Lose Yourself (Chauna Intro)

A recap of the week's writing at Atticus Review. Introduction by Chauna Craig.

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Right before my last trip, someone suggested Lewis Hyde’s book,

A Primer for Forgetting

, to me. His now-classic

The Gift

was transformative in my thinking about art and my own relation to it, so I eagerly downloaded the new book on Kindle, began reading, and then, well, forgot about it, wandering instead to more fast-paced “airplane reading.” When I returned home to grocery stores gutted of paper products, Akiko Busch’s

How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

, freshly out in paperback, awaited me in the mail. I read the first few chapters, connected with the ideas, appreciated the writing, yet somehow couldn’t stay engaged enough to finish. Schools and businesses were shutting down, changed reality pressing into my shell-shocked brain. Suddenly, reading didn’t appeal to me at all.

But weeks of hunkering down at home have led me back to these books and messages I’ve long needed to hear about the value of these negatives: forgetting and invisibility. I don’t mean “negative” in the connotation these concepts often carry in the twenty-first century, during an era when we are told “never forget” and when we are all highly visible to one another over social media and Zoom calls.

Consider this: negative space in visual art allows us to see what we otherwise would have missed. Think of the classic illusion of the vase which, when we look at the negative space, becomes the profiles of two people facing each other. An object transformed into human connection only because we looked where we haven’t been trained to look. Meanwhile, Keats’ idea of negative capability encourages us to live in uncertainty apart from what he calls the “irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I’ve struggled to find stability and certainty for so long that their absence is likely more frightening than it needs to be.

Our own absence may be the key to our best creations. John Cage purportedly told painter Philip Guston, “When you start working, everybody in your studio—the past, your friends, your enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”

If you’re lucky, even you leave.

This sheltering time reminds me that it’s okay to leave, maybe even essential. Blending in with the background, disappearing into our own minds has always been a gift—maybe an outright survival strategy—for writers. In my twenties, I often carried a notebook to coffee houses, even restaurants, where I’d sit alone, writing what I observed both around and within me. I eventually abandoned this type of meditation, this surrender to disappearing. I’ve forgotten why or when. Sometime after having children, or getting a smartphone, or working an administrative job. Sometime after everything wanted my attention all the time, and I gave in to the idea that I must always be present to those demands.

What the pandemic and these books brought home to me is how little anything outside of my own heart and mind actually needs my attention. Yes, my children and my students both need guidance as they navigate the changed world, and my body needs the usual life-sustaining practices. But as I’ve exhausted my most useless anxieties and run out of busy-making tasks, I’m left with the me that goes deeper than the optics of Facebook or Zoom, deeper than my now heightened sense of mortality, deeper than any sense of obligation for who I think I should be in any circumstance. That deep place is a scary place only because I stopped hanging out there, stopped allowing myself familiarity with life’s negative space.

I’ve finally recognized how this long stretch of absence from my workplace and my friends and family may be my opportunity to not return to what became my normal. I want to make peace with negative space, to lose a self that wasn’t ever my own, to see what’s really there. I don’t know how this will shape my relationship to the world, my writing, my sense of self, but I don’t want to reach for those answers. I’d rather, to paraphrase Rilke, learn to (again) love the questions themselves.

Thank you for reading. We’re glad you’re here.

Chauna Craig

Creative Nonfiction Editor

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

BOOK REVIEWDISRUPTING THE COLONIAL LENSA review of ALL HEATHENS by Marianne Chan from Sarabande BooksReview by Bridget LilletohrupGET THE BOOKREAD THE REVIEW

FICTIONAMICABLEby Sarah Starr Murphy"'Darling,' he said, one morning, 'I’m leaving you for the dental hygienist.''The tall one, or the red-head?''The one whose elbows are knives and whose breasts resemble Easter eggs.'"READ ON

POETRYWHAT LIFE WAS LIKEby Jean Theron"The newscasters would interrupt this program.Cinema was scored with shrieks and theremins.People dreamed of aliens. Espionage was chic..."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONI AM, I SAIDby Ellen TaylorPart of our series Superunknown: Stories About Songs"I’m carried away to the passenger seat, my father driving. 'Turn that up, will you?' his voice angsty as a teenager hearing his favorite band."READ ON

MIXED MEDIAPATIENCEby Gracie BialeckiFilm by Dan Chung & Alex Brook LynnWATCH VIDEOPOEM

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