“The desire to write comes (is the feeling you get) from certain readings: the kind of reading that agitates you into making a trace of itself. Or to put it another way, and reaching a little further for an answer to his outrageous, unanswerable question, Barthes arrives at the following claim: ‘to want to write is to want to rewrite,’ he says. And then: ‘Every beautiful work, or even every work to make an impression, every impressive work, functions as a desired work, but I would say, and it’s here that it starts to get interesting, that every work I read as desirable, even as I am desiring it, I experience as incomplete and somehow lost, because I didn’t do it myself, and I have to in some way retrieve it by redoing it; in this way, to write is to rewrite.'” -Kate Briggs, quoting Roland Barthes, 115.
i
I can’t remember where I heard (a professor, a book, a lecture, hearsay) that creative nonfiction is about distinction.
The genre is trustworthy hearsay, an oxymoron. The phrase creative nonfiction already raises more question than it answers.
I think of distinction as central to observation, and central to questions, the kind worth asking: What am I doing with my day? What makes it different? What distinguishes this breath this meal this prayer this walk from the last?
I’ve always hated February, how eager it is to be finished despite how slowly it takes. In my head, the month is pale blue, like gas station mint gum that loses its flavor as quickly as its shape. How do I distinguish these days beyond shades of murk and rhyme? What makes this February distinct from the previous thirty?
I am writing about February, if translator Kate Briggs (translating Roland Barthes) is correct, because I want to rewrite February.
ii
At a panel at a conference in Kansas City, Lilly Dancyger says that creative nonfiction is about asking questions, which only raise more questions. It’s the act of asking that matters most, not the questions or the answers but this Socratic mitosis. I write this in my notebook, but fail to cite who in the panel said the following: “There are no answers, just a deepening and sharpening of the question.”
In Evansville, a rideshare driver tells me about her life in this city that is actually a town. She tells me about her plans to leave. She tells me that people born in Evansville find themselves stuck because of one of two things: they get wrapped up in the legal system, its labyrinth of parole, fines, probation, and technicalities, or because of poverty. This is not a town anybody wants to stay in.
The west side of town is where immigrant labor built bricks and commerce on the Ohio River. The east side is where the new money pools. The east side of town is a horizonless expanse of malls and chains and products and solutions and parking lots that never reach a quarter of their capacity. Buildings stand apart, hands in their pockets, trying to be noticed.
Driving home from the conference on Superbowl Sunday, the roads are quiet and I have ten thousand things to think about/through/with. I listen to music, podcasts, audiobooks, podcasts, music. I laugh so hard at a podcaster’s stupid joke about the Internet, tears in my eyes, that I almost drive into a ditch. It seals the deal, really, to commit to a decision I had made months before. To get it over with.
iii
It is windy on the Ohio River. On the first Sunday of Lent, a season of repentance, I dress in black for a vigil. I recognize a few faces from the library, from bookstores, from somewhere indistinct. Some wear keffiyehs. Some carry flags. It is too windy to light the candles we hold but we manage. We share the flame from civilian to civilian as the wind snuffs it out. When my candle goes out in a burst of wind, I turn to a stranger and she lends me her flame. I share the fire with someone else after another gust of wind. Our hands numb, I think, but we keep the fire alive together. Is it a different fire from candle to candle? Do we carry the same message, or does it change meaning with every curved hand protecting it from the elements?
People speak. People listen. A man describes his memories of Palestine before the Nakba. Another, his memories as a refugee in Syria. I am glad that there is so much turnout from Evansville. I thought about driving to Louisville or Indianapolis for such a vigil, but even here, there are enough hands to protect the fire from the wind.
iv
I used to think of Sundays as the simplest days. I have used them to do chores, prepare meals for the week, and rest for the next morning. That’s what a sabbath should be, a reiteration of itself, a returning-to. Right?
Briggs likens translation to a group of women dancing in a gym. One line of women cannot see the dance instructor, so they imitate the moves the women in front of them do. Likewise, the women in the row behind them cannot see the instructor, so they imitate the women in the line ahead of them as they imitate the women in the line ahead of them. Each dance move is a translation of the instructor’s through the translation of each concurrent row of dancers.
I go to the library before the screening and help the coalition set up for a documentary. I see more familiar faces. I see colleagues from the university. There is coffee, there are books, art displays about the fact that gauze may originate from the weavers of ancient Gaza City. And there are platters of dates. Once, I worked for a chef who insisted during Ramadan that we, her prep cooks, put down our knives and ladles and join her in breaking her fast at sundown with a feast of dates. That was in May, 2021, during another Israeli bombardment of Gaza, or, as one Israeli official has described it, mowing the grass.
Is it enough to call a sabbath, a sabbatical (a respite, a prepared-for invitation to contemplate) a translation of the previous? Does this mean the dance instructor is God resting on the seventh day and we are all, in some way, trying to imitate the restfulness that follows Creation? And what does that mean for the eighth day? What comes after a sabbath? Is it recreation, a translation of the same creation, an apocalypse of the old to make way for another creation? Are these Sundays a thesis, antithesis, or synthesis?
I like how Barthes (translated by Briggs, one dancing after the other) describes it: “I have to in some way retrieve it by redoing it.” This is about reading literature and responding by writing literature, but I think the same is (must be) true of looking at one’s weekly calendar, at oneself and one’s place in the community. I want to retrieve the previous week by redoing it. I want to find my previous self, shake him like a dusty rug. I want a second chance. Should or shouldn’t doesn’t (shouldn’t) matter. That I can do better is what propels me, what keeps me writing and rewriting and rerewriting.
Keene Short 