup, she would ask.  Some of us would raise our hands.  And who wants chicken.  The others would raise their hands.  And then my grandfather would say, I’d like a little of both.  A little chicken and a little vegetable.  Mixed together.  Same here.  A little of both.  A little agony.  And a little ecstasy.  Mixed together.  Good soup.

15) What are you working on now?

When I was a kid in Yeshiva our rabbi told us if on Friday night you put a piece of challah bread underneath your pillow, wake up exactly at midnight, and look into the mirror you will see what you’ll look like as an old person.  I did it once.  I’ll never do it again.

16) What is your favorite snack?

Radishes.

17) Where do babies come from?

I used to think babies came from the earth, then from the sky, then from that big, white house over there, then from the shed behind that house, then I thought they may have crawled out from under those overturned flowerpots in that shed, but now I know they come from our imagination.  If you think about it, they really, really do.